Please watch this CBN report on the growing Loudon County, Va., parents’ protest.
CRT is the new racism and destroys any conception of timeless truths, like “all men are created equal”. In the Christian tradition, all souls are equal. Critical race theory and its grandpa, critical theory, seeks to erase these sacred truths from public memory and replace them with Marx’s dialectic with race, not class, as the catalyst.
L-R of Karl Marx: Elijah Muhammed, Nation of Islam; Derrick Bell, Critical Legal Studies theorist; James H. Cone, exponent of Black Liberation Theology.
Protect your kids from it. Challenge it at your school, school board, and take it to the state capitol. But first, know what it is so you can’t be bowled over by dimwitted teacher union mouthpieces and the far-too-numerous lefty educrats. Here’s where you go to get armored up to protect your kids and schools: https://heritageaction.com/crtbook.
Heritage Action will give you the goods on CRT so that you’ll know more than AFT president Randi Weingarden and NEA head honcho Becky Pringle. Don’t let them intimidate you with the charge of “racist” so they have a free hand to indoctrinate your kids in warmed-over Marxism.
Randi Weingarden gets it so wrong, and she presents herself as the uber-teacher. She has no clue about critical race theory. Watch the drivel for yourself.
The “T”, or theory, in CRT (critical race theory) is the most deceitful initial in the title. It’s not a theory. The appropriation of the word serves the purpose of creating an aura of science, of objectivity, in order to preempt opposition. The fact is, it’s more akin to a dogma, or set of dogmas, an ideology. As in a dogma, conclusions are pre-established on faith and the rest of the verbiage is used to justify the pre-ordained verdict. These acolytes of CRT think and behave more like missionaries as they propagate the faith under the taxpayer’s dime or lefty numbskull billionaire donors.
They’ve got it backwards. Instead of evidence being used to test a possible hypothesis to establish a sound theory, or explanation, these zealots already have their minds made up and will devote the rest of their efforts and resources at gaining new believers. These are doctrines and not credible hypotheses or theories.
Antifa prepares to confront Patriot Prayer group in August 2018. Look at all the white faces from middle class backgrounds in the photo.
The thought-storm begins with the doctrine of the powerful greasing the skids for the powerful. It’s a thought-commitment that preexists any other cognitive work in the thought process. This is where you find the “system” in systemic racism. All other reasons, data, and evidence is swept into the pre-ordained belief of a system of oppression. They rake in a plethora of unequal socio-economic stats by race and then in a leap of faith say, “Aha, it’s racism!”
It’s silly because so much can come between the disparate numbers and the conclusion, like the social annihilation of the Black family or bureaucratic devolution of the public schools, particularly inner-city ones – thanks to Weingarden’s proteges. Far from proof of a system of racial oppression, the additional evidence destroys the pre-ordained conclusion.
Rather, the “Theory” is essentially an ideology. An ideology has two main characteristics: a system of beliefs, or dogmas, and the powerful instinct to proselytize the creed. Integral to the spread of the faith is the capture of the centers of culture and government. The former shapes the popular mind and the latter enforces the ideological homogenization. What the schools and entertainment can’t accomplish, the state will.
NEA president Becky Pringle promises the teaching of critical race theory in the classroom and the defense of any teacher doing so. The legal apparatus of the union will be ginned up to challenge state laws banning the ideology in the classroom.
We are seeing the marriage of CRT ideology with powerful institutions from K-to-grad-school to the Pentagon. Commissars have their noses in the air for any whiff of disparate outcome to jump into feverish action. The kids’ minds are being gradually closed to any other alternative thoughts. We are breeding the minions who’ll perform assisted suicide on our cherished USA.
Weingarden is a living and breathing example of how bad things have gotten. Parents, if nothing else, shield you kids from the onslaught. Take them away from the clutches of her flunkies.
Previously, I questioned the common perception of a modern college degree as a visa to smartland. Let me be clear once again: it isn’t. Today, a person can be forgiven for concluding that the more time a person spends passing through college classrooms, accumulating mounds of debt, the dumber one gets.
Look at all the PhD’s gushing over the vogueish “Anti-racism” crusade, and the legions of advance-degreed consultants lining up to descend on the schools to convert school boards, administrators, staff, and the kiddies into a facetious belief system that amounts to one huge logical fallacy. Imagine a hysteria fed by an unproven assumption that is used to lead to an unprovable conclusion, by people who should know better. It’s the latest edition of the carnival barker; it’s “diversity-inclusion-equity” (DEI), “critical race theory” (CRT), and “Anti-racism”. The quotation marks means that the words are slathered with so much junk thought that they’ve lost their original meaning.
Remember the old trick question, “When did you stop beating your wife?” The query assumes that you were flogging your wife without first proving it. Any answer unknowingly accepts the assumption. That’s the loaded question; that’s CRT; and that’s how you lose your life’s savings in a lawsuit.
The hours and hours of training – aka indoctrination – being foisted on the schools and workplaces is an escapade into drivel. The nonsense begins with unequal outcomes by race: incomes, incarcerations, traffic stops, educational attainment, etc. Then abstract theorizing substitutes for hard data to attach the inequalities to . . . racism. When hard data is attempted to make the connection, it’s relationship to the conclusion is speculative and highly tenuous. In the end, the unequal incomes, for instance, are attributed to hidden, and maybe not so hidden, racist thoughts of employers. The racism is declared to be mysteriously “systemic”. However, it apparently never occurred to the geniuses that unequal incomes may have something to do with lower graduation rates, higher rates of single parenthood, and/or spotty work histories. And those factors aren’t evenly distributed in the population.
If a person was to mention any of that, the PhD-clad indoctrinator tries to gaslight the person into an admission of unconscious racism. At this point, we’ve entered the world of Orwell’s “doublethink”. By mentioning those facts as contributing factors, you would be showing your racism and the need for the penance of public shaming. The denial of racism instantly becomes an act of racism. Back to Orwell’s Oceania, the “Anti-racism” consultant becomes the brainwasher O’Brien to the target’s Winston Smith. It’s doublethink in action.
Now they’ve rejiggered the original query to “When did you become a racist?” And to think that this stuff is making millionaires of degreed blockheads. If not stopped, we’ll be well on our way to social suicide.
It’s similar to your brain on DiAngelo (l) and Kendi.
Remember those 1980’s “Just Say No” ad campaigns: This is your brain on drugs? Well, watch the guru of “Anti-racism” and critical race theory (CRT), Ibram X. Kendi, stumble through a simple definition of racism. Think, this is your brain on Kendi’s “Anti-racism”. Watch it here – it begins at the 34:06 spot on the tape:
When asked to define racism by a member of the audience, Kendi says, “So racism, I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.” Any simpleton can pick up the fact that this is hooey. Let me get this straight: He uses a word in a few of its forms that he hasn’t defined in order to define it. Got that?
It’s worse than farcical logic. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a circular firing squad.
I’ve always considered mental agility – for instance, speaking extemporaneously, off the cuff, with competence – to be a component of intelligence. Kendi is hardly coherent when forced to ad-lib. This guy is a lefty show pony.
Just think, this is the person whose book is on the Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday’s recommended reading list for the ranks under his command. This is the guy who is an inspiration for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. If these Pentagon potentates are sincere, I question their mental fitness to drive a car, let alone run military operations around the world.
I’m reminded of the congressional testimony of the pre-Pearl Harbor commanders after Dec. 7, 1941. Are we about to experience more Dec. 7’s and subsequent congressional mea culpas?
Circa 1946: Adm. Husband E. Kimmel at Pearl Harbor Hearing. (Photo: George Skadding, Time & Life Pictures)Battleship row, Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.
It’s too frightening to contemplate. Watch the video.
Useful idiot: noun; a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals.
The “useful idiot” is a term that is often wrongly attributed to Lenin, but can be traced back to post-WWII Italian politics when centrist democrats used the phrase in reference to the social democrats who were considering an alliance with the Italian Communist Party. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s comments before Congress on June 23 (see below) are a shocking admission that post-WWII Italian politics are analogous to the emerging alliance between the radical left and the people managing our arsenal of democracy. We might be viewing the beginnings of a new Red Army, and I’m not exaggerating.
His remarks were, to put it succinctly, appalling. Most egregiously, he used lefty jargon to justify lefty indoctrination of the ranks. That’s right, lefty indoctrination. The mashup of illogic began with a partisan rendering of the Jan 6 capitol riot. Let Milley speak for himself: “So what is it that cause[d] thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the constitution of the United States of America?” The former US District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Andrew C. McCarthy, put the kibosh to that story line (read his piece here).
McCarthy’s point is that what happened on Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection. The protesters weren’t trying to “overturn the constitution of the United States of America”; they were mistakenly trying to rescue it at the behest of the commander-in-chief, the then-president Trump. None of those arrested are likely to be charged with anything close to treason. The legal equivalent of trespassing and its derivatives are mostly in the offing. The reason: there’s no evidence of patriotically-inspired, flag-waving rioters wanting “to overturn the constitution of the United States of America”. 49-year-old grandmas and a shaman-pretending clown don’t make for an overthrow. Yet, Milley chooses to sound like AOC.
The protest crowd around the Capitol Building, Jan. 6
He then goes on to use his mischaracterization of Jan. 6 to justify radical left brainwashing at the military academies. That’s because he misconstrues the purpose of a military academy with that of a university. West Point exists to create an officer corps. UCLA exists to broadly educate a population, albeit, today, oriented extreme left. The SDS and Weather Underground of the 60’s, and their offspring, have filled today’s faculty lounges. The alleged call for free thought created a huge safe space for the nurturing of a whole host of lefty-inspired and self-defeating balderdash. Out of this hothouse came the buffoonery of critical race theory (CRT), its jargon, illogic, and Milley consequently making a fool of himself. That’s just what we want: a military closer in its thinking to Code Pink or the Black Panthers than George Washington.
Antifa on a US college campus.
The foolish premise to Milley’s bombast was a complete confusion of propaganda and teaching. He began by surrendering the validity of lefty boilerplate when he said, “. . . I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it.” What’s this “white rage”? It’s lefty lingo for anyone who opposes with them. Of course, it was used to brand the protesters as “white supremacists”, and Milley repeats the lie. They were Trump supporters and this group is more diverse than ever before. I guess in Milley-babble Trump’s people of color are now trying to reinstate the KKK. Milley’s brain is just a hot mess.
After surrendering the rhetorical battlefield to lefty banalities, he used the excuse of an “open mind” to condone indoctrination. Ideas studied for analysis (real teaching) is far removed from accepting their validity and engaging in political confessionals. This isn’t a scholarly study of Lenin or Mao but a form of brainwashing. Milley has little clue as to what he is saying.
Milley’s comments were an insult to the American people and all those laboring in the ranks trying to defend what Milley apparently believes to be an irredeemably racist country. That’s the “systemic” aspect of systemic racism, the essence of the radical doctrines emanating from the radical high priesthood of CRT. Now we have proof that the farce is the governing doctrine of the people commanding the most sophisticated fighting force in history.
Who’s dumber, a person without a college degree or a person with one? Additionally, who’s dumber, a person with a BA, MA, or PhD? Is it possible for a person to educationally advance and get dumber? A response might be to dismiss the questions as misleading for many reasons, but the common assumption is that a degree is a visa to smartland. Is it true? Recent voting patterns force us to confront the questions, and the answer may shock some of us.
I’m speaking of Tuesday’s NYC mayoral primary election. Boroughs heavily populated with blue collars, ethnics, and minorities – cohorts with few college degrees – are voting as if they have a dislike for socialism and affection for law and order. The lower the percentage of whites in the district, the lower socialist and woke vote. What? Yep!
Eric Adams greets supporters at a New York City primary mayoral election night party in New York City, June 22, 2021. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
The pundit Kyle Smith put it succinctly: “The socialists just can’t seem to process enough white people through Oberlin to get themselves to a majority, even in their intellectual capital, New York City.” Middle and upper-income whites have moved left, along with their sheepskins. Everyone else likes cops and abhors the coddling of thugs and the government largesse for the pampering (like Andrew Yang’s mass mailing of checks). Now that’s some real cognitive dissonance for the ladies on The View.
Ex-cop and law-and-order candidate Eric Adams won 46% to 17% for MSNBC lawyer Maya Wiley in early voting in the Bronx. Blue collar whites and Hispanics dominate Staten Island and turned out 31% for Adams and 13% for the AOC darling, Wiley. Over all, Adams holds a 9% lead as of now.
Where do we find the enthusiasts of wokeness? It’s clustered in tony, hipster micro-districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, any place with the highest concentration of whites.
Affection for socialism is my metric for gauging dumbness, which is popularly synonymous with stupidity. Simply put, the mental contraption doesn’t work. Its boosters – AOC, The Squad, Bernie, the activist core of the Democratic Party – cite countries, especially Scandinavian ones, who are in reality more free market than these zealots’ dream for America. Sweden, et al, dumped the nonsense long ago, and the demise of the USSR showed that Green New Deal central planning, as with all central planning, is a prescription for chronic depression. Non-whites have a gut instinct for the reality that escaped the geniuses from Oberlin, et al.
A degree hasn’t inoculated many upper and middle-class whites, and everyone else who grace these ivy-covered halls, from stupidity. Does a modern college degree befuddle the mind with inanities? I’m sure that it depends. But as of now, it would have been better for many of our degree-holders to skip the expensive indoctrination, and the 5-figure debt, and follow dad and mom into the work world.
Moving left is moving socialist and into forever oppressed/oppressor victimhood, and voting like it. It’s stupid and morally corrupting. Is that what is meant by the ‘burbs turning blue, ergo dumb? One has to wonder.
RogerG
*Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/eric-adams-probably-defeats-socialism-in-new-york-city/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=featured-writers&utm_term=third
*Also on my website: libertatevitute.com
Parents of children in the Poway, Ca., school district protest critical race theory in their schools, June 3, 2021.
A recent column written by Bonnie Jean Feldkamp of the Cincinnati Enquirer illustrates the shallow, activist-oriented mind that inhabits so many of our newsrooms and has broadly penetrated the education Borg and faculty lounges down to the elementary school a few blocks away. Critical Race Theory IS clearly, unmistakably Marxism in drag. People like Feldkamp seem to be blind to it.
Bonnie Jean Feldkamp
At issue in her piece is the parent opposition to a proposed adoption of a “social equity” course for Highlands High School in Ft. Thomas, Ky. Let’s be clear: “social equity” is a euphemism for critical race theory (CRT). The elements of CRT are at its roots, as is the moniker “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). Both apples don’t fall too far from the same tree.
Her argument in support of the class was embarrassingly incoherent. She presents the CRT-driven “social equity” course as an attempt to address “outcomes”. She writes,
“When you put the emphasis on outcomes and look at the data, it’s difficult to deny things like systemic racism and white privilege, which hits the core of the pushback on CRT, mostly from conservatives.”
That is, pure and simple, the post hoc fallacy (look below) run amok. Because slavery and Jim Crow preceded today’s lagging socio-economic numbers for African-Americans, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the former caused the latter. That’s jumping to conclusions; that’s ideology; that’s bias; that’s political activism; that’s Marxism in drag!
For the benefit of Feldkamp and CRT enthusiasts, there’s a lot that can come between 160-year-old historical circumstances and today’s crime-ridden slums. Try the War on Poverty. Try the rampant fatherlessness. Try the serial assault on traditional faith.
Try the failing inner-city public schools. Try the serial indoctrination of victimhood that strips a person of their agency. Actually, the conclusion is a baby with many fathers, least of all the one stretching back a full three hundred years.
This isn’t logic. This isn’t even serious history. This is an over-complex scheme to justify a political crusade, a campaign for a militant reverse discrimination. Thus, it is classic indoctrination when imposed on unsuspecting young minds and pushed by half-aware newspaper columnists and a few recruits from the education blob.
The missionaries for CRT, DEI, “social justice”, “social equity” are marinated in the mind of Marx. First, the cognitive monstrosity begins with a huge and unsupportable assumption: groups defined by some physical or socio-economic attribute determine the course of all of our arrangements throughout history. For Marx, it was class. For CRT’s minions, it’s race. From this hunch, it’s open-field running to the end zone of political power. The first stop along the way is to germinate an army of young activists like the child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge who marched off hundreds of thousands to the killing fields and death pits.
Khmer Rouge child soldiers at a base camp in the Cardamom Mountains of western Cambodia, north of Pailin, 8th February 1981. (Photo by Alex Bowie/Getty Images)
Her sources for her opinion are people with the same views. It’s nice to know that she has compatriots who are similarly misguided, but it’s not dispositive of anything, other than the misguided have company. She quotes Education Week Magazine, the organ of the education blob. It suffers from the overweening and smothering lefty orthodoxy of the self-proclaimed socialist John Dewey. I’ve spent 30 years of teaching in public schools and can’t recall spending more than 30 minutes perusing its pages. You learn to teach by teaching, not patterning your job around Dewey’s loopy constructivism.
People like Feldkamp try to thwart any criticism by quoting someone with “prof” before their name. Her “prof” is Phillipe Copeland of Boston University’s School of Social Work and “assistant director of narrative” for Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. He’s no more coherent than she is. The “Center” is run by the infamous CRT grifter, Ibram X. Kendi. Check out this mass of verbiage from Copeland:
“Critics cannot be satisfied because the criticism about Critical Race Theory is not being made in good faith. It is part of a systematic effort to discredit and undermine anti-racism while generating and manipulating white anxiety and resentment for political gain.”
Boston University’s Phillipe Copeland speaks at the School of Theology in 2015.
Wait a minute! He can’t, and doesn’t, prove the theory to begin with, but then rushes to condemn those who would make everyone aware of it. Now that’s a sweet gig at a tidy salary and tenure.
Parents, if you want your kids to be the next edition of the Red Guards, by all means, be my guest, but don’t complain when the world that they create looks more like today’s Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, et al.
The schools are having enough trouble successfully imparting the academic core and any pertinent vocational skills. What plausible educational or fiscal reason can excuse a foray into political activism? I don’t think that statue-toppling and spittle-laced fulminations in the face of police officers are marketable skills.
Social justice warriors in New York City, 2018.
Please read the piece if for no other reason than to know what we’re up against.
Shira Steinbeck, the parent of an 11-year-old in Pleasant Hill, recites an anti-distance-learning poem at the Mount Diablo Unified School District board meeting on Wednesday, February 10, 2021. (Screenshot)
An article in today’s San Jose Mercury News article is about the attempted recall of five members of the Mt. Diablo Unified school board. One unintended outgrowth of the pandemic was the self-besmirching of a growing class of “experts”. These scientific and technical professionals quickly confused scholarship with activism. Others, such as elected officials skilled in the arts of public utterances and little else, seek the confirmatory esteem of a science that they scarcely understand. They bring with them an unexamined assumption which elevates a near-utopian sense of pristine safety to the exclusion of everything else. The result is a society with the wheels coming off . . . and parents irate over their shuttered multi-billion dollar schools.
Once we knew the nature of the virus, which we did within a couple of months, and had a collection of therapies, efforts should have focused on the vulnerable. Instead, universal masking, distancing, and a shuttering of lives and livelihoods proceeded apace. Schools were closed, or nearly so, and children lost a year-and-a-half of learning, something that’ll be difficult if not impossible to recapture. Of course, inequality will be magnified as those with the wherewithal continue to excel and those not so well situated languish. It’s amazing that those most concerned about “equity” are doing the most to worsen it.
The absence of a vaccine is frankly irrelevant at this stage.
The reigning safetyism is a disabling crutch. The ill-fruits are all around us. Massive academic failures for our Zoomed children, a riddled economy on the cusp of rampant inflation, the decay of personal agency in the government bribes (lavish unemployment benefits) to stay at home, and growing political and social discord are abundantly on display. Waiting in the wings are escalating interest rates and a gargantuan federal debt service for the exploding red ink that’ll eat up the federal budget.
The most stringent measures were universalized in a mammoth wet blanket that some potentates worshipping at the altar of safetyism can’t find within themselves to lift.
I say this not as a political partisan. Both parties were and are culpable. Many of the commentariat – left, right, and center – perpetuated the strangulation. Looking back on it, within a few months of the outbreak, measures should have targeted those facing the greatest harm. Concentrated measures were ignored in favor of totalitarianism.
Now it’s time for the common man and woman to find their inner Patrick Henry and right the ship. Go get ’em parents.
How ironic for it was Karl Marx who coined this pithy phrase in reference to the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The same applies to the current state of our colleges and universities: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
The tragedy is cramming anyone capable of breathing into another four years in a classroom. The effort has quickly become farce. It’s rapidly being turned into a burlesque of lefty fascinations as standards are simultaneously shredded. I’ll let Bill Maher tell the story; he does a better job.
Now that’s ironic, once again. I find myself often disagreeing with Maher, but even a blind man can hit the dart board after enough tries.
Here’s the relevant scene from “A Man For All Seasons” mentioned in my previous post. Substitute young Roper for the cancel-culture mobs patrolling our campuses, infecting our children’s curriculums, manning the halls of power, and swarming the newsrooms. Mob rule has the upper hand over the rule of law and decency. These, indeed, are tumultuous times. We must keep our heads on straight in this period of malevolent madness.
