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.
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.
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.
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.
For years, many people – me included – encouraged others to go to college. We pontificated that the only way to break glass ceilings, indeed, all socio-economic ceilings, was to get a degree. I think that we were right in limited circumstances, but then it became a mania. Other routes to betterment were maligned and a full-frontal assault was manufactured to shove young people into collegiate classrooms. Money, money, and more money, along with a full-throated indoctrination campaign from Sesame Street to pop entertainment to the high school guidance counselor were geared with singleness of purpose to get every warm body into a college desk. Looking back on it, the whole humongous effort was a colossal waste. And it shows.
Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University, writing in Forbes draws the curtains back to show the emperor to be naked. You can read his eye-opening piece here.
He begins his analysis with a National Bureau of Economic Research study of the recent rise in college graduation rates, a reversal of the previous long-lasting trend. A good thing, right? In one sense, yes, but in another, it’s a sign of the decline of academic excellence. The author eliminated improvements in such things as academic preparation in the lower grades and greater access to taxpayer subsidies as the causes. There’s good evidence of rot in the former and the latter has no connection to anything but tuition inflation. The authors end up with grade inflation for the spike in graduation rates.
Average grades have risen as measures of study time have fallen. Transcripts are littered with anything but coursework in science, math, or classical philosophy. But we have those great GPA’s.
Many teachers are mightily trying to produce an educated citizenry. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a good number of them. Surely, a good portion of the blame applies to further down the social supply chain and outside of it (politics?).
The increase in college graduation rates is not a time for uncorking bottles of champagne. We’ll have to keep in mind that these numbers arise out of a very troubled educational environment.
We are on the cusp of permitting them to impose a permanent disfigurement of organized athletics. The entrance of the highly contentious ideology of transgenderism is about to destroy girls’ sports. Big Sports, Inc., won’t allow dissent. If you’re a believer in transgenderism, the full monopoly power of the organization will indulge your beliefs. If not, and you and your daughter aren’t warm to the idea of “gender identity” being used to hand trophies to people who weren’t born female, tough luck.
MLB, NBA, NFL, MLS, NCAA – Big Sports, Inc – are clear partisans in the turbulent debates of our time. They ought not be. They tip the scales in support of one side in these contests. This isn’t about the ethical ending of Jim Crow or giving women an equal place at the table of organized athletics. No, Big Sports’ special status as sanctioned monopolies gives them power to impose their favored side. For the sake of our civil order, they should be stopped and their special status revoked till their charters are reformed to prevent the harmful meddling.
They take one side on issues that should be left to the people in their debates and elections. Contradictory standards may result but that just means that Congress must step in and do its duty, not to allow others to usurp that responsibility.
Gov. Kristie Noem of South Dakota was caught in the vice. She was intimidated from signing a bill to protect girls in girls’ sports. She’s right to see this as a political fight. I agree, and until a broad revolt gains steam, Congress should revoke and revamp Big Sports, Inc.’s permissive charters.
These are matters for the people’s elected representatives to decide and not the province of corporate administrative offices functioning as partisan zealots. The people are quite capable of settling these matters without threats for holding the “wrong” views from those of corporate desk-jockeys.
The pandemic gave us a death toll and a politically motivated overreaction that is actively mauling the foundations of Americas greatness. The consequences are frightening as yesterday’s troubling events indicated. My guess is that more disturbances are coming because some Americans will not be passive observers as others wreck their world. Im not advocating it. Im predicting it . . . if cooler heads dont prevail.
From where came the time of troubles? It can be traced to the longstanding machinations of the donkey party and their cultural and institutional allies. The Democrats used the virus to nearly eliminate faith in the last vestige of free and independent citizen control of their government: the election. Theyve worked tirelessly to prevent ID verification, turn voter registration over to the DMV, push same-day registration, persist in maintaining sloppy voter lists, earlier and earlier voting, and now, with the pandemic, remove most remaining guardrails by shot gunning ballots through the mail and thereby throwing mud on the results, and all the while facetiously spouting voter suppression to silence opposition. Today, who can trust election processes that would make an Iraqi cringe? No refuge there.
Look at Georgia. How does a state go from reliably conservative to neo-Marxist without any transition? Something is afoot, and it ain’t a new pair of sneakers. Mail-in voting shifts the premium from the independent voter to the moron voter. You dont have to know the candidates, their positions, and make sense of it all because a generic D, which today is a generic socialist, is all that is needed when youre harvesting pre-packaged early votes in a well-funded processing operation. Interesting . . . and appalling.
Now, all institutions of critical societal mass are organs and tools of the cultural left, which is a direct pathway to the political left. For instance, the schools, K to grad school, have indoctrinated your teachers and kids in material and moral relativism, the philosophical mainstay of the many socialisms at the heart of the Democratic Party. In essence, they are the finishing schools of the cultural/political left. No refuge there.
Using the metric of political donations, the corporate boardrooms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are overwhelmingly populated with acolytes of the cultural/political left. Money poured into the coffers of the donkey party from these deep pockets, and made it possible to fund Stacey Abramss vast political mining operation that gave us two more neo-Marxists in the Senate. Corporate America is no longer a trustworthy bastion to defend American civilization. Their ads are increasingly endorsements of left-wing sloganeering and the collectivism of the super-state. The robber barons of today arent robbing your purse. They are stealing your country. No refuge there.
A war is brewing between Wall Street and Main Street.
And of course, theres Big Media. The stuff creeping through your tv screen is resplendent in lefty values and causes. Big Tech reinforces the bias by acting as gatekeepers of acceptable thought. Big Entertainment and Big Information are channeled in only one cultural and political direction. Lefty groupthink is pervasive. The ChiComs would find much to like. No refuge there.
At this point, Im beginning to wonder if, indeed, bigness is badness.
The pulpit is coming under increasing fire. For those denominations unwilling to submit some mainline ones already have the power of the state will be used to impose the agenda of coerced participation in abortion, transgenderism, and every other trendy surrender to the human will to come down the pike. If you are a church who takes seriously the mission to help the lost and the least, you are in the public square and subject to their gaze. Your church may remain something of a refuge if you remain locked in the sanctuary.
Boxing people into a corner with no outlet is not a prescription for civility. Some might resort to violence rather surrender to the central planning of the Green New Deal. Some might resist rather than submit to gun confiscation. Some might resist rather than see the path to prosperity for their children hampered by the color of their skin. Some might resist rather than accept the full emasculation of their state by a donkey party- and DC-engineered neutering of the Electoral College. Some might resist rather than submit to self-serving manipulation of the size of the Supreme Court, or accept the edicts of a cowed Court under constant threat of impeachment. These are dark times.
I hear the faint sounds of a militia in training. I hope and pray it never comes to that. My only recourse is prayer. Pray for America.
What’s happening to America? I have much reason to be worried about the soundness of popular thinking on some very weighty issues if an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report on the state of public opinion post-election has any validity. My concern isn’t due to the findings running counter to my opinions. It’s my suspicion – call it an informed suspicion – that there is little awareness of a counter point of view, or much of anything else for that matter. We appear to be well-connected but poorly informed, maybe predominantly non-informed.
Perhaps we have always been this way to a significant degree. Perhaps. But what of all that talk about our “great schools” and vibrant free press? Honestly, that “free press” isn’t so much “free” as it is monotone, at least for the big shots. As for the schooling, never before has so many Americans spent more years behind a desk and come out of it with so little. The prerequisites for sound reasoning are quickly disappearing. Our scandalous press has been much written about, so little need to go there. But what of our schools? The only real snapshot of learning attainment is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP). We are forever exhorted to spend more, trillions more, but are getting less and less. Reading and Math proficiency scores have plummeted from 2017 to 2019 (pre-pandemic): Reading fell from 40% to 34% and Math from 37% to 34%.
And what of those other subjects, like those that contribute to cultural literacy? Could our graduating seniors pass a citizenship test? Call me skeptical given the state of the other subjects.
Money, or the lack of it, isn’t the problem. Something more fundamental is afoot. Are we a healthy society? Is the infrastructure for the schools – college preparation, grad school teacher-training, curricular materials such as textbooks, etc. – healthy? They are festooned with a rigorless leftist ideology, wokeness run amok.
And let’s pull the rug back on our commonly chaotic homes. Now there’s a new normal for you.
No wonder according to AEI, 60+% expressed hostility to the Electoral College. I’ll bet that most don’t understand it and the Founder’s complex reasoning for it. This is a discussion in a vacuum, and a poll result coming out of the vacuum.
The sudden popularity of marijuana is another thing. Let’s strip the debate of the much-ballyhooed medical benefits and get real. This is about getting high, and not much else. The popularity of weed has been on the upswing for at least a couple of generations, as getting high has made a comeback. As these young adherents pass through the age pyramid, they tow along with them the residue of their younger escapades. This might help account for the jump of 22% for legalization in the AEI analysis.
Combine the corrupted education with the increasing frivolity of our new techie world and we get the idea in polls that Biden will unite the country. Where’d that come from? Biden spent all summer threatening many of our jobs and imposing on us the semi-literate musings of a few half-wits in Congress. Unite the country by foisting on us over-complicated junk like hybrids, by having us grow more accustomed to intermittent blackouts and expensive energy, by having fewer guys and gals with guns and more overpaid Sociology majors patrolling our neighborhoods, by Soros-funded DA’s not enforcing the laws and emptying the jails, by freezing your kids out of college slots to benefit other upper middle-class kids who check the right identity boxes, by hiking taxes on job creators, by open-borders caterwauling . . . . ?
This isn’t the stuff of a “uniter”. The whole scheme is based on division and a smear: a parceling out of blame to one group and government bennies to categorical favorites. And then there’s the view in the poll that Biden will do better with COVID. Once again, where’d that come from? Biden is frozen in March 2020 when we didn’t know anything. He wants to double down on stupid. Measures such as lockdowns, school closures, and having us masked-up everywhere at nearly all times may have been appropriate when COVID-knowledge was a blank slate. Now we know a lot more about who is vulnerable (very few), the nature of the bug, and how to treat it. Instead of targeting efforts on the truly vulnerable, Biden and company wants to bring back totalitarianism, the kind of thing that failed at preventing our current second surge. Yeah, doubling down on stupid.
The polling analysis by AEI doesn’t say nearly as much about public opinion as it does about the condition of the minds behind those broader set of opinions. I think that it was Will Rogers who said, “It’s not what he doesn’t know that’s so dangerous. It’s what he knows that ain’t so.” Chew on that.
As of now, I see no good reason to vote, especially if you live in one of those deep blue one-party states such as Chicago, California, the Acela Corridor, LA to Seattle, almost any metropolis, any burg with a 40,000-student college campus, or battleground state with Philadelphias crammed within it. What’s the point? The human capital to stay informed, tromping down to the polling place, or spending an hour filling out the thing is wasted when boxes of ballots are filled out by civic illiterates at the conniving of party activists or ballot harvesters reaping unused ballots and filling them out on the side of a van. Again, what’s the point in doing your duty only to have it canceled by the election equivalent of gangland enforcers?
I do have one caveat, though. It’s that the down ballot races, or maybe the mid-terms, retain some legitimacy because they lack a “Gone with the Wind” marquee status of the race for federal head honcho. Those races aren’t likely to attract the sinister gaze of our election system’s villains and therefore we benefit from their inattention. It’s like in a riot when one store is unexpectedly spared while the rest go up in flames. In such races, the pride in voting is replaced by the relief in knowing it will probably count because it won’t be aborted by the 3,000 empty ballots with the exception of one marked bubble next to one presidential candidate dropped in one heave at the registrar.
I was thinking today about the huge vote totals for both presidential candidates in this election. As of now, we have about 145 million ballots cast for president out of a US voting-age population of around 255 million. Of that number, about 169 million were registered to vote. Does each one of those 145 million represent one person above room temperature? Call me skeptical. The closer the vote percentage approaches the full mark, the greater the likelihood that many of those votes are reflecting the wishes of non-souls and the functionally illiterate. You can’t help but scrape more of the muck in the bottom of the pond as it is emptied.
The fix was in when people were allowed to vote a month early, sometimes after election day, and the spray of ballots across the country through the mail. In other words, the muck was thicker than usual this time around. And it ended up in the water supply.
Now the candidate that benefitted the most from this afterbirth of an election will have all the executive power to go COVID crazy. Get prepared, he’s going to go all Gretchen Whitmer on us. The Wuhan virus was used by power-hungry Democrats to destroy nearly everything in our public and private life. Authoritarianism is an addictive drug, and, once used, it will be easier the next time. Watch out every flu season for the mutilation of our social and economic life. Intoxicated with power, nothing will escape the gaze of our new Caesars. This virus, and any others that may befall us in the next four years, will be milked to essentially repeal the Constitution and turn an industrious people into a cowed and subservient one.
Our political ethos will not be spared. Supportive riots will be quietly approved through official silence as dissent against the rulers will be quashed. The right of association to protest will go out the window with the rest of the First Amendment. Forget about faith and fellowship. The equal protection of the laws will suffer a similar fate as children in chaotic homes won’t fare as well with Zoom education when compared to those well-heeled enough to form learning pods, tutors, and close parental supervision. It’s a social catastrophe. Watch other issues get thrown into the vortex such as gun control and AOC’s adolescent musings in her Green New Deal. COVID is robust enough for Schumer’s “change America”. This highly dubious election put the fox in the henhouse.
Let’s not look under that rock called the economy once these clowns get their hands around its neck. That important part of our lives involved with making a livelihood will be destroyed under the auspices of a hysteria about a vulnerable few, very few. The vulnerable should stay home and Biden’s efforts should focus on assisting and protecting them. A Sherman’s March through all of American life is a moral monstrosity and hardly justified, but we’re likely to get it anyway. That mound of pieces of paper said so.
One of the things that is lost on the civically illiterate – as they were made kicking and screaming to contribute to the rancid pile – is subtle and not so subtle distinctions. Biden and his crew wallow in a muddled fog between “experts” and policy-making. It works on the easily befuddled. In reality, experts provide advice; policy-making incorporates different points of view alongside an analysis of cost-benefit ramifications. For God’s sake, policy-making isn’t being led around by the nose by a select few “experts” who appeal to your authoritarian instincts. Different actions carry with them huge costs in a people’s social, economic, and political lives. Biden’s selected cabal of “experts” shouldn’t have the first and final say in what is to be done. There are too many in the class of “expert” who disagree. Plus, other experts in affected fields should have a say. That is what is meant by the art of statesmanship. Bringing all this together is the stuff of policy-making, not an act of waiting for Anthony Fauci to emerge from his lair like Punxsutawney Phil to issue his garbled pronouncements.
Collecting 50%+1 of these pieces of paper in enough states is just what the doctored ordered to resurrect the divine right of kings, or Rousseau’s “general will”, or Lenin’s “vanguard elite”, or whatever you want to call the emasculation of our citizen’s republic. After the Democrats mangled the vote by making the process a farce, there is little that the single citizen can do. It matters not if scant skullduggery can be proven. Follow your nose. You may not be able to identify the source of the stink in the pile, but that won’t stop it from stinking.
I was a teachers union local president. I know what teachers unions are all about. They are about maximizing rewards for their members, not students, as they push lefty curriculum. Circa 2020, they want to keep the schools closed, their full pay for “distance” instruction, with as few work hours as possible, and no accountability. Plus, plus, this from the microphone of incoming United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) president, Cecily Myart-Cruz: they are all-in for defunding police, the district’s campus police that is. UTLA is a combination of CHAZ (of Seattle fame) and La Costra Nostra. Give them what they want or they will extort the education of your children.
The prospect of more loosey-goosey “distance” learning is driving more parents to abandon the public schools. Some are turning to self-help by forming learning pods for their children. They might even learn that they don’t need Myart-Cruz and her UTLA cohorts.
When schools reopen, and they will have to reopen – probably after the Biden/AOC regime wins the White House – these teachers might wake up to fewer kids in the classroom. With budgets crimped by the lockdowns, and ADA numbers falling, many of those teachers in the photo might be looking for barista jobs. My guess: math and economics won’t show up in the college transcripts of the pink-slipped.
UTLA, CTA, and NEA are to the education industry what the UAW was to the American auto industry by the end of the 20th century. Sometimes, poison is self-administered.