What are they doing to our soldiers? Indeed, what are they doing to our children? The “they”? They go by various titles: “cultural curators (Salena Zito), “cultural commanding heights” (mine), “elites”, “limousine liberals”, “establishment”, “progressives”, “blue-check Twitter”, alongside a host of disparaging terms for anyone outside these tightly-packed super zip codes in the cartography of America. A tell-tale sign is glaringly evident in almost any place with a college of extortionate social and economic (and by extension political) influence. Three recent incidents are case studies of their baleful clout.
Who’s educating our children? It might be the same people like the staff of University of Wisconsin Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center (GSRC) who conducted a teacher training session for the Eau Claire Area School District in late February on the whole gamut of woke ideology. Safe spaces, the evils of heteronormativity and meritocracy and systemic racism and white privilege, and the need to freeze parents out of their children’s gender identity issues were taught as unassailable truths to the government employees who have the residents’ children under their control for 6-8 hours per weekday. The whole thing might have flown under the residents’ radar, pre-pandemic, but parent groups, post-pandemic, were tipped off.
Thankfully, word got out. Parents learned that teachers were told in power-point slides,
“. . . parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned. Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student.”
In essence, the area’s children were treated as property of the school district. The arrogance is startling. Chris Jorgenson, the director of the GSRC, was impertinent enough to declare to the throng of teachers, “But much like we wouldn’t act as stand-ins for abuse in other circumstances, we cannot let parents’ rejection of their children guide teachers’ reactions and actions and advocacy for our students.” If you can make sense of the word salad, the presentation of gender-identity ideology – sometimes referred to as transgenderism – makes an enemy of parents who understandably reject the ideology by calling the repudiation parental “child abuse”. The whole falderol was sanctioned by the district’s superintendent, Michael Johnson, in classic bureaucratese when he said the district “prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.” The effrontery of our cultural curators was on full display.
It doesn’t end there. Barrington, R.I., is home for many veterans and staff of the Naval War College (NWC), and what we see in the faculty lounge of UW Eau Claire is clearly evident among its professoriate, and it spills over into the town of Barrington. Don’t forget, the NWC educates the officer corps of one of the institutions that is assigned the sole task of protecting us from foreign aggressors who wish to inflict abject harm on us. The first decades of this century have made the threat abundantly clear.
Instead, like the teachers and children of Eau Claire, Marine and Naval officers are being indoctrinated with the same ideology of self-flagellation. Think about it: what effect will it have on morale in the ranks? General George C. Marshal warned us in the tumultuous days of World War II, “It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory.” Who would want to defend a nation that has been characterized barely this side of Nazi Germany?
At issue in Barrington is the sponsorship of this year’s Memorial Day activities. For the past number of years, it was the Barrington United Veterans Coalition (BUVC). Well, not this year. The town’s Master of Ceremonies will not be the head of BUVC but the role will be turned over to a NWC professor, Frank Douglas, who previously spoke in favor of flying the Black Lives Matter flag at city hall. The Veterans Coalition had opposed the proposal to grant BLM the same honor as the POW-MIA banner. Douglas, according to town council minutes, played the trite “diversity” card when he said, “… there is diversity in the veteran community because they [BUVC] do not speak for all veterans.”
Our intrepid NWC prof, Frank Douglas, is probably confusing the neologism BLM as a concept with the group. But flying a flag is quite different from simply endorsing the obvious truth that black lives matter. A flag denotes a group, and the BLM group is a scandal in belief and practice. A person who isn’t aware of the group’s neo-Marxist program has been living in a closet. Ditto for the bookkeeping shenanigans. Flying the BLM flag isn’t much different from flying the Viet Cong flag.
I’m not surprised. Douglas’s resume’ reads like a travelogue through academic bubbles – Georgetown U. (BSFS, Int. Affairs, 1993), Johns Hopkins U. (MA, Int. Relations, 1997), Harriman Institute (M.Phil., PoliSci, 2001), and Columbia U. (PhD, PoliSci, 2005). Clearly, this guy has the impression that some form of wisdom and competence is granted to someone with a litany of letters after their name . . . or it simply could be the desire for a cushy job.
As for his uniformed experience – he’s a commissioned officer in the Naval Reserve – his bio on the NWC’s website lists staff jobs in and out of theater from 2004 to 2018. Actual combat experience isn’t evident. I could be wrong but he appears to be a desk jockey. He might be the military’s version of a teacher quickly transitioning to administration. The old saying in education has a ring of truth: If you can’t teach, administrate. In the social ecosystem of the Pentagon, if you find the life of the grunt personally repellant, cram your resume’ with academic honors and be above the grime of actual combat, and, while you’re at it, engorge yourself on the thought-fads of academia.
If I’ve got it wrong, Douglas, please tell me.
The staff overhead of the Pentagon and its academic appurtenances frequently show the very same neo-Marxist influence as in Eau Claire Area School District’s headquarters. Who can forget General Mark Milley’s (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) statement before the House Armed Services Committee in June of 2021: “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The pinning of “white rage” on the January 6 rioters and protesters sounds like The Squad’s camera-hogging howls. The lunch room at the Pentagon may not be much different from the UW Eau Claire’s faculty lounge.
Back to the NWC, another prof, Pauline Shanks Kaurin, delivered a lecture to sailors in June of 2021 that treated Meghan Markle’s fully unsubstantiated accusations of racism in the royal family as analogous to the alleged systemic racism in American society. She went further in slamming classical liberalism in its focus on the individual. If you want more of the mental gobbledygook, she continued to ineptly wax as follows:
“… [racism] is not a case of a few bad apples. This is, as the Duchess of Sussex said, she said, racism, racist is not rude….
This is not a matter of people who are being mean or rude or ignorant individuals. We tend to think of racism or sexism as, ‘this is a problem with individuals’. It’s not a problem with individuals. It’s not a problem with individuals only, it’s a problem of individuals within a structure, within a society, within a system.”
This is the stuff promulgated to the people trained to kill. Those in charge should be held accountable for wrongly presenting this bombast. And if they won’t be responsible, keep it out entirely. The nonsense should be treated as the bone of contention that it is. That means that you don’t deliver it from a lectern, as from a pulpit, even if discussion is permitted. The setting grants to the presenter the power to frame the discussion. Rather, it only deserves the full debate treatment: two sides cognitively armed to argue the merits, or lack thereof.
If not, keep it away from our troops, and keep it away from our children. It’s noxious neo-Marxism whether flying under the BLM banner or anti-racism ideology in teacher training, and needs to be confronted, and not in any way presented as truth. Our men and women in uniform and school-age children merit better. Schooling should not be a national suicide pill.
RogerG