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The New Normal/Political Correctness Run Amok Thread


Muda69

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19 hours ago, swordfish said:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9262809/More-2-million-customers-Texas-without-power-following-winter-storm.html

Millions of people are without power in Texas after frozen wind turbines caused blackouts in the state amid Winter Storm Uri, which has sent temperatures plunging across the southern Plains a day after conditions canceled flights and impacted traffic across large swaths of the US.

1)  Not a very good endorsement for wind turbines......

2)  It's pretty cold in Texas this week, huh?

 

Also this article about solar panels and wind turbines from Germany, the 'solar and wind' capital:  https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/world-s-solar-and-wind-capital-freezing-due-to-snow-blanketing-millions-of-solar-panels/ar-BB1dF9Dp

Quote

Germany is held up as the world’s solar and wind capital by “renewables luvvies” but Germans are freezing through winter due to “millions of solar panels blanketed in snow” and turbines sitting idle, according to Rowan Dean.

BB1dFfds.img?h=1080&w=1920&m=6&q=60&o=f&

 

“Germany’s long been held up by the likes of these renewable luvvies, they say Germany’s the world’s great wind and solar capital,” Mr Dean said.

But as we speak millions of solar panels are blanketed in snow and 30,000 wind turbines are sitting idle because there’s no wind.

“Freezing Germans shivering in their lederhosen’s are desperate for coal fired power to heat up their wurst and sauerkraut.”

Nuclear energy is ultimately the solution.

 

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https://nypost.com/2021/02/16/nyc-public-school-asks-parents-to-reflect-on-their-whiteness/

A city public school principal is asking parents to “reflect” on their “whiteness” — passing out literature that extols “white traitors’’ who “dismantle institutions,” education officials confirmed to The Post on Tuesday.

The “woke’’ offensive at the East Side Community School in Manhattan features a ranking list titled “The 8 White Identities,” which ranges from “White Supremacist’’ to “White Abolitionist.”

The curriculum, written by Barnor Hesse, an associate professor of African American studies at Northwestern University in Illinois, claims, “There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities.

“People who identify with whiteness are one of these,’’ Hesse writes above the eight-point list.

“It’s about time we build an ethnography of whiteness, since white people have been the ones writing about and governing Others,’’ Hesse adds.

In between the two extreme “identities” of supremacist and abolitionist are such categories as “White Voyeurism’’ — defined as “wouldn’t challenge a white supremacist, desires non-whiteness because it’s interesting’’ — and “White Privilege,’’ or “sympathetic to a set of issues but only privately; won’t speak/act in solidarity publicly because benefitting through whiteness in public (some POC are in this category as well).”image.thumb.png.26f8c3e55227732f38088146dec456cf.png“The Eight White Identities” written by Northwestern University associate professor Barnor Hesse.

The handout was accompanied by a color-coordinated meter with the red zone on the left titled “White Supremacist’’ and the green zone on the far right labeled “White Abolitionist.”

A New York City Department of Education official told The Post that some parents at the school, which caters to sixth- through 12-graders on the Lower East Side, first shared the material with staff.

The principal then disseminated it to every parent “as part of a series of materials meant for reflection” and as “food for thought,” the official said.

A DOE rep said in a statement, “Anti-racism and the celebration of diversity is at the core of our work on behalf of the young people of New York City, and the East Side Community School’s students, parents and staff partner together to advance equity in their community.

“The document in question was shared with the school by parents as a part of ongoing anti-racist work in the school community and is one of many resources the schools utilizes.”image.thumb.png.fee7c57e05802b591f2cc6ec24820e2a.pngNorthwestern University associate professor Barnor Hesse presents an “ethnography of whiteness” in the ranking list.

The spokesman said school workers are now being threatened over the missive.

“Our staff are now being targeted with vile racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs and degrading language from people outside of their school and nothing justifies the abuse directed at our educators,” the rep said.

Christopher Rufo of the Discovery Institute wrote in a tweet that included a posting of the curriculum, “This is the new language of public education.”

The dissemination of Hesse’s literature to parents comes as the DOE and schools chancellor Richard Carranza have pushed to eliminate what they call current administrators’ “white-supremacy culture.’’

The administration has embraced “anti-bias training” across the board, with staffers forced to attend slide-show presentations denouncing the current culture’s “paternalism” and “power hoarding” — while getting sued over Carranza’s alleged creation of “an environment which is hostile toward whites.”

Rufo’s Feb. 15 tweet drew mixed reactions on Twitter.

“If you find this hostile, or unnerving, it’s because you are fearing the loss of power and advantage that your skin colour has afforded you. It’s an agenda to bring true equality,” a Twitter user fired at Rufo over Hesse’s chart.

But another writer said, “THIS is what a public school spends time and money on? Anti-racism like this is a poison.”

The racial makeup of the student body at East Side Community was 55 percent Hispanic, 18 percent white, 15 percent black, 10 percent Asian and 2 percent other during the last school year.

The school’s principal, Mark Federman, declined comment through the Education Department.

WTF?  How is this, in and of itself, not racist?  I guess since BLM endorses it, that makes it OK.  

 

 

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Adding wokeness: Oregon promotes teacher program to subtract ‘racism in mathematics’

https://nypost.com/2021/02/12/adding-wokeness-oregon-promotes-teacher-program-to-subtract-racism-in-mathematics/

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The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics” and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.

An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 “Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course,” which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.” The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California’s San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others. 

Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” Those include “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer,” students being “required to ‘show their work,'” and other alleged manifestations.

“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” the document for the “Equitable Math” toolkit reads. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.

The ODE, led by Colt Gill, confirmed the letter to Fox News. ODE Communications Director Marc Siegel also defended the “Equitable Math” educational program, saying it “helps educators learn key tools for engagement, develop strategies to improve equitable outcomes for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, and join communities of practice.”

An associated “Dismantling Racism” workbook, linked within the toolkit, similarly identifies “objectivity” — described as “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective or ‘neutral'” — as a characteristic of White supremacy.

Instead of focusing on one right answer, the toolkit encourages teachers to “come up with at least two answers that might solve this problem.” 

It adds: “Challenge standardized test questions by getting the ‘right’ answer, but justify other answers by unpacking the assumptions that are made in the problem.”

It also encourages teachers to “center ethnomathematics,” which includes a variety of guidelines. One of them instructs educators to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

The newsletter surfaced amid a broader uproar over critical race theory and diversity training sessions in government entities. For example, a media frenzy erupted last year after a controversial graphic on “whiteness” surfaced from National Museum for African American History and Culture.

The museum’s graphic broke the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” into categories such as “rugged individualism” and “history.” For example, under “future orientation,” the graphic listed “delayed gratification” and planning for the future as ideas spread by White culture.

The training promoted by Oregon references a 2016 workbook titled “Dismantling Racism.” 

“We do not claim to have ‘discovered’ or to ‘own’ the ideas in this workbook any more than Columbus can claim to have discovered or own America,” the workbook reads in one section. 

It’s unclear to what extent, if at all, teachers would be involved with this particular workbook, created by the group DismantlingRacism.org, but it appeared to form part of the foundation for the course’s material.

“The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visualizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture,” the toolkit reads before linking to both the workbook and a paper on “white supremacy culture.”

The toolkit adds that “building on the framework, teachers engage with critical praxis in order to shift their instructional beliefs and practices toward antiracist math education. By centering antiracism, we model how to be antiracist math educators with accountability.”

In one section of the “Dismantling Racism” workbook, the argument is made that “only white people can be racist in our society, because only white people as a group have that power.” Another section seems to justify anti-cop sentiments

“In some cases, the prejudices of oppressed people (‘you can’t trust the police’) are necessary for survival,” it reads.

That particular workbook seems to take a decidedly anti-capitalist tone as well. 

“We cannot dismantle racism in a system that exploits people for private profit,” it reads. “If we want to dismantle racism, then we must build a movement for economic justice.” One of the graphics includes protesters calling for taxes on corporations. Quotes are also featured from Howard Zinn, a self-described socialist, and Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, although the quotes are more generally about activism rather than economics.

Anti-racism curricula have received an array of criticism and support.

For example, political scientist Carol M. Swain told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last week that certain curricula “put forth by Black Lives Matter and being embraced in too many places is really destructive of the Black community and the Black family and racial justice.”

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, an expert on critical race theory at Boston University School of Law, told the Boston Globe that critical race theory helped people understand the complexity of race – beyond “simple” narratives that they may have been taught.

“Racism is not extraordinary,” she continued. “Race and racism are basically baked into everything we do in our society. It’s embedded in our institutions. It’s embedded in our minds and hearts.”

Attorney M.E. Hart, who has conducted these types of training sessions, told The Washington Post that the training helped people live up to “this nation’s promise – ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

The complete and utter dumbing down of nation's children continues in government education.  So I guess under "ethnomathematics"       2 + 2 can = 5,  but only if it is a white person who first says that 2 + 2 always equals 4.

Asisinine.

 

 

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On 12/15/2020 at 11:45 AM, swordfish said:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/abe-lincoln-was-a-hero-now-he-s-a-bad-guy-in-some-s-f-education-circles/ar-BB1bUNoA

Lincoln is one of dozens of historical figures who, according to a school district renaming committee, lived a life so stained with racism, oppression or human rights violations, they do not deserve to have their name on a school building.

The debate reflects a nation in turmoil, a reckoning with a racist past that lingers today, toppling confederate statues from town squares and eliminating a large number of Robert E. Lee street signs.

“Uprooting the problematic names and symbols that currently clutter buildings, streets, throughout the city is a worthy endeavor,” said Jeremiah Jeffries, chairman of the renaming committee and a first grade teacher in San Francisco. “Only good can come from the public being reflective and intentional about the power of our words, names and rhetoric within our public institutions.”

But history is not always clear. People are complicated. Heroism and bravery can be obscured by beliefs and behaviors deemed abhorrent when viewed through a modern lens.

Was Lincoln one of the greatest presidents of all time who ended the country’s great shame or a whitewashed historic character with a questionable record related to Native Americans not worthy of memorials, school names and street signs?

Critics have called the effort to rename 44 school sites, a full third of the district’s schools, amateur — citing the committee’s justifications pulled from Wikipedia or selective news sources rather than historical records or comprehensive research — and a waste of time amid a pandemic.

It has also received significant support from some communities, whose children wear school sweatshirts emblazoned with the name of former slave owners.

When the committee released the 44 school sites to be renamed, many made sense. Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe were slave owners, and Vasco Nunez Balboa was a murderous conquistador.

At least a few names on the list raised eyebrows, including El Dorado, literally translated to City of Gold, and Dianne Feinstein, who landed on the list because as mayor in the 1980s, she replaced a vandalized Confederate flag in front of City Hall.

But perhaps the most controversial on the list was Lincoln. Honest Abe. The Great Emancipator.

His inclusion exemplifies the struggle in San Francisco and across the country to balance the good and the bad, in this case, the hero and the 19th century man with many faults.

It is not an easy to sort worth from waste, said historians as well as those hurt by the legacy of those complicated figures.

“I have so many reactions in the sense of looking at his entire record and the fact of what (Lincoln) did for Africans and slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation,” said Sherry Black, who worked for more than 40 years in Native American economic and community development. “Considering the time period, it’s so difficult to understand how things were at the time. How do you make these decisions?”

To many, Abraham Lincoln was one of the country’s greatest presidents, the Great Emancipator, a beloved historic figure as well as political mentor to his successors, including Barack Obama, who used the Lincoln Bible for his inauguration.

Yet the renaming of Lincoln High School was a slam dunk for the committee, which didn’t even discuss it, according to video of the meetings. The members of the committee, appointed by the school board, deemed whether a person’s actions or beliefs met the criteria for renaming, and moved on. The committee’s spreadsheet with notes on their research listed the federal treatment of Native Americans during his administration as the reason.

“The discussion for Lincoln centered around his treatment of First Nation peoples, because that was offered first,” Jeffries said. “Once he met criteria in that way, we did not belabor the point.”

Jeffries, however, said the narrative of Lincoln’s legacy is false.

Regardless of the pop-culture myths of Lincoln and his motivations, the Civil War was not fought over slavery or the liberation of Black people.

“The history of Lincoln and Native Americans is complicated, not nearly as well known as that of the Civil War and slavery,” he said. “Lincoln, like the presidents before him and most after, did not show through policy or rhetoric that Black lives ever mattered to them outside of human capital and as casualties of wealth building.”

Others disagree.

“He saved the country from dividing and ruin,” said Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar and director of the Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. “He should be honored for it.

Lincoln’s involvement with Native Americans is even trickier to unravel.

Lincoln’s administration supported the Homestead Act of 1862 and transcontinental railroad, which led to the loss of Indigenous peoples’ land. Lincoln himself largely delegated the sometimes bloody response to Native American conflicts while focusing on the Civil War, according to historians.

But Lincoln, whose grandfather was killed by a Native American, oversaw the hanging of 38 indigenous warriors after a Santee Sioux uprising in Minnesota, but only after he personally reviewed the legal cases against the 303 men sentenced to death. He saved the lives of 265 Indigenous men.

Lincoln, historians say, was focused on the Civil War and therefore did little to change policies related to Native Americans, but had planned to.

“If we get through the war and I live, this Indian system will be reformed,” he said. He never got the chance.

“He was more progressive than most people,” Holzer said. “There was pretty rampant hostility (toward Native Americans) and I think Lincoln rose above it.

“Nobody is going to pass 21st century mores if you’re looking at the 18th and 19th centuries.”

Lincoln’s legacy is complicated, Black said.

He could have sentenced all 303 warriors to death, she said, but “he recognized they weren’t treated appropriately according to the legal system.”

Black wondered: Does the good outweigh the bad? “I could come down on either side.”

For the renaming committee, that wasn’t a valid question. One decision that met the criteria was enough.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Did the name under consideration meet one or more of our criteria?’ If that name met criteria, they were put on the list,” Jeffries said.

That’s how Feinstein landed on it.

“On a local level Dianne Feinstein chose to fly a flag that is the iconography of domestic terrorism, racism, white avarice and inhumanity towards black and indigenous people at the City Hall,” Jeffries said. “She is one of the few living examples on our list, so she still has time to dedicate the rest of her life to the upliftment of Black, First Nations and other people of color. She hasn’t thus far, so her apology simply wasn’t convincing.”

At the same time, labor leader Cesar Chavez didn’t make the list, despite his feelings toward undocumented immigrants, who he called “wetbacks” and other derogatory names. He encouraged his supporters to report them to the authorities for deportation.

United Farm Worker members would form “wet lines” at the border and beat those crossing, believing they would be strike breakers, according to his biographer Miriam Pawel.

Jeffries said no one on the committee offered evidence that Chavez met the criteria. He did not say whether anyone on the committee looked for any.

“We did not discuss the life of Cesar Chavez except to say that he did not meet criteria,” he said.

The committee is expected to formally recommend renaming the 44 school sites in January, which will also include an alternative name chosen by Jeffries and the other members.

School communities have an opportunity to suggest a new name this month.

Parent Alida Fisher is looking forward to seeing the name change at her school, saying many Denman Middle School families have long wanted another moniker on the building.

Denman might have been the first (San Francisco) superintendent, but he was also “an abject racist,” Fisher said at November school board meeting.

Parent Matt Price appreciates the idea, but wishes the district would just wait until the school communities have the energy and time for such decisions.

“This move, in light of the disastrous year this has been, feels terribly disrespectful to the parents who are really struggling right now,” said Price, whose third grade son attends McCoppin Elementary, which is also on the list. “It’s a well meaning exercise and I’m certainly not opposed, but it’s very, very badly timed.”

The school board is expected to vote on the recommendations early next year.

In the meantime, Jeffries urged the public to do their own research, “particularly on Lincoln.”

“There is a lot of scholarship out there,” he said. “I encourage everyone to seek it out. Read.”

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker

 

Are you fricking kidding me?  SMH.....

https://nypost.com/2021/02/22/san-francisco-cancels-choice-to-rename-racist-schools/

San Francisco has made a stunning about-face, walking back a controversial decision to scrub 44 “racist” names from its schools — including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — after the move drew nationwide ire and was criticized for being based on flawed information without insight from historians.

“I acknowledge and take responsibility that mistakes were made in the renaming process,” the president of San Francisco’s School Board Gabriela López wrote on Twitter Sunday

“Reopening will be our only focus until our children and young people are back in schools. We’re cancelling renaming committee meetings for the time being.” 

In late January, the school board voted 6-1 to rename schools honoring “racist” historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Paul Revere and replace them with people who didn’t aid or abet slavery, genocide or human rights abuses.

The move was widely criticized as a symptom of cancel culture and for being based on misinformation and “casual Google searches” without the input of historians. 

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California Bill Would Give $1,000 Fines to Retailers With Separate 'Girls' and 'Boys' Toy Sections: https://reason.com/2021/02/23/california-bill-would-give-1000-fines-to-retailers-with-separate-girls-and-boys-toy-sections/?itm_source=parsely-api

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Retail stores in most of California are only allowed to operate at 25 percent capacity. A new bill in the state legislature would ensure that whatever part of their shop is allowed to be open is as inclusive as possible.

Last week, Assembly Members Evan Low (D–Cupertino) and Cristina Garcia (D–Los Angeles) introduced a bill that would require retailers to offer their toys and childcare products in a gender-neutral format.

Brick-and-mortar shops would have to display the majority of their products and clothing aimed at children in one undivided, unisex area on the sales floor. They'd also be barred from putting up signage that would indicate whether a product was intended for a boy or girl.

California-based retailers that sell children's products online would also have to have a page on their website that offers these products in a general neutral fashion. The bill would allow retailers to title that section of their website "kids," "unisex," or "gender neutral."

The bill is nearly identical to one that Low introduced last year, telling Politico at the time that he was hoping to create a more inclusive shopping experience. "This is an issue of children being able to express themselves without bias," he said.

Low dropped the bill in May to prioritize COVID-19-related work but promised to pick up the fight later, saying in a statement that "the policy behind this bill is not only important in regards to addressing perceived societal norms but also ensuring that prejudice and judgment does not play a prominent role in our children's lives. I look forward to working on this issue in the future."

If passed, stores that did put dresses in a separate girls section could be hit with a $1,000 civil fine. The policy would only apply to retail department stores with over 500 employees.

Even without mandates, some retailers have been moving away from gendered in-store promotion. In 2015, Target announced that it would get rid of separate sections for bedding and toys.

At the time, the company was careful to note that they weren't eliminating all gender distinctions in their store layout and signage, saying that "some cases, like apparel, where there are fit and sizing differences" gender-based suggestions were appropriate.

Low's bill would deprive Target and other retailers of making that choice for themselves.

That stores like Target are voluntarily moving toward more gender-neutral promotions shows that mandating such a change isn't necessary to provide a genderless child section to shoppers. The fact that some haven't made the same move suggests that there may still be customers who find gendered distinctions helpful.

Regulating how companies market their products online and in their stores could potentially raise First Amendment challenges as well.

The bill would appear to disadvantage brick-and-mortar stores versus online retailers. But it's those same brick-and-mortar retailers that have been hammered by the pandemic and related lockdown restrictions. Having to spend more complying with new regulations is the last thing many need.

 

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A mister no more: Mr. Potato Head goes gender neutral: https://apnews.com/article/mr-potato-head-goes-gender-neutral-d3c178f2b9b0c424ed814657be41a9d8

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Mr. Potato Head is no longer a mister.

Hasbro, the company that makes the potato-shaped plastic toy, is giving the spud a gender neutral new name: Potato Head. The change will appear on boxes this year.

Toy makers have been updating their classic brands to appeal to kids today. Barbie has shed its blonde image and now comes in multiple skin tones and body shapes. Thomas the Tank Engine added more girl characters. And American Girl is now selling a boy doll.

Hasbro said Mr. Potato Head, which has been around for about 70 years, needed a modern makeover.

*sigh*  Where does it end?

 

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Young Carmel sisters spotted outdated 'men at work' sign. So they did something about it.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2021/03/03/carmel-sisters-men-at-work-construction-signs-change-wording/6868371002/

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Two sharp-eyed young sisters were hailed as change agents and champions of equality by the Carmel City Council Monday.

While passing Carmel construction zones on their school bus, Blair Babione, 11, and Brienne Babione, 9, saw something that seemed wrong: signs that read “Men Working.”

The girls and their mother, Leslie, did some online sleuthing and discovered that the federal government, states and cities put the signs out of use decades ago in favor ofgender-neutral signs, like a shovel, flag or a description of the work.

The girls wrote a letter to City Council President Sue Finkham.

"Why is this sign here? Why does it say, 'Men working' when we've seen plenty of women doing construction?'" the girls wrote.

They quickly got results.

Finkham introduced a resolution to enforce the gender neutral guidelines on Carmel construction projects. It passed unanimously.

“’Men Working” or ‘Men At Work’ signage communicates the false and unacceptable message that women cannot or should not work in the construction trades or other related fields,” the resolution reads. "Having been alerted to gender bias in this community by the thoughtful letters of two of the City’s youngest residents, Blair Babione and Brienne Babione, the Common Council chooses to take official action to promote equality and inclusivity."

Finkham said she wanted to reward the girls for their civic responsibility and promotion of equality, especially at the start of Women’s History Month.

“It is about empowering young people,” she said. “Instead of going on social media they wrote a letter to their city council. I’ve never seen that in 10 years on the council.”

...

Disheartening, but not surprised,  to see young people so programmed.    Such signs do not "communicate the false and unacceptable message".  Only those looking to be outraged would come to such a conclusion.   Pure woke PC drivel.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Racializing The Atlanta Massage Parlor Killings: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/racializing-atlanta-massage-parlor-killings/

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It is striking to see how quickly our media has racialized the narrative of the horrific murders at the Georgia massage parlors. From what we know so far, the alleged murderer was a young man tormented by his compulsive sexual desires. He visited massage parlors in the past, and went to this one to kill the women he once depended on to gratify his desires. From all the available evidence, these killings were the misogynistic act of a sexually depraved man.

But the media and others are bound and determined to make this a racial thing, because six of the dead women are Asian. The same media who couldn’t figure out the racial angle when black men attacked Asians on the street without provocation now seem giddy over the prospect of an anti-Asian hate crime committed by a white man. The New York Times, for example:

 

Screen-Shot-2021-03-17-at-10.59.52-PM.pn

The Washington Post:

 

Screen-Shot-2021-03-18-at-9.29.33-AM.png

The alleged killer himself admitted that the motivation for his crime was sexual, not racial! But our media cannot allow that to stand. They are going to find a way to racialize the story no matter what.

 

And not just the media. Evangelical commenter Ed Stetzer of Wheaton College writes:

As we listen to the cries of so many Asian-Americans today, it would be shameful not to acknolwedge their pain and to see this as the racially connected violence that it is.

All of the locations have been described in news reports as asian massage parlors. And, Daniel Yang asked, “[W]ill anyone point out that the Western sexual fetish for Asian women is racist?” So, yes, of course this is connected to race.

Too frequently we brush off the discrimination faced by our Asian American brothers and sisters because it does not fit into our narratives around race. Asian Americans bring a complex and rich tradition and experience to the church that is frequently underrepresented in broader conversations. It is grievous that it takes a tragedy on this scale to wake us up to their concerns or to highlight their voices in our midst.

Oh, come on. Absolutely Christians and everybody else ought to be opposed to anti-Asian racism. But Stetzer calls this “racially connected violence,” as if the fact that most of the victims were Asian makes racist motive clear. If these killings really are driven by racial hatred, then by all means let’s confront that demon and exorcise it. But there is no reason at this point to believe that. In many cities, if you want to go to a massage parlor for sexual activity, those places will be staffed by Asian women. It’s well worth asking why, and if these are women who were sexually trafficked into sex slavery. But at this point, we don’t even know if the killer had a sexual fetish for Asian women. All we know is that he went to massage parlors. It is more reasonable to think that he went to massage parlors for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that’s where the money is.

The alleged killer is also a Southern Baptist, so now we are seeing Southern Baptists demonized. Stetzer (who is Baptist) again:

Over the past few years, women theologians, historians, and church leaders have authored books on the intersection of women and North American Protestantism. Disturbingly, most identified common themes were the corrosive elements of Protestant theology of sexuality and gender. While claiming orthodoxy and resisting the tide of the sexual revolution, church leaders remained ignorant of how their rhetoric laid a foundation for misogyny and violence.

In one example, Rachel Joy Welcher outlines how many popular books on sexuality “use wartime imagery to communicate practical strategies Christian men can employ to fight sexual lust…. Depicting purity as an all-encompassing pursuit which involves one’s motivations, mind, and heart.”

As Welcher concludes, this constant stream of portraying women as dangerous sources of lust that need to be avoided inevitably shaped the way young Christian men perceived and acted towards women. In trying to guard men against the evil of pornography, church leaders failed to construct a positive theology of sexuality and gender.

Victim advocate Rachel Denhollander drew attention to this in response to the tragedy:

The man who murdered women in a massage parlor yesterday says he was “eliminating temptation” because he had a sex addiction.

He was a baptized member of an SBC church.

Brothers. Pastors. Seminary heads. How you teach sexuality matters. It can be life and death…

As church leaders, we must reckon with our role in shaping the culture that gave rise to these events.

The Washington Post wrote a story about the alleged killer’s connections to his Southern Baptist church. Excerpts:

According to a video that was captured by The Post before it was deleted, on Sunday the church’s pastor, the Rev. Jerry Dockery, gave a sermon on the apocalypse. Christ was coming soon, Dockery said, and the world must be ready.

“We’ve had, what, 45 presidents in our brief history as a nation? How many other kings around the world? How many other rulers have sat upon thrones, claiming to be in charge?” he asked. “The King is coming again.”

When Christ returns, Dockery said, he will wage war against those who have rejected his name.

“There is one word devoted to their demise,” the pastor said. “Swept away! Banished! Judged. They have no power before God. Satan himself is bound and released and then bound again and banished. That great dragon deceiver — just that quickly — God throws him into an eternal torment. And then we read where everyone — everyone that rejects Christ — will join Satan, the Beast and the false prophet in hell.”

It is not uncommon for pastors to preach on the apocalypse, and it’s unclear whether Long heard the pastor’s teachings Sunday. Police said Long told them he had a “sex addiction,” and authorities said he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation.

Wait a damn minute here. The story says — correctly — that pastors preach on the apocalypse all the time, and the reporters don’t even know if the suspect was in church to hear that sermon. But they’re still going to bring it up. Why on earth would they do that, if not to connect a bog-standard Baptist sermon about the End Times to the murderous mindset of a man who the paper’s reporters don’t even know for sure was in church that day! 

The story goes on to talk about how the murders might be connected to conservative Southern Baptist theology. There are something like 16 million Southern Baptists in America. About half of them are men. Eight million men have been exposed to some degree to conservative Southern Baptist teachings about sexual purity, but this is the first one who has gone out and shot women at a massage parlor. Does it even occur to these journalists and commentators that the problem here is not necessarily Southern Baptist theology, but a depraved young man? Of course not! Anything to destroy one’s culture war enemies.

Of course I know nothing about how Southern Baptist churches teach sexuality. I may well agree on certain points with critics of their approach. But it is slanderous and inciteful on its face to blame Southern Baptist theology for these murders, with almost no evidence whatsoever.We know that serial killers often target prostitutes, for a variety of reasons, including a contempt for women who do sex work.If the women at these spas were prostitutes, then what Long is alleged to have done is explainable by misogyny, and his turning outward his hatred of himself for having uncontrollable sexual desires. We know that Long was so tormented by his demons — his obsessions with sex and pornography — that he went to rehab for sexual addiction.We also know that he was a quiet loner and weirdo in high school, who was sometimes bullied.

Every young Christian man who takes the teachings of his faith seriously, and tries to live by them, struggles to conquer sexual desire. This is normal. This does not turn them into monsters. Where are all the other Southern Baptist misogynist serial killers? They don’t exist. We are likely to find out that this Long fellow had deep psychological problems — again, he went to rehab for his sex addiction. But hey, why miss this opportunity to slander and slime conservative Southern Baptists. The fact that conservative Southern Baptists are against Critical Race Theory is, incredibly, also trotted out in this story — as if that had anything to do with mass murder.

The Post had this paragraph, which explains a lot of the coverage we’re seeing:

Long has told police the shootings were not racially motivated. But Melissa May Borja, a religion scholar in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, said that it’s important for people to not just consider his intent but also his impact.

“Maybe he didn’t intend to harm Asian Americans, but it’s clearly had a disparate impact on Asian American women,” she said, adding that women doing the work in spas like the ones Long targeted tend to be economically vulnerable and the targets of harassment.

And there it is: the alleged killer has said point blank that he did not target his victims because they were Asian, that their race was just a coincidence. But disparate impact theory makes his murders racist, even if the killer himself said they were not, and even if all the available evidence indicates that these killings were acts of a depraved man who was driven to homicide by his sexual urges. It just feels too good to our elites — media, professors, et alia — to blame their ideological enemies.

I say this all the time on this blog, but it can’t be said often enough. Here is a quote from Live Not By Lies:

[I]n 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

A softer, bloodless form of the same logic is at work in American institutions. Social justice progressives advance their malignant concept of justice in part by terrorizing dissenters as thoroughly as any inquisitor on the hunt for enemies of religious orthodoxy.

For these journalists, academics, preachers, politicians and other commenters, the most important thing to know about the mass murders in Atlanta is that the victims were Asian women, and the confessed killer was a white male Southern Baptist. No facts that complicate the narrative should be allowed to interfere with the conclusions drawn, which is that this is the fault of white supremacy and religious conservatism.

We are in the middle of a moral panic over race and racism in this country, a panic driven by the media and elite institutions. We are seeing a horrible act of mass murder being turned into a culture-war weapon by people who are not seeking understanding, but just looking for enemies, and looking to reinforce an intoxicating narrative.

UPDATE: OK, OK, some of you are saying, “Why should we believe the killer when he says he didn’t kill out of racial motives?” Well, usually when someone confesses to a crime, and says, “This is why I did it,” we give them the benefit of the doubt, especially if the facts in the case fit the claim. We know that Long has a history of disordered sexuality, and went to rehab for sex addiction. He says he visited those massage parlors before. It stands to reason that a deeply religious man who is sexually compulsive and tormented by his desires would seek to eliminate what he believed to be the sources of his torment. (To be clear, those victims were innocent; the sources of Long’s torment were inside of Long.)

There is a single Korean media report in which someone says that the killer said he was going to “kill all Asians.”

It may yet come out that Long was motivated by racism. If so, let’s confront that ugly reality. My point is that people in the media, and in progressive circles, are acting as if they are excited to pin all of this on race hatred, when that may play little or no role at all in why that man killed all those people (not all of his victims were Asian, too).

A bigmouth Evangelical race-baiter at The King’s College in New York is now trying to blame Long’s Baptist Church, and the 9Marks movement, for what Long did:

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This is utter slander, and disgusting. Of course Bradley will get away with it.

We are moving towards a war of all against all.

Of course, which is what the progressive left wants.

 

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On 3/3/2021 at 10:15 AM, Muda69 said:

Young Carmel sisters spotted outdated 'men at work' sign. So they did something about it.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2021/03/03/carmel-sisters-men-at-work-construction-signs-change-wording/6868371002/

Disheartening, but not surprised,  to see young people so programmed.    Such signs do not "communicate the false and unacceptable message".  Only those looking to be outraged would come to such a conclusion.   Pure woke PC drivel.

 

WTF... is this the path our culture is taking?  A little over the top !!!!!

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Brown University Will Let Students Anonymously Report Title IX Sexual Misconduct

What could go wrong?

https://reason.com/2021/03/22/brown-university-will-let-students-anonymously-report-title-ix-sexual-misconduct/

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Brown University has debuted a new system for reporting sexual harassment and misconduct under the auspices of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex- and gender-based discrimination in education. Notably, it allows students to make an anonymous accusation against another member of campus.

"Brown University encourages community members to report any acts they believe to be an incident of sexual harassment, sexual violence, or gender-based discrimination," notes Brown on its website. "The Sexual Violence & Gender-Harassment Incident Reporting Form was developed to capture these reports as a part of the intake process."

The website stresses that using the anonymous reporting form is not the same thing as filing a formal Title IX complaint, which would automatically trigger an investigation. These investigations attracted significant criticism from civil liberties advocates for abridging the due process rights of accused students, though the process was overhauled by the Trump administration to restore basic fairness.

But an anonymous reporting system is a concern even if it does not always result in an investigation. Many campuses have anonymous tiplines for reporting "bias incidents," which in practice often amount to instances of people being unreasonably offended. Giving students methods for reporting one another for utterances that are actually protected by the First Amendment is a poor use of university resources, and it encourages hypersensitivity and snitching. On some campuses, the police have even become involved.

Brown's new reporting system is similar to these bias tiplines, except it's specifically for sexual misconduct. Despite federal guidance stating that Title IX administrators should focus on serious sexual misconduct, many campus bureaucracies continue to take an expansive view of what counts as a Title IX violation. As with anonymous bias response systems, the anonymous Title IX reporting portal will likely draw complaints about conduct that is not actually illegal.

One student activist described the new system as "liberating," precisely because it will allow anonymous reporting. "Any steps we can take to reduce barriers to reporting and to center marginalized populations can help us be more comprehensive and effective in dealing with interpersonal violence," wrote two advocates at Brown's Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education office.

Universities can and should deal with interpersonal violence. But for accountability's sake, campus authorities really do need to know the identities of accusers. Otherwise, the system is likely to be abused.

 

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Masterpiece Cakeshop Baker Sued Once Again over Refusal to Make Gender Transition Cake

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/masterpiece-cakeshop-baker-sued-once-again-over-refusal-to-make-gender-transition-cake/

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A Colorado baker who won a case before the Supreme Court in 2018 over his refusal to make a custom wedding cake for a same-sex couple is facing a new lawsuit after declining to make a birthday cake that celebrated a transgender woman’s transition.

Autumn Scardina tried to order a cake that was blue on the outside and pink on the inside in honor of her gender transition from Masterpiece Cakeshop on the same day in 2017 that the Supreme Court announced it would hear baker Jack Phillips’ appeal in the wedding cake case.

 

The high court later ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission showed anti-religious bias in sanctioning Phillips for his refusal to make the same-sex wedding cake, though the justices did not rule on whether businesses can refuse services to gays or lesbians over religious objections.

Scardina said during a virtual trial on Monday that she attempted to order the birthday cake as a test to see whether Phillips would make good on his assertions that he would sell any other type of product, but opposed making a gay couple’s wedding cake because, as a Christian, he was opposed to the religious ceremony involved, according to CBS Denver.

 

Her lawyer Paula Greisen claimed the call was not a “setup” but rather “more of calling someone’s bluff.”

Phillips’ lawyer, Sean Gates, said the baker could not create the cake because he did not agree with the message it would send: that gender transition is something to be celebrated.

He argued that it was not discrimination against Scardina and later added that Phillips had also declined to make cakes with other messages he disagreed with, such as Halloween products.

The lawsuit comes after Scardina, a lawyer, filed a complaint against the baker with the state. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission found probable cause that Phillips had discriminated against her.

Phillips later filed a lawsuit against the state, claiming that it had launched a “crusade to crush” him by pursuing the complaint.  Lawyers for both parties agreed to drop both cases in March 2019, under a settlement that allowed Scardina to pursue her own lawsuit.

 

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The Southern Baptist Convention Confronts Critical Race Theory

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/the-southern-baptist-convention-confronts-critical-race-theory/

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Creating a “movement of churches that engages all of the peoples in America, not just one kind. . . . That is very difficult, . . . and anybody who says that that’s not true has never actually done it.” These words from J. D. Greear, the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention, come at the latest difficult juncture for the largest denomination in the United States. Grear, for his part, is trying to navigate a middle ground between members of the church who (in his words) see “southern” as more important than “Baptist” and those who have embraced critical race theory (CRT), the idea that the sin of racism is collective and ever present. A few months ago, two prominent black pastors left the denomination after a group of seminary presidents released a statement saying that CRT is incompatible with the SBC’s statement of faith.

 

Since then the two sides have gone back and forth about exactly what critical race theory is and whether it diminishes the role of forgiveness in a religious context or the idea that all people hold equal value in God’s eyes. It is tempting for people in the pews to throw their hands up and dismiss this as either a politicized debate over whether Christians are racist or a dispute over academic abstractions.

The truth, though, is that this controversy over critical race theory could have real-life implications for a population that is already among the most vulnerable — children in the foster-care system. In recent years Evangelical congregations, including a great many Southern Baptist ones, have led a revolution in foster care and adoption. They have formed hundreds of ministries and other organizations devoted to the recruitment, training, and support of families who foster or who adopt children out of foster care. And their efforts have shown enormous success, both in drawing more people into the system but also giving them the education and the help that they need to stay in it for the long term.

There are, of course, a disproportionately high number of black children in the foster-care system and a disproportionately low number of (nonrelative) black foster and adoptive families. And so, inevitably, many of the families who volunteer to foster or adopt do not look like the children they are caring for. There was a time when this development would have been celebrated as a triumph of tolerance and racial harmony. But that time is not today. Instead, it is hardly uncommon for our cultural elites to question these interracial relationships.

A recent article from scholars at the Brookings Institution cited as still “relevant” today the 1972 statement against transracial adoption by the National Association of Black Social Workers: “Only a Black family can transmit the emotional and sensitive subtleties of perception and reaction essential for a Black child’s survival in a racist society.

And it is not just secular commentators who have made this claim. An article in the Catholic magazine America also cited the same statement and added that white parents who adopt black children are “establishing a situation that risks repeating a dangerous narrative: White people are the benevolent rescuers and patrons of needy Black people. So it is important to say right at the start that when white parents adopt a child of another race or ethnicity, they are depriving that child of a profoundly valuable resource: a mother and/or father who can guide that child in navigating U.S. culture as a minority and can also connect that child to the rich cultural heritage that is their birthright.”

Though most Americans have been largely insulated from or unmoved by these ideas, they are spreading. Telling potential foster and adoptive parents that they are responsible for “depriving that child” is a dangerous game — and one that is likely to result in more parents being reluctant to step up. Why would you want to be part of the problem?

And if critical race theory has come to Southern Baptist seminaries, these ideas are spreading much faster than we think. John Wilson, the former editor of Books & Culture, an Evangelical literary journal, tells me that “these ideas have gained a foothold in constituencies that on the face of it you wouldn’t think would be so vulnerable to buying into them.” Wilson, who lives near and has many friends at Wheaton College, a flagship Evangelical school, says that even there “it is often framed as you have to accept the effusions of someone like Ibram X. Kendi (who criticized Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett for her transracial adoptions). Either that “or you’re just perpetuating the racism of the past.”

Even if the proponents don’t refer to these ideas as critical race theory, they will often talk about the problems of systemic racism, how white people are collectively guilty for the treatment of blacks, and how the stain of racism has created a permanent division between racial groups that cannot be bridged. Wilson says the rhetoric about these transracial relationships is “so unbalanced. This work is incredibly sacrificial, but instead of honoring that, these families are portrayed as having perpetuated an injustice.”

Jedd Medefind, president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, tells me that he is concerned that these ideas “could be something that paralyzes the willingness of some white Christians to be involved in child welfare.” He sees some division in the Christian community between folks who are more elite — “progressive churches tend to be more in sync with cultural trends” — and people who just say, “There are kids in need right now and we need to help them.”

Thomas Kidd, a historian at Baylor University, is somewhat less worried. He says that in his own church in Texas he has seen little awareness of these social-media controversies: “I think the compelling value of adoption and foster care would totally overcome that. For your average church, those are unassailable commitments.” But he does acknowledge that, among Christians in more-liberal parts of the country, “you could run into people who take ideas” about systemic racism and transracial adoption “seriously.”

Indeed, these ideas spread pretty quickly, especially in an era of social media. The messages from hip, liberal pastors of yesterday are easily found in more-conservative churches today. One need only look at the change in the view of international adoption. Twenty years ago there was no doubt that international adoption was an “unassailable commitment” on the part of Evangelical congregations across the country. Now it is much more common to hear people talk about trying to help children in their home countries and even suggest that bringing international orphans to the U.S. demonstrates a kind of “white man’s burden” attitude. Indeed, just last year Bethany Christian Services announced the end of its international adoption program, something no one would have foreseen just a decade ago. And it’s not because there is a shortage of orphans who won’t be cared for in their own countries.

For his part, Medefind believes “there can be a de-escalation” in these conversations about race. For the sake of the kids who need families, let’s hope so.

 

 

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Teachers Compile List Of Parents Who Question Racial Curriculum, Plot War On Them: https://www.dailywire.com/news/loudoun-teachers-target-parents-critical-race-theory-hacking

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A group of current and former teachers and others in Loudoun County, Virginia, compiled a lengthy list of parents suspected of disagreeing with school system actions, including its teaching of controversial racial concepts — with a stated purpose in part to “infiltrate,” use “hackers” to silence parents’ communications, and “expose these people publicly.”

Members of a 624-member private Facebook group called “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” named parents and plotted fundraising and other offline work. Some used pseudonyms, but The Daily Wire has identified them as a who’s who of the affluent jurisdiction outside D.C., including school staff and elected officials.

The sheriff’s criminal investigations division is reviewing the matter — but the group’s activities might be no surprise to top law enforcement because the county’s prosecutor, narrowly elected with the help of $845,000 in cash from George Soros, appears to be a member of the Facebook group.

Secret communications reviewed by The Daily Wire do not offer any evidence of racism by the group’s targets. Their opponents were apparently those who objected to, sought to debate, or were even simply “neutral” about “critical race theory,” a radical philosophy opposed by many liberals and conservatives but increasingly embraced by governments.

In recent years, Loudoun’s school system has flooded its curricula and policies with racial rhetoric, paying about $500,000 to one racial consulting company alone. It required all staff to undergo “Equity in the Center” training that promoted a sense of injustice and urgency.

Now, as school-backed efforts to change the thinking of adults seemingly succeeded, the community has collapsed into acrimony, a criminal review has been opened, and a school board member has been stripped of her duties.

What follows is the story of the wealthiest county in America descending into a moral panic as a group of suburban white women egged each other to extremes against perceived “evil,” while a school system seemed to slide from serving taxpayers to targeting them.

The late-stage result of an experiment in saturating children’s education systems with the language of torrid oppression looks a lot like Beth Barts, a white, 50-year old former educator who was elected to the school board in 2019.

Barts has a reputation for lashing out at parents who either questioned what she calls the “equity” agenda or advocated for the reopening of schools. For her pattern of social media conduct, Barts’ colleagues censured her in a closed meeting on March 4, saying Barts failed to “welcome and encourage active cooperation of Loudoun County residents,” the Loudoun Times reported. On March 9, the board temporarily removed her from all committee assignments.

Barts deleted her Twitter account, but the events appeared to trigger more erratic behavior on the private Facebook group, with Barts rallying a crew who were convinced that Loudoun’s other school board members, mostly Democrats supportive of “equity” efforts, were insufficiently aggressive in pursuit of their stated racial aims.

At the same time, other parents who believed that causing young children to focus too much on race could diminish tolerance and harmony, rather than improve it, were gaining traction. Groups called the Virginia Project and Parents Against Critical Theory held a webinar called “What is CRT and its impact on Loudoun County Schools” on March 7.

“I wanted to share that I’m very concerned that the [anti-] CRT movement for lack of better word is gaining support,” Barts wrote to the “anti-racist” Facebook group March 12. She said she hoped to “call out statements and actions that undermine our stated plan to end systemic racism.”

In response, a local mother named Jen Durham began what turned into a massive thread, writing:

This is a call for volunteers to combat the anti-CRT activities of the P.A.C.T. folks, the stoplcpscrt website, and the like. Looking for folks who are interested in volunteering to organize, lead, execute, and donate regarding the following points:

  • Gather information (community mailing lists, list of folks who are in charge of the anti-CRT movement, lists of local lawmakers/folks in charge)
  • Infiltrate (create fake online profiles and join these groups to collect and communicate information, hackers who can either shut down their websites or redirect them to pro-CRT/anti-racist informational webpages)
  • Spread information (expose these people publicly, create online petitions, create counter-mailings)
  • Find a way to gather donations for these efforts. Volunteering is great, but these activities can be costly and not everyone has extra funds readily available

Anyone who is interested in this, please feel free to comment here or PM me directly and indicate what you can help with. Then we can hold a kickoff call and start on action items.

“I’m listing them this way: -First name -Last name -Alias(es) -Location,” Durham wrote.

“I’m losing any hope that remaining civil towards these people changes anything,” she wrote. “Avoiding these people isn’t enough to stop the spread of their evil rhetoric.”

“Anyone know any hackers?” she reiterated.

Members of the “Anti-Racist” group sprang into action, listing dozens of parents, often including where they lived, their employers, or their spouses’ names.

Durham, who posted under the name Jen Morse, works outside of education, for the American Society of Ophthalmic Administrators. But it was a former teacher, Hilary Hultman-Lee, who executed on the idea most prolifically.

“Regarding the anti-CRT movement, we’d like to compile a document of all known actors and supporters. Please comment below with legal names of these individuals, area of residence and or school board Rep known, known accounts on social media, and any other info that you feel is relevant,” wrote Hultman-Lee, who at one point taught Latin at Potomac Falls High School and who is listed as doing business with the school district as an education consultant.

They erred on the side of accusing the innocent. In response to one name Hultman-Lee added, another member asked, “Why is she on this list? I haven’t seen her support anti-CRT?”

Hultman-Lee responded, “I put a question mark next to her bc I’m curious about some of her comments re the Dr. Seuss nonsense and racial equity generally. Happy to remove if I’m off the mark.”

“No no, I wouldn’t go so far as to take her off. However, from what I’ve seen she is very carefully neutral,” the parent replied.

It was Loudoun County that first put Dr. Seuss in the news for deemphasizing him because of “strong racial undertones.” Hultman-Lee added a man whose evidence of guilt was a screenshot in which he said he had reviewed a Dr. Seuss book and “ask anyone to show me what is racist.”

Barts cheered them on. “Thank you for the response to my posting this morning,” she wrote. “Thank you for stepping up. Silence is complicity.”

Andrea Weiskopf, a teacher at River Bend & Seneca Ridge Middle School, named a father who has criticized critical race theory. The NAACP, which Weiskopf (who is white) works closely with, previously sent an “URGENT” email to school officials alerting them that the man is married to a teacher. We “are hopeful she does not share the same ideologies as her husband. Please confirm receipt of this message,” it said, according to an email obtained by The Daily Wire.

Though elected school board members control the school system, Weiskopf, a school employee, worked with the NAACP to strategize about how to manipulate board members, explaining that one member “is usually down with whatever the plan is. He needs a lot of handholding, he’s very new and very naive.”

On Twitter, Weiskopf offers the motto, “an educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.”

As part of the school system’s racial initiatives, Loudoun pays 93 teachers $3,820 extra a year to take on additional duties as “equity leads.” For Dr. VonEnde Coleman, that appeared to mean joining the mob against parents. “As an equity lead at one of the high schools, please let me know how I can help,” she wrote.

Coleman is a high school department chair whose doctorate degree came from an online university. “Greetings! I am the Learning Specialist Department Chair at Indpendence [sic] High School,” her LCPS bio reads. “This is my seventh year with the county.  I earned my undergraduate from Colorado Christian and her [sic] Master’s and Doctorate in Human Services from Capella.”

Another teacher, Dana Maier, wrote, “I’m happy to put some time into shutting down their hateful garbage.” Yet another teacher called a parent “Beetle Douche.”

One of the Facebook group’s moderators is Vanessa Maddox, a former town council member for the town of Leesburg and current member of its Diversity Commission. On February 26, she was a speaker at a Loudoun County Democratic Committee event discussing “What’s next with forward momentum in economic equality and justice for black businesses.”

Another moderator is Monica Belton. A group for black women, Mocha Moms of Loudoun County, thanked Belton in May 2020 for her role in what they called the “Occupy Schools Event,” describing her as a “Loudoun County Schools Social Worker.” Belton also started a nonprofit that provides racial consulting.

On April 6, she will host an event called “The Impact of Racial Trauma on Youth Online Workshop.” The description says, “Please note: This is not an opportunity to debate opposing mindsets. The operators of this forum believes, unequivocally, that BLACK LIVES MATTER and that immediate and drastic change in policy and practice is demanded.”

Members at times used seemingly violence-tinged rhetoric.

A third moderator is Jamie Ann Neidig-Wheaton, a one-time George Mason University adjunct professor. “The racists have a Go Fund Me,” she said, referring to Parents Against Critical Theory (PACT). “Burn it down.” According to public records, in 2012, Neidig-Wheaton was arrested on charges of trespassing and assault, which were later dropped.

Cortney Austin Smith, a mother in Leesburg, Virginia, listed those who had questioned government officials. “Ian Prior spoke about First Amendment concerns… Austin Levine criticized the School Board,” she wrote.

She then changed her Facebook profile picture to a graphic that said “I don’t argue with people who Harriet Tubman would have shot.” Maddox, the Town of Leesburg Diversity Commission member and group moderator, replied on the photo, “Yes!!!!!”

Smith is a paralegal with Cooley LLP, a law firm that says it is taking part in a “Fight for Racial Justice.” Her husband, Dusty Smith, is a former government reporter for the local paper as well as for the Center for Public Integrity, where he wrote a story that began, “Civil War remains a reality in Loudoun County, Virginia.”

Cortney Smith, Durham, Hultman-Lee, and Neidig-Wheaton did not return requests for comment.

The mob mixed rage at parents for questioning racialized curricula and ire at those advocating for schools to be open. “Most of these names are not a surprise since they regularly post in the LCPS Open group,” one poster wrote. Levine, who Smith named, asked, “Am I on this list because I want my kids in school?”

A mother named Emily J. Morford wrote down the name of Ian Prior, a former Department of Justice official in the Trump administration, alongside Aliscia Andrews, a former Republican congressional candidate, adding, “I am happy to help. The ones I mentioned are neighbors and mouthpieces for this in my community,” Morford wrote.

Prior told The Daily Wire that he first met Morford at a Halloween party and that Morford, who is white, later texted his wife to claim that unspecified minorities were offended by his pro-police “thin blue line” flag.

“I said ‘reasonable people can have different opinions based on their life experiences and other things, and if you want to discuss my beliefs, you know where I live.’ I didn’t expect that she would use that information to target me as part of a doxxing and hacking campaign,” he said.

List-makers noted that in October, Prior wrote an op-ed in the Federalist expressing disagreement with CRT’s tenet that “racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction.”

“The best way to counter that is with an op-ed arguing ‘this is why you’re wrong,’” he told The Daily Wire.

The school system’s focus on race has “radicalized privileged white women in Virginia. It has turned them into a threat to the people in their own community,” he said. “If it happened to them, what is it like for small children?”

Prior said he believes Durham violated a Virginia law that says “Any person who commands, entreats, or otherwise attempts to persuade another person to commit a felony other than murder, shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony” and that participants entered into a conspiracy to deprive him of his First Amendment rights.

David Gordon, director of the Virginia Project, sent screenshots to Loudoun Sheriff Mike Chapman, writing “We have been presented with evidence of open organization of criminal activity intended to infringe 1st Amendment rights.  We believe one intended target of this activity is our presentation on Critical Race Theory. Please note in particular the threat to hack websites, which from firsthand experience we know is not an idle one.”

Kraig Troxell, a spokesman for the sheriff, told The Daily Wire, “The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office is aware of the situation and the information has been forwarded to our criminal investigations division to review the matter.”

There is little evidence that Loudoun in the years preceding the schools’ racial focus was the site of widespread unrest of any kind. Black residents have a median income of $112,000, and the semi-rural county has precisely zero areas resembling inner cities. Blacks make up only 8% of the population, yet voters chose a black woman to chair the county board of supervisors.

To Prior, if the goal of all these school initiatives was increased peace and understanding, it didn’t seem to be working.

“They can’t see that the ‘other side’ is just people who want to cook on their grill and take their kids to soccer and enjoy the weekend and not have to worry about their neighbors trying to turn that into a political event,” he said.

The pronounced role of insiders and professionals in the “anti-racist” movement has the feel of government officials seeking to have citizens be responsive to their agenda, rather than the reverse.

According to the members list, the Facebook group appears to include school board members Denise Corbo, Leslee King, and Ian Sorotkin; commonwealth attorney Buta Bibaraj; county supervisor Juli Briskman; and NAACP Loudoun branch president Michelle Thomas. While these individuals were listed in the group, The Daily Wire saw no evidence that they were involved in the doxxing effort.

As the group tried to get a parent’s Facebook account shut down by reporting it, Gazal Modhera, a lawyer with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), jumped into the dogpile, lamenting that despite all the attempts, Facebook “did nothing!” The EEOC is tasked with enforcing the nation’s employment non-discrimination laws.

And while Barts may have been censured by her school board colleagues, in some ways, her behavior is not a departure from what the school system has strived to cultivate, but rather the fulfillment of it.

The school system proposed, then withdrew, a policy that would ban teachers from disagreeing with the schools’ racial philosophies, even when not on school district property. In January 2020, the school board’s Equity Committee voted unanimously to “Offer/Provide Equity in the Center-like training to parents.”

In January 2021, Eric Williams, the superintendent who set up the various equity programs — only to be besieged with unyielding complaints from both sides — quit and moved across the country to lead a much smaller district in Clear Creek, Texas.

Loudoun parents, hoping to save others from the results they had seen, contacted Texans imploring them to call off the hire.

The Clear Creek school board voted to ban “divisive” racial concepts, including the use of critical race theory on students — or staff.

So you mean there’s a leftist version of QAnon, with about the same amount of credibility, that sucks people in?

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Federal appeals court rules in favor of Ohio professor who refused to use student's preferred pronouns

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/29/us/ohio-professor-transgender-appeals-trnd/index.html

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A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that an Ohio professor can sue a university for violating his constitutional rights after he was disciplined for refusing to use the preferred pronouns of a transgender student.

 

Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio, filed a lawsuit in 2018 after the school formally disciplined him for refusing to follow a school policy requiring the use of a student's pronouns that match their gender identity, according to the decision.
 
A district court previously dismissed Meriwether's lawsuit for lack of standing. Friday's decision by a three-judge panel from the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals revives the lawsuit and sends it back to a lower court where Meriwether can make his argument that his First Amendment rights of free speech and religion and his 14th Amendment right to due process were violated.
 
"Traditionally, American universities have been beacons of intellectual diversity and academic freedom," Judge Amul Thapar wrote in the court's 32-page opinion. "They have prided themselves on being forums where controversial ideas are discussed and debated. And they have tried not to stifle debate by picking sides."
 
But Shawnee State chose a different route: It punished a professor for his speech on a hotly contested issue. And it did so despite the constitutional protections afforded by the First Amendment. The district court dismissed the professor's free-speech and free-exercise claims. We see things differently and reverse," he wrote.
Thapar, an appointee of President Donald Trump, was joined in the opinion by Judge David McKeague and Judge Joan Larsen. McKeague was appointed by President George W. Bush and Larsen appointed by Trump.
 
Shawnee State University declined to comment on the court's decision citing pending litigation. The small public university in Portsmouth, Ohio, serves more than 3,600 students.
...

Good, a decision supporting sanity.

 

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Crybullies Sue Christian Colleges

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/lgbt-crybullies-sue-christian-colleges-bob-jones/

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A professor of law sent this Washington Post story to me, with the comment:

A suit to “Bob Jones” Christian schools—take away their tax exempt status for discriminating against LGBTQ students, just like what happened to Bob Jones U when it used to ban interracial dating. There are some technical legal problems (regarding standing to sue) for the private plaintiffs, but one wonders how much the Biden administration will resist.

What does the Post story say? Excerpts:

 

Elizabeth Hunter says she became suicidal after Bob Jones University administrators grilled the former student about her sexuality for tweeting “happy Pride” and writing a book with lesbian characters. She was fined, sent to anti-gay counseling and removed from her job at the campus TV station. Veronica Penales says she’s told officials at Baylor University, where she is a sophomore, that people leave anti-gay notes on her door, but they don’t investigate. Lucas Wilson said he graduated from Liberty University with “a profound sense of shame” after being encouraged to go to conversion therapy.

The three are among 33 current and past students at federally funded Christian colleges and universities cited in a federal lawsuit filed Monday against the U.S. Department of Education. The suit says the religious exemption the schools are given that allow them to have discriminatory policies is unconstitutional because they receive government funding. The class-action suit, filed by the nonprofit Religious Exemption Accountability Project, references 25 schools across the country.

The Plaintiffs seek safety and justice for themselves and for the countless sexual and gender minority students whose oppression, fueled by government funding, and unrestrained by government intervention, persists with injurious consequences to mind, body and soul,” reads the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Oregon. “The Department’s inaction leaves students unprotected from the harms of conversion therapy, expulsion, denial of housing and healthcare, sexual and physical abuse and harassment, as well as the less visible, but no less damaging, consequences of institutionalized shame, fear, anxiety and loneliness.”

So they chose to go to these Christian schools, but are now trying to break the Christian schools to their will. More:

The suit injects dozens of personal experiences into a debate about religious liberty and ­LGBTQ rights that’s often been more legalistic. It seeks to put individual faces and names on an aspect of Equality Act debate that doesn’t get much attention — students at conservative Christian schools.

It cites a gay ICU nurse who said he was admitted to a graduate nursing program, sold his car, left his old job and was days away from starting school when he was allegedly told his admission was rescinded because he is engaged to a man. “A grown man with a successful career, loving family and fiancé, [he] went into his closet, curled up in a ball and cried,” the suit says. It cites a queer student who recalls being regularly called slurs on a Christian school’s campus and is afraid to walk at night alone. According to the suit, that person is often subject to disciplinary action for wearing feminine-style clothing. Another said he was fired as a resident assistant and then kicked out of school for being openly bisexual.

Why on earth would you intentionally go to a conservative Christian university, one whose policies towards gay sexuality were clear, then curl up in a ball and cry when the school acts on the basis of its clearly stated policies? Nobody should be called slurs on a campus, Christian or not, but why is that a matter for federal court? And if a school wants to kick men out for wearing women’s clothes, why shouldn’t they have that right? What these plaintiffs are trying to do is to compel every school in this country to conform, even at the cost of their consciences.

 

Read it all.

From the REAP website, here’s a profile of one of the plantiffs:

 

Hayden Brown lives in York, NE. He identifies as a queer demiboy and is majoring in English Education with an emphasis in reading instruction.

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Hayden studies at York College. They came out as part of the LGBTQ+ community the summer after their freshman year to their parents, who forced him into therapy designed to push Hayden toward changing their identity. School officials have attempted to interfere with her education, including by asking her to withdraw from a study abroad program in Vienna, Austria because of her sexual orientation, and by telling her to change her clothes when she wears high heels or dresses.

So York College has to have all federal funding taken away because queer demiboy wants to wear dresses to class, and his Christian school says no, you can’t do it. Great. This is what the Left fights for now.

From the profile of plaintiff Jake Picker, whose photo is at the top of this item:

 

Jake Picker lives in Waco, TX. He identifies as queer.

He attends Baylor University as a pre-med student and expects to graduate in May 2021 with a degree in Biology and Biochemistry. Baylor has several official anti-LGBTQ+ student policies, including stating, “Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm. Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior.” This policy and others like it result in Jake feeling unsafe and unprotected at school.

So he can’t even name a single harm he suffered! He just feels “unsafe and unprotected.” Religious liberty should be taken from Baylor because this queer crybully chose to attend a Baptist university whose policies were perfectly clear before he filed his application, and because Christian teaching hurts his feelings. It’s infuriating.

These plaintiffs are not victims. They are crybullies. What they seek in this lawsuit is the end of exemptions to Title IX for religious schools. What this would mean is that religious schools would either have to change their policies on LGBT, or lose all federal funding. The crybullies and the progressives will not stop until they have crushed dissenting Christians.

The thing about the famous 1982 Bob Jones case is that SCOTUS held that the IRS can remove the tax-exempt status of a religious school because “[g]overnment has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education . . . which substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on [the University’s] exercise of their religious beliefs.” I’d like to hear the opinions of lawyers in this blog’s readership, but it seems to me that the Biden administration could simply announce a policy change at the IRS, and tax exemption for religious colleges and universities that discriminate against LGBTs would disappear.

Understand, though, that the Bob Jones case involved federal tax exemption, but the federal LGBT lawsuit would be even broader, taking away all federal funding from non-compliant schools.

It’s not enough that LGBT folks have nearly every university in the country. They’re going to smash the few Christians holdouts. Love wins through hatred.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

A Rhythm Of Racist Prayer: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/a-rhythm-of-racist-prayer/

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There’s a book out called A Rhythm Of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal, compiled by the progressive Christian author Sarah Bessey. It’s been a bestseller. It’s meant for women. Here’s the description from the Amazon site:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • For the weary, the angry, the anxious, and the hopeful, this collection of moving, tender prayers offers rest, joyful resistance, and a call to act, written by Barbara Brown Taylor, Amena Brown, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and other artists and thinkers, curated by the author Glennon Doyle calls “my favorite faith writer.”

It’s no secret that we are overworked, overpressured, and edging burnout. Unsurprisingly, this fact is as old as time—and that’s why we see so many prayer circles within a multitude of church traditions. These gatherings are a trusted space where people seek help, hope, and peace, energized by God and one another.

This book, curated by acclaimed author Sarah Bessey, celebrates and honors that prayerful tradition in a literary form. A companion for all who feel the immense joys and challenges of the journey of faith, this collection of prayers says it all aloud, giving readers permission to recognize the weight of all they carry. These writings also offer a broadened imagination of hope—of what can be restored and made new. Each prayer is an original piece of writing, with new essays by Sarah Bessey throughout.

Encompassing the full breadth of the emotional landscape, these deeply tender yet subversive prayers give readers an intimate look at the diverse language and shapes of prayer.

The book contains a “Prayer of a Weary Black Woman,” by Chanequa Walker-Barnes, an associate professor in the Mercy University’s School of Theology (Mercer is a Georgia Baptist school).

 

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This piece breaks down the prayer. Here are close-ups in the photo of the tweet above:

 

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Here are quotes, if you can’t read the shots.

“My prayer is that you would help me hate the other White people – you know, the nice ones. The Fox News-loving, Trump-supporting voters who ‘don’t see color’ but who make thinly-veiled racist comments about ‘those people.’ The people who are happy to have me over for dinner but alert the neighborhood watch anytime an unrecognized person of color passes their house. The people who welcome Black people in their churches and small groups but brand us heretics if we suggest that Christianity is concerned with the poor and the oppressed. The people who politely tell us that we can leave we we call out the racial microaggressions we experience in their ministries.”

More:

 

“Lord, if it be your will, harden my heart. Stop me from striving to see the best in people. Stop me from being hopeful that White people can do and be better. Let me imagine them instead as white-hooded robes standing in front of burning crosses.”

And:

“Let me see them as hopelessly unrepentant, reprobate bigots who have blasphemed the Holy Spirit and who need to be handed over to the evil one.”

My, my, we have come a long way from Dr. King, haven’t we?

Now, imagine that you are a white student at Mercer, and Dr. Walker-Barnes is your professor. How can you possibly succeed in that class, knowing that your professor is an open racist who asks God to help her hate people like you?

This is not really about the deranged hater Chanequa Walker-Barnes, who, get this, says that her ministry advocates for “reconciliation.” This is about a progressive establishment that valorizes anti-white hatred.

How the hell did the people at Convergent Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, approve this? Is racial hatred fine by them if it’s directed at white people? Apparently so. I’ve read a couple of reviews of A Rhythm of Prayer, and not one of them have expressed surprise or alarm that Walker-Barnes prays for God to help her hate white people, and asking God to help her see them all as Klansmen. Not one. Walker-Barnes would not have written such a blasphemous, hateful, racist prayer if she thought she would face any sanction for it from her university, or within her professional milieu.

My conclusion is that the woke establishment is completely on board with stoking anti-white hatred. This is the fruit of Critical Race Theory. This week, the black Southern Baptist pastor Voddie Baucham published an incredibly powerful indictment of CRT and what it’s doing to Evangelical churches: Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe.

Baucham pulls no punches. He writes:

There are plenty of sincere, though perhaps naive Christians who, if they knew the ideology behind it, would run away from the term “social justice” like rats from a burning ship. … The current moment is akin to two people standing on either side of a major fault line just before it shifts. When the shift comes, the ground will open up, a divide that was once invisible will become visible, and the two will find themselves on opposite sides of it. That is what is happening in our day. In some cases, the divide is happening already. Churches are splitting over this issue. Major ministries are losing donors, staff, and leadership. Denominations are in turmoil. Seminary faculties are divided with some professors being fired or “asked to leave.” Families are at odds. Marriages are on the rocks. And I don’t believe the fracture in this fault line is yet even a fraction of what it will be.

No, I am not writing this book to stop the divide. I am writing to clearly identify the two sides of the fault line and to urge the reader to choose wisely.

I’m going to devote a separate post to Baucham’s powerful, urgent book, but let me here exhort Christian readers to buy it and share it with everyone you know. It’s important. What Walker-Barnes and her progressive Christian allies represent is, let’s be clear, the spirit of Antichrist. It is blasphemous to call on God to make you hate people at all, much less on the basis of race. Voddie Baucham is calling them out on it.

I have said for years in this space that the progressives are calling up racist demons that they won’t be able to control. A Rhythm Of Prayer — or at least the Walker-Barnes contribution to it — is an incantation to the demon of racial hate. This is embraced and promoted by a mainstream publisher. Until this morning, when I saw this on conservative websites, there was no criticism of it. This is what these people, these progressives, believe. They are preparing the country for violent racial conflict. Voddie Baucham characterizes the “antiracist” propaganda as follows:

If black people know racism, and white people cannot know racism (and are racist by default as the result of their white privilege), then the only acceptable response is for white people to sit down, shut up, and listen to what black people have to say on the matter.

People like Chanequa Walker-Barnes get away with this because all the white people in their social and professional circles sit down and shut up as a matter of course. And those who don’t — like Kieran Bhattacharya (who, by the sound of his last name, is not even white) — face the full weight of persecutorial institutions coming down on them to destroy their careers and their lives.

But not all white people, and not all people in general, are like those cowardly white liberals. It is time for those who hate this racism to find their backbones and their voices. Do not embrace anti-black racism, which is also the spirit of Antichrist! Stand against all race hatred. Confront managers of stores that sell this hateful book. Tell everybody you know that Mercer University employs an open racist. When your school, or your kid’s school, teaches garbage like this, confront the school’s administration. Don’t let it pass. If your church is teaching it, leave that church. This evil will never stop until and unless people of good will stand up against it, like Voddie Baucham is doing, and demand that it go away.

I remind you that propaganda like A Rhythm Of Prayer is what pre-Nazi Germany did to the Jews, preparing Germany for the Holocaust. It’s what the Hutus in power did to the Tutsis of Rwanda, preparing Rwanda for the 1994 genocide. If a bestselling prayerbook called on God to help one learn how to hate people of color, we would know exactly what we were looking at, and we would rightly condemn it without qualification. But our institutions — academia, publishing, media, and others — have been captured by this evil ideology. If we don’t stand up against it right now, without fear or apology, then history tells us where it may lead.

Again, the problem here is not really Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes. The problem is a progressive-controlled system — academia, publishing, and retailing — that valorizes her kind of race hatred. I believe that she should have the legal right to publish this. But it should be vigorously condemned all the same.

You can buy this book featuring Chanequa Walker-Barnes prayer for the gift of racial hatred through Amazon. You cannot buy Ryan T. Anderson’s sober, well-reasoned book critiquing transgender ideology at Amazon. This is what it means for progressives — not liberals, progressives — to have captured institutions.

None of this moral insanity will stop if the rest of us simply sit back and hope that it goes away. Fight it now, or the fight that’s coming is going to be much uglier, maybe, God forbid, even violent. If that happens, if the shooting starts, remember that progressive elites did this to us, to all of us, black, white, brown, all of us. They are openly teaching us to hate each other on the basis of race. Hell, they’re even praying for it!

UPDATE: Reader Coleman Glenn comments:

Rod, I think you and Ryan McAllister are misunderstanding what Walker-Barnes is doing here. It’s pretty clear to me that she’s expressing a desire to God that she knows He will say “no” to – crying out and saying, “Relieve me if this burden of having to forgive — nevertheless, not my will, but Yours be done.” It’s telling that she compares herself to Jonah, who does everything in his power to avoid calling Nineveh to repentance but eventually does it anyway. This becomes most clear in the following paragraph:

Free me from this burden of calling them to confession and repentance. Grant me a Get Out of Judgment Free card if I make White people the exception to your commandment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

She knows it doesn’t work like that, and this part of the prayer is her wearily acknowledging that to be the case. And so immediately after this comes the “nevertheless, not my will” — “But I will trust in You, my Lord.” She acknowledges her calling to justice and reconciliation. The answer to her prayer, “Make me hate” is “no,” and she knows it.

There’s plenty of things in the prayer that reasonable Christians can disagree about, and it’s worth asking whether Walker-Barnes should publish a prayer that can be so easily misconstrued. But it’s not fair to misrepresent it as essentially saying, “The Lord will make me hate whites,” when in reality it says the opposite: “Lord, I want to hate Whites, but you won’t let me.”

I see. I’m not sure I buy it, though. I need to think about it. I see your point, and you might well be right, but Walker-Barnes’s writing is so muddled on this point that it’s not clear to me what she’s saying. Or rather, given the fact that she has written such a long and vivid version of an imprecatory prayer, one fuzzy paragraph saying, in effect, “They deserve all this, but I need you to keep me on the straight and narrow in my denunciations of them,” is pretty puny. It reads to me as completely insincere, though obviously I can’t know my heart

Put another way, it reads like a kind of pornography: a detailed and highly-charged prayer about lust, with an obligatory, “but I know I can’t have that” graph slapped on to pass the censors, so to speak. Still, I will concede that that may have been her intention, however badly executed.

UPDATE.2: Think of it this way: if a white theologian had written a “prayer” that was a lengthy, lurid discourse on how black people deserved to be hated, but saying in a single paragraph at the end, “but Lord, I know that I can’t have what I’m asking for,” would we think that it was unproblematic? Again, if Walker-Barnes’s sin here is not moral, but aesthetic — that is, if she simply did a poor job of saying what she meant — that is important to note. But that potentially exculpatory graf seems awfully weak.

I remember when I was writing about the black radical professor Tommy Curry at Texas A&M a few years ago, and the many awful, racist things he was saying, some who came to his defense argued that in some cases, technically, he was simply quoting others, etc., and that we can’t say that he really believed these things. This was maybe — maybe — plausible in some of the instances, if you squinted and applied the strictest possible hair-splitting logic. But it was clear what he was doing. I think the same thing is happening here. Reading the entire “prayer,” I don’t believe for one second that Walker-Barnes struggles with her anger at white people. She does not sound like the sort of person begging for deliverance from her anti-white passions.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

The Cancer of Critical Race Theory: https://spectator.org/critical-race-theory-cancer/

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My father-in-law, Bob Baillie, a wonderful man and maybe the best storyteller I ever knew — in a way that only an Aussie could be — was not one of the lucky few. It started with “dry mouth” and an ill-defined feeling of something being “not quite right.” Then we got the diagnosis: pancreatic cancer. He was dead six weeks later, the last week of which was a brutal misery.

This is the thing with internal organ cancers: They frequently show no symptoms until they’ve reached an advanced stage, typically Stage Four, and by the time the diagnosis is made, there’s often nothing to be done. That’s why these cancers’ five-year survival rates are so low.

The American body politic is suffering from just such an internal cancer, one that has gone unrecognized by most during its early stages, especially when it was confined to a small corner of that place from which many such cancers originate: the halls of academia.

That cancer is critical race theory.

In brief: critical race theory (CRT) is a modified form of Marxism that divides people based on race and culture rather than class. The worldviews are similar in every other important way, the most significant being that they are promoted and perpetrated by people seeking their own power and aggrandizement regardless of the cost to society or to humanity. In the first iteration of this mindset, this meant the death of about 100 million human beings.

Just as Karl Marx didn’t necessarily intend his philosophy to lead to the murderous pogroms of Stalin or Pol Pot or to Mao Zedong’s starving tens of millions of his own countrymen to death in “the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded,” CRT founder Derrick Bell might not have intended his new “theory” to become the national cancer that it is. Indeed, CRT was initially little more than a debate in academia about the proper way to structure a college curriculum. No need for the “working man” or the “soccer mom” to care about that, right? The founding of CRT was Stage One of its cancerous spread; it was there, but nobody recognized its terrible, inevitable path.

Stage Two involved the spreading of these ideas, just as with Marxism, into the minds of ambitious people outside the world of academia and professional philosophizing. Some of them might have been true believers, and some of them recognized its potential as a tool to manipulate and dominate, whether through selling books and “consulting” contracts or through holding political office.

As they won elections and gave their lectures to confused ordinary Americans who didn’t understand why they were being called racist but felt afraid and powerless to call out the evil before them, the spread of the cancer of CRT reached Stage Three. Even then, had it been sufficiently recognized and treated, we might have recovered.

But just as Marxism in the hands of megalomaniacs or other seekers of power and personal fortune destroyed the lives of untold millions of men, women, and children by making its threat nearly unrecognizable until it had spread beyond the ability of the populace to control it, so it is with CRT in the hands of those who would destroy this nation from the inside. And so it is that we have reached Stage Four.

Purveyors of this evil mindset, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Kimberlé Crenshaw, race-hustlers like Al Sharpton and Robin DiAngelo (yes, race-hustlers can be white, too), and the mendacious yet still fêted-at-all-the-right-cocktail-parties Nikole Hannah-Jones, are making careers out of poisoning the minds of Americans and turning us against each other based on the immoral concept that a few hundred million individual Americans are responsible for misdeeds of mostly long-dead others, very often others who died before today’s Americans’ progenitors even reached these shores.

The things these human cancers get away with, such as calling racism “anti-racism” and using the term “equity” to describe their desired public policies of discrimination and theft and, yes, more racism, are the stuff of Orwell, yet Boston University supports Kendi with funding as the “director of the Center for Antiracist Research.” Robin DiAngelo’s worthless White Fragility has been required reading for years now despite its being based, in a social science sense, on nothing but the complacency and gullibility of “guilty” white liberals.

Companies and governments alike embark on “training” designed to tell white people that they’re all racist and owe a debt to society that can never be repaid regardless of how public their racial self-flagellation is and how many “Black Lives Matter” hair shirts Americans might wear.

Most disturbing of all is the increasing influence of CRT on our young people. CRT has, as a Stage Four cancer does, escaped its origins. Now, middle schools have “affinity groups” designed not just to separate children by race but to instill racial hierarchies. Colleges, including my alma mater, are hosting separate graduation ceremonies based on race. How exactly that is different from the sort of racial segregation that America has been fighting against, albeit imperfectly, almost since its founding, the judging-based-on-skin-color that Martin Luther King Jr. specifically dreamed would end in this nation, I don’t understand.

But from the perspective of its proponents, that’s one of the beauties of CRT: the fact that I don’t understand how segregation and racial division can be a good thing means simply that I suffer from implicit bias and that I must be reeducated. As to whether that gulag will be literal or figurative for someone like me, the CRT version of a kulak, remains to be seen; Stalin didn’t use gulags at first either.

I can’t say that there is a significant upside to any of this. But if I were to try, I’d offer this: America is awakening to the cancer that is critical race theory, to its explicit efforts to foment racist public policy and to turn Americans against each other just as communism did in the Soviet Union and Cambodia and China and so many other unfortunate places that dabbled with such evil.

Employees are awakening to the horror of Coca-Cola’s “try to be less white” training — given by the aforementioned Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility fame, who no doubt earned a pretty penny for this dreck — which included a slide that said, “To be less white is: to be less oppressive, to be less arrogant, to be less trusting, to be less defensive, to be less ignorant.”

Parents are awakening to the dumbing-down of curricula and standards that CRT inflict on our children, using Black Lives Matter as their vector of infiltrating impressionable young minds and manipulating the weak and irresponsible superintendents, school boards, and teachers who go along with this dangerous nonsense. It should infuriate you that schools across the nation are telling some kids that other kids are evil, or that they themselves are evil, for things over which they have — and never had and never will have — no control, such as the melanin content of one’s skin or the particular shape of one’s eyes. And for the distinctly un-American practice of teaching that free speech, critical thinking, and questioning authority are simply indications of one’s own irredeemable “privilege.”

Parents are awakening to curricula like “Equitable Math” that oppose focusing on “right answers” because “objectivity” is inherently “colonialist” and repressive. How are our children going to survive in a high-tech national economy, much less an intensely competitive international economy, if they can’t get the answers right and, if that isn’t enough, self-righteously argue that it doesn’t matter if they do? That’ll go over well in an interview at Intel or IBM or Wipro.

Even some leftist academics are awakening to the destruction wrought by a mindless desire to destroy everything that has come before, much as the French revolutionaries did when they established a new calendar because, you know, if you start a calendar at Year One, then nothing before that actually happened. Of course that didn’t stop the First French Republic from instituting the Terror and executing thousands of their countrymen who didn’t have the right family backgrounds or ideas. But I digress. The Marxist Ivy League professor Cornel West recently co-authored one of the most important pieces of pushback against CRT and its prescribed Memory Hole for Western civilization: “Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe.” (Seriously, if you only read one other article today, read that one.)

The problem is that even this initial national awakening to the harms and horrors of CRT is very, very late. We are in the midst of a Stage Four societal cancer. Critical race theory has metastasized from Harvard outward through other universities, and from there into almost every other internal organ of our nation, from businesses to governments to schools to, well, almost everywhere you look.

Can the cancer of CRT be successfully treated? Is there a form of national chemotherapy or surgery for such a pernicious disease? Maybe. But given how late we are to this diagnosis, and given that societal tumors like Kendi and DiAngelo and Hannah-Smith continue to distribute cancer cells throughout our body politic — and that there’s precious little political will to excise them — it’s difficult not to fear that this once-great nation faces a similar fate to that of my father-in-law: by the time we figured it out, it was too late.

 

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Another Prestigious School Pummeled by Critical Race Theory

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/another-prestigious-school-pummeled-by-critical-race-theory/

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There is a lot of trouble afoot at my alma mater, and it seems worth sharing.

Maybe that should be “more trouble,” because prestigious Regis High School has been in the news of late, with its president being fired over charges of sexual misconduct.

A Jesuit-run institution, and yes, the high school of one Anthony Fauci, Regis is not “prestigious” because of my particular alumnus status (nor that of my colleague, Daniel Tenreiro), nor because of cost (actually, it’s tuition-free per its founding in 1914). Simply, it is regularly ranked as the best Catholic high school in America.

It got that status because it was a determined fire hose of classical education that graduated young men who were put to many a test so they could think and analyze as adults, for God and country, as the blunt school motto stated.

But now, Regis — like many a school — seems ashamed of its legacy and purpose, maybe even of Deo et patria, and has become quick to genuflect and lie prostrate before the gods of Critical Race Theory. More on that shortly.

 

Back in the day, when Abe Beame was still mayor: Every year, Regis took around 120 Catholic boys (parochial-schoolers from classes low to high, and having a silver spoon in your mouth at birth was not a condition of acceptance) from New York and the surrounding area — through competitive exam and ensuing interview — into the freshman class. A goodly amount fell away through the ensuing four years (a grade of 75 was failing) of grueling and unrelenting work (learning Latin, self-taught physics among the heavier stones to push uphill). There was many a big brain among my classmates, but how I survived to graduate with the remaining 100 remains a mystery.

All being in this together, close quarters for four years, you could not help but notice the black classmate was black, the Puerto Rican senior was Puerto Rican, the gay freshman was gay. (We noticed the musical one was musical too, the artistic one artistic too — but such things are of no use in our times of pigmentary politics and cultural ethics.) My experience and perception was that we were all young guys who regarded each other as comrades. We were caught up in some worthwhile academic marathon. Ours was a brotherhood that transcended the facts of the Sharks vs. Jets neighborhood characteristics that still held forth. Able to walk in only my own shoes, I look back and find Regis to have been a place of e pluribus unum, of sanctuary, a haven, of true camaraderie — a thing set against the backdrop of a New York choked by unrelenting racial tensions. I feel blessed to have gone there, to have run the race, to have crossed the finish line, no matter how distant from most of my classmates.

Come 1978, about a third of them were graduating into Ivy League institutions. For many, the four years of academic rigor might have had a little something to do with that outcome.

So slapping the “prestigious” label on Regis is a legit thing to do.

It is also the legit thing to do to draw attention to the progressive turmoil that seems to have enveloped this school — as it has most institutions — in an attempt, either blind or willful, to supplant its mission (here, a Catholic education) with the leftist ideology that is Critical Race Theory.

The elites have demanded it, and Regis complies. Don’t, and you are indeed a racist institution. That’s how the rationale goes, right?

At its essence, Christianity is a belief in salvation, love, redemption, and forgiveness. At its essence, CRT is about classification, vilification, repudiation, and being unforgiving. How a Catholic institution such as Regis can replace one with the other is a scandal of monstrous proportion and an act of utter sinfulness.

(It is interesting to note that the school is named after a 17th century French Jesuit, John Francis Regis, a remarkable evangelist who converted many to Catholicism and worked tirelessly to reinvigorate the faith throughout France; his great disappointment being he was never to go to the New World to convert Indians, a task that resulted in the martyrdom of many other Jesuits, but let us not talk further of that annoying topic of defending the faith.)

There is a letter. It seems to this alumnus (who had no role in this document) a proper thing to give it attention. It is the voice of parents of current Regis students who are starting to say: “Enough. This is not what our sons signed up for. What you are doing is wrong and bad.”

 

The letter began circulating among the alumni community last week. Its authorship is unknown (to me, anyway) at this time, although its charges and intimations are indeed reflective of at least some Regis parents. It is a tale of how a storied institution of learning may be crippling itself, of a school of a distinct purpose consumed by the insatiable era of wokeness and cancellation and 1619 hatred for God and country.

Good for these parents. Bravo.

Their letter is published in full here as received (except for “superscripts” replaced):

This is an open letter from a group of concerned alumni and parents. Up until July 8th of last year, we were thankful that Regis remained faithful to its mission of academic excellence and fostering a spirit of generosity and service to those in need, and had resisted the fashionable racism inherent in Critical Race Theory (CRT) that has been embraced by other educational institutions. We felt confident that the academic rigor and focus on critical thinking that Regis has instilled in its graduates for over a century made Regis immune to the anti-rational, anti-liberal, anti-meritocratic, neo-racist ideology that is Critical Race Theory.

Regis’ reckoning came last summer when an anonymous group created an Instagram page called @BlackatRegis in response to a letter Regis emailed to the entire Regis community on June 3, 2020. Many of the stories on @BlackatRegis are awful, and we want to be clear that racial harassment and discrimination are unacceptable. We expect Regis to address any incidents swiftly and decisively.

However, the @BlackatRegis site does not simply draw attention to these incidents. It prescribes, as the remedy, the adoption of CRT ideology. The @BlackatRegis site contains links to two letters to Regis. The first letter is anonymous and states that the “mission of this project (@BlackatRegis) is to highlight the experiences of Black alumni, current students, faculty, and staff at a school that perpetuates racism and explicit anti-Blackness.”

The second letter, a document called “Dear Regis — Black Lives Matter,” was signed by over 600 Regis and REACH alumni and faculty. It is also full of CRT jargon and condemnations of Regis’ behavior:

  • It calls the reasonable and measured June 3rd letter from Regis “a slap in the face from an institution that prides itself on forming students into Men for Others” (emphasis theirs).
  • Rather than praising Regis for creating, guiding, funding and running the visionary REACH Program since 2002, these alumni write “Simply put, REACH cannot be Regis’s absolution from taking a clear stand against white supremacy or addressing the realities of race within the country, the city, and the four walls of the school.”
  • “If Regis really stands in solidarity with its Black students and is seriously committed to racial justice, it will use its privilege, take concrete action and encourage the Regis community to do the same. While Regis has many flaws in its curriculum, in the culture it fosters, and in its engagement with its community, the purpose of this letter is not to harp on those failures but rather to hold the school accountable…Provide the resources necessary to properly educate all your students about the realities of race, power, and privilege in America.”
  • These alumni chastise Regis’ (which gave them all an entirely tuition-free education) request for donations in the letter as “not only ill-timed but extremely inappropriate and disrespectful to the communities who are experiencing a great deal of anguish.”
  • Instead, these signatories “call on (Regis) to do (its) part and use (its) resources to donate to any number of organizations committed to the liberation of Black lives and the dismantling of white supremacy. The following links provide lists of possibilities compiled by organizers toward which Regis can focus its efforts and resources.
  • https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/#donate
  • https://sites.google.com/view/blm-petitionsfunds/home

Like so many schools around the country, Regis appears to have immediately surrendered to this particular prescription for addressing the racial climate on campus. This is evidenced by

In fact, it appears that Regis has embraced CRT ever since @BlackatRegis emerged. Many decisions were made during a time when Regis had no president. On April 11, 2021, the Regis community was informed that Christian Talbot, a current board member who attended Regis and also spent 13 years teaching at the school, is now our Interim President. A quick perusal of Mr. Talbot’s internet presence (he is the founder of a consulting company called Basecamp) indicates that he seems to be a strong supporter of CRT who recommends books by Ibram Kendi (a leading proponent of CRT), and is against standardized tests like the SAT.

Unless alumni speak up, we fear our Interim President, the to-be-hired Director of DEI, and the Diversity Steering Committee are going to do irreparable damage to our alma mater, despite their good intentions. CRT advocates work to weaken or eliminate entrance exams, reduce curricular focus on the Western Canon, set firm racial quotas for students and faculty (regardless of qualifications), and achieve “Equity” (equality of outcomes) by reducing all students’ performance to that of the weakest.

As alumni and parents, to the extent there is any racism at Regis, we want it eliminated. We want to ensure that ALL students feel safe and welcome. Regis’ sudden embrace of CRT is particularly upsetting when those of us who have been involved with Regis for decades know how hard Regis has worked to address the concerns of the black Regis community. Regis has been trying to hire more black faculty for over a decade. There is an enormous amount of competition for black teachers. 20 years ago, Regis designed the REACH Program to help more students of color prepare for the rigors of a Regis education when their local schools may not have been up to the task.

Regis opens a Pandora’s Box when it pledges to ensure that the Regis culture is “free from any racial or other bias, either implicit or explicit” in its July 8th missive to alumni. Pledging to eliminate IMPLICIT bias gives the CRT advocates control over all aspects of life at Regis, from admissions to curriculum, pedagogy, teacher training, grading, and discipline. All objective standards become subjective, and decisions are based on emotion rather than reason. From the CRT perspective, you cannot defend yourself against a charge of implicit racism, because the feelings of the accuser are given greater weight than an objective view of what actually transpired. From the CRT perspective, to challenge implicit racism is evidence of racism. Once CRT is given a foothold, it impacts all aspects of a school. Indeed, the job description posted by Regis mandates that the new Director of DEI be involved in every aspect of the school (admissions, curriculum, “professional development for all faculty and staff”, strategic planning, hiring, and “programming for student formation”).

We have provided links to numerous articles and essays on CRT in the appendix to this letter.

We whole-heartedly encourage Regis in its efforts to become a more inclusive environment for students of all backgrounds. Students who engage in racial harassment must face consequences for their actions. Regis should discuss these issues and the importance of judging people on their character and putting ourselves in others’ shoes with the students when they first arrive freshman year. But that does not require embracing CRT and going down the same path as Grace Church High School, Dalton and Brearley. We much prefer the common humanity approach to dealing with racism and hope the Regis administrators, faculty, and Board of Trustees agree.

OUR REQUESTS:

We have seen at other institutions that when a school restructures its educational philosophy around the principles of CRT, free and open debate is quickly replaced by a climate of fear and silence. We want to ensure this does not happen at Regis. We ask the Board of Directors and Regis Administration (including the Interim President) to be wholly transparent about any plans to implement CRT-based training or curriculum at Regis. We want to know what this will mean for the school, specifically in terms of admissions, curriculum, pedagogy, grading, discipline and the overall mission of the school. We request that they agree to take proactive steps to ensure that Regis remains a place where rigorous pedagogy, critical thinking, and free and open discussion remain the norm.

In particular, we request that before anything related to race at Regis is implemented by the school, it retain a consultant of the common humanity approach to racism to review such decisions and policies. These matters would include candidates for DEI Officer, candidates for the new full-time admissions hire, any race-related policies or policy changes including, but not limited to

  • all race-related proposals from any Board committee or sub-committee,
  • all proposals from the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion subcommittee and Diversity Steering Committees,
  • all proposals, programs, recommendations and other suggestions from the to-be-hired Director of DEI
  • proposed speakers at the school — whether to the Board, faculty, or students (CRT experts would be permitted, but only with equal time given to an equally qualified opposing voice)

The consultant would have to be associated with a common humanity inspired group such as 1776 Unites, FAIR, Counterweight, — groups that work to eliminate racism without resorting to the fatalistic, neo-racist, CRT ideology that is so divisive and pervasive at the moment. This consultant would share their view on these matters with the Board, administration and alumni. Their recommendations would not be binding on Regis — just as Regis should not hand over the reins to those who support CRT, it should not hand them to those who oppose it.

We would also like the school to agree that the to-be-hired Director of DEI will be responsible for teaching at least half a full-time teacher’s workload (two classes). A full-time DEI officer will feel obligated to find “implicit” racism and bias everywhere in order to justify their continued employment. No other peer school we looked at (Xavier, Fordham Prep, Cristo Rey Harlem, St Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, and Iona Prep) had a full-time DEI officer — they were all part-time obligations.

If Regis does not promote CRT, we request that the school stop using CRT terminology, both within Regis and in communications with alumni and the broader community.

We request that the Board vote on this and all race-related issues anonymously. CRT proponents call anyone who refuses to comply with their demands racist — voting anonymously is the only way Board members can vote their conscience without fear of retribution.

We request that the school give us equal treatment by sending this Open Letter to all alumni and posting it (or a link to it) on the Regis.org website, just as it sent the @BlackatRegis Instagram page to all alumni in its July 8, 2020 letter and currently directs people there on the school’s website.

If you are a member of the Regis Community and support the opinions expressed in this letter, please send an email to the law firm of Allen Harris PLLC at info@allenharrislaw.com with your name and year of graduation or relationship to the school. Allen Harris PLLC will not share anyone’s name with us or the school, unless you specifically request that your name be shared. It will only inform Regis how many people emailed them in support of this letter.

Thank you for caring enough about Regis to read this letter.

May ours be the noble heart, strong to endure . . .

 

 

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Plucking Out The Eyes Of Texas: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/plucking-out-the-eyes-of-texas/

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People have lost their damn minds. From the Texas Tribune:

Dozens of students at the University of Texas at Austin who give campus tours to prospective Longhorns are refusing to work this week over a dispute about a plaque with “The Eyes of Texas” lyrics hanging in the Admissions Welcome Center.

The dustup over the plaque is the latest example of UT-Austin officials standing by “The Eyes” over pleas that the university distance itself from the alma mater song because it originated at a minstrel show where students likely wore Blackface.

It’s also the latest in a series of clashes over the song in a nearly yearlong controversy that has frequently pit administrators and alumni against students and divided members of the Longhorn community.

More:

Students say protests over the song are not going away. Kendall Walker, a UT-Austin senior who is part of the student strike in the admissions office, said she thinks administrators wrongly assumed the issue would die down after the school formed a committee this past year to study the song’s origins. UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell has repeatedly affirmed that the university will keep the song.

“I think this is the tip of the iceberg honestly,” Walker said. “This is the beginning of it and people resisting that decision and not accepting a committee of people deem[ing] the song isn’t racist. There’s a whole generation of students and minority students that are equally and more mad than we are and don’t want to enter a space that predetermined their opinions don’t matter.

OK, wait a minute. If you don’t get your way, that doesn’t mean that your “opinions don’t matter.” It may simply mean that you made your case, and it wasn’t persuasive. This is childish. More:

Members of the Texas Tour Guides said the song has created a divisive environment on campus and wanted the plaque to be removed to ensure all student employees and prospective students feel comfortable in the Welcome Center, according to more than six students who work or volunteer as tour guides and spoke to The Texas Tribune.

Here is background on the song and the controversy: a university-commissioned report. The song was written to poke gentle fun of an early twentieth century president of the university, who used to say all the time, “The eyes of Texas are upon you.” It was debuted at a minstrel show in 1903 — a fact the report rightly says is regrettable, while noting that minstrel shows were a popular form of entertainment at the time. Here are the full lyrics:

I once did know a President,
Away down South, in Texas.
And, always, everywhere he went,
He saw the eyes of Texas.
The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
All the live long day.
The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
You can not get away.
Do not think you can escape them
At night or early in the morn
The Eyes of Texas are upon you
‘Till Gabriel blows his horn.
Sing me a song of Prexy,
Of days long since gone by.
Again I seem to great him
And hear his kind reply.
Smiles of gracious welcome
Before my memory rise,
Again I hear him say to me,
“Remember Texas’ Eyes.”

The part of the song I know (because my wife is an alumna of UT, and she and the kids would sing the song every time we would drive back to Texas from Louisiana, and cross the border) is:

 

The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
You can not get away.
Do not think you can escape them
At night or early in the morn
The Eyes of Texas are upon you
‘Till Gabriel blows his horn.

I didn’t know the complete lyrics till just now. This song is totally innocent! The earlier claim that the song has some sort of connection to Robert E. Lee has been debunked. The entire controversy is because its first performance was in a minstrel show. The students, alumni, and backers of the University of Texas have been singing this song for over a century, and nobody noticed that it was problematic until recently?! This is a manufactured controversy if ever there was one. More from the Texas Tribune story:

Walker, who is Black, said she is often asked on tours by Black families about her experience on campus.

“I [used to] stand up there and say, ‘I feel welcomed. I feel heard’ … The way that I feel has completely flipped in the past 12 months,” she said. “We bring in students into this university and showcase this university in a way other students cannot. They reap so many benefits of having our presence there but can’t honor something that makes us overtly uncomfortable. It’s just super hurtful.”

Multiple students who spoke to the Tribune said they’ve had uncomfortable conversations with prospective parents and students about the controversy over the past year, yet they have not received any guidance for how to deal with questions about the song while giving tours. In some instances, students said questioning has gotten aggressive.

“It definitely has been an added, like, burden on my mental health to go get dressed and put on my tour guide Polo and go out and talk to families that are oftentimes like predominantly white, about like things like racial justice here on campus,” said Jeremiah Baldwin, a tour guide and sophomore at UT-Austin. “I’m always like having this game of mental gymnastics that I’m playing, like, ‘how should I describe this?’ Or, ‘should I be as open and honest?’”

What kind of enfragilated souls find themselves traumatized by a song whose lyrics refer not to slavery or anything offensive, but which was first performed by students in a minstrel show during Theodore Roosevelt administration? Ridiculous and psychotic — a form of religious fanaticism. This therapeutic totalitarianism, under which we are commanded to cast all our history into the dustbin, including beloved cultural artifacts like a university fight song, if it strikes a privileged victim group as offensive, has to end.

Yes, it does need to end. These snowflakes have effectively destroyed higher level education in this country.

 

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Hamilton County schools don't teach critical race theory, but it still angers some parents

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/hamilton-county/education/2021/05/10/critical-race-theory-controversial-but-not-taught-hamilton-county/4939175001/

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It’s showing up on protest signs, in public comments of school board meetings, and in posts on social media: critical race theory.

As parents across the Hamilton County suburbs attend school board meetings to speak about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and social-emotional learning (SEL), those who are upset with the work schools are doing are often citing critical race theory as something they are opposed to and want to see removed. But districts have stressed they don't teach it.

While DEI and SEL isn’t new for districts, it has been in the spotlight as several Hamilton County district have hired districtwide leaders for DEI.

Briggs:Carmel schools don't teach critical race theory, but parents' anger proves point

Conversations on race were pushed to the forefront across the country after protests last summer following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, and several other police killings of Black people including Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Dreasjon Reed and McHale Rose in Indianapolis.

As school districts grapple with how to talk about race, parents have weighed in with both support and criticism.

But why has critical race theory become a focus for those who oppose the districts' work? Why has it come up in Carmel, Fishers, Noblesville and Westfield over the last several weeks?

Here's what you need to know about what's happening in Hamilton County.

Parents are speaking up across the Hamilton County suburbs

In all four of the suburban Hamilton County districts – Carmel Clay, Hamilton Southeastern, Noblesville and Westfield Washington – parents are bringing up critical race theory.

Some are contacting schools and districts to ask about it, while others are speaking about it during often long and passionate public comment sessions at school board meetings. Others still are protesting with signs and posting about it online.

In their opposition to critical race theory, parents are calling it divisive and saying a focus on race creates groups of the oppressed and the oppressor, leading to bullying of those who are the latter. They’re also saying it is an indoctrination and a political agenda that spills over to other areas such as SEL and classroom activities.

In response, all four districts clarified that they do not teach critical race theory and that their DEI leaders do not set curriculum.

Additionally, groups that support DEI in the schools have also spoken at school board meetings, sometimes outnumbering the critics. They have advocated and supported the districts’ DEI and SEL work as essential, empathy-building and a way to prepare students for life outside of their communities.

Critical race theory examines race in everyday life

Critical race theory is a concept that examines systemic racism as a part of American life and institutions, giving white people an advantage

The framework that got its start in critical legal studies, said Cleveland Hayes, associate dean of academic affairs and a professor in the IU School of Education in Indianapolis. Hayes' research includes critical race theory.

He said the theory first stemmed out of a recognition that the law was not inclusive of people who are not white especially when it came to sentencing and accessibility to plea deals.

Hayes added that the theory is complex and has become weaponized as anti-American or anti-white. But that's not the case, he said.

Asra Nomani, vice president for strategy and investigations at Parents Defending Education, is against critical race theory in schools and said that using a lens of race to look at society is superficial and divisive. Parents Defending Education is a "national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas."

Nomani added that it also creates a hierarchy of human value that separates and demonizes people based on race, and equated saying someone is privileged because of race to using a stereotype.

Hayes, however, said the theory is not about division or to make people feel bad. District leaders have also stressed that their goal is not to shame students, but rather make sure all are included.

"It’s not about you as a white person," Hayes said, "it’s about recognizing the humanity and erasure of people of color."

Schools are addressing racism

Hayes said that critical race theory is not being taught in K-12 schools, because it is unlikely that teachers have the ongoing training needed to teach the complexities and nuances. 

While it is a form of anti-racism work and one way to center the experiences of people of color, he said it is not the only way. So even without classes or lessons on critical race theory, schools are still doing anti-racism work. Multiple districts have expanded this work with the hiring of districtwide DEI leaders.

Nataki Pettigrew, HSE chief equity and inclusion officer, told the HSE school board at a work session last month that while critical race theory isn't used, examining the impact of race could come up in the classroom.

“If someone says racism doesn’t exist, that’s not living in reality,” she told the board.

Nomani said she does think that schools can address race and racism both in history and the present, but said it should be done in a way that's fair and doesn't denigrate students and teachers.

She argued that anti-racism work and areas like cultural competency, DEI and intersectionality can't be separated from critical race theory and have all become "word salad" for the same ideas that create divineness and shame. 

She added that critical race theory has become part of teacher training, therefore influencing teachers and their students.

Hayes told IndyStar that he does use critical race theory in some of his classes and trainings but not all, and that without regular study of the theory, it is not something teachers can implement after one training.

Eric Ward, executive director Western States Center and an expert in extremist movements and preserving an inclusive democracy, said those who are attacking critical race theory are actually attacking the dialogue about race happening in the U.S. and the potential for change. 

"It’s happening because there is a concerted effort to create a counter conversation," he said, "to the dialogue on racial equity that’s happening in this country."

Districts have stressed that their work in DEI, which includes optional trainings for teachers and staff and other programming for students and the community, is a way to be inclusive of all students and help prepare them for the world at large.

Criticism of critical race theory happening elsewhere too

The outcry about critical race theory and schools isn't just happening in Hamilton County.

The discussion continues among politicians and on conservative TV and radio as well in activist groups such as Purple for Parents, which was formed in Arizona as a response to the Red for Ed movement.

The founder in Arizona was a part of the Patriot Movement AZ, a group that started with Islamophobic and racist rhetoric in a now-closed Facebook group and became a force in Arizona politics, an investigation by the Arizona Republic found. The founder also ran for the state legislature.

Since then, it has expanded to Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia, per its website. The Indiana arm of the organization is present in all four of the suburban Hamilton County districts.

Purple for Parents says it has several goals including expanding school choice and ending politics and indoctrination in schools, per its website.  Per the Indiana chapter's Facebook page and website, it is also opposed to critical race theory.

Two articles on the Indiana chapter's website say that the theory places too much emphasis on race and takes issue with the concepts that social constructs were designed to keep white people in power and that society is systemically racist.

Purple for Parents did not respond to IndyStar's request for comment. 

The theory has also become a focus in statehouses and national politics.

The Tennessee General Assembly passed a law last week banning the teaching of critical race theory. Idaho Governor Brad Little signed a similar bill into law. Texas Republicans are also pushing to ban critical race theory in schools. And political pressure is growing on a similar bill in Oklahoma.

Experts who spoke to IndyStar said that while criticism of the theory has been around for years, they pointed back to an an executive order that President Donald Trump issued in late September 2020 to restrict the federal government and its contractors from diversity training, targeting critical race theory. President Joe Biden has since reversed that ban.

In addition to the executive order, Trump also created the 1776 commission as a counter to The New York Times' "1619" journalism project which he criticized along with critical race theory.

 

 

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