An Alabama lawsuit on behalf of unborn black babies that’s making its way through the state’s courts is alleging that the abortion industry is deliberately targeting black Americans and other minorities.

If successful, the attorneys and activists behind the case claim that it might ultimately lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court opinion that struck down state laws against abortion.

Even if the case doesn’t succeed in court, legal analysts and experts in the field say the implications in the court of public opinion are hard to overstate.

The lawsuit was filed by pro-life leader Amie Beth Shaver, named Miss Alabama in 1994, on behalf of “Baby Q,” an African American baby in Alabama who was unborn when the case began. Baby Q represents all other similar black babies in the womb across the state.

According to the complaint, Baby Q and other members of the “class” are being unlawfully discriminated against and targeted for abortion by the industry. Abortion giant Planned Parenthood acknowledges its roots in the eugenics movement, although it says it’s working to rectify that legacy.

“About 80 members of Baby Q’s class, which is African American babies in the womb, lose their lives in abortion every week in Alabama,” Sam McLure, the lead lawyer representing the babies, told The Epoch Times in a phone interview. “Enough is enough. This has to stop.”

Several leaders involved in the case told us that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry more broadly have a long history of racism and support for eugenics, the highly controversial idea that humanity should be “improved” by weeding out allegedly inferior genes from the population.

“This case really boils down to the question of whether states have the right to prohibit eugenics abortion,” McLure added.

Many of the black leaders involved in the case were also behind the Equality Proclamation, signed in 2020 on the 158th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, to shed light on what they describe as the systematic targeting of black babies.

Why Alabama?

Conservative Alabama is the best jurisdiction in the United States to wage this fight, McLure said.

Because of a measure approved by about 60 percent of voters in 2018, Alabama has one of the strongest protections for the unborn in its state Constitution. It says the policy of the state is “to recognize and support the importance of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life.”

The Alabama Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the personhood of unborn babies in other cases not directly involving abortion, McLure and other attorneys involved in the case told The Epoch Times.

The Baby Q case also hinges on a state law known as the Human Life Protection Act, which makes conducting an abortion a felony punishable by up to life in prison. Signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey in May of 2019, the measure bans all abortions in the state except to protect the health and life of the mother.

That law is widely seen as one of the strongest in the nation prohibiting abortion. It is even stronger than the Mississippi statute currently being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case many legal experts on both sides of the debate believe might overturn or at least scale back Roe v. Wade.

In October of 2019, a federal court issued a preliminary injunction against the Alabama law, arguing that it violates existing U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

As a result, Ivey and state Attorney General Steve Marshall have declined to enforce it for now, as the U.S. Supreme Court once again takes up the issue of abortion.

Legal filings and attorneys in the Baby Q case also point to the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects unenumerated rights, as well as the 14th Amendment, which provides for equal protection under the law.

Finally, the plaintiffs cite the U.S. Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which reserves to the states or the people all powers not specifically surrendered to the federal government, as authorizing or even requiring state action in defense of the right to life.

Intervening in the case on behalf of Baby Q are almost 50 state lawmakers and a supermajority of the state Senate, as well as dozens of black leaders from across America alleging that the abortion industry is targeting people based on race.

State Republican leaders are also active on the issue, with the executive committee calling on all GOP officials to use every tool at their disposal to stop abortion in Alabama, including shutting down clinics.

The Objective

The Baby Q case, originally filed in October of 2020, is aimed at forcing the government “to protect preborn African-American children from discrimination and to ensure their equal protection under the law,” according to court filings.

“The abortion industry has systematically targeted the African American community for extermination by abortion, and this history is undisputed,” said McLure, citing historical evidence and even recent statements.

More than 20 million black babies have been aborted in the United States, and are three to five times more likely to be aborted than white babies, said McLure, who noted that this sort of racial targeting is clearly prohibited under state and federal law.

“In New York City, more black babies are killed in abortion than are born alive,” he continued. “In Alabama, black Americans make up 27 percent of the population, and yet they make up more than 60 percent of the abortion cases. Nobody can argue that this is not deliberate.”

The plaintiffs in the case are asking the court to order Ivey to enforce the Human Life Protection Act and protect unborn children in the state from abortion and discrimination based on their race.

Eventually, the goal is to overturn Roe v. Wade and restore protections for the unborn that the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case undermined nearly 50 years ago.

Because equal protection and prohibitions on racial discrimination are so firmly established in U.S. jurisprudence, the activists and attorneys behind the case believe it might be a game-changer in the abortion debate.

The next major milestone will come on April 20, when the judge will hold a hearing on the issue after more than a year of inaction.

“Finally, on April 20th, these African American babies are going to get their day in court,” McLure said.

The previous hearing, which took place virtually on Zoom, dealt with whether the case should be public. While the abortion industry is seeking to keep the case behind closed doors, the state judge expressed a willingness to keep the proceedings open.

Attorney Brent Helms, who is representing the legislators seeking to intervene in the case, explained part of the rationale in a phone interview. “If the judge denies this case, that offers us the opportunity to get to the Alabama Supreme Court,” he said. “When the legislature looks at this case, Alabama’s law is more strict and says that the unborn child is a person with constitutional rights,” Helms continued. “Those rights cannot be denied without due process and equal protection.”

He added, “That means the child’s right to life would supersede or at least compete with the mother’s alleged right to privacy, as the right to life is an enumerated right, while the mother’s privacy rights to obtain an abortion were discovered in the penumbras as opposed to actually being written down.”

Regardless of how the state circuit court judge rules, the losing side is expected to immediately appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court. The court is known as one of the nation’s more conservative state supreme courts. From there, it’s practically certain that the losing side will appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Role of the US Supreme Court

Numerous legal experts told The Epoch Times that the courts involved in the Alabama case may wait until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks before making any major decisions.

However, the Mississippi statute only protects unborn babies after 15 weeks, while Alabama is seeking to protect them from the time of conception. The Baby Q case also deals with racial discrimination, while the Mississippi case doesn’t.

The plaintiffs and intervenors hope the apparent conflict between the Alabama state Supreme Court’s positions and the federal district court’s rulings will be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of protecting the right to life of the unborn in Alabama and beyond.

McLure, the lead attorney for Baby Q, said justices from theU.S.  Supreme Court have been leaving “breadcrumbs” in their opinions regarding what elements they might like to see in a major abortion case.

In his concurring opinion issued in the case of Box v. Planned Parenthood, for example, Justice Clarence Thomas raised the issue of racial targeting as an important component.

“We think the type of case the U.S. Supreme Court wants to take on to return abortion issues back to the states involves eliminating the abortion industry’s history of racial targeting, a purely state law claim, and a reliance on the Ninth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” McLure said, noting that the Baby Q case had all of those.

“Obviously, we care about all life in the womb, but this case in particular deals with the racial targeting of children of African descent and this is a key issue,” he added.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s own 1973 ruling on abortion acknowledged that if the “suggestion of [a fetus’] personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth] amendment.”

The people of Alabama, as well as many medical and scientific experts, have concluded that unborn children are indeed persons, attorneys and leaders involved in the case said. Thus, under the reasoning in Roe v. Wade, the high court must act.

The hope is that, through the courts, the abortion industry can be prevented from targeting unborn persons based on race, and eventually, state governments can regain the authority to protect all unborn lives, McLure said.

Racism in Planned Parenthood, Abortion

Dozens of prominent black leaders from across the United States are involved in the case, arguing that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry have been deliberately targeting the nation’s African American population and other minorities.

It started with Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, black leaders told The Epoch Times.

In her writings and her speeches to groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Sanger openly advocated for eugenics to control the reproduction of populations she believed were less desirable.

Indeed, in 1939, Sanger launched the infamous “Negro Project” to pay and train black leaders to promote birth control and other measures in the black community.

Eventually, when Alan Guttmacher took the helm of Sanger’s organization, abortion became a major element of the campaign, Georgia gubernatorial candidate and Baby Q intervenor Catherine Davis told The Epoch Times in a phone interview.

After Guttmacher and his allies were able to get the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down state laws protecting the unborn, “Planned Parenthood established their abortion clinics primarily in communities of color across America,” Davis said.

Among other evidence, she pointed to an investigation using 2010 Census data showing that about 80 percent of the organization’s abortion clinics were located in minority neighborhoods.

Planned Parenthood would claim that their clinics are located where there is “the greatest need,” Davis said.

“But if you look at their marketing, they are regularly targeting black Americans,” she added. “On Halloween, they even tweeted out that it was safer for a black woman to have an abortion than to carry the baby to term. This is outrageous.”

According to Davis and the dozens of other black leaders involved in the case, this is racist population control and eugenics.

“The closest example of this is what Hitler did in Nazi Germany,” she added. “Look at Planned Parenthood: This is exactly what Hitler was doing to Jews, but Sanger’s program was more successful because they take care to disguise their agenda as ‘helping’ women and protecting their ‘right’ to abortion.”

Another prominent leader involved in the case, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece and pro-life leader Alveda King, called this battle “the civil rights issue of our time.”

“No racial group in America has ever been more left out of societal protection nor suffered more deliberate discrimination, dehumanization, agonizing dismemberment, and death legally imposed upon them than black children,” she said.

“The Baby Q case is a gauntlet,” King told The Epoch Times in an email. “Pray that the hammer of justice will rule in favor of life.”

The controversial racial component of abortion also was highlighted nationally in the 2009 documentary “Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America,” which argued that the targeting of black Americans through abortion constitutes a genocide.

Planned Parenthood Data Speaks

In recent years, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained prominence, almost 20 Planned Parenthood affiliates have issued public acknowledgments of racism within the organization.

Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, for instance, condemned Sanger’s “racist legacy,” while announcing that her name would be removed from its building.

“There is overwhelming evidence for Sanger’s deep belief in eugenic ideology,” the group said. “Removing her name is an important step toward representing who we are as an organization and who we serve.”

Planned Parenthood of Pacific Southwest, meanwhile, acknowledged “white supremacy of the past and present,” including “our own organization” and the “implicit bias” that it said still exists within Planned Parenthood today.

“Planned Parenthood has been complicit in upholding systemic racism,” the group’s Illinois affiliate said.

Similar statements confessing to “present participation in white supremacy” and acknowledging that Sanger’s “racist ideals” have “shaped Planned Parenthood today” were issued by numerous other affiliates.

And yet, the massive disparities continue, advocates say. According to a legal filing by black leaders in the Baby Q case that cites state health statistics, 63 percent of the 7,538 “unborn children killed by abortion providers in Alabama” in 2019 were black.

This shows abortion providers “intentionally target African American children,” the black leaders said in the legal filing. And this “violence” based on race would never be tolerated in any other context, they argued.

Where the Case Goes Now

Later this month, a hearing on the case will be held in state court in Alabama to hear arguments from the various parties involved.

In its response to the lawsuit, Planned Parenthood Southeast asked the court to dismiss the case, based on lack of jurisdiction and Baby Q supporters’ alleged failure to identify a claim where the court would be able to provide relief. Neither the national Planned Parenthood office nor the Southeast office responded to requests for comment about the Baby Q litigation or the claims of racism.

The governor’s office is taking the same position as the abortion industry, urging the court to dismiss Baby Q’s case and refuse to allow legislators behind the Human Life Protection Act to intervene.

Gov. Ivey’s office didn’t respond by press time to requests for comment on why the governor has declined to enforce the Human Life Protection Act or why she is asking the court to dismiss the case. Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office also didn’t respond by press time.

Col. John Eidsmoe, a prominent constitutional scholar in Alabama who has worked closely with multiple state Supreme Court justices, told The Epoch Times that he doesn’t anticipate a ruling by the Alabama courts until after the U.S. Supreme Court issues its opinion in the Mississippi case. That ruling is expected by this summer.

“The general feeling is that the Supreme Court will uphold the Mississippi law, but it is not clear yet whether it will overturn or simply modify Roe v. Wade,” added Eidsmoe, a professor of Constitutional law at Oak Brook College of Law & Government Policy as well as senior counsel for the Alabama-based Foundation for Moral Law.

Alabama’s Supreme Court, he said, would likely want to wait for a favorable decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on the Mississippi law before moving on this. Eidsmoe also believes that, with its current makeup, the U.S. Supreme Court would be likely to uphold Alabama’s law protecting the unborn as well.

Potentially even more important than the legal issues is what this case could do in the court of public opinion, he said.

Multiple experts and leaders involved in the case told The Epoch Times that these may be the last days for Roe v. Wade, legal abortion, and racial targeting of minorities by the industry. The outcome of the Baby Q case may play a key role in that historic shift.

This article was originally published by the The Epoch Times.

It appears the racism identified as “anti-racism” and being endorsed all across America is bearing rotten fruit at ever younger ages and in ever more perverse ways.

Just last week, administrators at Edison Middle School in Wheaton, Illinois allowed student members of the blacks-only “Panthers in Black” school club to lecture peers on the intricacies of using various forms of the “n”-word. Students learned who is permitted to use the “n”-word and which “n”-word suffix is appropriate in what context. Parents of students forced to listen to this non-voluntary lecture were not notified ahead of time or asked to sign a permission slip.

Eighteen slides were included in the lecture addressing topics like the importance of Black History Month. This slide was notable for its vagueness. The Panthers in Black advocate for “recognizing” and “promoting” appreciation of African American “achievement, culture, heritage, sacrifices, and accomplishments, including past and current events.” Several things are unclear.

Should those goals serve as pedagogical criteria for determining what is included and excluded in history classes?

Should every racial and ethnic group have their own month or just blacks? Excluding winter and spring breaks, there are only eight months in a school year, not nearly enough to give every racial and ethnic group their own month.

Is “promoting appreciation” of one racial group even an appropriate goal for government schools?

Will the goal of “promoting appreciation” of African American achievement, culture, heritage, sacrifices, and accomplishments in the past and present determine what will be included and excluded in the limited time schools have to teach American and world history? For example, will greater achievements by non-blacks be jettisoned for lesser achievement by blacks?

When discussing the past history of blacks, will the sordid history of the involvement of Africans in enslaving other Africans be shared?

In the slide on the etiquette of using the “n”-word, the Panthers in Black shared the differences between the suffixes “er” and “a” when appended to the “n”-word. According to the Black Panthers, when blacks use the “n”-word with the “a” suffix among themselves, it’s a “term of endearment.” All other races are forbidden from using it.

The black Panthers claimed emphatically that,

African Americans DO NOT use the n-word with the ending of “-er”

But then they also acknowledge that although students “may listen to music or read books that have those two endings of the n-word, it is NOT OKAY to say if you are not African American.” So, do African Americans use the “er” ending or not?

The Panthers in Black moved on to establishing joke rules for all their middle school peers:

“joking around” about race is not a joke and it’s not okay. 

The black Panthers say this means no jokes about “past events,” Black Lives Matter, slavery, skin tone differences, and George Floyd. Imagine if someone had issued this diktat to Richard Pryor. And imagine if Key and Peele, Chris Rock, and Eddie Murphy were prohibited by the censors among us from “joking around about race.”

Are blacks allowed to joke about race? Are they allowed to joke about whites or Asians?

Come to think of it, since all jokes center on some group or some behavior humans engage in, maybe we should ban all jokes.

Most important, since leftists continually appeal to hurt feelings to control what others say and do, shouldn’t there be discussions about the critical importance of free speech in a free society and the concomitant need to tolerate expressions of diverse ideas, some of which make us uncomfortable?

In the two slides about “Race,” the Panthers in Black focused on biracial identities, saying that it’s “not okay” to ask any questions about the race of biracial students’ parents. Ironically, this slide also says,

Race shouldn’t be a reason to treat anyone differently.  

Isn’t that the whole point of their club and their lecture? Aren’t they treating whites different from blacks?

In two slides about hair, the black Panthers explained all the different hair styles blacks use to express themselves and how “big a part of the African American culture” hair is. But non-blacks are commanded by the Panthers not to ask any questions about this important part of their identities. Seems like a recommendation for cultural insensitivity to me.

The black Panthers also assert that it’s “offensive!” to ask Muslim girls if they’re hot wearing a hijab or why they’re wearing a dress in the summer. The Panthers don’t demonstrate much tolerance for the innocent curiosity of 11-year-olds.

The second to last slide was an invitation to African American students only to join the exclusive Panthers in Black club, assuring non-blacks that they are willing to talk to them.

The presentation concluded with a slide showing the Black Power raised fist accompanied by these words:

THANK YOU

We appreciate you for listening to our presentation!

“Thanks” are not in order, since listening to their lecture was compulsory.

Yes, this is racism and it’s dividing a society that was moving steadily toward a more unified country until leftist ideas spawned in colleges and universities made their malignant way into every corner of America. And now the cancer is systemic.

Watch this video clip of a parent responding to the racist presentation at the District 200 School Board meeting. (H/T Break-Through Ideas):

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/School-Approved-Racism-in-Western-Suburb-of-Chicago.mp3

As part of the highly controversial “Black Lives Matter” week that took place in schools nationwide, tiny kindergarten children in an elite Washington, D.C., indoctrination center were handed BLM signs and ordered to march around the school chanting “Black Lives Matter.” Yes, seriously.

Video evidence of the scandal enlisting children in a racist and Marxist cause first emerged publicly on the school’s Instagram page before being picked up by the popular “Libs of Tik Tok” Twitter account. It was promptly retweeted over 5,000 times as outraged commentators expressed shock and horror over what many described as the abuse of children in the footage.

“The younger, the better, as far as proponents of Marxist theory are concerned,” wrote Elizabeth Stauffer at The Western Journal, one of the national media outlets that picked up the story. “If students are taught compliance now, it increases the likelihood they’ll obediently follow the orders of their leftist masters later in life.”

The Black Lives Matter “Week of Action” focuses on indoctrinating children to reject the nuclear family, private property, Christianity, and even the nation-state. It admits all of this on its websites and programs, bragging about its promotion of “globalism,” the “queer” agenda, and much more.

Despite being bankrolled by many of America’s largest corporations and wealthiest billionaires, all three of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement have boasted publicly of being Marxists. The trio has also publicly revealed their involvement in occult religious practices, witchcraft, necromancy, and other bizarre pagan rituals.

The controversial weaponization and indoctrination of tiny children barely old enough to tie their own shoes took place at Lowell School, an overpriced private school that charges close to $40,000 per year. It boasts of providing “progressive education” and is just as “woke” as any government brainwash camp, except it targets the children of D.C. elites set to be “future leaders” rather than their future victims.

Indeed, the school brags about turning the impressionable children in its care into “social justice” warriors on the “Diversity, Inclusion and Equity” (DIE) section of its website. “Anchored in our history and mission, we believe that the foundations of advocacy begin in childhood and early adolescence,” the school explains in justifying the indoctrination of small children.

Of course, government schools across America are similarly brainwashing children to become unthinking left-wing extremists dedicated to tearing down civilization. In fact, The Newman Report has documented “Black Lives Matter” week abuse of children in public education even in extremely conservative districts from Iowa to South Carolina and everywhere in between.

Just recently, Libs of Tik Tok exposed a government school in Pennsylvania ordering children of European descent to apologize to those with more melanin in their skin. The school also lined children up from “the whitest to the darkest” as part of its racist brainwashing campaign. Similar abuses have been taking place nationwide for years.

The horrific and systemic abuse of children under the guise of “education” is an epidemic in America, and it is destroying the next generation in both public and overpriced private schools. Unless the crisis is dealt with before virtually an entire generation is lost, the nation, its liberties and even civilization itself will not survive much longer.

Read more:

Is China Using Tik Tok to Control the Minds of Our Children?

This article was originally published on FreedomProject.com.

At the most recent School District 200 Board Meeting in Wheaton, Illinois, new school board member and cunning rhetorician, Mary Yeboah, Director of Graduate Student Life at Wheaton College, posed six questions to the board,  beginning with a prefatory statement that let the woke cat out of the bag:

I would like to ask six rhetorical questions regarding the proposed October 10th, 2022 and October 9th, 2023 no-school all-grades Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day in relation to district purposes outlined in the mission of School District 200, Vision 2022, and the portrait of a graduate work. To be very clear, these are not questions that I expect you to answer right now. I am asking them for the benefit of reflective thinking for the district, especially in the month leading up to the approval of these calendars.

One, does the District 200 administration recognize the impact of holidays, statues, and other memorials on shaping school culture, which in turn shapes student experiences and outcomes?

Two, does the District 200 administration consider celebrating extreme violence, theft, genocide, and dehumanization to be in line with the study of social science to help students develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the benefit of the global society in which they live?

Three, does the District 200 administration affirm the accurate telling of history and recognize the impossibility of “discovering” land already inhabited?

Four, does the District 200 administration take into consideration the perspectives of Indigenous people regarding this particular calendar event?

Five, could maintaining this District 200 calendar event unintentionally support a myth of U.S. exceptionalism that could undermine district efforts to create diverse, inclusive schools for all children?

Lastly, does this calendar event advance the vision and mission of District 200 goals? And if it does not, must it remain despite state-level support?

It was so considerate of Yeboah to make very clear that she didn’t expect her six loaded questions to be answered immediately. It was also odd in that she had declared these were rhetorical questions, which are questions intended to make a point—not to be answered.

After some reflective thinking, I have some reflective thoughts and questions on Yeboah’s questions.

1.) Does Yeboah recognize the impact of using a leftist lens through which to view, socially construct, revise, and impose a particular interpretation of the meaning of holidays, statues, and other memorials, which in turn shapes student experiences, beliefs, and outcomes—including outcomes like the 2020 riots?

2.) Yeboah’s second question presumes an astonishing premise that she doesn’t even attempt to prove: She presumes that Columbus Day is a celebration of “extreme violence, theft, genocide, and dehumanization.” That is akin to saying Martin Luther King Day is a celebration of plagiarism, marital infidelity, and the exploitation of women.

What school has ever used Columbus Day to celebrate extreme violence, theft, genocide, or dehumanization?

Historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a relevant critique of the impulse that animates Yeboah:

Campuses and Western critics in the last half-century have turned a once risk-taking and heroic Christopher Columbus into an evil emissary of disease and destruction. History is now seen as one-dimensional melodrama in which our contemporary duty is to pick sinners and saints of the past based on our own modern (quite imperfect) perceptions of morality and then judge them worthy of either hagiography or banishment from memory.

And Hanson shares a fact inconvenient to the narrative of those who love to hate America:

[K]nocking down images of Columbus will not change the fact that millions of indigenous people in Central America and Mexico are currently abandoning their ancestral homelands and emigrating northward to quite different landscapes that reflect European and American traditions and political, economic, and cultural values.

3.) Does Yeboah affirm the accurate telling of history? Does Yeboah believe children at every age should be alerted to every serious foible, sin, or moral failing of every human involved in significant historical events or achievements? Should children of every age be taught about MLK Jr.’s significant moral failings? Should children of every age be taught the sordid stories of the abuse of women by John F. Kennedy and his lady-killer brother Ted Kennedy? Should kindergartners be taught that Harvey Milk was a homosexual ephebophile who acted on his sexual interest in teenage boys?

Regarding Yeboah’s concern about the impossibility of “discovering” an already inhabited land: Good teachers should and do explain that “discover” means “to obtain knowledge of something through observation, search, or study.” Benjamin Franklin “discovered” electricity in this sense. James Wilson Marshall “discovered” gold at Sutter’s Mill in this sense. The gold was always there in the ground. Erasmus Jacobs, son of a poor Boer farmer in South Africa “discovered” diamonds along the banks of the Orange River—diamonds that had always been there.

4.) Does Yeboah consider the perspectives of indigenous people about celebrating their histories of extreme violence, theft, genocide, and dehumanization on Indigenous People’s Day?

5.) In her fifth point, Yeboah again presumes a premise she doesn’t attempt to prove: In her fifth rhetorical question, she presumes that American exceptionalism is a myth. But is it? What objective standards or criteria has Yeboah applied to conclude that America is not exceptional?

6.) Yeboah implies that honoring Christopher Columbus’ exploratory achievement and how it transformed the world violates the vision and mission of District 200, which are here set forth:

Our vision is to be an exemplary, student-focused school district that is highly regarded for the competence and character of our students and people, programs, and learning environment.

Our mission is to inspire, encourage, and challenge, and to support all students to reach their highest level of learning and personal development.

Yeboah has yet to make her case that honoring a history-making explorer undermines the development of competence and character, or how it undermines the mission to inspire, encourage, and challenge students to reach their highest level of learning and personal development. Do District 200 taxpayers even know how District 200 distinguishes between good character and bad?

Yeboah’s reference to the vision and mission of District 200 raises other questions:

• How does the sexual integration of restrooms and locker rooms support all students to reach their highest level of personal development and character?

• How does the wildly obscene  (*WARNING*) graphic novel/memoir Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, which is available in both District 200 high school libraries, foster character and personal development?

• How was the invitation to lesbian activist Robin Stevenson, who promotes cultural approval of both the “LGBT” ideology and the legalized slaughter of the unborn, to speak to 8-11-year-olds at Longfellow Elementary School in Wheaton supposed to foster character and personal development?

• How did the offensive student drawings defacing the walls of Monroe Middle School through positive portrayals of homosexuality and opposite-sex impersonation, some accompanied by ignorant and troubling captions, contribute to character development?

In a Facebook post, Yeboah announced she’s all in for “anti-racism,” which everyone should know by now is a euphemism for anti-white racism.

In an upcoming “Table Talk” at Wheaton College, “Topics for White students” include “Invisible Racism” with guest speaker Mary Yeboah.

Yeboah is also a promoter of the  controversial “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” that garnered nationwide condemnation, including by National Review.

In a Feb. 7, 2021 Facebook post, Yeboah admits that one of her “favorite scholars” is Tyrone Howard who wrote the book All Students Must Thrive. Howard’s publisher writes that Howard’s book “brings together three frameworks relevant for equity in schools–wellness, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory.”

If there’s any doubt about Yeboah’s “progressive” bona fides, this should dispel it: In 2020, as BLM was destroying cities across the country, Yeboah was part of a “white moms” group in Wheaton that created signs to encourage support–including financial support–for the Black Lives Matter organization, which is hell-bent on destroying the nuclear family and normalizing homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation.

And Yeboah worries that Columbus Day will undermine character development in children? Sheesh

Public schools are no longer places that foster character development or provide the highest level of learning. Get your kids out now.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Wheaton-Illinois-School-Districts-Wokest-Board-Member.mp3

In his November 1 op-ed for The Hill, Fox News Analyst Juan Williams claimed that the “parents’ rights’ mantra in the Virginia gubernatorial elections is simply “a code for white race politics.” To the contrary, this really is about parents’ rights and about what is best for all children. To inject charges of white supremacy and racism is to miss the whole point of why so many parents are so upset. In all candor and with due respect, I would have expected better from Mr. Williams.

The fact is that these parents are concerned with the injection of racism into every phase of their children’s education, not to mention the injection of an extreme LGBTQ agenda. Williams should be standing with these parents, not against them. With reference to campaigning strategies in the 2018 elections, he wrote,

“Virginia Republicans are back with a new and improved ‘Culture Wars’ campaign for 2021. The closing argument is once again full of racial division — but this time it is dressed up as a defense of little children.”

Specifically, he claimed that,

“It is a campaign to stop classroom discussion of Black Lives Matter protests or slavery because it could upset some children, especially white children who might feel guilt.”

To the contrary, every white Christian parent with whom I have interacted wants their children to know the truth about slavery, segregation, and the lasting effects of those sinful institutions. And they want to see equal opportunities for all.

But they do not want their children thinking they are evil because they are white (this is actually happening). And they do not want their children to feel guilty for having a nice home or good educational opportunities, as if all success of all white Americans was built on the shoulders of slaves. In the words of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,

“The way we’re talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past.”

Most of all, these parents do not want everything to be about race, to the point that math can be seen as racist. Or that famous European poets and historians are cancelled because of their whiteness.

Remarkably, to make his case, Williams repeats the “very fine people” lie, writing, “Recall, it was Trump who famously said there were ‘very fine people’ on both sides of the violence sparked by ‘Unite the Right,’ the 2017 rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.”

Surely Williams must know that this has been debunked time and time again. But why let a good lie die? He also claims that,

“Critical race theory — broadly, a focus on racial disparities as a fact of American life — is not explicitly taught in Virginia’s public schools or anywhere in American public schools. But Republicans nationwide have made it a boogeyman to excite racial divisions and get their base to the polls.”

To be sure, there are different ways to define CRT. For some, it is healthy, positive, and objective. For others, it is unhealthy, negative, and biased. So, before we debate CRT, it’s important to ask, “What, exactly, do you mean by the term?”

And clearly, CRT in its full-blown, academic form, is not being taught to kids in Virginia (and elsewhere). But are classes taught through the lens of CRT? Without question.

As a Daily Wire headline announced on October 31, “Terry McAuliffe Claims CRT Has ‘Never Been’ In Virginia Schools. His Administration Pushed It, Documents Show.” The documentation is clear and undeniable.

Yet Williams approvingly cites McAuliffe, who said, “[Gubernatorial candidate Glenn] Youngkin’s closing message of book banning and silencing esteemed Black authors is a racist dog whistle designed to gin up support from the most extreme elements of his party — mainly his top endorser and surrogate, Donald Trump.”

To the contrary, it is authors with extremist views that are under scrutiny, or, at the least, authors whose views are being exploited by educators with extremist agendas, while contrary views are rejected and banned. (As an aside, but for the record, Youngkin largely campaigned as himself and for himself, not as an extension of Trump, as other political commentators have noted.)

To be clear, I would not deny that white racism remains an issue for some (perhaps many?) families in Virginia. Nor would I deny that some of them would prefer that the full truth about slavery and its legacy not be taught in schools. May they have a change of heart, may they face the facts, and may they enlighten their children. There is no place for white supremacy anywhere and at any time.

Unfortunately, Williams is guilty of a reverse racism, one that projects all kind of nefarious motives on to parents who really do care and who really want their kids to get a solid education rather than cultural brainwashing. In that spirit, I recently tweeted,

“The solution to anti-black racism is not anti-white racism (or anti-Asian racism, etc.). Instead, it is cultivating mutual understanding, respect, and love, with a real desire to see others thrive and enjoy the best of what America has to offer.”

Mr. Williams, I invite you to step higher with me so that, together, we could advance that mutual understanding, respect, and love – based on truth – rather than engage in an endless game of biased and racially charged sniping.

Surely America in 2021 deserves better.

This article was originally posted at AskDrBrown.org.

Then get the right people elected to the school boards.

Written by Ben Boychuk

Suddenly, but unsurprisingly, the U.S. Justice Department is interested in parents protesting local school board meetings. Because of course it is.

In America in 2021, citizens’ loud but nonviolent demonstrations before elected officials are tantamount to domestic terrorism and “hate speech,” while the Black Lives Matter and Antifa insurrectionary violence of 2020—which resulted in at least 30 deaths, over $1 billion in property damage, and the brief rise of lawless “autonomous zones” in Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, and Richmond, Virginia—is “fiery but mostly peaceful protest.”

The danger is clear and present—it simply depends upon who is protesting. As one wag put it on Twitter, “The DOJ used to go after MS13. Now you want them to go after Moms of 13-year-olds?”

Parents don’t like what they see coming out of their local schools. But government officials would prefer to do their work unencumbered by public input. This is old news, with an arrogant new twist. Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe summed up the current conventional wisdom nicely at a debate with his Republican opponent the other week: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

That depends on what the schools are teaching, doesn’t it?

Indoctrination Nation

Parents have two grievances, broadly speaking. First, they oppose COVID-19-related mask mandates for their children. They note that the European countries we’re so often asked to emulate do not have mask (or COVID vaccine) mandates for schools. Sweden, where school is compulsory through the age of 16, actively discourages kids from wearing masks. And yet that country’s transmission rates have gone down population-wide.

The second grievance is also COVID-related, in as much as the lockdowns compelled more parents to notice what their kids are—and are not—learning. Many parents, including many black and Latino parents, do not want their children to be taught that America is a systemically racist nation and that its institutions (capitalism often gets mentioned here) are irredeemable

Parents across the country have shown up to normally staid school board meetings to demand that critical race theory be removed from the curriculum. Defenders of the race-based curriculum like to point out that “critical race theory” is not actually being taught in schools. But that’s just a semantic sleight of hand. No, kids aren’t reading Derrick Bell. Instead, they’re getting “social studies” (since American public schools don’t really teach history anymore) heavily informed by critical race theory and Marxist-tinged critical theory.

Parents are on to the scheme and they’re unhappy about it. The National School Boards Association on September 29 asked Joe Biden to intervene, alleging “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat.” The group says its members have “received death threats and have been subjected to threats and harassment, both online and in person.”

Making a terrorist threat is a crime not protected by the First Amendment. But it’s unclear why such threats could not be investigated by state and local law enforcement, rather than the feds. Well, the NSBA has an answer for that, too, although the rationale is paper-thin: “NSBA believes immediate assistance is required to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.” (Emphasis added.)

Interstate commerce? The NSBA knows that the federal government can do just about anything under the auspices of “interstate commerce,” even if the commerce never crosses state lines. The NSBA’s letter mentions “interstate commerce” three times, even though it never bothers to explain how parents protesting in Loudoun County, Virginia or Coeur d’Alene, Idaho affect the free movement of goods and services among the several states.

While the NSBA notes that some of its members have received threatening letters, and several meetings have been ended early because of crowds “inciting chaos,” it strains to document any actual violence. The NSBA leans on a “fact sheet” published in July by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, which only documents an increase in demonstrations and notes the presence in some instances of “militias and other militant right-wing actors” whose mere presence is supposed to be seen as intimidating.

(It’s unclear whether any school board members have been followed into bathrooms by irate demonstrators, as Arizona’s Democratic U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema was last week. Would that make a difference? As Joe Biden said the other day, such harassment is “part of the process.”)

The Tedious Work of Politics Redux

Obviously, it’s no fun for a school board member to be shouted at by a throng of 200 angry parents. But the First Amendment for the most part protects what parents are doing. Harsh speech is still protected speech.

That doesn’t mean federal authorities can’t make our lives miserable and chill legitimate speech. During the 1990s, attorney Hans Bader reminds, civil rights lawyers with the Clinton Administration “investigated citizens for ‘harassment’ and ‘intimidation’ merely because those citizens spoke out against housing projects for recovering substance abusers or other classes of people protected by the Fair Housing Act.” Those investigations ended after a federal appeals court ruled they violated the First Amendment. But how much did those people lose in time and money battling the federal government before they won?

And just because the courts ruled one way 20 years ago, doesn’t mean a different set of judges ruling on a similar set of facts wouldn’t go the other way today. Bader notes that in 2017, a federal judge “allowed bloggers to be sued for intimidation for angry blog posts that allegedly created a ‘hostile housing environment.’”

Here, once again, the tedious work of politics becomes unavoidable.

Parents might take a leaf from the literal playbook of a Los Angeles-based group called Parent Revolution. About 10 years ago, Parent Revolution was involved heavily with organizing parents at failing public schools to use a (now largely toothless) state law called the Parent Empowerment Act, also known as the “parent trigger.”

Parent Revolution’s insight was to teach parents to use labor-union organizing tactics. They produced a hardcover book, small enough to fit into a pocket, called The Parent Power Handbook. It detailed, simply and directly, how parents could use the law to organize and transform their children’s schools.

Most importantly, anyone could follow the model Parent Revolution laid out in the handbook.

“Step 1: Build Your Base,” “Step 2: Establish Your Chapter,” “Step 3: Pick Your Focus,” “Step 4: Launch Your Campaign.”

Every step involves practical organization advice. Schedule one-on-one conversations. Host house meetings with people you already know. Ask questions like, “What would an ideal school look like?” Try to identify parents who show an extra level of interest. Form a leadership committee. Decide on a focus—in this instance, removing noxious race-based curricula from schools. And then get people excited about it.

California’s parent trigger law had some limited success. It showed that motivated parents could make substantive changes. It also showed that the education establishment would fight viciously to stop them. (Almost every parent-trigger effort ended up in court.)

But if parents cannot get a receptive audience with their elected school board officials, they may need to resort to a tried-and-true, red-white-and-blue act of civil disobedience: the boycott.

When well organized, boycotts can be a highly effective form of political action. In 1968, Chicano activists in east Los Angeles organized a mass boycott of local schools to demand bilingual education. They got it.

Twenty years later, a smaller group of Latino parents organized a boycott of their own—this time, to insist that their kids learn English. They believed, correctly, that their children were being ghettoized in Spanish-only classes and receiving a second-class education. As one mother of a seven-year-old told the Los Angeles Times, “We want our children to be taught in English . . . that’s why we came to the United States. If not, better to keep her in my country. There she can learn in Spanish.” They won. And in 1998, Californians passed Proposition 227, which eliminated bilingual education statewide.

The boycotts succeeded for at least two reasons. First, schools are funded based on the number of pupils in attendance. In other words, the schools were losing money. Second, the parents avoided running afoul of truancy laws by enrolling their kids in free alternative schools for the duration of the boycott. Eventually, the authorities had to accept the parents’ demands.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Unseat ’Em

Every few years or so, parents recognize that what goes on at those otherwise boring school board meetings is pretty important to their kids’ wellbeing and educations. Local school boards may not have as much power as they once did—the number of U.S. public school districts has shrunk from more than 117,000 in 1940 to around 13,000 today—but they’re still important. In states with term limits (such as California), one party recognized decades ago that those seemingly insignificant local boards are ideal proving grounds for future candidates for statewide office.

Parents’ impassioned denunciations of noxious critical race theories and their offshoots make for great viral videos and may help shape future policies. Ultimately, however, they’re little more than political theater.

Unless and until these parents are in a position to persuade board members to change their votes, the only other option is to replace the board.

To that end, it isn’t enough to show up once to lodge a complaint. Attend every board meeting, not necessarily to speak, though sometimes to speak to put certain thoughts on the record. Mainly, be there to watch and listen. Pay close attention to the structure of the meeting. Scrutinize the agenda and the minutes, which usually appear online in advance. Take note of who else addresses the board during public comment. Get ahold of the budget and break it down line by line. Study state and local education codes.

Oh, and don’t forget to read the contract with the local teachers’ union.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” Government-controlled schools seemingly disagree with Jefferson, preferring an uneducated populace instead. The trajectory of academic scores in the US has long been plummeting. The decline of basic knowledge among students from the public school system is alarming. However, more disturbing is the framework of the various leftist educational programs that are replacing the traditional academic-based curricula.

Individuals who work outside of education or academia may be surprised that the United States is struggling in regard to basic education. The U.S. has every benefit in our favor: compulsory education, taxpayer-funded schools, a plethora of highly educated faculty, numerous libraries, and the internet. Yet despite all these positive attributes, the U.S. educational system is failing. According to a report by the Global Citizens for Human Rights, in 2020 the U.S. was not even in the top 10 countries with the best educational systems. Perhaps this is due to declining literacy rates, math and science deficiencies, and decreased knowledge of U.S. History and civics.

Most educators will proudly declare that the US is one of the most literate countries globally, with a 99 percent literacy rate. In reality, literacy has declined significantly. Although most individuals in the US can read, the US Department of Education determined that 54 percent of people ages 16-74 read below the sixth-grade equivalency. Individuals reading below this level are considered partially illiterate. In a recent study by Gallup completed for the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, the lack of literacy in the country costs approximately $2.2 trillion per year. Some of this monetary loss is through loss of income as illiterate or partially illiterate individuals struggle to participate in the job market and economy.

Mathematics and science are also fields on the decline in education. Each year the U.S. ranks a little lower in math and science. In 2018 we were ranked 38th in the world in math and 24th in science. Only 1 in 4 high school students are performing at proficiency level in the area of science. STEM, an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, seemingly has garnered a great deal of attention from education proponents. There is currently a strong push by schools to increase young girls’ participation in STEM fields. Yet, despite the attention paid to STEM courses, students are still falling behind.

Social sciences are not fairing any better than literacy and STEM. In a recent survey, only 56 percent of adults could correctly name the three branches of government. Fewer students can answer the most basic questions about civics and U.S. History. In another survey conducted by Newsweek, only 38 percent of American citizens could pass a citizenship exam, and only 40 percent of adults know who the US was fighting against in World War II. It seems the public school system has failed to educate students on the most essential and basic subjects.

There are several reasons why the U.S. is on a downward trajectory in education. Progressive ideas have been infiltrating education since the turn of the 20th century. Proponents of progressivism believe education should be based not on teaching facts but on developing the child socially. As a result of the growth of progressivism in education, public schools have adopted Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). The idea behind SEL is to stress social values. Although it may seem like a good idea to teach these social values, they are based on pseudo-psychology and do not take the children’s or their family’s values in mind. The values they are teaching are entirely based on the leftist agenda and support secularism, while denouncing any religious values a parent is attempting to impart to their children. Over 67,000 schools and two million teachers are now using SEL programs in the classroom.

Often SEL programs include social justice and activism as a part of teaching social awareness. Some schools even require students to attend protests like those held by Black Lives Matter (BLM). Classrooms push sensitivity training and teach cultural acceptance rather than history and math. Education is no longer concerned with students having the ability to read or write as long as they can support leftist ideologies through protest and social upheaval.

Marxism has overtaken the classroom through Critical Race Theory (CRT), which advocates the Marxist theory of equity and uses racially divisive language promoting hatred towards America. The 1619 Project has rewritten U.S. History, erasing all positive attributes of the country and denouncing the Constitution and the nation’s history as racist. Theories of racism are applied to every subject. Oregon recently declared that math supports white supremacy. The Oregon Department of Education, in Orwellian fashion, encourages teachers to stop asking students for the correct answers. These unscrupulous educators believe that expecting students to complete a mathematical problem correctly is racist.

Public schools are indoctrination centers for extremism and Marxism. Some government officials are no longer hiding that public schools are not interested in education. In July of this year, Governor Kate Brown (D-Oregon) announced that Oregon schools would suspend all proficiency requirements in math and reading for high school graduates for the next three years. Instead of improving the scores and abilities of students in their state, these simpletons are eliminating the measurable standards. Other cities and states will certainly follow suit.

Government-run schools are failing to educate our citizenry and, if Thomas Jefferson is correct, it will mean the loss of freedom. Perhaps this is the goal of the Marxist elites that are involved in education. The declining scores in literacy, mathematics, science, and history are not an unfortunate outcome due to lack of support or funding. The U.S. education system is facilitating intentional indoctrination, designed to create social justice warriors bent on destroying democracy and the American values many of us hold dear. If we continue sending our children to these failing indoctrination camps, we will lose our values and freedom.

On November 7, 2020, four days after the General Election, a millennial friend who identifies as a Christian and is a devoted disciple of critical race theory and BLM posted this sacrilegious image on her Facebook page:

These were the last words of Christ before he died on the cross. The debt mankind owes to God for our sin and rebellion was finished, that is, paid in full, by Christ’s suffering and death. Jesus provided the means—the only means—for man to be reconciled to God. Satan was defeated. The sinless lamb of God’s self-sacrifice for the sins of man fulfilled all Old Testament prophecies. And this millennial Christian used that biblical allusion to celebrate the defeat of Donald Trump.

In addition to being sacrilegious, it is nonsensical as an analogy. If “it” refers to Trump’s tenure as president, in what precise way or ways is that analogous to Christ’s finished work on the cross? If Trump’s presidency is in no ways akin to Christ’s finished work—which, of course, it wasn’t—why use that allusion? Did she think it was clever? Funny? Unifying?

One thing is clear, this millennial and countless other Never-Trump, pro-Biden evangelicals believed that the country suffered under Trump’s presidency and that Biden would be America’s savior. And with their eyes blinded by rage at Trump and their minds clouded with foolish ideology, they have brought untold suffering to the world.

Cultural regressives who self-identify as “progressives” ripped Trump for his purported foreign policy ineptitude, claiming that he was destroying America’s reputation on the international stage. And here we are now with Western European leaders publicly savaging Biden’s astonishingly inept exit from Afghanistan, the effects of which worsen every day. As of this writing, two ISIS-K bomb blasts at the Kabul airport have left at least 12 U.S. service members dead, 15 injured, and an unknown number of Afghans dead or injured.

Politico has reported that “U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter” of the Kabul airport. An outraged defense official who described this act as “appalling and shocking,” said, “they just put all those Afghans on a kill list.”

Rebecca Klapper writing in Newsweek Magazine—no friend of conservatism—paints a vivid picture of the dim view European leaders have of bumbling Biden and his gang of accomplices who are too busy planning the forced entrance of men in dresses into women’s locker rooms to plan an exit of soldiers and allies from one of the most dangerous countries in the world:

Markus Soeder, a leading member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s center-right Union bloc, called for accountability from the United States.

Soeder said Washington should provide funding and shelter to people fleeing Afghanistan, since “the United States of America bear the main responsibility for the current situation.”

…

Even in the United Kingdom, which has always prided itself on a its “special relationship” with Washington … barbs were coming from all angles.

Former British Army chief Richard Dannatt said, “the manner and timing of the Afghan collapse is the direct result of President Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. At a stroke, he has undermined the patient and painstaking work of the last five, 10, 15 years to build up governance in Afghanistan, develop its economy, transform its civil society and build up its security forces. ” Dannatt said Wednesday in Parliament.

In response to attempts to “absolve” Biden of culpability for the botched exit, Charles Cooke writing for National Review said,

The Biden administration could. … quite obviously have ensured that before our troops were drawn down we had got every American, permanent resident, and eligible Afghan out; we had removed both our weaponry and any sensitive information; and we had consulted properly with our allies. That part … was within Joe Biden’s control. And he completely and utterly screwed it up.

Allies are not angered by just the exit debacle but also by Biden’s unconscionable lies concocted to shift blame, lies that provoked unprecedented bipartisan rebukes by members of Parliament:

Biden putting much of the blame on Afghan forces for not protecting their nation has not gone down well with Western allies, either.

Conservative Parliament member Tom Tugendhat, who fought in Afghanistan, was one of several British lawmakers taking offense.

“To see their commander-in-chief call into question the courage of men I fought with, to claim that they ran, is shameful,” Tugendhat said.

Chris Bryant, from the opposition Labour Party, called Biden’s remarks about Afghan soldiers, “some of the most shameful comments ever from an American president.”

Cranky leftists with their gender-neutral underpants in a twist repeatedly croaked that Trump lied about Stormy Daniels, lied about the weather on his inauguration day, and lied about the number of attendees at his inauguration.

Contrast those lies with Biden’s. Biden lied when he said al Qaeda was gone from Afghanistan. He lied when he said, “we know of no circumstance where American citizens are—carrying an American passport—are trying to get through to the airport.” He lied when he said, “I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.” And he lied when he said, “The Afghan military gave up, sometimes without trying to fight.”

Add those lies to the mound of whoppers from leftist journalists, members of Congress, Democrat Party operatives, the CIA, and FBI (aided and abetted by the algorithmic mischief of Big Tech) throughout Trump’s presidency and the 2020 campaign—lies which were created to take down a duly elected president and then to prevent his reelection.

They lied when they claimed Trump called all illegal immigrants rapists and murderers. They lied when they said Trump put immigrant children in cages. They lied about Trump and a Russian prostitute. They lied about Russia-collusion. They lied about Hunter Biden and his colorful computer.

And now in addition to the tragic scene of suffering on our southern border created by Biden, China, Russia, Iran, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS-K are celebrating the humiliation of America. Our relations with our allies have never been worse. Americans are dead or stranded in the hellhole of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And Afghan women and girls await their fate as sex slaves to barbarians.

I wonder if my millennial friend still thinks the election of Biden signaled the arrival of a savior who will end the suffering caused by former President Trump. It’s hard to know because she hasn’t posted a single thing about Biden since her sacrilegious post.

The iconic, famously woke ice cream company, Ben & Jerry’s, announced on Monday that it will no longer sell its product in “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” As the company explained, “We believe it is inconsistent with our values for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).” However, they added, “Although Ben & Jerry’s will no longer be sold in the OPT, we will stay in Israel through a different arrangement.”

Put another way (and to read between the lines), “We will continue to sell our ice cream to the evil oppressors in their own apartheid state, one that was founded on genocide and ethnic cleansing and one that exists to this day on stolen Palestinian land. But we will not sell our ice cream to these evil oppressors who live in illegal settlements in other portions of equally stolen land.”

How righteous. How consistent. How just.

Had I not given up eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream 7 years ago (for health reasons, along with lots of other foods I dropped), I would be losing my taste about now.

The responses to Ben & Jerry’s announcement have been as predictable as they have been telling.

From the Israeli side, the new prime minister Napthali Bennett said, “There are many ice cream brands, but only one Jewish state.”

Israelis can do without the ice cream but not without their state.

Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted, “Now we Israelis know which ice cream NOT to buy.”

Well said, sir.

From the anti-Israel side, the BDS movement tweeted, “Following years of #BDS campaigns @benandjerrys has announced it will end sales of its ice cream in Israel’s illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land.

We warmly welcome their decision but call on Ben & Jerry’s to end all operations in apartheid Israel.

#BDSsuccess”

In other words, “This is a good step in the right direction, but if you really want to do the right thing – and be assured we will keep pressuring you until you – you must stop doing any business with evil Israel.”

A fuller statement from the BDS movement (which stands for boycott, divestment, and sanctions) said this: “After years of pressure from activists, Ben & Jerry’s announced it will not renew its licensing agreement with its Israeli licensee, who is involved in selling the ice cream in illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

“The BDS movement welcomes Ben & Jerry’s decision as a decisive step towards ending the company’s complicity in Israel’s occupation and violations of Palestinian rights.

“Ben & Jerry’s, a leading socially responsible international company, is finally bringing its policy on Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians in line with its progressive positions on Black Lives Matter and other justice struggles. We hope Ben & Jerry’s has understood that, in harmony with its social justice commitments, there can be no business as usual with apartheid Israel.”

All, clear, BDS.

The Jewish people in Israel have created an apartheid state on stolen land. No business as usual with them. Not until they remove the protection barrier designed to keep out murderous terrorists. Not until they retreat to pre-1967 (= suicidal, indefensible borders). And not until they allow all Palestinian “refugees” to return to their homeland.

In other words, BDS will exist until Israel is no more, since the demands of the movement, if fully implemented, would result in the end of the Jewish state.

Why then is Ben & Jerry’s only pulling its ice cream from the “illegal settlements” rather than from the nation as a whole? Why allow those evil Israelis, those apartheid genocidal monsters, to enjoy these sumptuous treats in the luxury of their homes in West Jerusalem or their restaurants in Tel Aviv?

And if the ice cream will not be sold in the “OPT,” does that mean that the Palestinians living nearby will not be able to buy it either? Or that those of them whose jobs involve the distribution of the ice cream will be hurt economically by the boycott?

As for these last two questions, I’m simply putting them up for discussion, since the official announcement is lacking in details. But one thing is sure: a good case can be made for the fact that the BDS movement actually hurts the Palestinians more than it helps them. (For a strong, anti-BDS statement from Palestinian activist Bassam Eid, see here.)

Of course, there are other reasons not to be impressed with Ben & Jerry’s “righteous” stand, not the least of which is the company’s contractual agreement with Unilever.

As explained on the Washington Free Beacon, “The most common expression of anti-Semitism on the left is the application of double standards to Jews and the Jewish state.

“Look no further than Ben & Jerry’s partnership with Unilever, which acquired the ice cream company in 2000. There is no comparison between Israeli policy in the West Bank and the practices of the world’s greatest human rights abusers. Unilever happily does business everywhere from occupied Northern Cyprus to occupied Tibet and Xinjiang, home to Uyghur concentration camps. We won’t hold our breath for the ice cream boycott of China or Russia. But hey, there are no Jews in Xinjiang.”

Exactly.

As a lover of God and a lover of justice, I, too, want to see the fair and equal treatment of the Palestinians along with the safety and thriving of the Jewish state of Israel.

That’s why I so reject the incoherent and hypocritical policy decision of Ben & Jerry’s.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com.

Academics are fast becoming a thing of the past in public schools.

In their place are behavioral psychology and “social and emotional learning” (SEL) designed not to educate but to transform children’s core values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

Once upon a time, education meant learning how to read, write, do math, and think. It meant learning history and science as well.

That is barely happening now, as government data show.

Perhaps more importantly, once upon a time, school children all over the nation also learned the Ten Commandments—do not murder, do not lie, do not steal, and so on.

They learned the Golden Rule, too: Treat others as you want to be treated.

But those “good old days” are largely gone.

Today, government schools use advanced methods including SEL to instill in children a radical new and oftentimes contradictory “politically correct” value system: radical environmentalism, radical feminism, critical theory, Marxism, social justice, LGBTQ-plus, population control, socialism, hyper-racialism, class struggle, and more.

There’s also an occult connection to it all that would shock most secular observers—not to mention Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents of other traditional faiths.

SEL: The Mechanism for Transformation

In public schools across the United States today, from pre-K through 12th grade and beyond, children are being subjected to what is seemingly just the latest educational fad—silly, perhaps, but no more harmful than anything else—at least on the surface.

The education establishment refers to it as “social and emotional learning,” “social-emotional learning,” or just SEL for short. Generally they speak only in vague generalities using soothing language while dealing with the public.

And it’s true, some of what falls under the SEL umbrella is fairly harmless.

But then again, the food pellets that contain rat poison are fairly harmless, too—at least until the poison, which is just a trace component in the pellets, is digested by the intended victim.

Similarly, SEL all seems innocent enough at first glance.

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions,” explains the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), one of the leading outfits promoting SEL.

The way proponents explain it, SEL is simply aimed to help children do well emotionally and succeed.

What could be wrong with that?

Well, CASEL’s website, a review of SEL programs, and educators themselves reveal a great deal more about the agenda. And it’s not pretty.

Political Extremism and Radical Values

Behind the nice public facade lurk swarms of psychologists, psychiatrists, “educators,” and radical leftists hoping to exploit a century of psychological research for the purpose of molding children’s beliefs and “deconstructing” the values parents seek to instill.

“With a growing number of partners, CASEL is creating a more comprehensive approach to education, one that will lead to a more equitable, just, and productive society,” the organization’s website boasts under the headline “SEL as a Lever for Equity,” hitting multiple key buzzwords associated with the far-left “social justice” movement.

In other words, one of the purposes of SEL—as its leading promoters admit—is to reform society.

Among the webinars offered there are “SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice,” and also a lecture on how to use SEL to “support antiracist practices.” Another webinar outlines how to use policy to “dismantle inequities.”

Again, the leftist buzzwords are everywhere. And that isn’t an accident.

Under SEL Competencies, CASEL drops multiple bombshells acknowledging the far-left globalist indoctrination taking place under the guise of “social” and “emotional” learning.

“SEL competencies can be leveraged to develop justice-oriented, global citizens, and nurture inclusive school and district communities,” it states, adding that the programs will involve getting children to “assess power dynamics” and confront “issues of race and class across different settings.”

The children are also expected to “develop an understanding of systemic or structural explanations for different treatment and outcomes.”

In short, they are expected to believe the highly controversial hypothesis that America is awash in “systemic” and “structural” racism, and that only massive government-led social engineering can fix it.

The children are also expected to accept and agree with the artificial divisions being fomented along “race” and “class” lines as part of the now-obvious effort to “divide and conquer” America.

Put simply, this is all blatantly Marxist “critical theory” rhetoric masquerading as “education.”

It’s extremely dangerous.

In Practice, Educators Shine the Light

A review by The Epoch Times of a wide range of SEL programs used across the United States found that all contain similar extremism, along with highly controversial teachings on sex, sexuality, gender, race, racism, class, economic liberty, family, marriage, and more.

Interviews with educators and a review of their writings on the subject were also very revealing.

In short, the real goals of SEL go far beyond “helping” children socially and emotionally. And it isn’t difficult to find that out.

In fact, in practice, SEL is frequently and explicitly used in public schools to instill certain attitudes and values in children that many parents, if not most, would find controversial at the very least.

For example, public-school teachers in Florida, to comply with SEL mandates, were ordered to show a number of videos to their middle school students.

These included propaganda videos promoting homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, “diversity,” “inclusion,” and more.

Regardless of one’s views on these subjects, countless parents—especially those from faith traditions including Christianity, Islam, or Judaism—would find the effort to obliterate traditional sexual morality and even biological sex in children’s minds to be objectionable.

Numerous other highly controversial political, religious, economic, and worldview positions are treated as “correct” by the forces behind SEL.

More than a few self-styled SEL educators are very open about how they intend to use SEL to brainwash children.

Open Circle Director Kamilah Drummond-Forrester, who supports “social and emotional development for children,” wrote openly at EdSurge.com about weaponizing SEL to indoctrinate children with her hyper-racialist views.

“Teaching [white children] to be aware of their racial identity would allow them to better understand the privileges that accompany that identity,” she wrote, adding that this would help them dismantle the “concept of ‘whiteness.’”

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) has an important role to play in that education.

“One of the core competencies we focus on, as a necessary foundation for the others, is self-awareness. That self-awareness must include race,” she continued, without acknowledging that many parents probably don’t want their children obsessing about “race” or being propagandized by a far-left activist posing as an educator.

In an article for EdTech Magazine on peddling SEL to students amid coronavirus-inspired online learning, writer Adam Stone touts “SEL-oriented teaching materials from the Zinn Education Project.”

Howard Zinn, of course, is the far-left pseudo-historian whose dishonest and politically motivated narratives were most recently debunked by historian Mary Grabar in the book “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.”

Zinn described himself as “something of a Marxist,” his biographer recounted.

According to EdTech, though, the “SEL-oriented” propaganda from Zinn is supposedly “aimed at nurturing empathy and compassion.”

In the real world, Marxism has everywhere and always nurtured hatred, death, slavery, torture, starvation, shortages, political repression, religious persecution, and other evils.

And yet under the guise of SEL programs and “nurturing empathy and compassion,” millions of children are having their minds poisoned by being force-fed actual Marxist propaganda and fake history.

And perhaps even more alarming, Stone urges educators to use surveillance tools that give “insight into students’ online behaviors—both inside and outside the virtual classroom—to enhance SEL.”

One of the recommended total surveillance tools offers educators “a holistic view of online activity across search engines, social media, email and web apps,” Stone said, adding that an artificial-intelligence engine would perform “real-time assessments” to “flag online behaviors that indicate emotional distress.”

As explained in an earlier segment of this series, Orwellian technology is used to monitor and track “progress” on adjusting children’s attitudes, too. That data is being compiled and saved forever under the label of “emotional intelligence.”

The Big Brother technology is also used to determine whether further “interventions” are needed to coerce the child into holding the desired attitudes, values, and beliefs about the issue in question.

And, as U.S. Department of Education documents make clear, it will also be used to predict “future behavior and interests” of the children.

Educators Speak Out

Of course, educators who have seen through the agenda reject SEL as a massive threat to America’s children.

One of those who spoke out against the SEL abuses taking place in her school, Jennifer McWilliams of Indiana, was even fired for being too vocal about it.

“The thing I find to be the most disturbing about social emotional learning is how well it disguises its true sinister motives,” she told The Epoch Times. “Parents do not understand that SEL psychologically manipulates children to question (and eventually rebuke) any Christian or conservative beliefs that may be taught in the home.”

While parents are led to believe that SEL is like teaching children The Golden Rule, “it is quite the opposite,” McWilliams said.

“Social emotional learning is rooted in progressive, social justice ideology that divides anyone who questions the radical groupthink agenda,” she said. “From my personal experience, not only do parents not understand it but teachers and administrators don’t either.”

SEL also represents the “brainwashing of our children,” McWilliams continued, noting that it trains children to “compromise on everything” with no consideration of what is taught in the home.

“These programs rely on a bombardment of propaganda, conditioning, and role playing to separate children from God and the nuclear family,” she said, saying SEL was the vehicle used to get children to accept as truth the narratives behind Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The popular SEL program used in McWilliams’s school, Leader in Me, was designed to “shift the culture of the school to influence children’s morals and values based on progressive social justice standards,” she said, adding that it became ubiquitous on campus.

When she began publicly speaking out about it on social media, she was fired for supposedly making the school look bad.

“Parents must speak up and take back control of the influence in their children’s lives. If not, the kids will pay with their freedom,” McWilliams said.

The Occult Origins of SEL

The story behind SEL is even more troubling.

According to a history of SEL by CASEL, the term “social and emotional” originated in a meeting at the Fetzer Institute, a shadowy New Age powerhouse created by wealthy New Age guru and late media baron John Fetzer.

One of the founders of the SEL movement, David Sluyter, served as president and CEO of the organization.

“Our mission is to help build the spiritual foundation for a loving world,” the group states on its website, adding that it is working toward a “transformative sacred story for humanity in the 21st century.”

According to Brian Wilson’s book “John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age,” Fetzer was, among other things, a public and fervent devotee of Alice Bailey, the controversial occultist who founded the Lucifer Publishing Company (now known as the Lucis Trust).

So obsessed was Fetzer with Bailey that he and his people would regularly recite her “Great Invocation,” which she claimed was given to her by spiritual beings known as “ascended masters,” Wilson documents in his book.

The Fetzer Institute didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. CASEL initially suggested it would make somebody available for an interview, but didn’t follow up despite multiple requests.

More than a few other prominent names in education were similarly enamored with Bailey’s bizarre teachings from supposed spiritual entities.

United Nations World Core Curriculum author Robert Muller, for instance, who served as assistant secretary-general of the U.N., said in the teachers’ manual that his U.N.-backed global school curriculum was based on the teachings of Bailey and one of her “ascended masters.”

The values being taught to children under Fetzer-inspired SEL programs feature remarkable similarities to those taught by John Dewey, a man almost universally known among educators as the founding father of America’s “progressive” education system.

Dewey, who was inspired by the Soviet educational system, was a co-author and signer of the Humanist Manifesto, a religious document rejecting God and prescribing collectivism as the cure for society’s ills.

For at least 12 years—more if they go to college—American children are indoctrinated into the collectivist values of Dewey’s religion, which was essentially just warmed-over communism and atheism hiding behind a religious facade.

Interestingly, as early as 1898, Dewey himself expressed an understanding of the need to utilize psychology, a discipline then still in its infancy, if the plan to re-shape Americans through “education” was going to succeed.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Bailey, citing her ascended masters, recognized the importance of Dewey’s educational schemes in achieving her goal of a one-world order with a global religion.

“Our problem is to attain the kind of overall synthesis that Marxism and neo-Scholasticism provide for their followers, but to get this by the freely chosen cooperative methods that Dewey advocated,” Bailey wrote in her book “Education in the New Age.”

Funding and People

Even a brief review of the funding and individuals behind SEL also reveals a great deal about the agenda.

On its website, CASEL lists, among other financiers, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Gates, who has a friendly relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, put almost $300 million behind the Obama-backed Common Core standards, which formally nationalized and helped globalize America’s education system.

Before that, Gates signed a deal with UNESCO, the subject of part nine in this series, to work on globalizing the world’s education systems.

Also listed among the financiers of CASEL is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which CASEL said “provides generous funding to CASEL to support school districts and their capacity to promote social and emotional learning.”

For some background, the recently deceased patriarch of the family, David Rockefeller, wrote in The New York Times in 1973 that “the social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

Rockefeller also boasted in his autobiography “Memoirs” of “conspiring” with a “secret cabal” of globalists, “against the best interests of the United States,” to build a “One World” political and economic system.

Aside from its financiers, CASEL’s leading super-stars also suggest something is amiss, to put it mildly.

Consider the involvement of radical Stanford educator Linda Darling-Hammond, a board member emeritus of CASEL and known associate of communist terrorist turned educator William Ayers.

Ayers’s Weather Underground group set off bombs across America in cooperation with communist Cuban intelligence. The FBI operative who infiltrated the group’s leadership, Larry Grathwohl, revealed that the organization’s leadership was plotting to exterminate millions of Americans in camps.

Interestingly, Darling-Hammond had an opportunity to test out her educational quackery unimpeded in the Stanford New Schools. The results are now in: In 2010, Stanford New Schools placed in the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools in California, according to multiple reports.

More than a few other colleagues of Ayers are or were also involved with CASEL and SEL, with his University of Illinois at Chicago being central to the scheme. At least 3 of 13 members listed on CASEL’s website came from that university’s Department of Education and Psychology.

SEL was formally unveiled in the late 1990s. However, the real history behind it goes way back to Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist who studied how to effectively brainwash children to become good communists.

Vygotsky’s contributions in laying the foundations for SEL are widely acknowledged among practitioners and even in the academic literature (pdf).

Interestingly, Vygotsky was a close colleague of Ivan Pavlov, the Soviet psychologist famous for his behavioral-conditioning experiments on dogs.

Vygotsky had been inspired, in part, by American psychologist and educational researcher E.L. Thorndike, a student of close Dewey-ally and associate James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University.

In fact, Vygotsky wrote the foreword to the Russian translation of Thorndike’s “Principles of Learning Based Upon Psychology” published in Moscow in the mid-1920s.

Thorndike didn’t bother to conceal his views on education: Children should be educated like circus animals, and it should be so arranged that the child will be incapable of not doing what the trainer wants.

Vygotsky, too, had grandiose ideas about how Soviet “education” and “psychology” would be used to fundamentally transform the individual, and ultimately, mankind.

“It is education which should play the central role in the transformation of man this road of conscious social formation of new generations, the basic form to alter the historical human type,” Vygotsky wrote in 1930 in the journal of the All-Union Association of Workers in Science and Technics for the Furthering of the Socialist Edification in the USSR.

“New generations and new forms of their education represent the main route which history will follow whilst creating the new type of man,” he added.

SEL is simply the latest tool of the collectivist education establishment in its fiendish drive to create this “new type of man”—a collectivist man who will mindlessly submit to the tyranny of his overlords, without the intellectual ability to effectively resist.

Conclusion

Today, while most educators and parents have little understanding of what is going on, SEL has become ubiquitous in government schools across the nation.

National Education Association (NEA) Foundation Global Learning Fellow Wendy Turner, a second-grade teacher and self-styled “SEL warrior” quoted in an article on the NEA’s website, explained that SEL is now the top priority for schools.

“SEL is the foundation, the heartbeat of the classroom,” she said. “It’s about connecting everybody and making them feel safe and secure before you get to the academics.”

In a U.S. Department of Education report, a “review” of existing studies called for subjecting “the entire student body” to constant SEL programming “in order to reinforce social and emotional learning not only in the classroom but also on the playground, in the cafeteria, and in hallways.” Parents should also “reinforce” it at home.

But the facts are now clear: The SEL craze is an extreme threat to America’s youth—and to individual liberty.

The scheme isn’t about helping children at all. Instead, it’s about manipulating and conditioning America’s youth to hold the values and beliefs that the education establishment wants to instill.

Unfortunately, those values and beliefs are incompatible with individual liberty, Western civilization, the U.S. Constitution, the nuclear family, religious liberty, and other key values that underpin the United States.

Parents and policymakers must urgently protect the nation’s children from this dangerous threat.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Written by Patience Griswold

In a recent video from TakeCharge Minnesota, Rashad Turner, a former leader of Black Lives Matter explained why he left the organization. “I believed the organization stood for exactly what the name implies,” Turner said,

Black lives do matter. However, after a year on the inside, I learned they had little concern for rebuilding black families, and they cared even less about improving the quality of education for students in Minneapolis.

A year and a half after he founded the Saint Paul chapter of Black Lives Matter, Turner left and is now engaged in a movement that is seeking to rebuild families and expand access to quality education.

Until recently, Black Lives Matter stated on their website that one of their goals is to “disrupt the nuclear family.” This goal is incredibly harmful. The data shows that marriage reduces poverty in every racial demographic, and family breakdown consistently harms children and communities. Last year, World magazine’s Tim Lamer drew attention to the international data on fatherlessness, pointing out that throughout the world, fatherlessness hurts kids. Even if the economic disparities are removed, kids who grow up without a dad still face hurdles that their peers do not. No program can ever replace fathers.

Family breakdown has affected all demographics in the U.S. — currently, nearly a quarter of children in the U.S. do not have a father figure in the home and 50% of births occur outside of marriage for women under 30. The black community has been hit especially hard by this trend, with the rate of fatherlessness recently hitting 75%.  Take Charge MN has pointed out,

skin color is not the consistent variable for low performance… Fatherless homes is the consistent variable. The disparity is spreading in the Hispanic and White communities as well. It is prominent in the Black community because of a 50-year head start.

And as Take Charge MN has also noted, government policies that have disincentivized marriage have played a significant role in this trend.

In addition to Black Lives Matter’s ambivalence toward, and even promotion of family breakdown, Turner has pointed out the organization’s failure to pursue policies that expand access to quality education. Turner was raised by his grandparents after his father was shot and killed when he was two years old and his mother was no longer able to take care of him. They instilled in him a love of learning and emphasized the value of education. “I am living proof that no matter your start in life, quality education is a pathway to success,” he said. “I want the same success for our children and our communities.”

 In 2016, Turner left Black Lives Matter when the organization called for a moratorium on charter schools and an end to the “privatization of education.” Turner is an outspoken champion of school choice and has rightly pointed out that for students to succeed, families need to have the ability to put their children in educational settings that best fit their needs.

A student’s access to quality education should not be limited by their zip code, but without school choice, this is the reality for many students. Minneapolis-area schools have been failing black families for years, but when black children from those same Minneapolis neighborhoods attend private, faith-based schools, they score above the national average on exams. BLM’s 2016 decision to call for an end to the “privatization of education” put them at odds with student success.

Turner left Black Lives Matter because he saw how the organization’s goals were hurting, not helping the black community. In his words, “I was an insider in Black Lives Matter, and I learned the ugly truth.” It is impossible to help families and communities while encouraging family breakdown and shutting down educational opportunities.

This article was originally published by the Minnesota Family Council.

It’s a curious phenomenon that racists rarely see their own racism—the plank in their own eyes. That was true during the long, torturous days of slavery. It was true during the long torturous days of Jim Crow laws. It was true during the Civil Rights Movement. And it’s true now. No, it’s not conservatives who are spreading racism while remaining blithely blind to it. It’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and BLM who are spreading racism like manure throughout our cultural system. And it’s racist Ibram X. Kendi who sees himself as “anti-racist” and wrote,

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

And like racists of yore, they profit handsomely from their efforts to encourage Americans to judge people by the color of their skin.

Leftist change-agents posing as “diversity educators” have captured the wills of corporate executives. Now Big Business is in the business of not only selling goods and services but also in repackaging racism as “antiracism” and browbeating employees into pretending they believe it.

Prior to capturing the wills of corporate execs—not known for their familiarity with or investment in arcane academic theories or for steely-spined moral integrity—leftist change-agents in sullied ivory towers captured the wills of teachers and administrators—not known for independent or “critical” thinking, or for commitments to diversity, inclusivity, or tolerance. In my experience, will-capturing of yellow-bellied teachers and administrators is an almost effortless task. All it takes is a bit of name-calling topped by a dollop of mockery, and the spineless among us bend like paper straws dipped in a Big Gulp.

Now states are requiring ongoing critical race theory (CRT) indoctrination for staff and faculty. Schools are forcing white students to engage in exercises designed to make them feel shame for their skin color (goodbye self-esteem movement).  And schools are racially segregating students in what are euphemistically called “affinity” groups. “Separate but equal” has returned with a vengeance thanks to vengefully regressive “progressives.”

That probably explains why administrators and faculty said next to nothing when the increasingly woke, decreasingly conservative evangelical Wheaton College held a racially segregated pre-graduation ceremony for colorful people on May 8, 2021, which was advertised as “RACIALIZED MINORITY RECOGNITION CEREMONY” (all caps in original) and held in the campus chapel. While it was created “Especially for undergraduate students, staff, and faculty of color,” the school provided “limited seating” for colorless people. I wonder if those seats were way in the back.

One Wheaton faculty member who likely loves Wheaton’s embrace of re-segregation is associate professor of philosophy and critical race theorist Nathan Cartagena who was recently interviewed for leftist Christian Jim Wallis’ Sojourners’ magazine. In this interview, Cartagena explained how he sussed out Wheaton’s friendliness to CRT by delivering a visiting lecture on controversial critical race theorist Tommy Curry during the interview process:

I wanted to see: Is this a place that would welcome such reflection? I received a warm welcome from the students, my department, etc., so I thought “OK, this is a place where I can do this.”

And by “do this,” Cartagena meant, not expose students to the debate on CRT, but to promote CRT:

I taught a reading group my first year at Wheaton that involved one of the important texts in the critical race theory movement, Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell. The following year I asked if I could teach a half-semester class on critical race theory—I got a full thumbs up.

Derrick Bell is another controversial figure in the critical race theory movement “whose writings on ‘critical race theory,’” conservative African American economist Thomas Sowell explains “promoted an extremist hostility to white people.”

Sowell described the academic transformation of Bell, attributing it largely to his scholarly inadequacy at Harvard:

As a full professor at Harvard Law, Derrick Bell was … surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect of either the faculty or the students — or, more important, his own self-respect. …

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil-rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.

Cartagena openly admits the cunning way he gets his students to accept CRT:

When I was first teaching on CRT, I was very explicit about when something was a CRT essay or quote. Now, one of the things I do is I present CRT literature without telling students that it’s CRT literature. Then I ask them what they think about it. The overwhelming response from the students is: “Wow, this essay is so rigorously researched, so clear, and so well-argued. Even if I don’t agree with every claim, I learned so much,” etc. Then, after they’ve sung a little praise song, [laughs] I tell them they’ve read a piece by a critical race theorist. You can see a look of disillusionment set in — this part gets really hard, if I’m honest. On the one hand, it’s a healthy destabilization. You’ve gotta remember that a lot of my students are racialized white folks. If they’re not now going to say that everything they just said was false, how do they reckon with believing there are things to learn from critical race theorists while knowing that the stakes, in some of these communities they’ve been a part of, are so high that to say such is to find themselves ostracized?

While this tactic appears to be a means to enable students to approach ideas objectively, with a mind decluttered and “decolonized” by the detritus of white privilege and systemic racism, educators know it’s a tactic that can be used to propagandize. Presenting students with an interpretive lens beclouded by jargon, ambiguous language, assumptions, and subtexts with which students have no familiarity doesn’t educate; it indoctrinates.

At least as offensive is Cartagena’s evident pleasure in “destabilizing” his students and emotionally manipulating them by manufacturing cognitive dissonance.

Enquiring donors and parents considering sending their children to Wheaton may want to know if Cartagena spends equal time having students study any of the many works of criticism of CRT like Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everyone or Voddie Baucham’s book Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe.

Anthony Esolen, professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, senior editor at Touchstone Magazine, and contributing editor at Crisis Magazine, opposes the teaching of CRT in schools:

The problem is that the schools shouldn’t be teaching any “theory” of human behavior at all, for two principal reasons. First, the students do not have anything close to the learning or the broad human experiences that would serve as evidence for checking the theory. For the same reason why it is pointless, and perhaps destructive, to teach literary theory to young people who have hardly begun to read literature at all, because they have no evidence or experience from which to judge the theory, and they will instead be prone to force what literature they do encounter to fit the predeterminations of the theory, so it is pointless, and probably destructive, to teach some theory of human behavior to children who need first to have the experiences, personal or vicarious, that the theory purports to explain.

But the second reason … is more grave. It is that human behavior does not admit of that kind of theory at all. I am not talking here about moral philosophy, or about anthropological observations, or about history and its more or less reliable guidelines. All “theories” of human behavior are necessarily ideological and reductive: whether it’s from Skinner or Marx, it doesn’t matter. The simplest things we do in a given day are steeped in so many motives, passions, thoughts, physical exigencies, and moral commitments, we dare not simply paste a label on them to explain them away and have done with them.

There are glimmers of hope that Americans on both the right and left may be approaching their limits with the racist “antiracism” movement. Virtually everyone on the right and increasing numbers of people on the left are fed up with the ubiquitous manifestations of critical race theory. Americans see CRT is corrosive and divisive. They see CRT is being used to control discourse. And they see that “progressives” are passing CRT off as inarguable, objective truth. “Progressives,” in control of most of the levers of power and influence, feel no obligation to debate CRT’s arguable assumptions. Nor will they acknowledge that CRT is arguable as they use hard-earned tax dollars to promulgate it in government schools. And hoo boy, are they promulgating.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CRT-at-Wheaton-College.mp3

Join us in Collinsville on Saturday, May 22nd for an IFI Worldview Conference about CRT!

The dust that racist bullies tried to kick in the face of the honorable U.S. Senator Tim Scott for his crime of delivering a far superior speech in response to Biden’s lackluster recitation before a sparsely attended joint session of Congress has not quite settled.

In addition to delivering a poignant, inspiring speech, Sen. Scott committed the crime of rejecting the dogma spewed by leftists who detest tolerance, inclusivity, and free-thinking—especially from blacks whom they desperately need to keep chained to the Democrat Party.

In order to malign Sen. Scott, MSNBC’s oft-deceitful Joy Reid had to misrepresent what he said. In a scornful tone, she imitated Scott, saying, “This isn’t a racist country. There’s no racism here.”

The first problem is Sen. Scott never said, “There’s no racism here.” He said America is not a racist country—big difference that apparently escaped Reid.

America is constituted and defined centrally by the principles delineated in our founding documents—documents which assume the existence of God–and Americans can be justifiably evaluated in terms of how they align with those principles. The Left is now moving America at a precipitous pace away from the Constitution and God and toward racism and other forms of oppression.

Since there are racists in every country in the world, and racist acts—including speech acts—are committed in every country in the world, does Reid believe every country in the world is racist?

There are liars in this country (including at MSNBC and CNN) and every other country. Does that, in Reid’s view, make America and every other country lying countries? In Reid’s view, are MSNBC and CNN lying companies?

There are lazy people in this and every other country. Does that make America and every other country lazy countries?

There are egregiously selfish people in this and every other country. Does that make America and every other country egregiously selfish countries?

There are lawless anarchists who loot and burn private businesses in America. Is America, therefore, a lawless, anarchical country?

Joe Biden said America is not a racist country, and Kamala Harris said Americans are not racists. In Reid’s view, are they racists?

“Progressives” have spewed virulently racist comments at Sen. Scott in the hours and days since his response. In Reid’s view, is “progressivism” racist?

Not to be outdone by Reid in the creepy racism department, MSNBC host Tiffany Cross described the “inside” of Sen. Scott’s head as “hollow,” asserting that he represents “no one but the sleepy, slow-witted sufferers of Stockholm syndrome who get elevated to prominence for repeating a false narrative about this country that makes conservative white people feel comfortable.” Cross called him Mitch McConnell’s “tap dancer,” and a “token” who is “thirsty for white approval.”

That’s rhetoric that would make a KKK grand wizard smile.

Cross claimed that when blacks speak “an uncomfortable truth, like Nikole Hannah-Jones [author of the 1619 Project], the party that Scott claims is not racist gets big mad and tries to silence you.” Her evidence for the outlandish claim that Republicans try to silence black “progressives” was that “Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to scrap teaching of the 1619 Project.” Perfect encapsulation of the “progressive” belief that their freedom to do (or have) anything requires government subsidization.

Not using tax dollars or providing federal support for a particular curriculum does not constitute silencing it. And Republicans don’t object to the 1619 Project being taught in government schools because it articulates “uncomfortable” truths. They object to it because it’s a biased load of propaganda that many historians—including historians of color—find historically inaccurate.

While we digest the unsavory tripe that racist “progressives” are force-feeding us, trying to gaslight Americans into believing the freest, least racist country in the history of the world is “systemically racist,” let’s ruminate on a few questions.

Which political party supports the sale and purchase of humans (or genetic material to create humans)?

Which party separates children from mothers or fathers?

Which party declares some humans to be non-persons?

Which party denies children the freedom to go to good schools?

Which party tries to command persons of color what to think and say?

Which party is obsessed with skin color, averring that skin color matters more than character?

Are “progressives” like Reid and Cross concerned about the disproportionate number of black babies being slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs every year? Black Arizona State Representative Walt Blackman sure is:

Abortion impacts African Americans at a higher rate than any other population group. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an Abortion Surveillance Report. According to that report, black women make up 14 percent of the childbearing population. Yet, 36 percent of all abortions were obtained by black women. At a ratio of 474 abortions per 1,000 live births, black women have the highest ratio of any group in the country. …

A study by Protecting Black Lives, in 2012, found that 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of minority communities.

In the past, we criticized the tobacco industry for targeting young people with their advertising. Recently, the nicotine vape industry has been criticized for similar practices. The prevalence of abortion providers in African American and Hispanic neighborhoods indicates the abortion industry is targeting too. It smacks of the eugenics-linked past of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her views of contraception and abortion as ways of diminishing the black population.

What do Reid and Cross call “progressive” support for the killing of black babies? What do they call “progressive” support for Planned Parenthood, which plants most of its abattoirs in the heart of black communities? What do they call “progressive” endorsement of fatherless families and the policies that incentivize them when studies show one of the chief predictors of success is being raised in a home with a father? What do they call “progressive” refusal to offer school choice to disadvantaged families of color? What do they call it when “progressives” teach children of one skin color that children of another skin color are “lesser than”? What do they call it when “progressives” hurl the epithet “Uncle Tim” at a black man for thinking freely?

I call the whole stinking mess systemic racism.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/systemicRacismProgressives_mixdown.mp3

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How far gone is Illinois? And by “gone,” I mean arrogantly and divisively leftist.

Well, despite statewide and even nationwide condemnation of the proposed “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards,”  the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) failed to stop the controversial standards.

In a vote delayed by one day, JCAR voted 6-5 along partisan lines to, in effect, approve these standards, which will infuse the assumptions of Critical Race Theory/ identity politics/BLM into 1. all teacher-training programs, 2. all Professional Education Licensing (PEL), and 3. indirectly into all public school classrooms.

Not even yesterday’s plea from the left-leaning Chicago Tribune Editorial Board to JCAR not to pass these controversial standards—standards that the editorial board described as politicized—was sufficient to stop the Democrats in JCAR from further exploiting government schools for leftist propaganda purposes.

Ideological diversity—already a rare commodity in government schools—will be now be further diminished in favor of promoting arguable leftist beliefs about identity, “systems of oppression,” “sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege,” and “Eurocentrism.”

The standards were created by a committee hand-picked by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), which is controlled by leftists. While having the effect of law, these standards constitute an amendment to existing school code, so they did not have to go through the normal lawmaking process, which would involve more transparency, floor debates in Springfield, and every Illinois lawmaker publicly voting.

In the wake of nationwide criticism of the “woke” standards, the ISBE issued a statement with this chuckle-worthy, chuckleheaded claim:

The standards were developed by a diverse group of educators from around the state.

Just curious, how many in this “diverse group of educators” are critics of Critical Race Theory and BLM, or find fault with the ideas of Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Robin DiAngelo?

The ISBE’s statement also said the following:

The Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards apply to teacher preparation programs, not to K-12 school curricula. ISBE also will offer optional professional development on the standards to current educators. Educators and school districts maintain local control over what professional development they choose.

This is a transparent effort to mollify and silence critics of the infusion of leftist beliefs on race, American history, homosexuality, and “trans”-cultism into curricula. But “deplorables” are not stupid. We all know that “teacher preparation” is intended to and will shape both professional development and curricula.

As a result of the widespread condemnation of the leftist-created standards, the ISBE begrudgingly tossed an insignificant sop in the direction of Illinoisans who oppose the divisive politicization of education. Nervous ISBE leftists changed the word “progressive” to “inclusive.” For example, here is an original pre-condemnation sentence from the standards:

The culturally responsive teacher and leader will … Embrace and encourage progressive viewpoints and perspectives that leverage asset thinking toward traditionally marginalized populations.

Here is the worthless, one-word, post-condemnation change ISBE wokesters threw to Illinois serfs:

The culturally responsive teacher and leader will … Embrace and encourage inclusive viewpoints and perspectives that leverage asset thinking toward traditionally marginalized populations.

As I wrote last week, the unelected wokesters on the ISBE committee that created these radical standards think Illinois conservatives are stupid. They think we don’t realize that their definition of “inclusive” excludes conservative viewpoints.

They also think conservatives won’t notice the inclusion of the adverb “traditionally,” which necessarily excludes contemporary marginalized populations, like the theologically orthodox Christian population, which is today excluded, hated, and cancelled.

This is what’s called a distinction without a difference—a distinction intended to dupe the deplorables.

In another document, the ISBE makes another chuckle-worthy, eye-roller of a statement about the effects of these new ideological diktats:

The standards will help combat the teacher shortage. They will help educators become better teachers and experience higher job satisfaction, which makes them more likely to stay in the profession.

No acknowledgment of the teachers who will leave the profession or of those future teachers who will no longer consider teaching in Illinois because they know that Illinois schools are places of oppression that require ideological submission.

Here are just a few of the controversial ideas that Illinois will now force teacher-training programs and professional licensure to impose on all future “teachers, school support personnel” and administrators. Please note, that “identities” include homosexuality, cross-sex impersonation, and “gender fluidity”:

• Value the notion that … there is not one “correct” way of doing or understanding something.

• “Assess how their own biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric behavior or unearned privilege.”

• Be aware of the effects of power and privilege and the need for social advocacy and social action to better empower diverse students and communities.

• Encourage and affirm the personal experiences … students share in the classroom.

• Consistently solicit students’ input on the curriculum.

• Co-create, with students, the collective expectations and agreements regarding the physical space and social-emotional culture of the classroom.

• Create a risk-taking space that promotes student activism and advocacy.

• Invite family and community members to teach about topics that are culturally specific and aligned to the classroom curriculum or content area.

• Intentionally embrace student identities and prioritize representation in the curriculum.

• Implement and integrate the wide spectrum and fluidity of identities in the curriculum.

• Ensure text selections reflect students’ classroom, community, and family culture.

• Ensure teacher and students co-create content to include a counternarrative to dominant culture.

• Promote robust discussion with the intent of raising consciousness that reflects modern society and the ways in which cultures and communities intersect.

• Consider a broader modality of student assessments [i.e., grades and testing], such as … “social justice work.”

In my mind’s eye, I see more Illinois families planning their exit from public schools and more families planning their exit from this politically “woke,” intellectually slumbering, and morally vacuous state.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Illinois-Passes-Controversial-Leftist-Teacher-Training-Mandate.mp3

Please support the good work of Illinois Family Institute.

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Regardless of what black Americans think, the police departments that protect and serve their communities should be defunded immediately. At least that is the latest propaganda being peddled in a bizarre new campaign by the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a radical organization literally founded by members of the Communist Party USA.

According to the ACLU’s new campaign, American police are and always have been racist yahoos brutally oppressing minority communities. Reforms, investigations, firings, and other policy changes will not suffice. Instead, America’s thousands of local police departments must be defunded as soon as possible, with the “savings” being “invested” into priorities established by the ACLU.

In a series of videos purporting to document the last “100 years of history” surrounding policing in America, the far-left group argues that “policing still acts as an occupying force in communities of color.” And so, instead of public funding for police to investigate, punish, and prevent crime, that money should go to “black and brown communities,” the organization said.

A petition that goes with the campaign, which has been signed by almost 150,000 people as of this writing, displays hatred and dishonesty toward America’s police officers — many of whom put their lives on the line to protect their communities. And yet, from the ACLU’s rhetoric, American cops might as well be a pack of wild invaders led by Genghis Khan.

“The policing institutions in our country are deeply entrenched in racism and brutality, and we cannot allow it to continue,” the petition reads. “These inherently systemic issues require immediate and permanent solutions. That requires a bold reimagining of the role police play in our society: It is time to divest from law enforcement and reinvest in the Black and Brown communities [sic] they unjustly target.”

As usual, “defunding police” hysteria by guilt-ridden white liberals and agenda-driven hate-mongers such as those running the ACLU is portrayed as merely a benevolent effort to “help” black people who supposedly cannot help themselves. The narrative is very much akin to liberal campaigns to “save the whales” or “save the baby seals.”

Ironically, though, polling data show that black Americans are overwhelming against defunding the police departments that protect their communities from violent criminals. In fact, according to a Gallup survey released in August 2020 — right at the height of the media and “Black Lives Matter” demonization campaign against supposedly “racist” police — more than eight in ten black Americans wanted the same or a greater police presence.

In short, despite its supposed devotion to “democracy,” the ACLU’s radical agenda to defund police would require ignoring the wishes of the very black Americans it pretends to be concerned about. In fact, the scheme would require that a tiny, fringe minority of radicals be allowed to impose unpopular policy on the rest of the community using undemocratic means.

The ACLU’s “sweeping three-part formula” includes, among other elements, handcuffing the police, “prohibiting” them from enforcing laws against crimes that the ACLU determines are “non-dangerous” using fines or arrest. The money saved by eviscerating police will be “reinvested” into unspecified “alternatives to policing” that will supposedly help communities “thrive.”

Finally, for those “rare instances in which police officers do interact with community members” under the new policing regime, the ACLU proposes to implement “common-sense, iron-clad legal constraints” against police and “protections” for those law-enforcement interacts with. Of course, the U.S. Constitution and all 50 state constitutions already contain such protections.

To advance its dangerous anti-police narrative, the ACLU uses deception, lies, and half-truths. The very first video is based on a fraudulent narrative, painting Rodney King — a wife beater who pleaded guilty to armed robbery — as an innocent victim of racist cops. The fact that he charged at police while intoxicated after a dangerous high-speed chase reaching almost 120 mph is never mentioned.

Even the quote from the official LA commission report about the incident is used in a deceptive manner. When the narrator cited the commission’s mention of “racism and bias within the Los Angeles Police Department,” he failed mention that it was based on a survey that found just one fourth of officers in the department thought racism or bias existed at all in the department. In other words, more than 75 percent of officers did not believe racism existed.

But this was never about racism. The communist movement in the United States — backed for generations by the mass-murdering regime enslaving the Soviet Union — has been waging war on American police for almost a century now. In fact, in an official 1961 report headlined “Communist Plot Against the Free World Police,” the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate outlined the nature of the threat.

Among other concerns, it was revealed that communist agents across the West were working to undermine local police so that law-enforcement could be nationalized and federalized. Communists directed by Soviet intelligence had a special focus on the United States. The Judiciary Committee also detailed some of the methods, including formation of mobs to attack police and then demonizing the officers.

Considering the history of the ACLU, its latest salvo in its war on America’s police should come as no surprise. Among the charter members of the ACLU at its founding were numerous senior Communist Party officials including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Louis Budenz, and even eventual Communist Party USA General-Secretary William Z. Foster.

ACLU Executive Director Roger Baldwin, who led the group from 1920 to 1950 and visited the USSR twice, was proud of his communist leanings. “I am for socialism,” he famously wrote. “I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal…. I don’t regret being part of the communist tactic. I knew what I was doing. I was not an innocent liberal.”

American officials have known this for decades. In 1948, the California Senate Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities released a report on it. “The ACLU may be definitely classified as a Communist front or transmission belt organization,” the committee said on page 107 of its 1948 report. “At least 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of Communists who come in conflict with the law.”

Stripping American communities of their police forces would be a recipe for chaos, especially in minority communities. But the American people, including black Americans, have made it abundantly clear that they are vehemently opposed to such an idiotic plan.

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