For 42 years American school children have been subject to a barrage of misinformation about our American history. This has helped cause many of them to hate America. And virtually every day we read about the results.

For example, there’s a curriculum clash in one of our nation’s most conservative states. On Friday, Gary Bauer reported that the Oklahoma Board of Education decided to downgrade the Tulsa Public School District’s accreditation. This is because in Tulsa, they’re still teaching Marxist critical race theory—which is now against the law in the Sooner State.

Oklahoma’s Secretary of Education is Ryan Walters, who told Fox News: “What we’ve got to do is go back to teaching our history and ensuring that every young person has the ability to be successful and be inspired by our history.”

He added, “We’re the greatest country in the history of the world, and our kids need to know that.”

But how will children in Oklahoma, and all the other states, learn to appreciate our country when so many have been brainwashed with a false view for so long?

“Howard Zinn died in 2010, but [his book] A People’s History of the United States lives on and carries the rhetoric of past decades of leftist politics forward with it.” So writes Dr. Mary Grabar, author of the book, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America (2019).

Grabar is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and is the founder of Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc. She has taught at the college level for two decades, including at Emory University.

Grabar describes the late Howard Zinn, the American history professor who would’ve turned 100 this year, as a “communist propagandist.”

In her book, Grabar observes, “Zinn’s pervasive influence is a national tragedy, especially considering just how distorted, manipulative, and plain dishonest A People’s History of the United States is.”

Zinn’s work has been widely read by many who assume it is truthful. Indeed, A People’s History remains among the most widely-assigned history textbooks in America. But Zinn was a self-described Marxist, and author Daniel Flynn once described him as an “unreconstructed, anti-American Marxist,” whose book was a “cartoon anti-history.”

Grabar quotes many reputable historians who similarly find Zinn’s historical standards sub-par.

I spoke with Dr. Grabar for a radio segment on Zinn and his influence. She told me, “I don’t think there’s another book on American history that has sold as many copies as Howard Zinn’s has. It has been in constant publication since 1980 when it first came out…. His view of American history…has become the dominant one.”

I asked her if there is a link between Zinn’s teachings and the mobs in the streets tearing down historical statues related to American history. She answered “Absolutely.” She noted that readers of Zinn tend to “get this very jaundiced picture of the founders, of Christopher Columbus. These people are presented as enslavers, committing genocide.”

For example, in her chapter, “Columbus Bad, Indians Good,” Grabar states, “Zinn was instrumental in the sea change that has transformed Columbus from the discoverer of America into the genocidal villain whose murder and enslavement of the Indians is the original sin that makes America a crime.”

Zinn leaves out such facts as the explorer’s log entry for October 12, 1492: “I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange.”

Graber told me: “It’s all done through lies about American history. Very little of it is accurate, so there’s this false picture of the people we have justly honored.”

Graber continued, “We have generations of people who have grown up disillusioned with this country—thinking there is something better off on the horizon. And what they think is better is socialism.” And Zinn deserves a great deal of the credit—or rather, blame—for that.

This is all astounding when you think about it. Zinn was a propagandist for the Communists, who were guilty of far worse atrocities than the men and women who founded America. The records are not comparable.

A couple of disillusioned former communists summarized the legacy of seven decades of the atheistic U.S.S.R. in one phrase: “tens of millions of corpses.” And yet Zinn continues to poison the minds of millions of Americans against our country.

This reminds me of the famous quip from Ronald Reagan: “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

What is America in its essence? Very simply this: self-rule under God. Both of those phrases are necessary for a free and prosperous future for our country. May God spare us from the propagandists who withhold that information from present and future generations.

This article was originally published at JerryNewcombe.com.

The National Education Association’s (NEA) annual convention took place last week in Chicago. It opened with a theatrical speech act by NEA president, Rebecca (Becky) Pringle who has no dearth of pride in the “amazing accomplishments” of the NEA members. Pringle cited as inspiration for world transformation—not systemically oppressed persons of color like Thomas Sowell, Carol Swain, or Glenn Loury—but communist and former Black Panther who studied under Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis:

We must share [the] view Professor Davis holds dear whether it is a mind, a heart, a school, a community, or our world, transformation is always possible, change is always possible, NEA, because of you. [wild applause for themselves]

Of the many troubling things Pringle emoted, this may be the most troubling:

NEA, you are answering my call to lead a movement that unites, not just our members, but this entire nation, to reclaim public education as a common good, as the foundation of this democracy, and then transform it into something it was never designed to be—a racially and socially just and equitable system that prepares every student, every student, EVERY STUDENT, EVERY ONE TO SUCCEED IN THIS DIVERSE AND INTERDEPENDENT WORLD!

Yes, she was cacophonously shouting about the NEA’s goal to transform public education into something it was never designed to be.

Precisely how are “socially just and equitable” defined and by whom? How does the NEA propose to achieve their socially constructed goal?

The NEA plans to achieve that goal by using taxpayer funded schools with captive audiences to promote sexual perversity, sexual confusion, science denial, the slaughter of the unborn, compulsory language mandates, censorship of ideas they hate, and the destruction of the nuclear family. That’s how.

Pringle went on to bemoan recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions:

… [T]he rights many of us have spent a lifetime fighting to secure are being stripped away in our lifetimes.

… we’ve known since 2016, since that fateful election, that this day would come—that we would feel the effects of a radicalized Supreme Court, issuing decisions that do not reflect the views or the values of America.

We knew that the ground had shifted and the stage had been set to move us further away from the promise of America for all Americans, from decisions on school prayer that attack religious freedom to vouchers that threaten the right to a universal public education to the long-term devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to hijack the fundamental freedom to decide for ourselves when and how to have a family.

The U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade—a decision that even leftist law professors have long acknowledged had no grounding in the Constitution—is “radical” but the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned marriage for the whole country was not?

Allowing more powerful, more privileged “pregnant persons” the legal right to have powerless, non-privileged humans killed constitutes the “promise of America”? And here I thought the promise of America was to recognize that all men are created equal and endowed by our Creator with the unalienable right to life. Has Pringle read any books on history, civics, or government other than Howard Zinn’s People’s History of America and the 1619 Project?

Allowing a coach the freedom to choose to pray silently on a football field after a game constitutes an attack on religious freedom?

Providing school vouchers that help give impoverished families a tiny bit of freedom to choose where and how their children are educated constitutes threatening the right to a universal public education?

What Pringle and her thought-control collaborators don’t want is for moms and dads who must work two jobs in order to make ends meet to be allowed to choose not to have their children indoctrinated by leftists who want to turn public education into something it was never intended to be.

Pringle then began shrieking:

As we have for decades, we will fight tirelessly for the right to choose. We will never stop. We will fight unceasingly for the rights of our LGBTQ plus students and educators. We will say gay. We will say trans. We will use the words that validate our students and their families–words that encourage them to walk in their authenticity, to love themselves fully, to become who they are meant to be! 

What if walking in their authenticity includes sadomasochism, polyamory, infantilism, or any other of the myriad paraphilias that delight fallen humans? Will Pringle encourage those students to love themselves fully and become who they are meant to be?

Who exactly intends people to be “gay” or “cross-sex” impersonators, and how does Pringle know that’s how some people are meant to be? Is it the mere presence of persistent, unchosen desire that tells Pringle how someone or something intended those people to be? Do all unchosen, powerful, persistent desires have to be affirmed, in order for humans to fully love themselves?

Pringle’s proclamations “We will say gay. We will say trans,” are an allusion to the Florida law that prohibits teachers from initiating conversations about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation in grades K-3. Pringle has announced defiantly that creepy members of the NEA should violate Florida law in order to impose their socially constructed assumptions about sexuality on other people’s 5–9-year-olds.

Funny how leftists, who now treat the appointments of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett as an outrage and insult to the Democratic process, were never exercised when, according to Politico,

Democrats almost exclusively named federal judges and Supreme Court justices for decades. … Of the 22 open Supreme Court seats between 1933 and 1968, 17 were filled by Democratic presidents. And Eisenhower’s five nominees included Earl Warren and William Brennan, two future progressive icons.

Pringle believes that the NEA’s ideological world domination goals are thwarted by unceasing attacks:

We have weathered countless attacks on our profession, on us. We have become exhausted by the demands created by a crippling educator shortage. We have felt our voices grow hoarse from demanding professional pay and the respect we deserve.

Maybe the NEA has something to do with the crippling educator shortage.

Maybe liberty-loving young people don’t want to enter the teaching profession because it is controlled by leftists who demand ideological conformity from faculty, who demand that teachers promote sexual deviance and ideas derived from critical theory, and who disrespect parental rights and transparency.

Maybe veteran teachers are dropping out for the same reasons.

Maybe teachers young and old don’t want to be forced to be vaccinated. Maybe conservative teachers young and old are tired of being “attacked” by taxpayers for the inappropriate decisions leftist teachers make and which dissenting educators are not free to criticize.

Maybe leftist “educators” are getting paid too much and are getting all the respect they deserve.

Maybe teachers or those considering the teaching profession don’t support the commitment of the NEA to profile

the largest 25 organizations “that are actively working to diminish a student’s right to honesty in education, freedom of sexual and gender identity, and teacher autonomy.”

Maybe they object to the NEA’s plan to “spend more than $47 million to elect friendly candidates …, pro-labor judges, lobby for or against legislation, and support state and local affiliates in ballot measure campaigns.”

Maybe they object to the NEA’s decision to “publicly stand in defense of abortion and reproductive rights and encourage members to participate in activities including rallies and demonstrations, lobbying and political campaigns, educational events, and other actions to support the right to abortion.”

The self-important Pringle arrogantly declares to the NEA members the importance of the NEA’s work:

You understand that our work is fundamental to this nation. You have accepted the profound trust that has been placed in us. 

No, the work of the NEA is not fundamental to this nation. In reality, the NEA’s work is fundamental to no one and nothing but leftist ideologues—their beliefs, their systems, and their socio-political agenda.

No leftist event would be complete without an attack on the 2^nd Amendment, and Pringle did not disappoint. She claimed to have “listened to the stories of young people who experience gun violence in their communities every day,” but Pringle never mentioned that virtually every mass killer in America’s history has come from a broken, dysfunctional family. Leftists can’t say that because they are committed to the lie that all family structures serve children equally.

The NEA’s work contributes to the slaughter of the unborn; to a false understanding of sexual differentiation, sexual ethics, marriage, and family; to an imbalanced/erroneous view of history; to the dismantling of democratic institutions; to the erosion of liberty, tolerance, ideological diversity, and civility. The NEA is destroying public education, disrespects parental rights, and foments division. The NEA is plucking out all the threads that hold society together. 

At least Pringle admits two true things:

You have found a way to resist even as you hold on to joy. Creative and courageous, prepared and persistent, you stand in the power of the N-E-A, and the NEA stands in the power that is you [wild applause for themselves].

It is true that the NEA has power—too much power. And it is true that the NEA resists. It resists relinquishing power.

Pringle waxes melodramatic as she focuses—not on the needs of children and their families—but on the weepiness of poor pitiful NEA members:

For over a year I have traveled this nation to listen to the voices of, to learn from and to be inspired by our NEA members. … I’ve listened to educators describe their challenges as tears stream down their cheeks.

Today’s “educators” live and move and have their being in narcissism, narrative, and DEEP FEELINGS, so anecdotes about themselves weeping are even better than self-congratulations.

There was little to inspire truth-seekers in Pringle’s performance, but there was this:

Resistance is the secret of joy.

It’s good to know that Pringle looks favorably on resistance, because finally parents are resisting the efforts of public servants to force their socially constructed views on the nature and morality of cross-sex impersonation, homoeroticism, and human slaughter on all American children.

I hope Pringle realizes that one person’s “attack” on the NEA is another person’s act of resistance—which Pringle believes is the secret of joy.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/The-National-Education-Association-Convention.mp3

Americans educated by government today are, for the most part, hopelessly ignorant of their own nation’s history—and that’s no accident. They’re beyond ignorant when it comes to civics, too. On the history of the rest of the world, or the history of communism, Americans are generally clueless as well. This was all by design, of course.

After generations of flying under the radar, the ongoing corruption of history education in public schools is now suddenly the topic du jour. With the spread of The New York Times’ discredited 1619 Project aiming to “reframe” history through the lens of slavery, which even The New York Times’ own fact-checker called out, Americans everywhere are suddenly paying attention to what’s being taught to impressionable children at taxpayer expense.

Last year, President Donald Trump blamed the escalating mayhem in the streets on indoctrination by schools and the media. In September, he blasted the “toxic propaganda” being peddled as “history” in American classrooms. To deal with it, the president signed an executive order to “promote patriotic education.”

The reason why history is being rewritten is hardly a mystery. In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the totalitarian ruling Party’s motto explaining its strategy is “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And it’s very true—whoever controls the historical narrative will be able to shape the future. Liberty-minded Americans and truth are currently losing the battle—big time.

Totalitarians have long understood the power of historical narratives. Consider Chairman Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” in communist China. Under the guise of purging remnants of the old ways of capitalism and tradition, Mao’s communist storm troopers did their best to destroy the records and evidences of thousands of years of Chinese history. Books were burned and monuments destroyed in an orgy of destruction.

After true history was erased and disfigured, the Chinese Communist Party was able to rewrite history on a blank slate to suit its own agenda. Especially important to that effort was the indoctrination of children in government schools. Everything ancient and traditional was portrayed as primitive or even evil, while the new party line surrounding the supposed glories and progress of communism was force-fed to China’s youth.

America’s ongoing cultural revolution hasn’t been quite as dramatic, violent, or thorough—so far. But if left unchecked, the results of this long-term operation may turn out to be just as deadly. And there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind about the effectiveness of the effort to rewrite the history of the United States, Western civilization, and even the world.

Consider the data. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the “nation’s report card,” just 15 percent of American students were at or above the “proficient” level in history. When it comes to civics, less than 1 in 4 U.S. eighth-grade students performed at or above “proficient” in 2018 on the NAEP, the latest year for which scores are available.

Keeping in mind the wild bias of the Education Department (some 99.7 percent of the bureaucrats’ contributions to a presidential candidate in the 2016 election went to Hillary Clinton), even those numbers probably drastically overstate the true level of historical and civic understanding of U.S. students.

Contrast the dismal scores with previous generations. There was a time when Americans were the best-educated people on the planet—especially when it came to history and civics. According to prominent French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the early-to-mid 1800s and recorded his observations in two volumes before government hijacked education, “every citizen … is … taught the doctrines and evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of the Constitution.”

Some areas on the Western frontier and the deep South weren’t quite as advanced educationally. However, in the more populous and developed areas, “it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon,” de Tocqueville continued.

Today, it’s just the opposite: Finding a person who understands the history of America or the leading features of its Constitution is a sort of phenomenon.

The Rewriting of History in America

The process of rewriting history was a long one. Unlike Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which took about a decade, those seeking to erase and distort America’s incredible and unique history were forced to proceed slowly, working over decades and generations rather than accomplishing it all in one fell swoop. But concrete evidence of this deliberate plot has surfaced periodically since at least the 1940s.

In the early 1950s, Congress became suspicious about the scheming of the major tax-exempt foundations, a subject covered extensively in part 7 of this series on education. To deal with the issue, lawmakers formed the Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, sometimes referred to as the “Reece Committee” after its chairman.

What investigators found should have shocked America to the core. In its final report, the select committee reported that the major foundations of the day, which still exist, had “supported a conscious distortion of history.” The foundations also sought to hijack education for the purpose of undermining American constitutional principles and liberty, investigators found.

One of the expert witnesses who testified during the select committee’s investigation, attorney and investigator Aaron Sargent, an expert in subversion through education, put it clearly. “They sought to create a blackout of history by slanting and distorting historical facts,” Sargent testified about the goals of the major tax-exempt foundations in the education field. “They introduced a new and revolutionary philosophy—one based on the teachings of John Dewey.”

By the time of the congressional probe, the situation was so serious that Norman Dodd, the chief investigator for the committee, said the foundations had orchestrated a “revolution” in the United States. The revolution “could not have occurred peacefully or with the consent of the majority unless education in the United States had prepared in advance to endorse it,” Dodd told lawmakers in his sworn testimony. The attack on real history in school was a crucial element of that.

Of course, the situation only got worse from there. By 1980, pseudo-historian Howard Zinn, a radical exposed in declassified FBI documents as a Communist Party member, had published his book “A People’s History of the United States.” It’s a favorite in public schools. More than 3 million copies have been sold so far, shaping the minds and attitudes of countless millions of Americans while turning them against their own nation and their own political institutions that guaranteed individual liberty for so long.

The propaganda “history” book was full of obvious lies, as exposed most recently by scholar Mary Grabar in her book “Debunking Howard Zinn.” The deception was strategic, too, and powerful. The lies begin right at the start of the book, portraying Columbus as a genocidal monster, and continue onward from there.

“We were really no better than the Nazis in the way Zinn presents it,” she said.

It was carefully calculated. “Rewriting history is what communists do,” continued Grabar, who also serves as a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. “They don’t want people to know about any other form of government or to remember a time when there was freedom and abundance. Like Zinn, the Marxists of today want young people to be so disgusted with their own country that they become inspired to overthrow it.”

While demonizing the United States and Western civilization more broadly, Zinn and other communists work hard to conceal the history of communism—“the horrors of starvation, gulags, repression, and mass murder,” Grabar said. Interestingly, there were clear parallels between Zinn’s fake history and a history written by Communist Party USA chief William Z. Foster published in 1951 dubbed “Outline Political History of the Americas.” Foster wrote openly about how crucial hijacking education would be for the Soviet-style communist regime he envisioned for America.

When starting the project, Grabar said she already knew Zinn’s book was biased. “But even I was surprised by how blatantly and deliberately Zinn lied,” she said, urging students, parents, and community members to use her book to refute the propaganda with facts.

More recently, The New York Times released its 1619 Project, the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Like Zinn’s book, it’s essentially fake history, as historians from across the political spectrum—and even The New York Times’ own fact-checker—publicly confirmed. Like Zinn’s book, it seeks to “reframe” America’s history as one based on oppression, slavery, and racism rather than liberty. And like Zinn’s fake history, the 1619 Project is now being used in public schools across America.

Perhaps most alarming about Hannah-Jones’s false narrative is the notion that racism and evil are embedded “in the very DNA” of America. In other words, there’s nothing short of the complete annihilation of the United States’ very foundations and essence that could possibly resolve the real and imagined shortcomings. The message of the project was obvious and clear: Death to America!

In reality, the truth about American history is almost exactly the opposite of what the project presents. The principles upon which the nation was founded—“all men are created equal,” for instance, and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—paved the way for abolishing slavery worldwide while facilitating the greatest expansion of human freedom and prosperity in world history.

Despite the obvious lies and deception, Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project. Ironically, though, New York Times writer Walter Duranty also won a Pulitzer Prize for peddling lies and communist propaganda. In Duranty’s case, he infamously parroted Stalin’s obvious propaganda and covered up the Soviet genocide in Ukraine that killed by some estimates up to 10 million people.

Effects of Fake History

This strategic rewriting of history in public schools across America has led to dramatic shifts in Americans’ attitudes, values, beliefs, and worldview. For example, national pride among Americans, who arguably live in the richest and freest nation in human history, has reached historic lows, according to a Gallup poll released last summer. Among younger Americans, just 1 in 5 are extremely proud to be American, while among those 65 and older, just over half are extremely proud.

But the real dangers are becoming clear, too. A 2019 survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 7 in 10 millennials said they are likely to vote for a socialist. Fully 36 percent of millennials support communism, the survey found. And just 57 percent of them believe the Declaration of Independence guarantees freedom and equality better than the Communist Manifesto. A generation ago, these numbers would have been inconceivable.

“When we don’t educate our youngest generations about the historical truth of 100 million victims murdered at the hands of communist regimes over the past century, we shouldn’t be surprised at their willingness to embrace Marxist ideas,” explained Victims of Communism (VOC) Memorial Foundation Executive Director Marion Smith.

“We need to redouble our efforts to educate America’s youth about the history of communist regimes and the dangers of socialism today.”

VOC Director of Academic Programs Murray Bessette explained that American public schools simply don’t teach the true history of communism. Part of the reason for that, he said, is the “ideological character of many involved in developing and delivering curricula for American schools.” Parents must insist on a full account of history, and teachers must seek out programs and materials that teach the whole truth, added Bessette.

The effects of these false narratives pushed on children in government schools are becoming more and more obvious. Just think of the brainwashed armies of young Americans rampaging through the streets rioting, looting, killing, protesting, and destroying. Funded by rich and powerful individuals, companies, and foundations, their goal is to “fundamentally transform” what they view as an evil America. And because they don’t know the truth about their own nation or its history, many genuinely believe in what they’re doing.

Speaking at an Independence Day celebration last summer, the president of the United States hit the nail on the head. “The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions,” Trump explained. “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains.”

Their goal, the president correctly observed, is not to improve America, but to destroy it.

Fortunately, now that the problem has been identified, steps are being taken to address it. And at the core of that process will be ensuring that young Americans understand the truth about their own nation’s history. During remarks made on Constitution Day, Trump blasted the left’s distortion of American history with lies and deception.

“There is no better example than The New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project,” said Trump, calling it “toxic” propaganda that would “destroy” America. “This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”

In reality, as Trump correctly pointed out, “nothing could be further from the truth.”

“America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history,” the president declared.

Trump also promised action to reverse the progress of the history destroyers and rewriters. “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country,” he said. “We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

To accomplish that, grants are being awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to help develop a pro-American curriculum that “celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history,” Trump said. He also said he would soon sign an executive order to create a national “1776 Commission” that will promote patriotic education that will “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history.”

Whether the rot and corruption that has taken over the teaching of history and civics in America’s government schools can be reversed remains to be seen. But diagnosing an illness is the first step to treating and curing it. Now that Americans are starting to understand what’s killing their nation, serious efforts can be made to stop the bleeding. Teaching children the truth about U.S. history will be a good first step.

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.

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.

One of the many remarkable aspects of this time in America is that all the forces of oppression about which George Orwell warned in his novel 1984 are present and growing, and many of the oppressors can’t see it. Ironically, many of the oppressors view themselves as paragons of virtue when, in reality, they’re paragons of virtue-signaling, which constitutes a performative cloak of invisibility that conceals their totalitarianism.

In Orwell’s portentous novel, he describes four government ministries, one of which—the Ministry of Truth—“concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts.” Orwell wrote,

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ … All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

While our news, entertainment, education, and fine arts are not institutionally linked to the government, they are ideologically bound together in an unholy alliance that seeks to indoctrinate society just as Big Brother does in 1984.

Today “progressives” are tearing down statues and renaming government schools to erase recognition of our Founding Fathers. Government schools are teaching the revisionist history of the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States.

Through falsified birth certificates and drivers’ licenses, the state colludes with mainstream news outlets, entertainment, and educational institutions to scrub history by identifying men and women as the sex they aren’t. Try looking for information on the actress Ellen Page. Within hours of Page’s recent announcement that she was no longer a woman, the disparate minions in the Ministry of Truth began scrubbing history, changing “Ellen” to “Elliot” and replacing all pronouns that refer to her with deceitful male pronouns.

Acts of hatred and deceit against the human person are now called “love” and “authenticity” by those practiced at the art of Newspeak.

Orwell wrote, “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

It’s happening now, and it is terrifying, indeed. Now we have intrusive Big Government—including government schools—in cahoots with Big Tech to control the past, the present, and the future. Social media has created algorithms and inconsistently applied “community standards” to suppress the dissemination of not only ideas but also news.

Orwell explains that in the government-mandated language of Newspeak, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” When I worked at Deerfield High School, two English teachers, Michael Wolf and Jeff Berger-White, sent a letter to the local press which was signed by half the department in which they argued,

It is difficult for … people … to simultaneously hold conflicting opinions. But this difficulty should not prevent us from attempting to do so. The best work we do in our classrooms is to highlight how multiple understandings are true, and that the validity of one idea does not necessarily negate the validity of another.

I’m pretty sure they read 1984 but seemed to have missed the point.

In their letter, they acknowledged that “certain doctrine” that “may not allow diverse and conflicting views to coexist” still have a “cherished place” in their classrooms—unless those doctrine are “malicious.” Guess which views on sexuality the gods of government schools have declared malicious.

The vehicle for our rocketing trip deep down into our subterranean Orwellian dystopia is “trans”-cultism. The world we’ve entered is the anti-science Transtopia where, in Orwell’s words, “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” The propellant that reality-denying “trans”-cultists and their fearful and/or foolish collaborators use is Newspeak.

Newspeak, like the speech rules leftists impose today, is intended to control thought:

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings. … [T]he special function of certain Newspeak words. … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.

In two now-famous quotes, Orwell illuminates the troubling views of tyrants about language:

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

On December 8, 2020, the University of Michigan’s Information and Technology Services’ “Words Matter Task Force”—Ministry of Truth for short—issued its spanking new Newspeak lexicon. Acknowledging that “language is powerful,” the Ministers of Truthiness have published a document with banned words and “recommended” replacements along with a bewildering array of action steps to ensure widespread compliance. The banned list—which is “not exhaustive and will continue to grow”—are those words deemed by the Ministers of Truthiness (aka Thought Police) to “harm morale, and deliberately or inadvertently exclude people from feeling accepted” or “cause people to feel alienated.”

Here are a few of the alienating terms (left column) and their “recommended” Newspeakian replacements (right column):

I don’t know how fans of Masters of the Universe are going to feel about Primaries of the Universe.

This list reveals that the left is teaching people to be offended in order to maintain their cultural power through intersectional-identity grievance politics. My anecdotal experience with even leftists suggests virtually no one has been offended by most of these expressions as they are commonly used until the last five minutes of history. And the faux-offense now being asserted didn’t arise naturally. It had to be beaten into them by the hammer of tolerance wielded by far-left social justice warriors.

It also raises a question for leftists: If a word’s history is largely unknown and its current meaning is inoffensive, why eliminate it? Why not be thankful that the old ugly association has been supplanted by a new innocuous one?

If, on the other hand, we must commit to linguistic stasis, then shouldn’t we retain the historical meaning of, for example, pronouns?

And what if I’m offended by being commanded to use pronouns based on “gender identity” rather than on biological sex?  What if, because I’m deeply committed to science, reality, truth, and the First Amendment, I’m offended by attempts to socially coerce language compliance in the service of a political agenda?

Orwell wrote that “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” Yep, that pretty much describes what 16+ years of secular education does to children.

Under an article about the University of Michigan’s Ministry of Truth on the College Fix website, one waggish fellow left this perfect response to the banned words list:

Every member of the Words Matter Task Force has sold his or her ideals down the river. This black-and-white thinking only ever leads to blacklists, and shunning people off the reservation while the crazies enjoy a crippled picnic. To be thrown under the bus for being the low man on the social-justice totem pole is to be grandfathered into the ever-growing community of gypped guys and gals, excluded when the masters change the rules of polite society into one of a dummy society where every utterance is weighed for a privileged account. Even asking for a sanity check of these lunatic brown-baggers puts you at risk of being professionally, if not personally, disabled. They may start by cracking the whip rhetorically, but their rhetoric inevitably leads to insane physical realities sooner or later.

In short, kiss my grits, sweetie.

Remember this list next time you see the leftist American Library Association’s annual umbrage-fest called Banned Books Week. Leftists ban not only books, but also words.

Orwell said something else “progressives” will hate:

Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

The ideology of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other “social justice” organizations teaches that all whites are racist oppressors, thereby justifying verbal attacks on people who are deemed inveterate racists and justifying riots to destroy everything that has emerged from an allegedly irremediable racist system. In promoting an explicitly racist ideology, BLM and other “social justice” organizations institutionalize racism, and we are suffering the fruits of that poisonous ideology.

In the hell-bent quest by America-hating revolutionaries to destroy America by destroying its institutions and history, 60 monuments have been removed, ordered removed, defaced, or torn down. In addition, according to Reinsurance News,

While no estimates of the costs of the damage is available yet, a look back at the costliest U.S. civil disorders shows that there’s potential for claims from the current riots, which are in multiple cities, to have easily run into the billions of dollars already.

Worse still, this BLM-led revolution has resulted in 25 deaths, hundreds of injuries—including injuries to 700 law enforcement officers—and the establishment of a rogue nation in the midst of downtown Seattle with the blessing of the incompetent mayor who called the squalid, uninhabitable, and dangerous encampment a free-love street festival.

The culture-destroyers are not done yet. Well-known racist activist Shaun King, whose purported racial identity and numerous fundraising projects are questioned by even leftists, recently tweeted,

Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.

and

All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down.

BLM, with whom King was previously associated, is a destructive revolutionary group leading a Maoist-like cultural revolution, and many conservatives don’t seem to understand that. Those who support BLM and its skin-pigment-obsessed divisive, separatist, elitist ideology are de facto racists, no matter their skin color.

In National Review, Kyle Smith describes the white liberal BLM disciples as “the White-Guilt Cult”:

Amidst nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, a black man and woman are seated on a park bench while a white woman … takes to her megaphone. “We repent on behalf of, uh, Caucasian people,” she says. A small crowd of white people comes to kneel before the two seated black folks, who are co-pastors of a local church. Some of the kneelers wash the feet of the black people. … Several people start audibly weeping, or keening, as the speaker continues. Roughly a dozen people join in the gesture and kneel before the black couple. “We have put our necks, put our hands, our knees, upon the necks of our African-American brothers and sisters, people of color, indigenous people.” …

The original sin in the White Guilt Cult, the New Church of Anti-Racism, is to be, “uh, Caucasian people.” … If anything, the Great Awokening’s response to the George Floyd killing seems to be bolstering racial barriers rather than eradicating them. By making a religion of anti-racism, white people carry on with the longstanding project of “othering” black folks. … Take the principles of Woke in vain and you invite instantaneous ritual chastisement—the most thrilling, ecstatic element of the woke religion. The techno-narcissistic innovation of the Wokesters is that they have made themselves, as a collective, their own godhead, equipped with the authority to wield and unleash the thunderbolt of righteousness on blasphemers here and now, on their own authority. …

“White silence equals violence” is one new precept gaining currency. …  How exciting it must be to upend the meanings of words in service of the greater cause of smiting one’s perceived enemies, or even whatever suspected counterrevolutionaries there may be among one’s sworn allies. No one dared to be the first to stop applauding a Stalin speech. 

Even Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy has joined the anti-biblical white-guilt Cult, last week calling for white people to pay penance for sinful acts of racism that they never committed by shining the shoes of black people.

The ideology of BLM grows out of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is essentially repackaged socialism with its focus on economic redistribution. CRT like that espoused by BLM and scores of other organizations and ideologues emphasizes redistribution of wealth and values uniformity of economic and social position over liberty. Those whose worldview has been shaped by CRT–also known deceptively as “social justice warriors,” seek to use the force of government to establish economic uniformity.

CRT focuses on race, sex, class, “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity.” It encourages people to view the world through the divisive lens of identity politics, dividing groups into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Those who are identified as “oppressors” need not have committed any acts of actual persecution or oppression, nor feel any sense of superiority toward or dislike of the supposed “oppressed” class. CRT promotes the idea that “institutional racism,” as opposed to actual acts of mistreatment of individuals by other individuals, is the cause of differing lots in life.

“Social justice” activists cultivate the racist, sexist, heterophobic belief that whites (especially males and heterosexuals) are oppressors—a belief that robs minorities of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives, telling them that their lots in life cannot improve through their own efforts but only through endless confessions of guilt on the parts of the purported oppressors. CRT cultivates a sense of perpetual victimization and powerlessness on the parts of minorities and an irrational and illegitimate sense of guilt on the parts of whites (or men or heterosexuals).

Finally, social justice theory is distinctly anti-American and hyper-focuses on America’s mistakes and failings. CRT diminishes or ignores the remarkable success America has achieved in integrating virtually every ethnic and racial group in the world and in enabling people to improve their lots in life through economic opportunity and American principles of liberty and equality.

Racism peddlers—including colorless racism-peddlers and profiteers like Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility—disseminate their cancerous ideology everywhere. Many Americans view our colleges and universities as the primary indoctrination centers, but they should look at government middle and high schools, because indoctrinating the next generation begins long before college.

Through “professional development”—which are the teacher training workshops, seminars, and conferences that take place during summer breaks, institute days, and late-arrival days—teachers are being coached and pressured by administrators and colleagues to adopt the beliefs of “anti-racism” and diversity trainers whose hefty fees are paid for by the public.

Teachers are forced to attend these indoctrination workshops, which never include resources or experts that challenge the assumptions of “anti-racism” trainers. Teachers are then expected to incorporate these revolutionary, leftist, and dubious beliefs into their classroom instruction. Our taxes are being used in government schools to teach children to hate America.

The predatory “anti-racism” scammers profit from peddling guilt to whites, shaming them into falsely believing—or pretending to believe—they are racists. The snake-oil salesmen and women do that in two ways. First, they redefine racism. Racism no longer refers to the belief that people with brown or black skin are by nature inferior. Nor does it refer to individual acts of incivility, unkindness, oppression, or violence. It refers to being white in a culture whose power structures used to be controlled by whites. Whites are guilty of racism and oppression based on nothing more than the color of their skin. This repugnant redefinition is the antithesis of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream for America. It is also unbiblical.

The second way snake-oil salespersons peddle their ugly wares is equally sneaky. They recast all criticism of or opposition to their ideology as something negative, thereby making those who disagree reluctant to express their opposition. Robin DiAngelo insultingly describes the denials of white-skinned people that they are racists as “white fragility.” Those whites who  aren’t racists don’t want to deny being racists because if they do, they’ll then be charged with non-existent white fragility on top of their non-existent racism.

When I worked at Deerfield High School, the district hired expensive racism huckster from California, Glenn Singleton, to teach District 113 employees about their racism. At his first lecture to the entire district, Singleton pre-classified his audience as falling into three categories according to their potential responses to his theories: The first group were those who would agree with him immediately. The second group were those who would be on the fence and need to be convinced. And the third group were those “who are gifted at subverting reform.” Singleton cunningly attempted to prevent criticism by pre-labeling pejoratively those who disagreed with him. This dishonest labeling tactic works because conservatives let it.

Organizations, resources, and profiteers that provide “anti-racism” propaganda to government schools are numerous, but here are some that taxpayers should watch out for:

• The 1619 Project—a much criticized revision of American history by the New York Times and racism-peddler/activist Nikole Hannah-Jones

• Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center

• Deep Equity

• White Privilege Conference

• Pacific Education Group/Courageous Conversation About Race—founder Glenn Singleton

• National SEED Project (Seeking Education Equity and Diversity)

• “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”—essay written by Peggy McIntosh

• The People’s History of the United States, a revisionist history written by Howard Zinn

It is not racist to criticize the loathsome and radical BLM that is explicitly committed to “disrupting ” the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure led by a father and mother, and to normalizing homosexuality and “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices. Such justifiable criticism does not become racist just because leftists shriek over and over and over that it is. Their epithet-hurling is not a magical incantation that turns truth into ugliness. It is a means of intimidation that leftists use all the time because conservatives quake and crumble in its wake.

Snap out of it, conservatives or you feed and strengthen the belching behemoth.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, a committed Christian, and, before last week, deeply admired and liked by people of all colors and no color, committed an almost unforgivable sin. He said this in response to a specific question about athletes kneeling during the national anthem:

I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country. Let me just tell you what I see or what I feel when the national anthem is played, and when I look at the flag of the United States. I envision my two grandfathers, who fought for this country during World War II, one in the Army and one in the Marine Corp, both risking their lives to protect our country and to try to make our country and this world a better place. Every time I stand with my hand over my heart, looking at that flag, and singing the national anthem, that’s what I think about, and in many cases, it brings me to tears thinking about all that has been sacrificed, not just [by] those in the military, but … those throughout the civil rights movements of the ’60s, and everyone, and all that has been endured by so many people up until this point. And is everything right with our country right now? No, it’s not. We still have a long way to go, but I think what you do by standing there and showing respect to the flag with your hand over your heart, is it shows unity. It shows that we are all in this together, we can all do better and that we are all part of the solution.” (emphasis added)

“Progressives” became apoplectic and splenetic. Judging from their attacks, one would think Brees had publicly celebrated Derek Chauvin.

Under withering attacks, Brees offered two apologies because the mob hated his first one. Then his wife, Brittany Brees, issued an apology in which she said,

Somehow we as white America … can feel good about not being racist, feel good about loving one another as God loves us. We can feel good about educating our children about the horrors of slavery and history. We can read books to our children about Martin Luther King, Malcolm X., Hank Aaron, Barack Obama, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman.. and feel like we are doing our part to raise our children to love, be unbiased and with no prejudice. To teach them about all of the African Americans that have fought for and risked their lives against racial injustice. Somehow as white Americans we feel like that checks the box of doing the right thing. Not until this week did Drew and I realize THAT THIS IS THE PROBLEM. To say “I don’t agree with disrespecting the flag” .. I now understand was also saying I don’t understand what the problem really is, I don’t understand what you’re fighting for, and I’m not willing to hear you because of our preconceived notions of what that flag means to us. That’s the problem we are not listening, white America is not hearing. We’re not actively LOOKING for racial prejudice.

If saying “I don’t agree with disrespecting the flag” also says “I don’t understand what the problem really is,” then does kneeling during the national anthem mean both “America is systemically racist” and “I don’t understand why you value the flag and national anthem. I don’t understand what you see that’s good in America. I’m not willing to hear you because of our view of America as pervasively evil and whites as oppressors”?

Unlike Brittany Brees, I can’t speak for all of white America. I don’t know what all of white America feels. But I do know that for a lot of white Americans, teaching our children about the horrors of slavery and lynchings, about Jim Crow laws, and about Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Hank Aaron, Jesse Owens, and the Tuskegee Airmen is not about “feeling good.” Raising our children to love others, to hate bigotry, and to stand up for mistreated friends is not about “feeling good” or “checking boxes.” It’s not about virtue-signaling or pride. It’s about serving Christ. It’s about loving our neighbors as ourselves. It’s about truth.

“Progressives” argue that people who explicitly condemn police brutality and all forms of bigotry and who have never said or done anything racist are the problem if they don’t endorse kneeling during the national anthem. Just curious, does that principle of collective guilt apply to all egregious sin? Are people who explicitly oppose the sexual exploitation of women and children in pornography, strip clubs, prostitution, and sex trafficking, and who have never viewed porn, visited a strip club, hired a prostitute, or trafficked women and children a problem? Should they kneel during the national anthem as a protest against the many Americans who watch porn, leer at women in strip clubs, hire prostitutes, and/or traffic in women and children? Are our flag and national anthem now symbols of the poisonous systemic abuse of women and children that colleges and universities promote through courses that celebrate porn? Are Americans who explicitly oppose the sexual exploitation of women and children, who are pro-actively teaching their children about its evil, and who have never been complicit in it via using porn, visiting strip clubs, hiring prostitutes, or sex-trafficking, the problem if they are not “actively” looking for the sexual exploitation of women and children?

Former NFL player Shannon Sharpe said this about Drew Brees’s response to an interviewer’s question about the knee-taking of athletes:

[Drew] issued an apology … but it’s meaningless because the guys know he spoke his heart the very first time around. I don’t know what Drew’s going to do, but he probably should just go ahead and retire now. He will never be the same. Take it from a guy that has been a leader in the locker room for a number of years. What he said, they will never look at him the same because he spoke his heart. It wasn’t what he said, it was how he said it. He was defiant. I will NEVER [yes, Sharpe shouted that defiantly] respect the man.

BTW, Brees did not speak defiantly as Sharpe falsely claimed—making Sharpe, therefore, a slanderer. Don’t believe me? Well, watch it yourself and see if you think Brees was “defiant”:

Sharpe expresses the “progressive” view of “tolerance,” and this is why “progressivism” will destroy both freedom and the country. Brees saying that he disagrees with knee-taking during the national anthem while at the same time saying the flag represents the sacrifices made during the Civil Rights era and acknowledging that right now we have a lot of work yet to do renders him—in Sharpe’s repugnant view—unsuitable for employment or respect.

Brees’s teammate Malcolm Jenkins castigated him too saying,

Drew Brees, if you don’t understand how hurtful, how insensitive your comments are, you are part of the problem. To think that because your grandfathers served in this country and you have a great respect for the flag that everybody else should have the same ideals and thoughts that you do is ridiculous. And it shows that you don’t know history. Because when our grandfathers fought for this country and served and they came back, they didn’t come back to a hero’s welcome. They came back and got attacked for wearing their uniforms. They came back to people, to racism, to complete violence.”

Brees never said anything like “everybody else should have the same ideals and thoughts” that he does. Moreover, Brees is justified in valuing the service of his grandfathers, and he is justified in his respect and love for America—the country to which emigrants the world over seek entry. He’s justified in loving America for her founding—though imperfectly realized—principles. He’s justified in celebrating the incredible integration of peoples of diverse races, ethnicities, and religions in America. He’s justified in appreciating how far we’ve come since slavery and Jim Crow laws.

It is possible for whites both to value the sacrifice and service of their fathers and grandfathers and to feel contempt for the injustice of black fathers and grandfathers being ill-treated following their service and sacrifice.

Vietnam war veterans—both black and white—were spit on by liberals when they returned home. Do we hold liberals who, not only didn’t engage in such behavior but also condemn it, accountable for that injustice? Do we blame such ugly behavior committed by some liberals fifty years ago on all of America? Does the American flag and national anthem symbolize their repugnant acts?

Jenkins continued,

And then here we are in 2020, with the whole country on fire, everybody witnessing a black man dying—being murdered—at the hands of the police, just in cold blood for everybody to see. The whole country’s on fire, and the first thing that you do is criticize one’s peaceful protest that was years ago when we were trying to signal a sign for help and signal for our allies and our white brothers and sisters, the people we consider to be friends, to get involved? It was ignored. And here we are now with the world on fire and you still continue to first criticize how we peacefully protest because it doesn’t fit in what you do and your beliefs without ever acknowledging that the fact that a man was murdered at the hands of police in front of us all and that it’s been continuing for centuries, that the same brothers that you break the huddle down with before every single game, the same guys that you bleed with and go into battle with every single day go home to communities that have been decimated.

Brees didn’t “continue to first criticize.” He has not been continually criticizing the kneeling protests. He didn’t initiate discussion of the topic. Brees was asked by an interviewer what he would do if teammates kneeled during the national anthem.

And while Brees didn’t mention George Floyd, he did acknowledge the suffering of the black community. To remind Jenkins, this is what Brees said:

[I]t brings me to tears, thinking about all that has been sacrificed, not just [by] those in the military, but … [by] those throughout the civil rights movements of the ’60s, and everyone, and all that has been endured by so many people up until this point. And is everything right with our country right now? No, it’s not. We still have a long way to go. … we can all do better and … we are all part of the solution.

What exactly did Jenkins mean when he said the kneeling protests were “ignored”? Likely he meant that there were many people who didn’t participate or support the protest. In other words, in Jenkins’ view, the only acceptable way to help decimated black communities is to protest the national anthem. But then isn’t Jenkins doing exactly what he accuses Brees of doing? Isn’t he demanding that everyone believe what he believes about the protests, the flag, and the national anthem?

Jenkins is ignoring that there are white people and black people trying to help decimated black communities. They’ve been trying for years, but they’re shouted down and called bigots for having different views than white and black liberals on how to solve the problems of racism and urban blight. Here are some of their ideas:

• How should we address actual racism committed by racist individuals in police departments—most of which are controlled by liberals? Punish them and/or get rid of them. How do we do that? Revisit/reform “qualified immunity” and policies that conceal police misconduct and protect brutal cops.

• How should we address crime in black communities? Work on transforming society by getting rid of no-fault divorce and using every resource available to promote true marriage and discourage out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Intact families with a mother and a father are the greatest protections against poverty and crime. And when crime is reduced in communities, businesses will move in.

• How do we improve education? Offer impoverished families school choice and end teachers’ unions that promote destructive policies and protect lousy teachers. And stop teaching divisive and false ideas from organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s education arm Teaching Tolerance, or Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, or The 1619 Project that present imbalanced views of American history and teach children of color that because of white oppression, they have no hope of moving up in the world.

• How do we help blacks improve their financial position? Deregulate businesses and reduce taxes in order to grow the economy, thereby providing jobs.

• How do we help eradicate bigotry, bitterness, and hatred? We preach the gospel—the whole gospel.

If Jenkins is concerned about the decimation in his community, why attack Brees? Why not attack “progressives” who have run the cities in which those decimated communities subsist? Why not attack the racism profiteers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who make bank by fomenting racial division? Why not attack liberal leaders who deny school choice to poor black families? Why not attack teachers’ unions that protect lousy teachers in failing schools? Why not attack fatherlessness that results in criminality? Why not attack Black Lives Matter (BLM) that seeks to dismantle families, which are the single best hope for black children?

Here are just some of BLM’s principles and goals:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.

Note that mothers and parents are mentioned but not fathers.

Are those principles and goals helpful to black children? Are they unifying? Are they good?

Jenkins was not done with his accusatory screed:

Drew, unfortunately, you’re somebody who doesn’t understand their privilege. You don’t understand the potential that you have to actually be an advocate for the people that you call brothers.

Will Jenkins stand behind whites who advocate for school choice, true marriage, and the end of teachers’ unions? Will Jenkins cheer whites who advocate against premarital sex and out-of-wedlock births? Will Jenkins cheer whites who advocate for the end of divisive, destructive diversity training and The 1619 Project that teach lies and foster division? Will Jenkins cheer for whites who advocate the ideas of Candace Owens, Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, Bob Woodson and “1776 Unites” project? Or are whites expected to advocate for only ideas and policies that Jenkins, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project scam promulgate?

Liberals have had fifty years to solve the problems endemic to urban communities of color—including eight years with a black president whose presidency saw black unemployment and racial division surge. Is Jenkins willing to listen to the ideas of others on how to help, how to advocate, how to get involved? Is he willing to listen to diverse ideas on how to rebuild suffering communities? Or will he say to black conservatives what he said to Brees: “you should shut the f–k up.”

It’s ironic that progressives have controlled most major cities for decades and have been forcing Americans in government schools and the corporate world to endure years of “diversity training,” “sensitivity” sessions, and “social justice” indoctrination, and yet we just suffered through the worst race riots since 1968 when Boomers and their rotten ideas began corrupting academia.

Their rotten ideas have—as expected and predicted—produced rotten fruit that is poisoning the hearts and minds of Americans. Race relations had been improving slowly but surely until the Boomers’ ideas seeped from sullied towers in bastions of idiocy like Berkeley to countless colleges and universities and then into high schools. Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege Conferences, and Howard Zinn’s revisionist history of the United States turned young teens’ minds into burbling cauldrons of contempt for America and its founding principles—those very principles that had brought us so far from the days of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and red-lining. With an erroneous understanding of American history, young Americans falsely believe that America was and remains a wholly evil country that must be destroyed and rebuilt in the recriminatory image of “progressives.”

Former NFL coach and Christian Tony Dungy, who likes and respects Drew Brees, expressed disappointment with his initial comments. Dungy said that “we need unifying voices, not divisive voices.” Dungy’s comments were disappointing in that he didn’t address the divisiveness of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, The 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, or people like Al Sharpton. He didn’t address the divisiveness of the attacks on Drew Brees for saying—when asked—that he doesn’t agree with kneeling during the national anthem. But you see, Dungy wasn’t asked about any of that, just like Brees was not asked specifically about George Floyd.

Two apologies from Drew Brees and one long one from Mrs. Brees, all of which suggest they have joined BLM. These apologies bring to mind Winston Smith at the end of 1984. Sadly, it doesn’t take torture to get grown men (and women) to capitulate to a destructive ideology. All it takes today is a barrage of insults.

Every day, we see across America signs of hope and progress. We see interracial couples, multi-racial churches, multi-racial groups of friends, and upwardly mobile black families. Is America perfect? Of course not. No society can ever be perfect because humans are fallen creatures. Fallen creatures hate. People of all colors hate. But our founding principles are good, and they are guiding us toward better.

Over a dozen years ago, while working at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois, I was helping a high school junior on her paper for American Studies (still co-taught by the same two teachers today). She cheerily told me that by the end of first semester in American Studies, she hated America and hated being an American. “Social justice” mission accomplished.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Drew-Brees-the-Mob.mp3

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A recent headline of a Chicago Sun-Times article alarmingly reports that a Chicago Public School watchdog is fielding 3 complaints of sexual misconduct per school day. This comes on the heels of a 2018 Chicago Tribune report that exposed Chicago public schools of having more than 520 sexual assault cases all across the city over the past decade.

According to the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), only 38 percent of Illinois public school students meet proficiency expectations in English Language Arts, only 32 percent of students meet proficiency expectations in math. This despite the fact that the NEA reports that taxpayers pay $16,925 per student per year in Illinois. For that kind of investment, the vast majority of students should not only be meeting proficiency expectations but exceeding them.

In addition, we now have the serious problem of gender-confused boys demanding unrestricted access to girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, and school boards and administrators affirming this nonsense. We also have a new state mandate that requires all students in K-12 public schools be taught, in a positive manner, about the “roles and contributions” of homosexuals and opposite-sex impersonators; as well as, textbooks purchased must include discussions of the those purported “roles and contributions.”

And let’s not forget that we have a state mandate in favor of highly objectionable sex ed material for the impressionable minds of government school children in 6th through 12th grade.

As if that isn’t enough, government schools are using instructional time to promote left-wing political views on climate change; open borders and global citizenship; Islamic studies and prayers to the god of Islam; Howard Zinn’s warped view of America’s Founding Fathers; and the pernicious ideology of “intersectionality” that is designed to divide and pit Americans against each other.

Christian parents and grandparents must seriously consider the great options they have for their students, and make the move away from government schools. The prevalence of perversion, subversion, and indoctrination are becoming more pronounced, and in order to protect the hearts and minds of our children, it is wise to consider other options.

We invite you to join us on Saturday, April 25th, to hear from a great line up of experts as we explore what we need to do to begin to rebuild the culture through education. The event is free and open to the public. Click HERE for a flyer for this event.

2020 IFI Education Forum

WHEN: Saturday, April 25th
WHERE: Church of Christian Liberty
  502 Euclid Avenue
Arlington Heights, IL  60004
TIME: 9:30 AM – 1:00 PM

Our tentative schedule includes:

9:30-10:15        Rescuing Our Children from Government Schools (Alex Newman, The Liberty Sentinel)

10:15-11:00       Homeschooling: What in the World is Going On? (Dr. Brian Ray, NHERI)

11:00-11:30       Home Education is Possible (Kirk Smith, Illinois Christian Home Educators)

11:30-Noon       The Benefits of Christian Schooling (Rev. Calvin Lindstrom, Christian Liberty Academy)

Noon-12:15        The State of Education Choice in Illinois (Lennie Jarret, Heartland Institute) 

12:15-1:00         Q&A Session

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Conservatives claim that government schools are in the tank for “progressivism” and that “progressive educators” lie when they claim to value diversity. There is no better evidence for those claims than the upcoming “All-School Seminar Day 2017” on Feb. 28 at New Trier High School (both campuses), which serves the affluent communities of Northfield and Winnetka, Illinois.

A perusal of the list of workshops being offered at this mandatory event reveals a Leftist dream for “education.” No need to travel to the next White Privilege Conference. New Trier parents can just send their kids to school for a smorgasbord of ideologically non-diverse seminars on “Understanding Today’s Struggle for Racial Civil Rights.”

Esteemed Chicago attorney Joseph Morris describes the seminar as “a rather bold and raw effort at hard-left propaganda with decidedly anti-American, anti-free-market, anti-family, anti-parent, and bigoted biases on display.”

In our quixotic quest for the holy grail of education–ideological diversity–let’s meander about the day’s agenda (click here and here) to learn about some of the workshops and speakers.

Seminars/workshops

• “Whose Civil Rights?: Transpeople of Color Navigating the U.S.”: “Civil rights are social and political freedoms that everyone in our society is supposed to have access to; however, because of socialization, bias, and discrimination, many trans people (particularly trans people of color) do not have access to these freedoms. In this session, we will explore the current cultural climate that enforces a gender binary and, therefore, forecloses civil rights for many trans people. We will examine how trans people are challenging and changing these systems.”

• “21st Century Voter Supression” [sic]: “A group discussion about the methods and regulations used in the US to deny or limit the voting rights of various minority groups…..The main emphasis of the workshop will be how to recognize, identify, and combat modern voter suppression tactics. Attendees should come out with a few concrete plans or ideas to help address the problem moving forward.”

• “Blackenomics 101 (The Movement, The Music, The Solution)”: “Rapper, entrepreneur, and activist, John the Author explores systemic racism in relation to building a black business and artist presence in minority communities.” I wonder what New Trier students will learn from little-known Chicago rapper who penned this little ditty about economics (my apologies to Mr. Author for any translation errors):
  

  CHORUS:
  
  Blackenomics nigga (repeat 8x)
  Black beat black, nigga
  Black beat black, suga
  Black heat black, nigga
  Take a back seat back nigga
  Not graduate from back
  Give back, nigga,
  Tell them get back, nigga
  Blackenomics nigga (repeat 8x)
  Black beat black, nigga
  Black eat black, suga
  Black heat black, nigga
  Take a back seat back nigga
  Not graduate from back
  Give back, nigga,
  Tell them get back, nigga
  

  VERSE 1:
  
  I seek to restore
  That’s why I opened the store
  That’s why I seek to rebuild
  ‘Cause I know they seek to destroy
  So when they look to the hills,
  That’s when I look to the Lord
  And when he tell me to kill
  That’s when I reach for my sword
  Die motherf*cker die
  I’m surprised that you’re still alive
  I heard you sold your soul a long time ago, but not I nigga, not I
  I’m a freedom fighter
  Need a lighter—no need cause I’m streakin’ fire, you can buy it from me
  All the lyin’ eye of tiger (?) I ain’t lyin’, come to my side you can try it for free
  Savor the taste, cause too much can endanger your taste buds
  Hope you niggas know what is and what ain’t love
  Cause if you don’t, then you can f*ck around and make love
  I’m from a city where we had a black mayor but they took his ass
  The public school system wasn’t built to last
  No equal opportunity or (?) to land on
  The only way we stand a motherf****** chance is if we break (?)
  

  CHORUS
  

  VERSE 2:

  Blackenomics, that’s the logic, that’s the target
  That was not a threat at all, that’s a promise
  It’s apparent if you feel it, you will flourish
  If you don’t you will perish, incoherent
  Lost souls—you lost souls when you crossed over,
  Trying to pass like a gallstone
  Raised from the foster home
  Niggas lost hope when the walls broke
  They crucify me, but the cross broke
  Heavy is the head that wear the crown
  I don’t wanna be king, but I’m the only one ready for it now
  Cause all these other niggas selling out
  Individualism is all these mothersf*ckers yelling about
  Divide and conquer, white supremacy the silent monster
  I see you sneaking in the corner trying to have some karma
  We ain’t looking to know your honor
  No your honor we (?) problem
  The resolution is an economic revolution
  All in the name of retribution, you ready? Let’s do it
  They integrated then infiltrated through immigration
  The richest folk in our neighborhood ain’t even our neighbors
  They take the dollar back across town, don’t you dare tell me to calm down
  (?) mister doghouse
  We want it all now, it’s time to push ‘em all out—I’m ready to start now

  If this is what passes for education in one of Illinois’ best public high schools, imagine what kind of education our poorest performing schools offer.

• “R.E.A.L.: Race, Equity, and Leadership – A Unique Course for High School Students”: Students will “Experience a snapshot of a unique high school course that is grounded in the Courageous Conversations Protocol. The “Courageous Conversations” protocol was developed by skillful race-baiter Glenn Singleton who exploits public schools to advance Leftist assumptions about how to think about race. I first encountered Singleton and his Pacific Educational Group when I worked at Deerfield High School, where seven one-day visits to District 113 to teach faculty and staff about their institutional racism and “whiteness” cost almost $100,000.

• “Not a Day Has Passed”: Students will watch a slide show based on an article by Lee Mun Wah. According to his bio, Mun Wah is among other things “an…Asian folkteller, educator, community therapist and master diversity trainer.” I first learned of Lee Mun Wah’s “Stir Fry Seminars” when one of Deerfield High School’s premier “change agents,” Daniel Cohen, became a disciple of Mun Wah. Cohen, now an English teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High school, is listed as Stir Fry Seminar “facilitator-intern”:
  

  As a white man dedicated to anti-racist, anti-sexist work, Daniel works to recognize his own assumptions and biases….Daniel has come to realize that he carries his whiteness, his maleness and his heterosexuality with him everywhere.

  How dare he. Surely Cohen has learned from the Left that he can dump his maleness like a hot potato. And if he can do that, it should be easy-peasy to shed that politically-incorrect whiteness and heterosexuality that mark him indelibly as an oppressor.

• “A People’s History of Chicago”: “In the tradition of Howard Zinn, A People’s History of Chicago is a poetic, progressive history that celebrates this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins whose stories are not often told.” For those who are unfamiliar with Howard Zinn, he was a far Left historical revisionist who wrote The People’s History of the United States, which is used in many high school social studies classes. Eminent economist Thomas Sowell said this about Zinn’s pseudo-history book:
  

  It speaks volumes about our schools and colleges that far-left radical Howard Zinn’s pretentiously titled book, “A People’s History of the United States,” is widely used across the country. It is one indictment, complaint, and distortion after another. Anyone who relies on this twisted version of American history would have no idea why millions of people from around the world are trying, sometimes desperately, to move to this country. The one virtue of Zinn’s book is that it helps you identify unmistakably which teachers are using their classrooms as propaganda centers.

• “Western Bias in Science”: “Newton, Darwin, Curie…Can you think of a nonEuropean [sic] or non-American scientist in history? Come examine the western bias in science education, its sources and its implications, in this interactive workshop.”If the theme of the all-day seminar is race, why would all European and American scientists be excluded? Don’t students learn about African American scientists George Washington Carver and Mae Jemison?Moreover, by the end of high school, how many scientists have students learned about in depth? 12? 16? 20? Here’s a question for those rummaging for racism: How many of the 20 most influential scientific discoveries or theories in over 2,000 years of history were the accomplishments of non-European and non-American scientists? And let’s not forget that America and Europe together cover vast geographic territories and include wildly diverse cultures and ethnicities over this time period. Many important American and European scientists are also excluded from the short list of scientists about whom students learn.

• “Developing Empathy & Acceptance by Reading Picture Books to Children”: “Come to the Northfield Library and read picture books to a group of children (ages 3-5). The picture books will focus on themes of embracing diversity…and social justice. Students will lead activities related to the books with the young children.” One wonders what picture books students will be reading to toddlers and who chose them? What forms of “diversity” will be depicted in these picture books?

Speakers

Andrew Aydin is the keynote speaker at the Northfield campus. Aydin is a policy advisor to liberal congressman John Lewis. Aydin has contributed to the ethically impoverished Southern Poverty Law Center and the dystopian feminist comic book Bitch Planet.

Monica Trinidad “will share her organizing work with We Charge Genocide….She will then lead a hands-on workshop that will guide participants through a discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement today.” Trinidad “is a queer, latinx artist and organizer born and raised on the southeast side of Chicago.” The word “Latinx” was invented by those who detest “gendered” anything, including language. The goal is to “move beyond gender binaries….Latinx…makes room for people who are trans, queer, agender, non-binary, gender non-conforming or gender fluid.”

OiYan A. Poon: “Dr. Poon challenges students to critically analyze systems of higher education, student affairs practices, and to understand their power to transform oppressive structures as social justice change agents…. she received….a 2013 National Distinguished Educator award from the Pacific Education Group’s Courageous Conversations Summit.” An award from the Pacific Education Group is confirmation that Poon is a Leftist.

Suggestions for ideological diversity on race

• The Winnetka campus is offering a seminar on “Mass Incarceration: Race and Prison in America.” Perhaps in the interest of ideological diversity, seminar organizers could have students read Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald’s testimony before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary titled “The Myth of Criminal Justice Racism.”

• In the workshop on black economics, students might be better served by reading some essays by black economist and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell.

• New Trier could invite Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece Dr. Alveda King to talk about the “black genocide”: the disproportionate number of black babies being aborted relative to the number of blacks in the population.

• Seminar organizers could have students read or listen to and discuss an interview with black author Shelby Steele on “The Future of Race in America.” Steele asserts that fatherless families and the use of “victimization as a rationalization” are the chief causes of the plight of blacks in America.

• Perhaps New Trier could offer students the opportunity to listen to a presentation by author and member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board Jason Riley, who happens to be black, in which he discusses his book Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed.

I can almost see the scornful scowls on the faces of the organizers of New Trier’s All-School Seminar Day at the thought of exposing students to assumptions about race with which they—“progressive” dogmatists—disagree.

What can parents do?

• New Trier parents could file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking all documents including electronic communication that mentions “All-School Seminar Day,” “civil rights,” “race,” “racism,” “systematic racism,” “institutional racism,” “bias,” and “microaggression.” Those are broad terms, but they can limit the time frame that their request covers to, for example, Feb. 1, 2016-Jan. 9, 2017. This would help them know who the propagandists organizers are. Leftist teachers depend on their anonymity, autonomy, and absence of accountability to exploit their positions and taxpayer money to proselytize and propagandize.

• New Trier parents could call their children out of school on All-School Indoctrination Day. They could call them out for “personal reasons,” or tell the school administration and board members exactly why they’re calling them out. No school administration wants to risk the bad PR that would result if they tried to take disciplinary action against students for their absence, and no teacher wants to risk the bad PR and wrath of parents if he or she tried to dock a student’s grade for their failure to attend an indoctrination day.

• Parents could ask for the total cost to the district of holding this event, including speakers’ fees (and flights and per diem if speakers have come from out of state), cost of materials, and cost of any substitute teachers that may be needed.

• Parents could attend the next school board meeting to criticize (winsomely, of course) the absence of ideological diversity on these topics, which violates the most basic pedagogical obligations of a sound education. School administrators and faculty often respond to parents who challenge obvious bias and viewpoint discrimination by saying that students are free to express dissenting views, but that’s a red herring. The central issue is not whether students are free to express dissenting views. The central issue is whether all students should have their views challenged by the voices of experts or just conservative students. Should all students have the opportunity to have their views reinforced through reading and hearing the voices of experts or is that opportunity reserved just for “progressive” students?

• Parents should request that another “All-School Seminar Day” be offered with equal number of opportunities in which dissenting views (i.e., conservative views) on matters related to race (or gender dysphoria) are presented. If the school administration refuses, they should be asked to defend their refusal. Conservatives are always on the defensive. It’s long past time that we use the hypocrisy, intellectual inconsistency, and rhetoric of “progressives” to put them on the defensive.

It should be obvious that it’s not ideological diversity that we find in government schools today. It’s ideological incest committed by Leftists. And the kind of de facto censorship of conservative ideas that is corrupting New Trier’s All-School Seminar Day is what transmogrifies education into indoctrination.

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Written by Kate Hardiman

For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.

The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”

Pesta, currently an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, has taught the gamut of Western literature—from the Classics to the modern—at seven different universities, ranging from large research institutions to small liberal arts colleges to branch campuses. He said he has given the quizzes to students at Purdue University, University of Tennessee Martin, Ursinus College, Oklahoma State University, and University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.

“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix.

Before even distributing the syllabus for his courses, Pesta administered his short quizzes with basic questions about American history, economics and Western culture. For instance, the questions asked students to circle which of three historical figures was a president of the United States, or to name three slave-holding countries over the last 2,000 years, or define “capitalism” and “socialism” in one sentence each.

Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.

Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.

What’s more, he began to observe a shift in his students’ quiz responses in the early 2000s. Before that time, Pesta described his students as “often historically ignorant, but not politicized.” Since the early 2000s, Pesta has found that “many students come to college preprogrammed in certain ways.”

“They cannot tell you many historical facts or relate anything meaningful about historical biographies, but they are, however, stridently vocal about the corrupt nature of the Republic, about the wickedness of the founding fathers, and about the evils of free markets,” Pesta said. “Most alarmingly, they know nothing about the fraught history of Marxist ideology and communist governments over the last century, but often reductively define socialism as ‘fairness.’”

Pesta also noted that, early on, his students’ “blissful ignorance was accompanied by a basic humility about what they did not know.” But over time he said he increasingly saw “a sense of moral superiority in not knowing anything about our ‘racist and sexist’ history and our ‘biased’ institutions.”

“As we now see on campus,” Pesta said, “social justice warriors are arguing that even reading the great books of Western culture is at best a micro-aggression, and at worst an insidious form of cultural imperialism and indoctrination.”

Pesta, an outspoken critic of Common Core, said he believes that these attitudes will become more pronounced moving forward, due to Common Core architect David Coleman’s rewrite of Advanced Placement American and European history standards.

Pesta argues that Coleman, now president of the College Board, “has further politicized the teaching of history, reducing the story of Western culture to little more than a litany of crimes, exploitations, and genocides, while simultaneously whitewashing the history of ideologies like socialism and communism.”

Despite no longer giving the quizzes, Pesta told The Fix that he continues “to seek effective ways to teach students the literature of Western culture, which it is not only alien and complex, but often condemned by students before it is truly encountered.”

“We must absolutely teach those areas where Western culture has fallen short, but always with the recognition that such criticism is possible because of the freedoms and advantages offered by Western culture,” he said.

This article was originally posted at TheCollegeFix.com

The young black man in the video below, Frederick Wilson II, expresses views that are arguably far wiser and more helpful in the debate over justice and racial reconciliation than anything Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, or Jesse Jackson has said in recent years.

And Wilson’s views are exponentially more helpful than these inflammatory words from Louis Farrakhan who spoke recently at Morgan State University:

The young are God’s children, and they’re not goin’ down peaceful. You may not want to fight, but you better get ready. Teach your baby how to throw the bottle [Molotov cocktail] if they can [he then imitates a child throwing, while the audience laughs and applauds].

We’re gonna die anyway. Let’s die for something. Elijah Muhammad said…near fifty years ago…there were 20,000,000 of us, he said “If 10,000,000 of us lost our lives, there would be 10,000,000 of us left to go free….”

In this book [Farakkhan holds up a book], there’s a law for retaliation: Like for like. The Bible says, an eye, a tooth, a life. As long as they kill us, and go to Wendy’s, and have a burger, and go to sleep, they’re gonna keep killing us. But when we die and they die [cheering and standing ovation], then soon, we’re gonna sit at a table and talk about it We want some of this earth, or we’ll tear this G##d#mned country apart! As-salaamu alaikum.”

Perhaps this kind of rhetoric contributed to some blacks believing that the way to end racial injustice in Ferguson, Missouri was to steal and destroy the property of fellow blacks.

I hope that those high school social studies teachers who currently use tax dollars to promote their Leftist social and political views about race would show the Wilson video to students to balance out the whole “institutional racism” theme.

A few years ago when I was helping a Deerfield High School (DHS) student with a paper for her American Studies class, she shared that by the end of her first semester in that class, she hated America and hated being white. Great job, teachers. I’m sure that’s just what American taxpayers want their hard-earned money to subsidize.

Political proselytizing in public schools continues unabated. DHS teachers Ken Kramer and Neil Rigler continue to teach American Studies, and this year’s curriculum includes an essay by Leftist homosexual playwright Tony Kushner and five essays (some of which come from controversial history book A People’s History of  the United States) by Leftist American history revisionist Howard Zinn:

“American Things” by Tony Kushner

“A Kind of Revolution” by Howard Zinn

“American Ideology” by Howard Zinn

“Columbus and Western Civilization” by Howard Zinn

“We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God” by Howard Zinn

“Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom” by Howard Zinn

Other authors include Eric Foner, Barbara Kingsolver, Lorraine Ali, and Leon Litwack, all liberal.

“Progressives” will argue that these scholars are well-respected scholars and prize-winners, which is true but ignores the bias that shapes their work, determining which facts to include, which to omit, which to emphasize, and how to frame their analyses. It also ignores the academic mission of both Zinn and Foner to use their role as historians to advance their political agenda.

Let’s take a glimpse at the writers whom public school “agents of change” promote.

Former Leftist, now conservative writer David Horowitz writes this about Eric Foner:

In 2002, Columbia University hosted a conference of academic radicals called, “Taking Back The Academy: History of Activism, History As Activism.” The published text of the conference papers was provided with a Foreword by Professor Eric Foner, who is a past president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and a leading academic figure. Far from sharing Professor [Stanley] Fish’s view that a sharp distinction should be drawn between political advocacy and the scholarly disciplines, Professor Foner embraced the proposition that political activism is essential to the academic mission: “The chapters in this excellent volume,” wrote Foner, “derive from a path-breaking conference held at Columbia University in 2002 to explore the links between historical scholarship and political activism….As the chapters that follow demonstrate, scholarship and activism are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but are, at their best, symbiotically related.”

Kramer and Rigler include in their coursepack the essay “And Our Flag Was Still There,”  in which well-known author and liberal Barbara Kingsolver takes aim at patriotism:

Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth who’ve spent years learning our culture and contributing their talents to our economy. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union.

In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder? Who are we calling terrorists here? Outsiders can destroy airplanes and buildings, but it is only we, the people, who have the power to demolish our own ideals.

Thomas Sowell (who happens to be black), Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution ), has this to say about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States of which Kramer and Rigler are so enamored:

It speaks volumes about our schools and colleges that far-left radical Howard Zinn’s pretentiously titled book, “A People’s History of the United States,” is widely used across the country. It is one indictment, complaint, and distortion after another.

Anyone who relies on this twisted version of American history would have no idea why millions of people from around the world are trying, sometimes desperately, to move to this country. The one virtue of Zinn’s book is that it helps you identify unmistakably which teachers are using their classrooms as propaganda centers.

One wonders if all the “progressive” public school “agents of change” around the country tell their students and their parents that Zinn is a controversial historian. One wonders if they require their students to read criticism of Zinn’s revisionist history and discuss Zinn’s open admission that he used his work to advance his Leftist political goals. One wonders if Leftist “educators” require students to spend equal time reading the work of Thomas Sowell, and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom—you know, in the service of diversity, balance, and “critical thinking.”

It’s not just curricula that are infected with biased Leftist ideas that distort American history and foster division rather than unity among disparate groups. School administrations also promote Leftist assumptions through professional development conferences, workshops, and seminars that taxpayers subsidize. These include controversial racism-profiteer Glenn Singleton’s National Summit for Courageous Conversations, Regional Summits for Courageous Conversations, and “Beyond Diversity” seminars, which suck money from Americans through their public schools.

For the uninitiated, liberal theories regarding oppression almost always address homosexuality. Here’s an excerpt  from one of the sessions offered at last fall’s National Summit for Courageous Conversations in New Orleans:

Phase 2 seminar. Journey back to a time when homosexual men and women were exalted in their native cultures (”Two Spirits”), only to have it stripped away when Eurocentric ways took control.

And we can’t forget one of the most infamous wastes of taxpayer money: the annual White Privilege Conference that seeks to persuade whites that they are racist oppressors by virtue of nothing other than their skin color.

The curricular choices of liberal teachers present a lopsided picture of America that over-emphasizes America’s flaws and de-emphasizes those aspects of America that have made this the greatest nation in history. Biased Leftist resources transform education into indoctrination and exacerbate rather than mitigate racial hostility.  The Leftist assumptions about race, oppression, and justice that emerge from the writings of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, Peggy McIntosh’s invisible knapsack, the White Privilege Conference, and Glenn Singleton’s dizzying array of money-making seminars and summits are corrupting education and disuniting Americans.

Race ballyhooers who line their pockets from the sale of their snake oil that aggravates racial wounds thus ensuring the perpetuation of their schemes claim they seek courageous and honest conversations.  They don’t. The only kind of “conversations” they want are ones that involve them pontificating and others sycophantically echoing.

It would behoove taxpayers to send an email to their local school administrators, asking if any district money has been or will be spent on any of these professional development conferences.

Please consider supporting the work of Illinois Family Institute.

Decades ago, summer was the time that necessitated increased parental vigilance. School was the safe place. But the times they have a’changed. Self-righteous “agents of change” stand ready at the schoolhouse door to mold other people’s children into ideological replicas of themselves. So now the school year has become the time that necessitates increased parental vigilance.

One organization that warrants particular attention is “Teaching Tolerance,” which is laughingly called an “educational project,” but is, in reality, the pernicious propaganda project of the leftwing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This is the organization that has listed the Illinois Family Institute, Family Research Council, and the American Family Association as “hate groups.”

The propagandists — I mean educators — at Teaching Tolerance are taking full advantage of the propensity of parents to remain blissfully unaware of what their children are being taught. These “tolerance teachers” count on parents remaining ignorant of their goal to undermine conservative moral and political beliefs.

Here is the newest resource spawned by the manipulators of children at the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance of which parents should be aware:

Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers 2011-2012

This handbook for teachers begins with a quote from the Brazilian Marxist, Paulo Freire, who is the guru for “social justice teachers” and wrote their bible, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The introduction makes clear that liberation from oppression supersedes sound, apolitical education:

Planning to Change the World is a plan book for teachers who believe their students can create meaningful social change. It is the product of a collaboration between two education networks — the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) and the Education for Liberation Network — and is published in partnership with Rethinking Schools. The information and ideas featured on its pages come from teachers, college students and activists who, like you, struggle daily to put their values into practice. As educators, our vision of teaching for liberation often gets buried under the everyday realities of teaching. Bombarded with paperwork, tests, curriculum mandates, we feel frustrated, overwhelmed, alone.

…Planning to Change the World is packed with important social justice birthdays and historical events, words of wisdom from visionary leaders, lesson plans, resources, social justice education happenings and more. [Emphases added]

The planning book includes quotes from radical historical revisionist Howard Zinn, homosexual activist Staceyann Chinn, and controversial labor leader Cesar Chavez. It also includes dozens of resources for teachers, most of which are extreme leftwing resources, including resources that promote far leftist assumptions about homosexuality, economics, religion, and American “imperialism.”

Here are some of the historical events honored just in November by the SPLC’s “educators” from Teaching Tolerance:

• Transgender Day of Remembrance
• The 50th anniversary of the first openly gay person to run for public office
• Eid al-Adha: an Islamic holiday
• Muharram, the first day of the Islamic calendar
• The 170th anniversary of the Creole revolt
• First day of Native American Heritage Month
• 80th anniversary of the beginning of the removal of the Choctaw Indians from their lands
• Thanksgiving: Teaching Tolerance recommends that teachers use resources from the anti-American organization, Oyate, about which I have previously written.

Teaching Tolerance also recommends an activity they created called Thanksgiving Mourning:

[S]tudents will review two written works by Native American authors. The first — a speech written by Wamsutta James in 1970 — gave birth to the National Day of Mourning, which is observed on Thanksgiving by some indigenous people. To them, Thanksgiving is ‘a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture.’ The Day of Mourning, on the other hand, is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection, as well as a protest of the racism and oppression that Native Americans continue to experience.”

I wonder if Teaching Tolerance would revise their list of important “social justice” historical events to include mention of Joseph Scheidler, father of the pro-life movement. He is the indefatigable pursuer of social justice for the most vulnerable in America: babies in utero, whose developmental immaturity or imperfections put them at risk of legalized extermination.

As I’ve written before, “teaching for social justice” is, in a nutshell:

repackaged socialism with its focus on economic redistribution. Social justice theory emphasizes redistribution of wealth and values uniformity of economic and social position over liberty. Social justice advocates seek to use the force of government to establish economic uniformity.

Its other dominant features pertain to race, gender, class, and sexual orientation/ identity/ expression. Social justice theory as I’m describing it encourages people to view the world through the divisive lens of identity politics that demarcates groups according to which group constitutes the “oppressors” and which the “oppressed.” Those who are identified as the “oppressors” need not have committed any acts of actual persecution or oppression, nor feel any sense of superiority toward or dislike of the supposed “oppressed” class. The problem with social justice theory is that it promotes the idea that “institutional racism,” as opposed to actual acts of mistreatment of individuals by other individuals is the cause of differing lots in life.

Social justice theorists cultivate the racist, sexist, heterophobic stereotype that whites, males, and heterosexuals are oppressors. This is an offensive, prejudiced stereotype that robs minorities of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives, telling them that their lots in life cannot improve through their own efforts but only through an appropriate degree of self-flagellation on the parts of the purported oppressors. It cultivates a sense of perpetual victimization and powerlessness on the parts of minorities and an irrational and illegitimate sense of guilt on the parts of whites, or men, or heterosexuals.

Finally, social justice theory is distinctly anti-American and hyper-focuses on America’s mistakes and failings. Social justice theory diminishes or ignores the remarkable success America has achieved in integrating virtually every ethnic and racial group in the world, and in enabling people to improve their lots in life through economic opportunity and American principles of liberty and equality.

To learn more about the ethically and intellectually bankrupt Southern Poverty Law Center’s deeply troubling ideology, goals, and tactics, click HERE (this is a very recent and important article from an immigration reform organization on the SPLC’s “phony claims”), and HERE.

When you’re done, email your children’s teachers, some of whom likely subscribe to Teaching Tolerance’s free online newsletter for educators, asking whether they will be using any resources or activities from Teaching Tolerance. Then make it clear that should they decide to use any resources created by, or recommended by Teaching Tolerance, you want to be notified so you can opt your child out.