Ever since the D.C. marsh rodents regained control of both legislative chambers and the executive branch in a murkier, mustier way than usual, the evening news has gone from depressing to unbearable. But just because the political marsh is controlled by R.U.O.S. (rodents of unusual size, hat tip Princess Bride) doesn’t mean all the Wesleys are pinned beneath them.

Last month, U.S. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX), introduced H.R. 3163 in the U.S. House of Representatives. Roy’s proposal, titled “Combatting Racist Teaching in Schools (CRT) Act,” would forbid federal money (aka taxpayer’s moolah) from funding any elementary, secondary school, or institution of higher education that teaches race-based ideologies. Rep. Roy is fulfilling his role as a representative of the people with this resolution, and he should be applauded for being bold enough to do his job.

This bill has 32 Wesley-esque co-sponsors, all Republican, including Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller, who is one of the original co-sponsors.

In a Daily Signal podcast, Roy expounded on the dangers that will result if America’s youth keep being brainwashed in Critical Race Theory (CRT):

The danger is that we destroy the republic because we’re no longer united under the idea of what it is to be an American. And people say, “Oh, you guys are overstating this.” No, we are great because we’re united around these ideas. We’re great because we have values that bring us together. … And when you … destroy all those things that hold us together, including a belief that we’re united as Americans, then it destroys the fabric of the country.

Congressman Roy specified in his press release that this legislation would ban funding to institutions that propagate ideologies teaching any of the following:

• Any race is inherently superior or inferior to any other race, color, or national origin.

• The United States is a fundamentally racist country.

• The Declaration of Independence and/or Constitution of the United States is a fundamentally racist document.

• An individual’s moral character or worth is determined by the individual’s race, color, or national origin.

• An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, is inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

• An individual, because of the individual’s race, bears responsibility for the actions committed by other members of the individual’s race, color, or national origin

Not many good things occur in the political swamp, so when an occasional fresh breeze like H.R. 3163 stirs the fetid air, we should do all in our power to let our lawmakers know that we approve wholly and heartily.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative to ask him/her to support or even co-sponsor this legislation to ban federal tax dollars from going to any school that promotes CRT.

CRT has managed to sneak into government schools, corporate training programs, and even the military. Yet, most Americans reject this insidious Marxist-derived ideology that claims that racism (or white privilege) is the evil foundations force at work in society. CRT is sowing seeds of division and hatred, or as Rep. Roy said, CRT is “teaching our children to believe that America is evil, to be ashamed of ‘their whiteness,’ and how they can undo their whiteness.”

“Worse yet is its pernicious demands to ‘divvy us up by race’ and perpetuate the lie that we should be treated differently by virtue of our skin color. There is no room for state-sanctioned racism anywhere in our society, and we must oppose it with all our might.”

Long before California’s infamous “ethnic studies” curriculum made national headlines in March for literally suggesting children chant to the Aztec gods of cannibalism and human sacrifice, the insidious weaponization of “race” and “racism” had already overtaken the nation’s government school system.

The racist effort to divide and conquer Americans by “race,” all under the guise of examining everything through the “lens of racism” and fighting “structural” or “systemic” racism, has come to be known as critical race theory, or CRT.

Just think of it as half-baked pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook aimed at stirring up as much racial hatred, resentment, division, and conflict as possible.

Like cult leaders, the growing overpaid legions of tax-funded “experts” in CRT want the public to believe that this is some complicated and mysterious “epidemic” that only overpaid “experts” can understand. But the reality behind CRT is actually pretty simple.

The premise is basically this: All “white people” are racist oppressors with power and privilege, and all non-white people are oppressed victims.

From that flows the silly premise that America—among the least racist nations on earth, studies show—is a “systemically racist” abomination that must be “decolonized” and dismantled.

In fact, any institutions created by peoples or nations of mostly European heritage are evil and must be pulverized. And any people who lack sufficient melanin must repent for their collective guilt.

If all that sounds evil and unhinged, good—it is.

Unfortunately, it’s also now a staple in the diet of impressionable young victims of government schools across America.

The goal isn’t really fighting racism, as its proponents claim.

In fact, a number of studies show that “diversity training,” an offshoot of CRT aiming to put the cult’s views into practice, “can activate bias or spark a backlash,” the Harvard Business Review warned.

“Many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward,” it said.

Duh!

The same is true for children: When they’re bombarded with racial division and hyper-racial extremism, they not only begin thinking in terms of race, they also begin resenting those supposedly in other “groups” alleged to be in conflict with them.

And that’s precisely the point. In the Soviet Union, like Karl Marx decades earlier, totalitarians divided people by “class,” driving a wedge between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.”

Similar divisions were created and exploited by Chairman Mao in communist China.

In America, where the poor live materially better than the rich in many nations, the “class conflict” narrative was not as effective.

And so, as in National Socialist (Nazi) Germany, socialist and communist agents from abroad and homegrown subversives turned to “race” as the key fault line to exploit.

It has been bubbling beneath the surface in America for years—even decades. But in recent months, it has exploded into the national consciousness as increasingly extreme examples of tax-funded CRT indoctrination spark outrage from parents and normal people.

There’s a long history behind this ideology of hate in America.

Part 6 of this series explored the enormous influence of the Marxist Frankfurt School and its “critical theory” schemes on American culture—and particularly in its government-controlled education system. CRT is an outgrowth of this deadly weapon, adapted to the American scene.

A big part of the lie depends on fraudulent history taught to children such as the almost universally discredited “1619 Project” and the debunked diatribes of communist Howard Zinn, as documented in this previous article in this series.

The end result is disaster.

Tax-Funded CRT at School

Naturally, adults of all “races” with even basic critical-thinking skills, common sense, and a rudimentary understanding of history could see right through the CRT propaganda.

But young children in government schools for five days a week? They make for easy victims. After all, mommy and daddy said to listen to the teacher.

That’s why the forces behind CRT are focusing so heavily on targeting children.

What do CRT and the race-mongering look like in practice?

In California, for example, the newly adopted “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” approved by the state Board of Education on March 18, suggests children seek help from pagan Aztec gods for “a revolutionary spirit” in a chant.

“The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression,” writes Christopher F. Rufo.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in the nation, has already indicated that it will be requiring “ethnic studies” for graduation starting in 2023. The whole state may eventually follow. And the cancers that begin in California often spread nationwide.

In one of the wealthiest districts in the nation, Silicon Valley’s Cupertino Union School District, third-grade students were reportedly ordered to “deconstruct” their racial, gender, religious, family structure, and sexual identities.

After that, they were told to create an “identity map” and rank themselves based on the “power and privilege” received from the “intersection” of their various “identities.”

“A white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman,” offered the school materials in an example of how to understand the results.

In short, under this twisted worldview, your melanin content makes you either an oppressor to be destroyed, like the bourgeoisie, or a victim who must destroy others, like the proletariat.

This sort of madness is taking place all across “red” states, too.

North Carolina’s largest school district, Wake County, for instance, launched a campaign to eradicate “whiteness in educational spaces.” As part of that, teachers were ordered to “disrupt whiteness” and “override families,” according to Rufo.

It’s not new, either. In 2017, outraged parents fumed at a Rockingham County, North Carolina, Board of Education meeting after learning that a teacher forced children of European heritage to stand in front of the class and apologize for their “white privilege.”

In Ames, Iowa, and other cities and towns across America in recent years, the “Black Lives Matter Week of Action” has been peddling “diversity and globalism,” “the disruption of the Western nuclear family,” “transgender, queer affirming, and collective value,” and more.

To understand just how aggressive the peddlers of this Marxist narrative in schools have become, consider news reports from mid-March about government-school teachers who plotted to “infiltrate” parents’ groups opposed to the indoctrination, use “hackers” to mess with their communications, and even “expose these people publicly” for speaking out.

Similar Tactics in Communist China

Victims of these tactics who have lived through the horrors that stem from them recognize the same schemes clearly.

Prominent Chinese exile Lily Tang-Williams, who grew up under Mao but eventually fled to the United States, remembers those exact tactics being used in Mao’s government-indoctrination centers for children, masquerading as “public schools.”

“It creates hatred, guilt, and division in our country,” she said about CRT being peddled on children in school. “It is a tool used by the radical left to divide and conquer.”

Having grown up during Mao’s reign and experienced the entire 10-year Cultural Revolution, Williams sounded the alarm about what’s happening in America today.

“Let me tell you, this racist theory is nothing more than a tactic to separate citizens into ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressor’ classes, and it is something I have heard before,” said Williams, who recently testified before the New Hampshire legislature on this issue.

Mao’s regime sought to destroy the “four olds,” she claimed, referring to the mass-murdering communist Chinese tyrant’s campaign to eradicate China’s old ideas, culture, habits, and customs.

“He and his regime used identity politics to divide people into 10 classes: five red and five black,” she explained. “The red classes included poor and lower-middle peasants, workers, revolutionary soldiers, revolutionary cadres, and revolutionary martyrs. The black classes were landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad-influencers, and rightists.”

Every member of the “black classes” was considered guilty by association, simply for having been born into a family, and was said to have been “born black.”

“Mao urged Red Guards to publicly shame the black classes by raising their fists, making them do self-criticism, confess and denounce themselves, or they would get beat up, locked up in a room to write about their ‘blackness,’ apologize for their families or themselves, and be sent to re-education camps to do hard labor,” Williams continued, adding that some young members of the families would do anything to escape the shame and association, including reporting their own relatives to the Chinese Communist Party.

Tens of millions of Chinese died amid the Cultural Revolution “due to those murderous policies,” said Williams, who serves on the advisory board of U.S. Parents Involved in Education along with this writer and others in the field.

“What is happening in America today with CRT, in our schools, in our workplaces and governmental agencies, really reminds me of what happened during the Cultural Revolution,” she added.

Bad for Children

Aside from being destructive to society, the CRT madness is going to harm children of all types, too, experts say.

“It is horrendous and utterly harmful psychology to tell people, especially young children and teens, who do not believe that they are racists, and may actively despise racism, that there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from being racists,” explained Doctor of Clinical Psychology Gary Thompson with the Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center.

“Woke Supremacy is just as psychologically destructive on people as White Supremacy,” added Thompson, who happens to be a black American.

Thompson claims that many public schools are now teaching children as young as second and third grade that “whiteness is synonymous with evil, that the police systematically hunt down and murder black men deliberately, and all these other highly charged political convictions that they’re teaching as if they’re uncontested fact.”

How to Fight Back

Parents across the nation are scrambling for ways to fight back and protect their children.

Thompson, who also serves on the advisory board of U.S. Parents Involved in Education, said his personal opinion is that attempts by average parents to eliminate CRT from their children’s public school would be “futile.”

“If CRT does not fit your family values, the option of leaving public schools may be a viable option for parents,” he said, echoing a growing sentiment in America as enrollment in public schools continues to plummet.

Partly in response to CRT propaganda, millions of parents have fled government schools over the last year for homeschooling and private schools.

Unfortunately, the CRT madness is no longer confined just to government schools. Even many “woke” elite and self-styled “Christian” schools have been jumping on the bandwagon, so parents must do their due diligence.

Ignoring the voices of some of America’s most prominent black Christian leaders—Voddie Baucham and Bishop E.W. Jackson, for instance—many liberal churches and seminaries have taken the plunge, too.

Some critics have argued that indoctrinating children with CRT at taxpayer expense is already against the law.

Wu Wenyuan, executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, has been fighting the battle in California and beyond for years. She argues that CRT in the classroom is “illegal and unconstitutional.”

“Teaching CRT that’s predicated on racial divisions and a social dichotomy of victim versus oppressor fundamentally violates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which guarantees equal protection of the laws—Title VI/VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, California’s constitutional principle of equal treatment, and a plethora of anti-discrimination laws,” she warned.

In Florida, top officials are taking action. In fact, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis just promised the ideology would not be included in his state’s public schools.

“Let me be clear there is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory, teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money,” DeSantis said.

“They’re trying to make people view each other based on race, I want to do the opposite. I want to treat people as individuals,” he added. “I want to treat people based on character.”

But of course, dividing people is the goal—not an unintended side effect—and the constant appeals to “white supremacy” are simply a red herring designed to force critics to remain silent.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

CRT’s leaders and cult-like adherents have labeled virtually everything the far-left and Marxists hate as “white supremacy”: the U.S. Constitution, Christianity, math, the rule of law, punctuality, individualism, Western civilization, the nuclear family, objective truth, and more.

Nothing and nobody is safe.

Adults largely recognize the evil and idiocy of this. However, America’s children—like children in other nations who have been indoctrinated to hate their parents and their compatriots before committing ghastly atrocities—do not know better.

It will be up to parents to protect their own children, and thereby the nation and its freedoms.

This article as 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.

Here’s a story of actual racial injustice that happened in a liberal North Shore school district: District 113. As you read this, imagine if the Hispanic community in Highland Park and Highwood, Illinois had known this story as it was taking place.

In 2007, District 113, which is composed of Deerfield and Highland Park High Schools, received a federal grant of thousands of dollars because Highland Park High School (HPHS) had failed to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP).  AYP is a tool for measuring how well a district’s students perform on standardized tests under the controversial No Child Left Behind Act.

The reason HPHS’ scores on standardized tests failed to make AYP is that HPHS has a sizeable Hispanic population from primarily neighboring Highwood. Most of these families do not have the financial resources available for private subject area and test-prep tutors as many Highland Park and Deerfield families do, and in many of these families, English is not spoken at home.

To be clear, District 113 had received a hefty federal grant to help Hispanic students score better on standardized tests. And what did the administration and school board chose to do with those taxpayer dollars?

Between spring 2007 and spring 2008, District 113, using both the federal grant and some  district money, spent approximately $83,000 to hire the San Francisco-based shyster Glenn Singleton and representatives from his Pacific Educational Group to come  seven times to District 113 to teach employees about their “whiteness.”

Every time Singleton or his representative came, every administrator, every department chair, two teachers from every department and area (e.g., multi-media, custodial pool, technology, secretarial pool) from both high schools attended all-day meetings during which they discussed their “whiteness.” This meant that all the participating employees missed seven days of work or classes.

The $83,000 included $53,000 for Pacific Educational Group’s fees, travel expenses, and per diem; $10,000 for hiring substitute teachers for all the teachers who were absent from class to attend the all-day indoctrination seminars; and $20,000 to feed all the district attendees at the swanky Highland Park Country Club where the meetings took place.

Ironically, both Singleton and his facilitators explicitly stated at the time that neither he nor his book (Courageous Conversations) on which his “consultations” were based provided any solutions for the problem of underperformance of minority students on standardized tests.

Singleton also preposterously claimed that neither poverty, nor language issues at home, nor lack of family support, nor family mobility contributes to the racial learning gap. The causes, Singleton claimed, are “institutional racism” and “whiteness.” Singleton also declared that anyone who disagrees with his preposterous theories is “gifted at subverting reform.”

He explicitly exempted Indians and Asians from the category of “persons of color.” Why would that be? If America is systemically racist against persons of color, and if this systemic racism is the cause of the underperformance of students of color on standardized tests, why exempt them? And why do Indians and Asians manage to excel on standardized tests in the face of systemic racism?

Could it be that Singleton tacitly admitted—and hoped no one would notice—that language issues, lack of family support, mobility, or poverty may, indeed, contribute to the racial learning gap? Could it be that systemic racism didn’t exist in District 113?

I asked the District 113 School Board and administration at the time how even in theory would having secretaries, custodians, and teachers miss school to talk about their “whiteness” at the Highland Park Country Club help minority students improve their test scores. They offered no answer–as in, they literally said nothing.

Imagine if the educationally and economically disadvantaged Hispanic community had known the shameful truth that District 113 had had thousands of dollars available to help their children score better on standardized testing and used it instead to line Singleton’s pockets while district employees talked about their whiteness and noshed at the Highland Park Country Club.

In a recent article in The New York Times Magazine about “antiracism” re-education, writer Daniel Bergner told this story about attending one of Singleton’s indoctrination workshops:

At my table, Malik Pemberton, a Black racial-equity coach at a middle school, who had been a teenage father, wanted to talk, he said in the softest of voices, about “accountability,” about how “it starts inside the household in terms of how the child is going to interpret and value education,” about what can happen in schools “without consequences, where they can’t suspend.”… One of Courageous Conversation’s “affiliate trainers,” stationed at the table, immediately rerouted the conversation, and minutes later Moore [another affiliate trainer] drew all eyes back to him and pronounced, “The cause of racial disparities is racism.”

Glenn Singleton is a slicker version of Al Sharpton, a manlier version of Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, and a blacker version of White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo. He sells the same divisive, racist Critical Race Theory dogma just gussied up in different packaging.

Hans Bader writing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute shared that Singleton—who has been hired by wealthy school districts all around the country, including in Evanston, Illinois—teaches teachers that,

“white talk” is “verbal,” “intellectual” and “task-oriented,” while “color commentary” is “emotional” and “personal.”

This is disturbingly similar to the ideas in a chart posted by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on their online portal about race and racism—a chart the Smithsonian was forced to take down and apologize for.

The chart promoted the false and racist idea that the following are “aspects and assumptions” of communities of color:

• de-emphasis on objective, rational, linear thinking
• de-emphasis on cause and effect relationships
• de-emphasis on planning for the future
• de-emphasis on working before playing
• devaluation of hard work
• devaluation of respect for authority
• devaluation of delaying gratification
• devaluation of politeness in communication

Critical Race Theory and its many ugly faces solves no societal problems and creates many. IFI is deeply thankful that the Trump administration has ceased the use of federal funds for promoting Critical Race Theory, which is fomenting race and class warfare in America.

“Progressives” have obscenely exploited the disadvantaged among us for votes and power for decades. “Progressives” pretend to care about the impoverished even as they promote policies that destroy their families, their schools, and their communities.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/A-Story-of-Actual-Racial-Injustice-in-an-Illinois-School-District.mp3

HELP: Our get-out-the-vote campaign is up and running. We are distributing the IFI Voter Guide to hundreds of churches, civic groups and tea party organizations. Will you financially support our endeavor to educate Illinois voters and promote Christian family values?

There is a lot of talk of oppression, privilege and struggles in America right now. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this dialogue is in the negative sense, very often as a smear against our system of governance. Americans have a tendency to look through a lens that clouds not only our history, but it also limits our views to an Ameri-centric perspective.

Ironically, and quite disturbingly, some of the loudest voices proclaiming oppression are from those who are among the wealthiest in the nation, and the world. As I mentioned before I do not believe in “white privilege.” I do believe in American privilege. It is something that is too often overlooked.

A groundbreaking study by Just Facts has discovered that after accounting for all income, charity, and non-cash welfare benefits like subsidized housing and Food Stamps—the poorest 20 percent of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. This includes the majority of countries in the prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including its European members.

In other words, if the U.S. “poor” were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest.

In a July 1st New York Times video op-ed claimed that “America is the richest country” in the OECD, “but we’re also the poorest, with a whopping 18 percent poverty rate—closer to Mexico than Western Europe.” Yet, World Bank data shows that 35 percent of Mexico’s population lives on less than $5.50 per day, as compared to only 2 percent of people in the United States.  In other words, poverty rates say nothing about which nation is “the poorest.”

To accurately compare living standards across or within nations, it is necessary to account for all major aspects of material welfare. None of the Times data did this. The OECD data is particularly flawed because it is based on “income,” which excludes a host of non-cash government benefits and private charity that are abundant in the United States.

When politicians, celebrities and the media talk about poverty, disadvantage or income inequality, they often use statistics that fail to account for large amounts of income and benefits received by poorer households. This gives America’s poor a purchasing power that far exceeds the purchasing power of every income group in many other nations.

In 2010, even the poorest 20 percent of Americans consumed 3 to 30 times more goods and services than the averages for all people in a wide array of developing nations around the world:

These immense gaps in standards of living are a major reason why people from developing nations immigrate to the U.S. instead of vice versa. America has more opportunity and wealth for all classes of Americans than many people around the world will ever know.   No one wants to be poor, but if you are, America is the best place to be.

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

I had awarded Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey the award for Most Cringeworthy Performative Act/photo op of 2020 for his fake body-wracking sobbing while kneeling at George Floyd’s casket. Frey’s performative act/photo op topped even that of the genuflecting congressional thespians adorned in culturally appropriated African kente-clothe scarves led by prayer warrior Nancy Pelosi.

You might want to take some Zofran 30 minutes before watching this:

But now I must rescind the award and give it to the dozen apparently racist celebrities publicly confessing and self-flagellating before the Black Lives Matter Crusaders for their collective, systemic white transgressions.

In melodramatically somber tones, lesbian Sarah Paulson, Aaron Paul, bisexual Kesha (formerly Ke$ha), Bethany Joy Lenz, Kristen Bell, Justin Theroux,  Debra Messing, Mark Duplass, Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard’s daughter), Julianne Moore, Piper Perabo, Stanley Tucci, Ilana Glazer, and gymnast Aly Raisman are taking responsibility for “every unchecked moment, for every time it was easier to ignore than to call it out for what it was, for every not-so-funny joke, every unfair stereotype, every blatant injustice, no matter how big or small, every time” they “remained silent,” and “every time” they “explained away police brutality, or turned a blind eye.”

Eleven of the twelve sanctimonious celebrities work in an industry rife with sexism and exploitation of women and now we learn they are also, apparently, guilty of racism. While profiting from one of the most hypocritical and destructive industries in the country that creates and promotes soft-core porn and glorifies violence, all these self-indulgent, privileged celebrities are now confessing to being racists.

Are they really responsible for every not-so-funny joke, unfair stereotype, and blatant injustice in the world? Did all twelve of them really explain away police brutality? If that’s true, they have a lot to atone for.

The moralizers/offenders identify what they see from their snazzy digs:

Black people are being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes. Going for a job should not be a death sentence. Sleeping in your own home should not be a death sentence. Playing video games with your nephew should not be a death sentence. Shopping in a store should not be a death sentence. Business as usual should not be life-threatening.

No disagreement. Is there anyone in America who believes black people should be slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes, killed while playing video games with their relatives, or killed while shopping?

But is there a pervasive problem with black people being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes, or murdered while shopping? Well, yes, there is, but the slaughtering of blacks—including innocent children sitting on their porches, sleeping in their beds, and walking home from school—is being committed primarily by young black men raised without fathers.

Here are some data from scholar Heather MacDonald that the celebrity social justice warriors may want to consider:

However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is. …

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

Of course, everyone knows the celebrity pontificators aren’t really confessing and don’t really feel guilty. They’re doing what socially insular, intellectually myopic, presumptuous, and self-righteous celebrities do best: scold the deplorables—oh, and act.

What other icky cultural manifestations of kowtowing to the destructive Marxist ideologies of BLM and Antifa fascists are emerging? Here are a few:

• As of this writing, Seattle, a sanctuary city with a plague of homelessness, is now a lawless Antifa/BLM enclave, which has been named the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ). At the command of political leaders, Seattle police surrendered the entire 6-block area to anarchists, including their own police precinct, which has been renamed “Seattle People’s Department East Precinct.” Leftists promptly erected borders around their zone and appointed a defacto armed police department. Lawlessness and chaos–which ultimately result in tyranny–are the logical ends of “progressivism.” Next up, the Purge. If current policemen all across this once-great nation walked off the job and BLM members took over “protecting” our rights and communities, would we have less racism, fewer bad “cops,” and communities better suited for human flourishing? I wonder if any businesses will open stores or corporate headquarters in Seattle? I wonder if any families will move there? Other than anarchists and zombies, who will want to move there?

• There are a number of candidates vying for the title of “Progressive” Hypocrite of the Pandemic Year. Top of the list is Michigan governor Christine Whitmer, or as Andrew Klavan calls her, “Obersturmfuhrer Whitmer, ” who prohibited Michiganders from buying seeds or paint when they were shopping at Home Depot, who told Michiganders not to travel north on Memorial Day weekend as her husband traveled north on Memorial Day weekend to get their essential boat on the water early, and who banned lawn care workers from mowing lawns—alone. Well, here she is marching shoulder-to-shoulder with BLM. Sheltering in place is good for thee but not for she when there’s a campaign for the vice presidency that needs a photo op. #PerformativeAct
  Does anyone think that if there had been hundreds of thousands of conservatives marching peacefully in streets for the past two weeks to protest the crushing quarantine—with zero rioting, arson, looting, and brick-throwing—that leftist quarantine zealots would have been silent? Or would there have been mass rage, rending of clothes, and sanctimonious scoldings over the iniquitous disregard for human life demonstrated by demonstrators?

• The mob is coming for your jobs. John Daniel Davidson writing for The Federalist warns that your position on BLM has consequences:

There will be no opting out of the Black Lives Matter movement. You’re either for BLM or against it—and if you’re against it, you’re a racist. You will either support BLM publicly and enthusiastically, or you will be harassed, shunned, and shamed out of mainstream America. If you dare to speak a word against BLM, you will be targeted, mobbed, and probably fired.

• Leftists now want to burn books (and movies and historical monuments), but since they can’t actually say that, they had to figure out a way to conceal that they want to burn books. What to do, what to do? 💡Brainstorm!Just rename book-burning. Call it “decolonizing your bookshelf.” Oh, and when you’re done with all that decolonizing, call the Firemen:

Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. (Captain Beatty, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury).

We just put our American flag up at our house. I think it’s going to stay up for a while. I am deeply thankful to live in America where “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and where our forefathers wrote, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This is a remarkable country built on principles that enable it to become “a more perfect Union” as long as we remember the Creator who endowed us with Rights. Without a Creator, there exist no unalienable Rights. Without a Creator, there exist no transcendent truths, no moral absolutes. Un-created human lives don’t matter. Un-created humans create and inhabit a world of highly intelligent dogs eating dogs.

I hope Christians who, in the face of slander, hostility, and threats, offer feeble, vapid defenses of their silence on issues that both culture and Scripture address realize that 1. We the people are the government, 2. Children are watching as parents model cowardice and rationalization, and 3. Silent capitulators are feeding the behemoth that will devour their children’s and grandchildren’s hearts, minds, liberty, and maybe their bodies.

But by all means continue. Take up your crosses daily, and hide them in the basement.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/nauseating-performative-acts-by-celebrity-racists.mp3

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I am really torn about what to say about the upheaval going on in our nation. I have spent a lot of time reading, researching, and listening to various sermons, presentations, and articles on things like the social justice movement, intersectionality, racism, cultural Marxism and virtue signaling in our culture and in our churches…

I recently had a “discussion” with someone that almost instantly turned into my having to prove I am not racist . . .  as defined, of course, by his perceptions, not my heart, or my statements, or my actions.

I love America and I love the study of U.S. history. I thank the Lord that in His sovereignty he blessed me by ordaining my birth here in 1967. I almost never think of myself as “white.” I do often think of myself as American. I believe that I have American privilege. I am so thankful for it. I do not buy into “white privilege.” I cannot think of a better place for anyone of any ethnic background to live that offers more freedom, more equality, and more opportunity than the U.S.

I do not believe that in 2020 America is racist. More than any other country, America has sacrificed to correct the wrongs of our history. I am worried that too many people have been led to believe that America has not changed since 1865 or 1920. It has . . . but for many, the sins of the past can never be overcome or repented of enough. I do not believe this is Biblical, let alone secularly true.

I do believe that, even today, there are racist Americans, and that some people treat others poorly. (There are also racist police officers.) But I do not believe they are racist because they are Americans or even because they may be white. There are some racists among us, of all ethnicities, and all professions, because we are all humans with a sinful nature that utopian ideas cannot change. For this same reason, there are also liars, adulterers, thieves, rapists, and child abusers among us too. We have, and need, laws to address and deter these human sins.

Thankfully, we have passed a great deal of laws that have been successful as both a teacher and a protector, so that all Americans have opportunities in spite of our differences. We also have vital institutions like churches and schools to help us live above our base human tendencies.

There are people out there talking about “systematic racism” some saying that, as one professor declared on national TV, “America is a social experiment that has failed.”  If this is true, we are doomed. But it is not true. Venezuela and the USSR were social experiments that failed. America has been a very, though not perfectly, successful experiment in liberty in so many ways.

There are definitely economic inequalities in the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Yet, it should also be remembered that 71 percent of the world’s population has less than $10,000 in total assets. Americans are a prosperous lot, and globally, most of us would be considered wealthy and privileged. The typical American has as much wealth sitting in their driveway, as much of the world currently has in their entire life.

I say that only to say a self-hating society cannot last.

The loss of life of at least 17 people, mostly minorities, in these riots is horrific. To me, after this is the destruction of businesses and properties in the cities where serious social problems remain. A part of this destruction that deeply worries me involves an historic ignorance I see mostly among young white anarchists who have infiltrated and hijacked a legitimate concern over the death of George Floyd and police policies.

Last week, I mentioned the senseless painting of “Black Lives Matter” on the Indianapolis Soldiers and Sailors monument, which was built in large part to remember the lives and service given by Indiana’s Union soldiers in the Civil War. I think that outrage has now been topped in Boston.

Rioters vandalized the Shaw Memorial statue dedicated to the 54^th Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry regiment. This was the all black Union regiment depicted in the Oscar winning movie Glory, starring Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman. Authorities believe that rioters vandalized the memorial on Sunday, May 31^st – the 123rd anniversary of its dedication!   

This kind of stupidity, and total dismissal of the good things in American history that occurred to achieve equality, is baffling and scary. Too many of our nation’s young have been indoctrinated to believe everything bad about our nation with no historic or global perspective of the positive uniqueness of America. These senseless anarchists might as well vandalize the Selma, Alabama, Pettus Bridge too.

While I do not want to dismiss legitimate conversations, let me pass along a couple of facts that point to my title of this item.

• Today, 28 percent of all children adopted from foster care in the United States are interracial adoptions.  Another 21 percent of privately initiated adoptions in the U.S. are interracial adoptions.

• For children who are not Caucasian, 73 percent of their adoptions are to Caucasian parents.

• The percentage of international U.S. adoptions that are interracial is 84 percent.

• Fifty years ago, only 3 percent of marriages in the U.S. were interracial, but by 2015, 17 percent of newlyweds in the U.S. had a spouse from a different racial background. (For comparison, interracial marriages in Japan today are still just 3 percent. In 1978, China did not have one single interracial marriage registered among its 950 million people, which was a population three times the size of America today.)

• The percentage of interracial marriages involving a black spouse has tripled since 1980.

I am not wanting to overlook any concerns, but these are not the kind of major life decisions you would see of a people living under a “systematically racist” government.

America needs prayer, optimism, and unity right now; not lawlessness, self-loathing ignorance, and destruction.

This article was originally published at AFA of Indiana.

Recently, ABC 7 Eyewitness News anchor Terrell Brown interviewed Shari Runner, the president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League on the problems of black-on-black violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. Her predictable responses sound like she just returned from a White Privilege Conference and illuminate why “progressives” exacerbate rather than ameliorate inner city violence.

Brown: “Gun violence is still a big problem in the city, and it’s often gang-on-gang and it’s black- on-black crime….What do you do to stop it?”

Runner: “Well, I think the root cause is…jobs for kids who are disengaged. We have 46,000 disengaged youth in our city. That means that they are out of school and out of work, and they need jobs. And they really want to be in legal jobs. And they want to be able to be trained to do those jobs rather than be involved in gangs. So, that’s really a big focus of ours for the next ten years, to make sure that happens.

“We need to have better schools. We need to train our kids for the things they’re gonna face when they graduate, and make sure that they graduate, make sure that they stay in school.

“College is an option for many, not for all. Certificates are good. There are a lot of opportunities in the city that just are not being taken advantage of because people cannot get access to them.”

Brown: “Let’s talk about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. There’s a lot of debate right now about the genesis of the movement, what it represents, where it’s going. Often when someone says, ‘Black lives matter,’ the response is, ‘Well, you know what? All lives matter.’ What’s your take on that?”

Runner: “I think the thing is that ‘black lives matter’ is a cry about the fact that institutional, systemic racism still exists in our society. And when you look at the evolution of [BLM] coming from the police violence and the shooting of young black men, unarmed men and boys, 12-year-olds who are confused as 30-year-old men, and the kind of narrative and stereotyping that goes into those kinds of decisions, it is a real cry about the racism that still is very endemic in our society.”

What was most stunning in her troubling comments was her assertion that the absence of jobs for teens is the “root cause” of gang-on-gang and black-on-black violence. The dearth of jobs for teens cannot possibly be the “root cause” of gang-on-gang or black-on-black violence. By the time young males in urban areas who join gangs or engage in violence reach the age at which they are able to work, the root causes have been operative in their lives for a decade.

The root cause of violence perpetrated by black men against the black community and others is family turmoil, including the absence of fathers or the presence of poor fathers. In a 2013 research paper titled “Why American boys join street gangs” about Mexican and black boys who had joined street gangs, author Stanley S. Taylor writes that “Each gang affiliated subject…expressed deep-seated frustrations in early childhood (prior to 10 years old). In addition, each gang member (and the reformed members interviewed) attributed their feelings directly to unstable home lives.”

A poor economic climate may be one of the contributive factors to family instability, which points to the importance of creating an economy able to sustain families. But it is not a dearth of jobs for teens that makes them vulnerable to gang membership, which in turn results in black-on-black crime.

Taylor identifies the factors that contribute to gang membership, the top two of which are “frustration and anxiety stemming from family problems such as fatherlessness,” and “sadness, frustration, and anxiety in home life.” To illustrate this tragic reality, Taylor shares the story of how 32-year-old “Joseph” became a member of the Crips, a black Los Angeles gang:

Joseph…described what his life was like as a 7 year old. He mentioned that he and his younger brother who was 6 years old had their father in the home. However, at around the time he turned seven years old his father moved in with a woman on the same city block and had children with her, while he and his brother were left to live with their mother. Joseph explained how this devastated him and that… abandonment was on his mind constantly….

Joseph mentioned his father never visited with them nor allowed he and his brother to come to the father‘s residence. Joseph spoke of several instances where his father would not stop to talk to he and his brother when the father drove by. He mentioned the few times that his father did stop and speak to them as they played outside, that he made promises to visit them or take them for car rides with him that he never kept. He stated that their father stopped once and gave them both one dollar and left. Joseph stated that he would see his father taking Christmas presents out of the car for his other children while they received nothing for Christmas. Joseph said that it hurt him very badly. He mentioned that as he got older the inner pain was with him every day and that he and his brother were unsupervised by their mother because she worked late.

He had begun to associate with boys in the neighborhood that were in gangs and participated in delinquent activities such as defacing property, bullying non gang members, and missing classes at school to spend time with the local gang members. By the time Joseph was 12 he had joined the Crip gang….

Joseph described how a 31-year old veteran gang member began taking him to parties where he met older girls, smoked marijuana, and drank alcohol. He said that it made him feel like he was “on top of the world.” He gained a reputation in the neighborhood as being “gangsta” because he was accepted by the gang and could therefore “hang out” with various members. Many of them sold drugs and had money and cars. Joseph stated they did many things to make him feel like part of the family so he joined the gang.

Camaraderie was developed by doing delinquent acts, drinking together and just hanging out. But as time went on, he said that he was expected to commit delinquent acts from vandalism and fighting rival gang members, to drive-by shooting.

It would take tortured reasoning to identify the “root cause” of Joseph’s problems as a dearth of jobs for teens. Gang members are telling us that they join gangs—not because they couldn’t find “legal jobs” as teens—but because they found no peace, security, and stability in their families during childhood. Why isn’t society listening to them?

The factors that contribute to gang membership, gang-on-gang violence, and black-on-black violence are numerous and tied up in a tightly woven Gordian knot. Certainly, a weak economy in which both parents must work or in which parents cannot find work contributes to family tension and breakdown, but there are other issues at play as well.

When divorce is hailed as a solution that is “best for the children,” when “progressives” normalize motherless and fatherless family structures (e.g., same-sex faux-marriage), when Hollywood normalizes and glamorizes non-marital sex, when having and raising children is viewed as a “right” to which single men and women and homosexuals are entitled, when children are objectified and commodified, and when purported Christians—including Christian leaders—turn a blind eye to or even affirm the unbiblical sexual and marital views and values of “progressivism,” family instability increases and children suffer.

If progressives truly cared about the violence destroying our black urban communities, they would be willing to sacrifice their deleterious sexual views and values for the good of black children. The Chicago Urban League and Black Lives Matter would turn their focus, energy, and money away from finding “legal jobs” for hurting teens to ensuring that all children grow up with mothers and fathers, preferably their own biological mothers and fathers. Of course that goal has been made even more politically challenging now that our president has endorsed legalized homoerotic pseudogamy—a family structure that necessarily deprives children of mothers or fathers.

Read more:  Exposing Black Lives Matter

By now everyone except off-the-grid cave-dwellers has heard about the student protest at University of Missouri which began when thirty black football players and other teammates, supported by the coaching staff, threatened to boycott practices and games until the university president resigned, which he did, along with the chancellor. The reason for the threatened boycott and subsequent campus protest is the belief on the parts of student protestors that the administration had not adequately addressed campus racism. I suppose the team is busy now interviewing candidates to fill those positions.

Shortly thereafter, a student journalist attempting to exercise his First Amendment rights by reporting on the campus tent city “triggered” a marauding horde of anti-microaggression protestors to commence (to quote Richard Scarry) “pushing and shoving, shrieking and shouting.” Methinks the response of the delicate orchids, deeply traumatized by a reporter reporting, veered dangerously close to ordinary run-of-the-mill aggression.

The events at Mizzou followed close on the heels of another campus brouhaha, this one at Yale where some Ivy League hackles were raised when university lecturer Erika Christakis in a carefully worded, politically correct-ish email challenged a silly administrative warning against insensitive Halloween costumes. Following Christakis’ email, her husband, Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, was accosted on campus, where a young woman of color shrieked and swore at him saying among other things, “Who the f*** hired you?” Now scores of socially-just Yalies are seeking the Christakis family’s removal from their positions and home in a Yale residential college.

All this because Christakis dared to suggest that perhaps college students should have the freedom to choose to be a bit provocative or even “transgressive” on Halloween. And by provocative she means costumes that social justice fanatics may view as “appropriative”—not inappropriate—appropriative. So, for example, no non-indigenous female should wear a Pocahontas costume because that would suggest she’s attempting to “appropriate” Native American culture. The merest hint that these hothouse flowers may see an image that sets off their finely-tuned, offense-o-meters sends them into fits of infantile pique.

The seeds for these cultural weed patches were sown years ago when campus radicals, heavily influenced by Brazilian Marxist and educator Paulo Freire, took over academia and began propagating their doctrinaire ideology about oppression. Proponents of Freire’s critical pedagogy—sometimes referred to as “teaching for social justice”—have imposed on all of society their obsession with the notion of systemic oppression, dividing society into two groups (i.e., oppressor and oppressed) and imputing guilt or victimhood respectively.

For example, colorless people, males (more precisely “cismales”), and heterosexuals are automatically oppressors regardless of whether they have engaged in any acts of oppression. “Progressives” rail against members of the purported oppressor group, telling them that the only way to expiate their imputed sins is to engage in endless self-flagellation.

Conversely, people of color, females, trans-everyone, and homosexuals belong to the oppressed group and, therefore, cannot be found guilty of, well anything, no matter how nasty and oppressive their actions. This is the ideology promoted at the annual White Privilege Conference that many educators attend.

To get a sense of how silly and doctrinaire this oppression ideology has become, look no further than Jonathan Butler, the black Mizzou student whose hunger-strike and demand that the university president “acknowledge his white male privilege” played a pivotal role in this burlesque of a civil rights protest. Jonathan Butler is the son of Eric L. Butler, an executive vice president for sales and marketing for the Union Pacific Railroad, whose 2014 compensation was $8.4 million and whose total net worth is upwards of $20 million. Clearly, Jonathan is systemically oppressed.

“Progressives” have added another layer of ideological slime to their unstable foundation. They have for decades disseminated propaganda via accommodating government schools, academia, the mainstream press, and Hollywood, brainwashing our young’uns into believing that among the gravest social injustices that plague patriarchal, colonialist America is the presence of unpleasant ideas. Oppressed peoples are entitled to be free of exposure to ideas and images they don’t like

Devotees of diversity tacitly teach children and teens that they have a right not to be offended—well, “progressives” have a right not to be offended.

Exalters of emotion extol the supreme value of subjective feelings—well, the subjective feelings of those who belong to the designated oppressed groups. It is their feelings that dictate what may or may not be seen or heard.

Teachers of tolerance tolerate only that which they approve and affirm.

Masters of moral relativism proclaim that there exist ideas so absolutely evil that they must not be spoken or heard. And they alone are the arbiters of truth. Violating their commandment to speak no evil requires prior trigger warnings to prevent oppressed victims and their genuflecting allies from being reduced to puddles of tears, or, as at Mizzou and Yale, rivers of rage.

In the service of their cultural mission to cleanse the university and universe of ideas that offend liberals, teachers help students grow tissue-paper skin in their school laboratories, which they can don whenever they may encounter a “microaggression”—you know like Romans 1:26.

Agents of change have taught their malleable changelings how to feign macro-umbrage to get their way. Now they are stupid-drunk with the power they’ve gained from the supposed “right” to be free from micro-ickiness. Students at once possess oh-so-delicate sensibilities and an incongruent lust for the freedom of others. At Mizzou and Yale, we witnessed the macro-tantrum of a macro-monster with a micro-brain.

The monster created by the Left is now a rapacious, oppressive beast, mindlessly trampling the First Amendment, intellectual diversity, and intellectual freedom. Feeding at the slop trough of narcissism and solipsism, the oppressed have become the oppressors.

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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.

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