The Base of the Democratic Party is Socialist/Marxist — How they’re infiltrating our public school system

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A pamphlet by the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), in conjunction with the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission, outlines a push for socialists to “take jobs as teachers” as a way to move teachers unions “in a more militant and democratic direction.”

The blood-soaked history of socialism is no longer brought up in history classes so it’s unknown by millennial’s, leading them to identify as supporters of the movement.

Campus Reform reported that the YDSA’s 11-page pamphlet notes teachers are able to use their relationships with students to discuss “campaigns around police brutality, immigrant rights, and environmental justice.” In an article titled “YDSA urges socialists to infiltrate public education” Zachary Petrizzo reports:

The Young Democratic Socialists of America organization is urging socialists to “take jobs as teachers” in order to exploit the “political, economic, and social potential the industry holds.”

“Why Socialists Should Become Teachers,” an 11-page pamphlet crafted jointly by YDSA and the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission, contends that education is “a strategic industry to organize,” and offers prospective socialist educators “a basic roadmap for how to get a job in education.”

“Even in West Virginia, where teachers experienced some of the lowest pay in the nation, they were sometimes the highest-paid workers in their communities.”    ]

The pamphlet begins by outlining the “success” of the recent West Virginia teachers strike, which it attributes to “creative shop floor organizing” from teachers who believed in “socialist politics.”

“Our immediate win in West Virginia was a 5% raise for all public sector workers, plus halting charter school legislation and attacks on seniority,” the document boasts. “But crucially, our movement’s demand was that the money come from highly profitable corporations that have long exploited West Virginia’s natural wealth.”

The Democratic Socialist platform was championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) two years ago on the campaign trail.

Using the same platform, young political newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a shock victory in June over Rep. Joe Crowley (N.Y.) in a Democratic primary. A new Gallop Poll revealed that more Democrats have a positive view about socialism than those who express a positive view about capitalism. Gallop found:

For the first time in Gallup’s measurement over the past decade, Democrats have a more positive image of socialism than they do of capitalism. Attitudes toward socialism among Democrats have not changed materially since 2010, with 57% today having a positive view. The major change among Democrats has been a less upbeat attitude toward capitalism, dropping to 47% positive this year — lower than in any of the three previous measures. Republicans remain much more positive about capitalism than about socialism, with little sustained change in their views of either since 2010.

The following are the Gallop Poll numbers:

  • 47% of Democrats view capitalism positively, down from 56% in 2016
  • 57% of Democrats now view socialism positively, little changed from 2010
  • Republicans very positive about capitalism; 16% positive on socialism

Views About Capitalism and Socialism: by Political Party

Positive view of capitalism Positive view of socialism
% %
Democrats/Leaners
2018 47 57
2016 56 58
2012 55 53
2010 53 53
Republicans/Leaners
2018 71 16
2016 68 13
2012 72 23
2010 72 17
GALLUP

Radio host Michael Knowles said on “Fox & Friends” that Democratic Socialists are urging Socialists to become teachers because they can’t win a “fair fight.” Knowles said Saturday that he believes Democratic Socialists are targeting the public school system and as a result, the students, because they can’t win against their parents.

“They can’t win in the battle of ideas, Democratic Socialists are trying to cut off any thought of freedom by students and replace it with socialist ideology. “They’ve got to indoctrinate an ideology rather than educate in history because if they teach history, they’re going to lose,” he said.

The pamphlet notes that organizing in schools is a way to “win concessions from the millionaire and billionaire class.”

“Teaching is proving to be one viable way for socialists to get into the labor movement and wage class struggle in a key industry that is under attack by capital,” it reads.

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The Media Lies About the Number of School Shootings in America

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“One of the most heinous lies that the legacy press loves to perpetuate – the number of school shootings that have taken place in America. It’s so easy to debunk, but none of them bother to.” —Dana Loesch

EDITORS NOTE: Judicial Watch reported the following.

Most School Shootings in Federal Report Just Didn’t Happen

This is one for the annals of fake news. A federal agency is blundering around with erroneous but inflammatory data on a major topic of national contention, it gets called out by a government-supported news outlet … and it does nothing about it. Our Corruption Chronicles blog peeks into the window of this fun house.

In an amusing story, a government-funded media outlet notorious for its liberal slant found that the overwhelming majority of school shootings listed in a federal report never occurred. The embarrassing blunder involves Department of Education (DOE) figures stating that schools around the U.S. reported an alarming 235 shootings in one year.

National Public Radio (NPR) launched an investigation and actually contacted every one of the schools included in the DOE data, which was gathered by its Office for Civil Rights. The figures focus on the 2015-2016 school year and reveal that “nearly 240 schools…reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.”

Three months later, after every school was contacted by NPR, the stats changed drastically. More than two-thirds of the reported gun incidents never happened, according to the news outlet. “We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports,” the article states. “In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.” A program director at the nonprofit research organization that assisted NPR in analyzing the bogus government data is quoted in the piece saying: “When we’re talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful.”

Even though the DOE is the agency responsible for disseminating the erroneous information, in typical government fashion, it shrugged it off as no big deal. When asked for comment by reporters, the agency said it relies on school districts to provide accurate information. Evidently, the federal agency doesn’t bother checking data before publishing it as fact. In the meantime, the DOE has no plans to correct the errors. The article points out that the confusion comes at a time when the need for clear data on school violence has never been more pressing. Dozens of school safety measures have been enacted nationwide on the heels of high-profile school shootings in Texas and Florida and public districts are allocating large sums to boost campus security. “Our reporting highlights just how difficult it can be to track school-related shootings and how researchers, educators and policymakers are hindered by a lack of data on gun violence,” the NPR piece reads.

This is hardly an isolated incident of government inefficiency, but the seriousness of the matter should inspire the feds to provide the public—and policy makers—with accurate information. Instead, the DOE, a typical bloated agency with a $59 billion budget, passed the buck to the so-called civil rights data collection division which apparently plays fast and loose with facts. In the report with the skewed stats, schools were asked: “Has there been at least one incident at your school that involved a shooting (regardless of whether anyone was hurt)?” The DOE should have known better than to blindly publish the information. All it had to do was check out the easily available figures provided by a reputable group that maintains a reliable gun safety database. For the same school year that the DOE listed 235 shootings, the group had only 29. “There is little overlap between this list and the government’s, with only seven schools appearing on both,” the NPR story says.

No NRA Members Need Apply

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Like most people, we understand that educational institutions and staff tend to lean left. The degree and intensity of the bend varies across universities, but a leftward orientation is actually expected today.

We’re aware that some – perhaps even many – academics look upon the NRA and gun owners with disdain. We always hoped this didn’t extend to the individual level, that the disdain was limited to the aggregate, and that personal interactions could be open-minded or – gasp! – even cordial.

The thought that academics would consider NRA members the bottom of the proverbial barrel never occurred to us. We never imagined that more college professors would be comfortable with an avowed communist than with an NRA member. It sounds like a joke, like an appeal to extremes to call attention to the absurd, but that’s precisely what a new study has discovered. A sociology professor at the University of North Texas found that political biases in academia peak with NRA members.

Professor George Yancey wanted to investigate possible hiring discrimination in higher education. He asked professors across the country how their support for a job applicant would change if they knew the applicant was a member of certain groups. Of all the groups Yancey tested, “NRA membership was ranked as the most likely to hurt an aspiring professor’s chances of getting hired.”

NRA membership was more damaging than being a Republican, a Libertarian, a vegetarian, a member of the ACLU, or a member of the Green Party. NRA membership is considered more damaging than being a communist.

Overall, more than two in five professors say a person’s membership in the NRA would “‘damage’ an applicant’s chances of getting hired.” Yancey suspects that, “academics envision individuals in the NRA as being on the far right.” Yancey also found that “meat hunters, evangelicals, and fundamentalists also are less likely to be hired.”

Imagine that. Being an actual, admitted communist – who proudly acknowledges being as far left as left can go – is less harmful to one’s career prospects than being an NRA member.

We’ve heard about high school teachers kicking students out of class for wearing NRA shirts. We’ve heard politicians disparage this association and its membership. But to hear that college professors would rather work with a communist than an NRA member is just sad. We found two takeaways from this: first, an inability to explain one’s adherence to a political and economic ideology with an absolute perfect failure rate probably doesn’t matter in academia and, two, academia is somehow even more out of touch with America than any of us thought.

Remember that the next time “academics” release a “study” on “gun violence.”

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University System Plans ‘Full Criminal Investigation’ After Confederate Statue Toppled

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The University of North Carolina System is taking action after protesters toppled the statue of a Confederate soldier at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Monday night.

“Campus leadership is in collaboration with campus police, who are pulling together a timeline of the events, reviewing video evidence, and conducting interviews that will inform a full criminal investigation,” UNC System Board Chairman Harry Smith and UNC System President Margaret Spellings said in a statement Tuesday, adding:

The safety and security of our students, faculty, and staff are paramount. And the actions last evening were unacceptable, dangerous, and incomprehensible. We are a nation of laws—and mob rule and the intentional destruction of public property will not be tolerated.

“Around 9:20 p.m. Monday night, a group from among an estimated crowd of 250 protesters brought down the Confederate Monument on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,” UNC Chapel Hill said in an official statement in an email to The Daily Signal.

The statue of the Confederate soldier is known as Silent Sam.

One person has been arrested for “concealing one’s face during a public rally and resisting arrest,” according to Jeni Cook, a spokesperson for the Office of University Communications.

An article on the University of North Carolina’s grad school website describes the statue this way:

Erected in 1913, in remembrance of ‘the sons of the University who died for their beloved Southland 1861-1865,’ the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam stands on McCorkle place, the University’s upper quad, facing Franklin Street. The monument was given to the University by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909. More than 1000 University men fought in the Civil War. At least 40 percent of the students enlisted, a record not equaled by any other institution, North or South. Sam is silent because he carries no ammunition and cannot fire his gun.

“Last night’s actions were dangerous, and we are very fortunate that no one was injured,” the university’s statement continued. “We are investigating the vandalism and assessing the full extent of the damage.”

The statue toppling is meant to be “smashing white supremacy” at UNC, according to Maya Little, who is charged with vandalism for an April protest and also faces an Honor Court hearing. Little’s remarks were reported by the Associated Press.

COLUMN BY

Portrait of Rachel del Guidice

Rachel del Guidice

Rachel del Guidice is a reporter for The Daily Signal. She is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, Forge Leadership Network, and The Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program. Send an email to Rachel. Twitter: @LRacheldG.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Police surrounding the toppled remains of a Confederate statue on Aug. 20, 2018, at UNC-Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Demonstrators surrounded and obscured the statue with large banners before toppling it. (Photo: Travis Long/TNS/Newscom)

VIDEO: Jewish Students Speak About Anti-Semitism at George Washington University

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Whenever Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) or other anti-Israel activists initiate a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign, Jewish students become fearful of the accompanying anti-Semitism. This is exactly what happened in April 2018, at George Washington University (GWU).

The ugly face of BDS at  #GWU: Jewish students voice their fears again and again, student government ignores them and votes for a secret ballot to push BDS through with zero accountability.

Please retweet #BDSisAntiSemitic

RELATED ARTICLE: CAIR in the Classroom: Islamist Group Partnering with Public Schools

Massachusetts’ Taxpayers sue over anti-Semitic, pro-Islam public school lessons

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At last, some push back against what is a nationwide problem.

“Massachusetts Taxpayers Sue Over Anti-Semitic, Pro-Islam School Lessons,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, August 17, 2018:

A group of Massachusetts-based taxpayers are suing the school committee in the city of Newton, a wealthy, liberal enclave, over what they claim is the leadership’s ongoing promotion of anti-Semitic school materials and the promotion of Islamic religious beliefs, according to an announcement from the organization handling the lawsuit.

Education Without Indoctrination, a local community group driving the lawsuit, “claims multiple violations of the Massachusetts Open Meeting Law stemming from the school committee’s handling of a burgeoning scandal over anti-Semitic lessons and the promotion of Islamic religious beliefs as objective facts in the public school district’s history classes,” according to a press release from the group.

The lawsuit stems from a controversy of Newton Public Schools use of what the group claims are “unvetted educational materials” produced by the Saudi Arabian oil company ARAMCO and the Qatari government, which has long been cited for its funding of terrorism.

“In teaching world history, Newton Public Schools (NPS) use unvetted educational materials funded by the Saudi oil company ARAMCO and the government of Qatar. As a result, Newton public school students are propagandized with materials that slander Israel and the Jewish people, and that falsify history to promote the Islamic religion in public schools,” the press release states.

“Just this past May, Newton North High School invited an anti-Semitic group to screen Palestinian propaganda films to its students,” it continues. “For this, NPS Superintendent David Fleishman earned a rebuke from the New England branch of the Anti-Defamation League and Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council.”

Concerned parents have been stonewalled in their attempts to gain information from the school leadership about these activities, the group claims….

Colleges Are Turning Red Students Radically Blue

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A good friend of mine recently attended his daughter’s high school graduation and was amazed at the high number of students attending prestigious universities around the nation. That includes his daughter, who is traveling across the continent to attend Stanford University.

The high school is located in a very conservative part of Southwest Florida just littered with churches, Republican Clubs and Trump supporters. Most of the transplants are from Midwest states. In other words, this is very red America, and presumably a high number of those graduating students reflect their parents’ values. Certainly my friend’s daughter does.

At this moment. And that’s the rub.

Our university systems are increasingly focused on turning red students radically blue. This is not a stated goal, of course. It’s simply the reality on the ground — taking generally conservative, pro-America Christian students and indoctrinating them over four years into progressive, anti-America non-Christian students. While there are certainly exceptions, the numbers depressingly bear out the effectiveness of this indoctrination.

According to Campus Renewal, more than 70 percent of teens who confess Christianity when they enter college reject Christianity by the time they leave four years later. Previous studies have placed it between 65 and 80 percent. So roughly three out of every four.

Of course some percentage of young people will leave the faith when they leave home anyway. That has always been the case, as William Wilberforce explained more than 200 years ago. But the percentages are significantly lower in that group. So if you have a youth group with 20 kids that go to college, the odds are only five or six will still be Christians four years later. Those are just the facts, and that should be deeply sobering for parents, pastors and priests.

There are virtually no studies on the shift in political views of people before and after college, perhaps because so many are still so young they have not formed firm enough worldviews yet to create a data set. But considering the dominance of liberal professors and the monolithically progressive environment that young, impressionable students are thrown into for four years, it is only reasonably to expect a similar level of influence and “flipping” among them.

This picture is partially painted just from faculty political affiliations. In an article published by the National Association of Scholars, entitled “Homogeneous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty,” Brooklyn College professor Mitchell Langbert shows this in pure, dominating numbers. Langbert examined the political affiliations of doctorate-holding faculty members at 51 of the top 66 liberal arts colleges listed by U.S. News & World Report.

His findings are astonishing. Fully 39 percent of the colleges in his sample have no Republican doctorate faculty on staff. Not one.

Langbert also looked at the total Democrat-to-Republican faculty ratios at the most elite colleges. At Williams College, the Democrat-to-Republican ratio is 132-to-1; Amherst College, 34-to-1; Wellesley College, 136-to-1; Davidson College, 10-to-1; Swarthmore College, 120-to-1. Only two colleges of the top 66 are even close to having an even faculty: the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) with a Democrat-to-Republican ratio of 1.3-to-1, and the U.S. Naval Academy, with a ratio 2.3-to-1.

Many on the left and in the media have dismissed such studies by claiming that the GOP has moved far right and so actually it left academia. That doesn’t really pass the smell test, but Sam Abrams, writing at Heterodox Academy, plotted graphs comparing where university faculty stand on the political spectrum and where the American people stand. What he demonstrates is that as liberal as universities were as recently as the 1990s, they are dramatically more so now.

“Professors were more liberal than the country in 1990, but only by about 11 percentage points. By 2013, the gap had tripled; it is now more than 30 points. It seems reasonable to conclude that it is academics who shifted, as there is no equivalent movement among the masses whatsoever.”

This dominance, and the obsequiousness of college administrators, reveals itself in the shift in curriculum.

In 64 of the top 76 universities in the country, students can get a history degree without any American history. Wisconsin is entirely dropping history as a major. So is California. Less than 3 percent of colleges require history or civics to get a degree. This all explains why 75 percent of students support socialism, but can neither define it or give one successful example of it. Ignorance of history is foundational to indoctrination. It’s a form of Orwell’s Memory Hole in “1984.”

This is about as objective as is available right now: Comparing the polling on Christian students, the smothering monolithically Democratic faculty, the leftward lurch compared to the rest of the country and the dramatic shift in curriculum, and the outcome becomes not only obvious, but predictable.

In “What’s So Great About Christianity,” Dinesh D’Souza, makes the broader point about public schools through universities:

“Children spend the majority of their waking hours in school. Parents invest a good portion of their life savings in college education and entrust their offspring to people who are supposed to educate them. Isn’t it wonderful that educators have figured out a way to make parents the instruments of their own undoing? Isn’t it brilliant that they have persuaded Christian moms and dads to finance the destruction of their own beliefs and values? Who said atheists aren’t clever?”

The same holds true about Democrats and political radicalization.

An indicator of the veracity of this truth is that the most liberal of media outlets, such as The New York Times and Vox have been working hard to show that while all these facts may be true, college is not making students more liberal, or professors aren’t doing so, or maybe colleges are just opening students’ eyes — depending on the publication.

In other words, they’re providing cover for the indoctrinators.

The students with the best ability to weather the storm of the politically progressive, theologically anti-Christian college years are those whose parents and churches equip them with strong defenses for their beliefs. Without that they walk into a four-year, sustained assault on everything they believe and the statistics are clear what happens.

There is one silver lining. The small percentage that survive the fires of liberal programming over four years, are some of the most stalwart young conservatives out there and are far more adept at defending their views than their peers on the left who were seldom, if ever, challenged in their worldviews. (See: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.)

Even this small percentage worries the progressive gatekeepers such as the New York Times. And that, at least, is a good thing.

RELATED ARTICLE: Yale honors prof who enraged students by defending free speech

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Revolutionary Act. The featured image is by ISTOCK/IZUSEK.

Stoneman Douglas at 6 Months

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It was six months ago but feels like just yesterday. On Feb. 14, a deranged teen attacked students and staff members at Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17.

Like millions of parents and grandparents across America, I was transfixed by the news that day, watching the coverage with horror. I grieved for those whose lives were lost and those they left behind. And I feared for my own school-age grandkids.

On Wednesday, Stoneman Douglas opened its doors once again to a new school year. Again, like mothers and grandmothers nationwide, I want to know if anything has changed over the last half year.

The intervening months have certainly been eventful for some of Stoneman Douglas’ students. They marched in Washington, D.C., gave fiery speeches, and took a 20-state “Road to Change” bus tour to register voters and push for gun control. They rubbed shoulders with celebrities, gave hundreds of interviews, and made passionate appeals for gun control.

But as they settle back in at Parkland, will their school be any safer?

Fortunately, the answer appears to be “yes”—and it’s not because of any media-focused bus tour.

Instead, Broward County—like many other communities across America—has been working hard to improve school safety. Security upgrades at Stoneman Douglas include a new 12-foot security fence, improved classroom door locks, additional security guards, and continuous monitoring of the school’s video surveillance system. The school is even piloting the use of portable metal detectors.

None of these measures are as glamorous as a press conference with a movie star. But each will meaningfully improve school safety.

Of course, much more can and should be done. A good place to start is by taking action to prevent future tragedies by identifying and intervening with those who are likely to commit them.

I find it deeply disturbing that the Broward County school district reported no instances of bullying, harassment, battery, or trespassing at Stoneman Douglas for the entire 2016-17 school year. None.

That’s not just a problem—it’s a potential crisis. The Sun Sentinel reports that the school had many reportable incidents that year. But failure to report such incidents, as the paper observed, “mak[es] it impossible to spot a school’s trouble spots and inform parents about safety.”

Why is this so relevant?  Because the Parkland attacker was himself the victim of reportedly vicious bullying. He was also the subject of dozens of tips made to local police and the FBI. But no one acted on that information—and then it was too late.

The “Road to Change” bus tour could have focused the nation’s attention on these issues. It could have called for schools’ safety improvements and proactive intervention for people like the Parkland attacker. Sadly, though, it seems to have had a very different objective.

According to the tour’s website, its objective was “to get young people educated, registered, and motivated to vote.” It was, according to its own words, a political operation.

Political activism is fine, but to focus on politics instead of commonsense solutions for school safety simply isn’t.

Nor is focusing solely on guns. The Columbine attackers brought bombs to school. Last year, a Maryland girl was arrested for planning to blow up her classmates. And just weeks after the Parkland attack, an ISIS-inspired Utah teen brought a homemade bomb to school.

That’s why a holistic approach is needed. More secure schools. Better mental health services. A proactive response to bullying. And “red flag” laws to keep weapons away from those who pose a clear threat to themselves and others.

These are just a few of the commonsense solutions that can make schools safer. None of them have the flash and dazzle of a political bus tour. But that’s all the more reason for us to pursue them.

After all, our children deserve nothing less. It’s been six months since the Parkland tragedy—and they’re heading back to school NOW.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Kay Coles James

Kay Coles James

Kay Coles James is president of The Heritage Foundation. James formerly served as director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and as Virginia’s secretary of health and human resources. She is also the founder and president of The Gloucester Institute. Twitter: .

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of a student as she waits to cross a street to enter for the first day of classes at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Aug. 15. (Photo: Joe Skipper/Reuters/Newscom)

President Trump to De-fund Over 100 Chinese Communist Party ‘Confucius Institutes’ in America

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Grace Gottschling an investigative reporter for Campus Reform writes in an article titled “Trump to sign Confucius Institute funding ban“,

President Trump is about to sign the new National Defense Authorization Act, which will prohibit funding to Chinese-run Confucius Institutes on American campuses.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz added the key amendment to “The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019,” which also restricts funding to universities that host Confucius Institutes and requires them to provide a public record of any agreements or contracts they have with the program, which has deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

“The Confucius Institutes are the velvet glove around the iron fist of their campaigns on our campuses.”   

Earlier this week, the White House confirmed that Trump plans to sign the bill during a visit to Fort Drum, New York, according to Fox-28.

In March, the Central Intelligence Agency issued a classified report labeling the institutes as a threat, according to an unclassified page of the document obtained by The Washington Free Beacon.

“The [Chinese Communist Party] provides ‘strings-attached’ funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it in a negative light,” the unclassified portion of the report reads. “It has used this tactic to reward pro-China viewpoints and coerce Western academic publications and conferences to self-censor. The CCP often denies visas to academics who criticize the regime, encouraging many China scholars to preemptively self-censor so they can maintain access to the country on which their research depends.”

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) in an April 9, 2018 article titled “How Many Confucius Institutes Are in the United States?” by Rachelle Peterson reports:

Image Credit: Kreeder13 CC BY-SA 4.0

Updated July 18, 2018. This list, originally published in March 2018, will be updated periodically. If you know of additional Confucius Institutes that have opened or closed, please let us know at contact@nas.org. 

Since 2004, the Chinese government has sponsored Confucius Institutes on college and university campuses around the world. An agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education, called the Hanban, provides teachers, textbooks, and operating funds.

In April 2017, the National Association of Scholars released Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education, a comprehensive report on the way the Chinese government infiltrates American colleges and universities to enhance its own image. At that time, we counted 103 Confucius Institutes in the United States.

As of July 2018, NAS counts a total of 107 Confucius Institutes in the United States. We identify 100 Confucius Institutes at American colleges and universities. We also identify 1 Confucius Institute at a private educational organization, the China Institute, and 6 Confucius Institutes at K-12 public school districts.*

Our count differs from that of the Hanban, which lists 110 Confucius Institutes in the US. However, the Hanban includes two Confucius Institutes that have since closed: Pfeiffer University, the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, and the University of West Florida. It also includes one that never opened: Dickinson State University. Finally, the Hanban’s list omits two Confucius Institutes that opened in 2017: Baruch University and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

*Most K-12 schools that partner with the Hanban have “Confucius Classrooms,” of which there are about 500 in the United States. However, the Hanban does designate these six school districts as home to Confucius Institutes as part of a collaboration between the Hanban and the College Board.

Download the NAS chart of the current Confucius Institutes in the United States.

Download NAS chart of US-based Confucius Institutes that closed. 

EDITORS NOTE: Here are the Confucius Institutes in Florida.

University of South Florida
Qingdao
University FL President Judy Genshaft
cvisot@usf.edu
http://global.usf.edu/confucius/College/university

Miami Dade College
Jiangsu Normal
University FL President Eduardo J. Padrón
epadron@mdc.edu
http://www.mdc.edu/mdcglobal/ci/College/university

University of North Florida
Shaanxi Normal
University FL President John Delaney
tom.serwatka@unf.edu
http://www.unf.edu/confucius/College/university

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Parents Should Be Free to Choose Safer Schools

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As back-to-school time approaches, parents are bracing for school-related trauma. The threat of bullying, violence, school shootings, and mental health maladies looms large as a new school year emerges. A 2018 PDK poll found that one-third of parents are concerned about their child’s safety at school, a sharp jump in recent years. And it’s not just peer harassment that worries parents. The Miami-Herald reported last month that an experienced teacher who was named “teacher of the year” this year in Florida, was caught on video calling a kindergartener a “loser.”

Some parents are fed up. They want options other than a mandatory, assigned district school.

For families who can choose them, private schools offer a safer learning environment than conventional public schools. A new study recently published in the Journal of School Choice found that private schools are much safer than public schools. Study authors M. Danish Shakeel of Harvard University and Corey DeAngelis of the Cato Center for Educational Freedom analyzed a large data set from the most recent Schools and Staffing Survey of school principals across the country. Even after controlling for school type and size, geography, student and teacher demographics, and student-teacher ratio, the authors revealed statistically significant safety benefits for private school students over public school ones.

Voucher programs and other school choice mechanisms can help to make private schools more accessible to more families, granting an exit from an assigned district school to those who want it. Vouchers redistribute to families some or all of the taxpayer money allocated to their local school district, allowing parents to use those funds at a private school of their choice. School vouchers were popularized by Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who saw their potential in loosening the government-controlled monopoly on education. He wrote:

Given, as at present, that parents can send their children to government schools with out special payment, very few can or will send them to other schools unless they too are subsidized.

Critics of school choice argue that parents are incapable of making good choices for their children’s education. This arrogance justifies denying school choice to parents and forcing them to accept their district assignment. Opponents cite reports, like this one released by the U.S. Department of Education last spring, showing that voucher recipients may have lower scores on standardized tests than their peers in public schools. This particular report looked at recipients of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that has been available exclusively to low-income recipients in the District of Columbia since 2004. While math scores were slightly lower for the voucher recipients, the report shows that parents were quite satisfied with the private school their children attended. Most crucially, the report shows that voucher parents felt their children were safe in school.

It’s also important to note that while test scores of voucher students may be lower, other U.S. Department of Education data show that voucher recipients have significantly higher high school graduation rates than their public school peers.

When given the opportunity to make choices about which school their child attends, parents are quite competent. It’s true that they may value qualities like their child’s safety and graduation prospects over exam results, but is that such a bad thing? When it comes to protecting a child’s well-being, parents usually know best.

Reprinted from Intellectual Takeout

COLUMN BY

Kerry McDonald

Kerry McDonald

Kerry McDonald (@kerry_edu) has a B.A. in Economics from Bowdoin and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard. She lives in Cambridge, Mass. with her husband and four never-been-schooled children. Kerry is the author of the forthcoming book, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press). Follow her writing at Whole Family Learning.

VIDEO: Turning Point USA’s Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk Explain They Want to ‘Build,’ Not ‘Destroy’

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After being harassed and assaulted by leftist militants earlier this week, the founder of a conservative organization for young people and the group’s communications director vow to remain civil and not respond in kind.

While dining at the Green Eggs Cafe in Philadelphia on Monday morning, Turning Point USA’s founder, Charlie Kirk, and communications director Candace Owens were accosted by left-wing activists.

The mob, said to be self-styled Antifa “anti-fascist” militants, reportedly shrieked and shouted at Kirk and Owens for several minutes.

“The protesters were screaming ‘white supremacist’ and something about immigrants,” the cafe’s manager, Malik Joe, told The Washington Post, adding that the protesters also hurled food and other objects.

Kirk was even doused with a beverage.

Owens, who is black, thanked the minority police officers who protected them from further harm, noting the irony of the far-left white protesters decrying “racism.”

Kirk and Owens described the encounter on Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity’s program that night.

“Candace and I said, ‘You know what? Let’s just stand here for a couple of minutes and show them that we’re not going to back down,’” Kirk said. “Very peacefully, we’re not going to retaliate if things get thrown of us. We don’t want to play the ‘victim card’ here. That’s what the left does all the time.”

“We felt it was an important moment to show America exactly what we are fighting, because not many people understand,” Owens added. “This is real. They’ve grown increasingly violent, because they understand that they are losing.”

Kirk’s and Owens’ remarks on “Hannity” echoed observations they made in a joint exclusive interview with The Daily Signal at Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit on July 25 in Washington.

The Turning Point leaders shared the importance of civil discourse and positive energy.

“People that go after us, people that go after our organization—their life is about destroying and ruining. I don’t want to be a part of that. We’re about building. We wake up every single day [thinking] how to make something bigger, stronger, better,” Kirk said. “Of course, you are going to have ups and downs. So, you have those two buckets, right? What kind of energy are you going to put in the world—energy that’s determined to destroy or to build? We’re builders, and we’re going to keep doing that.”

Owens added: “What you put out, you take in. So, if that’s the energy, you wake up every day thinking, ‘How can I destroy something?’ You will eventually eat that sort of destruction. We genuinely believe that, and we are hyper-focused on having … [an] optimistic influence in this world and inspiring our children, our students, to the exact same impact.”

COLUMN BY

Portrait of Ginny Montalbano

Ginny Montalbano

Ginny Montalbano is a contributor to The Daily Signal. Send an email to Ginny. Twitter: @GinnyMontalbano.

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Public University Pays Radical 89-yr-old Linguist Who Supports Hezbollah $750,000 to Teach Politics

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A public university is paying a radical 89-year-old linguist hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach his famously leftist brand of politics, according to records obtained by Judicial after a months-long battle with the taxpayer-funded institution.

Noam Chomsky

Judicial Watch launched an investigation after the University of Arizona (UA), located in Tucson with an enrollment of about 40,000, announced that it hired Noam Chomsky to teach a general education course for undergraduates titled “What is Politics?” In the announcement UA describes Chomsky as a “world-renowned linguist” and one of the “most cited scholars in modern history.”

The reality is that Chomsky is an extreme leftwing propagandist who defends communist regimes—including those in Vietnam and Cuba—and openly supports the anti-Israel and anti-U.S. terrorist organization Hezbollah. In fact, Chomsky met with Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon even though the State Department lists the group as a terrorist organization and the elderly professor has publicly supported the militant group’s right to be armed.

At the time Chomsky was a professor of linguistics at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private institution that can hire whoever it wants with no public accountability. However, UA is funded with taxpayer dollars and must comply with public-records laws meant to keep government transparent. It still took UA four months to provide Judicial Watch with the records of Chomsky’s outrageous deal.

The records show that the university’s relationship with the decrepit academic began several years ago while he was still teaching at MIT. Chomsky delivered guest lectures at UA, mostly in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the university eventually hired him as a “consultant” for $65,000. His consultant duties were to show up only six times for a politics class with only 38 students, which means he received north of $10,000 a lecture.

The class met for 7 ½ weeks and Chomsky was to attend only on Thursdays for a total of six sessions, the contract obtained by Judicial Watch shows. UA subsequently hired Chomsky to teach for three years—from 2017 to 2020—at an annual salary of $250,000. The money comes from tuition dollars, grants, contracts and other funds generated by the public institution, the records show.

Pouring salt on the wound, UA lost nearly $25,000 hosting lectures (“THE HAURY CONVERSATION: NOAM CHOMSKY TALKS WITH TONI MASSARO”) featuring Chomsky. The school promoted one of them as an event in which Chomsky would speak on “a range of topics that could include the refugee crisis, political conflict, democracy, capitalism, climate change and social inequality.”

The records show that the outlay expenses by UA for both lectures totaled $17,007.01. An invoice for $12,687.16 dated April 30, 2018, appears to be a payment to Eventbrite from the university for the second of the two Chomsky lectures. Ticket sales came in at $12,385 and ticket costs totaled $7,683.24. When combined with the original outlays, UA lost $24,992.41 on both of the Chomsky events. It should be noted that UA has not hosted similar events for any other academic in the past 24 years, making the Chomsky fiasco a unique, one-time production at a loss to taxpayers for a radical leftist political activist.

The university’s arrangement with Chomsky has outraged many, especially those with connections to the school. Bevan Olyphant, a former Green Berets who taught a leadership class in the honors program at UA, got paid $1,500 a semester and says a full engineering professor at UA receives an average annual salary of $80,000.

This is enraging considering the university is paying Chomsky an astounding quarter of a million dollars a year. Olyphant, who owns a ranch in southern Arizona, said this is the response he got from the president of UA when he requested that the university bring in conservative speakers: “We can’t do that! We would have a riot,” Olyphant told Judicial Watch. As part of the investigation into Chomsky’s egregious deal, Judicial Watch requested records of UA’s contracts with other speakers and lecturers and none were conservative.

Colleges: A Force for Evil

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Many of the nation’s colleges have become a force for evil and a focal point for the destruction of traditional American values. The threat to our future lies in the fact that today’s college students are tomorrow’s teachers, professors, judges, attorneys, legislators, and policymakers.

A recent Brookings Institution poll suggests that nearly half of college students believe hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. Of course, it is.

Fifty-one percent of students think that it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. About 20 percent of students hold that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. Over 50 percent say colleges should prohibit speech and viewpoints that might offend certain people.

Contempt for the First Amendment and other constitutional guarantees is probably shared by the students’ high school teachers, as well as many college professors.

Brainwashing and indoctrination of young people has produced some predictable results, as shown by a recent Gallup poll. For the past 18 years, Gallup has asked adults how proud they are to be Americans. This year, only 47 percent say they are “extremely proud,” well below the peak of 70 percent in 2003. The least proud to be Americans are nonwhites, young adults, and college graduates.

The proudest Americans are those older than 50 and those who did not graduate from college. The latter might be explained by their limited exposure to America’s academic elite.

Johnetta Benton, a teacher at Hampton Middle School near Atlanta, was recorded telling her sixth-grade students, “America has never been great for minorities.” In a tirade, she told her class: “Because Europeans came from Europe … you are an immigrant. You are an illegal immigrant because you came and just took it. … You are an immigrant. This is not your country.”

To exploit young, immature people this way represents an act of supreme cowardice. The teacher should be fired, but I’m guessing that her colleagues share her sympathies. At the same school, students were given a homework assignment that required them to write a letter asking lawmakers for stricter gun control laws.

One might be tempted to argue that the growing contempt for liberty and the lack of civility stem from the election of Donald Trump. That’s entirely wrong. The lack of civility and indoctrination of our young people have been going on for decades.

UCLA history professor Mary Corey told her class: “Capitalism isn’t a lie on purpose. It’s just a lie.” She added that capitalists “are swine. … They’re bastard people.”

An English professor at Montclair State University, in New Jersey, told his students, “Conservatism champions racism, exploitation and imperialist war.”

An ethnic studies professor at California State University, Northridge and Pasadena City College teaches that “the role of students and teachers in ethnic studies is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

The University of California, Santa Barbara’s school of education emailed its faculty members to ask them to consider classroom options concerning the Iraq War, suggesting they excuse students from class to attend anti-war events and give them extra credit for writing about it.

Rodney Swanson, a UCLA economics professor, told his class, “The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world.”

There is little question that colleges stand at the forefront of an attack on America and Western values.

Leftists often say that the U.S. is the world’s worst country. But here are some empirical facts they might explain. According to a recent Gallup poll, about 13 percent of the world’s adults—630 million people—would like to move to another country. Roughly 138 million would like to live in the U.S.—making us the No. 1 destination, followed by the U.K., Canada, and France.

There’s something exceptionally appealing about America and the Western world that leftists choose to ignore or lie about.

COLUMN BY

Portrait of Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams is a columnist for The Daily Signal and a professor of economics at George Mason University. Twitter: @WE_Williams.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by Javier Larrea/agefotostock /Newscom. COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM

K-12 Schools Bringing in Drag Queens to Teach Gender Ideology [+Video]

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K-12 schools are bringing drag queens into the classroom to teach gender ideology, a Thursday video revealed.

Teachers are praising “Drag Queen Story Hour,” according to a clip released by videographer Sean Fitzgerald and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The program “captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.”

dcnf-logo

Maurice Sendak Community School, a public school located in Brooklyn, New York, hosted a drag queen and first grade teacher Alexis Hernandez marveled at the event in a testimonial published on Drag Queen Story Hour’s website.

“Drag Queen Story Hour gave my first-graders a fun and interactive platform to talk and think about social and emotional issues like acceptance, being yourself, and loving who you are,” Hernandez said. “During our debrief … [students] were preaching the incredible lessons they had learned, like ‘It’s OK to be different,’ and ‘There’s no such thing as “boy” and “girl” things.’”

The first grade teacher said she would be hosting the event again the following year. Katrina Green, a teacher from Chickpeas Preschool in Brooklyn, also lauded the program.

The event “allows preschool children to deepen and complicate their ideas about gender at the exact age when they are often developing rigid ideas about this concept,” Green said.

Drag Queen Story Hour markets itself to children between 3 and 8 years old. The program’s reading list includes books like “Jacob’s New Dress” by Sarah and Ian Hoffman and “Red: A Crayon’s Story” by Michael Hall. While the former book’s plot revolves around a boy convincing his parents to let him wear a dress to school, the latter chronicles the journey of a crayon “mistakenly labeled” red to identify successfully as blue.

Fitzgerald cited articles noting a spike in children identifying as transgender within the past few years.

“Think about how absurd this is,” the videographer said. “The taxpayer is funding adult-themed performers to come and read to our smallish children in order to indoctrinate them into a political ideology about gender while, at the same time, school districts across the country are removing any and all references to biological sex from science textbooks.”

Fitzgerald directed viewers to stopk12indoctrination.org, where they can report indoctrination in K-12 schools.

COLUMN BY

Rob Shimshock

Rob Shimshock is a reporter for The Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter: @ShimshockAndAwe

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is a 2008 photo showing Drag Queen Phyllis Denmark, whose real name is Randy Patterson, and who called out the bingo numbers every Gay Bingo night. (Photo: St Petersburg Times/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom). Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

War on Boys: The ‘Feminist Jihad’ on Normal Male Behavior

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James Woods tweeted the following,

James Woods (@RealJamesWoods)
There is a war on boys in America: chemical “castration” (ritalin), the mythology of #ADD, the scourge of pedophilia (#NAMBLA), the feminist jihad against virtually all normal male behavior in pre-teens and teens, etc. It is open war on boys and the prognosis is devastating.

Prager University published the below video titled “War on Boys” narrated by Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mr. Woods is correct in his analysis that there is a war on boys being boys.

In an August 2nd, 2018 Washington Examiner op-ed titled “Feminism is the last thing in the world boys need” Suzanne Venker wrote:

The sheer degree of havoc feminists cause never ceases to amaze me, nor does their arrogance and condescension. In a ridiculous piece in the The New York Times titled “What Feminists Can Do for Boys,” feminist author Jessica Valenti claims that those who share her ideology can help boys become men.

I cannot think of a more preposterous argument. Feminism is a major cause of the predicament boys and men now face. In what world could it be the remedy?

What modern feminists want is to rid the world of traditional masculinity, pure and simple. They’re consumed with the unwarranted and bogus notion that men in their natural state are prone to oppress women and that the male drive to provide and protect is evidence of said oppression.

While girls and young women have ample resources to seek “respite” from restrictive cultural mores, writes Valenti, boys do not — and this oversight makes them “susceptible to misogynist hucksters peddling get-manly-quick platitudes and dangerous online extremist communities.”

She then points to none other than Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor and YouTube philosopher who’s become a bona fide sensation ever since his interview with the U.K. feminist Cathy Newman. But Peterson’s meteoric rise is hardly due to his being a “misogynist huckster.” On the contrary, it is due entirely to his being a shining example of what it means to think for oneself and to be a mature, responsible man who’s committed to his wife and kids.

I can’t think of a single better role model for men.

Read more.

The Honorable Steve Baldwin, author, researcher and speaker on homosexual issues, wrote a white paper published in the Regent’s University Law Review titled “Child Molestation and and Homosexual Movement.” In a January 2014 column Mr. Baldwin wrote:

Lately, the gay movement seems to be making large gains in its war on America’s Judeo-Christian culture. Gay characters have become the norm on sitcoms; it has become fashionable to attack the Boy Scouts; homosexual propaganda inundates many of our public schools; nearly all the mainstream religious denominations have “revised” their understanding of Biblical teaching concerning homosexuality; and the gay “rights” legislative agenda is succeeding beyond the advocates’ wildest imaginations.

[ … ]

It is difficult to convey the dark side of the homosexual culture without appearing harsh. However, it is time to acknowledge that homosexual behavior threatens the foundation of Western civilization ─ the nuclear family. An unmistakable manifestation of the attack on the family unit is the homosexual community’s efforts to target children both for their own sexual pleasure and to enlarge the homosexual movement. The homosexual community and its allies in the media scoff at this argument. They insist it is merely a tactic to demonize the homosexual movement. After all, they argue, heterosexual molestation is a far more serious problem.

The feminists have joined forces with the LGBTQ community and introduced into public schools, colleges and universities an anti-boy/male agenda. Being a “male student” is not an appropriate pronoun on many college campuses.

Mr. Baldwin concludes:

The homosexual community knows that the capture of all major youth groups is absolutely necessary to the expansion of its movement. They know what most social scientists and sex researchers know but refuse to talk about: homosexually-molested children are likely to become homosexual. After all, one of the most common characteristics of homosexual molesters is the fact that they were molested themselves during boyhood. An article published by the American Medical Association reported that, “Abused adolescents, particularly those victimized by males, were up to 7 times more likely to self-identity as gay or bisexual than peers who had not been abused.”

It is high time that America’s elected officials, health authorities, education leaders, and law enforcement officials act to not only tell the harsh truth─the homosexual community has targeted America’s youth─but act now to counter this horrible trend. Failure to do so will have disastrous consequences for both our culture and for the health of our children.

Time for boys to be boys and grow into men, who will be fathers, brothers and real males.

RELATED VIDEO: Make men masculine again. Rape, murder, war – all have one thing in common: Men. The solution seems simple: make men less toxic – make men less masculine. In this video, Allie Stuckey, Host of “Allie” on CRTV & “Relatable” podcast, explains why demonizing masculinity is not the solution, but the problem.

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