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DEI Training Makes You More Likely to Agree With … Literally Hitler: Study

November 29, 2024/in Anti-Semitism, Culture War, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Religion, Social Issues, Socialism, Techno-Fascism, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Family Research Council

At the beginning of his administration, President Joe Biden explained why he planned to institute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government. “[O]ur soul will be troubled as long as systemic racism is allowed to persist,” he said. Yet a new study finds that being exposed to DEI training or materials makes people more likely to agree with statements made by Adolf Hitler — yes, “literally Hitler.”

Researchers had subjects read “anti-oppressive DEI educational materials frequently used in interventional and educational settings.” Then they presented subjects with a series of statements based on quotations from Adolf Hitler, replacing the word “Jews” with “brahmins,” the favored class in India’s caste system. The subjects “exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements, agreeing that Brahmins are ‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%),” the study found. “These findings suggest that exposure to anti-oppressive narratives can increase the endorsement of the type of demonization and scapegoating characteristic of authoritarianism.”

Rather than engendering racial harmony, DEI training made subjects hypersensitive to sleights and likely to detect offense where none was given, researchers discovered. “[W]hile purporting to combat bias, some anti-oppressive DEI narratives can engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence for a transgression deserving punishment,” added the researchers from Rutgers University Social Perception Lab and the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in their study titled “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias.”

Further, they concluded, DEI trainings’ extreme and often distorted view of race relations creates participants’ “demands for more anti-oppressive DEI training, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of suspicion and intolerance.”

“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — those are three words that sound great but, when implemented into the policy by the Biden administration, have been very devastating, even toward the stated goals that they claim to espouse,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) told “Washington Watch” last week.

The chairman of the anti-discrimination organization Do No Harm, Stanley Goldfarb, had previously linked DEI to anti-Semitism. Hitler regularly accused Jews of discriminating against ethnic Germans and conspiring to enrich themselves from German labor — much as DEI and allied radical theories accuse white people of doing today.

DEI Promotes Racial Discrimination

DEI self-consciously bases itself on critical race theory (CRT). The Marxist-inspired ideology holds that all differences in outcome between ethnic groups stem exclusively from racial discrimination, that American society systemically discriminates against minorities, and that all white people share in unearned privilege. “[N]o white member of society seems quite so innocent,” wrote CRT pioneers Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in their book “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.” Teachers in Buffalo, New York, taught students that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism.”

To overturn alleged “systemic racism,” CRT/DEI activists urge the federal government and private employers to discriminate in favor of racial minorities. Ibram X. Kendi wrote in his bestselling book, “How to be an Antiracist”:

“[R]acial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity [minority wealth], then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging that inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached. The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Kendi removed this passage from the Kindle version of his book sometime last year, complaining it had “been heavily quoted by the conservators of racism to attack me and this book.” Kendi made a stealth edit, allegedly to make it “harder to distort the meaning of these sentences.” The updated passage changes the words but not the meaning, stating:

“The only remedy to negative racist discrimination that produces inequity is positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to past negative racist discrimination that has produced inequity is present positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to present negative racist discrimination toward inequity is future positive antiracist discrimination toward equity.”

Public opposition to DEI’s advocacy of racial discrimination against white people has led numerous corporations to step away from the controversial ideology. Walmart recently walked back its DEI policies, joining such corporate titans as Caterpillar, Boeing, and Toyota.

Yet DEI and CRT currently thrive on college campuses. Two out of three major universities require students to take courses in DEI, according to the Goldwater Institute. The Supreme Court ruled last June that racial discrimination in college admissions violates the 14th Amendment. “To rigorously enforce yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, I will eliminate all ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ programs across the entire federal government,” promised then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

For threatening to ding DEI, Democrats denounced the 45th president as a fascist. Biden charged Trump with “echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” After receiving the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination — despite bypassing the primary process — Vice President Kamala Harris closed her campaign by calling Trump a threat to “our democracy,” falsely accusing the former president of threatening to use the military against “the enemy within” on election day 2024, and agreeing with the statement that “Donald Trump is a fascist.” The Associated Press reported that two-thirds of Kamala Harris supporters named the so-called threat to democracy as their top issue.

DEI and Acts of Political Violence

President-elect Trump and those close to him have suffered as a result. He experienced two attempted assassinations on the campaign trail this summer. On Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, the Trump campaign announced several Cabinet nominees faced “violent, unAmerican threats to their lives and those who live with them.” The threats included bomb threats and “swatting” — falsely calling the SWAT team to target a family. “This is what happens when you call a major party candidate ‘literally Hitler’ and ‘a threat to [d]emocracy’ for years,” observed former Michigan State Representative Brett LaFave.

DEI concepts have exploded into violence in the past. The target of Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale, who identified as a transgender man named Aiden and killed six people at Covenant School last March, exhibited signs of CRT-based self-loathing. In her journals, Hale referred to herself as a “white nothingness” festooned in thoughts of “white privilege [sic], an embarrassment to self.” Later, she wrote, “I am nothing. Brown love is the most beautiful kind.” She referred to her future victims as “white privileges.”

The federal government’s caricature of Trump voters has denied them aid after this summer’s hurricanes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 2022-2026 Strategic Plan ranks as “Goal 1: Instill Equity as a Foundation of Emergency Management.” A FEMA worker, Marn’i Washington, instructed canvassers to avoid storm-ravaged Florida homes that sported signs supporting Donald Trump for president. Washington later said she was “simply following orders” from above: FEMA characterized Trump supporters as anti-government and potentially violent.

“I can tell you for this particular incident, at the direction of our employee, 20 homes were skipped,” testified the Biden administration’s FEMA administrator, Deanne Criswell, before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on November 19.

The same day, the committee passed the Dismantle DEI Act (H.R.8706), introduced by Cloud, by a 23-17, party-line vote. Among its other provisions, the Dismantle DEI Act would end all federal training that requires employees to agree “that a particular race, color, ethnicity, religion, biological sex, or national origin is inherently or systemically superior or inferior, oppressive or oppressed, or privileged or unprivileged.”

“DEI programs masquerade as fairness while instead fostering division, inefficiency, and discrimination in our institutions,” commented Cloud in an email sent to The Washington Stand. “The Dismantle DEI Act takes aim at this harmful ideology and will root it out of our government.”

“True justice is — and must remain — blind. It should not consider race, sex, or other characteristics when evaluating an individual. Instead, it must focus on fairness, merit, and equal opportunity,” Cloud told the committee before the vote. DEI represents “a dangerous detour that risks erasing the strides we’ve made toward a more perfect union. By dismantling these harmful policies, we can reaffirm our commitment to the ideals of equality, merit, and justice that make our nation great.”

Outgoing conservative Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) introduced two bills to right DEI-inspired discrimination emanating out of the government into the private sector. The No Discrimination in Housing Act (H.R.10195) would prevent large corporate landholders that have a DEI initiative, such as Vanguard and Blackstone, from receiving the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). The Flexibility in Housing Act of 2024 (H.R.10194) would halt the implementation of a Biden-Harris administration rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requiring HUD grant recipients to implement equity-driven housing plans.

Christians Oppose the Suspicion and Offense at the Heart of DEI/CRT

Christians should welcome bills that eliminate DEI, CRT, and other forms of left-wing discrimination from government, education, and broader society. Further, Christians must make clear such racial discrimination is incompatible with the word of God. Christian love “is not easily provoked” (I Corinthians 13:5). “He who busies himself with the sins of others, or judges his brother on suspicion, has not yet even begun to repent or to examine himself so as to discover his own sins,” wrote St. Maximos the Confessor. Conversely, the Greek word translated as “the devil” (δι?βολος) literally means the “accuser, slanderer.”

Ironically, DEI supporters will likely impute false racist motivations to these bills, while slouching toward endorsing the words of the most racially focused totalitarian of the 20th century — and the spiritual power that stands behind all forms of ungodly oppression.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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Pete Hegseth Must Reform ‘Woke’ Military: Congressman

November 21, 2024/in Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Propaganda, Social Issues, Socialism/by Family Research Council

As Democrats deride President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense, one congressman says Hegseth is just the man to turn the Biden-Harris administration’s “woke and weaponized” military into a “strong and focused” fighting force. The president’s proposal to remove underperforming or politicized generals would actually depoliticize a Pentagon that once again failed its annual audit, he added.

Hegseth, an Ivy League graduate who served in the military, has been “wrongly criticized” as a lightweight, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Monday. “We’re going to get a strong and focused military. Pete Hegseth has written books about it. He’s a well-educated, very successful combat veteran as an infantry officer, and I think he’s the right kind of leader. We have to get him confirmed.”

Trump’s Warrior Board Will Cut ‘Bloated’ Military

Democrats and the legacy media lumped in criticism of Hegseth with concern over President-elect Trump’s proposed executive order establishing a Warrior Board to review, and possibly remove, three- and four-star generals who moved up the ranks due more to their political views than their military prowess.

“Our senior ranks are already bloated. We have one officer for every nine enlisted soldiers. When we won World War II, we had one officer for every 30 enlisted soldiers,” Davidson told Perkins. “We’re very top heavy.”

Removing military officers has occurred numerous times under Democratic presidents. Barack Obama purged 197 military officers over five years. In 1941, during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third term, General George C. Marshall removed 600 officers over age or physical fitness concerns.

The Left has tried to portray this as part of the president-elect’s “war on democracy” and “norms.” On Sunday, “ABC This Week” host Martha Raddatz asked if Trump plans to “fire or arrest” generals “he considers woke, or those close to former Chairman Mark Milley.” Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), just elected Michigan’s next senator, dismissed the tribunal as a “kangaroo court” that would, for the first time, introduce politics into the military. “I think we’re really at risk of politicizing the military in a way that we can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said Slotkin.

But Davidson says the board would reverse the damage done by the Biden-Harris administration.

Observers Say Clinton, Obama-Biden-Harris Politicized the Military, Not Trump

The Clinton and Obama-Biden-Harris administrations politicized the military by using it as a tool for social experimentation, critics say. Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy allowed closeted homosexuals to join the military for the first time in 1993. Barack Obama liberalized the policy, and the Biden-Harris administration extended it to transgender-identifying Americans. The Democratic administrations forced soldiers to sit through LGBTQ political propaganda at each step of the way. Biden-Harris also emphasized critical race theory and so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

The U.S. Navy produced a widely mocked video in 2022 schooling soldiers on how the “proper” use of pronouns helps create “a safe space for everybody.” A video in the Navy’s online recruitment pilot program the following May featured a drag queen who uses the name “Harpy Daniels” (2nd Class Petty Officer Joshua Kelly). The entire DOD referred to male and female service members with the gender-neutral pronoun “themself” in its Manual of Military Decorations and Awards last August 7, before reversing itself weeks later.

“One of the key woke elements they created is this three letter acronym, DEI: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” said Davidson. But DEI officers “are really just political officers” who “politicize every department, and they’re clearly doing it in the Department of Defense.” The Biden-Harris administration requested $114.7 million for the Pentagon to teach “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) to the U.S. armed forces and deeply embed “DEIA values, objectives, and considerations in how we do business and execute our missions” last year.

That built on the administration’s commitment to critical race theory (CRT). As The Washington Stand’s Dan Hart reported, in 2022, “more than 600 documents were uncovered showing that West Point cadets are being immersed in CRT, with lessons on how ‘whiteness’ is ‘a location of structural advantage, of race privilege,’ how ‘racism is ordinary’ and ‘White Americans have primarily benefited from civil rights legislation.’” The materials directed cadets to use CRT principles to form their answers.

The Washington Stand’s Suzanne Bowdey produced a list of 25 incidences of the military promoting the woke agenda in the Biden-Harris administration’s first 21 months:

January 2021: Biden Welcomes Transgenderism back into the Military, Scrapping Trump Policy
January 2021: Army Punishes Chaplain for Opposing Transgenderism in the Ranks
March 2021: Pentagon Launches Extremist Stand-Down
March 2021: White House Announces Taxpayer-Funded Gender Reassignments for Troops
March 2021: Navy under Fire for Reading List that Promotes America as ‘Systemically Racist’
May 2021: Space Force Suspends Lt. Colonel for Denouncing Marxism
June 2021: DOD Asks for Money to Combat Climate Change
June 2021: Critical Race Theory Infiltrates U.S. Military Academies
June 2021: Military Defends Drag Show at Largest Training Center as ‘Essential to Morale’
June 2021: Pentagon Warns Chaplains to Affirm the LGBT Lifestyle
February 2022: Army Introduces Strategy to Fight the ‘National Security Threat’ of Global Warming
April 2022: Military Offers ‘Compassionate Reassignments’ for Service Members in Red States
April 2022: Defense Secretary Considers Adding Nonbinary or ‘Polygender’ Troops to Ranks
May 2022: Air Force Library Forced to Cancel Drag Queen Story Hour after GOP Pressure
June 2022: Marines Celebrate Pride Month with Rainbow Bullets
June 2022: Gratuitous Pride Tweets Circulate across the Branches
June 2022: Pentagon Hosts ‘Transgender Visibility and Progress’ Event
June 2022: Langley Air Force Base Hosts a Taxpayer-Funded Drag Queen Show
June 2022: Democratic Leaders Resurrect Push for Women in the Draft
June 2022: Navy Launches Training Video on the Correct Use of Personal Pronouns
June 2022: Army Investigates Chaplain for Celebrating the End of Roe v. Wade
June 2022: Pentagon Expands Access, Leave, and Travel for Service Member Abortions
September 2022: Veterans Affairs Announces the Start of Taxpayer-Funded Abortions
September 2022: Military Accused of Indoctrinating Kids with Woke Gender Ideology, CRT in Base Schools
September 2022: Air Force Cadets Warned Not to Use ‘Gendered’ Words like ‘Mom,’ ‘Dad’

The Biden-Harris administration also denied religious exemptions for those who refused to take the COVID-19 jabs, firing thousands of soldiers who refused to take the then-experimental shot.

Biden officials “know that, by and large, the vast majority of men and women who serve in the military lean to the Right. And those 260,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who did not take the vaccine are probably far more conservative,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) at the time. Only 43 of the roughly 8,000 soldiers dismissed for refusing to take the untested injection had sought to reenlist in the armed forces, according to military data furnished to CNN last October, the last full fiscal year of the Biden-Harris administration.

All of these ideas have impacted recruitment. The Army exceeded its 2023 recruitment goal of 55,000 by a mere 300 enlistees. The other service branches posted similar numbers. The number of men volunteering for military service has declined by 35% over the last decade, much of it during the Obama-Biden-Harris years.

Slotkin acknowledged in passing that “there’s issues with recruiting” but felt the Pentagon’s “equity” agenda remains worthwhile, because “we want a diverse force.”

“You inherently build a diverse unit [when] you take the most talented people at each of the skill sets required to succeed,” replied Davidson, “and the unit flourishes.” Unit cohesion and “the ability to shoot, move, and communicate lethal force is what makes our military strong.”

The news comes as the Pentagon has once again failed its audit.

Defense Department Fails Seventh Audit in a Row

On Sunday, the Biden-Harris administration’s Defense Department announced it had failed an audit for the seventh time, failing to account for how it spent its $824 billion budget. Of the 28 components of the Pentagon’s audit, only nine passed with an unmodified opinion; more than half (15 of 28) received a failing report with disclaimers.

Administration figures dismissed claims they were guilty of nonfeasance. “I do not say we failed,” said Michael McCord, the Biden-Harris administration’s undersecretary of Defense comptroller and chief financial officer, last Friday. “We have about half clean opinions; we have half that are not clean opinions. So, if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure.”

A 50% grade is, indeed, a failing grade even under the most generous grading system.

The DOD, which has never passed an audit since they became legally mandated in 2018, is the only major government agency not to pass an audit.

McCord says passing an audit by 2028 is achievable — but not at the DOD’s current performance. “If you draw a trend line … back from when we started, from year one to year seven, I don’t think it’s going to show you’re getting there in time if you don’t continue to pick up the pace,” said McCord.

Concerns have percolated for years about Pentagon accountability. Liberal comedian Jon Stewart broached the topic during an April 2023 interview with Biden administration Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, calling it a potential sign of “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“The fact that DOD has not passed an audit is not suggestive of waste, fraud, and abuse. That is completely false right there,” deflected Hicks. “It’s suggestive that we don’t have an accurate inventory of what we have where.”

“So, in my world, that is waste,” replied Stewart.

As Hicks laughed dismissively at his argument, a staid Stewart replied, “I’m not looking to pick a fight with you, but I am surprised that the reaction to these questions is, ‘You don’t know what an audit is, Bucko.’”

The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requires the Pentagon to have a clean audit by 2028. “The fiscal and national security benefits that will come with the Pentagon finally being able to account for all of its assets are literally immeasurable and will continue to be until it gets its financial house in order,” said U.S. Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Congress should help push it over the finish line.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

Truth Breeds Trust, Deceit Breeds Destruction

October 22, 2024/in Censorship, Commentary, Communism, Culture War, Election Fraud, Elections, Fake News, Lawfare, Marxism, Misinformation, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Socialism, Techno-Fascism, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Family Research Council

Americans’ trust in mass media has stumbled to 31%, the lowest measurement since Gallup first asked the question in 1972, while those with absolutely no trust in the media has climbed to 36%. Trust in the media is higher among Democrats (54%) than Republicans (12%) and among senior citizens (43%) than those aged 18-29 (26%), but the media is now the least trusted of all civic and political institutions included in the survey.

How could this happen? If you’re reading The Washington Stand, you likely already know. Mass media, as an institution, lost Americans’ trust by behaving less like the neutral arbiters of objective information they claimed to be and more like partisan organs dedicated to getting candidates who shared their ideology elected.

In other words, they lied — or at least significantly misrepresented themselves. If the media were open about their biases and allowed consumers to reach they own conclusions, they might enjoy greater public trust than they do today.

In fact, the media’s problem with accurate reporting was “highlighted this week,” noted Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice on “Washington Watch,” in a “CBS news interview with [Vice President] Kamala Harris and … an interview with [House] Speaker [Mike] Johnson.” On one hand, CBS News faced accusations of selectively editing Harris’ answers, as well as giving her multiple chances to respond to the same question when her first attempt was unsatisfactory. On the other hand, Johnson accused CBS News of selectively cutting out the most persuasive parts of his interview.

While the media may be the worst offender, Americans’ distrust of institutions is not confined to the evening paper. “Trust in our institutions is eroding” more broadly, warned David Closson, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, “whether it’s the courts, whether it’s our school system, even the military.”

“Why is that?” Closson asked. “It’s because of decisions that our leaders have made.”

“Thinking of the military,” he continued, “why are recruitment levels so low? Well, think of the woke ideology that’s been introduced into our service branches.” The military is not supposed to be a partisan or ideological entity. Yet servicemembers were subjected to critical race theory trainings, celebration of transgenderism, and DEI performance objectives. Not only was the military drifting away from its critical mission, it was also becoming unmoored from objective reality and truth.

Or, “think about the thousands of service members that were discharged because they didn’t want to get the COVID-19 shot,” Closson added. In fact, public officials in many arenas squandered trust profligately during the COVID pandemic. “Think of all of us that were told to wear masks, and how none of that was actually based on science,” recalled Closson.

Indeed, the brazen lies and arbitrary orders issuing from public institutions during COVID created a “run” on public trust that went beyond just the issues at hand. Backed by the media and powerful government agencies, public health officials demanded that citizens comply with draconian mandates, including stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, vaccine passports, and social distancing farces. These officials traded on their scientific reputation as public health experts, when in fact few to none of the recommendations they issued were based on science.

As a result, Americans jaded by their COVID-era interactions with government are more willing to question the government on unrelated points. If public health officials were willing to lie about the efficacy of the COVID jabs, for example, then why should they be trusted on the rest of the recommended vaccine regimen? This, combined with a wide-open southern border — another example of gaslighting — has led to the resurgence of diseases once on the verge of eradication. Drug companies are now paying for advertisements that aren’t selling new products, but which are simply begging Americans not to turn their backs on longstanding vaccine recommendations. Building trust takes much longer than destroying it.

The collapse of public trust in America holds lessons for Christians to take to heart. “As Christians, we believe in an objective order, right and wrong,” concluded Closson. “And we believe in speaking the truth in love. And, too often, people in positions of power are abusing their authority, and that is eroding trust we have. And that’s not sustainable for any society in the long term.”

Three thousand years ago, David lamented that “Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak” (Psalms 12:2). But, rather than giving in to despair, David placed his trust in the Lord. “The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times” (Psalm 12:6).

Because God speaks the truth, his children should also be known for their truthfulness. Paul describes how God has given the church pastors and teachers to “equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,” so that we may not be misled “by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:12, 14-15).

The goal is unity and mutual edification (Ephesians 4:16), but the means are truth and love. Truth fosters trust, but deceit leads to destruction. This holds as true for the church as it does for the society at large. So, rather than be discouraged and disillusioned by the maelstrom of brazen lies swirling through our public discourse, Christians should consider in what ways they are walking in the truth, and how that can contribute to building up the body of Christ.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

Critical Race Theory

August 31, 2024/in Commentary, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, Marxism, News, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Social Issues, Socialism/by Dr. Tamzin A. Rosenwasser, M.D.

Just as Karl Marx interpreted all of human history as a fight between the “proletariat” (oppressed) and the “capitalists” (oppressors) using a method I can only call “Illogical Abstractionism,” so also do the “critical race theorists” use a rigid abstraction to divide all of mankind into one of two groups.

Karl Marx had no understanding of history or the time course in human affairs. He never set foot in the situations he wrote about with such stupid certainty. The “revolt of the proletariat” never happened, because the people whose strengths did not include invention of machinery, or founding of factories, (the proletariat) became much more comfortable and wealthier as a result of the existence and work of those whose strengths did include those things (the capitalists). The capitalists provided useful work, and it was an enormous benefit to the workers (proletariat).

Could humanity have managed without refrigerators and automobiles? We did so for millennia. Do you want to return to a world without refrigeration or the other comforts brought to u you thanks to capitalism?

To take abstract theories and apply them with deadly force to human beings does not appear to me to be a viable formula for happiness, or for unchaining anybody from any kind of oppression. In fact, we have history as our guide in judging the result of the abstract theories of Marxism as it was imposed in the Soviet Union. In all places where Marxism, Communism, Nazism, Fascism, and Socialism have been imposed, the major result is not tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, but millions of corpses.
Where less force has been used, the most benign result of these economic and political systems has been economic stagnation and the blighting of human lives.

At least a few people do well. Not necessarily the people who are so eaten up with the abstract theories that they have decided they must be imposed on everyone, but those who survive the brutal political power struggle—like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and the Kims in North Korea. They live in luxury while people starve and suffer all around them.

Marxists like Patrisse Cullors, the “Black Lives Matter” queen, may hope to remain on top but should remember that the revolution devours its children.

Critical Race Theory’s view of the oppressor (whites) and oppressed (people of color) classes quickly leads to logical contradictions. Where is Barack Obama? He is half “White” on his mother’s side, and half “Black” on his father’s side, whether his father was the elder Obama or Frank Marshall Davis.

So, is half of Barack Obama oppressing the other half? Sounds schizoid, but of course, that’s why we have psychiatrists. The question also arises, which half is which? Does the left half oppress the right? The right side of the brain is not exactly the same as the left half, so right away we run into a problem. Same with the front side fighting the back. There are no eyes in the back of the head, so they are not exactly equal halves. I suppose maybe each cell could line up its mitochondria, and uncurl its chromosomes, and
each divide into half. Obviously crazy, but crazier than dividing society by skin tone?

More conundrums ”Are Arabs people of color?” They enslaved “Black” Africans for centuries. In fact, they bought “Black” people as slaves from other “Black” people in Africa, and sold them to British slave-traders, or took them east to their lands, where they were enslaved. Arabs also enslaved “White” people. Do those “White” people somehow become “Black” because they were oppressed? Do “Black” people who enslaved other “Black” people get transmogrified into “White” people?

Perhaps an easier solution would be for all oppressed people to identify as oppressed victims. It works for gender, so why not for race?

As we see, human beings and productive enterprises are not all that Critical Race Theory, Communism, Nazism, Fascism, and Socialism kill. They also kill reason and logic. They kill love and hope. They also try to kill faith in Jesus Christ, whose teachings led William Wilberforce to get rid of the slave trade in the British Empire.

Think about it.

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The NextGen Marxist Movement That Wants to Fundamentally Change America

June 5, 2024/in Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Family Research Council

Some may wonder why conservatives talk so much about “the Left.” Are we overgeneralizing, or is there really an organized movement to tear down and reshape America into a completely different country? The answer is: there is a highly influential movement within the Left that actually is an organized, international, and well-funded Marxist movement that has been on the rise for years.

It started to become mainstream in American universities in 1989 and now runs rampant in our culture through the implementation of critical race theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies. Authors Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Gorka thoroughly researched and exposed the history and organization of the Left in their new, eye-opening book, “NextGen Marxism.”

Thankfully, not only do Gonzalez and Gorka reveal how organized, international, and powerful the Left is, but they also show how powerful and effective passionate citizens — especially parents — have been at stopping it in recent years. They provide straightforward action steps for those of us who love America and its freedoms and want to continue fighting for them on behalf of freedom-loving people around the world.

What Is NextGen Marxism?

NextGen Marxism (or cultural Marxism) is a philosophy implemented by “social justice” warriors (led by Black Lives Matter) through DEI policies that — over the last four years especially — companies and schools are expected to implement. If they don’t, they are labeled as heteronormative, sexist, white supremacist oppressors, and likely to be canceled.

Gonzalez and Gorka explain:

“This book makes the case that the social upheaval we are experiencing in the United States today is the result of a zero-sum view of the world, a world of irreconcilable antagonisms, one in which the open exchange of ideas is replaced by a rigid orthodoxy, in which there is no room for dissent, in which people are reduced to their skin color or sexual orientation. It is a worldview that sees the United States as fundamentally flawed and for which the sole antidote is its destruction and rebuilding.

“The [Black Lives Matter] leaders who shared this view well before they founded BLM made use of [George] Floyd’s tragedy to try to deliver a knockout blow against the US constitutional order in 2020 and were able to convince the managers and leaders of all our top institutions to buy in to the idea that the United States is systematically racist and oppressive, and thus in need of total transformation. It is this phenomenon that accounts for what has happened to American society.”

In The Heritage Foundation’s online forum, “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It,” Gonzalez and Gorka discuss how they discovered that in 1989 (when the Berlin Wall came down and many thought that Marxism and communism were dying), in reality Marxism became mainstream in American universities’ humanities and law departments, CRT was created, and Eric Mann formed his Marxist Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. (Several years later, Mann recruited Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter.)

Who Are “The Oppressors” and “The Oppressed,” according to Next Gen Marxists?

Today “the oppressors” are the “privileged”: whites, Americans, Israelis, Christians, Jews, heterosexuals, and males, according to NextGen Marxists. “The oppressed” is everyone else: those in the minority based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and those who were once colonized. They claim that Americans cannot work together to solve the supposed fundamental/systemic problems in our country, so they have to fight. They want to bring down the oppressors because they’re the “victimizers.”

From Economic Marxism to Cultural Marxism: “Abolish the Family”

Marxists believe that humankind can be perfected and that utopia can be attained here on earth (whereas Christians know that humans have been sinful since the fall and only will experience paradise in the new heaven and new earth). In order for Marxists to attain utopia, they believe they must tear down norms and traditions, the “trinity of the most monstrous evils”: private property, religion, and marriage. Gonzalez and Gorka write:

“One can draw a straight line from the anti-family, anti-morality position of [Robert] Owen and other utopians and socialists of the 1800s to BLM in 2020, which posted on its website (and subsequently removed following heavy criticism) the goal of destroying the nuclear family: “[W]e disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family-structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”

In a video that he released in 2023, filmmaker and Florida educator Chris Rufo explained:

“In the late 1980s, a group of writers, including Judith Butler, Gail Rubin, Sandy Stone, and Susan Stryker established the disciplines of queer theory and transgender studies. They argued that gender was a social construct, used to oppress racial and sexual minorities. They denounced the categories of man and woman as false binary that upholds a system of hetero-normativity, the white male heterosexual power structure. These writers made the case that these systems must be ruthlessly deconstructed and turned to dust, and the most visceral, dramatic way to achieve this is transgenderism. If a man can become a woman, if a woman can become a man, they believed the entire structure of creation could be toppled.”

These views espoused by the leftist elite influence America’s schools and culture. The nonprofit Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) writes in its guidelines on comprehensive sex education for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Sex education has the power to spark large-scale social change. SIECUS is not a single-issue organization because sex ed, as SIECUS envisions it, connects and addresses a variety of social issues. Sex ed sits at the nexus of many social justice movements — from LGBTQ rights and reproductive justice to the #MeToo movement and urgent conversations around consent and healthy relationships.” They add, “Controlling the formation of sexual identities through racialized stereotypes and the reproduction of racial and ethnic minority groups is central to effective population controls.”

Over the last 10 years, the Marxist Left has been successful at influencing schools, businesses, and the entertainment industry by making catchphrases such as “racial reckoning,” “marginalized groups,” and “heteronormative” a part of America’s everyday vocabulary. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens described this as the “great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome — became, more and more, not just passé, but taboo.”

Americans Are Successfully Pushing Back against Marxism

FRC’s Senior Fellow for Education Studies, Meg Kilganon, told The Washington Stand:

“When the vast majority of universities in America, including Christian and Catholic universities, have adopted ideas and concepts of Marxism that are antithetical to Judeo-Christian western civilization, the teachers, doctors, lawyers, bankers they produce will have been influenced by or will have accepted revolutionary ideals. This will make it very difficult for us to build and maintain organizations and institutions that are not vulnerable to take over. But that is exactly why we must fight to protect what we build and reclaim what has been stolen. The future depends on our devotion to God and his people.”

“Ten Tactics for Patriots”

Gonzalez and Gorka are encouraged by the successes that motivated Americans, including the impact that Family Research Council, Parents Defending Education, and Moms for Liberty have had at fighting back against NextGen Marxists. The Marxists’ “ideas must be exposed for the lies they are, their utopia as nothing more than a formula for tyranny and suffering.” They offer “Ten Tactics for Patriots”:

Expose
Network
Follow the money
Live within the truth
Vote with your wallet
Engage
Show up
Play the long game
Focus internationally, nationally, and locally
Reclaim the culture

If We Believe That All Humans Are Created in the Image of God, We Should Fight Marxism

Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement, Joseph Backholm, told TWS:

“From a biblical perspective, NextGen Marxism as with old Marxism, is born out of a rejection of the idea that we are created in the image of God. If the fact that we are all created in the image of God is the most important thing about us, it’s something we share in common with every other person we ever encounter. That idea is inherently equalizing and unifying.

“But if we reject that as the basis of our identity, we root our identity in superficial things like our class, race, sexual proclivities, sex, intelligence, or capacity. Once we do that, the most important thing about me is something that puts me at odds with many of the people around me. After all, if we are not created equal, then we are not equal. Just look around, we are significantly different, and human pride tempts us to use those differences to consider ourselves better than others. Marxism correctly identifies the fact that people are different and those differences lead to exploitation and abuse, but the gospel provides the only solution because it provides a basis for equality.”

Thankfully, we have leaders in the highest levels of the federal government that recognize the severe threat that NextGen Marxism poses to our country. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently told “Fox & Friends” cohost, Brian Kilmeade:

“I do have a great reverence for this country and for our great experiment in self-governance. And you know, we’re only going to be 248 years old on July 4th. We don’t know how long a constitutional republic like ours can last. The Founders didn’t know, but they gave us their advice on how to preserve it. And what we have to do every day here is defend those founding principles so that we can preserve them, so that we can pass along liberty, opportunity, and security for the next generation.”

He went on to say:

“There are a rising number of people who don’t appreciate the founding principles of the country and many of them want to trade it in for something else. I mean, we have elected members of Congress who would prefer that we be some sort of European-style socialist utopia or something that’s Marxism that leads to all sorts of evil ends, and so we’re in a battle right now not just between Republicans and Democrats Brian, but between two competing visions, two competing worldviews, for who we are as Americans and how we’re going to preserve this great republic.”

Thanks to the work of Gonzalez and Gorka and many others, more and more Americans are waking up to NextGen Marxism, fighting against it, and are working to protect the democratic republic that America’s founders established. As President Abraham Lincoln said, the Founders “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”

AUTHOR

Kathy Athearn

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Biden, Democrats ‘Intent on Destroying Our Military’ through DEI, CRT: Congressman

November 30, 2023/in Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues/by Family Research Council

President Joe Biden’s insistence that the military indoctrinate soldiers in left-wing orthodoxy by demanding a record-setting budget for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) proves he is “intent on destroying our military by dividing us further,” a congressman says.

The Biden administration’s Department of Defense has requested $114.7 million to teach “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) to the U.S. armed forces and deeply embed “DEIA values, objectives, and considerations in how we do business and execute our missions.” The budget request in the pending National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) shows the budget dedicated to teaching the race-based ideology in the U.S. military increasing from $68 million in 2022 to $86.5 million in the last fiscal year.

Democrats, who have often been accused of transforming the military from an elite fighting force into an experiment for social engineering, seem to want to transform the U.S. military into a safe space, according to the Biden administration’s official Fiscal Year 2024 budget request. “The Department is committed to building a safe environment to serve. This includes fully embracing a diversity of backgrounds, experience, and thought to build unity within the DoD,” says the document, released in March.

It notes the Biden administration “continues its efforts to eliminate” alleged “extremism, and discrimination” in the military. “Furthering DEI” will allow the administration to create a purported “climate of inclusion that supports diversity … free from problematic behaviors.”

DEI teaches “principles that are critical … They are not simply about building a workforce; they are the cornerstone of the human element of warfighting and national security.”

The document mentions the term “diversity” 18 times.

The Defense Department’s more recent Strategic Management Plan (SMP) for Fiscal Years 2022 – 2026 mentions “diversity” 27 times.

The Democrats’ plan to foist DEI and other left-wing orthodoxies on the armed services is “doing nothing but divide us in the military, dividing our nation,” said Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.”

“This administration and the Obama administration before them are intent on destroying our military by dividing us further,” Alford told Perkins. The refusal of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to consider House amendments stripping left-wing ideological funding from the NDAA is “part of this master plan to keep this DEI and the CRT [critical race theory] going in the military after we have offered successfully amendment after amendment to get rid of these programs.”

House Republicans’ version of the NDAA, which funds U.S. military priorities for the coming year, would “take out the critical race theory and DEI stuff” in order “to limit the abuses and the Woke” agenda the Biden administration wants to push on the military, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told Perkins on Wednesday.

Both congressmen emphasized the fact that divisive left-wing ideology that reduces all transactions to “power” based on race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity corrodes military unit cohesion and retards readiness. “There is a reason that they wear uniforms in the military, that is to make people uniform and to concentrate on skin color or what gender they use,” said Alford. “The Communist Chinese simply don’t care” about these concepts, as they prepare for a potential showdown with the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific in a potential clash over Taiwan.

Roy agreed that Biden’s single-minded focus on promoting DEI and “abortion tourism” represents a distraction” from the military’s purpose.

The budget request drew sharp backlash from Republican House members this week. “The Biden admin’s focus on progressivism over warfighting continues to exacerbate the military recruiting crisis and calls into question our level of military preparedness,” said Republicans on the House Oversight Committee. “Does Joe Biden want the military to be a lethal fighting force or a clown show?” asked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on X.

The Biden administration has long signaled its commitment to DEI and critical race theory, an ideology created by professed Marxists in the 1970s that has become the dominant organizing principle of U.S. institutions after the 2020 death of George Floyd. In June 2021, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told Congress he read CRT books, because “I want to understand white rage.”

But critics say the Biden administration’s focus on DEI/CRT, the use of preferred pronouns, the deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the continued threat of intervening in wars of choice such as Ukraine have led to a military recruitment emergency. Milley’s branch of the armed services, the U.S. Army, fell 10,000 soldiers short of its 65,000 soldier recruitment goal in the past year.

“I would imagine we’ll settle on something lower than 65,000 for 2024,” admitted Christine Wormuth, Biden’s secretary of the Army.

“We need our military laser-focused on defending the nation, not on woke training seminars,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). “Congress can’t continue to rubber-stamp this superfluous spending.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

‘White Rage’: General Mark Milley Leaves Behind A Checkered Legacy

October 4, 2023/in Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics/by The Daily Caller

Gen. Mark Milley retired Friday after serving four years as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under both presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Some view Milley as an upstanding adviser and protector of democracy, but many conservative leaders deride him as a political actor too willing to make his views on controversial progressive policies known.
“It’s his nature to pitch into a fight if he sees one going on,” retired Lt. Col. Thomas Spoehr, who served with Milley in the Pentagon, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gen. Mark Milley retired Friday after serving four years as the top military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense. He is perhaps the most well-known individual to ever serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a development that seems likely to color his legacy for years to come.

Milley’s term was punctuated with crises: the Afghanistan withdrawal, nuclear tensions with Iran and North Korea, defense of Taiwan and Ukraine against would-be conquerors, and domestic turmoil. While some venerate Milley as an American hero who shepherded democracy through a chaotic administration turnover, many conservatives deride him as a political actor who obediently went along with the Biden administration’s progressive agenda.

“General Milley destroyed the U.S military’s 250-year tradition of staying above partisan politics. That’s his legacy,” Republican Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, a Navy reserve veteran who serves on the Armed Services Committee and leads the House Anti-Woke Caucus, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Milley was a brash, combative former special operations officer with strong opinions informed by his four decades of experience in the Army and his deep affinity for history and literature, retired Lt. Col. Thomas Spoehr, who served with Milley in the Pentagon, told the DCNF.

Former President Donald Trump, who appointed Milley as chairman, is thought to have appreciated Milley’s machismo and appearance as the general’s general.

“He kind of really seemed to have a warrior’s mentality. He was clearly an officer who wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. Or so it seemed,” retired Maj. Chase Spears, a former Army public affairs officer, told the DCNF.

The DCNF spoke to multiple current and former officials who served alongside Milley as well as several military experts to form a fuller picture of the former chairman’s tenure. Milley, through a spokesperson, did not respond to questions.

As chairman, Milley’s job was to advise the president and the secretary of defense on national-security threats and operations abroad and maintain military communication channels with friends and adversaries.

“Sometimes, that advice would be misinterpreted or purposely used by others for political purposes despite trying very hard to avoid politics,” Col. Dave Butler, Milley’s spokesman, told the DCNF.

Yet, Milley has shown willingness to delve into political fights and mud sling when it suits him, experts told the DCNF. In his farewell speech, Milley said the military does not answer to a “wannabe dictator,” which many interpreted as a jab at former President Trump.

In a June 2021 House Armed Services Committee hearing, Milley gave a full-throated defense of the Biden administration’s budget request for funding to purge “domestic extremists” from its ranks.

“There is no room in uniform for anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the values of the United States of America,” Milley said during the hearing.

Milley himself seemed to be aware of how he was being perceived. Speaking in November 2021 before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Milley lamented that he had “become a lightning rod for the politicization of the military,” targeted by both Republicans and Democrats, the transcript shows.

“It’s his nature to pitch into a fight if he sees one going on,” Spoehr told the DCNF.

Some congressional Democrats criticized Milley for defending the strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force in January 2020, according to CNN.

Then, Milley was blasted by Republicans when he apologized for having joined Trump in a march across Lafayette Square after the square had been cleared of people protesting the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Milley said he did not mean to give the impression the military had taken sides in a political fight.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, called Milley’s apology video “self-serving.”

The apology proved the first major incident in a trend lasting for the next four years of his career through two politically opposed administrations. Milley would often project disdain for interfering in politics, but then make exceptions in crisis situations or to defend core military values.

Milley “tried his hardest to actively stay out of politics,” but if extraordinary events demanded he step in, “so be it,” an unnamed official told CNN in July 2021.

Perhaps Milley’s most politically perilous moment came after he admitted holding two calls with his Chinese counterpart in October 2020 and January 2021 during the tumultuous administration handover. Lawmakers hammered Milley for his actions months later during a September 2021 hearing. Milley defended his actions as apolitical and in the interest of national security.

“I firmly believe in civilian control of the military as a bedrock principle essential to the health of this republic, and I am committed to ensuring the military stays clear of domestic politics,” he told Congress.

This was a refrain he would reiterate time and time again.

“He’s been saying those things for as long as I’ve known him. And I do think he’s true to those words,” said Spoehr.

‘A Tight Rope To Walk’

Others have pointed to Milley’s willingness to defend social policies in the military and to comment on broader trends in society as undermining the very norm of the apolitical military he claims to embrace.

Milley showed himself “willing to wade into topics that many including myself would argue are beyond the scope of the Joint Chiefs,” said Spears, the former Army public affairs officer.

In the days following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, Milley took it upon himself to “land the plane” as he and other leading national security officials worried the former president was displaying increasingly erratic behavior, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their book “Peril.”

Woodward and Costa portray Milley’s acts — including convening a “secret” meeting of senior military officials involved in nuclear command and control on Jan. 8 to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons — as orchestrating the peaceful transfer of power and restraining a rogue president from triggering an international crisis.

In November 2021, Milley told House lawmakers about a January 8 phone call he had with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who he described as “quite animated.” During this call, Milley sought to “assure her” of the security of the nation’s nuclear weapons systems.

“It’s clearly recognized that the President and only the President can authorize the launch,” Milley said, “so he, alone, can authorize the launch, but he doesn’t launch alone.”

“Best practice suggests that ‘regular order is your friend,’” Peter Feaver, an expert in civil-military relations who previously taught Milley, told the DCNF. But the military has no role in the democratic transfer of power from one administration to the next, Feaver said.

Many in the media framed Milley’s actions in the latter days of the Trump administration as heroic measures taken to safeguard democracy. Milley “saved the constitution” from Trump, The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in a glowing Nov. 2023 profile.

But, the savior of American democracy is not how Milley wants to be remembered.

“He would prefer not to be portrayed in that light,” a senior military official close to Milley told the DCNF.

While the chairman does not have command authority, he does serve at the top of the “chain of communication.” Some experts have argued this can give the chairman undue influence on policymaking.

“There’s a tightrope to walk here,” Bret Devereaux, a military historian who teaches at North Carolina State University, told the DCNF. “He’s expected to speak for the military as an institution and while, as an institution, the military does not have politics, it does have policies. In his capacity as an advisor, he advocates for certain policies.”

Milley repeatedly considered resigning during the Trump administration, according to reports. He felt Trump was “doing great and irreparable harm” to America and “ruining the international order,” according to a copy of the resignation letter included in Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s “The Divider.” But resigning in protest of a legal policy with which he disagreed would be the “consummate political act,” Milley said, and he never submitted the letter.

“Milley concluded that difficult times do not release him from a duty to uphold those norms and traditions,” said Devereaux. “Milley was put in a situation where those two parts of the oath might conflict. He might have to say that the president himself was the constitutional danger.”

In the end, Milley testified to Congress that he never received an illegal order. Milley also admitted to speaking with reporters, including Woodward, who were working on books about the Trump administration. The former joint chief also said he spoke to Leonning and Rucker, for their book, and to Michael Bender, for his.

Milley’s expansive media presence “comes with some clear downsides since it means he becomes part of many stories that he probably could have stayed out of, or at least minimized,” Feaver explained.

“I don’t think that served him well. I don’t think it served the country well, for him to be talking to those guys,” Spoehr added.

‘White Rage’

Milley may also not have been served well by his outspoken defense of “woke” Biden administration defense policies and his willingness to wade into the culture wars.

“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it,” Milley said, deflecting criticism of Critical Race Theory being taught at West Point, during the June 2021 hearing. “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”

Republicans in Congress who see CRT as antithetical to American values derided Milley.

“That was a partisan political question, framed in a particularly partisan way, and so he could have and should have deferred to the political figure on his side of the hearing table,” Feaver said.

In a CNN interview on Sept. 17, just weeks before his retirement, Milley pushed back against assertions the military had gone “woke.”

“The military is a lot of things, but woke, it’s not,” Milley said. “So I take exception to that. I think that people say those things for reasons that are their own reasons, but it’s not true. It’s not accurate. It’s not a broad-brush description of the U.S. military as it exists today.”

When Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville held up military promotions in opposition to a new Pentagon policy facilitating abortion access, Milley elaborated on the detrimental impact it could have on military readiness. But he declined to comment on the policy itself.

“I don’t want to enter into the whole discussion of abortion and the culture war. I’m staying out of all that,” he told the Washington Post.

The accusation of wokeness “certainly wasn’t something that we expected to have to deal with,” Butler, Milley’s spokesman, told the DCNF. “We did not expect that to be a new issue brought up by Congress or anybody else.”

Nor does the chairman have time to spend focusing or advising on internal personnel policies when he has global crises to attend to, Butler said. Butler estimated Milley spent 13 hours each day on external threats and operations, and maybe one on other issues.

‘Some Very Difficult Dives’

Just two months after the “white rage” comment, Milley would be dealing with a catastrophe abroad.

Afghanistan collapsed amid the U.S. military withdrawal much faster than administration analysts expected. Both Trump and Biden sought to wipe out the military’s footprint in Afghanistan and end the war. But they planned for the Afghan army to resist the Taliban. It didn’t.

At the September 2021 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Milley echoed Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina in calling the Afghanistan evacuation “a logistical success, but a strategic failure.”

Milley did not explicitly describe conversations with the presidents, but he made it easy to deduce both Biden and Trump had resisted his “best military advice” to maintain a contingent of American troops in Afghanistan. Military leaders’ advice to Biden in the lead-up to the withdrawal had not changed from the previous fall, and that his opinion was to keep 2,500 troops in country. He had also pushed back on a signed order directing a full withdrawal by January, according to his testimony. Trump rescinded the order.

“Based on my advice and the advice of the commanders, then-Secretary of Defense Esper submitted a memorandum on 9 November, recommending to maintain U.S. forces at a level between about 2,500 and 4,500 in Afghanistan until conditions were met for further reductions,” Milley said in his testimony.

A national security official close to the situation told the DCNF that Milley repeatedly warned Biden “of the risks of a poorly-timed withdrawal by recounting details from the chaotic 1975 Saigon evacuation.” in the hours before the president announced his decision in April 2021.

Likewise, Milley saw Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine coming, The New York Times reported. He is blunt and level-headed in his assessment of Russia’s capabilities and Ukraine’s challenges — and he has often proven correct, according to Spoehr.

“He’s been a very good chairman,” Spoehr told the DCNF.

As Milley closed out his career, high-level military communication between the U.S. and China, America’s greatest competitor, had been stalled for more than a year. The war between Russia and Ukraine shows no signs of abating. And his successor, Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, faces the same culture war pressures.

Military leaders should be judged like Olympic divers, “taking into account the difficulty of the dive they have to do,” Feaver told DCNF. “Circumstances have conspired to force General Milley to do some very difficult dives. Even though he has kicked up some splash that does not necessarily mean he has under-performed.”

AUTHOR

MICAELA BURROW

Investigative reporter, defense.

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Florida Law Defunds DEI in Higher Ed

May 19, 2023/in Culture War, Education, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Science, Social Issues/by Family Research Council

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday signed three bills to excise woke ideology from state higher education institutions and promote productive education goals.

SB 266 will “prohibit institutions from spending federal or state dollars on discriminatory initiatives, such as so called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)’ programs,” the governor’s office summarized in a press release. HB 931 will “prohibit Florida’s public institutions from requiring students, faculty, or staff to take political loyalty tests,” and SB 240 will “expand workforce education programs and increase access to career and technical education (CTE) programs.”

The first of these laws doubles down on Florida Republicans’ efforts last year to crack down on woke ideology in institutions of higher education. SB 266 forbids “a Florida College System institution” to “expend any state or federal funds” on “any programs or campus activities that: (a) Violate s. 1000.05; or (b) Advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI], or promote or engage in political or social activism.”

The first prohibited category (violations of s. 1000.05) refers to a section of Florida law dealing with discrimination in K-20 public education, which the Individual Freedom Act (a.k.a. Stop Woke Act) modified last year. The Stop Woke Act added paragraphs stating that “it shall constitute discrimination … to subject any student or employee to training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such student or employee to believe any of the following concepts.” The list that followed included foundational tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and other leftist ideologies, such as “A person’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.”

In October, a federal judge in the Northern District of Florida temporarily blocked Florida officials from enforcing this section of the law, on the grounds that it ran afoul of First Amendment Freedom of Speech.

Following this legal setback, Florida Republicans devised a different approach to achieve their original objective — eliminating woke programming on academic campuses. It began with Governor DeSantis ordering all state universities and colleges “to provide a comprehensive list of all staff, programs, and campus activities” related to DEI or CRT. Within days, the same parties who had challenged the Stop Woke Act complained that Florida was violating the judge’s preliminary injunction against portions of the Stop Woke Act. However, the judge denied the motion on the grounds that the injunction had not been violated.

Perhaps in an effort to avoid another free speech challenge, SB 266 does provide an exception from its DEI funding ban for “student fees to support student-led organizations” and “use of institution facilities by student-led organizations.”

SB 266 also enacted other DeSantis objectives for higher education. It directed the Board of Governors to review the mission and curriculum of each university, gave university presidents (as opposed to less accountable academic departments) final authority over hiring full-time faculty, and prohibited left-wing loyalty pledges as a condition of employment. These changes are among those DeSantis set forth in his January 31 education agenda “to focus on promoting academic excellence, the pursuit of truth, and to give students the foundation so they can think for themselves.”

In addition to SB 266, DeSantis also signed HB 931, which states that “a public institution of higher education may not … Require or solicit a person to complete a political loyalty test as a condition of employment or admission into, or promotion within, such institution.” It also bars universities and colleges from giving “preferential consideration” for employment, admission, or promotion based on “an opinion or actions in support of: a. A partisan, a political, or an ideological set of beliefs; or b. Another person or group of persons based on the person’s or group’s race or ethnicity or support of an ideology or movement … that promotes the differential treatment of a person or a group of persons based on race or ethnicity.” This prohibition encompasses university diversity statements (not academic diversity but identity diversity), which require university staff to affirm a DEI agenda as a condition of employment.

While DeSantis’ educational initiatives make headlines for countering woke ideology, they reflect a fundamentally positive vision, not one that is negative or contrarian. Rather, the goal is to remove politics from education, thus “empowering students, parents, and educators to focus on creating opportunities for our younger generations,” said DeSantis. This mission, to prepare young people to be productive members of society, is reflected in the third bill DeSantis signed, SB 240, which will “expand workforce education programs and increase access to career and technical education (CTE) programs.”

Unsurprisingly, left-wing activists like the ACLU of Florida dislike Florida’s higher education reforms, which demolish the barriers protecting left-wing academic hegemony. But every significant reform will face opposition. Ray Rodrigues, Chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said the legislature and DeSantis were “re-orienting our distinguished universities to missions that treat people as individuals, that reward merit and achievement, and center on recruiting excellent faculty while creating the talent pipeline necessary to fuel Florida’s future.” Making the right enemies is worth it, for the right reasons.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

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Critical Race Theory And Gender Ideology Are Ubiquitous In U.S. Schools, New Study Shows

March 2, 2023/in Culture War, Education, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Last month, the Manhattan Institute released a groundbreaking new study, titled “School Choice Is Not Enough: The Impact of Critical Social Justice Ideology in American Education.”

The study presents survey results of a representative sample of over 1,500 Americans aged 18-20. Their primary finding was that “Ninety-three percent of American 18- to 20-year-olds said that they had heard about at least one of eight [Critical Social Justice] concepts from a teacher or other adult at school, including ‘white privilege,’ ‘systemic racism,’ ‘patriarchy,’ or the idea that gender is a choice unrelated to biological sex.'” Also included on the list of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) concepts are the ideas that discrimination is primarily responsible for disparities, that America is built on stolen land, and that there are many genders.

This study is significant because, over the past two years, debates about education policy have occupied an increasingly prominent place in political discourse. In particular, ideas on the proper way to instruct on subjects like race and gender have been hotly disputed. Backlash over perceived indoctrination into extreme theories of race and gender — as well as the exclusion of parents in the educational process — have decided major elections in some states.

However, up to this point, there has been a glaring issue with these debates: they have been largely based on anecdotes. The findings of the Manhattan Institute’s study are important because they represent the first time we have been able to put some real numbers to phenomena that many have only observed anecdotally.

Thus, we should examine the findings in more detail to find out how we ought to move forward.

A Cause For Concern

Ever since journalists such as Christopher Rufo and Bari Weiss began highlighting examples of “institutional capture” of the education system by politically-driven actors, skeptics have often claimed that CSJ concepts are not being taught in schools. This assertion has been promoted by the leaders of teacher unions, cable news hosts, and politicians.

The issue is, and this study confirms, that their claim is simply not accurate. As noted, 93 percent of respondents affirmed that they had heard at least one CSJ concept “from a teacher or other adult at school.”

If these concepts were being introduced as one perspective among many, then there would be no issue with the fact students have been exposed to them. After all, if one wishes to give students an accurate picture of the competing visions of society, then it would be dishonest to exclude all CSJ concepts.

The issue is that the Manhattan Institute study confirms that K-12 schools are effectively indoctrinating students into radical — revolutionary, even — political ideologies. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said that, when taught, “These concepts are introduced as the only respectable approach to race, gender, and sexuality in American society.” This means various perspectives were not weighed against one another, but rather kids are being led to believe that only one view is legitimate. When one considers how impressionable K-12 students are, along with the fact teachers have a fair amount of sway over the way their students think, the issue here becomes apparent.

Click here for Deltapoll Survey results.

This is also concerning because CSJ presents a vision of America that is at best unorthodox and at worst destructive. In Critical Race Theory: An Introduction — which is among the most influential textbooks on the subject — the authors write that “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” In other words, critical race theory opposes the basic tenants of the American founding. Ibram X. Kendi, a leading “anti-racist” author — whose writing has been brought into many schools — has written that “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

There is simply no justification for schools across the country to present this as the only viable perspective.

The study demonstrates that the prevalence of CSJ concepts — and the way they have been introduced — is having real effects on students. Data presented in the report show that the more CSJ concepts kids have been exposed to, the more left-wing they are in their politics — as measured in a variety of ways in the study.

It should be clear that this approach is an improper use of the state — which should be educating, not indoctrinating, students. It not only gives children an incomplete picture of the world around them, but also creates a civil society that is more prone to intolerance of dissenting views. After all, if one was led to believe only one perspective was legitimate, then it is natural to then believe that it is important to shut out all “illegitimate” views — both socially and maybe even legislatively. This is concerning because pluralism and tolerance are indispensable to a healthy and vibrant political culture.

A Bigger Problem Than We Expected?

Critics of the educational approach detailed above often assume their enemies are the traditional public school system and public sector teacher unions. One thing that this study demonstrates, though, is that this problem is by no means exclusive to traditional public schools. Rather, this type of instruction on race and gender has made its way into private schools, parochial schools, and even homeschools; indeed, CSJ was shown to be just as prevalent in private schools as it is in public schools.

This observation is why the title of the study is “School Choice Is Not Enough.” The authors recognize that this issue is not relegated to traditional public schools, which means that advancing choice and privatization will not make the problem go away.

This is true, but it does not mean school choice should not still be promoted. After all, studies show that school choice programs are associated with better educational outcomes. Additionally, public sector teacher unions inflict considerable damage on the traditional public school system — and, by extension, the children in those schools. This means that we should recognize school choice as beneficial, but not as a panacea.

What Should We Do?

The fact that these ideas are being taught everywhere — not just in traditional public schools — suggests a deeper problem than is often assumed. It is not just about the traditional public school structure, but about an ascendant culture that — much like the instruction outlined — assumes that CSJ concepts are the capital-T Truth. Thus, in order to fight against it, and remove indoctrination in schools, it is important to address it on a cultural level. Private and parochial schools will only stop if, culturally, the tide turns decisively away from these ideas and towards those that have traditionally characterized American philosophy — ideas of liberty, virtue, pluralism, and meritocracy.

The significant exception to this “cultural argument” is when it comes to public schools. The reason is simple: the government decides the curriculum. Taking action on this front would therefore be a way of correcting government overreach. In particular, impartiality laws, curriculum transparency laws, and audits of existing instruction and employee training — as the study recommends — are reasonable measures to ensure the government is not being used as a tool of indoctrination for CSJ.

This would hopefully, in turn, help shift the culture towards a more balanced classroom in all schools.

This issue has been brewing for a long time, but only now do we have the data to back up our suspicions and anecdotal understanding. This study represents a comprehensive statement of the problem.

Now it is our job to fight back.

AUTHOR

Jack Elbaum

Jack Elbaum was a Hazlitt Writing Fellow at FEE and is a junior at George Washington University. His writing has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The New York Post, and the Washington Examiner. You can contact him at jackelbaum16@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @Jack_Elbaum.

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Department of Critical Race Theory Neologisms: ‘To Racialize’

January 30, 2023/in Commentary, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by MercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sense

In an article on the website of the Canadian Public Health Agency entitled “Inequalities in Health of Racialized Adults in Canada,” one reads that “populations who are racialized in relation to a ‘white’ or non-racialized social group experience stressors including inter-personal and systemic discrimination throughout the life course,” that “racialized adults are less likely to feel that their health is either good or excellent,” and that “racialized Canadians are disproportionately impacted by inequalities in safe and stable housing.”)

As a linguist, I was struck by the repeated use in this article of a new past participle that I was not familiar with — “racialized”. I began to wonder about the implications underlying the use of this verb form, which implies the existence of a verb “to racialize”.

So I looked on the internet to see if I could find other forms of this verb. My search turned up examples such as the following: “Coleman Hughes on how America racializes its citizens”; “Not all racializers do the same thing when they racialize”; “Discourses that are racializing and othering muslim*women [sic] can sustain hegemony, by disguising their particularities”.

The past participle of this verb therefore represents the person or group to which it is applied as having undergone the action of being racialized by some agent who is represented as a racializer. This leads to the question as to who is doing the racializing. A further search on the internet showed that the answer to that question is invariably the same — whites.

Behind that little past participle “racialized”, consequently, there lies a whole worldview which sees the relations between different races in terms of racializer/racialized or, in other terms, oppressor/oppressed. As Robin Diangelo states in White Fragility, “white people raised in Western societies are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions,” and this worldview “brings into existence whites and nonwhites, full persons and subpersons.”

The name of this worldview is Critical Race Theory, and its underpinnings are essentially Marxist. It divides the world into two opposing power groups: the oppressor (capitalists/whites) and the oppressed (workers/nonwhites). Since everything is governed by power-relations in this system, the only recourse of the oppressed is to use whatever power they have to rise up against the oppressor and throw off his yoke: as one of the foundational thinkers of Critical Race Theory, Ibram X. Kendi, has written in How to be an Antiracist: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

One doesn’t have to be a linguist in order to see that the division of the world into racializer/racialized is a recipe for conflict and violence, and not for the resolution of unjust discrimination.

As Edward Feser points out in his book All One in Christ. A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory, “if one were to replace expressions like ‘whiteness’ and ‘white supremacy’ with terms such as ‘Jewishness’ and ‘Jewry’, it would be difficult to distinguish Critical Race Theory literature from the ugly propaganda of Nazism. Its claims are comparably extreme, even if it has not (yet?) led to comparable levels of violence.” Feser advocates that the way forward entails “not Critical Race Theory’s cancel culture and hermeneutics of suspicion, but rational discourse and mutual understanding. Not the demonization of any race as inherently oppressive, but solidarity and mutual respect.”

Amen to that.

AUTHOR

Patrick Duffley

Patrick Duffley is Professor of English Linguistics at Université Laval, in Canada. More by Patrick Duffley

DeSantis Announces Plan To Squash ‘Equity’ At New College Of Florida And Restore Merit

January 6, 2023/in Culture War, Education, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues/by The Daily Caller

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his plan to overhaul the ideological education system at New College of Florida (NCF) and restore its original mission.

DeSantis will appoint six new members of NCF’s board of trustees: activist Chris Rufo, Dr. Mark Bauerlein, Dr. Matthew Spalding, Dr. Charles Kesler, lawyer Debra Jenks and educator Jason “Eddie” Speir. The Florida Board of Governors will also appoint a seventh member.

The 13-member board now has enough members to reshape the public college’s ideological courses and campus environment.

“As Governor DeSantis stated in his second inaugural speech: ‘We must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth.’ Starting today, the ship is turning around. New College of Florida, under the governor’s new appointees, will be refocused on its founding mission of providing a world-class quality education with an exceptional focus on the classics,” Bryan Griffin, the press secretary for DeSantis, said in a statement.

NCF currently lists among its values “a just, diverse, equitable and inclusive community,” echoing the progressive ideology of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), better known as critical race theory. The school is “actively working toward eliminating outcome disparities for underrepresented and underserved groups,” it says in its values section.

“It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” James Uthmeier, Chief of Staff for DeSantis said.

The school provides certain services, like its Office of Inclusive Excellence, a gender studies program and its Gender and Diversity Center. It celebrates “latinx” history month through films, workshops, concerts and lectures, its website says.

NCF’s Office of Inclusive Excellence, the DEI office on campus, documents “outcomes and learnings from Phase I of the Inclusive Campus Climate initiative” and develops “campus-wide DEI key metrics and milestones, and support departmental implementation,” according to its page.

The NCF gender studies program offers courses in queer studies, queer history and feminist philosophy as part of its curriculum. It lists “community relations and organizing” among its potential career paths.

It also provides students with “gender identity affirmation resources” to assist students with legal name changes and updating their pronouns, according to a resource form.

In 2001, the Florida legislature separated NCF from the University of South Florida (USF) system and outlined a mission “combining educational innovation with educational excellence,” and to “provide a quality education to students of high ability who, because of their ability, deserve a program of study that is both demanding and stimulating.”

DeSantis’ promised to challenge ideological education in his inaugural address Tuesday.

“We must ensure school systems are responsive to parents and to students, not partisan interest groups, and we must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology,” DeSantis said

AUTHOR

JAMES LYNCH AND HENRY RODGERS

Contrubutors.

Nebraska Legislators Prep Investigation Into Education Docs That Claim Conservatives Are ‘Racist’

October 13, 2022/in Education, Elections, Hot Topics, Policy, Politics, Science, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Daily Caller

The Nebraska legislature is calling for an investigation into the state’s Education Department after unearthing documents promoted to educators that claim conservatives are “racist” for opposing Critical Race Theory, the Daily Caller has learned exclusively.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the state’s Education Department created the “Launch Nebraska” platform to provide schools with reopening guidelines in the post-COVID era. By the 2021-2022 school year, the website evolved into a resource for promoting Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other left-wing tropes such as “anti-racism.”

State Sens. Steve Erdman, Joni Albrecht, Steve Halloran, and Dave Murman told the Daily Caller they are calling for an investigation into the Department of Education’s promotion of Critical Race Theory and potential inappropriate sex education curriculum.

“Parents, not educators, are responsible for the teaching of children,” Erdman said. “Public schools should educate children on the facts of history, not indoctrinate them with Critical Race Theory, which deliberately distorts these facts in order to push an erroneous Left-wing, Woke narrative about our nation’s founding, its history, and its heritage.”

“Due to the recent underhanded tactics of the Department of Education to reform Nebraska’s sex-ed curriculum, I believe an investigation into teaching CRT in Nebraska’s public schools is now warranted,” Erdman continued.

One of the documents that drew the ire of state legislators was a PDF that gave educators talking points on how to push back against “Right Wing Attacks Against Critical Race Theory.” The guide also alleges that the efforts of parents to oppose critical race theory are the work of malign political actors and former Donald Trump staffers.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE PAMPLET “WINNING RACIAL JUSTICE IN OUR SCHOOLS

“This effort has been conceived by former Trump strategists, funded by billionaire donors throwing tens of millions of dollars at the misinformation campaign, and managed by some of the same right-wing organizations driving racist voter suppression laws across the country,” the PDF reads.

Murman told the Daily Caller that such ideas must be “rooted out” from the public education system.

“In our state, we’ve dealt with left-wing activist bureaucrats promoting comprehensive sex education and critical race theory in our public schools,” Murman said. “Any promotion of these reprehensible ideologies by the Nebraska Department of Education must be rooted out.”

Nebraska’s Education Department did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

HENRY RODGERS AND CHRISSY CLARK

Contributor.

Public Schools Are Spending Money Like Crazy, Despite Sharp Enrollment Declines

September 11, 2022/in Education, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Taxes/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

This pattern of spending is unsustainable. These schools are bleeding money.

The public education system has been failing students for years. From misappropriating funds to providing inadequate lessons and passing illiterate students; public schools are losing support. Despite this they continue receiving extensive budgets which do not properly represent enrollment rates, attendance numbers, or staffing issues.

While it is true that 2020 was an extremely difficult year for these taxpayer-funded institutions, those who blame the Covid-19 pandemic are using it as a scapegoat. Before the extensive government pandemic response, the nation was experiencing a teacher shortage and a political takeover of public schools — the likes of which had never been experienced — which has only increased during the political battle over public health issues.

Politicized Teachers Unions & School Boards?

Since 2013 conflicts between teachers and school boards have been reported. This specifically hindered interest in the teaching profession.

In 2015 student interest in the teaching profession dropped by 5 percent in just a year and has continued to decline. Although arguments over teacher pay have been brought to the forefront of the situation, elementary and secondary school teachers made an average of over $63,000 during the 2019-2020 school year, and since then districts have increased pay and added massive bonuses to attract educators back to the profession, inflating budgets, yet still the teacher shortage remains.

New students entering the teaching profession continues to decline as teachers unions and school boards not only battle themselves, but parents as well. Instead of listening to the communities they serve, these powerful organizations are pushing their own political ideologies in the classroom. Educational focus has shifted from teaching core classes like math, science, and history, to identity-based practices which promote critical race theory (CRT) and gender theory.

The National School Board Association itself has fought to persuade schools to adopt CRT and the 1619 project. These race-focused lessons have yet to produce successful results. Because of this, families have disputed replacing sound lessons with untested classroom theories. When expressing their concerns at school board meetings these parents were silenced, and even publicly smeared as “domestic terrorists.”

In addition, during the pandemic various school boards and teachers unions fought to keep children isolated and masked long after it was deemed safe for them to return to in-person learning. Yet, educators still wished to receive full pay as students suffered from widespread learning loss and achievement gaps. It was even discovered that the American Federation of Teachers influenced CDC reopening guidelines, indicating that their power held sway over school health policies, arguably even more than factual public health data.

Student Performance Is Suffering

Parents quickly recognized the harmful effects of lockdowns and long-term masking. Schools which remained locked down longer saw the sharpest enrollment declines. These are, coincidentally, in highly progressive areas where CRT and other identity based lessons have been adopted by teachers and districts.

In 2019 math was deemed a “racist” subject in the state of Washington. By 2021, 70% of students in the area were failing math and more than half failed English. In nearby Oregon, reading and writing requirements have been removed to offer more “equitable” education experiences, and even test taking was deemed “racist” by the National Education Association.

In addition, the Biden Administration is leading the Department of Education to bring race to the forefront of American education on a national level. Instead of allowing states to choose what is best for their populations, government grants are now being awarded based on the implementation of identity-based education practices.

Public school officials have been quick to blame the pandemic for increasing student failures, but teaching equity over performance has yet to lead students to academic excellence. Learning loss is plaguing students across the nation, and instead of utilizing COVID relief money to ensure that students achievement gaps are filled in before Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds (ESSR) expire, progressive states have allocated masses of these taxpayer dollars for identity based lessons.

Covid Relief Funds Abused

Taxpayer funded ESSR money was swiftly approved and distributed with little to no oversight during the pandemic. Because of this, less than half of public schools have used COVID relief money to update HVAC units and reduce viral illness transmissions. Instead, districts in New York, California, Illinois, and Minnesota openly spent their pandemic dollars on political endeavors.

The California Department of Education received $15.1 billion in ESSR funding. Instead of focusing all of these taxpayer dollars on public health concerns the state funneled portions of this money into “implicit bias training,” “ethnic studies,” and “LGBTQ+ cultural competency.”

Similarly, New York gained $9 billion in emergency funding. This money was not primarily focused on keeping students healthy or improving classroom air quality but, “anti-racism,” “anti-bias,” “socio-emotional learning,” and “diversity, equity, inclusion,” lessons.

Illinois has also utilized masses of pandemic-relief money to institute equity plans with a specific focus on “anti-racism.” Minnesota took their $1.15 billion in ESSR funds and decided to use a portion of this massive payout for “culturally responsive” training and addressing “gender bias,” with a focus on gender affirmation.

COVID relief funds have been abused and directed to non-pandemic related educational services. All the while, students continue to fail at record rates and leave the public education system entirely.

Enrollment Is Down, Yet Budgets Are Up

Public schools are funded by local, state, and federal taxes. Funding is determined by varying factors which usually include student performance, enrollment rates, and attendance. Yet despite experiencing drops in all of these criteria, somehow states are still increasing budgets.

California — which has lost 2.6% of public school students since the start of the pandemic — has approved the largest education budget in the state’s history. This massive increase comes as California’s largest public school district has experienced a 40% chronic absenteeism rate. This reflects a national trend.

A third of Chicago schools are at least half empty, but that didn’t stop the Chicago Board of Education from increasing their 2022 budget from what was approved in 2021. In Washington DC, public school reading and math proficiency has dropped, and enrollment has stagnated, but the mayor proposed a 5.9% budget increase.

Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and other states have all continued spending more despite serving fewer students. These public schools are bleeding money and costing taxpayers billions in debt that will eventually have to be repaid.

Public schools received record amounts of funding during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, school boards and teachers unions have allowed politics to dominate their policies and teaching practices. As a result, student success rates have suffered, and families are walking away from the system while lawmakers are passing budget increases that only further tax communities.

This pattern of spending is unsustainable. These schools are bleeding money. There is currently no end in sight as districts continue this trend into the 2022-2023 school year and beyond.

AUTHOR

Jessica Marie Baumgartner

Jessica is an education news reporter, homeschooling mother of 4, and author of “Homeschooling on a Budget,” whose work has been featured by: “The Epoch Times,” “The Federalist,” “The New American,” “The American Spectator,” “American Thinker,” “St. Louis Post Dispatch,” and many more.

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis Sweeps School Board Elections with 25 Wins!

August 25, 2022/in Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Science, Social Issues/by Dr. Richard M. Swier, LTC U.S. Army (Ret.)

The endorsement of Ron DeSantis for school board candidates has created a “red wave for parents rights” in the Sunshine State.

The Washington Stand’s Marjorie Jackson reported,

Just as school bells across the country begin ringing for another semester of class time again, Florida conservatives are running another victory lap around the school yard.

Tuesday night’s Florida primaries handed victories to 25 of the 30 school board candidates backed by the state’s Governor Ron DeSantis (R), and 35 of 49 candidates endorsed by school board-challenging 1776 Project PAC, flipping several school boards to have conservative majorities.

“It’s the culmination of a lot of hard work,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, told The Washington Stand. “It’s a reflection of Florida citizens’ anger at the school boards in red counties and a red state acting like they live in blue counties and blue states. A lot of these places very publicly and strongly pushed back on implementing the governor’s recommendations on masking for students and following the federal guidelines. This is a big part of why you’re seeing this big turnout right now.”

Read the full article.

Florida Research Council Action’s Matt Carpenter stated,

“The most important government is the government closest to home, so when parents stream to the polls to toss recalcitrant ideologues off their local school board they are sending a clear message: teach our children to read and write, not gender ideology or dividing them by race.”

According to an October 21st article in the Tampa Bay Times reporter Jeffrey S. Solochek wrote,

In October 2021 the National School Boards Association sent a letter to Biden raising concerns about “domestic terrorism” targeting boards. Although the association did not mention parents, and the Justice Department did not call for investigations, DeSantis and others have framed the issue as a federal attempt to curtail parental rights.

[ … ]

DeSantis said Wednesday that federal officials were trying to intimidate parents from speaking their minds on controversial issues at board meetings.

“As we continue to see the use of fear and intimidation to suppress opposition to the regime, we’re going to find new ways to be able to empower parents’ rights to decide what is best for their children,” DeSantis said. “Parents across the state should know that their freedoms are going to be protected here, and that the state of Florida has your back.”

Governor DeSantis kept his word and helped elect candidates to school boards in Florida that are dedicated to empowering parents’ rights to decide what is best for their children.

For example in Sarasota County DeSantis endorsed three pro-parental right to choose candidates for the school board and all three won, giving parents a voice on matters concerning how and what their children are being taught.

Public schools statewide are under the microscope in Florida and Governor Ron DeSantis is leading the charge to make sure the the voices of parents are heard, loud and clearly, by each and every school board.

Parental rights is now the key issue in Florida with Democrats saying parents have no rights and Governor DeSantis clearly supporting the rights of parents in their child’s education. This issue was a factor in the primaries and will be again in the midterm election for Governor of Florida.

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It’s unfair to force a truck driver to pay a loan for someone who got a PhD in gender studies.

Taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for student loan relief and Biden’s order isn’t constitutional.

If anything, universities handing out worthless degrees should be on the hook. pic.twitter.com/wZuH6GxPII

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) August 25, 2022

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Teachers Unions Politicized U.S. Schools, Not Parents

August 12, 2022/in Culture War, Education, Elections, Hot Topics, Labor & Unions, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Union leaders claim that “extremists” politicized US schools. This is blatant revisionism.

When voters were asked by Pew Research, prior to the 2020 election, what issues were most important to them, education wasn’t even among the top dozen.

But things have changed dramatically since then. Outlets ranging from The Washington Post, to ABC News, have identified education as a potentially significant factor in the 2022 midterms. Additionally, after education emerged as a defining issue in Virginia’s gubernatorial election last year — ranking as a top two or three issue — school choice became a litmus test issue for Republicans.

This is quite the swing in just two years.

Theoretically, education should not really be a political issue; but, as we have seen, it clearly has become one. Therefore, we must ask why exactly this has happened.

There are many possible answers to this question. One of them came from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers — the second largest teachers union in the country. In a recent tweet, she blamed “extremists” who are “attacking teachers” and focusing on a culture war that is “intended to undermine teaching and learning.”

“The culture wars are intended to undermine teaching and learning,” Weingarten wrote. “Extremists are politicizing schools and attacking teachers. Attacking teachers doesn’t help kids, it undermines everything.”

If that was not clear enough, she also linked to a news article where she gets a bit more specific about the kinds of people she is talking about: “the anti-public schools crowd, the anti-union crowd, the privatizers, the haters.” In other words, she is referring to the conservatives, libertarians, liberals who believe in school choice, and even parents themselves.

But are these groups really the ones politicizing education? Or, alternatively, are they simply responding to the overtly political forces that have controlled education for a long time?

Why Education Has Become so Politicized

The 2020-2021 school year should be seen as critical when considering the politicization of education. Two events occurred in the months preceding that school year that led to the extreme stances that eventually launched schools into the political limelight: the Covid-19 pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd. The former was taken advantage of by teachers’ unions with backward incentives, while the latter led to a nationwide racial reckoning that some took so far as to actually begin promoting regressive racial ideologies in the name of progress.

First, when the Covid-19 pandemic began, there was understandably a lot of uncertainty. But one of the first things that was known about the virus was that kids were the least vulnerable to severe infection. We also soon found out that schools were not a hotspot of Covid transmission. Yet, many K-12 schools started the 2020-2021 school year online — largely due to cynical activism by teachers’ unions. Prior to the school year, Weingarten threatened a strike, stating that “nothing is off the table” if school districts decided to reopen, and the Chicago Teachers Union tweeted later that the push to reopen school was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” It is reasonable to point out that this is just rhetoric — not necessarily representative of what actual power the unions have to shape policy — but studies demonstrated that the strength of a district’s union, not the prevalence of Covid-19 in the community, was the best predictor of prolonged school closures.

More recently, the effects of these closures — caused by the exploitation of a crisis by public sector unions — have become clear. A study released by McKinsey & Company found that “by the end of the 2020-21 school year, students were on average five months behind in math and four months behind in reading.” The learning loss was even more severe among low-income students, as well as black and Hispanic students. Numerous studies — including the CDC’s own research — also show that the closures damaged students’ mental health, with rates of anxiety and depression rising.

Second, following our nation’s racial reckoning beginning in the summer of 2020, some schools began to include radical — regressive, even — teachings on race in their curriculum. Activist Chris Rufo has done deep reporting on this issue for City Journal, exposing example after example of racial essentialist messages surrounding race making their way into K-12 classrooms. Moreover, looking to spread this kind of instruction further, the National Education Association, which is the largest teachers union in the country, passed a resolution that explicitly endorsed the teaching of critical race theory in the classroom as a tool to understand America. And the American Federation of Teachers, which is the second largest teachers union in the country, announced a campaign to bring the writings of Ibram X. Kendi — a scholar who has written that “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” — into every single classroom.

In response to perpetual school closures driven by union power, as well as racially divisive curricula making its way into K-12 schools, a coalition of conservatives, libertarians, and liberals mobilized against such policies.

Parents showed up to school board meetings, politicians passed legislation, and heterodox news outlets reported on what was happening. So many people have left the traditional public school system recently that it is being referred to by some as an ”exodus” of sorts. This is the response that Weingarten is blaming for the politicization of schools. However, it should be noted that all of this came after both radical and unprecedented policies were implemented. So, while one may criticize aspects of the response — after all, I do not agree with every law passed or with every speech given by a parent at a school board meeting — it stretches credulity to claim that parents politicized schools when in fact it was the schools themselves, in tandem with the unions, who introduced these radical political elements.

The End of Government’s Monopoly?

Data show that more and more people are looking for alternatives to the traditional public school system. Earlier this year, PBS published a piece exploring the surge in homeschooling across the country.

“In 18 states that shared data through the current school year, the number of homeschooling students increased by 63% in the 2020-2021 school year, then fell by only 17% in the 2021-2022 school year,” wrote the Associated Press’ Carolyn Thompson.

The article tells the stories of multiple parents who started to homeschool their children over the past year, and they find that a common reason is that they were simply unimpressed by the quality of the instruction during school closures. Apart from homeschooling, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reported that enrollment went up by seven percent during the pandemic.

The reason is clear: the traditional public school system has been riddled with failures for a long time, but events over the past few years made people more aware of them. And these failures do not just exist in the heads of parents, conservative ideologues or school choice activists, as Weingarten suggests. They are very real. Parents want their kids to attend school in person, and they generally don’t want their kids to be indoctrinated into a particular ideological system by strangers who work for the government. According to the American Federation of Teachers’ own poll, 60 percent of likely voters in battleground states are dissatisfied with the way traditional public schools are teaching about race and 58 percent are dissatisfied with how they are teaching about issues related to gender identity.

People vote with their feet; so, as more and more people leave the traditional public school system, it will become more and more clear that something fundamental needs to change in the way the U.S. handles education policy.

The reason something fundamental must change is that the failures we are seeing do not just happen by chance; rather, they are the natural byproduct of a government monopoly on education coupled with power in the hands of a public sector union. Therefore, any real reform to the education system must address these two things.

First, it is generally understood that monopolies are bad for consumers. They lead to higher prices, along with lower quality and quantity. Figuring out why this happens isn’t difficult: firms have no incentive to innovate, nor provide a high-quality product, when consumers have no other options. The economist Thomas Sowell was correct when he observed that education is truly an outlier when it comes to how it is treated, as traditional public schools — as opposed to a grocery store or a summer camp — do not have to convince anyone that attending them is in their best interest. People are simply forced to attend. However, moving to a model that is characterized by choice will 1) empower families to choose a school that best fits the needs of their individual children and 2) incentivize every school, including traditional public schools, to prioritize the quality of the education they are providing and to continually improve. After all, if they do not, then people will simply decide to attend elsewhere.

Second, the job of a union is to protect, and accrue benefits for, its members. This can clearly be a worthwhile goal; but, when it comes to public sector teachers’ unions, the problems arise when advocating for the interests of teachers means advocating against the interests of students. The truth is that what is best for students is not always best for teachers, and vice versa.

For example, when Covid-19 school closures were being considered, it was clearly in the interest of students to learn in an in-person environment; however, teachers’ unions advocated against opening schools because their job is to look out for the comfort and safety of members. Another example is when a teacher’s job performance is egregiously sub-par. In such a scenario, it is clearly in the interest of students for that teacher to be removed, while it is in the interest of the teacher and the union to retain the teacher’s job. This is why in New York City it takes an average of 830 days and $313,000 to fire a single incompetent teacher.

A successful educational system cannot include cornerstones that, due to their very nature, work to the detriment of children. The good news is that by enacting policies that advance school choice, the power of teachers’ unions to advocate backward policy will weaken for two reasons. First, if that policy is detrimental enough, it may encourage students to leave for a school that puts students’ needs first; this could certainly cause the unions to begin to tread a bit lighter in their advocacy. Second, most charter schools and private schools are not unionized, which means that more students will be learning in schools that are not unionized after there is school choice if unionized schools fail to provide the education consumers want.

Steven Levitt, who co-authored the bestselling book, Freakonomics, explained the current problem with schools aptly. He wrote that “the problem (…) is not too many incentives but too few.” Right now, the schools and the teachers can really just “do whatever they want” in the classroom, regardless of what is best for students, because political forces are protecting the government’s education monopoly and the power of the unions to influence policy. In other words, because there is no competition, there can be no accountability.

This is clearly correct. And so the only solution is greater educational freedom. More people recognize this than ever before, but the work is only just getting started.

AUTHOR

Jack Elbaum

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