The tenor of the times in today’s California in this protest march in the state from 2018.
The Great Skedaddle once referred to the flight of the Union Army from the battlefield in First Bull Run in 1861. No longer. Many cities and states have opted into the woke revolution . . . and people are fleeing, a Great Skedaddle II. What’s more, if we shifted the census from a mid-2020 counting to mid-2021, California would come close to losing 3 seats in the House of Representatives instead of the one. It’s the same in nearly all jurisdictions where Antifa and BLM appeasers reign supreme.
The official census is a centennial affair, but the bureau does annual estimates based on a continuing stream of data. And as a result, it gets worse for blue America. From mid-2020 to mid-2021, 10 states grew by 1% or more; eight are essentially red states. The other two (Delaware and Nevada) have maintained mostly friendly tax regimes in spite of, not because of, Dem dominance, when compared with their high-profile political cousins who routinely vote Democrat by double digits from their bi-coastal, metropolitan enclaves.
Some of the biggest losers are what you’d expect: California (-.76%), New York (-1.81%), Illinois (-1.1%), and Washington, D.C. (-2.83%). Some lost because of the continuing trend of the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt, which is slowing. Where it is accelerating can be pinpointed by county numbers. Manhattan (New York County) lost 6.9% over the one-year period; San Francisco down 6.7%; San Mateo dropped 3.5%. King County, Washington State, the home of Seattle, et al, and the mother lode of lefty votes, took the biggest step backwards in the state. With few exceptions, the county metro areas that grew the most are found in Idaho, Florida, Texas, Utah, and South/North Carolina.
An aerial view of today’s Manhattan.
One more interesting aspect to the story: states bordering California are magnets, with the exception of Oregon, thanks to the radical-Left dominance of the Portland/Willamette Valley urban corridor. Nevada did well, but the flight pattern’s sphere of influence extends to Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and my own western Montana. Most of these states would come close to gaining an additional House seat if the count was held just one year later.
Indeed, the pandemic is a contributing factor, but not the sole cause of this trend. COVID ripped off the scab of a festering wound. The population hemorrhagers were more commonly the most zealous in their regulatory suffocation of lives and livelihoods. Then, they go off into climate-change hysteria, transgenderism, slashing police budgets, and a racist Anti-racism crusade. Their schools and urban spaces became open sewers riddled with crime. What’s there to like?
Let this be a warning to woke corporate boardrooms: you’ve been betting on the wrong horse. Boycotting states over election laws and protections for girls’ sports, and ads showing your fidelity to the cultural Left, is not a winning strategy. People who vote with their feet are also more inclined to vote with their dollars. Disney, rethink your opposition to parental rights. Your stand may sound glorious in your corporate boardroom, gated community, or lunchroom, but the commoners have a profoundly different take.
Please read the source article for this post here.
There’s too much at stake in today’s omni-powerful Supreme Court to let resumés be the gateway to a lifetime appointment. The narrow emphasis on “qualifications” has led to the domination of a cramped, elite clique from Harvard and Yale – eight of the nine went to the two Ivy Leaguers. This alone is immensely troubling. The Court has garnered unto itself too much power to allow only two insular academic monasteries to potentially take away our property and ruin our public spaces with needles, feces, and violence.
Today, Sen. Collins announced her support for Ketanji Brown Jackson (KBJ), the possible latest addition to the ever-growing Harvard faction on the Court. Here’s the mental trap of Sen. Collins and many others in the Senate who have embraced a rationale that results in the monopoly status of the two east coast campuses, in her own words:
“In my view, the role under the Constitution assigned to the Senate is to look at the credentials, experience and qualifications of the nominee. It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the individual ideology of a senator or would vote exactly as an individual senator would want.”
Ever since the American Bar Association (ABA) was given a back channel in approving Court nominees (since the 1940s or 50s), a few ideological zealots of the kind that spill out onto our streets as raging mobs and into comfortable socio-political sinecures get the power to dictate to us who shares a locker room with our daughter, so long as they show the “prestige” of an Ivy League pedigree. Wallowing in the exclusive socio-political world of the Acela corridor is no longer considered a weakness but a strength for a majority in the Senate and the cadre running the ABA show.
Au contraire, Sen. Collins, ideology now matters a great deal. The battle lines are between originalists and the Living Constitution devotees. Making the Constitution a living thing means a form of interpretive evolution defined by the Left, the ethos of our campuses. A living Constitution is an anti-Constitution, no need for amendments, a legislature, or executive action – you know, the popular sovereignty arenas. KBJ is fully marinated in this anti-law version of law.
Don’t blame me for the oxymoron. Ideological acolytes like KBJ actively try to press it on us.
For the citizenry, we are reduced to quietly waiting for another ruling to stretch “equal protection” to cover who shares a school’s bathroom with our young daughters.
It’s gotten that bad. If the NCAA can betray our daughters, so can the courts. Both of them are a reflection of the college campus, and increasingly only two of them.
Please watch the CSPAN interview of Benjamin Barton, author of The Credentialed Court (click on the image). He adds the concern about an expertocratic groupthink on the most undemocratic, authoritarian branch in our government. In the program, watch for the near-uniform experience of having lived and worked as an adult almost exclusively in the geographic isolation of Washington, D.C., on today’s Court. For a lighter note of real diversity of experience on an earlier Court, listen for the description of Justice Byron White (JFK appointee). Fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
But let’s not forget, diversity of life experience as advocated by Professor Barton is secondary to ideology since one of the philosophical contenders, the living constitution, is such a grave threat to our way of life.
Porfessor Benjamin Barton, U. of Tennessee, and author of The Credentialed Court.
Please watch the clip of political sloganeering in March Madness:
I love March Madness . . . until this year. Today, the c-suites managing the tournament from their metropolitan lairs gave us a steady diet of messaging, or what is often called “virtue-signaling”. It’s simply revolting to find almost everything polluted with not-so-thinly-disguised political messaging. With the tournament as a backdrop, you can see it on everything from the team warm-ups to the litany of ads punctuating every broadcast. This isn’t basketball. It’s the same monotonous, droning sermon in the church of the woke revolution.
We are pummeled by “Black Lives Matter” (and its companion, “Stop Racism”) which, by the way, was worn by the players of the tournament’s “Cinderella” team, St. Peters. Nothing new here. The banality has been with us since neo-Marxist hooligans started chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” in 2014. What does the slogan mean? Simple, and it’s not the obvious. If we were limited to the direct meaning of the words, it would be the equivalent of “Breathe” on the St. Peters’ t-shirts. The slogan is the crowd favorite of revolutionaries for a reason. It pushes the same tired, worn-out oppressor/oppressed gag. The real meaning: a state takeover of life by us (Antifa, BLM, Inc., snotty upper-middle-class whites, college ASB’s) is essential to make “Black Lives Matter”, and the lives of all the other identity clients in our sloganeering repertoire. It’s revolutionary theater.
Not content with that, we get walloped by ads from the NCAA, Buick, and Adidas. The point in the NCAA commercial is a pure inanity. They are committed to “opportunity” for “all of us”. Well, if they weren’t, they’d be sued. What’s new here? Virtue-signaling. The NCAA’s corporate bigs are saying that they aren’t like those yahoos at Trump rallies. They don’t discriminate . . . in sports that have to discriminate, as in distinguish between winners and losers. To get around the reality that not everyone gets a trophy, they inundate us with images of the Supreme Court’s “protected classes”, as if there is a shortage of black players on basketball teams. Do we really have to be constantly reminded, going back decades, that Title IX commands equality in sports, that there exist women basketball players?
They do the “opportunity” schtick to such an extent that they’ve created real opportunities for men to compete on women’s teams. Can’t make a go of it on the men’s team, jump over to the woman’s pool after pumping up on estrogen and announcing that you feel like a woman today, thanks to the NCAA. So much for opportunities for women . . . while expanding opportunities for men.
Car companies juice-up their commitment to the revolution by playing the statistical-disparity game. Going to a break during a timeout, Buick prints across your tv screen, “Over 40% of athletes are women, but they get 10% of the media coverage”. The ad continues, “Buick is committed to raising that percentage.” In actuality, they mean, shame on you, the viewers, for finding men’s basketball more interesting than women’s hoops. Bluntly put, that’s the rub. They, of all people, should know that ad exposure and expenditures closely track Nielsen ratings. Dah!
As for “raising that percentage”, Buick apparently believes that the natural human preference for watching excellence in greater physicality in speed, strength, and agility can be reshaped by c-suite decisions to spend more of the shareholders money on social engineering. Is Buick selling cars or militant affirmative action? Could the money on that ad campaign be better spent on improving Buick’s competitiveness with Toyota? Shareholders are indicted for letting them get away this.
And then we got Adidas’ ditzy ad offering (see below). They’re all-in for the trans agenda, the freedom of trans women to compete. And shame on you for not relishing the thought of your daughter sharing swimming lanes and a locker room with a woman with male genitalia. Are these folks selling shoes or gaslighting us into ignoring our lyin’ eyes?
For once, can’t we just sit down and enjoy the performance of exquisitely trained athletes and great coaches without the constant clamor of how committed the c-suite is to lefty politics? We need a separation of politics from athletics in much the same manner as some have constructed an impenetrable wall separating church and state. If we can ban the post-game prayers of football players and coaches, we ought to be able to keep the inane political opinions of billionaire athletes and c-suite execs from spoiling the fans’ experience.
For me, once again, I’m done with the whole sordid mess. They just made my time better spent in my garage working on the MGB and reloading cartridges for sport shooting. Please, stop the politics in everything, literally everything.
KBJ before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering her nomination for the Supreme Court.
We have reached the point of personal ideology being a disqualification for office. Progressivism has long been subversive of the rule of law. One commentator of recent memory called the progressive’s “living constitution” an ongoing, never-ending constitutional convention. Jurists under its sway can make and enforce law at will. No longer content with simply applying the law in court cases, they’ll force us back into the jungle of the rule of men (or women, or . . .), and away from the rule of law. We don’t need any more judges as potentates. That means a healthy “No” to KBJ.
KBJ is an embodiment of the threat to our civilizational order. It’s more than her refusal to define a woman when asked. Some of her rulings are just way out there, as in contortions to ignore the restraints in the job description in order to achieve long-sought lefty ends. She’s more of a revolutionary than a judge.
One example of the radical’s monstrous rationale came to the fore in committee hearings considering her nomination. Sen. Grassley (R, Iowa) brought to light her ruling as a DC District Court judge in Make the Road New York v. McAleenan, (2019). She, with a stroke of her pen, made a ruling in violation of the law. At issue is the power of the AG or Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) to exercise “unreviewable” (by the courts) discretion to determine the classes of aliens eligible for expedited removal from the country (Immigration and Naturalization Act, section 1225). So, what did she do? She went ahead and “reviewed” the DHS decision.
She tried to hang her hat on the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), as if it was the wormhole to make reviewable what was clearly not reviewable. So astounded was the normally liberal DC Circuit Court of Appeals that a panel of the Court reversed and admonished her by ruling that,
“There could hardly be a more definitive expression of congressional intent to leave the decision about the scope of expedited removal, within statutory bounds, to the Secretary’s independent judgment.”
She was so intent on bashing the Trump administration’s immigration policies that she violated the law when making a decision on the law. Try to make sense of that. Some could try, given that many are completely unaware that Article III of the Constitution gives to Congress the power to set the federal courts’ appellate jurisdiction. In other words, by statute, “unreviewable” means “unreviewable” by KBJ, et al.
The APA is not to be confused, as she apparently did, with the Constitution. This person is a radical, an unhinged progressive, or maybe even a revolutionary. As such, her nomination should be rejected, if not setting her to face impeachment.
Eau Claire Area School District Administration Building, Eau Claire, Wisconsin.Naval War College, Newport, R.I., and near Barrington, R.I.
What are they doing to our soldiers? Indeed, what are they doing to our children? The “they”? They go by various titles: “cultural curators (Salena Zito), “cultural commanding heights” (mine), “elites”, “limousine liberals”, “establishment”, “progressives”, “blue-check Twitter”, alongside a host of disparaging terms for anyone outside these tightly-packed super zip codes in the cartography of America. A tell-tale sign is glaringly evident in almost any place with a college of extortionate social and economic (and by extension political) influence. Three recent incidents are case studies of their baleful clout.
Who’s educating our children? It might be the same people like the staff of University of Wisconsin Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center (GSRC) who conducted a teacher training session for the Eau Claire Area School District in late February on the whole gamut of woke ideology. Safe spaces, the evils of heteronormativity and meritocracy and systemic racism and white privilege, and the need to freeze parents out of their children’s gender identity issues were taught as unassailable truths to the government employees who have the residents’ children under their control for 6-8 hours per weekday. The whole thing might have flown under the residents’ radar, pre-pandemic, but parent groups, post-pandemic, were tipped off.
Thankfully, word got out. Parents learned that teachers were told in power-point slides,
“. . . parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned. Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student.”
In essence, the area’s children were treated as property of the school district. The arrogance is startling. Chris Jorgenson, the director of the GSRC, was impertinent enough to declare to the throng of teachers, “But much like we wouldn’t act as stand-ins for abuse in other circumstances, we cannot let parents’ rejection of their children guide teachers’ reactions and actions and advocacy for our students.” If you can make sense of the word salad, the presentation of gender-identity ideology – sometimes referred to as transgenderism – makes an enemy of parents who understandably reject the ideology by calling the repudiation parental “child abuse”. The whole falderol was sanctioned by the district’s superintendent, Michael Johnson, in classic bureaucratese when he said the district “prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.” The effrontery of our cultural curators was on full display.
Culprit #1: Chris Jorgenson, director of UW Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center
It doesn’t end there. Barrington, R.I., is home for many veterans and staff of the Naval War College (NWC), and what we see in the faculty lounge of UW Eau Claire is clearly evident among its professoriate, and it spills over into the town of Barrington. Don’t forget, the NWC educates the officer corps of one of the institutions that is assigned the sole task of protecting us from foreign aggressors who wish to inflict abject harm on us. The first decades of this century have made the threat abundantly clear.
Instead, like the teachers and children of Eau Claire, Marine and Naval officers are being indoctrinated with the same ideology of self-flagellation. Think about it: what effect will it have on morale in the ranks? General George C. Marshal warned us in the tumultuous days of World War II, “It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory.” Who would want to defend a nation that has been characterized barely this side of Nazi Germany?
At issue in Barrington is the sponsorship of this year’s Memorial Day activities. For the past number of years, it was the Barrington United Veterans Coalition (BUVC). Well, not this year. The town’s Master of Ceremonies will not be the head of BUVC but the role will be turned over to a NWC professor, Frank Douglas, who previously spoke in favor of flying the Black Lives Matter flag at city hall. The Veterans Coalition had opposed the proposal to grant BLM the same honor as the POW-MIA banner. Douglas, according to town council minutes, played the trite “diversity” card when he said, “… there is diversity in the veteran community because they [BUVC] do not speak for all veterans.”
Culprit #2: Frank Douglas, Naval War College professor
Our intrepid NWC prof, Frank Douglas, is probably confusing the neologism BLM as a concept with the group. But flying a flag is quite different from simply endorsing the obvious truth that black lives matter. A flag denotes a group, and the BLM group is a scandal in belief and practice. A person who isn’t aware of the group’s neo-Marxist program has been living in a closet. Ditto for the bookkeeping shenanigans. Flying the BLM flag isn’t much different from flying the Viet Cong flag.
I’m not surprised. Douglas’s resume’ reads like a travelogue through academic bubbles – Georgetown U. (BSFS, Int. Affairs, 1993), Johns Hopkins U. (MA, Int. Relations, 1997), Harriman Institute (M.Phil., PoliSci, 2001), and Columbia U. (PhD, PoliSci, 2005). Clearly, this guy has the impression that some form of wisdom and competence is granted to someone with a litany of letters after their name . . . or it simply could be the desire for a cushy job.
As for his uniformed experience – he’s a commissioned officer in the Naval Reserve – his bio on the NWC’s website lists staff jobs in and out of theater from 2004 to 2018. Actual combat experience isn’t evident. I could be wrong but he appears to be a desk jockey. He might be the military’s version of a teacher quickly transitioning to administration. The old saying in education has a ring of truth: If you can’t teach, administrate. In the social ecosystem of the Pentagon, if you find the life of the grunt personally repellant, cram your resume’ with academic honors and be above the grime of actual combat, and, while you’re at it, engorge yourself on the thought-fads of academia.
If I’ve got it wrong, Douglas, please tell me.
The staff overhead of the Pentagon and its academic appurtenances frequently show the very same neo-Marxist influence as in Eau Claire Area School District’s headquarters. Who can forget General Mark Milley’s (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) statement before the House Armed Services Committee in June of 2021: “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The pinning of “white rage” on the January 6 rioters and protesters sounds like The Squad’s camera-hogging howls. The lunch room at the Pentagon may not be much different from the UW Eau Claire’s faculty lounge.
Culprit #3: Pauline Shanks Kaurin, Naval War College professor
Back to the NWC, another prof, Pauline Shanks Kaurin, delivered a lecture to sailors in June of 2021 that treated Meghan Markle’s fully unsubstantiated accusations of racism in the royal family as analogous to the alleged systemic racism in American society. She went further in slamming classical liberalism in its focus on the individual. If you want more of the mental gobbledygook, she continued to ineptly wax as follows:
“… [racism] is not a case of a few bad apples. This is, as the Duchess of Sussex said, she said, racism, racist is not rude….
This is not a matter of people who are being mean or rude or ignorant individuals. We tend to think of racism or sexism as, ‘this is a problem with individuals’. It’s not a problem with individuals. It’s not a problem with individuals only, it’s a problem of individuals within a structure, within a society, within a system.”
This is the stuff promulgated to the people trained to kill. Those in charge should be held accountable for wrongly presenting this bombast. And if they won’t be responsible, keep it out entirely. The nonsense should be treated as the bone of contention that it is. That means that you don’t deliver it from a lectern, as from a pulpit, even if discussion is permitted. The setting grants to the presenter the power to frame the discussion. Rather, it only deserves the full debate treatment: two sides cognitively armed to argue the merits, or lack thereof.
If not, keep it away from our troops, and keep it away from our children. It’s noxious neo-Marxism whether flying under the BLM banner or anti-racism ideology in teacher training, and needs to be confronted, and not in any way presented as truth. Our men and women in uniform and school-age children merit better. Schooling should not be a national suicide pill.
Lest we find ourselves distracted by all things Ukraine at the moment, we should not suffer temporary blindness to the ongoing threats closer to home. If you’ll recall, we are engaged in a wholesale demolition of our cultural inheritance under the guise of a landslide of hackneyed buzzwords: diversity, equity, inclusion (curiously in that order to avoid the acronym DIE), social justice, systemic racism, white supremacy, et al. An older but truer meaning of the word stewardship comes to mind.
See 1 Peter 4:10:
“As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”
See Genisis 2:15:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”
The ransacking of the legacy flies in the face of the obvious meaning of stewardship. Throughout the Bible it is used to remind us that God is the ultimate source of all gifts (broadly defined) and His expectation that we are to wisely use these favors. It is not a cover for political enthusiasms such as recycling regimes, anti-plastic crusades, climate-change manias, the assault on fossil fuels, government handouts for windmills and solar panels, the punishment of workers in certain commodity industries, the promotion of guilt-trips for owning an SUV, the policies of herding families en masse into cramped apartments, the demonization of single-family-residential, and the relegation of the public lands to mere hikers’ paradises and no one else need enter. God’s gifts are conferred on a businessman exercising property rights to extract mineral wealth from the earth as they are for white collar public employees wealthy and organized enough to politically force everyone else to live according to their preferences. At present, there the mutilated corpse of stewardship lies.
If I hear another clergyman spout from the pulpit stewardship as the guise for greenie agendas, I’ll scream.
The insipid mangling of stewardship has manifested beyond Green New Deals and into a frenzy for an inflated race-consciousness. Hyper-sensitive race-awareness tars everything to the point of a wholesale dismantlement of our grand cultural inheritance. Statue-toppling, the insidious doctrines of race-obsessiveness in instruction to the young, the rantings and bullying in social media, the loud advocacy of the extinction of personal freedoms in free markets, and the espousal of life under massively intrusive government commands will mean the death knell for God’s gifts. “Stewardship” undermining stewardship. Go figure.
A rereading of the writings of Zora Neale Hurston are the antidote to what she referred to as the “race man”, the carnival barkers for perpetual race-victimhood, people like the barely coherent Ibram X. Kendi or the insufferable Maxine Waters.
Ibram X. KendiMaxine Waters
Check out this gem from Hurston’s essay “Art and Such”, wherein she decries the tendency of the “race man” to reduce the entire black experience to oppression and sorrow:
“Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back. He says to himself, . . . ‘Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and . . . if I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.’ So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again. . . . The writer thinks that he has been brave in following in the groove of the Race champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and least originality.”
Zora sets the record straight. This latest campaign to ravage our inheritance is absolutely mind-numbing. The soul-destroying dogmas reduce thought to mindless chants. These people aren’t capable of originality and can add nothing to our inheritance. They only pillage. A painter’s palette is replaced by a sledge hammer.
Alison Collins, right, speaks during a meeting in San Francisco, on Sept. 26, 2018. (Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
Yep, you read it right. Who would have thought it possible, in San Francisco of all places? Voters on Tuesday sent packing three true-believing social justice warriors on the school board for wrecking the educations of the city’s children: school board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins. Granted, the city’s school-age cohort is proportionally the smallest of any major US city, but residents of all stripes have had their fill of turning the most vulnerable – children – into lab rats for chic political crusades.
Even more striking is the reaction of the city’s Asian-American population. They quickly grasped where this was heading. School board member Collins let the cat out of the bag. She tweeted, and never apologized, that the city’s Asians were cognitively “white supremacists” for complaining of school closures, the obsessive effort expended to rename 44 schools, the erasure of any semblance of merit in doing things like the rejection of competitive admissions for the district’s elite Lowell High School. The woke blokes and blokettes just learned a powerful lesson. Don’t mess with tiger moms!
One parent, Siva Raj, cut to the chase. He said,
“The city of San Francisco has risen up and said this is not acceptable to put our kids last. Talk is not going to educate our children, it’s action. It’s not about symbolic action, it’s not about changing the name on a school, it is about helping kids inside the school building read and learn math.”
Right! Now, what will this portend for the future? Could woke school boards across the country be heading to electoral guillotines as parents across the nation rise up as the newest edition of Committees of Public Safety? The spirit of Robespierre is ripe in the land.
Rapper 50 Cent performs during the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show at SoFi Stadium on February 13, 2022 in Inglewood, California. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
Let me start by saying, I don’t care. As a Florida allegator hunter might put it, I don’t have a dog in that hunt. The game pits two teams for which it’s hard to conjure any enthusiasm. The Bengals are from Ohio and the Rams have never been, for me, an object of affection. So, what will I do . . . if you’re even interested? I’ll record the thing to zip out all the hype, including the unbearable half-time show. I’ll get the result and later see how it ended that way. In other words, I’ll view the spectacle in my old role of a coach analyzing game tape.
My only interest, and it’s a slight one, is in the underdog (LA is favored) and maybe watching the next Tom Brady in the making: Joe Burrow. After that, meh! My appetite has been ruined. The NFL, like the rest of the big-metro blue bubbles, has shown itself to be duly immersed in the cloistered zeitgeist of the fashionable neo-Marxist critical theory, pushing radical BLM slogans throughout the season. A game not about politics came to be about politics. It’s hard to get up for the America sellout (the NFL).
How appropriate for the game to be played in a lefty metropolitan funhouse in the leftward most governed state on the furthest leftward edge of the continent. I pity the athletes for they will pay the greatest pound of flesh for playing a game in the highest taxed state outside of North Korea. But what does it matter if you earn a million and have to turn over a couple hundred thousand to subsidize a fiscal and cultural nightmare?
In other words, where are our school leaders leading us?
Parents talk before rally to oppose critical race theory in Loudon County schools, June 12, 2021.
Please listen to the last 30 minutes of the Radion Free California podcast and capture Will Swaim’s (of the California Public Policy Center) interview of Dr. Lance Izumi, Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. Click on Dr. Izumi’s picture for the interesting conversation. You’ll find it compelling if you’re worried about the condition of your child’s school.
Dr. Lance Izumi
To be clear, let’s not tar everyone with the same brush. Not every Trump voter cheered the January 6 riot, not every Democrat is, figuratively speaking, in bed with the socialistas of The Squad, and not by a long shot is every teacher responsible for the mediocrity of the schools. During my near 30 years as a public high school teacher, I have seen the great variability in teacher quality but few, very few, fit the bill as truly incompetent and uncaring. Some, like me, failed at their first bite of the apple, but learned the lesson that effectiveness is a dynamic process, experience being the best stylist of good teaching.
Yet, undeniably, something is amiss in our schools, and most emphatically in our public schools. Pre-pandemic, the failings spared no socioeconomic group. Certainly, the pandemic panic exacerbated the situation. Using the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) as the benchmark, schools with overwhelming middle-class enrollment produced dismal results with over half performing at below grade level. It only gets worse when we look at schools with the entire student body on the school lunch program. So, moving to a “better” neighborhood for the “better” schools is a fool’s errand. You’re only getting a student body in nicer clothes and cars, not a better education.
If I was to choose one overriding factor for the dreary situation, it would come down to rotten leadership. And I don’t mean to make administrators as a group the brunt. Poor captaincy stretches from many school board members to professors to superintendents through an administrative descent to the individual school, and, lest I forget, their directors and abettors in state and federal government. Most of this leadership crowd is pickled in a brine of progressive ideology emanating from the political arena and the gatekeepers of credentialing, the collegiate schools of education.
Teachers must also traverse the same gauntlet.
If you’re shocked by racial shaming sessions in your child’s Zoomed Social Studies lesson, well, what did you expect? Today’s progressivism is synonymous with the militant wokeness of neo-Marxist critical theory and it percolates through ed courses and the teams of “educators” who produce the curricula. It’s everywhere and everywhere destructive.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)
If you want better schools, clean house of the poison and install leaders with their heads screwed on straight. Start with the state leadership and move like Sherman’s March through the collegiate schools of education and the people who run the local districts. The rot begins at the top, so start there. In the end, the teachers will be better for it.
Oh, before I leave the topic, an important cog in this Borg is the teacher unions. They need to stop being a conduit for this ideological mania. If they are to continue to exist, they must stop seeing themselves in the vanguard of a revolution and more as shapers of patriotic and productive citizens. Got it?
Hillsdale College in Michigan.Student walks past statue of Ronald Reagan on the campus of Hillsdale College.Site of Hillsdale College campus in Placer County near Roseville.
I kid you not: Hillsdale College is coming to California and the true believers of the ruling groupthink are going bonkers. The state is hemorrhaging legacy-cost red ink, businesses, and residents as it is mired in COVID totalitarianism, homelessness everywhere, a crime wave, debased schools, welfare dependency, expensive everything, and public spaces that aren’t fit for children (and adults). And to think that they are frazzled beyond restraint by the appearance of a classical liberal arts college within their playpen. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
If you want to know the reason for the state’s looniness, no better candidate can be found than in the loopy thought processes of many of the state’s college graduates who then scatter into the state’s institutions for employment. An example of the phenomena is 24-year-old Hannah Holzer, “opinion assistant” at the Sacramento Bee. She penned an op ed – really, more of a screed – on January 23 titled “A conspiracy-peddling college is coming to Placer County. That should scare us all” (read here). What does she bring to the table other than vapid sloganeering and ad hominems? Let’s see.
Hannah Holzer
Her LinkedIn resume’ mentions a 4-year stint at UC Davis with an “English – professional writer” degree. Her post-graduate journey winds its way through a news internship at the Bee, a DC communications internship, editor of The California Aggie, editor at SF Weekly, and finally Bee assistant opinion editor/Sunset Beacon freelance reporter at the wizened age of 24. She had plenty of opportunity to ply her trade while infusing her journalism with left wing nuttery.
And it shows. Read the piece. It’s a mental fingerprint of unexamined assumptions and left-wing boilerplate. The opening paragraph is an unacknowledged tribute to the Unibomber’s Manifesto. It’s ripe with “ultra-conservative” (Hillsdale College) and this gem, “. . . extremist institution [Hillsdale College], perpetuating alternative facts and harmful conspiracy theories.” Plowing deeper into the tirade, one finds an excoriation of Hillsdale’s rejection of the lefty bromides of “social justice” and “multicultural diversity”. She then unabashedly and unthinkingly equates the two with “a just nation”. What? A “just nation” is created by the racial discrimination of a racial favoritism? For our intrepid reporterette, lady justice is not to wear a blindfold.
There’s more. She adopts the vocabulary – “dog whistle” – of Democratic Party electioneering. Of course, the phrase is attached to the opponents of the neo-Marxist critical theory and its offspring, critical race theory, leading to this whopper: “. . . they [Hillsdale] view the practice of accurately teaching America’s complex history to students as a threat to white supremacy.” There you have it. “White supremacy” has come full circle to include those who take Martin Luther King seriously.
Hillsdale’s sin is its unwillingness to kowtow to the fashionable tomfoolery that is so commonplace in the modern academy. Hillsdale is an unflinching advocate of classical education – classical means rooted in Western civilization. It’s the same civilization that gave birth to the university, the higher ed that has currently been bastardized to produce the youngins who can’t wait to dismantle it in their ignorance.
Hey, California, the doctor has arrived with a little tough love in the form of Hillsdale College.
