Commentary: School Choice Is Not Enough

Young girl wearing black headphones, smiling

If there is a public policy silver lining to this past year, it is the increased support for school choice. Most public schools went online during lockdowns and parents, dissatisfied with the results, sought out other solutions, including private schools, pods, charter schools, online learning, and homeschooling. The last more than doubled with 11.1 percent of households homeschooling, up from 5.4 percent the year before.

Many state legislatures improved school choice options in their states. This is to be celebrated and continued.

School choice by itself, however, will not save students from a failing education if charter and private schools adopt the same curriculum and practices as the most woke schools. Without a focus on the right subjects and lessons, students will be unprepared for personal or professional success. 

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Columbia Medical School Will Teach Students How to ‘Disrupt Racism’ and Confront Microaggressions

Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health entrance

Columbia University has developed new programming to help black and Hispanic medical students “disrupt racism” and confront microaggressions they could face.

A medical school professor, who is also the diversity director, said that the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota has made the situation worse at the New York institution.

Professor Jean Alves-Bradford said in a news release that “it’s been very difficult for students in general, but especially for students underrepresented in medicine.”

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Commentary: Historians Selling Out for Leftist Star, Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones

The University of North Carolina’s decision on June 30 to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones came about through a torrent of threats (often tweeted), profanities, doxxings, and assaults—tactics that have become increasingly commonplace among professional activists and racial grievance-mongers.

Hannah-Jones, of course, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion writer and architect of the New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project,” which claims that America’s true founding was not in 1776 but rather in 1619, when 20 or so African slaves arrived in Virginia. Hannah-Jones contends, moreover, that the American War of Independence was fought solely to preserve slavery. 

More than two-dozen credible historians, many of them political liberals and leftists, have debunked Hannah-Jones’ claims. Though, as we’ll see, some are less firm in their convictions than others. What’s clear, however, is that peer review is passé in the era of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Forget a stellar record of scholarly accomplishment—that’s a relic of “Eurocentrism.” Far more important these days is a candidate’s enthusiasm for social justice. It was Hannah-Jones’ celebrity activism and her “journalism,” not her scholarship, that formed the basis for the university’s initial offer of tenure earlier in the spring.

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Commentary: White Privilege and the Layers of False Ideology that Support Its Concept

Group of kids playing with a rainbow parachute cloth in a field

White privilege is a myth. A relic of a time that no longer exists and that none of us living and raising kids today have ever really experienced. There was once a time when legal and cultural advantages were offered to whites, but those days are gone and pretending otherwise is causing great damage to children and our society.

White Privilege Talk Harms Children Psychologically

White privilege is a concept which hurts both white and non-white children, albeit in different ways. For white children, you steal from them the ability to feel pride in who they are, their ancestors, and in their cultural inheritance. Certainly every nation and people can find stains in its history. The past was a violent and merciless place in which all sides are implicated.

White privilege requires that children of European descent are never allowed to feel deserving of what they, their parents, or their ancestors have achieved. They are never allowed to believe that they have rightfully earned anything. Consequently, they are pressured to actively give up what is theirs in penitence. This is obviously damaging and abusive for a child to endure.

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REPORT: Biden’s Education Department Has Closer Ties to Critical Race Theory Group Than They Admit

Young girl in pink long sleeve writing

The Biden administration called it an “error” to promote a critical race theory (CRT) activist group’s guide in a Department of Education (DOE) handbook meant for use in over 13,000 public school districts on reopening recommendations and policies, Fox News reported.

The activist group, Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN) has connections to at least two high-ranking officials in the Biden administration’s DOE, Fox News reported. It is unclear why ATN was mentioned in the April 2021 handbook and who added the link.

The Biden administration DOE backtracked on the promotion and its link to the group in a statement to Fox News Wednesday which said, “The Department does not endorse the recommendations of this group, nor do they reflect our policy positions. It was an error in a lengthy document to include this citation.”

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Commentary: Attend a School Board Meeting

If you want to know, up close and personal, the banality of evil, attend a school board meeting. With critical race theory and forced vaccination and masking all the rage, I did just that last night.

This board meeting wasn’t my first. When I was a kid, my dad ran for school board and won after a terrible teacher (a feel-good hippie) allowed one of my classmates to steal my work all year and put his name on it. Said teacher taught us second-graders macramé and little else. My family had moved from a high-performing school district to this less-than-stellar place. For about three years, I learned nothing new. My parents were incensed. So my dad ran for board treasurer, got elected, and promptly pissed everyone off.

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Pentagon Contractor Paid to Tackle ‘Extremism’ Claims Searching for ‘The Truth About’ BLM Implies White Supremacist Behavior

The Pentagon is working with a contractor to reportedly look into web searches such as “George Floyd deserved to die,” “Jews will not replace us” and “the truth about black lives matter” as potential signals of white supremacism, Fox News reported.

Pentagon contractor Moonshot CVE (Countering Violent Extremism), which has ties to the Obama Foundation, is gathering data to determine which bases and branches of the military have the most troops searching for domestic extremist content, Defense One and Fox News reported.

The exact details of the project are not clear, but the data is expected to be available in three weeks, Defense One reported. Moonshot Founder and CEO Vidhya Ramalingam said the data suggested active duty troops are less prone than the general American public to searching for violent extremism information.

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Art Professor Claims Enforcing Rules at Public Schools Is Racist

Public Schools Racist

An assistant professor at Appalachian State University recently argued that enforcing behavioral standards in public high schools is rooted in racism and unfairly affects Black students.

In the article “’Press Charges’: Art Class, White Feelings, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” Albert Stabler writes that the desire to punish students for violating school rules, especially when the police are involved, is the result of “the overvaluation of White feelings” harming non-Whites.

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Davidson College Spends $1 Million Telling White Churches How Not to Be Racist

Davidson College

Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina will spend $1 million teaching “white dominant” churches how to strive for racial equity.

According to Davidson’s official news service, the college received a $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., a private philanthropic foundation that donates to race and faith-related charitable projects. 

The partnership with Davidson is a fraction of the $93 million in grants the Lilly Endowment will offer throughout North America via its Thriving Congregations Initiative.

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Commentary: The Macro Subjectivity of ‘Microaggression’ Studies

Micro-Aggression

Ever since the most blatant forms of racism and discrimination in America faded, what are called microaggressions have, in the view of leftist academics and social justice activists, taken their place. These are “a form of racism,”  the slights and insults that, though subtle and small and typically unconscious, are insulting and harmful to their targets.

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Walt Whitman Statue, a Target of Protests, to Be Removed From Center of Rutgers–Camden Campus

Rutgers University-Camden Walt Whitman statue

Rutgers University-Camden will remove a statue of the famous poet Walt Whitman from the center of campus as a result of activists’ petitions and a recommendation from a committee of scholars.

The statue of Whitman, featured prominently in the front courtyard of Camden’s Campus Center, will be “relocated to a historically relevant site on campus and contextualized,” interim Chancellor Margaret Marsh recently announced in an email to students and employees.

That new location has yet to be announced by campus officials.

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Utah House Passes Bill to Ban Critical Race Theory in Public Schools

Students in class, listening to the teacher at the front of the room

Utah is one of many states in America considering banning critical race theory in public schools.

Republican State Representative Steve Christiansen sponsored a bill that takes direct aim at critical race theory concepts being taught in public education. The bill passed the Utah House and is awaiting the signature of the Speaker to move onto the state Senate.

That bill, HR901, calls on the Utah Board of Education for a re-evaluation of guidelines to weed out critical race theory in publicly funded classrooms.

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Commentary: Critical Race Theory Discourse Is Political Gaslighting

Back of the Statue of Liberty

Happily, the spirit of American liberty seems to be awaking from its decades-long slumber.

Unless you’ve been living in an underground bunker for the past two years (I wouldn’t blame you too much if you had), you know there’s quite a lot of controversy over critical race theory (CRT). You also know that just as those who oppose it have started to gain some momentum in pushing back against it (like parents in Loudoun County, Virginia), legacy media shills all leaped into action, concern trolling about ordinary Americans’ alarm over this racist theory’s presence in their children’s schools. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for 11 articles in two weeks on the RealClearPolitics homepage doing exactly that.)

This is a crystal clear example of what Michael Anton calls the “celebration parallax”: “a fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending on who states it.” Thus, when CRT fanatics indoctrinate your children to hate America and to hate one another on the basis of their skin color, it’s a much-needed dose of hard medicine for a racist people whose country’s “very DNA” is racist (according to the “1619 Project”). But when you—a patriotic, decent American mom or dad—point out how evil a thing that is to say unironically, let alone teach to children and force on Americans across the country via human resources departments, it’s either not happening, or we’re overreacting, or opposing it will hurt the Right “in the long run,” or it’s innocuous and really just about “teach[ing] children that slavery is bad and racism still exists.”

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Rashida Tlaib Says Opposition to Critical Race Theory Is ‘Rooted in Racism’

General Mark Milley

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said Thursday that opposition to Critical Race Theory is “rooted in racism.”

“Opposition to critical race theory is obviously rooted in racism and has just become the newest dog whistle for racists,” the Michigan Democrat tweeted Thursday, referring to a video in which Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley defended Critical Race Theory to the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday.

CRT holds that America is fundamentally racist, yet it teaches people to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. Its adherents pursue “antiracism” through the end of merit, objective truth and the adoption of race-based polici

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Commentary: The Systemic Con Behind Wokeism

Group protesting; "no justice no peace" sign

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020. 

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them. 

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

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Commentary: Anatomy of the Woke Madness

Black Lives Matter Protest in DC, 5/31/2020

Wokeism has become our most popular secular religion—at least for a moment dethroning climate change. It reduces all of the past and present into puerile binaries between “whites” and “non-whites.”

Its aim is for the present generation to rewrite our history—whether by The 1619 Project and cancel culture or iconoclastic statue-toppling and Trotskyization of names and places. Wokeism becomes a child’s morality tale of noble non-white victims versus villainous white victimizers. Erasing the past and its language supposedly fuels a recalibration of the future, all in the here and now, a holy Year Zero

In the process, wokeism has done a lot of damage to America, and will do even more if left unchecked. Here are its chief characteristics.

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Albion College Makes Kendi’s ‘How to Be an Antiracist’ Required Reading for First-Year Students

Ibram X. Kendi

Albion College recently announced its selection for the 2021 Common Reading Experience: “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi. The Richard M. Smith Common Reading Experience is a mandatory program for all first-year students.

According to the school’s website, “all of Albion’s first-year students read a shared text that serves both to connect students to one another and to help them make the important shift from high school to college.”

In an email addressed to the Albion Community on Wednesday, June 2, 2021, the Common Reading Experience (CRE) Taskforce revealed that it had chosen the book for the first-year mandatory curriculum. 

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Medical Journal Article Calls ‘Whiteness’ a ‘Parasitic-Like Condition’

A recent article in an academic medical journal made the absurd declaration that being White is a “malignant” and “parasitic-like condition,” with no “permanent cure,” as reported by Fox News.

The racist and pseudo-scientific claim was made in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA). The article, titled “On Having Whiteness,” was written by Dr. Donald Moss, a faculty member of both the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, who is himself a White man.

Among his baseless claims are the notions that White people suffer from an “entitled dominion” that allows the disease’s “host” to demonstrate “force without restriction” and “violence without mercy,” as well as an increased desire to “terrorize” others.

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New York Psychiatrist Admits in Yale Lecture to Fantasizing About Shooting White People

Aruna Khilanani

A psychiatrist from New York City went on a racist rant back in April in which she expressed her desire to kill White people simply because they are White, as heard in recently-revealed audio of the lecture, the New York Post reports.

The comments were made by Dr. Aruna Khilanani during a lecture to the Yale School of Medicine on April 6th. She said that she dreams of “unloading a revolver into the head of any White person that got in my way,” and that if she did so, she would leave the scene of the crime “with a bounce in my step.” She added that White people “make [her] blood boil,” and also believes that White people “are out of their minds and have been for a long time.”

The lecture was titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” During the speech, Khilanani talked about “learning objectives” such as “[setting] up White people’s absence of empathy towards black rage as a problem,” and also claiming that “White people are psychologically dependent on black rage.” These details, along with the full audio of the lecture, were posted online via Substack on Friday, by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss.

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Commentary: Florida is Overcoming ‘Systemic Privilege’ by Putting Students Before the ‘System’

Students in shop class at school with safety goggles on

Throughout America, a very important – and highly racialized – conversation is taking place about overcoming injustice. Here in Florida, that conversation has often gone in a markedly different and very promising direction. And schoolchildren of color are among the greatest beneficiaries.

The conversation in Florida, at least as it pertains to education, has focused on what might be called “systemic privilege.”

If you are unfamiliar with this (de-racialized) mash-up term, try this: Go to a public forum and suggest that all families should be treated fairly – that all parents should have access to the per-pupil funds for their children even if they choose to educate them outside the public school system.  

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Commentary: BLM Founder Patrisse Cullors, Marxist Abolitionist

Patrisse Cullors

Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors has been in the news a lot lately because of controversy over her income and financial dealings, including recent purchases of several new homes. Cullors lashed out at these criticisms by protesting, “The fact that the right-wing media is trying to create hysteria around my spending is, frankly, racist and sexist.”

The fact is that Cullors’ own organization has demanded answers. Hawk Newsome, head of Black Lives Matter Greater New York City, called for “an independent investigation” of Cullors. “If you go around calling yourself a socialist, you have to ask how much of her own personal money is going to charitable causes,” says Newsome. “It’s really sad because it makes people doubt the validity of the movement and overlook the fact that it’s the people that carry this movement.… We need black firms and black accountants to go in there and find out where the money is going.”

But another particularly striking Cullors revelation of late has gotten almost no publicity. It was flagged for me by Mike Gonzalez, author of an upcoming major new book on BLM. It’s a video by Cullors titled, “What Is Abolition And Am I An Abolitionist?” Posted on her personal YouTube channel, it needs to be widely watched.

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Joint Special Operations Command Personnel Requested to Attend Conference on ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’

Both civilian and military personnel with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) are being asked by the Pentagon to attend virtual conferences focusing on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” in order to boost their “professional development,” according to a Breitbart exclusive.

The emails making the requests were sent in April and May by JSOC’s Civilian Training Office, claiming that the conferences that would normally cost “$500 a session per person” are now available “at no cost” to personnel, and would both be virtual and broadcast at JSOC’s compound in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

There were three different conferences promoted by the email: “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” “Change & Transformation,” and “Emotional Well-Being.” The diversity conference would include four different panels: “Inclusive leadership for building equitable organizations,” “psychological safety and belonging,” “restorative justice, community trauma, and the partisan divide,” and “racism, white supremacy, and anti-racism.”

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Commentary: Spinning Wuhan with ‘Intelligence’

Wuhan Institute of Virology

Joe Biden’s instruction to the U.S. intelligence community to report whether the novel coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a comical attempt to avoid being discredited by the unraveling narrative that China’s role in the pandemic is another manifestation of racism. You know, the racism that results in Asian Americans being beaten in the streets by white Trump voters insidiously disguised as black Democrats. Having much invested in that narrative, the Democratic Party wants to distance itself from its unavoidable collapse.

Basic facts should be stipulated.

U.S. intelligence does not possess hard facts to prove exactly what happened in that lab. If it had them, it would have informed the previous president as well as the current one. 

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Senate Republicans Expand Investigation into ‘Woke Mission Creep’ of Federal Reserve

Federal Reserve

Senate Banking Committee Republicans have expanded an investigation into regional Federal Reserve banks over their alleged “woke mission creep.”

Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee sent letters to regional Federal Reserve banks in Minneapolis, Boston and Atlanta demanding a briefing with leaders and documents related to a recent “Racism and the Economy” initiative, GOP staffers said during a press briefing Monday morning. Engaging in political advocacy is out of the Fed’s purview, the letters said.

“Of course, racism is abhorrent and has no place in our society…. I recognize the interest in studying economic disparities along demographic lines, such as race and gender,” Banking Committee Ranking Member Pat Toomey wrote in the letters sent Sunday.

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Tulsi Gabbard Demands Chicago Mayor Resign for ‘Blatant Anti-White Racism’

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot

Former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard accused Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot of “blatant anti-white racism” Friday for only granting one-on-one interviews to “black and brown” reporters.

“Mayor Lightfoot’s blatant anti-white racism is abhorrent,” Gabbard, a fellow Democrat, said. “I call upon President Biden, Kamala Harris, and other leaders of our county—of all races—to join me in calling for Mayor Lightfoot’s resignation.”

“Our leaders must condemn all racism, including anti-white,” Gabbard, who is Samoan, added.

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Education Group Files Federal Civil Rights Complaint Against School District That Admitted to ‘Systemic Racism’

A national advocacy organization has filed a federal civil rights complaint against the Columbus City Schools after its board said there is “systemic racism” within the system.

Parents’ Defending Education’s complaint to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights came after The College Fix asked it about the statement from the school system.

The Fix asked the legal nonprofit if it planned to file a complaint, similar to the one the group filed against Webster Groves schools in Missouri.

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Commentary: Tuning Out Wokeism

Group protesting; "no justice no peace" sign

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

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Major School District in Virginia Eyes ‘Anti-Racism’ Instead of Questioning Assumptions

Students dancing in classroom

Parents in one of the nation’s largest school districts are being asked about how schools should teach their children about systemic racism, “multiple identities,” and ways to “challenge power and privilege.”

Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools sent a survey Thursday to parents and teachers seeking input about the school system’s future “anti-racism” and “anti-bias” policy. 

“One key strategy to achieve educational equity is to analyze and address the beliefs and policies that inform teaching practices along with what is taught in schools,” Schools Superintendent Scott S. Brabrand said in an email message introducing the survey to parents and teachers. 

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Minnesota School District Adopts Black Lives Matter Slogan as Privileged ‘Government Speech’

BLM protest

Many schools promote racial justice slogans such as Black Lives Matter. But one district in Minnesota has gone a step further, adopting several slogans as uniquely privileged “official government speech” tacitly exempt from challenge by dissenting opinion ordinarily protected under the First Amendment.

Rochester Public Schools board members unanimously approved a sweeping resolution that authorizes the superintendent to promote the slogans Black Lives Matter, Brown Lives Matter, Indigenous Lives Matter, All Are Welcome Here, and Stop Asian Hate.

The official is directed to take all actions “that further the objectives” of the resolution, including by approving “messaging, signage, and visuals” for the slogans. The district also adopted the six-color “pride flag” as government speech to support “a message of inclusion” within schools.

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Commentary: A Tribute to Mothers with Inspiration from Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou speaking

You wouldn’t think any possible controversy could append itself to that day, except that we are living in preternaturally contentious times. Two days ago, Rep. Cori Bush, a freshman Democrat from St. Louis, was testifying about racial disparities in health care, focusing specifically on childbirth. While describing her own medical experiences, Bush used the unwieldy phrase “birthing people” instead of “mothers.” Apparently, this was an awkward attempt to use inclusive language.

Predictably, this rhetorical gambit earned her a fair amount of ridicule on social media. I’m sure Rep. Bush has many virtues, but neither self-awareness nor self-deprecating humor are at the top of that list. Just as predictably, Bush lashed out at those who mocked her wording for their “racism and transphobia.” She also accused her critics of trivializing an important subject, which was a more substantive rejoinder. Bush was discussing racial disparities in America’s medical system, which is no laughing matter, and invoking her own harrowing experiences in hospital delivery rooms to do it.

Yet breezily trying to replace the word “mothers” as a sign of wokeness a few days before Mother’s Day wasn’t likely to go down well. It was Cori Bush’s own peculiar choice of words that distracted listeners from her story.

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Commentary: Two Studies on Immigration and Race, with Surprising Details

Group of people holding small American flags

Two mainstream think tanks have published new studies on immigration and race in America that come to the typical, safe conclusions. But a look at the data inside shows something more interesting.

A new Cato Institute report defending immigration begins by contending that immigrants are unlikely to negatively affect states’ fiscal health. But within the study’s findings, Cato may have inadvertently provided a new reason to oppose immigration.

Using state budgets as a proxy for the quality of economic institutions from 1970-2010, the authors of the Cato study assert that “a larger share of immigrants at the state level is correlated with slower state revenue and spending growth in the short-term, measured by total per capita government revenue and expenditure growth.” In other words, the more immigrants there are in a state, the less the state tends to take in in taxes and the less it spends on services. This is hardly groundbreaking; we have always known that immigration is linked to welfare chauvinism.

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Department of Education Is Stalling Complaints Against Race, Sex Segregation, Critics Say

University of Denver

When the University of Denver hosted race-based gatherings for students, faculty and staff “to process the outcome” of the November election, a student filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Christi Collins got a quick response from an enforcement attorney in OCR’s Denver office, and they scheduled a phone call. Then the attorney asked to postpone, and disappeared for two months. Their last contact was Feb. 22.

“At this time, OCR is evaluating your complaint, and I apologize for the delay and inconvenience,” Lori Welker wrote in the email, one of several communications Collins shared with Just the News. “I will be in touch when we have completed the evaluation.”

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Commentary: Critical Race Theory Is About to Face Its Day(s) in Court

New York State Education Building, Albany, New York

As recently as last summer, few people outside academia had heard of critical race theory, whose central claim is that racism, not liberty, is the founding value and guiding vision of American society. Then, President Trump issued an executive order last September banning the teaching of this “malign ideology” to federal employees and federal contractors.

Trump’s ban was blocked by a federal judge in December and immediately revoked by Joe Biden upon occupying the White House in January. Since then, federal agencies and federal contractors have resumed staff training on unconscious bias, microaggressions, systemic racism and white privilege – some of the most common but also most disputed concepts associated with the four-decade-old academic theory.

Now critical race theory is about to face a major real-world test: a spate of lawsuits alleging that it encourages discrimination and other illegal policies targeting whites, males and Christians. But unlike Trump’s executive order, which ran into First Amendment problems by prohibiting controversial speech, the lawsuits name specific policies and practices that allegedly discriminate, harass, blame and humiliate people based on their race.

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Police Groups, Unions to Argue Against Minneapolis Police Racism Probe in Meeting with DOJ

Minneapolis Police Department

Top police organizations and unions will reportedly express concern to Attorney General Merrick Garland about his racism probe into the Minneapolis Police Department, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The groups are expected to confront Garland and other Justice Department (DOJ) officials about the investigations during a meeting Friday afternoon, the WSJ reported. While many of the groups’ leaders have endorsed various police reforms since George Floyd’s death last year, they worried a broad probe would be unproductive and hurt rank-and-file officers.

“We recognize that there needs to be more oversight, there needs to be some reform in place, but we need DOJ to work with us because there has to be buy-in from the line men and women who do this job,” David Mahoney, president of the National Sheriffs’ Association and sheriff of Dane County, Wisconsin, told the WSJ.

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‘Anti-Racist’ Professor with BLM Syllabus Offers ‘Diversity Bingo’ Extra Credit

Black Lives Matter sign

A University of Florida professor gave students a “Diversity Bingo” extra credit assignment, which called for students to find people of various ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations.

The course, titled Problem Solving with Computer Software, is a general requirement course for all business majors at the University of Florida. “Diversity Bingo” was offered to students in the class as an extra credit assignment.

The assignment appears within a chapter dedicated to problem-solving specify, using groups and critical thinking strategies. Within this chapter students learned about Problem Definition, Idea Generation, and Decision making. The professor also included this assignment as being relevant to the material.

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Email Shows Biden Nominee Pushed Essay Comparing Police to KKK

Kristen Clarke

President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division circulated an essay from self-proclaimed Marxist poet Amiri Baraka defending cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and referring to police officers as members of the Ku Klux Klan, according an email from her days at Columbia University.

Kristen Clarke forwarded the Baraka essay in an email on June 25, 1999, to her mentor, the late historian Manning Marable.

She suggested that the essay, entitled “Mumia, ‘Lynch Law’ & Imperialism” be placed in a magazine Marable edited and used for a panel on the death penalty.

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Commentary: I No Longer Recognize My Hometown of Minneapolis

City of Minneapolis

Minneapolis is my home. My happiest memories are here. It’s where I learned to ride a bike, had my first date, received my high school diploma.

But today, I’m too afraid to even walk in my neighborhood by myself.

The ACE Hardware down the street? The one that I used to bike to in the summer? Robbed twice in the past five days.

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Commentary: Election Integrity and the Jim Crow Slur

Person with mask on at a computer.

Not too long ago, a good friend of mine took umbrage at a Facebook post that compared a proposed “vaccination passport” to the requirement that Jews in Nazi Germany carry papers identifying them as such. As a Jew, my friend argued that such a comparison trivialized the horrors of the Nazi regime that culminated in the Holocaust.

My friend’s objection was justified. But this same individual has not hesitated to join the president of the United States in comparing the recent Georgia voting law to Jim Crow. Anyone who makes such a claim has no idea of what Jim Crow entailed. Second only to slavery, the Jim Crow era represents the darkest period in U.S. racial history, far darker than Reconstruction or the decade that followed.

Indeed, the racial oppression, segregation, and violence that prevailed throughout the South during the era of Jim Crow in many respects exceeded that of the period of slavery. At least during slavery, there were free blacks in the South who, while denied most civil rights, were protected by laws that left them free to go about their business unmolested and did not prevent commercial interactions between the races.

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Commentary: Proposed Education Department Rule Would Prioritize Funding Critical Race Theory Grant Applications

Close up of person writing

The Biden Administration is wasting no time in working to promote highly controversial critical race theory and anti-racism concepts into curriculums nationwide.

A proposed rule from the U.S. Education Department seeks to prioritize funding grant proposals that support diversity and inclusion narratives within American History and Civics Education programs.

The department states on the Federal Register that such a move would “support the development of culturally responsive teaching.”

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Medical Journal Forces Out Editor Who Questioned ‘Structural Racism,’ Professors Rejoice

Edward Livingston

A leading medical journal terminated an editor who questioned the existence of structural racism. His fellow medical professors expressed approval of the firing.

The American Medical Association wrote in a statement that it was “deeply disturbed” and “angered” by a recent Journal of the American Medical Association podcast that “questioned the existence of structural racism.” Though the organization claimed that “JAMA has editorial independence from AMA,” the statement added that “this tweet and podcast are inconsistent with the policies and views of AMA.”

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