Religion is a Mental Illness

Republicans Support Indoctrination in Public Schools After All

Republicans are hypocritically supporting the mandatory display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

realityslaststand.com

When the 3rd grade reading level is only 49 percent, I don’t see why the state wants to spend money on lawyers for a probably unconstitutional law making the Ten Commandments mandatory just to virtue signal a side in a culture war. Actually use conservative reforms to fix the schools instead of putting up posters half the 3rd grade cannot even read.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

... Secularism means that no particular ideology is being forwarded and getting special treatment. Go have your belief. Believe what you want. Privately. You don’t get special treatment because you believe this with tons of conviction. Secularism means that your belief in your faith covers none of the distance to proving that it’s true. Conviction is not evidence of much of anything. Except conviction. -- James Lindsay

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

‘Pedagogical Malpractice’: Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University

Washington Free Beacon

Top physicians, including former Harvard dean, say required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor."

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum "promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation."

UCLA "has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate," said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. "As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking."

One required reading lists "anti-capitalist politics" as a principle of "disability justice" and attacks the evils of "ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism." Others decry "racial capitalism," attack "growth-centered economic theories," and call for "moving beyond capitalism for our health."

The essay by Mercedes "describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms" and offers guidance on "resisting entrenched fat oppression," according to the course syllabus. Mercedes claims that "ob*sity" is a slur "used to exact violence on fat people"—particularly "Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people"—and offers a "fat ode to care" that students are instructed to analyze, taking note of which sections "most resonate with you."

"This is a profoundly misguided view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups," Flier told the Free Beacon. "Promotion of these ignorant ideas to medical students without counterbalancing input from medical experts in the area is nothing less than pedagogical malpractice."

Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician at Yale University, who has spent decades providing medical care to underserved communities, including in the South Side of Chicago, called the curriculum "nonsensical."

The relationship between health and social forces "should indeed be taught at medical school," Christakis wrote in an email, "but to have a mandatory course like this—so tendentious, sloganeering, incurious, and nonsensical—strikes me as embarrassing to UCLA."

UCLA did not respond to requests for comment.

Snapshots of the course have been leaking for months and left the school doing damage control as members of UCLA’s own faculty have spoken out against the curriculum. The most recent embarrassment came when a guest lecturer, Lisa Gray-Garcia, led students in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" after instructing them to kneel on the floor and pray to "Mama Earth." Lessons on "decolonization" and climate activism, as well as a classroom exercise that separated students by race, have also stirred controversy.

"There are areas where medicine and public health intersect with politics, and these require discussion and debate of conflicting viewpoints," Flier said. "That is distinct from education designed to ideologically indoctrinate physician-activists."

The mandatory class is part of a nationwide push by medical schools to integrate DEI content into their curricula—for residents as well as students— both by adding required courses and by changing the way traditional subjects are taught.

Stanford Medical School sprinkles lessons on "microaggressions," "structural racism," and "privilege" throughout its curriculum. Residents at Yale Medical School must complete an "Advocacy and Equity" sequence focused on "becoming physician advocates for health justice," while those in the infectious disease program must complete additional lessons on "Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism."

Columbia Medical School promotes an "Anti-bias and Inclusive" curriculum by encouraging educators to use "precise, accurate language." Instead of "women," guidelines for the curriculum state, faculty should refer to "people with uteruses."

The changes have been driven partly by the Association of American Medical Colleges—one of two groups that oversees the accrediting body for all U.S. medical schools—which in 2022 released a set of DEI "competencies" to guide curricula. Schools should teach students how to identify "systems of power, privilege, and oppression," the competencies state, and how to incorporate "knowledge of intersectionality" into clinical decision-making. Students should also be able to describe "public policy that promotes social justice" and demonstrate "moral courage" when faced with "microaggression."

The course at UCLA, which predates those accreditation standards, offers a preview of how DEI mandates could reshape medical education. It is littered with the lingo of progressive activism—"intersectionality" is a core value of the class, according to slides from the first session—and states outright that it is training doctors to become activists.

Students will "build critical consciousness" and move toward a "liberatory practice of medicine" by "focusing on praxis," according to the slides.

A section called "Our Hxstories" adds that "[h]ealth and medical practice are deeply impacted by racism and other intersectional structures of power, hierarchy, and oppression—all of which require humility, space and patience to understand, deconstruct, and eventually rectify."

That jargon reflects a worldview with clinical implications. In a unit on "abolitionist" health, which explores "alternatives to carceral systems in LA," students are assigned a paper that argues police should be removed from emergency rooms, where 55 percent of doctors say they’ve been assaulted—mostly by patients—and threats of violence are common, according to a 2022 survey from American College of Emergency Physicians. Other units discuss the "sickness of policing" and link "Queer liberation to liberation from the carceral state."

Flier said the syllabus was so bad it called for an investigation—and that anyone who signed off on it was unfit to make curricular decisions.

"Assuming the school’s dean," Steven Dubinett, a pulmonologist, "does not himself support this course as presented, it is his responsibility to review the course and the curriculum committee that approved it," Flier said. "If that body judged the course as appropriate, he should change its leadership and membership."

Dubinett did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the leaders of the course is Shamsher Samra, a professor of emergency medicine who in December signed an open letter endorsing "Palestinians’ right to return" and linking "health equity" to divestment from Israel.

"To authentically engage in antiracism health scholarship and practice is to explicitly name injustices tied to white supremacy and maintain an unapologetic commitment to antiracism praxis that transcends US borders," the letter reads. "As such, we, the undersigned,* unequivocally support a free Palestine and Palestinians’ right to return."

Samra, who in 2021 published a paper on "infrastructural violence and the health of border abolition," did not respond to a request for comment.

To the extent the course addresses actual medical debates, it frames contested treatments as settled science, omitting evidence that cuts against its activist narrative. A unit on "Queerness/Gender," for example, assigns readings on "gender self-determination" and "DIY transition," but does not include any of the research from Europe—such as the newly released Cass Report—that has led England and other countries to restrict hormone therapies for children.

"UCLA School of Medicine has decided to shield its students from the ongoing scientific debates playing out in Europe and even in the U.S.," said Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who researches gender medicine. "This is fundamentally unserious, and a stain on the school’s reputation."

The omission of inconvenient facts extends to a unit on Los Angeles's King/Drew hospital—nicknamed "Killer King" for its high rates of medical error—which the course promotes as an example of "community health."

Founded in 1972 as a response to the Watts riots, the hospital was majority black, had a documented policy of racial preferences, and was hit with several civil rights complaints by non-black doctors alleging discrimination in hiring and promotion.

It closed in 2007 after a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Los Angeles Times found numerous cases in which patients had been killed or injured by clinical mistakes, such as overdosing a child with sedatives and giving cancer drugs to a meningitis patient. Efforts to reform the hospital stalled, according to the Times, because its board of supervisors feared coming across as racially insensitive.

The assigned readings on King/Drew do not include any of this history. Lecture slides instead praise the hospital for "suturing racial divides," but suggest that it may not have gone far enough. A focus on "producing highly talented and skilled physicians," one slide reads, "forced" King/Drew to hire doctors who were, "in some cases, not Black."

The curriculum is a "compilation of ideologic and anecdotal assertions that represent a warped view of medicine," said Stanley Goldfarb, the founder of the medical advocacy group Do No Harm and the father of Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb. "American medical education needs to purge itself of this nonsense and treat every patient as an individual."

The slides suggest that "lived experiences," "historical memory," and "other knowledges" can constitute medical expertise.

Biomedical knowledge, after all, is "just one way of knowing, understanding, and experiencing health in the world."

“There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five.”

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

EXPOSED: Gender Workshop for Parents Supporting Trans/Non-Binary Youth

Gender “experts” say that children are the real experts.

www.realityslaststand.com|Colin Wright

When we talk about children, so I’m thinking you know like 10 and under, kind of before the tweens, we’re only ever talking about socially transitioning, right? Little kids are never kind of put on hormones or puberty blockers, or undergoing any kind of medical transition or surgery. And that, I think again, a lot of misinformation out there, and what it looks like for children of 10 is, you know, changing their appearance, maybe changing pronouns, maybe changing name. So when we’re talking about children, we’re talking about social transitioning, and sometimes legal, but we’re not talking about medical transitioning. It’s when people slowly approach puberty that then we’re starting, for some people, where they’re you know, really distressed or need to have other options, then we sometimes start talking about puberty blockers, right? And that’s really when people have just kind of started puberty.

So the idea of being nonbinary, it means that you not necessarily are rejecting, I mean for some folks sure, but it’s like that idea of like, okay, like I don’t feel like a man, I don’t feel like a woman—that’s a binary—those are two genders, and you’re like, well, if these don’t fit for me then I suppose I’m nonbinary. And so for some folks that might mean that they fall in between these two genders, or maybe they’re like ‘I feel like I’m a combination,’ or maybe they’re like ‘Nope, I’m neither, I’m none.’ And so it is, yes, this binary of man and woman, that is the gender binary that you are stepping outside of.

And so the difference between being nonbinary and gender non-conforming is like so nuanced [both Kyle and Jessie smile and laugh]. I think I could probably Google it and like you would, um, see it and be like ‘Okay, those sound very similar, I don’t really… uh, I, but I, you know, it’s just these like, little differences. Gender non-conforming, meaning you’re not conforming to gender, but lots of people kind of use it almost like synonymously, but then for some folks it just feels right to use nonbinary instead. What do you think, Jessie?

I think it’s, you know, ‘cause some of these definitions they’re so, especially under the nonbinary umbrella, they’re so kind of, um, yeah close together almost, right? So, we want to just really invite conversation around what it means to the person, right? Because sometimes they just really resonate with uh, with like the term nonbinary, or with agender. Like there’s very little difference between those two things. Like agender really is part of the nonbinary umbrella, but maybe they just more closely associate with, say, agender or something. Um, so, I think it’s really about kind of just having the conversation, and getting them to like explain what it means to them, and what is it about that term that kind of resonates for them. You can kind of get a lot more information.

One thing I’ve noticed just in my practice where I work with youth, right, and this is around sexuality too, there’s so much fluidity now with this new, what’s the new generation? There’s Alpha and Gen Z, right? There’s so much just fluidity that a lot of times, you know, I’ve heard nonbinary folks they’re like even rejecting nonbinary and they’re just like ‘I’m just me and this is what I want to look like, and this is how I feel inside.’ Um, and so to just really open up that conversation, because there is a lot of nuance and I think it’s different for everybody.

I think yes and also your internal sense of self, like you know, I think this is getting like quite philosophical I suppose but it’s true that the concept of what is man and what is woman is a social construct as well. Like what makes us a man, what makes us a woman? So often it’s based on your sex, but we’re saying no, like your sex doesn’t define your gender identity, so I think, you know, if the binary is man and woman, um, and that is defined by like social constructs, social roles and stereotypes, but also internal sense of self, like how you feel when and how you identify when you think of who you are and what your gender is. So like, yes, and, um, for that which is very hard to put into words.”

That’s the dream. That sounds amazing. That is our goal. When that happens Jessie and I don’t have a job anymore, and we will be happy to retire. I think that that is, you know, why do we teach such strict binaries? And it’s just, like it’s just the way it has been in Western society with colonialism, with this rigid belief of like there is man and woman, and there is a certain way that we live and a way that we will grow up. And to break free of that is really important, and I think that it is more than even just though, like, teaching your kid that at home because you know then they watch TV and they see it reinforced. Then they go to school and it’s reinforced. And then they go into their lives and they’re being told like ‘You gotta man up!’ or you’ve gotta, whatever, all these things, ‘be a good girl’ and that stuff, and so it is like an ongoing unlearning and unbreaking of those binaries.

And I would love if it were taught in school that like, you know, anatomy doesn’t necessarily match with a gender identity. I think that might be the way it’ll go one day, but I think like, what we all learn in school about people who are intersex, or at least I didn’t, and like that is very very valid. People are born intersex, meaning that, as I said, you have a combination of masculine and feminine primary or secondary sex characteristics at the same rate as people who are born with red hair or green eyes, or twins are born. So it’s definitely not uncommon, and yet it’s like something that I have to define when I talk about it because a lot of folks don’t necessarily aren’t familiar with it, and it feels like something and up to a certain point it was something that was ‘dealt with’ through medical intervention.

Well that’s a great question. So I did an undergrad and a masters in Gender Studies, and like, I don‘t know if I could even tell you that, right? Like, because part of it, it’s, you cannot get away from social constructionism and language. So we define these terms based on many different things, but they’re always defined by the current context in which we live, like culture, time, all of these pieces, right? I think, and in that, we also define it by things like hormones, and things like anatomy, right? It’s like, how do we decide, um, you know, when we assign somebody male or female at birth, what is that based on? That’s based on anatomy, right? But there’s actually so many things, um, that are, that we’re not kind of looking at, right? That we also have to take into account. So, I mean, I honestly can’t answer those questions.

Um, you know, it’s, when we talk about gender identity, right, people, uh, say like ‘How do you know you’re trans?’ kind of almost like ‘How do you know you’re gay?’ It’s like, how do you know you’re straight? Right? It’s just kind of like, it’s often times like an internal feeling, but we define these things in terms of like biological factors, social factors, psychological factors, um, and they change from, like, different eras, different centuries, and mean different things at different times. I don’t know, that’s a hard one.

We spoke a bit earlier about this idea of like labels and alphabet soup, and sometimes I think like yeah, these ideas of what is man and what is woman, what is boy what is girl? They’re just like arbitrary words to describe, you know, experiences and labels to put on people. And like who really knows what it means to be man, to be woman, to be masculine, to be feminine? I think it is what you say it is.

I think that we need to give way more credit like, when I’m, as I said when I’ve run these workshops it’s like students who are the ones being like “We don’t care that you’re trans and telling your story because, like, that’s fine, you be you.” I get asked so many times “Why were people ever mean to you for being trans? Like, it’s just you.” And it’s like, yeah, they get it way more, like I think it’s the unraveling that we are doing presently, the peeling of the onion, has already happened for them. They’re there with this fresh onion already, like crying away and being like “Cool,” like this radical acceptance of like this is how things are, and it is like an unlearning that has already been happening, um, and so we’re catching up, I think.

These are challenging ideas, and we can get into philosophy and all these things, but you have to remember the way that we were all socially kind of, like, you know, taught about these concepts, and so we’re very much in a process of unlearning, where you know, there’s almost like a simplicity to kids, right? Like around, um, just being who they are, and being accepting, and loving of themselves and other people, and then, you know, and then bias kind of comes into play, and a lot of hat is taught, actually.

“You don’t need to have anything to be trans besides the knowledge or the feeling that you’re trans.”

Elite $60K-a-year NYC schools forcing woke indoctrination on parents, too

At least five elite New York City schools are forcing parents to undergo both mandatory and “optional” training in “anti-racism” and “diversity, equity and inclusion.&…

nypost.com

New York City private schools are pushing woke training on parents in a Soviet-like effort to keep their kids on message — with potentially serious consequences for those who don’t fall in line.

At least five elite schools — where yearly tuitions hover around $60,000 — are forcing parents to undergo both mandatory and “optional” training in “anti-racism” and “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The controversial theories demand a hyper-focus on race and privilege and have been accused by critics of demonizing white people.

Prospective parents at The Brearley School, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side, are informed on their application that “parents are expected to attend two diversity, equity, inclusion and antiracism (DEIA) workshops per school year,” and write a 500-word essay demonstrating their fealty to those values.

If their daughters are accepted, parents are then expected to sign a pledge vowing to support the new religion.

“We expect teachers, staff members, students and parents to participate in anti-racist training and to pursue meaningful change through deliberate and measurable actions. These actions include identifying and eliminating policies, practices and beliefs that uphold racial inequality in our community,” it reads, while also enjoining parents to “discuss with your children Brearley’s mission, diversity, equity and inclusion, and anti-racist statements in the student handbooks, and establishing your family’s responsibility to uphold these values.”

Andrew Gutmann, a former Brearley dad who yanked his daughter in protest and denounced the school in a public letter said the parent outreach existed in order to stifle dissent.

“They want parents indoctrinated the same way they want their kids,” he said.

Grace Church High School In NoHo required children in 2020 sign a pledge promising that they would fight against “racial propaganda” and “interrupt biases.” The school said they had no plans to require the oath going forward, but refused to disavow it.

“Grace makes it clear to prospective parents from the beginning that DEI and Critical Race Theory and anti-racism is a moral imperative and all members of the community must commit to it,” Paul Rossi a former teacher at the school, told The Post.

“Respect for differing viewpoints is a fundamental commitment of the school,” a Grace spokesman said.

At Spence, another Upper East Side all-girls school, parents are “invited” to take part in “Courageous Conversation equity workshop” put on by Pacific Educational Group, a privately held DEI consulting shop based in San Francisco.

On Twitter, PEG has declared “systemic racism” to be “deeply embedded in the fabric of this nation.”

“To become truly anti-racist, it takes abandoning all sense of ego and comfort,” they added elsewhere in their dogma of the faith. The group has blasted as “racist” the NFL, the Nobel Prizes, property taxes, and the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“The opportunity to participate in the DEI program offered by PEG is strictly voluntary for parents. These programs do not involve students,” a rep for Spence said.

Earlier this month, the Upper East Side’s Chapin School held a panel discussion for prospective parents to discuss the school’s “ongoing commitment to equity & inclusion, including our newest community-wide initiatives.” Though the Chapin gathering was declared optional, insiders said it was anything but.“They take attendance, they have name tags, there is someone from the admissions office to keep track of who goes and who doesn’t,” said one mom of her school’s program. “If you don’t go, your child is not going to go very far in the admission process.”Another mom told The Post that she was told to get with the program after her son commented that boys were physically more capable at sports than girls.

“I [was] talked to” she said, adding she was told her son “had to better understand the values of inclusion at the school and I had to familiarize myself with the values of inclusion at the school and be clear with my child as to what they were so he arrived at school prepared.”

In a “family learning session” with Horace Mann in The Bronx, Ronald Taylor gave a presentation lauding the work of Robin DiAngelo, whose book “White Fragility” asserts that all white people are racist.

“How can we take DiAngelo’s message and make it applicable to all communities in the [Horace Mann] community,” he asked, while wearing a face mask reading “I CAN”T BREATHE” and “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

“I don’t want to be in necessarily white spaces, because when black children were put into those spaces their support and caregivers were taken away and they were put into racially hostile environments,” Taylor lectured as parents listened attentively.

Slides from the demonstration admonish those listening to asses how they might be “upholding racism” in their thoughts and actions.

Taylor, who declined to comment for this article, is a former associate director of the Office for Identity, Culture, and Institutional Equity at Horace Mann.

“The workshop was designed to educate parents about what they were hearing not only in the news at the time but from their children. It was completely voluntary and if a parent rejected this instruction or the content, their children would be welcome at Horace Mann,” a school spokesman said.

"'Yes we can't' has never been the slogan for Black America and it's not now." -- John McWhorter

How To Make a ‘Trans Kid’

Since adults typically make difficult converts, gender activists are increasingly turning their focus to children.

www.realityslaststand.com|Colin Wright

Most people understand the terms “man” and “boy” refer to adult and adolescent human males, respectively, and that “woman” and “girl” refer to adult and adolescent human females, respectively. These are not “identities,” but terms that describe objective facts about one’s age and biological sex.

Gender ideology, conversely, is a belief system asserting that what makes someone a woman or a girl, or a man or a boy, has nothing whatsoever to do with their sex, but is based entirely on the social roles and stereotypes with which they “identify.” Therefore, a person who identifies with feminine roles and stereotypes is a girl or woman, and a person who identifies with masculine roles and stereotypes is a boy or man—regardless of their biological sex. According to gender ideology, people who do not identify with the social roles and stereotypes typically associated with their sex are considered “transgender.”

That’s Gender Ideology 101. If it comes across as completely insane, that’s because it is.

Gender ideology has therefore proven to be a hard sell for many adults who rightfully view such ideas as regressive and sexist. After all, this worldview entails that a woman who does not fully embrace femininity is not actually a woman, and a man who does not embrace masculinity is not actually a man. If this sounds similar to the regressive and oppressive system that women’s and other human rights groups fought for decades to overcome, that’s because it is. But it’s actually much worse, since it also promotes the idea that a “mismatch” between one’s sex and “gender identity” can be medically “corrected” with hormones and surgeries.

Since adults typically make difficult converts, as any religious proselytizer will tell you, gender activists are increasingly turning their focus to children, and one of the most common ways they go about indoctrinating youngsters into gender ideology is through normalizing the “inclusive” practice of sharing pronouns. Being asked “what are your pronouns?” is often the first encounter a child will have with gender ideology, and it is therefore a common first step in creating so-called “trans kids.”

This is effective because asking a child about their pronouns mentally separates the terms “he/him” (as referring to men and boys) and “she/her” (as referring to girls and women) from one’s biological sex and instead roots it in “gender identity.” This question causes a child think hard about their own “gender identity,” a novel concept to them which will inevitably be based on masculine and feminine stereotypes they associate with males and females, respectively.

The Genderbread Person is a common educational tool for teaching children about gender identity, which it defines confusingly as “how you, in your head, experience and define your gender, based on how much you align (or don’t align) with what you understand the options for gender to be.” And in case the reliance on sex-based stereotypes wasn’t explicit enough, it depicts “Gender Identity” below the illustration as degrees of “woman-ness” and “man-ness,” and lists “personality traits, jobs, hobbies, likes, dislikes, roles, expectations” as its components.

Another common avenue for child indoctrination into gender ideology is through popular children’s books like I Am Jazz, which tells the story of Jazz Jennings, a young boy who is described in the book as being “different from other kids” because “she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body.” Other more recent books such as Call Me Max and Jack (Not Jackie) touch on similar themes, but are about young girls who believe they’re boys because they exhibit behavior and preferences more typical of boys. Many parents have reported that their young children expressed confusion about their “gender identity” after being introduced to these books.

When introduced to these concepts, whether through books or probing questions about their pronouns, gender nonconforming children, who are more likely to grow up to be gay and lesbian adults, as well as kids who don’t view themselves as paragons of masculinity or femininity, will then come to believe they're “trans” or “nonbinary,” or they’ll be extremely confused. This confusion can cause considerable distress because it overturns their prior (sane) notion that their sex made them a boy or girl. But now they’re being told their body and mind may not be “aligned” but can be made to align with hormones and surgeries.

Their teachers, with or without their parents’ knowledge or consent, may begin to socially transition them by using gender neutral “they/them” or opposite-sex pronouns. Many schools now explicitly require this. While social transitions are often presented a risk-free way to let children explore their “gender” without permanent interventions like hormones and surgeries, it is in reality a serious psychosocial intervention known to cause children to persist in rejecting their bodies. But parents are not told this.

A child’s parents will likely be very concerned at this point, having heard the widely perpetuated myth that gender-confused children are at extreme risk for suicide. And since puberty is rapidly approaching for their child, there is no time to waste in getting their child the care they need. Being the loving parents that they are, they rush their child to see a professional “gender-affirming” therapist. Because the child is showing confusion regarding their “gender identity,” the therapist is likely to recommend puberty blockers, which they will portray as a “safe” and “fully reversible” option to “pause” puberty and give the child more time to resolve their gender confusion.

What’s the harm?

The harm is that, far from being a hormonal “stop sign” that allows time for deep gender introspection, studies show that nearly 100 percent of children who are put on puberty blockers persist in rejecting their bodies and continue on to cross-sex hormones, which will cause permanent physical changes and render them sterile. Some of those children will then pursue risky and irreversible “gender-affirming” surgeries. These children’s bodies are now permanently disfigured, and their endocrine systems fully dependent on the medical establishment for the rest of their lives.

Looking back, the child’s dysphoria that initiated this morbid cascade of events was not inevitable—it was conjured into existence by a radical ideology that wedged itself into the child’s mind by the simple act of giving them a book or asking about their pronouns, and the social transition and puberty blockers cemented it.

This is how you turn normal children into “trans kids.” Simply put, this is conversion therapy for gender nonconforming kids, except that it’s now bodies instead of minds that are being converted to bring children into “proper” alignment with themselves.

This trajectory for children is becoming increasingly common as gender ideology becomes further entrenched in our educational institutions. At this point it’s not about whether your children will encounter these ideas, it’s when. As a parent, it is therefore important to inoculate your children against these pernicious ideas before activist educators get to them. When you see these materials in your child’s school, you need to raise hell. Your children will thank you for it later.

• All white people benefit from racism, regardless of intentions; intentions are irrelevant. • The racial status quo is comfortable for most whites. Therefore, anything that maintains white comfort is suspect. If you are white, practice sitting with and building your stamina for racial discomfort. -- Robin DiAngelo

Sahar: During my junior year my school had wanted to sponsor this political organization called Erase Racism, to give a presentation to the school on systemic racism in Long Island. And they had asked for student government to fund the presentation, but i didn't really know what the presentation was going to be about and they weren't really giving me any information. And this is when I was treasurer, so i needed to sign off on these checks.

They got student government members together for a meeting and just berated us for about an hour over Zoom about how our refusal to sponsor this organization was really our refusal to oppose racism.

My two student government advisors had also brought in my social studies teacher to join them in this meeting. So it was it was really intense just having three adults, all of whom you know had authority over me and one of whom had control over my grades in my junior year of high school.

And I was also, again as a junior, not used to situations like this. I'm Jewish. They asked me if I would have done the same thing for a Holocaust presentation. So from there i realized that there were some issues in the school that definitely needed to be hashed out when it came to just intimidation and speech.

Later on in the year, a student in the school, a friend of mine actually, showed his dad a Google Slides presentation that was being taught to his English Regents class, which is a mandatory English class in the school for I think juniors... yeah it's English 11 Regents. And the contents of the presentation were again very controversial. Some of the things that were said in these slides were that America is as racist today as it was 200 years ago.

The students who were watching the presentation had harbored white fragility when it came to race and that white fragility was actually a function of white solidarity, so white people get upset at being called racist in order to fight for racism. And that we all have internalized racism and it ended with a pledge to be anti-racist, but that was anti-racist as defined by this controversial slideshow. It had some it had some recommended readings, I think one of which was maybe White Fragility.

So the contents of that presentation was released to a lot of parents who just were not happy about it. So the parents brought that to the Board of Education. Board of Education offers a public kind of discussion where you as a constituent get to talk to the Board of Education about this issue, this issue, that issue, and a lot of parents were going up saying, whoa I object to this being taught to my kids on a mandatory basis, and also I didn't know about this being taught to my kids, and also apparently this was being taught for years and the school administration knew about it so what's going on here.

So this Board of Ed meeting was was huge.

Ben: Perhaps half the parents of this of the school district here are immigrants or refugees, Jewish or Asian. Unfortunately my father learned what white supremacy was he he grew up in in Poland, in the part of Poland that's now in the Ukraine.

Having their kids being taught that they're white supremacists, it's very incongruous to the local actual felt experience, the lived experience of the people in this town.

Sahar: So i found out about this Board of Ed meeting, I think maybe the day of or the day before, and what was going to be happening and what a lot of parents in particular were coming to protest.

So I decided that this was really going to be my opportunity to speak up about other things that were happening in the school and really let the rest of the community know that there was a lot going on. That the school administration had basically been sponsoring this mandated learning of controversial ideas to the kids and was also sponsoring intimidation to get there.

So I wrote up a speech basically detailing what happened with student government and also just included this question of, really this presentation, the very controversial Google Slides presentation, it's been being taught for years. How could the people in charge here have not known about this and how could they not have been so transparent you know.

It was a problem, it's an issue that our school was enforcing ideologies with with an iron fist, rather than a gentle hand.

Undoctrinate Our Students

Children are being bullied and harassed for not falling into line.

persuasion.community

Gabrielle Clark was worried about her children. Something was off, but she couldn’t put her finger on the problem. Gabrielle was temporarily disabled and unemployed, so her son William worked as a fast food shift manager to help make ends meet while taking his high school senior classes remotely. As a single mom—William’s father died before he was old enough to know him—she had to figure this out alone.

One day, she decided to sit down and watch her son’s distance-learning classes from his magnet school. She tuned into a required course, “The Sociology of Change,” and what she saw on screen shocked her. Her son, unbeknownst to her, had been taught lessons that were completely antithetical to her family’s values...and common sense.

William’s deceased father was white, which means William is biracial. However, his light skin, light hair, and green eyes mean that some people assume he is white. He’s sometimes described as “the only apparent white boy in his class.”

Being “apparently white” was enough for his teacher to target him.

For years, schools have had “anti-bullying campaigns” to stop kids from picking on each other. But what if the bullying is coming from the teacher and school administrators? According to the family’s recently filed lawsuit, William was singled out and subjected to derogatory name-calling and hurtful labeling, based on his physical appearance. His teacher delivered regular “privilege checks” for William, which his mother described as “deliberate and protracted harassment” and “emotional abuse.” The classroom materials even implied that William’s white father probably physically abused his black mother, because—according to his lessons—that’s what white men do.

This is a far cry from Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a nation where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Gabrielle claims her son, as well as the other students, were forced to profess their identities which were then subjected to open, official scrutiny that assigned negative character attributes and worldviews based on unchangeable personal characteristics, such as race and gender.

When students, including William, attempted to object, discussions were terminated and their speech effectively chilled. However, William refused to complete certain “identity confession” assignments or to avow certain politicized statements he could not in good conscience affirm.

That was enough to earn him threats of a failing grade.

As a senior, that was bad news. He had planned to spend the year applying to colleges and dreaming about his freshman year in which he’d study music. But this bad grade would put all of that in jeopardy.

Gabrielle had her attorney write a letter to the school, which prompted a meeting. But Gabrielle didn’t feel the school was taking her concerns seriously. “That’s when I withdrew my daughter and got the lawyers for my son,” she wrote. “I’m not playing with these people.” She filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming they violated the mother’s constitutional due process right to “family integrity and autonomy” by interfering with her “right and covenant to guide and direct the upbringing” of her children.

This case may have some of you scratching your heads. Others of you—having experienced similar interactions at school—might be nodding at how sadly familiar that story feels.

* * *

Our nation has a problem. Recently, in both urban and rural communities, young children are being indoctrinated, bullied, and harassed by their fellow students and teachers for not falling into line on various topics.

In Arizona, Roberto Sandoval, the son of a Mexican immigrant who worked hard to achieve the American dream, was alarmed when his teen showed him her high school homework. “I have an assignment that’s asking me how I am privileged,” she told him. The homework included statements such as “My skin color gives me privileges I didn’t earn … Your skin color gives you struggles you didn’t deserve,” and “No one is asking you to apologize for being privileged; people want you to stop using your privilege in ways that require an apology.” 

In Seattle, meanwhile, teachers explain that “Western” mathematics has been used “to disenfranchise people and communities of color.” Then, they attempt to “rehumanize” math by incorporating curricular content such as explaining “how math dictates economic oppression” and asking, “How can we change mathematics from individualistic to collectivist thinking?”

Third-grade students in Cupertino, California, were told to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, ranking themselves on the intersectional hierarchy from “oppressor” to “oppressed.” One scandalized parent objected, saying, “They were basically teaching racism to my eight-year-old.” When questioned, the principal acknowledged that the lesson was not part of the “formal curricula.”

The specific topics of parents’ complaints in the examples above change from year to year, or even from week to week. Over the past few years, the following issues have waxed and waned in intensity: global warming, Occupy Wall Street, weapons of mass destruction, voter suppression, immigration reform, the border wall, DACA, Black Lives Matter, gun control, same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, abortion, patriotism, election integrity, and the MeToo movement.

In all of these examples, well-intentioned people of good faith can agree on underlying problems, while disagreeing on what to actually do about them. Increasingly, however, children who are too young to have developed solid or informed opinions are being forced into premature ideological conformity with some teachers and administrators who seem intent on pushing their own particular worldviews in K–12 classrooms.

These kinds of transgressions are not limited to the political Left.

A Georgia teacher was yanked from class after telling the students that President Barack Obama was a closeted Muslim.

In Wisconsin, a high school social studies teacher was placed on leave after instructing students to watch a one-sided video questioning the integrity of election results. In a shared screenshot of the assignment, he also apparently made sure to inform students that he would be protesting what he saw as unfair election results because it was “too important” not to do so, in a pretty clear attempt to influence them on this issue.

In Alabama, a geometry teacher actually taught a math lesson by asking students to evaluate the best angles to assassinate Obama.

No matter the specifics of the heavy-handed ideological teaching, we should all be against it. “Citizens of both parties should adopt a legal corollary to the Golden Rule—fight for the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself,” writes former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and Persuasion advisor David French. “And one of the most important and vital of those rights is the right to speak and act in accordance with your deepest beliefs.”

In fact, I’ve noticed that liberal parents are—in some ways—even more alarmed over the rapid transformation of their children’s schools and surprised to find themselves opposed to it. If it ever was a partisan issue, the problem of school indoctrination has steadily worsened to the point that people across the political spectrum have found themselves allied against it.

* * *

Many of you don’t want to think about this, and I understand. You’d rather send your kids to school and trust implicitly in the system, as your own parents probably did. After all, it worked out okay for you. However, this fight will come to you, whether or not you want it. It doesn’t matter if you live in a city or the rural South.

As frustrating as it can be to hear from people who disagree with us, this is part of the temperament that productive citizens need to develop in order to take their places in our society. In order to achieve this goal, our schools must be populated with educators who model and practice appropriate intellectual forbearance worthy of emulation by the younger generation. Remember, it’s an imperfect world and we are all imperfect people: practice forgiveness and give others the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.

All Americans, regardless of political persuasion or direct personal experience, should be alarmed at the path on which our nation is careening. We’re at a crossroads. It’s a good time—a necessary time—to see what is going on and to fight for the ideals our founders envisioned for us.

Bonnie Snyder is director of high school outreach at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the author of Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools—And What We Can Do About It.

Therapists Have Betrayed The Parents Of Gender-Confused Kids

Therapists have lost all credibility because of their surrender to a destructive, unscientific ideology. We’ve harmed thousands of parents and kids.

thefederalist.com

There’s something rotten in the state of my profession, the mental health field. While therapists are usually the first to reach out to trauma victims, there’s one group we neglect. Even worse, we blame the victims.

I’m referring to parents of gender-confused kids, whose stories I am hearing firsthand in my office. Parents come to me because I’ve publicly objected to my profession’s faulty views about gender identity and its treatment. How many parents are unable to find help? Judging by the number of recently created organizations and online groups where such parents gather, there are thousands, and the numbers grow by the day.

My patients, and those in the parent-run groups, are shocked, overwhelmed, confused, and anxious. They’re not sleeping or eating. Many have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Why have they turned to one another for help? Why don’t more come to us – psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors? We’re the ones with the degrees and experience.

They don’t turn to us because we have failed them.

Of course young people are also victims of the trans craze, but my focus here is their parents’ distress. It is massive and demands acknowledgement.

Following their teen’s bombshell announcement, most parents initially consult with gender therapists or clinics. The vast majority tell them they must unconditionally accept their child’s chosen identity, use a random, unfamiliar name, and help Sara bind her breasts and Michael tuck his genitals.

Parents object, suggesting a slower process and deeper exploration. They insist: we know our child! The ideologues dismiss their parental instincts. They see their discomfort, but brush it off.

Bad Advice

For those therapists, the parents are the problem. Not the child’s social anxiety, autism, irrational thinking, or social media addiction. No, the issue is mom and dad’s refusal to embrace their teen’s two-week-old identity and allow a kid to run the show.

The therapist shares that assessment with parents, sometimes in front of their child. In doing so, the gender specialist strikes heavy blows against a family in crisis, who turned to her with hope and trust: she undermines parental authority and weakens the parent-child bond.

As if that’s not enough, she refers them, following a hasty, incomplete evaluation, to an endocrinologist for hormones to block development. Safe and reversible, the therapist reassures the parents. Your child needs them now. In fact, it’s already late.

She speaks with authority and confidence. There’s a consensus among professionals, she explains. If you reject our advice, the risk of losing your child to suicide is increased.

She threatens this about their child — the center of their lives, their most precious relationship! The therapist may have spent only a short time with him or her, but she knows what’s best.

Some Parents Find the Facts

The parents go home, emotions reeling. Some decide to trust the expert and they’re soon at the endocrinologist’s office, signing consent for drugs that will prevent their teen’s physical, emotional, sexual, and cognitive development. Their child looks happy; they pray it lasts.

Others dive into the research. Sooner or later they are startled to learn the truth: If teens go through natural puberty there’s a 60-90 percent chance of desistance (outgrowing transgenderism, aligning with one’s biology). Changing names, pronouns, and presentation can be a slippery slope and decrease desistance. Once on puberty blockers, desistance is very rare.

Blockers are controversial, have a history of lawsuits, and their off-label use in healthy children is experimental. There is a risk of suicide in gender-questioning teens, but there is no evidence that transition lowers that risk.

No Consensus

Parents learn that the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland carefully examined the dangers of hormonal treatment of minors and minors’ ability to give informed consent for such treatments. As a result, those countries made U-turns in their policies; patients must wait until they are 18 for medical intervention. Similar concerns are coming out of New Zealand and Australia.

Bottom line: parents who look further than gender clinics and therapists discover a heated debate regarding how to help kids like theirs. There’s a consensus among experts, they were told. Are you kidding? There is no consensus whatsoever.

So the parents search for a therapist who won’t immediately affirm the new identity, but instead take it slowly, get to know their child, and figure out the appeal to her of a new identity. A clinician with a more cautious, nuanced approach — that’s all parents want. Another shock: there are almost none.

Counting psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors, there are more than a million therapists in this country. I located a group of therapists who believe in long-term, exploratory talk therapy for gender-questioning youth, and there are only 60 members, with many outside the United States.

My Patient’s Sad Experience

My patient “Cheryl” is an example of a traumatized parent. Her 18-year-old autistic daughter, her only child, identifies as a man and has been on testosterone for six months. Cheryl is convinced she and her husband were misled by a gender clinic and that “Eva” did not have adequate evaluations and therapy. For the first time in her life, Cheryl is taking psychiatric medication for her constant crying, sleeplessness, and anxiety.

Cheryl feels she’s at odds with everyone: Eva, family members, friends, schools, doctors, therapists, politicians, the media, and the culture. On how many fronts can one person fight?

I was not surprised when Cheryl told me, “Sometimes I wish my daughter had cancer. The whole world would be there for me.”

Doctors at Johns Hopkins tell Cheryl to embrace her child’s “evolving sense of self.” But when she first heard the lowered pitch of Eva’s voice, Cheryl threw up. A double mastectomy is planned; the thought of it floods her with panic and horror. She fears for Eva’s physical and emotional health, including her sexual health.

Cheryl also grieves for the biological grandchildren she’ll never have. But there’s nothing to be done about any of it. Horror, fear, helplessness, and grief are Cheryl’s constant companions, outside of the days when she just feels numb.

We Must Challenge the Narrative

There are thousands of parents like Cheryl. Where are the psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors who will validate their experiences without judgment? How is it we’re able to serve the emotional needs of sexual offenders and murderers but not the traumatized, grieving parents of transgender children?

It’s because to do so would challenge the entrenched narrative in our field: that denying biology is part of normal development, and if “transphobic parents” would just accept that, it will be all rainbows and unicorns for their kids.

Few of us challenge that narrative, at least publicly, so parents have turned to one another in droves to cry, rage, and brainstorm. But they can’t even meet openly; the woke environment forces them underground. They fear losing their jobs and relationships, even their child, if exposed. Hence the secret meetings, private Facebook pages, made-up names, and extensive vetting. They hide in the dark as if they’re guilty of some awful crime.

This is an appalling betrayal of parents. To my colleagues: we’ve lost all credibility because of our surrender to a destructive, unscientific ideology. We’ve harmed thousands of parents and children, and they’ve had it with us.

Not too long ago, doctors performed frontal lobotomies as a cure for severe mental illness. They severed connections in the brain with crude instruments inserted through the eye socket. It was a barbaric but mainstream procedure, performed on about 40,000 people.

Right now in the United States, girls as young as 13 are having mastectomies and minor boys are castrated. What will it take to put the breaks on the massive transing of children? Call me a cynic, but I’m guessing a few huge lawsuits.

Trust me, the lawyers are coming, and victims will finally have a public platform. They will tell the world of the nightmare that descended on their precious children and families, leaving them traumatized and broken.

I eagerly await that day. Until it comes, I will be meeting with Cheryl every week, validating her story, helping her cope, and weeping along with her.

"When I tell people what I’m afraid of, nobody says to me ‘ooh, that makes sense. You should be afraid of that.’ They may be sympathetic to my suffering or they might laugh at how silly it is, but no one I have ever met has ever reinforced it.

In fact, I pay for a man to tell me at regular intervals that my fear is ridiculous. Perhaps not in so many words, but there’s actually a service for that. It’s called a therapist. That’s what therapists do, they politely tell you that your fears are ridiculous.

And although it’s been hard to beat this fear, it can be beaten. In large part because no one is reinforcing it. I can only imagine how much darker my darkest days would have been, and how much longer I would have suffered them had the whole world been telling me to be afraid.”

-- Allison Tieman

Thought Reform 101

The Orwellian implications of today's college orientation.

Reason.com

At Wake Forest University last fall, one of the few events designated as "mandatory" for freshman orientation was attendance at Blue Eyed, a filmed racism awareness workshop in which whites are abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity so that they can identify with "a person of color for a day." In Swarthmore College's dormitories, in the fall of 1998, first-year students were asked to line up by skin color, from lightest to darkest, and to step forward and talk about how they felt concerning their place in that line. Indeed, at almost all of our campuses, some form of moral and political re-education has been built into freshman orientation and residential programming. These exercises have become so commonplace that most students do not even think of the issues of privacy, rights, and dignity involved.

A central goal of these programs is to uproot "internalized oppression," a crucial concept in the diversity education planning documents of most universities. Like the Leninists' notion of "false consciousness," from which it ultimately is derived, it identifies as a major barrier to progressive change the fact that the victims of oppression have internalized the very values and ways of thinking by which society oppresses them. What could workers possibly know, compared to intellectuals, about what workers truly should want? What could students possibly know, compared to those creating programs for offices of student life and residence, about what students truly should feel? Any desire for assimilation or for individualism reflects the imprint of white America's strategy for racial hegemony.

In 1991 and 1992 both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal published surveys of freshman orientations. The Times observed that "orientation has evolved into an intense …initiation" that involves "delicate subjects like…date rape [and] race relations, and how freshmen, some from small towns and tiny high schools, are supposed to deal with them." In recent years, public ridicule of "political correctness" has made academic administrators more circumspect about speaking their true minds, so one should listen carefully to the claims made for these programs before colleges began to spin their politically correct agendas.

[..]

The darkest nightmare of the literature on power is George Orwell's 1984, where there is not even an interior space of privacy and self. Winston Smith faces the ultimate and consistent logic of the argument that everything is political, and he can only dream of "a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason."

Orwell did not know that as he wrote, Mao's China was subjecting university students to "thought reform," known also as "re-education," that was not complete until children had denounced the lives and political morals of their parents and emerged as "progressive" in a manner satisfactory to their trainers. In the diversity education film Skin Deep, a favorite in academic "sensitivity training," a white student in his third day of a "facilitated" retreat on race, with his name on the screen and his college and hometown identified, confesses his family's inertial Southern racism and, catching his breath, says to the group (and to the thousands of students who will see this film on their own campuses), "It's a tough choice, choosing what's right and choosing your family."

[..]

The goal of such training, according to Amirall-Padamsee, is "to produce graduates who are individuals committed to educational and social justice, and not just a tolerance of, but a validating of difference." To accomplish that she says, "we need to define and implement ways to translate education to behavioral change." In addition, she boasts, she has access to federal work-study funds, and she uses that position--and her capacity to dismiss people-- "to try to make a positive change in the way that the student is thinking."

Tovar, formerly of Oklahoma State University and now at the University of Oklahoma, declares in an interview at the conference that "at OSU we have all kinds of sensitivity training." She describes an incident involving fraternity brothers who had been disrespectful of Native American culture: They ended up "incredibly emotional….These fraternity kids broke down." OSU also has mandatory multicultural freshman orientation sessions.

Bynes, also the co-chairman of the Prejudice Reduction Committee at Adelphi University, says the committee's emphasis is on training individuals how to interact "with a diverse student body," with "separate training for students…[and] special sessions on student leadership training." This "cultural and racial awareness training would benefit all members of the Adelphi community, both in their university and personal lives." The committee would get people to talk about "`what I like about being so-and-so,' `what I dislike about being so-and-so,' and `the first time I encountered prejudice,'" all exercises that the facilitators had been shown and had experienced in their own "training" by the Justice Department.

Bynes is a kind, accomplished, candid, and well-meaning woman. As she explains, "White people must have…sensitivity training…so that they can become aware of white privilege." Mandatory sensitivity training ideally should include both students and faculty, but "there are things that we can't dictate to the faculty because of the fact that they have a union."

There are painful ironies in these attempts at thought reform. Individual identity lies at the heart of both dignity and the flourishing of an ethnically heterogeneous society. Black students on American campuses rightly decry any tendency of university police to stop students based on race. Their objections are not statistical but moral: One is an individual, not an instance of blood or appearance. The assault on individual identity was essential to the horror and inhumanity of Jim Crow laws, of apartheid, and of the Nuremberg Race Laws. It is no less inhuman when undertaken by "diversity educators."

From the Inquisition to the political use of Soviet psychiatry, history has taught us to recoil morally from the violation of the ultimate refuges of self-consciousness, conscience, and private beliefs. The song of the "peat bog soldiers," sent by the Nazis to work until they died, was "Die Gedanken sind frei," "Thoughts Are Free," for that truly is the final atom of human liberty. No decent society or person should pursue another human being there. Our colleges and universities do so routinely.

The desire to "train" individuals on issues of race and diversity has spawned a new industry of moral re-education. Colleges and universities have been hiring diversity "trainers" or "facilitators" for 15 years, and the most famous of them can command $35,000 for "cultural audits," $5,000 for sensitivity workshop training, and a sliding scale of honoraria, some for not less than $3,000 per hour, for lectures.

This growing industry has its mountebanks, its careerists, its well-meaning zealots, and its sadists. The categories often blur. Three of the most celebrated facilitators at the moment are Edwin J. Nichols, of Nichols and Associates in Washington, D.C.; Hugh Vasquez, of the Todos Institute in Oakland, California; and Jane Elliott, the Torquemada of thought reform. To examine their work is to see into the heart of American re-education.

Nichols first came to the attention of critics of intrusive political correctness in 1990, when he led an infamous "racial sensitivity" session at the University College of the University of Cincinnati. According to witnesses, his exercise culminated in the humiliation of a blond, blue-eyed, young female professor, whom he ridiculed as a "perfect" member of "the privileged white elite" who not only would win "a beauty contest" but even "wore her string of pearls." The woman, according to these accounts, sat and sobbed. These contemporaneous revelations did not harm Nichols' career.

According to the curriculum vitae sent by his firm, Nichols studied at Eberhardt-Karls Universität in Tubingen, Germany, and at Leopold-Franzens Universität in Innsbruck, Austria, "where he received his Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology and Psychiatry, cum laude" (a rare degree). In some publicity material, he states that he founded a school of child psychology in Africa; at other times, he modestly withholds that accomplishment.

Nichols' schedule of fees is almost as impressive as his schedule of thought reform. He charges $3,500 for a three-hour "Basic Cultural Awareness Seminar," plus travel and per diem. For a plain old "Workshop," he gets $4,000-$5,000 plus expenses. This makes his staple offering--a "Full Day Session (Awareness Seminar and Workshop)"--a bargain at $5,000 plus expenses. For a "Cultural Audit," he gets $20,000-$35,000 (he recently did one of these for the University of Michigan School of Medicine). The Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor paid him $15,000 for diversity training; the Environmental Protection Agency got him cheaply at $12,000.

Business is booming. Nichols has brought awareness to the employees of six cabinet departments, three branches of the armed services, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the FBI; the Goddard Space Center, the Naval Air Warfare Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NASA; the Office of Personnel Management, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Social Security Administration. He has enlightened city and county governments, whole school systems, various state government departments, labor unions, several prestigious law firms, and the Archdiocese of Baltimore. His clients include "Fortune 500 Corporations, foreign governments, parastatals, associations, health and mental health systems," and he has been a consultant to offices of "The British Commonwealth of Nations" and "organizations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Latin America…Singapore, Malaysia, and China." He has a very long list of academic clients, and he was a centerpiece of Johns Hopkins' 1999 freshman orientation.

What does Nichols believe? He believes that culture is genetically determined, and that blacks, Hispanics, and descendants of non-Jewish Middle-Eastern tribes place their "highest value" on "interpersonal relationships." In Africa, women are the equal of men. Whites were altered permanently by the Ice Age. They value objects highly, not people. That is why white men commit suicide so frequently when they are downsized.

Nichols calls his science of value systems "axiology," and he believes that if managers and administrators understand these cultural differences, they can manage more effectively, understanding why, according to him, blacks attach no importance to being on time, while whites are compulsive about it. Whites are logical; blacks are intuitive and empathetic. Whites are frigid; blacks are warm and spontaneous. Whites are relentlessly acquisitive; nonwhites are in harmony with nature. White engineers, for example, care about their part of something; Asian engineers, managers should know, care about the whole. Whites are linear; nonwhites have a spiral conception of time. Nichols has a handout that he frequently uses. Whites, it explains, "know through counting and measuring"; Native Americans learn through "oneness"; Hispanics and Arabs "know through symbolic and imagery [sic]"; Asians "know through striving toward the transcendence [sic]." Asking nonwhites to act white in the workplace is fatal to organizational harmony. Understanding cultural axiology is essential to management for the 21st century. Now, reread his list of clients.

[..]

In short, this is America, and there truly is no hope. Nothing ever changes. No one can succeed by effort. Culture, society, and politics all are static. "White privilege" controls all agencies of power, influence, and image, and uses all the means that arise from these to render "people of color" psychologically impotent, confused, passive, and helpless. So either vent your hatred or assume your guilt.

There is no redemption except guilt, but there is a political moral. After "teaching" a "bluey" to submit totally to her authority, she asks if that was a good lesson. The workshop thinks it was. No, she says with venom, submission to tyranny is a terrible lesson, but "what I just did to him today Newt Gingrich is doing to you every day…and you are submitting to that, submitting to oppression."

The facilitators' guide and publicity for Blue Eyed states things honestly: Elliott "does not intellectualize highly emotionally charged or challenging topics…she uses participants' own emotions to make them feel discomfort, guilt, shame, embarrassment, and humiliation." Facilitators are urged to use the raw emotions of Blue Eyed (blueys do cry a lot) to tap the reactions of the viewers. They should not expect black participants to "bleed on the floor for whites," but they should get whites to "stretch" and "take risks." The facilitators should be prepared for very strong and painful emotions and memories from the participants. The ultimate goal of the film: "It is not enough for white people to stop abusing people of color. All U.S. people need a personal vision for ending racism and other oppressive ideologies within themselves."

Elliott does mean everyone. In 1996, she told her audience at Kansas State University that all whites are racists, whatever they believe about themselves: "If you want to see another racist, turn to the person on your right. Now look at the person on your left." She also believes that blacks were in America 600 years before whites. She told the students at Kansas State that if they were angry at her, they should write letters, but that they must do so without paper, alphabet, or numbers, all of which were invented by people of color. Whites, in Elliott's view, did have a certain creativity. Betraying a breathtaking ignorance of world history, she told the Australian Internet magazine Webfronds in 1998 that "white people invented racism." Other than that, however, whites were quite parasitic.

"You're all sitting here writing in a language [English] that white people didn't come up with," she told the magazine. "You're all sitting here writing on paper that white people didn't invent. Most of you are wearing clothes made out of cloth that white people didn't come up with. We stole those ideas from other people. If you're a Christian, you're believing in a philosophy that came to us from people of color."

Jane Elliott has lived through revolutionary cultural changes without taking note of any. She teaches only helplessness and despair to blacks and only blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites. She addresses no issue with intellectual seriousness or purpose. She also is the reigning star in thought reform these days. On May 7, 1999, CBS News ran a feature on her that declared: "For over 30 years, Jane Elliott has waged a one-woman campaign against racism in America." CBS might want to rethink the notion of "racism."

Even traditionalist campuses now permit the ideologues in their offices of student life to pursue individuals into the last inner refuge of free men and women and to turn students over to trainers who want them to change "within themselves." This is a return of in loco parentis, with a power unimagined in prior ages by the poor souls who only tried to keep men and women from sleeping with each other overnight. It is the university standing not simply in the place of parents but in the place of private conscience, identity, and belief.

From the evidence, most students tune it out, just as most students at most times generally have tuned out abuses of power and diminutions of liberty. One should not take heart from that. Where students react, it is generally with an anger that, ironically and sadly, exacerbates the balkanization of our universities. The more social work we bring to our colleges and universities, the more segregated they become, and in the classifieds of The Chronicle of Higher Education during the last few years, colleges and universities by the hundreds have advertised for individuals to oversee "diversity education," "diversity training," and "sensitivity training."

Orwell may have been profoundly wrong about the totalitarian effects of high technology, but he understood full well how the authoritarians of this century had moved from the desire for outer control to the desire for inner control. He understood that the new age sought to overcome what, in Julia's terms, was the ultimate source of freedom for human beings: "They can't get inside you." Our colleges and universities hire trainers to "get inside" American students.

Thought reform is making its way inexorably to an office near you. If we let it occur at our universities and accept it passively in our own domains, then a people who defeated totalitarians abroad will surrender their dignity, privacy, and conscience to the totalitarians within.

Ofsted downgrades American School in London over focus on social justice

Inspectors were sent in after parents complained of ‘woke agenda’ at prestigious day school

the Guardian

One of London’s leading independent day schools has been downgraded by Ofsted after inspectors criticised some of its teaching for focusing more on social justice than subject knowledge, and a culture where “alternative opinions are not felt welcome”.

The American School in London (ASL), which charges annual fees of £32,650 for older pupils, was previously rated “outstanding” but slipped two grades to “requires improvement” – just above “inadequate” – after inspection in December.

Ofsted inspectors were sent in after the ASL featured in a series of newspaper articles, which reported that parents were concerned about a “woke agenda” at the school and had complained children were being “indoctrinated” in critical race theory.

Most recently the Jewish Chronicle reported the school in St John’s Wood was at the centre of a row about a Holocaust Memorial Day presentation, which highlighted “outspoken” Jews of a radical leftwing background who “had no relevance to the Holocaust whatsoever”.

The Ofsted report, published on the school’s website, found much to praise about the school with its first-class resources and well-qualified teachers. The inspectors said the school, which teaches four- to 18-year-olds, has high expectations and “gives strong importance to equality and inclusion”.

The report added: “Sometimes, however, teaching places much more weight on the school’s approach to social justice than on learning subject-specific knowledge and skills.”

In lower-school social studies, inspectors pointed out that pupils “spend much time repeatedly considering identity (including analysing their own characteristics) rather than learning, for example, geographical knowledge”.

The teaching of middle-school humanities, including English, also led to a focus on social issues rather than subject knowledge and skills, the report said, leaving some pupils feeling underprepared for the next stage of their schooling.

And while there was praise for the extracurricular activities on offer, the report raised concerns about the school’s use of “affinity groups”, in which pupils discuss world issues, which in some cases were limited to under-represented groups.

“Some parents and pupils feel that this approach is divisive when seen alongside some teachers’ stridently expressed views on social justice,” the report said

The report said the school’s trustees had already taken action to deal with concerns raised around the promotion by some staff of political and partisan views and there has been a change in leadership.

It concluded: “While recognising the importance of promoting equalities, a significant minority of parents and pupils told inspectors that a culture has developed where alternative opinions are not felt welcome.

“In some classrooms, teaching has not allowed for questioning or for the balanced presentation of opposing views. Leaders and trustees should ensure that teaching does not preclude tolerance of those with different views, particularly where specific partisan or political views are presented.”

An ASL spokesperson said: “ASL has been rated outstanding in all of our previous inspections. This review, however, was unusual in scope and substance, with a narrow focus on some aspects of our programme.

“Despite meeting 96% of the Independent School standards, our rating was downgraded two levels. We do not think this rating reflects the quality of our school or excellence of our teaching.”

As a high school teacher approaching my third year, I look back in despair when I think about how little of what I learned in graduate school was actually connected to the craft of teaching or to what goes on in real classrooms. My experience in the Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) program at Ithaca College is a mirror to a larger trend: that today’s programs seem to focus more on indoctrinating prospective educators into the “social justice” faith, thereby creating more ideological homogeneity throughout the field. I post my story at Heterodox Academy in order to expand the discussion around the impact of intellectual orthodoxy in teacher-training degree and certificate programs.

At Ithaca College, the education department makes no bones about the fact that they expect prospective educators to be, first and foremost, activists and social justice champions–more so than teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers. Visit the department’s homepage, and after two social justice quotes you will see the following disclaimer: “We believe that true excellence in education requires a commitment to equity and social justice.” In fact, to even be considered for the M.A.T. program I had to take a prerequisite course for which the primary text was a book called Teaching to Change the World. This move towards “teaching as activism” is a trend I am seeing proliferate in the field of education, in addition to the humanities and social sciences.

Each course in the M.A.T. program started by criticizing No Child Left Behind, behaviorism, and other theories not currently “in vogue.” At the end of the program we were required to put together an “e-portfolio” explaining, defending, and essentially swearing an oath on the core values of the Ithaca College education department, with special emphasis throughout the program placed on the standards related to diversity and creating a safe learning space. When I asked questions about details or the efficacy of certain methods or philosophies, I was assured firmly and repeatedly that it was “best practice.” When I asked what “best practice” meant, I was told that it is what most scholars in the field believe is the right way of doing things.

I entered the M.A.T program at Ithaca College in 2013 because I expected to be trained in the art of teaching. That is to say, I expected to learn practical pedagogical strategies that would enable me to become an effective educator. Instead, what I got was a militant crash course in ed-psych theories like constructivism and sociocultural theory, and a series of pontifications on issues of race, gender, literacy, and second language acquisition. I also expected that since I was receiving an M.A.T. with an English concentration there would be some kind of rigorous immersion in American and British literature, or even young-adult or children’s literature. Not so. Instead we were required to take “Multicultural Literature” and “Global Literature.”

Throughout the 13-month program, we were constantly put through what felt to me like social justice litmus tests. My first presentation had to do with ensuring comfort and safety for gay, transgender, and other marginalized students. Another module involved a unit on understanding African American English–with the goal of convincing us that African American English has its own internal system of logic that often improves upon that of standard written English. Regardless of whether or not this is true, the amount of time we spent on these types of issues is difficult to justify. Teaching is a high-stakes, high-pressure profession. We are expected to teach five or more classes a day, advise clubs, contact parents, plan lessons, grade assignments, and, most importantly, equip students with the knowledge and skills they will need to survive and thrive in a complex world. A curriculum that focuses narrowly on diversity, cultural literacy, and identity politics does little to prepare prospective educators for the day-to-day realities of the job.

Such narrow-mindedness is not just bad for viewpoint diversity and intellectual curiosity, but by pushing teachers out in the world who are generally unprepared to deliver high-quality instruction, the result ends up being even worse for students. When teacher-preparation programs work like corporate “diversity training” sessions; when theories of inclusion and problems like institutional racism are the main focus; when teacher-preparation is disproportionately geared towards urban students, English language learners, and special education students–teachers enter the workplace bewildered by classroom realities and, as a result, tend to be intellectually unfit to help any students reach developmentally appropriate learning objectives. Teachers need to develop specific pedagogical skills in graduate school, including strategies for classroom management, principles of fair grading, awareness of common student mistakes, and procedures for text-selection, as well as deep levels of content-knowledge. These things were only briefly and tangentially covered at Ithaca College.

During student teaching, whenever my lessons were observed or critiqued, the criticisms leveled were not focused on my command of the material, my presence, or my ability to convey information, nor were they questions about my ability to engage students or plan lessons. The criticisms I received were almost always about some “implicit bias” or slip of the tongue, some unconscious stereotype or microaggression. One example will suffice: While teaching S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders to 8th graders, I introduced the class to the actor Paul Newman, a 1960s heart-throb and celebrity fixation for characters in the book. I then briefly mentioned his charity work with Newman’s Own. After the lesson, my professor told me that my comment may have referenced “privilege” and “alienated some of the students who were poor and likely could not afford to buy Newman’s Own products.” The irony is that the rural town in which I taught this lesson only has a few restaurants, the cheapest being McDonald’s–which exclusively serves Newman’s Own coffee and salad dressing. This punctilious language-policing was a daily regularity in our program, and our constant awareness of it produced a frustrated hesitancy in our teaching, as well as an Orwellian dullness in our verbal expression.

Now lest I sound like a disenfranchised conservative, I should add that I consider myself both a pluralist and a liberal democrat who is passionate about free speech and expression. I teach both 10th and 12th grade English, in addition to a college philosophy course for juniors and seniors. I am just as comfortable teaching The Autobiography of Malcolm X as I am Macbeth. In my philosophy course, we discuss a weekly current event article, and we have studied and debated some of the most controversial topics imaginable, such as third wave feminism, tattoos, race, marijuana, income inequality, affirmative action, and even Haidt and Lukianoff’s pivotal piece in The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” My students were shocked by this article. They could not believe that “adult” college students wanted safe spaces, free speech zones, trigger warnings, and administrative protection from words and ideas that might oppose their worldview or make them uncomfortable.

As a class, moreover, I suspect that the spirit we created together throughout the year–fostered by an atmosphere of critical thinking and maturity–has empowered and emboldened my students. They have seen first-hand what active discourse and a free and open marketplace of ideas can do for their own learning of difficult theories and concepts, and it has given them a sense of confidence and self-sufficiency. Most students do not want to be seen as victims; they want to learn. They want to examine ideas thoroughly and consider them from multiple and varied perspectives. Increasing viewpoint diversity among faculties at schools of education will be a big step forward in toning down the current ideological indoctrination and will help prepare teachers to truly master their noble, chosen craft.

A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination…

REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give ‘preferential treatment’ to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as “reverse racism.”[2]

Each student will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society. (sophomore year)

Each student will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression. (sophomore year)

Each student will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality. (junior year)

Learn the skills necessary to be a change agent. (junior year)

Demonstrate civic engagement toward the development of a sustainable society. (senior year)

•         Gender Equity •         Water Rights •         Human Rights •         Child Labor Issues •         Affirmative Action •         Multicultural Competence •         Pollution & Farming Practices •         Worker’s Rights •         Sweatshop Labor •         Slavery

ugly, hateful, and extremely divisive. It forced the students to act out the worst possible racial stereotypes and was replete with … ideological commentary and gratuitous slurs …

Students are asked to focus on stereotypes in the media to encourage them to share “real” stereotypes that actually exist without the fear that they will be judged by their peers. … This activity needs to be done rapidly. Pressure is to be put on the participants as the goal is to have them write down the first thing that comes to their mind.

1. Create an anti-prejudice slogan for your floor, such as “I Don’t Put Up With Put-Downs.” … 17. Investigate the cultural diversity of various performers [brought] to campus. … 30. Examine your textbooks and course work to determine whether it is equitable, representative and multicultural.

Date: October 31, 2007

The University of Delaware’s senior residence life staff are so proud of their totalitarian approach to student “education” that they are hoping to export their model to educators from around the country. In the November–December 2006 issue of About Campus—a magazine for college and university educators—UD Director of Residence Life Kathleen Kerr and Associate Director of Residence Life James Tweedy published an article entitled “Beyond Seat Time and Student Satisfaction: A Curricular Approach to Residential Education.” In that article, Kerr and Tweedy discuss their belief that residence halls “represent an important setting for delivering a curriculum focused on citizenship development.” They discuss their desired “learning goals,” which include requiring each student to, among other things, “explore societal privilege and the experiences of those disadvantaged in our democracy,” “explore social identity privilege,” and “explore class privilege.” They also discuss potential improvements to the program, such as—creepily—“the possibility of identifying behavioral factors that can be observed and recorded by hall staff members.” Then, in January 2007, Delaware hosted the first Residential Curriculum Institute. According to a university press release, the Institute focused “on UD’s efforts to use a curricular approach to residential education as a replacement for the traditional programming model.” (Those following this case may remember that the quaint and outmoded “programming model” differs from the curricular approach in that it “relies on voluntary attendance.”) Representatives from more than 35 schools across North America registered to attend the Institute.

Date: April 21, 2021

One would think after the program was disastrously exposed and condemned by faculty,  the authors of the program would’ve been fired. But look at the career trajectory of a co-author of the University of Delaware program, Kathleen Kerr. In 2007-08, the time of the controversy, she was the Director of Residence Life. In 2013, she was promoted to Executive Director, Residence Life & Housing. In 2017, she was promoted to Associate Vice President for Student Life, a role she holds today.

Indeed, Kerr and Tweedy came out with the book just last year titled “The Curricular Approach to Student Affairs: A Revolutionary Shift for Learning Beyond the Classroom,” advocating, again, for administrators to take an “educational” role in the dormitory and beyond.

Opinion | Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine

After watching 100 hours of leaked video, we now fully grasp the danger of this ideology in schools.

www.wsj.com|Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi

Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however, neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools totally and reshape society radically.

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.

The path to remake schools begins with the word “diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change.

In workshops such as “Integrating Healing-Centered Engagements Into a DEIA School Program” and “Racial Trauma and the Path Toward Healing,” we learned how DEI practitioners use segregated affinity groups and practices such as healing circles to inculcate feelings of trauma. Even students without grievances are trained to see themselves as victims of the their ancestors’ suffering through “intergenerational violence.”

The next step in a school’s transformation is “inclusion.” Schools must integrate DEI work into every aspect of the school and every facet of the curriculum must be evaluated through an antibias, antiracist, or antioppressive lens. In “Let’s Talk About It! Anti-Oppressive Unit and Lesson Plan Design,” we learned that the omission of this lens—“failing to explore the intersection of STEM and social justice,” for instance—constitutes an act of “curriculum violence.”

All school messaging must be scrubbed of noninclusive language, all school policies of noninclusive practices, all libraries of noninclusive books. Inclusion also requires that all non-Bipoc stakeholders become allies in the fight against the systemic harm being perpetuated by the institution. In “Small Activists, Big Impact—Cultivating Anti-Racists and Activists in Kindergarten,” we were told that “kindergartners are natural social-justice warriors.”

It isn’t enough for a school to be inclusive; it also must foster “belonging.” Belonging means that a school must be a “safe space”—code for prohibiting any speech or activity, regardless of intent, that a Bipoc student or faculty member might perceive as harmful, as uncomfortable or as questioning their “lived experience.” The primary tool for suppressing speech is to create a fear of microaggressions.

In “Feeding Yourself When You Are Fed Up: Connecting Resilience and DEI Work,” we learned techniques, such as “calling out,” that faculty and students can use to shut down conversations immediately by interrupting speakers and letting them know that their words and actions are unacceptable and won’t be tolerated. Several workshops focused on the practice of “restorative justice,” used to re-educate students who fall afoul of speech codes. The final step to ensure belonging is to push out families or faculty who question DEI work. “Sometimes you gotta say, maybe this is not the right school for you. . . . I’ve said that a lot this year,” said Victor Shin, an assistant head of school and co-chairman of the People of Color Conference, in “From Pawns to Controlling the Board: Seeing BIPOC Students as Power Players in Student Programming.”

With the implementation of diversity, inclusion and belonging, schools can begin to address the primary objectives of DEI work: equity and justice. NAIS obligates all member schools to commit to these aims in their mission statements or defining documents. Equity requires dismantling all systems that Bipoc members of the community believe to cause harm. Justice is the final stage of social transformation to “collective liberation.” The goal is to remake society into a collective, stripped of individualism and rife with reparations.

In sessions such as “Traversing the Long and Thorny Road Toward Equity in Our Schools,” “Moving the Needle Toward Meaningful Institutional Change,” “Building an Equitable and Liberating Mindset” and “Breaking the White Centered Cycle,” we learned that the only way to achieve equity and justice is to eradicate all aspects of white-supremacy culture from “predominantly white institutions,” or PWIs, as NAIS calls its member schools, irrespective of the diversity of a school’s students. Perfectionism, punctuality, urgency, niceness, worship of the written word, progress, objectivity, rigor, individualism, capitalism and liberalism are some of the characteristics of white-supremacy culture in need of elimination. In “Post-PoCC Return to PWI Normal,” DEI practitioner Maria Graciela Alcid summarized: “Decolonizing white-supremacy-culture thinking is the ongoing act of deconstructing, dismantling, disrupting those colonial ideologies and the superiority of Western thought.”

DEI was “another thing to put on the plate, and absolutely now, it is the plate on which everything sits” said teacher Gina Favre, describing her school’s transformation.

No longer are private schools focused primarily on teaching critical thinking, fostering intellectual curiosity, and rewarding independent thought. Their new mission is to train a vanguard of activists to lead the charge in tearing down the foundations of society, reminiscent of Maoist China’s Red Guards.

The danger, however, goes far beyond private schools. The same framework called diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity and justice has gained influence in public education, universities, corporate workplaces, the federal government and the military. For the sake of our children and our nation’s future, it must be dismantled.

You are both deliberately misreading the graphic in order to be outraged. Sure, it could have made its point better. But the conclusions you draw here have no basis in the actual text of the image.