Cambridge College goes for Woke

There are some wokefications in this world of ours that are a little more disheartening than others. One of those was the news that on June 4th, Cambridge University’s Corpus Christi College at held a Pride themed Formal Hall in its beautiful Pugin wallpapered, 19th Century gothic Dining Hall.

The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary was founded by townspeople in 1352 after the Bubonic plague had decimated 30-40 percent of the population. As the Italian author Bocaccio commented, such was the terrifying speed at which the virus spread, that its victims ‘ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise.’ About 2/3 of the clergy were wiped out, prompting the surviving members of two Cambridge gilds, still reeling from the horror, picked themselves up and founded a college specifically to train priests.

This June, the college sought to create a ‘comfortable, safe space for our LGBTQ+ family’ with a Pride themed Formal Hall. Organisers positioned an enormous rainbow balloon arch at the hall’s entrance, which was apparently ‘the showstopper of the evening.’ Once they had taken their seats in front of plates adorned with rainbow napkins, attendees were treated to selection of queer- themed lectures, delivered from a lectern draped in a voluminous rainbow flag.

First up was Leah Palmer of the Scott Polar Institute who talked about ‘how queer voices are changing our thinking about the Arctic and Antarctic regions’. She was followed by a public servant who rift on ‘what LGBTQ+ people think about having children’. Then an induvial by the name of Roan Runge from the Department of Anglo Saxon- Norse and Celtic, gave a lecture on medieval Irish hagiography from a ‘Trans Studies perspective’. According to her bio, Ms Runge occupies her time by ‘thinking about the continued dehumanization of trans people, as well as trans reclamations of unhumanity and monstrosity’, hoping to ‘take theoretical approaches to figures who linger between species and gender.’ The evening must have been a blast.

Once the propagandising was over, hungry college members were dished up the type of fare that you might expect at a four-year old’s birthday party, the catering staff apparently pulling out all stops to produce a three-course meal of rainbow -themed food. The entire evening was an embarrassing infantilisation of students, academics, and staff. The college has survived the Peasants Revolt, the Reformation, Civil War and Two World Wars, but whether it will survive the war on reality by the forces of woke remains to be seen.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/cambridge-college-goes-for-woke/

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Fighting Woke

People hate Chris Rufo. "Your agenda to turn our campus into a space of extremist indoctrination is harming our enrollment!" shouts a student at Florida's New College. "You are the problem!"

"I'm not the problem," Rufo tells me in my newest video. "I'm actually the solution."

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made Rufo a trustee of a state college. Rufo quickly moved to end what he considers leftist indoctrination. "We fired the director of DEI and abolished her entire department."

Rufo learned about indoctrination after making a PBS documentary on poverty. He started getting odd leaks from government workers. "Mid-level bureaucrats, so exasperated with what was happening, started feeding me documents," says Rufo.

The documents showed that government Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officials pushed anti-white racism. Seattle told employees, "Work on undoing your own whiteness."

It's a product of critical race theory, says Rufo. "The intention is to have an emotional lever against you."

"What's in it for them? I ask.

"Career advancement, and cultural and emotional power over others," he answers.

Tweeting the leaks led to more leaks. "I did one story, and then I'd get five or six people sending me documents ... then suddenly it was 100 people and 1,000 people."

A worker at the defense contractor Sandia Labs revealed that Sandia's new hiring rules require them to always interview "at least one" woman and one minority.

"Sounds fair," I say to Rufo. "Make up for past discrimination."

"You should be encouraging a wide variety of people to apply," Rufo responds. "But when we're talking about nuclear weapons, you need to have the most capable individuals, regardless of race or sex."

Rufo's critics accuse him of making things up. The New Yorker profile on him was titled "How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory."

"I post all of the original source documents for every one of my stories," Rufo responds. "It's so shameful when it's exposed to sunlight that they've engaged in these accusations as a form of denial."

"All 100 Fortune 100 companies have DEI bureaucracies. It's seen as second nature to endorse Black Lives Matter, a left-wing racial activist organization responsible for rioting, violence, but if you say, 'I'm pro-life and I want a pro-life message in a corporate setting,' it would be shut down immediately! ... Why are only one set of political ideologies allowed?"

I push back, "Because America's history of slavery and oppression is so bad."

"But that's also based on a lie!" Rufo replies. "Of course, slavery is an abominable historical legacy, but the record of the United States on slavery ... is much better than almost anywhere else."

Florida now has banned all public universities from funding DEI programs, and from claiming that systemic racism is inherent in the United States.

But doesn't that violate professors' right to speak? The free speech group FIRE calls Florida's new university rules "flatly unconstitutional."

"I worry about things you and DeSantis do," I tell Rufo. "It feels authoritarian."

"Impressionable young kids should not be taught race hatred," Rufo responds. "These are commonsense restrictions that aren't authoritarian. They're simply acknowledging that the state is the authority in the public schools."

Florida forbids public schoolteachers from teaching the '1619 Project,' which argues that America was really founded when slaves were brought here.

"The idea that the founders fought the revolution to protect slavery," says Rufo, "is so mind-boggling that even Marxist historians debunked it."

That's true. But doesn't he worry that the next Florida governor might require schools to teach things like the '1619 Project'?

"Of course I worry about that," says Rufo. "But that's what democracy is for ... what politics is for."

Really? I think politics is for letting us choose representatives who preside over limited government, one that protects us from fraud, force and theft, but mostly leaves us alone.

Florida leads the nation in school choice. That's great. We're better off when politicians give power back to parents. Then parents who want their kids taught the '1619 Project' can have that. Those who don't are free to pick another school.

Choice is better than diktats from politicians.

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/06/14/fighting-woke-n2624458

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Why the Left Can’t Stand Homeschooling

Loudoun County has been in the news quite a bit recently. Why? Because parents in the Northern Virginia enclave are outraged over the baptism of their children in “woke” ideology. For example, last year the Virginia Department of Education enacted a policy that allowed schools to shirk their obligation to notify parents of a change in their child’s gender identity.

Some of those parents have been harassed, and at least one has received death threats.

But that wasn’t enough. The smear campaign against concerned parents got some help from the media. Namely, The Washington Post, which recently decided to run a hit piece on homeschooling by cherry-picking a disgruntled couple who’d been homeschooled themselves but decided later to enroll their own children in public schools to free them from what they now claim is the oppressive and abusive environment of a Christian homeschooling education.

The fact that the Post had to find a needle in a haystack to make a point is a testament to homeschooling and represents the lengths to which the enemies of homeschooling are willing to go. Meanwhile, it only takes a click of the mouse to unearth thousands of disturbing reports coming out of public schools each year about drugs, violence, sexual assault, critical race theory — you name it.

One of the more despicable undercurrents within the Post’s article is that Christianity is synonymous with child abuse. Besides basic observation of society all around us, at least one study refutes that dubious insinuation.

“What they want is for people to put their kids in government schools,” writes Joy Pullmann at The Federalist. “As this article shows, they’re willing to invest major business resources in smearing anybody who doesn’t obey. Since we’ve established it’s not because The Washington Post cares about child abuse — because if it did, it would go to war against dismembered marriages, the No. 1 risk factor for child abuse — we have to ask the real reason it is using such sharp rhetorical swords to herd people into this one childraising direction.”

The Post’s cross-town rival, The Washington Times, adds this: “We won’t do the couple a disservice by mentioning their names, but they were perfectly cast in this Post screed, which is anti-Christian and anti-home schooling. They’re probably nice people, especially since they were raised in Christian homes. But somewhere, the husband lost his faith.”

How convenient. But it’s nothing new. This is simply one of the strategies of the Left. When covering a political campaign, they’ll showcase the one pro-abortion Republican candidate, write an article about the one conservative librarian who doesn’t mind putting pornographic materials on the bookshelves, or fawn over the one church pastor who thinks Jesus was nonbinary.

What’s ironic is that the Post fully supported homeschooling for several years during the COVID-19 scare, praising the benefits of keeping our kids away from their teachers and classmates. Now, though, the Post thinks it’s dangerous.

In another irony, it was the pandemic itself that made many parents across the country realize that homeschooling was a better option for their kids. Data show that major public school systems across the board have lost a significant number of students who’ve never returned. Today, their parents are taking advantage of homeschooling or independent schools.

Educators should celebrate these trends, but a child who doesn’t attend public school is a child who can’t be controlled by the teachers unions, the activist teachers, or the cultural Marxist ideology that permeates the current public school curriculum.

For these reasons, the so-called progressive Left has done everything to scare parents away from alternative methods of educating their children. Indeed, for decades they’ve claimed that homeschooling is steeped in racism and child abuse.

Leftists fail to address why parents are pulling their kids out of public schools “because the fruits of the poisonous tree would lead back to these same failed leftist education policies,” as our own Emmy Griffin wrote last year. “More and more parents are unwilling to sacrifice their children on the altar of the leftist agenda.”

Parents who want the best for their children need not fear the Post’s attack on homeschooling because the movement to stand up and protect our children is growing larger each year — thanks to the Left’s very own noxious and destructive policies.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/98132

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