I remember how it was -- JR
School District Censored Watchdog Group After It Exposed Teacher’s Tirade Against Parental Rights
The person behind a popular X (formerly Twitter) account aimed at exposing leftist ideology in schools is threatening legal action after a Maryland school district that has become notorious for clamping down on parents restricted the account’s access to what courts have ruled constitutes a public forum.
Montgomery County Public Schools blocked the account, Inside the Classroom, days after Inside the Classroom had exposed a public school teacher who condemned the “right-wing idea of parents’ rights” as “literally just fascism.” The school district has fought in the courts to deny parents the right to opt their kids out of lessons that include LGBTQ+ books.
America First Legal, a public interest law firm that represents Inside the Classroom, sent a demand letter to the school district on Tuesday, threatening legal action if the district does not restore Inside the Classroom’s access to the district’s account.
“It isn’t enough that Montgomery County Public Schools has been trampling all over parental rights,” Ian Prior, senior adviser at America First Legal, told The Daily Signal. “Now, MCPS teachers are taking to social media to bash parents as ‘fascist’ for daring to protect their children from the radical and abusive transgender agenda.”
“Then, MCPS hits the trifecta of bad judgment and violates the First Amendment rights of those, like Inside the Classroom, that are shining the spotlight of accountability on what is happening at our schools,” Prior added. “We look forward to MCPS taking swift action to unblock all accounts and come into compliance with the First Amendment.”
In the demand letter, Inside the Classroom notes that Montgomery County Public Schools blocked its X account shortly after the account exposed the teacher who condemned the idea of parental rights.
“Alright, we have to talk about this right-wing idea of parents’ rights. It’s literally just fascism,” the teacher said in a TikTok video Inside the Classroom shared on Feb. 10. While the teacher says she sees “educators’ role as partnering with parents,” she goes on to insist that “parents and caregivers who reject their children’s gender identities are not taking care of their children.”
“Conservatives that claim that their real concern is ‘parents’ rights’ are just trying to use a family-friendly excuse for wanting trans people to not exist,” the teacher says.
Four days after Inside the Classroom shared that video, “tagging” Montgomery County Public Schools in the post, the school district blocked Inside the Classroom’s account from accessing the school district’s X page.
While X users have the ability to block any other user, courts have ruled that the First Amendment bars government officials from doing so in certain circumstances.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Davison v. Randall (2019) that a Virginia public official violated the First Amendment by engaging in “viewpoint discrimination.” The official had banned an individual from commenting on her social media page, which the court said constitutes a public forum.
Phyllis J. Randall, chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, banned Virginia resident Brian Davison from her official Facebook page, on which she allows public comments. The court ruled that the “interactive component” of a local government official’s social media page constitutes a public forum and that Randall violated the First Amendment by excluding Davison from her page due to his views.
Inside the Classroom claims in the letter that Montgomery County Public Schools is “even more culpable in its constitutional violation” than Randall had been.
“Unlike the defendant in Davison v. Randall, where the account at issue was that of an elected official, the account at issue is the official account for the entire taxpayer-funded school system,” the letter reads. “MCPS has over [122,000] followers on X, and users are able to repost, reply, and like MCPS’s posts.
MCPS’s X account consists of information related to school activities such as upcoming events, announcements, surveys, and school schedules. In fact, according to the MCPS website, social media ‘can help Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) further our mission and core values by engaging students, their parents/guardians, and the community.’”
“Given that the MCPS X account is undoubtedly a public forum, it is thus impermissible for MCPS to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint against those who engage in the interactive nature of that public forum,” the letter adds. “Here, MCPS blocked Inside the Classroom because it tagged MCPS and tweeted a video and its commentary of an MCPS teacher who compared parental rights to ‘fascism’ and stated that parents who don’t affirm their child’s claimed gender ‘are not taking care of their children.’”
Many X users interacted with Inside the Classroom’s post, mostly criticizing the teacher and Montgomery County Public Schools, and then the school district blocked Inside the Classroom.
“It is abundantly clear that MCPS was motivated to take this action by suppressing the ‘particular views taken by’ Inside the Classroom; namely, disapproval of a teacher attacking parents for not supporting ‘gender identity,’” the letter adds, citing a relevant court case.
“America First Legal therefore demands, on behalf of Inside the Classroom, that MCPS cease and desist blocking Inside the Classroom on X and that any and all official MCPS or MCPS staff social media accounts cease and desist blocking users in violation of the First Amendment,” the letter concludes.
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How Marxist Left Captured Higher Education
The mission of a university is to discover truth and transmit that essential knowledge to future generations. That has been achieved by what we call in the West the Socratic dialogue—that is, ferreting out what is good, true, and beautiful by testing ideas in an academic setting.
None of that is possible in an educational environment controlled by a Marxist Left that denies the existence of truth, that seeks to stop the transmission of past traditions to future generations, that decries Socrates and Western concepts, and that wages war on beauty.
Now that this Left is entrenched in academia, it uses myriad ways to impose its views and suppress others.
The concept that the good, the true, and the beautiful are transcendental “properties of being” goes back to Plato, Socrates’ disciple. It was explored further by St. Augustine in the transition between antiquity and the Middle Ages and by St. Thomas Aquinas in the High Middle Ages.
Quoting Aristotle recently, Peter Berkowitz rightly noted that the purpose of right education consists of “cultivating the virtues and transmitting the knowledge that enables citizens to preserve their form of government and way of life.”
But the leftists running America’s institutions no longer want such preservation. Rather, they see it as their quest to “decolonize” the university from Western thinking and believe that class time must be used instead to study non-Western (read “victim”) ways and works.
This particular Left, which focuses on culture, has gained ascendancy in universities since the 1980s, when the student radicals of the 1960s discovered that they could carry out their revolutionary mission culturally by taking over academia.
The chant “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” refers to the time on Jan. 15, 1987, when Jesse Jackson rallied 500 students to march on Stanford University. As Robert Curry at Intellectual Takeout reminds us, “They were protesting Stanford University’s introductory humanities program known as ‘Western Culture.’ For Jackson and the protesters, the problem was its lack of ‘diversity.’ The faculty and administration raced to appease the protesters, and ‘Western Culture’ was formally replaced with ‘Cultures, Ideas, and Values.’”
In the past decade and a half, this destructive mission has been accelerated, first with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, then with the creation of Black Lives Matter in 2013, and finally with BLM’s damaging riots in 2020. The shock was so great that the leaders of key societal institutions surrendered and accepted the facile, but bizarre, notion that America is systemically racist and oppressive and thus in dire need of systemic overhaul.
During this evolution, the culturally Marxist Left has increasingly used racial and sexual characteristics as determinants of victimhood status and thus as reasons for the supposedly aggrieved to tear up the system.
Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 provided a new interpretation of Title IX in its “guidance” on how universities were to judge sexual accusations. John Schoof of The Heritage Foundation explained at the time that this guidance “pressured schools to use the ‘preponderance of evidence’ standard of proof rather than the much stronger ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard applied to sexual assault cases in our criminal justice system.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
This new guidance soon became “about policing and disciplining speech on campus—especially speech that deviates from the orthodoxy of progressive politics,” as professor Adam Ellwanger explained in 2015.
He was in a position to know. Four years after Obama’s letter, Ellwanger had a Title IX complaint lodged against him because he had not sufficiently “affirmed” a student’s homosexual life choice.
“Title IX in its expanded articulation,” he wrote, “is nothing less than an attempt to advance the ideological objectives of the Left on campus. It has been weaponized to silence dissenting speech and chill open debate of leftist ideology on campus.”
The letter led to a second way in which the new Left polices conservative ideas: the boom in diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. The letter “exploded upon impact into a thousand Offices of Diversity and Inclusion,” wrote Ellwanger.
These DEI offices employ a growing bevy of officers who are nothing more than political commissars, imposing the Left’s view on faculty and students alike. As Heritage’s Jay Greene and I wrote recently, the University of Virginia alone has 94 of these officials, or 6.5 for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
A third way (out of many) to suppress thought that does not conform to the Left’s orthodoxy is to demand that faculty sign statements declaring loyalty to DEI and promising to further the mission as a condition of hiring or promotion. These are nothing more than loyalty oaths to the extreme wing of the political spectrum that is dedicated to the victim-oppressor paradigm. They are intended to shut down the Socratic dialogue.
And yet The New York Times informs us that “nearly half the large universities in America require that job applicants write such statements.”
How do we get out of this fix? First, we need to explain to the public what has happened to create a favorable climate of opinion. That is already happening.
Then, political figures must understand that their political longevity depends on delivering solutions. Most universities, public and private, depend on taxpayer money. And the taxpayers have been clear: They want it to pay for the good, the true, and the beautiful.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/28/how-marxist-left-captured-higher-education/
***********************************************Foxx: Hunting and Archery Programs are Here to Stay
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Today, the House passed H.R. 5110, the Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act, bipartisan legislation that overturns the Department of Education’s funding ban on hunting and archery programs in schools.
On passage of the bill, Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) made the following statement: “The Department of Education is completely tone-deaf to think that cutting hunting and archery programs in schools is a good idea. These programs have been around for decades. They educate millions of students on how to become better stewards of our land and animals, and they develop responsible hunters and gun owners. It should be a wake-up call for this administration that this bill passed on a bipartisan basis. Hunting and archery programs are here to stay.”
The Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act:
Clarifies that the prohibition on the use of ESEA funds for certain weapons does not apply to educational enrichment activities such as archery, hunting, other shooting sports, or culinary arts;
Reaffirms that hunting and archery programs teach America’s schoolchildren self-esteem, responsibility, and how to use these recreational tools safely; and
Sends the Department of Education a clear message that we stand behind student hunters and archers.
Press release
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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