Tuesday, September 29, 2020


Public schools across the country promote Black Lives Matter, organize protests

Public schools across the country have endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement and encouraged teachers, students and parents to do the same, with some schools organizing their own BLM protests, a Daily Caller News Foundation review found.

The Black Lives Matter movement has been linked to 91% of riots across the United States between May 24 and Sept. 12, according to the US Crisis Monitor, a joint project of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University.

Despite the close links between the Black Lives Matter movement and riots across the country, public schools have been a consistent source of support for the movement.

Buffalo Public Schools integrated Black Lives Matter’s “guiding principles,” which include disrupting the nuclear family, into its curriculum for elementary school students, according to lesson plans obtained and published by Fox News on Friday.

One such principle included in the lesson, “Black Villages,” calls for “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other.”

Milwaukee Public Schools held a Black Lives Matter Week of Action in February. The listed demands for the week’s events included: “Fund counselors not cops.”

“Please join Ms. Seidel and other Buckman families for a Kid’s March to show support for the memory of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Families are encouraged to make signs and meet in front of Buckman at 3pm on Sunday, June 7th,” the principal of Buckman Elementary, a Portland public school, told students in a newsletter.

Sabin Elementary School in Portland held a Black Lives Matter protest as well. A picture on the school’s website shows a crowd of more than 100 people, mostly children, standing with their fists in the air. The students and adults in the crowd, many of whom are holding Black Lives Matter signs, do not appear to be following social distancing guidelines in the photo.

The school’s principal also promoted a “week of action” organized by the Movement for Black Lives, a left-wing coalition that openly seeks to abolish police and prisons. (RELATED: Public School Teachers Behind Violent Antifa Group)

Teachers at Lincoln Park Elementary in Oregon also organized a Black Lives Matter protest that was promoted on the school’s website.

“The Black Lives Matter movement must include all of us as we support our Black and brown students, teachers, staff and families. It is not a Black problem, but a global problem,” Muncie Community Schools, an Indiana school district, states on its website.

The president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), a union representing 30,000 teachers, announced in June that the union board had voted to support disbanding the Los Angeles School Police Department in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

“We should be actively promoting Black Lives Matter,” UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz told EdSource in an interview the same month.

“We need to have a set of demands that dovetail with Black Lives Matter. We have to have massive political education,” Myart-Cruz said later in the interview when asked what her plans were for the union.

“People will say, ‘Not all police are bad,’ but we’re not talking about that,” she continued. “We’re talking about racism as a social construct, systemic and institutional racism, and wrapped on top is white supremacist culture, which is the dominant culture.”

Neither Myart-Cruz nor any of the schools or school districts mentioned in this story returned the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

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Glasgow University feels like a prison

Police patrol our halls of residence. We’ve been banned from pubs. Even Christmas could be cancelled.

I’ll confess, I think I almost enjoyed lockdown at first: I could cycle to work without the roar of cars all around me, and I enjoyed the novelty of being able to walk down a near-empty high street. The hard reality of our government’s decision to shut down society hit home soon enough, though. I lost a planned seasonal job that was due to start at the beginning of May, and so was forced to spend an additional three months in a job I disliked, working even longer hours due to greater demand. As much as I love my family, you can grow sick of the same faces after a while. Not being able to see friends certainly had an effect on my mental health – and the incessant screeching of the fear-mongering media could leave anyone in a nervous fit. In an unfathomable irony, during the ‘peak pandemic’, university was my glimmer of hope on the horizon.

I’m at Glasgow University, which has been the subject of considerable controversy this week. I’ll spare myself a lawsuit by not revealing every detail, but if you take a group of young people, most of whom won’t have been away from home before for longer than a school trip, it takes only a few brain cells to realise that they’re going to find creative ways of having fun – restrictions or not.

We enjoyed smatterings of the usual activities, yet everything was tinged by the times we live in. Drinking, meeting new people and poor attempts at cooking – all hallmarks of many students’ first steps into adulthood – were juxtaposed with regular police patrols through halls. Police would even harass people for the heinous sin of congregating in the street. The university’s own security staff swaggered around like trumped-up soldiers, replete with hi-viz vests and body cameras. Even in the early days, whispers of positive cases and self-isolating flats permeated conversation.

Of course, nobody signs their life away for three or four years solely for the purpose of becoming a drunken mulch. But our education itself has also been one of the major victims of the government’s ineptitude. I do enjoy watching my pre-recorded lectures, in as much as I enjoy my subject. But without wishing to denigrate the lecturers – many of whom would rather be teaching face to face and have worked hard – the experience doesn’t strike me as being all that different from watching YouTube (which would not come with a nine-grand price tag). The dynamic pedagogy of being in a lecture theatre simply cannot be replicated virtually.

My first few online seminars have not exactly endeared me to the genre. They have been plagued by connection problems and are full of awkward, frustrating interactions with strangers. It’s far removed from the experience of university education I had looked forward to while studying for my A-Levels. The first few two-hour seminars were never going to be easy for someone with an attention span befitting of the worst Gen-Z stereotypes, but being in front of a laptop in my room, surrounded by temptation, was worlds worse.

In the past few days, my halls of residence have become the centre of a media whirlwind. Every day you hear about new cases, new flats locking down and new restrictions on our nascent freedom. Absent from this, however, are new hospitalisations. In fact, not a single one of the hundred-plus Covid-positive students at the University of Glasgow has had to go to hospital. This fact is rarely alluded to by the media, though it reveals the central absurdity of our situation: the UK and Scottish governments have consistently neglected those who needed protecting, such as the elderly in care homes, while hyper-regulating those at least risk – younger people. What’s more, we need young people to be getting out there if we want to have any hope of restoring growth (and sanity) to a country racked by the worst recession in living memory.

The media are also obsessed with young people. Glasgow students have been namechecked on Sky News and the BBC and seemingly in every paper. We’ve had TV crews shoving cameras up people’s noses. And for one day, a mobile testing clinic was placed slap bang in the middle of the halls, replete with roadblocks and security. I often wonder, is this a student hall or the set of a prison documentary?

Even while writing this, the restrictions grow like an unwanted rash. The Scottish CMO (Chief Misery Officer) Jason Leitch has declared that seeing your own parents is no exception to the draconian ban on household visits. Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, has announced a ban on students going down the pub. In a move unseen since Cromwell, UK health secretary Matt Hancock has openly mooted the idea of literally banning Christmas. And despite all we have been put through, the media portray us students as drunken louts, vessels of disease and squalor, best to be glared at from a distance – a selfish morass content to enjoy themselves at the expense of the elderly and vulnerable.

We are not a selfish generation. As a matter of fact, we take far fewer liberties than any generation preceding us by decades. We smoke less, drink little and commit few crimes. We have had our education stultified, social lives stifled and we are already bearing the brunt of the economic impact of the restrictions. Most of us still take the precautions we deem sensible, despite being almost entirely invulnerable to this illness. So next time you see one of us students, try to have just a little sympathy. And please, Mr Hancock, will you let us celebrate Christmas?

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg Agreed With Amy Coney Barrett That Campus Kangaroo Courts Were a Problem

In 2018, following the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, President Trump tipped his hand about who he’d be inclined to choose if given the opportunity to fill another vacancy on the high court.

That person, the New York Times observed, was Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative law professor whom Trump tapped for a federal appeals court in 2017.

A week ago, it appeared the chances of Trump filling another Court vacancy in his first term were slim. However, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died September 18 during her 27th year on the high court just six weeks before the presidential election, means Trump will get the opportunity to send another nomination to the Republican-controlled Senate.

As the Brett Kavanaugh nomination and previous hearings have shown, Supreme Court battles can be nasty, even nastier than typical political battles. There’s little reason to expect the filling of Ginsburg’s seat to be any different—even if it wasn’t coming just weeks before a presidential election—so it’s no surprise to see that news media are already dissecting Barrett’s court opinions.

Just 48 hours after Ginsburg’s death, the Washington Post ran an article on Barrett’s opinion in Doe v. Purdue University, a Title IX—the rule prohibiting sex-discrimination in public education —case involving a Purdue student (John Doe) who was suspended by the university after being accused of sexual assault by a former girlfriend (Jane Doe).

According to John Doe, as described by a court summary of the case, the couple met in Purdue’s Navy ROTC program and started dating in the fall of 2015. They soon began a sexual relationship. In December, Jane attempted to take her own life in front of John. He reported the attempt to the school, and the couple ceased dating.

“A few months later, Jane alleged that in November 2015, while they were sleeping together in his room, she awoke to John groping her over her clothes without consent,” the Washington Post reports. “Jane said she objected and that John told her he had penetrated her with his finger while they were sleeping together earlier that month. John denied the allegations and produced friendly texts from Jane after the alleged November incident.”

These are serious charges that demand a serious appraisal of the facts and due process. But like plaintiffs in Title IX cases—some 600 lawsuits have been filed against universities since Barack Obama’s Education Department issued its “Dear Colleague” letter to schools warning them they’d lose federal funding if they didn’t prioritize complaints of sexual assault—John Doe encountered something else.

Court documents show the hearing resembled a show trial, including a false confession, that resulted in a year-long suspension of John Doe that cost him a spot in the ROTC program.

“Among the university’s alleged missteps cited by the court: John Doe received a redacted copy of investigators’ report on his case only moments before his disciplinary hearing. He discovered that the document did not mention that he had reported Jane’s suicide attempt and falsely asserted that he had confessed to Jane’s allegations,” the Post reports. “Jane Doe did not appear before the university panel that reviewed the investigation; instead, a written summary of her allegations was submitted by a campus group that advocates for victims of sexual violence.”

All of this fits the pattern of the kangaroo courts universities established after the Dear Colleague letter. As Reason has spent the last several years documenting, these cases tend to presume individuals guilty until proven innocent, while depriving them of the due process necessary to prove their innocence.

Barrett is hardly alone in her jurisprudence regarding the importance of due process. As the Post concedes, campus kangaroo courts were widely criticized by civil libertarians across the political divide.

“Judges of all stripes around the country have been concerned with fairness in these proceedings,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor and retired federal judge appointed by President Clinton.

It was these concerns that prompted US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to issue new rules to Title IX hearings in April that strengthened the rights of those accused of sexual misconduct, including the right to cross-examine accusers and preventing investigators from also serving as case judges. (Former Vice President Joe Biden has said he’d reverse Devos’s ruling if elected president, which prompted some to point out that Biden, who like the current president stands accused of sexual assault, would be guilty under the current standard.)

Few would argue that protecting the rights of sexual assault victims is important, but it’s worth noting that among the critics of the previous standard was Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Post admits the “feminist icon, surprised some victim’s advocates in a 2018 interview with the Atlantic magazine” when she said many of the criticisms of college codes were legitimate.

“The person who is accused has a right to defend herself or himself, and we certainly should not lose sight of that,” Ginsburg said. “There’s been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that’s one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know, everyone deserves a fair hearing.”

Ginsburg is correct that due process and a fair hearing for the accused are fundamental principles of the American system. Yet hundreds of individuals who believe they were denied fair hearings and are seeking redress from universities have found the path difficult due to legal technicalities.

Plaintiffs tend to claim their rights were violated in two ways: 1) the university violated the plaintiff’s right to due process; 2) the school discriminated against the plaintiff on the basis of sex, violating Title IX.

Prior to Purdue vs. Doe, the Post reports, courts often upheld accused student claims of due process violations “but rejected their Title IX arguments on the grounds that the students had failed a complicated series of legal tests first established in 1994.” Essentially, plaintiffs had to prove not just that their due process rights were violated, but that they were violated on the basis of their sex.

Barrett’s ruling, however, was instrumental in lowering the burden of proof plaintiffs had to show.

“It is plausible that [university officials] chose to believe Jane because she is a woman and to disbelieve John because he is a man,” Barrett wrote in her opinion, citing the political pressure the Obama administration had put on schools to address sexual assault.

Barrett’s opinion was adopted by other courts, and it was this reasoning that caused women’s rights groups to criticize the appellate judge.

Emily Martin of the National Women’s Law Center bristled at the idea of “replacing [Ginsburg] with a judge who is eager to use the language of sex discrimination in order to defend the status quo, and to use the statutes that were created to forward gender equality as swords against that very purpose.”

We’ll never know if Ginsburg would have believed it was plausible to assume that sex played a role in the university show trials that allowed hundreds of people accused of sex crimes to be found guilty without due process or a fair hearing.

What we do know is that on the broader issue of campus kangaroo courts, Ginsburg and Barrett found common ground.

“We have a system of justice where people who are accused get due process, so it’s just applying to this field what we have applied generally,” Ginsburg told The Atlantic in 2018.

Indeed. It was for this reason that America’s founders carved out specific protections for the principle, declaring in the Fifth Amendment that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law… .”

Universities have long been able to deny due process to students accused of sexual crimes, because the allegations against them are not criminal charges. This is a grave injustice.

Accusing individuals of heinous sexual misconduct is a serious matter. A verdict of guilt will be carried with students for the rest of their lives and has the potential to impact their career and future earnings, not to mention their reputation. Such matters are far too serious to withhold from the accused fundamental tenets of our system designed to ensure justice and fairness.

Justice Ginsburg and Judge Barrett might have had starkly different constitutional views, but on this basic idea of justice they found common ground.

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We need a “youthquake” against these Covid measures

From police patrols at university to a collapse in bar jobs, the young are suffering badly in this hysteria.

Has there ever been a worse time to go to university? Not content with forcing students into arbitrary social bubbles, banning all social events, and fining anyone who dares to go on a pub crawl, British universities are now reportedly paying local police forces to patrol student neighbourhoods and break up anything even resembling a party.

Given the much-celebrated role of universities in fostering independence and building ‘life skills’, this Covidisation of campus life is a clear betrayal of everything higher education should stand for. And one that should leave students under no illusion as to how their vice-chancellors see them: as feral super-spreaders whose basic liberties need curbing for their own good.

But as depressing as campus patrols and ‘voluntary lockdowns’ might be, they’re hardly out of line with what many young people will have inevitably come to expect – at least from a government that seemingly thinks nothing of curbing their freedoms in order to pursue its fanciful strategy of eliminating the coronavirus altogether.

Of course, the problem doesn’t stop at universities. Who doesn’t feel sorry for the hundreds of thousands of couples – most in their 20s and 30s – who have been forced to cancel their dream weddings, perhaps even more than once, as Britain’s lockdown was extended for months at end? Even now, weddings remain strictly capped at 15 attendees – a limit reimposed, with just six days’ warning, by Boris Johnson this week – with venues expected to act as uncompromising overseers for Whitehall’s social-distancing diktats.

What about those graduates and younger workers having to rethink their hard-fought career plans – maybe after job offers were cancelled altogether? The Musicians’ Union says that one third of its members are thinking about packing in their jobs entirely. Better that, they figure, than deal with a future where any slight uptick in cases can mean concert halls being shut down overnight. Who can blame them?

But where else to go? Younger people have traditionally relied on hospitality – which employs one-third of all workers under 25 – to keep a roof above their head. But that hasn’t stopped the government repeatedly hammering the industry at every opportunity – even as the British Beer and Pubs Association warns that nonsensical curfews could put thousands of jobs at risk. Given how seriously the government used to take youth unemployment, it’s a baffling strategy.

Yes, I know: it isn’t just younger people who suffer under this neverending ‘lockdown lite’ (who could forget the cruel restrictions around visits to care homes?). But I’d still challenge anyone to argue that under-30s aren’t getting a seriously raw deal here: having to put their lives – and livelihoods – on hold, potentially indefinitely, for a virus that hardly affects them.

But who will speak up for the right to enjoy a normal – and police-free – university experience? Certainly not the institutions themselves, which seem content to go along with the government’s incessant micro-management. After all, challenging the restrictions would mean addressing the organising principle at the heart of government that abstract notions of public health must trump fundamental civil liberties.

That’s the sacred cow here. And despite what Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings might think, it’s an argument that has shifted drastically since March. Back then, the proponents of criminalising basic freedoms had uncertainty on their side: we must take drastic action, they argued, until we know exactly what we’re dealing with. But that doesn’t apply now. And the more we understand about the virus, the harder it becomes to justify the harsh restrictions placed on the young and healthy.

Pressed to justify the criminalisation of freshers’ week, my guess is that the lockdown fanatics would fall back on what has always been their weakest card: the idea that people are too irresponsible not to be locked down. As if they seriously believe that harsh sanctions are all that will stop students from throwing their own Covid mega-party with giant spin-the-bottle and ‘laughing gas’ ventilators.

The fact that university is meant to be the point at which many teenagers learn to make life decisions holds no water with these misanthropic pessimists. In fact, rather than a case for restoring freedom, it would probably be seen as the opposite. Rather than let young adults learn to be responsible, we must force them to be responsible. How terribly progressive of them.

If nothing else, the horrors of freshers’ week will at least prepare beleaguered students for the so-called ‘New Normal’: a world where even the most basic liberties must be pitted against tenuous coronavirus indicators, and where the heavy hand of government hovers constantly above the dial to wind freedom back a notch.

When you put yourself in the shoes of a 21-year-old, you can see just how bleak the picture is. Let’s not forget that casual sex is actually illegal in Britain. As are music festivals and house parties. And nor is it just decadent options that are off the table. Good luck to graduates with finding a decent internship when the whole of London is working from home. The deck is increasingly stacked against them.

In weighing up the whole depressing situation, I’m reminded of the great Corbynite hope of the ‘Youthquake’ – the long-awaited tide of angry first-time voters that would supposedly propel Labour to victory. If there was ever time for a Youthquake, surely it’s now. And I hope for their sake we get one.

It’s six months since the UK lockdown began and how many people you have round your house is still a police matter. New restrictions continue to be introduced without proper parliamentary scrutiny. Meanwhile, protests are banned and Covid Marshals are being hired to patrol a high street near you. spiked exists to fight for freedom and we will continue to challenge the illiberal New Normal. But to do so we need your help. Unlike so many things these days, spiked is completely free. We rely on the generosity of our readers to keep us going. So if you already donate to us, thank you! And if you don’t, please do consider making a donation today. One-off donations – or better yet, monthly donations – are hugely appreciated. You can find out more here. Thank you!

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