I remember how it was -- JR
Meet The Billionaires’ Club Pumping Critical Race Theory Into Your Child’s Classroom
A decade ago, when an Obama-era initiative called “Common Core” convinced 41 states to give up control of their education standards, it was infamously the result of a massive influence campaign by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, with America’s K-12 landscape being turned upside down by “equity” initiatives that divide children by ethnicity and devalue rigorous academics, the culprit is much the same: Gates and other philanthropic foundations.
That’s a takeaway from the two years I spent poring through educational and financial records for my new book, “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” These philanthropic foundations are perhaps the most powerful and least understood force in American politics — and a key node in moving critical race theory from academic papers to society. Pick any radical racial initiative in your child’s school, and it is likely to tie back to the Ford, Kellogg, Gates, Annie E. Casey, MacArthur, or Surdna foundations.
Take the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 2019 New York Times series-turned-grade school curriculum. It might never have seen the light of day if not for the MacArthur Foundation.
In 2014, MacArthur awarded a $1 million, three-year grant to ProPublica, a left-wing nonprofit news outlet for which Hannah-Jones wrote about race. In 2017, MacArthur awarded Hannah-Jones a “$625,000, no-strings-attached grant.”
In “How the 1619 Project Came Together,” the Times explained that Hannah-Jones consulted with “Kellie Jones, a Columbia University art historian and 2016 MacArthur Fellow.” Matthew Desmond, who contributed an article about the “brutality of American capitalism” to the series, was a 2015 MacArthur fellow.
The nonprofit that pushed curriculum based on the 1619 Project into schools is also funded by MacArthur. In 2021, MacArthur secured a position for Hannah-Jones as a professor at Howard University, where she would teach her racial ideas and continue the 1619 Project, by donating $5 million to the school.
The Kellogg Foundation bankrolls the group behind the Zinn Education Project (named after anti-American author Howard Zinn), which is relied on by a company that produces content for 90 percent of K-12 schools. In one lesson plan, the teacher stages a “tribunal” to decide who should be held “accountable” for Covid-19, tells students it should not be China, and leads them to order that “all members of the [U.S.] federal government [be put] in jail” to “end, or lower the amount of, capitalism so no secrets are present.”
Even groups that exist to get government officials on the same page, such as the National School Boards Association (which likened parents to “domestic terrorists”), receive private funds from foundations like Ford, Gates, and Carnegie.
Making it even creepier, far-left foundations have converged through a group called Arabella, a for-profit company that brings them together alongside groups like the American Federation of Teachers union. Teachers union honcho Randi Weingarten said of one Arabella initiative, fittingly called “The Hub Project”: “It essentially creates a place to have a shared strategy on issues with groups that might seem disparate.”
Arabella is the same group that The New York Times conceded in January has led Democrats to dwarf Republicans with the “dark money” leftists publicly denounce. One tentacle of Arabella, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, spent more in 2020 than the Democratic National Committee.
You likely don’t know the name Arabella, or the names of its main nonprofits like the Sixteen Thirty Fund, because they specialize in creating pop-up astroturf fronts, which operate with little financial disclosure and with scant public recognition of where they’re coming from.
But these groups have been sowing the seeds of critical race theory in obscure educational bureaucracies since long before you even heard the term. In 2013, New Venture Fund, one of Arabella’s most important arms, outright paid for the creation of a federal government entity, the “Equity and Excellence Commission,” which pushed for a return to 1970s-style bussing.
Savvy activists strategically fund force-multipliers: behind-the-scenes groups that shape others who go on to shape others. For those seeking to efficiently spread fringe ideas, there is no better bang for the buck than conscripting schoolchildren. But once I saw who was behind the curtain, it became clear why they hid.
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Biden ATF pick opposed arming teachers
President Joe Biden’s second pick to head the nation’s gun regulating agency opposed training and arming teachers with military or police backgrounds, an issue likely to be raised at a Senate confirmation hearing today.
In his failed 2018 bid for Ohio attorney general, Steve Dettelbach, nominated to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, opposed arming teachers, claiming that it is a “politician’s plan” that some police opposed.
It is one strongly endorsed by some key officials in Texas who yesterday said it could have lessened the tragic slayings of young children and a teacher at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
As the death count mounted yesterday, for example, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton reiterated his call to arm teachers as the best way to stop or delay a school shooting until police arrive.
"The reality is, we don't have the resources to have law enforcement at every school," he said on Fox. "It takes time for law enforcement, no matter how prepared, no matter how good they are to get there. So, having the right training for some of these people at the school is the best hope,” he added.
Sen. Ted Cruz also called for armed school guards. "We know from past experience that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus," Cruz told a gaggle of reporters.
The push for arming teachers is not new, though it is picking up support from more experts.
Public interest law professor John Banzhaf, among the first to suggest arming airline pilots, said today that training and arming some teachers is a public safety issue.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/biden-atf-pick-opposed-arming-teachers
***************************************************Cambridge don claims woke critics have labelled him a 'white supremacist' for teaching classics
Dr David Butterfield has warned of the ‘political danger’ and ‘threats’ to his academic discipline amid rising numbers of woke rows on campuses.
The senior lecturer in classics says his subject at Cambridge has even been accused of supporting ‘some shadowy ill-identified cabal of far-Right extremists’.
He added: ‘Folks who want to defend the moral neutrality and political independence of looking at the ancient Greeks and Romans on their own terms, receive the slogan of the day, which is to be a white supremacist.
‘White supremacy is now used as a term for those who defend the intellectual value of studying Greece and Rome in a geographically, technically, culturally, separate discipline. Or those who believe in the very existence of the concept which is Western civilisation.’
Dr Butterfield, fellow and director of studies in Classics at Queens’ College, was speaking at a debate on academic freedoms in universities held by think-tank Politeia this week.
He said it was wrong to hold the Greeks, Romans and other ancient civilisations to the same moral standard as the present day.
Criticising the current trend for decolonisation, Dr Butterfield added: ‘Decolonisation doesn’t mean anything of any intellectual value in the context of studying the ancient Greeks and Romans on their own terms.’
He attacked the ‘phenomenon of activist scholarships’, whereby academics and students want to use their research or scholarships to push their political agendas.
A small minority of political activists have succeeded in shutting down any dissent from woke orthodoxy.’
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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)
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