Thursday, November 24, 2022


Parental Rights Candidate Wins Loudoun School Board Race, Signals Changes on Board

A parental rights candidate who narrowly secured a spot on the Loudoun County School Board could influence how the school system handles transgender issues and parental rights in education.

Incoming board member Tiffany Polifko won her race in the northern Virginia county as school boards across the commonwealth are expected to change policies related to transgender students. The Department of Education released new guidelines compelling school boards to keep parents informed if the student is seeking to change his or her gender identity and requires them to get parental permission before offering counseling services that affirm a student’s transgender identity.

Those guidelines conflict with Loudoun County School Board’s current policies, which do not keep parents in the loop. During her campaign, Polifko expressed her support for the new guidelines and will likely serve on the board as a voice in support of changes that match the DOE’s new guidelines. This comes as some school boards across the state have already indicated they might ignore the rules.

“Congratulations to Tiffany Polifko for her well-earned win for the Broad Run School Board seat in Loudoun County,” Ian Prior, who is the executive director of the northern Virginia parental rights group Fight For Our Schools, said in a statement.

“She was a tireless campaigner who ran for school board to become part of the solution to what ails Loudoun County Public Schools,” Prior continued. “Tiffany deserves all the credit for boldly taking on this challenge, staying true to her convictions, and winning. We have no doubt that she will be a much-needed champion for parental rights on the Loudoun County School Board.”

Last year, the school board came under fire after it had been accused of misinforming parents about a sexual assault in which a male student wearing address assaulted a girl in the girls’ bathroom. He was later transferred to a different school in the district, in which he sexually assaulted another girl. He was convicted on both counts.

Even though Superintendent Scott Ziegler informed the board of the initial assault, he later said during a public hearing that there are not any records of sexual assaults occuring in school bathrooms. No one on the board corrected him. The public discussion occurred when the board was considering changes to transgender policies, which would allow students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity even if that identity did not match their biological sex. Some parents and parental rights groups accused Ziegler and the board of covering up the assault to help advance transgender policy changes.

Attorney General Jason Miyares is currently conducting an investigation into how the board handled the sexual assault. The investigation seeks to determine whether school board members and school administrators intentionally withheld information from parents or whether they intentionally lied to them.

Polifko narrowly won her race with 35% of the vote in the three-way race for the Broad Run District. She won by fewer than 100 votes.

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Your kids know they ARE being taught critical race theory despite the denials — here’s the proof

City Journal last month released a survey that asked 18- to 20-year-olds whether they had been taught six concepts, of which four are central to critical race theory: “America is a systemically racist country,” “White people have white privilege,” “White people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people,” “America is built on stolen land,” “America is a patriarchal society,” and “Gender is an identity choice.”

Each was answered in the affirmative by a majority of participants, of whom more than 80% attended public schools. That’s curious given that public educators and their defenders in corporate media have been claiming for years that CRT is not taught in schools.

“Teaching critical race theory isn’t happening in classrooms, teachers say in survey,” reported NBC in July 2021. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson in June 2021 called the controversy over CRT “manufactured,” while his colleague Karen Attiah the same month called it “hot air.”

Since then, the narrative has evolved. A November 2021 PBS report, for example, explained, “There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students, though some ideas central to it . . . have been.”

That’s naïve if not disingenuous. Few high-schoolers know the names of the philosophical schools of utilitarianism and scientific materialism, but most of them are trained in their premises.

There’s an added dimension, given that The New York Times’ 1619 Project’s curriculum has been disseminated across the country to public schools responsible for teaching millions of students. There are other CRT-friendly public-school curricula: The Southern Poverty Law Center for years has been pushing its “Teaching Hard History” program, which many school districts have adopted, including in my home state of Virginia.

Concerned parents need guides to effectively respond to these “anti-racist” curricula, and scholar Mary Grabar has written one: “Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America.” Grabar, who crossed swords with 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones so many times that NHJ blocked her on Twitter, offers a careful rebuke to CRT’s problematic (and often erroneous) claims. Grabar explains: “We must understand The 1619 Project: its divisive aims and its dishonest methods, its sweeping historical misjudgments and its blatant errors of fact. And we must drive its lies and its poisonous race-baiting out of public institutions, beginning with the official curricula of our schools.”

The book’s early chapters deal with the historical inaccuracies and irresponsible reductionism of the original essays in The New York Times Magazine. (Tellingly, a lot of the project’s language was deleted or changed following public outcry and critiques from respected professional historians who said the authors had replaced history with ideology.) For example, put on the defensive by backlash to her claims that 1619, not 1776, is America’s true founding, NHJ claimed the 1619 Project “does not argue that 1619 is our true founding.” Yet Hannah-Jones herself had previously tweeted, “I argue that 1619 is our true founding.”

The blatant historical errors have been well covered elsewhere, so I’ll note just a few. The 1619 Project argues the colonies declared independence “to protect the institution of slavery,” though there’s virtually no historical evidence to substantiate that. It asserts American slavery was “unlike anything that had existed in the world before,” though any cursory survey of the ancient world, medieval and post-medieval Africa and the Ottoman Empire puts that idea to rest. Slave traders from the Barbary Coast alone enslaved and brutalized more than 1 million Southern Europeans between 1500 and 1800.

And NHJ fundamentally misreads the effect of the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which, far from “enshrining” the idea that blacks are a “slave race,” likely expedited the peculiar institution’s demise, with the Civil War starting only four years later.

“Debunking the 1619 Project” contains other, perhaps less-well-known information. Contra NHJ’s claims of intellectual novelty, black Americans have been discussing and memorializing the arrival of a Portuguese slave ship at Jamestown in 1619 for more than a century. There’s also the complicated fact many blacks profitably participated as slave owners in the antebellum Southern economy (Grabar doesn’t mention it, but so did many Native Americans). That by no means excuses white slaveholders’ sins, but it certainly muddles the Manichaean narratives anti-racist ideologues preach.

Yet there’s another component to this story beyond bad history: NHJ’s and fellow anti-racist pseudo-intellectuals’ self-serving exploitation of the remarkably lucrative grievance industry. She charges about $25,000 per speaking engagement (between September 2019 and February 2021, she made 33 appearances on college campuses, many of them remotely). She not long ago earned a staggering $55,000 for a single speech at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo charges $30,000 for a 60-to-90-minute speech.

Americans, many motivated by misplaced white guilt, are paying grievance-industry celebrities to inculcate a spirit of resentment, cynicism and victimhood across an entire generation of youth. The data City Journal compiled demonstrates that. So does peer-reviewed research on what students are learning in social-studies classrooms.

Consider one article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Social Studies Research. The authors observe a teacher provoke a class discussion on the failure of Galveston, Texas, to heed warnings from Cuba before a 1900 hurricane wrecked the city. “That was just racist that we didn’t listen to them,” say the students. “Good answers,” the teacher tells them.

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UK: Churchill in Disrepute as Woke Indoctrination in Schools Spreads Throughout West

Woke attitudes are becoming pervasive among young people, even outside the United States.

Recently released research by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London, shows how concepts such as critical race theory and radical gender ideology have become common concepts taught in U.K. schools.

The research was based on a YouGov survey of 1,500 U.K. residents ages 18 to 20. It reinforces the fact that radical ideas such as critical race theory are not just relegated to the United States.

And even Winston Churchill isn’t safe, that survey shows.

“A majority, 59%, of British school leavers say they have either been taught, or heard from an adult at school, about at least one of ‘white privilege’, ‘unconscious bias,’ and ‘systemic racism,’ three concepts associated with applied critical race theory,” the study found.

That number rises to 73% when the research included “critical social justice” approaches to gender, patriarchy, and the concept that there are many genders.

The study noted that CRT concepts are even more frequently picked up on social media, though Kaufmann said schools are reinforcing these concepts.

According to the research, left-wing cultural attitudes are most prevalent among Britain’s young “elite,” who are at or plan to attend universities.

In an UnHerd article explaining his findings, Kaufmann said schools aren’t just teaching critical race theory as a concept, they’re teaching it as fact: “68% of those taught these ideas said that they were either not taught competing perspectives, or that they were told that the alternative views on offer were not ‘respectable.’”

So this is more along the lines of indoctrination, not pedagogy.

Kaufmann also noted that these polls reflect other findings about young people in the United Kingdom. He noted a separate survey showed stark differences in attitudes toward free speech between the young and old, especially on the Left. The politics professor used the case of J.K. Rowling, author of the “Harry Potter” series, who has criticized the transgender movement.

“When asked whether J.K. Rowling should be dropped by her publisher, young people split evenly while the over-50s plumped 82-3 for Rowling. The biggest age gap is within the Left, between illiberal young leftists and their liberal older counterparts,” Kaufmann wrote.

It gets worse. From Kaufmann:

18-25s are evenly divided over whether Churchill’s statue should be removed from Parliament Square whereas those over 50 oppose it 83-6. Just 9% of 18- [to] 20-year-old women report a positive opinion of the wartime leader. When asked whether Britain is a racist country, the 18-25 group responded in the affirmative by a 61-39 margin compared to 35-65 against among the over-50s. Indeed, nearly 6 in 10 of these young people thought Britain was as or more racist than most countries.

Apparently, leading the fight against a genocidal Nazi Germany isn’t good enough for a huge number of penitent woke youths in the modern U.K.

What’s notable, and deeply disconcerting, about these polls is how similar woke attitudes have spread so quickly among young people in the West. This isn’t just a disease infecting American institutions.

At one time, the “West” generally meant “Western Christendom.” Despite often stark cultural differences between countries, countries within Western civilization shared a certain moral basis—even as they fought over borders and other details.

What we now have is a competing belief system that’s spread by academia and a globalized elite culture.

In just a short amount of time, fringe concepts such as critical race theory—once relegated to small corners of academia—became not only common but in some cases the dominant theories being taught and transmitted to young people.

Self-criticism, once an important Western trait that in some cases led to genuine progress and improvement, now is becoming the basis of the civilizational suicide of the West. This civilizational suicide conveniently allows the elites to retain power, of course.

The increasingly dominant ethos in the West among the young and elites in general has exacerbated the warped loathing of all things Westerners were once proud of—Winston Churchill, in the case of the U.K.—and combined it with an increasing inability to criticize anything outside the West.

Western business leaders seem to have particularly glommed onto this trait so that they may continue to contribute to progressive projects at home while making money in countries that practice brutal repression of their citizens, or simply modern slavery. Our new robber barons not only get rich thanks to Western laws and institutions, they now lecture us about our bigotry and backwardness while operating businesses in countries with concentration camps.

Zealotry for the cause, whether grounded in deep belief or not, is often tied to self-interest. To be a member of the elite in good standing, you must embrace these views or risk cancellation.

But this hypocrisy shouldn’t lead conservatives or centrists to think that the rising woke ideas aren’t deeply felt by many. For young Westerners—many of whom are detached from family, religion, community, and tradition—woke ideas provide a framework to live by.

As I wrote in my book “The War on History,” attacking and rewriting the past is how the far Left shapes the present and the future. The old pillars of the West and the United States—Christianity, liberty, self-government, and even democracy properly understood—are being uprooted, torn down, and ultimately replaced by the new faith.

That’s why the political battles over education and schools are so important.

Insiders, educrats, and union bosses won’t save us. They’ve only reinforced the mechanisms of indoctrination that have poisoned the minds of young people. But there are ways of fighting back.

Some governors are proactively preventing woke indoctrination in public schools. Parents are organizing to reshape local school boards and taking their children out of failing schools that won’t change.

Yes, many woke concepts will continue to get to young people through media and entertainment. That’s almost unavoidable at this point. But ceding our schools to fanatics exacerbates the problem and creates the perception that this is the only way to think about the world.

Preserving the free world, for ourselves and posterity, means that these battles over education are of the greatest importance.

There is no escaping the culture war or the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime. They are coming for you and your children here and throughout the Western world. If we fail, we will slip into a new dark age, as Churchill warned us a few generations ago.

The rot within goes deeper than ever before, but it will become total if we don’t draw lines in the sand now.

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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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