I remember how it was -- JR
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
CLEAN SWEEP: Every Leader Involved in Botched Response to Loudoun Girls’ Room Rape Is Now Gone
A reckoning has come for Virginia’s Loudoun County, where the school board had a father arrested after he demanded answers regarding the rape of his daughter in a girls’ restroom.
The school board, the superintendent, and even the local prosecutor, whom the parents blamed for letting the assailant escape the sex offender list, have all been ousted or declined to run for reelection, according to preliminary election results.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj, a Democratic prosecutor bankrolled by the George Soros-funded Justice and Public Safety PAC, lost her reelection campaign last week. Biberaj conceded to Republican Bob Anderson on Wednesday.
Biberaj’s defeat comes after the county elected an entirely new school board. As The Daily Signal previously reported, only two of the incumbent school board members ran for reelection, and both lost their races.
The prosecutor and school board ousters come after the school board itself previously fired Superintendent Scott Ziegler after a grand jury compiled a report into the sexual assaults and alleged school board cover-up.
The story traces back to May 28, 2021, when a 15-year-old male student forced a girl to commit sex acts at Stone Bridge High School. The same student went on to sexually assault another girl in the girls’ restroom at Broad Run High School on Oct. 6. The Loudoun County Juvenile Court had found the perpetrator “not innocent” of charges of forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio. The student also pleaded “no contest” to charges of abduction and sexual battery on Oct. 6.
Then-Superintendent Ziegler said in a June 22, 2021, school board meeting that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.” After that statement, Scott Smith, the May 28 victim’s father, spoke out and was arrested and eventually convicted on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. (Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, would go on to issue a complete pardon to Smith after he won election campaigning on parental rights.)
The assailant avoided the sex offender registry and Smith blamed Biberaj for allowing it to happen.
“We were always concerned that Ms. Biberaj would not vigorously protect our daughter and seek justice for her and the other victims throughout the court proceeding,” Smith said in January 2022. “And, it now appears that our fears have been proven true by her utter failure to follow even the most basic statutory procedures required to ensure that our daughter’s predator would be placed on the Virginia Sex Offender Registry list.”
In December 2022, a special grand jury released a separate report on Loudoun County Public Schools’ handling of the 15-year-old “gender-fluid” student’s multiple alleged sexual assaults.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, requested the grand jury in April. Loudoun County residents on the grand jury panel heard from over 40 witnesses and examined over 100 pieces of evidence.
The grand jury’s report states that Loudoun County Public Schools “failed at every juncture” and that the school system “as an organization tends to avoid managing difficult situations by not addressing them fully.”
The panel also suggested unsuccessfully that the report be released to the public, to provide as much information as possible.
Ian Prior, a Loudoun County father and parental rights advocate, celebrated the apparent ouster of Biberaj, Ziegler, and the entire 2021 school board on Tuesday. He also noted that Ziegler had been convicted of retaliation in a special education teacher’s firing, and that Smith and his wife filed a $30 million Title IX lawsuit against Loudoun County Public Schools.
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Iowa Governor Explains How Hawkeye State Won School Choice Revolution
“I truly believe that school choice will make the most consequential change for our education system in decades,” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds says.
The Heritage Foundation feted the state of Iowa in Des Moines on Thursday for the state’s dramatic rise on Heritage’s Education Freedom Report Card after a flurry of reforms.
In January, Reynolds, a Republican, signed the Students First Act into law, creating education savings accounts for K-12 students in the state. By June, some 29,025 students had applied for the program.
Not only that, she signed into law a parental rights bill that prohibits instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in K-6 public schools and prohibits school libraries from having sexually explicit materials on bookshelves.
“For making these groundbreaking reforms, the Hawkeye State won The Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Education Freedom Award,” wrote Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Lindsey Burke, director of Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, in a column for the Washington Examiner. “Due to the new laws pertaining to transparency, teacher freedom, and school choice, Iowa jumped an impressive 13 spots on Heritage’s Education Freedom Report Card relative to the state’s 2022 standing—the largest improvement of any state in the country.”
Reynolds spoke at the Heritage Report Card Honors Event and explained how her state rose so quickly in the rankings.
“I’m extremely proud of the work that we’ve done in recent years to ensure that every student in our state has an equal opportunity to succeed in school and life,” she said.
Reynolds explained that the success of education reform in the state was the product of many different groups, including conservative legislators and school choice advocates, particularly parents.
“Because of that collective effort, nearly 19,000 students in Iowa were approved this fall,” she said.
Reynolds noted that when she was raising her own children, she wasn’t worried that what they would be taught in school would run counter to her beliefs. If there were concerns, she said, the schools were responsive in addressing the problem.
“It’s truly concerning to see how far we’ve drifted off course in just the last few years,” the Iowa governor said.
She explained that children across the country have been dealing with massive learning deficiencies due to widespread COVID-19 lockdowns in other states. During this time of mass online learning, Reynolds said, many parents learned that what was happening in classrooms was actually counterproductive.
“The reality is that COVID simply pulled back the curtain on issues that had fueled, I think, behind the scenes for years by some of the teachers unions, by higher education, and progressive activists,” she said.
The American public school system failed children when it should have provided the “stability and calm during the storm” in a time of crisis, Reynolds said, and that led to swift changes.
She provided an overview of the significant changes made in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. After an initial school choice bill failed, Reynolds said, she and the state Legislature continued to push hard for transformational change:
We successfully enacted a lot of other things, like laws to expand open enrollment, laws to remove restrictions on voluntary transfers from high-poverty school districts—really, to encourage charter school startups, so we started to move in that direction.
We expanded the tax credit benefits to up to 75% of every dollar that was donated to the school tuition organizations to help more families afford private tuition, to make that choice of where they wanted to send their child. We [also] banned critical race theory.
With those changes, Reynolds said, Iowa’s “education crusade for freedom was under way.”
Iowa jumped up from No. 22 on the 2022 Heritage Education Report Card to No. 9. Reynolds said she’s happy with the improvement, but wants to keep improving the state’s school system so it can catch up to that of Florida, which was ranked No. 1.
“We have [Florida] in our sights. You know, we’ve gained 13 spots. We’re going to be in the top five, if not higher next year, right? No. 1, we’re coming after you,” she said.
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The root cause of the insanity on college campuses is older than you may think
Americans are finally catching on that the oppressor-oppressed narrative being taught in our schools and universities is not a conspiracy theory disseminated by conservatives. It’s real. Jewish students having to barricade themselves in a college to escape a mob in Manhattan, of all places, has opened people’s eyes to the threat woke ideology represents to civilization.
Too bad it took a grotesque massacre and mass rapes in the Holy Land to do it. But now that we have people’s attention, let’s connect the dots.
The oppressor-oppressed worldview that paints democratic Israel as the "oppressor" and Palestinian terrorists as the "oppressed," so prevalent on college campuses, is pure Marxism.
In the first page of "The Communist Manifesto" of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explain that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." They add:
"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
Capitalism and democracy are based on competition, but competition requires compromise and that gives each side something.
In the economic sphere, buyer and seller haggle over a price (or in most cases, millions of buyers and sellers known abstractly as "the market" do) to come up with a "market-clearing price" that allows buyer and seller to walk away with some measure of satisfaction.
In a democracy, one party or side seldom gets all it wants. And if the system is correctly structured, as the founders strived to do with the American system of government, there are checks and balances. The legislature, the executive, and the judiciary check each other’s powers (and the legislature itself is divided into two chambers).
Not so in Marx’s "oppressor and oppressed" view. There you end up with a "revolutionary reconstitution," which Marx himself promised would be ruthless. "This cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads," he averred in the manifesto.
A few months later, Marx wrote, more ominously, "There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."
Blood will run – it’s a feature, not a bug, of Marxism.
College students fighting against antisemitism on campusVideo
What we are seeing right now is no longer economic Marxism, but cultural Marxism. In 1888, Engels added a footnote to the Manifesto’s first page which explained the two classes that were contending.
"By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live."
The problem was that, as Marxists from the end of World War I in 1918 to the 1960s were able to document, the actual proletariat had very little interest in "revolutionary reconstitution of society at large." In the 1920s in Europe, and in the 1960s here in America, they wanted better working conditions, and maybe a week or two at the beach every year.
But they didn’t want to "abolish" the family, the nation state, property or God, as Marx had called for. In fact, they wanted to become richer and move up a class. It turned out that Marx had never spent much time with actual workers, and didn’t understand them. He was the original limousine Marxist.
In the 1960s, the Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse derided the workers for being such bad revolutionaries. "They find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment," wrote the despairing Marcuse.
But then Marcuse witnessed the riots of the 1960s, and wrote that – in his words – the revolution would come from the "ghetto population." The vanguard of the revolution, he added, would therefore have to come from "the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and the persecuted of other races and other colors."
Since then, the revolutionary locus has been placed not in economic classes, but in cultural identities.
Marx had written in 1859 that revolutions would inevitably come when "the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production." But Antonio Gramsci, one of Marcuse’s cultural Marxist precursors, added in 1930s that "popular beliefs and similar ideas are themselves material forces."
NY college refuses to condemn antisemitism Video
Eric Mann, the former Weatherman terrorist who recruited BLM founder Patrisse Cullors at the age of 17 to train her into Marxism, later added: "Given the social formation of the U.S. as a settler state based on virulent white supremacy, the racialization of all aspects of political life operates as a material force in itself."
That’s how we get from economic Marxism to the mess we have today on U.S. campuses. "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," for example, the Marxist tract penned by Paulo Freire, has "achieved near-iconic status in America's teacher-training programs," according to Sol Stern.
Many of us have been explaining for years, in books, papers, op-eds, media interviews, and speeches, that what we are seeing is "cultural Marxism." That, too, has been dismissed. Google "cultural Marxism" and the very first entry is a Wikipedia page that informs the reader that "The term ‘Cultural Marxism’ refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory."
They’ll have a harder time hiding the truth now.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/root-cause-insanity-college-campuses-older-think ?
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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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