Teachers See Progress, Conservative Parents See Racism. The Battle for Public Education Arrives in Red America

Ryan Mills

The news that a new social-equity course was being planned at Highlands High School in Fort Thomas, Ky., first started bouncing around Facebook early this spring.

A proposed syllabus was leaked online. Students who signed up for the elective course would “develop awareness and engage in constructive discussion about social justice and diversity issues,” it read. They would learn about “the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and sexuality,” and begin to “create an action plan for future social change.”

Guest speakers were being lined up. The students would watch Dave Chappelle’s “8:46” YouTube special, where the comedian engages in a frank and explicit conversation about American racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police last summer.

There would be “required textbooks” – Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility – that for this class students would be asked to buy, with the hope that “these books will stay with you as a reminder of the work that we (society) need to do.”

The battle lines were drawn. There were dueling petitions for and against the class. And as has happened repeatedly in schools nationwide, parents and community members quickly retreated to their respective ideological camps.

To opponents of the course, it was apparent this was an attempt to inject critical race theory into the school, even if the syllabus doesn’t specifically mention it. “Anyone who believes this particular course is not critical race theory doesn’t understand what critical race theory is,” said Maggie McCluskey, a mom who helped lead the opposition to the class.

To supporters of the course, the opponents were flaunting their white privilege and trying to whitewash American history. “Many critics want to shroud themselves in the European fairytale that downplays the role of slavery and racism in our country’s foundation,” wrote Bonnie Jean Feldkamp, a newspaper columnist and Fort Thomas native who in May attended a packed community meeting about the proposed course.

The Kentucky case is emblematic of the cultural battles raging across the country in American schools, both public and private. While much of the attention has focused on schools on the liberal coasts or in big progressive cities, groups such as Parents Defending Education have noted that in many cases, like in Fort Thomas, the battles are raging in conservative communities in red states, including Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

Georgia isn’t in line with the MLB’s values. But Cuba and China are?

Marc Thiessen

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced last Friday that “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft” away from Atlanta. Apparently, Georgia’s new election law — whose net effect, The Post’s Fact Checker blog found, “was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them” — was such a violation of baseball’s values that the exhibition game could not be played there.

But apparently it wasn’t a violation of baseball’s values to hold an exhibition game in 2016 in Havana between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team. In an interview with ESPN during that game, Manfred exulted how Cuba is “a place where we would want to play regularly” and that “at a minimum” he’d like to start playing regular-season games in Havana, and eventually have an MLB team based on the Communist island. “Baseball could be significant in terms of driving the economy and development here in Cuba,” he said.

It didn’t seem to bother Manfred that Cuba has long been home to one of the world’s most brutal and repressive dictatorships. He pulled MLB out of Georgia because he said that baseball “opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” Well, according to the State Department’s human rights report released last month, “Cuba remains a one-party system in which the Communist Party is the only legal political party,” voting is “neither free nor fair nor competitive” and “specialized units of the [Ministry of Interior’s] state security branch are responsible for monitoring, infiltrating, and suppressing independent political activity.” The regime engages in “extrajudicial killings, by the government; forced disappearance by the government; torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of political dissidents, detainees, and prisoners by security forces; … [and] arbitrary arrests and detentions.”

Just two days before the 2016 game in Havana, hundreds of regime thugs attacked and arrested peaceful protesters known as the Ladies in White as they were leaving a Palm Sunday Mass. Raúl Castro’s secret police pounced on the women as they chanted “Freedom! Freedom!” and “half-dragged, half-carried them to waiting buses,” The Post reported. As the women were arrested, an organized pro-regime crowd hurled insults and chanted “This is Fidel’s street!” Indeed, the Cuban regime carried out 526 political detentions in the first two weeks of March leading up to the game. But Manfred did not cancel the game in protest. Apparently playing baseball in the Castro family’s tropical gulag is perfectly consistent with baseball’s “values as a sport.”

What else is consistent with baseball’s values? The same week that MLB decided to leave Georgia, the league also announced a deal with Tencent, the Communist Party-linked Chinese telecommunications firm, to broadcast MLB All-Star Games as well as spring training, regular season and playoff games in Asia through 2023. In 2019, Tencent blocked the streaming of all NBA games featuring the Houston Rockets after the team’s general manager expressed support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Tencent is also the owner of the WeChat app, which is helping the Communist regime build a vast repository of data about Chinese citizens that the State Department said in 2019 forms “a foundation of technology-facilitated surveillance and social control.” So under Manfred’s leadership, Major League Baseball is willing to get in bed with a regime that brutally suppresses freedom in Hong Kong and carries out genocide against Uyghur Muslims — including the use of Uyghur slave labor and the systematic rape and forced sterilization of Uyghur women — but refuses to play an All-Star Game in Georgia.

READ ENTIRE COLUMN

Cancel culture is erasing history – and America

 

Now they're canceling cartoons. They're cartoons, people!

But that's what leftists do and have done for over a century.

It began with Woodrow Wilson's desire to rewrite the Constitution. His reasoning was that it was a fine document for its time, but was no longer applicable to the concerns of the day. You could say he was the father of modern-day cancel culture.

...Since then, the left has evolved, or devolved, into what we see today, a movement bent on asserting that all past American culture is offensive, isolating it – and little by little, step by step, erasing it from history until there's nothing left.

It used to be that we on the right were afraid that the left wanted to spin or change history – for example, that it wasn't the Democrats who were the party of slavery, Jim Crow and the Klan, that they've always advocated for people of color.

It was a win for them for sure, but the truth may eventually come out because the history is still there for anyone to find if they are so inclined. In other words, the history wasn't erased.

However, it appears that the left has learned this lesson. It appears they've figured out that it's more effective and a lot quicker to just cancel history, erase it, wipe it away, rather then take many decades to change and spin history.

The statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, was torn down in 2017 – less than four years ago. How far we've come just since then.

Tearing down statues and monuments, canceling the Confederacy – this was a logical beginning of the cancel culture movement.

Pick something easy and obvious that no one, or very few, would oppose. Get the people used to the idea of declaring something offensive and canceling it. Just haul it away and treat it as if it never existed. It's classic totalitarian leftism.

And it's the slippery slope we've been warning of. They knew there would little outrage – little push-back, which allowed them to crest the top of the slippery slope. And once over the crest, the hard part is done; it's all downhill from there.

Simultaneously, they've done a bang-up job of convincing the average American that there is no such thing as a slippery slope, and that whoever believes, or worse, verbalizes it, is a right-wing conspiracy nut, which further limits push-back. No one ever said these people are stupid – just evil.

But now we are well over the crest. So it's full steam ahead. Cancel everything from the consequential to the trivial.

It's on to Dr. Seuss and children's movies. Like other totalitarian regimes have understood throughout history, it's critical to indoctrinate the children, to get them while their young, impressionable and have no sense of historical context.

Or better yet, just remove "offensive" material – wipe it away like it never existed...

If this cancel culture trend continues, within a generation, the children of today will barely know of Dr. Seuss, or the majority of classic Disney movies like "Peter Pan," "Dumbo," "The Aristocats" and "Swiss Family Robinson" – and, I'm sure, many more to come.

And if we don't stand up against it, we will lose what it means to an American. We will lose our unique and rich American history, and may end up looking more like North Korea, where history begins with the first Great Leader.

READ ENTIRE POST

Or if you prefer, listen to the column here.