President Trump delivered the keynote address to the CPAC audience today. It was widely watched by those interested in how the 2022 primary season is shaping up. Without a Trump endorsement, it’s unlikely any GOP candidate can win.
Update: As expected Google banned the speech.
Rumble Link to Video and embed here:
If you added the election fraud in Atlanta (GA), Clark County (NV), Maricopa County (AZ), Cook County (IL) and Wayne County (MI) together, you would only have a quarter of the election fraud that exists in Philadelphia. That is the scale of historic, generationally evident, fraud in Philadelphia county.
That is also the context for why any attempt to audit Philadelphia will become a cataclysmic battleground.
The revolutionary battles of Lexington and Concord will almost equate in modern significance if the people who live in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania can pull this off and stand victorious.
Everyone knows Philly is massively corrupt, even the most hardened Democrats will admit they know it; but no-one knows the exact scale of that Democrat corruption that has controlled Philadelphia County elections for decades; and an independent forensic ballot audit would reveal it.
That scale of known Philadelphia ballot fraud is exactly why the Acting Secretary of State in Pennsylvania, Veronica W. Degraffenreid, has issued a state-wide directive seeking to block any Pennsylvania legislative attempt to audit the 2020 election results [pdf LINK].
The law is on the side of the legislature. The PA Senate has the power and legal authority, but Governor Wolf, Secretary of State Degraffenreid and State Attorney General Josh Shapiro just don’t care.
They can, and will, lose every court battle and still they will not comply.
Senator Doug Mastriano responds: [Twitter Link and Rumble Link] Mastriano knows of the power of the Legislature to oversee elections and conduct investigations to serve that constitutional purpose. Mastriano knows the law is on his side.
Joe Biden is responding to the Pennsylvania Senate likely conducting a forensic audit of Philadelphia ballots by urgently traveling to the city of brotherly love on Tuesday July 13th. Other than the original announcement the White House has not announced any details.
Perhaps it would be remarkable to see several thousands of people in the tri-state area show up to express their voice. It would appear there is plenty of time to organize some grassroots activity.
Then again, perhaps a large scale response from voters is exactly why the White House is keeping the details of the trip quiet.
Thousands of Cubans took part in rare protests Sunday against the communist government, marching through a town chanting "Down with the dictatorship" and "We want liberty."
The protest in San Antonio de los Banos, a town of some 50,000 people southwest of Havana, came as Cuba is experiencing its toughest phase yet of the coronavirus epidemic, the same day it reported a new daily record of infections and deaths.
Some of the demonstrators, mainly young people, shouted insults against President Miguel Diaz-Canel who turned up at the event, according to amateur videos posted online, while others proclaimed: "We are not afraid."
Social anger has been driven by long food lines and a critical shortage of medicines since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic, with Cuba under US sanctions.
The country of 11.2 million people was left relatively unscathed in the first months of the outbreak, but has seen a recent hike in infections and a new record of 6,923 daily cases reported Sunday and 47 deaths for a total of 1,537.
"These are alarming numbers which are increasing daily," said Francisco Duran, head of epidemiology in the health ministry.
Under hashtags such as #SOSCuba, calls for assistance have multiplied on social media, with citizens and rap stars alike urging the government to make it possible for much-needed foreign donations to enter the country.
An opposition group on Saturday called for the creation of a "humanitarian corridor," an initiative the government rejected by saying Cuba was not a conflict zone.
Ernesto Soberon, a foreign affairs official, denounced a "campaign" he said sought to "portray an image of total chaos in the country which does not correspond to the situation."
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210711-thousands-join-rare-anti-government-protests-in-cuba
No bad idea ever dies. That is the mournful lesson we are being taught daily by the partisans of so-called “critical race theory,” the disciples of “equity,” and the shock troops of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. There are some local differences, of course—differences of fashion and vocabulary, mostly—but to a large extent the present radicalisms are a reprise of the radicalisms of the 1960s, which in turn were recapitulations of the radicalisms of the French Revolution filtered through the argot of Marxism.
Perhaps the biggest difference between our situation now, circa 2021, and the long decade of the 1960s is the extent to which, this time around, corporate culture and the entrenched bureaucrats who run the institutions of our federal, state, and local governments are there on the barricades helping to destroy the very civilization whose survival they had been entrusted to preserve.
Back in 1991, in his book The Disuniting of America, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote that “A cult of ethnicity has arisen both among non-Anglo whites and among nonwhite minorities to denounce the idea of a melting pot, to challenge the concept of ‘one people,’ and to protect, promote, and perpetuate separate ethnic and racial communities.” That could have been written about Ibram X. Kendi, this season’s favorite race hustler and conspicuous anti-American beneficiary of the American free market.
Kendi is part of a larger movement to institute the poison of racialist ideology into the supporting institutions of the United States—its schools and colleges, the workplace, even in government bureaucracies and the military. But what Schlesinger said about earlier iterations of the demand for “multiculturalism” are true of what Kendi and his acolytes are attempting. “[T]he debate about the curriculum,” Schlesinger pointed out, “is a debate about what it means to be an American.”
Over the last few decades, we have heard ad nauseam litanies denouncing Western civilization as inextricably racist, sexist, elitist, and patriarchal. We have watched college administrators promulgate speech codes that undermine the culture of free expression and open debate on (and even off) campus. And we have stood by as history has been rewritten in an effort to soothe artificially inflamed ethnic or sexual sensitivities. Once largely confined to the academy, these forces have escaped into the wild and threaten to transform the defining fabric of American society.
Implicit in the politicizing mandate of multiculturalism is an attack on the idea of a common culture, the idea that, despite our many differences, we hold in common an intellectual, artistic, and moral legacy, descending largely from the Greeks and the Bible, supplemented and modified over the centuries by innumerable contributions from diverse hands and peoples. It is this legacy that has given us our science, our political institutions, and the rich and various monuments of artistic and cultural achievement that define us as a civilization.
Pace the partisans of radical multiculturalism, Western civilization, far from being a narrow ideology, is a capacious register of human achievement, embracing everything from the lyrics of Sappho and the philosophy of Aristotle to the works of Dante, Bach, Newton, Locke, Jane Austen, James Madison, and T. S. Eliot. Indeed, it is this legacy, insofar as we live up to it, that preserves us from chaos and barbarism. And it is precisely this legacy that the multiculturalist wishes to dispense with. Either he claims that the Western tradition is merely one heritage among many—and therefore that it deserves no special allegiance inside the classroom or out of it—or he denies the achievements of the West altogether.
The sources of the multicultural animus against the West are various. In its more radical versions, multiculturalism explicitly denies the ideal of the United States as an integrated society in which peoples of different races, creeds, and ethnic backgrounds can live together in a state of social harmony. The multiculturalist replaces the traditional integrationist image of our society with the ethnically and racially divisive image of the United States as a kind of salad or mosaic: a potpourri of essentially unassimilable elements.
Despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary, the multiculturalist scorns the motto E Pluribus Unum—out of many heritages, one society—in order to bolster ethnic, racial, or class-oriented fiefdoms. It follows that the multiculturalist will also have little patience with the idea of universal humanity. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke for this idea with his famous declaration that what matters was not our skin color but the “content” of our character. Black Lives Matter, as its very name suggests, turns King’s teaching on its head. That’s why the alternative motto—“All Lives Matter”—was rejected as unacceptable.
Corresponding to the attack on the idea of a common culture is a rejection of the idea of a common humanity. The multiculturalist, the partisan of critical race theory, and the proponent of Black Lives Matter reject the idea that our identity as human beings transcends our membership in a particular class, race, or gender. On the contrary, for them what is important is not what binds us together but what separates us. And what separates us—be it gender, ethnicity, class, or race—is used as a totem to confer the coveted status of victimhood upon certain approved groups.
Again, it’s a matter of what the philosopher Yogi Berra called “déjà-vu all over again.” Today, every “woke” advertisement or television commercial must feature blacks, whites must be portrayed as evil, bumbling, or both, and both the curriculum and history itself must be revised in support of the new racialist agenda. A couple of decades back, we had the same teaching in different clothes. Today we talk about “critical race theory” or the “1619 Project.” Then, “Afrocentrism” was all the rage.
The basic contention of Afrocentrism is that Western culture is largely a bastardization of African, and especially Egyptian, culture, which in a highly innovative piece of ethnography is said to have been predominantly black. Consequently, black Americans—sometimes referred to as “diasporan African people”—are enjoined to discard “the preponderant Eurocentric myths of universalism, objectivity, and classical traditions” and reclaim their proper intellectual, cultural, and spiritual legacy by returning to African sources.
What might be left of culture after dispensing with “universalism, objectivity, and classical traditions”—in other words, with rationality, science, and history—is never really discussed because the truly radical nature of the enterprise is never admitted publicly.
As with the 1619 Project, whose fundamental contentions are that America was founded as a “slavocracy” and that the Revolutionary War was fought primarily to preserve the institution of slavery, the teachings of Afrocentrism are beyond satire. In its simplest terms, the doctrine of “Afrocentrism” claims that many of the great achievements of classical civilization were stolen from black Africa. It is the belief of Afrocentrists that Greek philosophy and science and political theory were largely pilfered from African sources. A subsidiary claim is that many famous historical figures—Socrates and Cleopatra, for example—were black.
How could the world have labored for centuries in ignorance of such monumental cultural pillage? According to the Afrocentrists, it was no accident. They claim that the black African contribution to world history has been systematically covered up by a white conspiracy to deny the black race its place in the sun, as it were.
Old Testament history is conveniently rewritten to portray the ancient Hebrews as guests, not slaves, of the Egyptian pharaohs. It is suggested that the “so-called Pythagorean theorem” was discovered—like just about everything else—by the ancient Egyptians. One influential Afrocentrist text even includes a section on ancient “Egyptian Metallurgy and Electrical Engineering.” Greek philosophy, we are supposed to believe, was plagiarized from black African Egypt (Plato and Aristotle, it turns out, are figures of derision for Afrocentrists) and, more generally, that “all Western knowledge is a corruption of Egyptian, i.e., black African thought, and must therefore be junked.”
In its extreme forms, anyway, Afrocentrism reminds one of nothing more than Evelyn Waugh’s portrait, in his novel Scoop, of the Consul-General from the fictional African country of Ishmaelia haranguing a passerby in Hyde Park:
‘Who built the Pyramids?’ cried the Ishmaelite orator. ‘A Negro. Who invented the circulation of the blood? A Negro. Ladies and gentlemen, . . . Who discovered America? . . . As that great Negro Karl Marx has so nobly written . . . Africa for the African worker, Europe for the African worker, Asia, Oceania, America, Arctic and Antarctica for the African worker.’
Instead of being a novelist’s wicked parody of certain fringe elements, the movement for Afrocentrism, of which the 1619 Project and critical race theory are lineal descendants, was an influential ideology that was insinuated into the curricula of high schools and colleges across the country.
There is something grimly ironic about the spectacle of our new multiculturalists using ethnocentrism as a stick with which to beat the West. After all, both the idea and the critique of ethnocentrism are quintessentially Western.
There has never in history been a society more open to other cultures than our own; nor has any tradition been more committed to self-criticism than the Western tradition: the figure of Socrates endlessly inviting self-scrutiny and rational explanation is a definitive image of the Western spirit.
Moreover, “Western” science is not exclusively Western: it is science plain and simple—yes, it is “universal” science—which, though nurtured and developed in the West, is as true for the inhabitants of the Nile Valley as it is for the denizens of New York. That is why, outside the precincts of the humanities departments of Western universities, there is a mad dash to acquire Western science and technology. The deepest foolishness of multiculturalism shows itself in the puerile attacks it mounts on the cogency of scientific rationality, epitomized poignantly by the Afrocentrist who flips on his computer and downloads material from the internet in order to write books decrying the parochial nature of Western science and extolling the virtues of the “African way.”
The potentially good news is that the outlandish and destructive nature of our new racialist cavalcade may now be calling forth a sort of Thermidorian reaction. In the French Revolution, a turning point came when the populace rebelled against Robespierre and his Committee on Public Safety. They had endeavored to institute their own vision of virtue on French society in one of the most radical societal transformations ever attempted. The inherited names of the months were cashiered and replaced by ones more agreeable to the new paganism. Time itself was recast, as the calendar was reset to the year zero. The Terror claimed the heads of thousands, even as traditional French institutions, from the Church to the monarchy, were destroyed or recast beyond recognition. But all that came to a grinding halt when the populace woke up and began to fight back against the tyranny and insanity that had descended upon French society.
Perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of something similar in American society. All across the country, school boards attempting to insinuate the teachings of critical race theory or the 1619 Project are being confronted by battalions of angry parents who do not want their children taught that all whites are evil, that America is inextricably racist, that the free market is exploitative, and that blacks must be given preferential treatment in school and in the workplace.
Bad ideas never die, but their rebirths reliably are met—eventually—by critics who call attention to the emperor’s nakedness and, by so doing, dispel the mesmerizing and malevolent illusion that, just yesterday, had us in its grip.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that “eventually” can be a very long time indeed.
To quote that famous American philosopher Rodney King: "I just want to say – you know – can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?"
Article by Andrew W. Coy in The American Thinker
America must be a colorblind nation, one that does not obsess about skin color or use it as the measure for judging a person. Only in that way can we survive as a unified people. Unfortunately, after fifty years of elevating a colorblind nation, Democrats are again insisting that we must judge people solely by their skin color. Even worse, many now believe that hatred and violence are warranted against others based on color differences. This trend is extremely dangerous to our future.
Aside from race hustlers at home, America’s enemies – e.g., China, Iran, and Russia – are the only ones benefiting from this new “tribalism.” If Americans are fighting each other, they have little time, energy, and effort to fight against geopolitical foes. We must hope that the left’s identity politics do not prove that both Lincoln and Khrushchev were correct when each predicted that, if America were to fall, it would fall from within.
After World War II, people of faith, the same people who had once been on the abolition frontlines, refocused their energy on the sin of racism. Dr. Billy Graham preached that racism is a sin against God. For him, segregation was antithetical in God’s church. Famously, in 1952, while in Jackson, Mississippi, he pulled down the ropes himself that separated the White Christians from the Black Christians at his revival.
Beginning in the 1960s, and with a powerful effect, Dr. Martin Luther King famously used his faith as both sword and shield as he fought against racial injustice. As did Dr. Graham, he understood that judging people by race is a sin against both God and man. He did not want to be treated better or give more rights, just equal rights. His famous dream that his children should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” became the clarion call for a color-blind society in America.
Both King and Graham were guided by Revelations 5:9, which states that Christ came for people “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” The message from these men affected Americans more than fifty years ago and, since that time – and. indeed, until quite recently -- Americans have been guided by that message, and have constantly worked to judge people by their words and actions, not their skin color.
Today, though, when Dr. King’s words calling for a color-blind America are considered racist, we have surely lost our way. This is both frightening and destructive.
The Democrats’ divisions, of course, go deeper than race, with people divided by sex, sexuality, and disability, among other things. This too is dangerous. Over one hundred years ago, in 1915, Teddy Roosevelt stated that America cannot become a hyphenated nation: “There is no room in this country for a hyphenated Americanism.”
While Roosevelt was speaking then of those claiming to be Irish-American, Italian-American, or Catholic-American, he saw how dangerous it was for Americans to categorize themselves by race, ethnicity, religion, and color. Add in gender and sexuality and the divisions begin to run very deep.
Many in America recognize the dangers attendant on having American’s first sense of identification hewing to ethnicity, race, color, religion, or language, rather than country. Indeed, the country in which they live almost becomes an after-thought to those other external factors.
Yugoslavia was once an apparently unified country under the Communist dictator Josip Tito. After Tito’s death, when his iron fist was removed, Yugoslavia violently separated itself by skin color, ethnicity, language, and religion, with ethnic cleansing, genocide and, predictably, millions of deaths. Eventually, peace came in the form of six little countries. Other than oppression, the people had no common denominator, no common cause, no common value system. Thus, the term “Balkanization.”
Looking at where the left is taking this country, many Americans rightly fear Balkanization here. The call for one culture, one flag, one country is being drowned out or aggressively silenced as leftists demand separate identities, pigmentations, and people. Moreover, in true totalitarian fashion, leftists encourage those in thrall to them to engage in violent retribution and to demand reparations.
The following list sets out ideas, values, beliefs, and facts about America that can all simultaneously be true. They speak to our greatness and our errors, but most importantly to our shared values, values the left despises:
Those who trade in race-baiting and who profit from America’s newfound “tribalism” are leading us down a very dangerous path. As all revolutionaries have discovered, events quickly spin out of control and revolutions have a habit of “eating their own.
If we go in the opposite direction of a revolution -- if we pull together as one -- we can accomplish so much. The leftists’ foolish divide and conquer strategy means we are almost certainly destined for the ash heap of history.
We must not let Lincoln’s warning or Khrushchev’s boast prove correct. While some Americans may be Lenin’s famous “useful idiots,” our enemies are no fools. They profit from, and therefore help foment, our dissension. A divided nation falls more easily than a unified one and a democracy must die when it breaks into fighting tribal factions. Our enemies know this. Meanwhile...Dr. King and Dr. Graham weep.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/resisting_the_lefts_push_to_balkanize_america.html
The latest defense for teaching our children to be racially divisive? It’s free speech!
Last week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by commentators David French, Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Jason Stanley, who presented themselves as a heroic “cross-partisan group of thinkers.”
They derided as “un-American” laws passed by states such as Texas, Florida, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas and New Hampshire that prohibit public schools from promoting the core principles of critical race theory, including race essentialism, collective guilt and state-sanctioned discrimination.
These authors imagine themselves the steady hand in a grandiose morality play, defending liberal-democratic freedoms against the threat of illiberalism, wherever it comes from.
But in practice, they are enablers of the worst ideologies of the Left and would leave American families defenseless against them. Their three core arguments — that critical race theory restrictions violate “free speech,” that state legislatures should stay out of the “marketplace of ideas,” and that citizens should pursue civil-rights litigation instead — are all hollow to the core.
In reality, they would usher in the concrete tyrannies of critical race theory, which explicitly seeks to subvert the principles of individual rights and equal protection under the law. Despite the superficial ideological differences between the four authors, they serve a single function: to prevaricate, stall and run interference for critical race theory’s blitz through American institutions.
The authors’ primary error is framing the debate as a question about free speech. This is bizarre. The First Amendment was designed to protect citizens from the government, not to protect the government from citizens.
Public schools, which have the power of compulsion, are pushing toxic racial theories onto children, teaching them that they should be judged on the basis of race and must atone for historical crimes committed by members of their racial group.
Critical race theorists, of course, have the right to express their beliefs as individuals, but voters and taxpayers are not obligated to subsidize their speech and include it in the public school curriculum.
After all, the public education system is not a “marketplace of ideas”; it is a state-run monopoly with the power of force. Even under the most dogmatic libertarian philosophy, monopoly conditions justify, even require, government intervention.
The anti-critical race theory bills do not restrict teaching and inquiry about the history of racism; they restrict indoctrination, abusive pedagogies and state-sanctioned racism.
In Idaho, for example, the law tells public schools they cannot “compel students to personally affirm, adopt or adhere to” noxious ideas, such as one race “is inherently superior or inferior” or that an individual “should be adversely treated on the basis of race.”
The Times op-ed authors, however, make the case that the public must not interfere directly in public institutions, even those that promote state-sanctioned racism. They argue that anti-critical race theory legislation constitutes a “speech code” and that any such limitations on the public school curriculum “threaten” democracy itself.
But isn’t some kind of speech restriction inevitable, even obligatory, in public schools?
Or do state educators have the right to promote any ideology they desire — say, for example, eugenics or gay conversion therapy — immune from legislative restriction?
During a recent conversation on the Bari Weiss podcast, I asked co-author David French a simple question to test the implications of his theory: If a public school adopted a Klan-sponsored curriculum that promoted racial superiority theory, would he support or oppose state legislation to ban it?
He ducked the question — and, when confronted on social media, Kmele Foster and Thomas Chatterton Williams also refused to answer. But the application of this principle to school curricula still remains, and there seem to be three possible answers: First, they could support a ban, in which case their disagreement on the critical race theory ban would be partisan, not principled; or second, they could oppose a ban, which would be internally consistent, but atrocious on moral and practical grounds — a state should absolutely prohibit public schools from promoting Klan ideology.
In the Bari Weiss podcast and in the Times op-ed, French and his colleagues appear to take a third position: They claim that many of the practices of critical race theory are already illegal under federal civil-rights law and, therefore, new legislation is unnecessary.
This might be true as a matter of pure legal theory, but in reality, thousands of public schools are already engaging in these abusive practices and most parents do not have the resources to file a federal civil-rights lawsuit at every infraction — and the Biden administration has dropped all enforcement against critical race theory in public education, eliminating another avenue of protection.
After they took heat on social media, they also silently scrubbed their entire headline. The premise of the piece was that the authors were brave heterodox truth-tellers—but they caved immediately under pressure. pic.twitter.com/WDBLsPcwnV
— Christopher F. Rufo(@realchrisrufo) July 9, 2021
The status quo puts an extreme burden on individual families, while shielding public school from democratic oversight and accountability. This position, presented as a principled third way, is an illusion: It might make for a compelling law-review article, but in practice, it will move the country further down the path of racial abuse in the classroom, affording parents no recourse except for the abstract satisfaction that, in the mind of some intellectuals, these practices are already illegal.
The difference between these two approaches — action and nonaction — is significant. With state prohibitions on critical race theory indoctrination, schools have clear guidance about their curricula and families have immediate recourse.
If teachers are pushing divisive racial theories in the classroom, parents can point to a clear, specific legal statute and force the school into compliance; if that fails, they can appeal to state attorneys general or state superintendents, who can immediately enforce the law.
With the French-Foster-Williams-Stanley approach of maintaining the status quo, schools can continue to promote race essentialism, collective guilt and racial superiority theory, and parents would be obligated to file an expensive, multiyear federal lawsuit to challenge these programs in the courts one by one, with no guarantee of success.
In the end, state legislation tilts the playing field in favor of parents; the status quo tilts the playing field in favor of bureaucrats, lawyers, and diversity officers.
Is it possible that these writers simply aren’t aware of the illiberal nature of critical race theory? In a word, no.
David French, in particular, should know better. In 2012, he denounced critical race theory as a dangerous cult that enforced its orthodoxy with “vicious” harassment on the Harvard University campus; in 2017, he described it as “racial poison” that “leads to sheer cruelty and malice.”
In our recent podcast conversation, after I suggested that critical race theory was verging on hegemony within our institutions, he pushed back, arguing that if the critical theorists had truly achieved hegemony, our conversation would not have been possible — it would have been outlawed, censored, banned.
This is telling: French understands intuitively that critical race theory is a totalitarian ideology that, if it were to achieve absolute power, would immediately dismantle the liberal system, beginning with the right to free speech.
But French and his collaborators refuse to make the obvious connection. If critical race theory is “racial poison,” why allow it to seize control of our schools? If critical race theorists are “magnetic, preacher-like personalities” who seek totalitarian power, why defend them in the name of liberalism?
In practice, these writers have turned the Paradox of Tolerance into a farce. They cling to procedural arguments about phantom freedoms, while conceding substantive power to those who explicitly oppose Enlightenment rationalism, equality under the law, and the concept of rights itself.
As a result, they end up enabling the most intolerant voices in our society, who have shown no capacity for self-moderation.
At heart, they mistake protecting the status quo with protecting freedom — a lazy, not principled, position. If their ideas were to prevail, they would end up perverting the very values they claim to cherish: public school teachers forcing first-graders to denounce themselves as racists would become “free speech”; school diversity officers forcing students through race reeducation programs would become “academic freedom.”
And the ratchet only goes one way: They see no problem with states such as California, Oregon, Washington and Illinois mandating critical race theory in their state curricula and teacher-training programs; but if states such as Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho and New Hampshire prohibit it, all of a sudden, that is an “un-American” threat to “the expression of ideas.”
Luckily, the American public has infinitely more sense than the New York Times op-ed page. The revolt against critical race theory has inspired millions of parents to engage in the political process, protest at school board meetings, run for office, file lawsuits, and lobby state legislators to stop the madness through the rightful exercise of democratic power.
According to a recent YouGov/Economist poll, 64 percent of Americans now know about critical race theory, of which 58 percent view it unfavorably, including 72 percent of independents who believe including it in school curricula is “bad for America.”
These citizens understand implicitly that public schools are being devoured by a hostile ideology that seeks to divide the country by race and undermine the core principle of democratic control. They understand a simple truth, forgotten by the chattering class: In a democracy, voters get to decide how to shape, guide and restrict public institutions, especially those that have power over children.
The war against critical race theory is a war worth fighting — and, more importantly, a war worth winning. Naive libertarianism, as always, is a path to demoralization, empty gestures and, ultimately, defeat.
More than two dozen public schools and school districts across the country are recommending a book titled “Not My Idea” by Anastasia Higginbotham that suggests being white is a deal with the devil.
Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher F. Rufo found that the picture book (below) is being recommended for students as young as preschool age despite including passages such as, “Whiteness is a bad deal. It always was.”
On one page, a red-tailed devil made of money offers a “Contract Binding YOU to WHITENESS.”
“You get: stolen land, stolen, riches, special favors. WHITENESS gets: to mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of COLOR for the purpose of profit.”
The book, also recommended for students age 8 and up at the private Corlears School in Chelsea, presents a mother who “doesn’t see color” as wrong.
“Deep down, we all know color matters,” the book reads. “Skin color makes a difference
in how the world sees you and in how you see the world . . . It makes a difference in how much trouble seems to find you or let you be.”
