There's a major asterisk next to this one because William Arkin had <a href="https://twitter.com/OrinKerr/status/1557464955602890753">formerly claimed</a> at Newsweek that his sources told him AG Garland hadn't approved the Mar-a-Lago raid.


	And plenty of people got burned by that.


	This story claims that the FBI raid <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-sought-documents-trump-hoarded-years-including-about-russiagate-1734280">targeted </a>specific documents.

<blockquote>
	
		"The&nbsp;FBI&nbsp;raid on Mar-a-Lago last Monday was specifically intended to recover&nbsp;Donald Trump's personal "stash" of hidden documents, two high-level U.S. intelligence officials tell&nbsp;Newsweek.

	
		To justify the unprecedented raid on a former president's residence and protect the source who revealed the existence of Trump's private hoard, agents went into Trump's residence on the pretext that they were seeking&nbsp;all&nbsp;government documents, says one official who has been involved in the investigation. But the true target was this private stash, which Justice Department officials feared Donald Trump might weaponize."
</blockquote>


	According to Arkin, these documents involved Russiagate.

<blockquote>
	
		"The sought-after documents deal with a variety of intelligence matters of interest to the former president, the officials suggest—including material that Trump apparently thought would exonerate him of any claims of Russian collusion in 2016 or any other election-related charges."

	
		"Trump was particularly interested in matters related to the Russia hoax and the wrong-doings of the deep state," one former Trump official tells&nbsp;Newsweek. "I think he felt, and I agree, that these are facts that the American people need to know." The official says Trump may have been planning to use them as part of a 2024 run for the presidency.
</blockquote>


	Is it true? Who knows. Arkin's sources were wrong about Garland. And that's a very basic thing. But it would provide a certain motive power for the controversy. It would explain why Trump wanted certain documents and why the Biden administration might want to seize them.


	Of course just because something sounds plausible, doesn't mean that it's actually true.

Did FBI Raid Seek "Exonerating" Russiagate Materials?

There's a major asterisk next to this one because William Arkin had formerly claimed at Newsweek that his sources told him AG Garland hadn't approved the Mar-a

Did FBI Raid Seek "Exonerating" Russiagate Materials?

The engine of Holocaust denial is a desire to kill Jews. Otherwise why bother?


	There's a fringe of conspirazoids, the sorts of people who believe that the moon landing was faked,&nbsp;that UFOs can be found in your backyard, and that 9/11 was carried out by the NYPD, and that Bigfoot killed JFK who are attracted to Holocaust denial among the many other conspiracy theory options.&nbsp;But the big leagues of Holocaust denials are associated with Nazism and Communism because they both specialized in the extermination of Jews.


	The "Palestinian" cause is a toxic inbreeding of Nazis and Communists.


	The Muslim Brotherhood, key players in the Arab Revolt, got a lot of their techniques from the Nazis. And the Nazi influence was felt most strongly in Egypt. But the "Palestinian" cause was manufactured by the Soviet Union.


	Mahmoud Abbas, the current dictator-for-life of the PLO, got his <a href="https://www.jpost.com/opinion/abbass-untranslated-book-480751">Holocaust denial training</a> from the USSR. Abbas wrote it as a "student" in the Soviet Union as part of the&nbsp;Palestinian-Soviet Friendship Foundation which was itself <a href="http://www.thetower.org/article/how-holocaust-denial-shaped-mahmoud-abbas-worldview/">crossbred with Nazi propagand</a>a.

<blockquote>
	
		&nbsp;PA President Mahmoud Abbas is profoundly fascinated by Nazi propaganda and has employed it in his own writings, particularly in his doctoral dissertation on the subject of the Holocaust, “The Other Face: The Secret Connections Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement,” which he wrote in Moscow in 1982. Two years later, Abbas published a book based on his dissertation. It is written in Arabic and, tellingly, has never been translated into any other language.

	
		There is a reason for this: The book is inspired by and based on the work of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. While he was a fugitive in Argentina, Eichmann formulated and disseminated Nazi propaganda according to which the Holocaust was a Jewish-Nazi conspiracy that sacrificed Jewish lives in order to create a Jewish state in Palestine.&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	So what did the Germans really expect when they invited the head of a terror group responsible for the <a href="https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-714943">Munich Massacr</a>e?

<blockquote>
	
		At a news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Abbas was asked by a reporter whether he plans to apologize to Israel and Germany for the 1972 Munich massacre, ahead of its 50th anniversary. Eleven members of the Israeli delegation and a German police officer were murdered after members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, which was linked to&nbsp;Abbas’s Fatah party, took hostages at the Olympic Village on September 5, 1972.&nbsp;

	
		“If we want to go over the past, go ahead,” Abbas responded in Arabic. “I have 50 slaughters that Israel committed... 50 massacres, 50 slaughters, 50 holocausts,” saying the last word in English.

	
		While Scholz could be seen wincing at Abbas’s Holocaust reference, he did not immediately rebuke the Palestinian president, although he had earlier rejected his use of the word “apartheid” to describe Israeli policies.
</blockquote>


	Scholtz has since tepidly condemned Abbas' Holocaust denial.


	The debate about Holocaust denial is less important than the motive for it. Abbas responded to his role in the massacre of Jews with Holocaust denial. That's typical. It's the essence of the purpose that Holocaust denial is meant to serve.


	The "Palestinian" cause is about finishing the work that the Nazis began. It's why Hitler is so widely admired in the Palestinian Authority. "Palestinian" Holocaust denial, like most kinds, is about paving the way for justifying the future murder of Jews.

Abbas' Holocaust Denial Tour Hits Germany

The engine of Holocaust denial is a desire to kill Jews. Otherwise why bother?


	There's a fringe of conspirazoids, the sorts of people who believe that

Abbas' Holocaust Denial Tour Hits Germany

Here's the JTA&nbsp;very <a href="https://www.jta.org/2022/08/16/united-states/texas-school-district-orders-librarians-to-remove-a-version-of-anne-franks-diary-from-shelves">deliberately</a> pushing its political agenda of getting sexualized books to kids.

<blockquote>
	
		A school district in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, has ordered its librarians to remove an illustrated adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” from their shelves and digital libraries, along with the Bible and dozens of other books that were challenged by parents last year...

	
		“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation,”&nbsp;by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman and illustrator David Polonsky, is a 2019 illustrated adaptation of the bestselling diary by the teenage Holocaust victim.&nbsp;The New York Times called the book&nbsp;“so engaging and effective that it’s easy to imagine it replacing the [original] ‘Diary’ in classrooms and among younger readers.”&nbsp;

	
		The parental challenge against the book came in February, and the district initially dismissed it, Hawes said. Hawes, who is not Jewish, is on a list of parents who can be called in to serve on a committee to review book challenges.

	
		“When we got ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ we thought, ‘This is a joke.’ But it wasn’t,” Hawes said, adding that the complaint was that “the book shouldn’t be read without parent supervision.” She suspected that the parent may have objected to the unabridged diary’s references to female genitalia,&nbsp;same-sex attraction&nbsp;and&nbsp;other sexual matters, which&nbsp;have been deemed “pornographic” by parental challenges in the past. But she couldn’t be sure because the parent who challenged the book didn’t show up to the meeting.
</blockquote>


	This is not Anne Frank's diary.


	This is a comic book based on a version of the diary that neither Anne nor her father wanted published.


	I've written about the abuse of Anne Frank's legacy multiple times. There's the famous play that eliminated her Jewishness. There's also the 'unabridged' diary. This is material that Frank wrote when she was younger that she then got rid of. Her father respectfully edited the diary when he fulfilled her wish to have it published. After his death, the "unabridged" diary containing sexual materials that neither the dead girl nor her father wanted to publish was gleefully put out there.


	The material that parents objected to in&nbsp;“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation”, even assuming it's true to the unabridged version (I have no idea if it is) was also the material that Anne's older self censored and that her father got rid of. It doesn't belong in schools and shouldn't be in public view. It's an insult to her memory.


	Not everything people write as 13-year-olds should be out there. Nor should they be forced to live with it after death.&nbsp;


	The publishing interests pushing this claim that they have some moral right to dig up and publish material that Anne did not want out there for the "greater good".


	Getting it out of libraries and out of publication is a very good thing because it's effectively stolen material that was never meant for publication. It's no different than publishing sexual materials or photos of any other deceased person&nbsp;that they would have not wanted in the public realm.&nbsp;


	Exploiting the Holocaust to push a sexual agenda in schools is despicable. And using stolen writings from a murdered Jewish girl to do so is equally so.


	Anne Frank deserves better. So do our children.

This Version of Anne Frank's Diary Should Be Removed From Libraries

Here's the JTA&nbsp;very deliberately pushing its political agenda of getting sexualized books to kids.


	
		A school district in suburban Fort Worth,

This Version of Anne Frank's Diary Should Be Removed From Libraries

NY Gov Hochul Won't Lock Up Criminals, Will Ban Toy Guns

Toy guns don't kill people, violent criminals who aren't locked up kill people.


	But New York's Governor Hochul has made it clear that, along with

NY Gov Hochul Won't Lock Up Criminals, Will Ban Toy Guns

I remember the controversy over dropping Truth, Justice and the American Way. But that was just the beginning.


	This story involves Spider Man: Remastered, a game for Sony video game consoles that recently came to the personal computer. PCs have a vibrant modding community, much of which is based around a site known as 'Nexus'. While the game's fictional depiction of New York City contained the inevitable 'Pride' flags, a&nbsp;'modder' on that site reportedly figured out how to trigger an alternate graphic used in Muslim countries that would get rid of the flag. And he replaced the Pride flags with American flags.


	Anyone downloading the 'mod' would be able to replace all the 'Pride' flags with the Stars and Stripes.&nbsp;


	Since Spider Man: Remastered is a single-player game, it's an individual choice and nothing they did would have any impact on anyone else playing the game.


	Despite hosting a variety of violent and sexual mods,&nbsp;Nexus, the modding site, responded by banning the 'modder' declaring that sort of thing isn't welcome here. The ban however has only made the mod <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/woup7g/nexus_mods_removes_spiderman_mod_that_replaces/">more popular </a>and it's being distributed across a variety of sites.


	While it's been a while since Gamergate hit the scene, the struggle between the social justice elites and gamers has never actually gone away. Gaming journalism has become much less relevant since, but at the same time corporate wokeness has become more rigidly policed.&nbsp;


	And the one thing you can't do in even the most violent games, as Rockstar's GTA 6 series and its studios are reportedly being remade to be sensitive and politically correct, is be proud of being an American.

Pride Flags, Yes, American Flags, No in Spiderman Game

I remember the controversy over dropping Truth, Justice and the American Way. But that was just the beginning.


	This story involves Spider Man: Remastered

Pride Flags, Yes, American Flags, No in Spiderman Game

Many people have become aware of how Mark Zuckerberg’s <a href="https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/zuckerbucks-2020-election/">Center for Technology and Life</a> nonprofit foundation influenced the 2020 elections.


	But few are aware of how his company, Meta, and other far-left companies are also underwriting 1619 Project educational indoctrination programs for future voters. Taxpayers help subsidize these efforts. Those who profit are the world’s largest publisher, Penguin Random House, and the global media company, the New York Times, whose newspaper has the second-highest <a href="https://agilityprstage.wpengine.com/resources/top-media-outlets/top-10-daily-american-newspapers/">circulation</a> in the nation.


	The New York Times, a for-profit company, had its product promoted by a nonprofit company, the Pulitzer Center, which designed the prepackaged curriculum and pushed it, unvetted, into 3,500 schools immediately after the 1619 Project was published as a special issue of the August 18, 2019, New York Times Magazine. Coincidentally, <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/people/sam-dolnick">Sam Dolnick</a>, New York Times assistant managing editor, sits on the board of the Pulitzer Center. The Pulitzer Center also posts promotional materials, such as editor <a href="https://1619education.org/blog/1619-project-and-long-battle-over-us-history">Jake Silverstein</a>’s op-ed touting the 1619 Project books and <a href="https://1619education.org/blog/webinar-demand-teaching-1619-project">webinars</a> on teaching the 1619 Project, where subscriptions for the newspaper are pushed to teachers.


	Penguin Random House, which published The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, a picture book, and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a pseudo-scholarly, 500-page neo-Marxist expansion of the magazine (copyright held by the New York Times) also enjoys the services of the Pulitzer Center to market its books to educators and librarians, and to fight laws intended to keep it away from students.


	Penguin Random House also exploits nonprofit opportunities to sell its books. Markus Dohle, the CEO of the German group Bertelsmann that owns Penguin Random House, donated $500,000 via the nonprofit Dohle Book Defense Fund to PEN America to fight “censorship.” As Daniel Greenfield has written, <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/german-ceo-behind-kendi-and-diangelo-funds-daniel-greenfield/">Penguin Random House</a> specializes in publishing racist “anti-racist” tracts by Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ibram X. Kendi, and pushes them into schools. Kendi’s screed, “Progress,” which refers back to his own book Stamped, appears in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Before <a href="https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2022/02/ceo-of-worlds-largest-publisher-funds.html">publish</a>ing The 1619 Project books, Penguin had quickly produced a collection edited by Kendi and Keisha Blain (University of Pittsburgh history professor, who, in the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/crt-black-teachers-resist/">Nation</a> claimed that the “obsession over critical race theory is a new manifestation” of &nbsp;“anti-Blackness and anti-intellectualism”). Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, featured short knock-off essays by contributors to the 1619 Project and mostly far-leftists, such as Donna Brazile, the Democrat Party-Clinton operative, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, radical academics Robin D.G. Kelley and Peniel Joseph, Sherrilyn Ifill, Barbara Smith (on the Combahee River Collective), Black Panther and Communist Angela Davis (on “The Crime Bill”) and “Black Lives Matter” founder, Alicia Garza. Most recently, Greenfield has exposed how the company is remaking <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/goodbye-dr-seuss-hello-ibram-x-kendi-daniel-greenfield/">Dr. Seuss</a> into an avatar of social justice.


	Prior to release of the two 1619 Project books in November, the publisher had set up a deal for getting “woke” followers of Hannah-Jones to buy copies and <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/1619-project-story-weeks-mary-grabar/">donate</a> them to schools and libraries, where laws addressing <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/1619-project-book-school-libraries-critical-race-theory-bans">curriculum</a> do not apply. This was through a nonprofit, diversebooks.org, which was largely funded by Penguin Random House. By March 1, more than 6,000 books had been bought and donated through retailers at <a href="https://bookshop.org/1619">bookshop.org</a>.


	The Pulitzer Center, which has enjoyed the largesse of Democrat donor Pierre Omidyar and funding from the Zuckerberg Foundation, has served as the clearinghouse for 1619 Project educational materials.


	The Pulitzer Center also helped Penguin Random House by running a pilot program that gave advance copies of the book to 35 educators in fifteen states and the District of Columbia. Last month a post-pilot <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/1619-project-education-conference">education conference</a> &nbsp;<a href="https://1619education.org/1619-project-education-conference">hosted</a> by the Pulitzer Center revealed how these two books are intended to be used. (Penguin Random House has also provided free, downloadable educational <a href="https://1619books.com/">guides</a> written by Learning for Justice, the educational arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center.) Penguin Random House, which certainly wants to get its books to every student, provided the moderator, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/allanspencer/">Allan Spencer</a>.


	The webpage for the conference describes Meta, “formerly Facebook,” as “lead <a href="https://1619education.org/1619-project-education-conference">supporter</a>” for the 1619 Project Educational Materials Collection at the Pulitzer Center. Additional funding comes from “Humanity United, the Trellis Fund, the Art for Justice Fund, Open Society Foundations [Soros], The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.” The 1619 Project creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has appeared on several of the Pulitzer Center webinars (alongside teachers union president Randi Weingarten and others) to encourage and instruct teachers on using the materials. Teachers have received <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/17/pulitzer-center-helps-1619-project-teachers-subvert-laws-banning-racism/">$5,000 grants</a> to implement the materials and write lessons.


	A good part of the Pulitzer Center’s mission these days is “resisting” state laws against the use of the 1619 Project in classroom instruction. So efforts are being made to get the books to other students and in other ways—such as in libraries, and after-school and prison programs. One of the sessions involved a Stetson University program advertised as offering “quality <a href="https://www.stetson.edu/other/cep/index.php">liberal arts education</a>” to inmates at Florida’s <a href="https://spectator.org/leftists-are-using-the-1619-project-to-indoctrinate-florida-prisoners/">Tomoka Correctional Institution</a>. The presentation by &nbsp;<a href="https://www.stetson.edu/other/cep/team.php">Andy Eisen</a>, who teaches history, and Pamela <a href="https://www.stetson.edu/other/cep/team.php">Cappas-Toro</a>, professor of World Languages and Cultures, offered a view into the three-day “mini-unit,” <a href="https://1619education.org/builder/lesson/public-history-and-1619-project">Public History and The 1619 Project</a>, created by the <a href="https://www.stetson.edu/other/cep/get-involved.php">non-profit</a> Community Education Project program. As one of the assignments, involving inmate-students collecting information about their sugar consumption from products in the commissary and linking results back to sugar plantations that relied on slave labor revealed, the program has little to do with history, languages, or the liberal arts. It follows, instead, the 1619 Project mantra, that every injustice in the world—down to availability of sugary snacks in a prison commissary—has its roots in slavery.


	From <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/558675-texas-gov-abbott-signs-anti-critical-race-theory-bill">Texas</a>, a state that has passed anti-CRT/1619 Project bills, <a href="https://coe.unt.edu/people/amanda-e-vickery">Amanda Vickery</a>, professor of education at the University of North Texas, served on the panel, “Teaching the Next Generation of Teachers, The 1619 Project Books in Schools of Education,” and was commended for her bravery and dedication to “resistance.” She described how she used the free copies in classes for her future teachers. As typical, the idea of historical accuracy was not even broached. Instead, Vickery expressed the reigning 1619 Project idea that history is merely an expression of “power,” with competing narratives, and the importance of students telling their own stories. (Such standards presumably justify the (false) claim in the picture book that “white people” went into Africa and kidnapped “mommies” and “daddies” in order to make them slaves.)


	Unfortunately, a number of history professors are supporting the 1619 Project. Not surprisingly, as revealed in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, such Marxists as Gerald Horne and Eric Foner have advised the 1619 Project from the beginning! Johns Hopkins University history professor Martha S. Jones has jumped on board, contributing essays to both book collections, on &nbsp;“The American Revolution” and “citizenship,” and making frequent appearances. She gave the keynote address at the conference, but revealed the ahistorical purpose; the 1619 Project, she told teachers, was meant to “challenge us to engage in a powerful thought experiment.”


	A number of teachers shared how they used the materials in their classes (one of which was described as 99 percent black with most of the students lagging several grades in reading ability). One teacher used the Project to help instill in her students the idea that they were descended from African “kings and queens” (though not apparently that kings and queens in Africa owned slaves which were often sacrificed in funeral rituals for royalty).


	As one reader told me about the use of the 1619 Project in his child’s high school class, the aim is to set students against each other by race. Criticisms or disagreements are cast as evidence of the student’s racism. I advised the student to use the sources in my book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-1619-Project-Exposing-America/dp/1684511771/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Debunking The 1619 Project</a>, to rebut the claims being made.


	Everyone from kindergarteners to inmates are being targeted for indoctrination by companies that are <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/gift-mendacious-nikole-hannah-jones-conservative-mary-grabar/">profiting</a> from an alliance with non-profits funded by left-wing political operatives—and taxpayers, against their wishes and the law. Taxpayers subsidize what these companies would normally contribute to the tax base but which they loop into tax-free subsidies to market their own products, as Penguin Random House does with Diverse Books and the Dohle Book Defense Fund. Education professors use class time in state universities to push Random House’s books to future teachers. Woke librarians eagerly accept donated books.


	Recently, Hannah-Jones on Twitter asked <a href="https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=19065&amp;mc_cid=a30c4c8728&amp;mc_eid=113abc14e5">professors</a> to share how they use the 1619 Project. A sampling of the responses is alarming. In addition to being used in history and education courses, the 1619 Project is infusing English, paralegal studies, sociology, public health policy, and who knows what else.


	Alarmingly, according to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, more 1619 Project books are in the works. It may seem amazing that the one magazine issue has had such an impact. But it should not be, when you consider that two of the biggest and most powerful media companies in the world are behind it.


	Mary Grabar, Ph.D., is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the author of <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511778/debunking-the-1619-project/">Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America</a> and <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511525/debunking-howard-zinn/">Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America</a>.

The Big Money Behind the Push for 1619 Project Education

Many people have become aware of how Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Life nonprofit foundation influenced the 2020 elections.


	But few are

If political leaders across the country are looking for more evidence that they are justified in banning The 1619 Project curriculum in schools they can refer to comments made by the Project’s own creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, on December 26, during the Sunday show <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/25/the-shows-sunday-listings-for-dec-26-2021-526140">line-up</a>, on NBC’s Meet the Press.


	In her comments to Chuck Todd, she revealed herself to be a dissembler regarding her role in promoting 1619 Project classroom lessons. Then in tweets that insisted that all critics henceforth engage only with her new book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a 600-page expansion, she admitted that the original project, upon which the lessons are based, is flawed.


	Shortly after the program aired, at 10:21 a.m., Hannah-Jones tweeted, “It is revealing when critics of the 1619 Project, 2 yrs later, refuse to critique the book &amp; instead keep rehashing arguments abt the magazine. That’s because we responded to good-faith critique, we revised in response, we included 1,000 endnotes, historians wrote half the essays.” Phil <a href="https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1475139408206696464">Magness</a>, Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, who has been among the earliest and most frequent critics of the economic claims promoted by The 1619 Project, and who had reached out to Hannah-Jones, <a href="https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1475206521462140938">commented</a>, “I witnessed this process directly as one of those critics over the last 2 years. And there’s not a word of truth to what she is claiming.” Hannah-Jones, who refuses to engage in debate, in typical fashion, attacked the economic historian’s <a href="https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1475139408206696464/photo/3">credentials</a>.


	Sixteen minutes later, at 10:37 a.m. she went after <a href="https://twitter.com/vikki_bynum/status/1475066039755055105">Victoria Bynum</a>, one of the historians who early on requested corrections to the Project. In December 2019, Bynum had signed Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s <a href="https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/u-professors-send-letter-requesting-corrections-to-1619-project">letter</a> to the editor, which was also signed by historians James McPherson, Gordon Wood, and James Oakes. At 6:28 a.m. Bynum had commented on Oakes’s recent article in Catalyst magazine responding to New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein’s November 12 defense of the Project—a promotional lead-up to the November 16 publication of the hardcover book, which is copyrighted by the Times. Bynum summarized it as a critique of the political agenda, specifically Black Nationalism, motivating the project. Hannah-Jones <a href="https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1475147979858362371">tweeted</a>, with no reference to these points, “Is it common ‘very serious’ practice, 2.5 years later, to critique the unrevised work and to not engage the updated version? Asking for a friend.” Bynum politely replied that neither she nor Oakes was commenting on the new book. As revealed by her defensive response, Hannah-Jones was admitting that the original 1619 Project, the August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine, was error-riddled. As Magness noted, “Nikole Hannah-Jones’s latest argument is to claim that the original 1619 Project—as published in the New York Times as part of a multimillion dollar advertising blitz—was just a rough draft, and the new book is the revised version by which it should be judged. Seriously.”


	There was also an education blitz. Immediately upon the publication of the original in 2019 prepackaged lessons were shipped to 3,500 schools, a number which soon rose to 4,500. It is hard to know how many teachers are using these materials today. Hannah-Jones has many teachers among her hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. And if one follows the nonprofit Pulitzer Center which developed the lessons, and pushed them into schools with contests, payments to teachers, and webinars—several of them featuring Hannah-Jones—it becomes apparent that teaching The 1619 Project has taken off like wildfire.


	But that is not what Hannah-Jones indicated to Chuck Todd on December 26, as she repeated points from “<a href="https://hosted.ap.org/republicanherald/article/639d2841fad5619c32a87c786a60a515/ap-interview-nikole-hannah-jones-warning-democracy">The AP Interview</a>” and elsewhere, about laws banning her work in schools evidencing a “backlash” against “a work of journalism”—but also part of a “Republican propaganda campaign” against “the teaching of more accurate history.”


	Hannah-Jones told Todd that she was “concerned” because her “work of journalism” was being “banned by name in Georgia, Florida, in Texas.” She also referred to “efforts to ban the teaching of this history in Oklahoma, in South Dakota, in Tennessee.”


	She then repeated what she had been saying about authoritarianism and fascism, points she gleans from reading <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/17/pulitzer-center-helps-1619-project-teachers-subvert-laws-banning-racism/">anti-Trump</a> polemics. A society that “bans books or bans ideas, that is not a free and tolerant democratic society,” she intoned, “is a society that is veering towards authoritarianism.” She predicted “a dark age of repression and suppression of the truth”—"unless people who believe in free speech, who believe in our children being intellectually challenged, begin to get organized and speak up.” The laws keeping her materials out of classrooms “are paving the way for the taking of other political rights like voting rights, like women's reproductive rights, like rights for LGBTQ people.”


	Hannah-Jones also weighed in on the recent Virginia governor’s race. According to her, Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory resulted from “a right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents that they needed to fight against their children being indoctrinated” and “being called racists.” The black and Latino parents in Virginia, who wanted “more teaching about race . . . the history of racism,” she told Todd (but contradicted by surveys and <a href="https://1776unites.com/">1776 Unites</a>), “were not being featured in that coverage”


	She then asserted that parents should not be deciding “what’s being taught” (except presumably the black and Latino parents she claimed wanted more “teaching about race”). She admitted that she is “not a professional educator. I don't have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have an expertise in the subject area. And that is not my job.” She expressed agreement with Democratic candidate, <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/12/27/1619-project-head-hannah-jones-questions-parents-role-in-schooling/">Terry McAuliffe</a>, who had stated that parents should not “be telling schools what they should teach.” His statement, she said, was “just the fact. This is why we send our children to school and don’t homeschool.”


	One wonders why the “not a professional educator” Hannah-Jones has felt qualified to conduct webinars for K-12 teachers with the Pulitzer Center. On February 18, 2021, alongside Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, she was featured in a “Webinar for Educators: Examining Essays from The 1619 Project <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/event/webinar-educators-examining-essays-1619-project-nikole-hannah-jones">with Nikole Hannah-Jones</a>.” A week later, on February 25, 2021, she participated in an event called “Panelists Give Advice on <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/blog/panelists-give-advice-how-teach-black-history">How to Teach Black History to Elementary and Middle School Students</a>” with LaGarrett King, director, University of Missouri Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education. On <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/blog/1619-projects-implications-law-medicine-and-other-professional-fields">March 10</a>, 2021, she served as a panelist in a “conversation” about using The 1619 Project in law schools.


	Most recently on December 13, <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/teaching-1619-project-insights-educators-and-librarians">Hannah-Jones</a> was featured in a webinar called “Teaching the 1619 Project: A Virtual Event for Educators and Librarians.” The <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/17/pulitzer-center-helps-1619-project-teachers-subvert-laws-banning-racism/">webinar</a> offered tips for skirting laws and announced an event in February that would present student work and share information about “how teachers have protected themselves.” Calling the anti-1619 Project legislation “memory laws,” Hannah-Jones expressed gratitude to “the educators” for their courage and desire “to teach what is not easy to teach to your children, because you know that our children deserve to be taught a truer version of what this country is … We have choice and agency — all of us — in the country that we want to build” (emphases added).


	The Pulitzer Center article about that webinar advertised the upcoming conference and bragged that “the first cohort of the Network has grown to 41 teams of four to 10 educators representing 21 states. There are now 170 teachers and administrators working on units utilizing 1619 materials that align to many subjects and grade levels.” Teachers were encouraged to use the lesson plans created by the Pulitzer Center and through the Network as an “entry point into the project.”


	That’s a lot of material, not to mention the accompanying videos and podcasts. Will these be updated to reflect the second draft of the 1619 Project, the one historians should now consult, as Hannah-Jones demands?


	And what about the new volumes that are promised in the book’s Acknowledgments? Caroline Que, of “the New York Times books division” is thanked for her help “as we sought to turn the 1619 Project into a series of books, of which this is the first.” Will more and more lessons be produced? Will Hannah-Jones demand that everyone scramble to keep up with the ever-shifting “work of journalism” that still insists at bottom that this nation, a slavocracy, was founded in 1619?


	Hannah-Jones, who presumes to be more qualified to engage in such academic debates than accomplished historians and economists, rails on, propped up by corporate interests, such as the New York Times and its books division, the multinational publisher Penguin Random House, and the profiteering educational companies. We know (and she must know) that she is out of her depth.


	She unwittingly exposed herself to a national audience on December 26. The revelation about her work-in-progress is a perfect Boxing Day gift for legislators concerned about education and the future of our country.


	Mary Grabar, Ph.D., is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the author of <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511778/debunking-the-1619-project/">Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America</a> and <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511525/debunking-howard-zinn/">Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America</a>.

A Gift from the Mendacious Nikole Hannah-Jones to Conservative Lawmakers

If political leaders across the country are looking for more evidence that they are justified in banning The 1619 Project curriculum in schools they can refer

“It cannot be overstated,” says the educator’s <a href="http://images.randomhouse.com/teachers_guides/9780593307359.pdf">guide</a> for the new children’s book, Born on the Water, published alongside the hardcover edition of The 1619 Project. “The first step in mitigating harm to children as you teach the hard and triggering history of the enslavement is confronting yourself.” This sentence is bolded.


	This guide for those teaching kindergarten through eighth grade is linked at the page of the publisher, the multinational conglomerate Penguin Random House, but is produced by Learning for Justice, the educational arm of the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-reckoning-of-morris-dees-and-the-southern-poverty-law-center">Southern Poverty Law Center</a>, a criminal, conservative-smearing non-profit. It was the SPLC’s “survey” claiming that students were not being taught about slavery that was used as a pretext to justify The 1619 Project, published as an issue of the New York Times Magazine on August 18, 2019. A guide for high school teachers is also provided for the 600-page hardcover edition, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.


	New York Times “race” reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the <a href="https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/u-professors-send-letter-requesting-corrections-to-1619-project">much-criticized</a> 1619 Project, co-author of the children’s book, and co-editor and contributor to the hardcover edition, accuses those introducing or passing <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/tackling-critical-race-theory-what-it-is-and-where-it-is-being-banned_4108055.html">laws</a> forbidding classroom use of The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory of “censorship.”


	At the same time, she has been publicizing a <a href="https://bookshop.org/1619?ref=PRHBF1BF5369903&amp;linkid=PRHBF1BF5369903&amp;cdi=B698EEE07E80567AE0534FD66B0A9F45&amp;template_id=23190&amp;aid=randohouseinc35978-20#book-store-selector">collaborative</a> effort by her publisher, bookstores, and the nonprofit diversebooks.org (which receives donations from Penguin Random House!) to encourage fans to buy and <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/the-1619-project-born-on-the-water/9780593307359">donate</a> her books to “low income classrooms, libraries, and educational organizations.” The non-profit Pulitzer Center, which produced the original curricular materials for over 4,500 schools, has sponsored events for <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/event/teaching-1619-project-virtual-event-educators-and-librarians">librarians</a> and <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/event/sharing-1619-project-afterschool-education-spaces">after-school</a> initiatives, including the “<a href="https://www.1619freedomschool.org/">1619 Freedom School</a>.”


	Hannah-Jones insisted that the first stop on her nationwide book tour be at West High School in Waterloo, Iowa, where the celebrity author <a href="https://wcfcourier.com/news/local/education/former-teacher-pulitzer-prize-winning-student-meet-onstage-at-west-high-school/article_45f0d494-f9f6-51be-b9eb-80a7f7506d75.html">appeared</a> “in conversation” with Mr. Dial, the high school teacher who radicalized her thirty years ago by introducing her to the writings of Lerone Bennett, a 1960s Ebony Magazine polemicist and coiner of the term Black Power. She tweeted on November 22, “Iowa’s Republican governor and legislature might not respect me or my work as they sought first to ban the 1619 Project explicitly and then passed one of these anti-history laws, but my community always supports and I can’t wait to see you all.”


	Hannah-Jones’s experience in her childhood years when she found herself unable to participate in a classroom exercise about her family’s origins (apparently never thinking to include her white mother’s heritage) provides the framework for the 38-page picture book, which begins and ends with a girl standing in for Hannah-Jones.


	After school, the girl’s grandmother tells her and her brother the story about their African orgins, illustrated with drawings of giddy toothy African villagers, who, “before they were “stolen,” “were free” and had a home, a language, and knew farming, math, science, cooking, metal-working, drumming, and dancing.


	The “white people,” kidnappers, then “baptized them in the name of their god.” So, “Ours is no immigration story.”


	This “origin story” is a fairy tale, however. In West Africa, slaves for centuries had been working on plantations, in households, in mines, and suffering as victims of sacrifice, as I demonstrate in <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511778/debunking-the-1619-project/">Debunking The 1619 Project</a>. And it was the “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html">savage chiefs</a>,” as Frederick Douglass called them, who raided villages for slaves, rounded them up, and sold them to African and Muslim middlemen, who then marched them to the coast where Europeans waited. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	None of this is mentioned, but the horrors of the Middle Passage are dramatized. Those who did not die from maltreatment or suicide arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, crying “a silent cry as white men spoke strange words / talking about their bodies / and with a handshake / traded another’s child, another’s momma and daddy, 20 to 30 beloved human beings in all, / for a few pounds of food and drink.” The “people” then worked in the tobacco fields from “sunup to sundown” “bringing wealth to Virginia” (the far more numerous white indentured toilers go unmentioned).


	The misery continues: “White people told the people they were not human. / That the people were things / to be bought and sold and given as gifts / alongside horses and chairs.” Yet, those who were “born on the water” resisted, survived, and succeeded as “inventors and athletes, / nurses and cooks, / pilots and architects / farmers and housekeepers, / singers and artists. . . .”


	This is illustrated with a drawing of black notables, chest-deep in water, including Frederick Douglass; Shirley Chisholm; an athlete bearing an Olympic gold medal, fist in the air; a young woman wearing a “BLM” t-shirt; and the girl. The last page shows her drawing an American flag as the grandmother tells her, “This is why we say / Black Lives Matter, / why we celebrate <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/1619-project-took-over-2020-inside-story/2020/10/13/af537092-00df-11eb-897d-3a6201d6643f_story.html">Black Girl Magic</a> [also inscribed on Hannah-Jones’s favorite necklace]. . . .


	Hannah-Jones and co-author Renée Watson write in the authors’ notes that they “hope Black American children . . . come away empowered” and feel “no shame” for having descended from slaves. A laudable goal, but it comes at the expense of accurate history, which would acknowledge the reality of black slave ownership, in Africa and in the United States.


	Instead, quoting Marxist theorist Paulo Freire, the guide warns teachers to confront their own “personal biases, internalized racism, and ignorance of historical truths,” lest these show up in “interactions with children.” With books from Teaching for Justice and Facing History and Ourselves (another far-left education nonprofit), teachers are reassured that they will “build a classroom community that welcomes critical and courageous conversations, maintains safety during those conversations, and, in the event of students being harmed, restores relationships through honest dialogue.”


	I see six-year-olds bursting into tears because “white” people take black children away from their “mommies and daddies.” I can just imagine the <s>browbeating</s> “honest dialogue.” Teachers are warned that such teaching may be “harrowing.” It is intended to be “harrowing.”


	After being told that black children have been given “an origin story,” and “all children” “the gift of truth,” teachers are thanked—in the words of the Teaching for Change <a href="https://www.marygrabar.com/images/sampledata/pdfs/grabar_reprt_kevinjennings.pdf">mantra</a>, for “being the change,” a “lifelong” endeavor to prepare for teaching “about enslavement of Africans and racism in the United States of America,” requiring “personal study”—such as of the 1619 Project, three books by Ibram X. Kendi, and a collection of Black Lives Matter writing. Suggested materials for improving pedagogy include Learning for Justice books, radical education professor <a href="https://people.coe.uga.edu/bettina-love/">Bettina Love</a>’s Breathing New Life into Book Clubs, the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project curriculum; “Teaching Hard History” podcasts by Hannah-Jones and by PushBlack; and The Black Power Mixtape, I Am Not Your Negro, and Soundtrack for a Revolution videos.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The framework for SPLC’s “Teaching Hard History” warns teachers that it is hard, especially for white teachers, to talk about slavery without talking about race. But students K-second grade should “know” about freedom, equality, and equity. Questions posed to them should be general enough for “any text,” though these “texts” must be “liberatory,” e.g., promote healing from the past, “convey love” and “hope for the future through children's agency and self-directed action,” help “build community,” and provide a “’portal’ to students’ radical imaginations.”


	Now teachers are ready to devote three weeks of classroom time to Born on the Water through Obama-era Common Core State Standards, the misapplied “close reading” rubric used to justify watered-down standards to bring along struggling readers through weeks of discussion.


	Week one begins with an affirmation of “Black lives and ways of being” and then student responses during and after the readings, in student groups, and as student reflections in writing or drawing. According to the “text reflection protocol” students should ask themselves such things as, “What are you wondering?” “What are you feeling?” and what “actions” would you like to take.


	Day one of week two should be dedicated to reading the book, but after teachers practice reading the “poetry” (pedestrian prose arbitrarily divided into lines) aloud to themselves. In class, teachers should read the text slowly to give students time to reflect and ask questions. A sample page-long introduction tells teachers to direct students’ attention to the drawings and people’s expressions; a long paragraph provides a mini-lecture on the relationship between racism and slavery. In preparation for days two through five, a model “book talk” offers, “We’ve read the phenomenal book Born on the Water. It is teaching us so much. For the next several days, we are going to read the text part by part, a few poems at a time, so we can take a closer look and learn even more from the phenomenal human beings in the book. We are going to study them very closely, using the same questions every day so we get lots of practice. . . .”


	In addition to learning the vocabulary words, democracy, enslaver, enslaved person, equality, immigration, kindergarteners, first, second, and third-graders are directed to answer questions about what people in the “poems” say, do, think, feel; whether they have problems, solve problems, and change. Day five is dedicated to “connect[ing] the dots between the work you did celebrating Black lives during Week One and studying Born on the Water during Week Two,” in preparation for Week Three, devoted to discussing the book’s success as an “origin story,” with yet another reading, and then on days two through four students composing “where I’m from” poems, aided by listening to NPR and sample spoken word poems.


	Suggestions for “extended learning”—“across the school year”—include students making podcasts, videos, and art installations, and researching black history museum websites. Books about African civilization before “contact with European colonizers and enslavers” are suggested, as are books about black life in America on such topics as “Enslavement and resistance,” “Black Power Movement,” “Black Lives Matter Movement,” “Black Excellence,” and on becoming “antiracist.” Ibram X. Kendi reminds that one must “connect the dots between the enslavement and present-day racist outcomes.”


	Born on the Water may not appear as an official part of the curriculum, but all efforts are being made to get this propaganda to children. Citizens need to be aware.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

The 1619 Project and Classroom Struggle Sessions

“It cannot be overstated,” says the educator’s guide for the new children’s book, Born on the Water, published alongside the hardcover edition of The 1619

Voters this election rejected the teaching of The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, as proven by the results of Virginia’s gubernatorial race and, less publicized but as equally telling in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, where nineteen-year-old, Nicholas Seppy won a seat on the school board. Seppy said he thought that the history of slavery should be taught in the classroom, but it should be taught objectively.


	I agree with him. That’s why I wrote <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511778/debunking-the-1619-project/">Debunking The 1619 Project</a> and before that <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511525/debunking-howard-zinn/">Debunking Howard Zinn</a><a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781684511525/debunking-howard-zinn/">.</a>


	So hats off to Christopher Rufo who exposed these toxic materials and to Seppy and Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin who listened to parents who were rightfully outraged.


	But we cannot rest. The radical “educrats” who believe they are the ones to remake your children never do.


	Over the years I have seen how “educators” introduce a topic, put on a pretense of retreating, and then sneak back. This happened with the teaching of Ethnic Studies in California, which was withdrawn for about eighteen months after complaints about antisemitism. Then—surprise!—it was signed into law by the governor. Superficial changes had been made but the promotion of politicized ethnic identity—what the educrats wanted—will remain for all California high school graduates.


	Similarly, the <a href="http://www.corestandards.org/what-parents-should-know/">Common Core State Standards Initiative</a>, which claims to “establish clear, consistent guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do in math and English language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade,” was rebranded under various names by states. But the damage remains as demonstrable knowledge of the subject matter was replaced by students’ ability to “collaborate” and accept “diversity.” As I pointed out back in 2012, Common Core broke down the distinctions between nonfiction and fiction. English teachers were tasked with having students read “cold” such historical materials as the Gettysburg Address.


	This development, as well as that of Critical Race Theory’s assault on truth and replacement of objective history with “narrative,” has ushered in the use in classrooms of such materials as The 1619 Project, a hundred-page mishmash of polemical essays, “literary works'' contemplating “moments in history,” short biased articles, and profiles. Creator Nikole Hannah-Jones has insisted that her Project is truthful. But when accepting the Freedom of Speech award from the Roosevelt Institute on October 13, she called The 1619 Project a “narrative,” one pushing the “policy” of reparations. Students in grades K-12, however, are told that it is history.


	But real history is not “narrative.” It is certainly not what Hannah-Jones presents: white Americans as uniquely and uniformly guilty of enslaving people. I testified about what it leaves out—such as black involvement in slavery in Africa and America—before the Michigan State Senate for a bill that would remove it from classrooms. A version was recently passed by the <a href="https://detroit.chalkbeat.org/2021/11/2/22760429/critical-race-theory-race-and-gender-stereotyping-andrew-beeler-michigan-house">Michigan House</a>. Fortunately, over half of the states have passed or introduced legislation to remove The 1619 Project from classroom material.


	Still, we cannot rest.


	Though it may be removed from the curriculum, a 600-page hardcover edition of The 1619 Project and a <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/653856/the-1619-project-born-on-the-water-by-nikole-hannah-jones-and-renee-watson-illustrated-by-nikkolas-smith/">children’s picture book</a> version, Born on the Water, were published by <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/658295/the-1619-project-by-created-by-nikole-hannah-jones-and-the-new-york-times-magazine/">Penguin Random House</a> on November 16. The picture book has a grandmother telling her grandchildren a fantastical history of white oppression of blacks. At the end she says, “This is why we say Black Lives Matter, why we celebrate Black Girl Magic.” The hardcover edition, intended for high school use, is an expansion of the original, with footnotes from Marxist historians and leftist organizations. The teachers guide offers a historian’s claim that history is a matter of “‘evolving interpretations, not facts’”—in support of Hannah-Jones’s claim that the “fights over the 1619 Project were never really about the facts.”


	While young students have a grandmother promoting Black Lives Matter, high school students are instructed in advocating for reparations. They are directly asked to contemplate Hannah-Jones’s “arguments for reparations for Black Americans” and how this country “can make amends for the legacy of slavery, theft, violence, terror, and mass incarceration.”


	Hannah-Jones’s 600,000-plus Twitter followers are eagerly “donating” copies via leftist bookstores to school libraries, where librarians, eager to “<a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/article/85127-what-it-means-to-decolonize-the-library.html">decolonize</a>” libraries, are discarding classics to make room. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Similarly, The Zinn Education Project, when a bill was proposed in Arkansas to forbid the use of Howard Zinn’s Marxist tract in publicly funded schools in 2017, used the opportunity to fundraise and send copies to teachers. Recently, it has enlisted teachers and students to defy current legislation.


	Professors are pushing both of these fake histories. The 1619 Project became a “common read” on campuses across the country after the riots of 2020. It is being taught as a first-year <a href="https://firstyear.nd.edu/academics/courses/engl-13186-5-reading-the-1619-project-2021-2022-john-duffy/">seminar</a> at Notre Dame University by English professor <a href="https://ndsmcobserver.com/2021/11/university-seminar-delves-into-controversial-1619-project/">John Duffy</a>.


	The University of Georgia Press just published what is essentially a teacher’s manual, Rethinking America’s Past: Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in the Classroom and Beyond by history professor Robert Cohen and education professor Sonia E. Murrow. This book, by two credentialed professors, ignores Zinn’s falsification of evidence, misquotations, fabrications, and plagiarism and promotes a clearly Marxist history. It presents my book that documents it all as “mean-spirited” “polemic.”


	Students, at the minimum, should have access to materials that do insist that facts matter and that provide <a href="https://www.amazon.com/1620-True-Beginning-American-Republic/dp/1641771240">alternatives</a> to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Howard-Zinn-Exposing-Generation/dp/1684511526/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Zinn</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-1619-Project-Exposing-America/dp/1684511771">The 1619 Project</a>.


	With this year’s election over, we should now insist that librarians at public schools and public libraries give such materials equal space on bookshelves. They are, after all, paid for by taxpayers.

Replacing History with a 'Narrative'

Voters this election rejected the teaching of The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, as proven by the results of Virginia’s gubernatorial race and, less

Nikole Hannah-Jones has a new defender of her 1619 Project, the hundred-page mishmash of essays, surreal “literary” contemplations on historical “moments,” and profiles, published as a special issue of the August 18, 2019, New York Times Magazine to “reframe” the American founding in 1619 as a “slavocracy”—pushed with prepackaged lessons to over 4,500 schools, as history—until lawmakers in some states started taking actions. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	He does not merely echo Hannah-Jones’s claims about white nationalism and January 6, as David Blight and Ron Chernow did on <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/the-sunday-show/watch/trump-supporters-storming-capitol-linked-to-historical-white-supremacist-mobs-99603525712">MSNBC</a>. He is doing battle for the damsel who cries she is being attacked by “right-wingers,” <a href="https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1454797411671490560">white</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1454799838000918530">people</a> who want to “censor” her truthful history because it makes their children “uncomfortable” as they are forced to read (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-1619-Project-Exposing-America/dp/1684511771">falsehoods</a>) about how their European ancestors kidnapped families from the interior of Africa and how Thomas Jefferson ran “<a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf">forced-labor camps</a>” for the enslaved whom he viewed as “subhuman,” the “one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggl[ing] under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before.”


	To Hannah-Jones, only a racist would object to their third-grader reading, about post-Civil War America, “In response to black demands for [their] rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.”


	This historian has been tweeting images of very old newspaper articles—from the eighteenth century—day by day. And he has vowed to do it till day 76. This is <a href="https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/history/our_people/directory/holton_woody.php">Woody Holton</a> who is fighting Gordon Wood who had the temerity to, with four of his colleagues, write an open <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html">letter</a> to the New York Times objecting to the statement by Hannah-Jones: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”


	Hannah-Jones, busy speechifying about race, accepting awards, and demanding and then rejecting <a href="https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/24/historians-selling-out-for-leftist-star-nikole-hannah-jones/">tenure</a>, never addresses points of fact. The chore of replying went to Magazine editor <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html">Jake Silverstein</a>, who cited the 1772 Somerset decision, which declared slavery in England unlawful, and Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 offering freedom to slaves joining the British Army. Silverstein added, without notice, the words “some of,” i.e., “one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence. . . .” This rescue was orchestrated with the help of consultant, historian <a href="https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/24/historians-selling-out-for-leftist-star-nikole-hannah-jones/">Leslie Harris</a>, who dropped her outrage over having her initial objections ignored. She, like oft-critic Sean Wilentz, feels that it is more important to defend Hannah-Jones’s placement of slavery at the “center” of this nation’s history than to agree on points of fact with “right-wingers.”


	But none have gone as far as Woody Holton. Holton, who teaches at the University of South Carolina, writes “bottom-up” histories of the common people, in the tradition of Howard Zinn. Except that Holton has footnotes, and he tweets images.


	On October 23, he participated in a <a href="https://www.masshist.org/video">debate</a> with Gordon Wood that was to focus on their new books on the American Revolution. Wood started off by praising Holton as a “superb” narrator of military battles and compiler of “extensive” research. He criticized Holton for a lack of proportion (only one out of his 36 chapters focuses on the Constitution) and context, and using present-day standards to make judgments on the past. Wood cited one of Holton’s Zinn-like accusations about the denial of the vote to slaves, women, and men who did not meet property qualifications. “Where in the world at that time,” Wood asked, did these people vote? In fact, Americans had “the largest electorate in the world,” with two-thirds of all adult white men voting, while in England only about one in six voted.


	But Holton has gathered quotations galore to support the contention that colonists were worried about the proclamation threatening their right to own slaves. As the ever-vigilant <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/28/5438-o28.html">World Socialist Web Site</a> (upholding Trotsky’s class struggle narrative over race struggle) pointed out, Holton was forced by Wood’s points to go further south in the colonies to slave-heavy South Carolina, but then was flummoxed by a caller’s question about why those in the Caribbean, where slavery was even stronger, did not join the Revolution. So, when <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/1619-project-historians-controversy-gordon-wood-woody-holton.html">moderator</a> Massachusetts Historical Society president Catherine Allgor gave the cue, noting Hannah-Jones’s recent <a href="https://www.theroot.com/head-of-prep-school-who-uninvited-nikole-hannah-jones-i-1847964422">disinvitation</a> from the Middlesex School in Concord, Holton attacked Wood for his letter.


	Holton charged Wood with being “a founding father,” of the group of letter writers, and leading “<a href="https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-slavery-3985265c932e142c070f8b2422178087">a massive campaign of censorship</a>” of Hannah-Jones, who “like a good scholar” he claimed had corrected the error. He demanded that Wood immediately “write another open letter to Sen. Cotton and to Gov. DeSantis, and to all the other demagogues who are using your letter to ban the 1619 project, to say, ‘I am Gordon Wood, and damnit, I am not in favor of censorship.’”


	With “dozens of printouts of primary sources on hand,” as William Hogeland reported in <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/1619-project-historians-controversy-gordon-wood-woody-holton.html">Slate</a> Magazine, Holton seemed to be trying “to get Wood to accept personal responsibility for having deployed a category of criticism that has placed both the 1619 Project and Hannah-Jones herself in danger.” And he demanded that Wood also offer the “concession that preserving slavery motivated the Revolution.”


	Hannah-Jones, who has been proudly exhibiting Holton’s screen shots, saw this as further confirmation of her own intellectual infallibility. On November 2, she rebuked the Daily Mail for the headline, “Nikole Hannah-Jones ADMITS new book [expanded hardcover edition due November 16] reworks reporting about the American Revolution.” “<a href="headline%20was%20">Wrong as usual, Daily Mail</a>,” she tweeted. “We added the clarification—adding the words ‘some of’ in front of colonists—a year and a half ago. . . .” &nbsp;


	But the two-word addition hardly corrects what follows, such as, “By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western hemisphere.” (Actually, Britain was nearing her status as top slave trader internationally, and it was the colonists’ abolitionist movement that influenced Britain’s.) &nbsp;The two-word qualification hardly addresses Hannah-Jones’s claim that the abolition of slavery would have “upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South” (ignoring other kinds of labor, such as indentured and wage) or that the “dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery” is what “empowered” Jefferson and the Founders to break from Britain. Furthermore, her claim that the founders would not have declared independence “if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue” remains.


	It was an ugly scene as the 62-year-old Holton attempted to force the 87-year-old Wood to make a retraction, in the name of free speech.


	But Holton’s own historiography is barely more sophisticated than Hannah-Jones’s, as he revealed in a July Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/02/fourth-july-african-americans-declaration/">essay</a>. In discussing the letter the free black scientist <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/02/fourth-july-african-americans-declaration/">Benjamin Banneker</a> had written to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in 1791, Holton, like The 1619 Project (in the supplementary <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/18maglabs_1619_issue_shipped_0.pdf">Broadsheet</a>), presented Banneker falsely, as “upbraiding” Jefferson, in reminding him of his words in the Declaration of Independence, accusing him of “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.”


	Banneker’s letter, which runs to fourteen paragraphs, actually was strongly influenced, if not written, by the group of white scientist-abolitionists, including Benjamin Rush, who had welcomed Banneker into their group. The letter said nothing personal about Jefferson, who had agreed to appoint Banneker to Pierre L’Enfant’s team surveying the District of Columbia. Banneker’s interest was science, especially astronomy. The letter accompanied a manuscript version of Banneker’s Almanac. Jefferson treated Banneker with his customary respect and did Banneker the great honor of forwarding his almanac to the Marquis de Cordorcet.


	The quotation that Holton plucks out comes in paragraph ten, which, like the rest of the letter uses the plural form when discussing abolitionism in the context of the Declaration. Clearly, <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-22-02-0049">Banneker</a> refers to the founders, plural:

<blockquote>
	
		Here Sir, was a time in which your tender feelings for your selves had engaged you thus to declare, you were then impressed with proper ideas of the great valuation of liberty, and the free possession of those blessings to which you were entitled by nature.
</blockquote>


	It was “pitiable . . . to reflect,” Banneker continued, “that altho you were so fully convinced of” . . . [“the Father of mankind’s”] “equal and impartial distribution of those rights and privileges . . ., that you should at the Same time counteract his mercies, in detaining . . . so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity . . ., [and] be found guilty of that most criminal act [slavery], which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves. (emphasis added)


	Yes, context does matter. No amount of Tweeted images will validate The 1619 Project. It is not “censorship” to remove such error-ridden and hateful materials as The 1619 Project from the classroom.


	Mary Grabar is the author most recently of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-1619-Project-Exposing-America/dp/1684511771/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America</a>.

Defending the Lies of The 1619 Project

Nikole Hannah-Jones has a new defender of her 1619 Project, the hundred-page mishmash of essays, surreal “literary” contemplations on historical “moments,” and

Recently, Education Next, spurred by The 1619 Project, “the subject of recent legislative efforts, heated debate, and extensive press coverage,” and the “post-George Floyd racial reckoning and the new Juneteenth federal holiday” presented a forum by seven historians and educators discussing the topic of teaching <a href="https://www.educationnext.org/teaching-about-slavery-forum-guelzo-berry-blight-rowe-stang-allen-maranto/">about slavery</a>. They were asked to respond to the prompt, “How should K–12 schools teach about slavery in America? What pitfalls should teachers and textbooks avoid? What facts and concepts should they stress? Are schools generally doing a good or bad job of this now?”


	The 1619 Project came out nearly a year before George Floyd died in police custody on Memorial Day weekend 2020, an event that spurred nationwide rioting and statue toppling. A study by the corrupt and disreputable Southern Poverty Law Center provided faux justification for bringing the historically warped 1619 Project into 3,500 schools immediately upon its publication with prepackaged lesson plans, discussion questions, and “quizlets.” It is now in three-quarters of K-12 classrooms. The creator of the Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, proclaimed that she was “proud” of her role in fanning the flames of the post-Floyd rioting, which left over 25 people dead.


	Education Next’s prefatory comments signal the idea that a connection exists between slavery and Floyd’s death and that the aftermath was a justified “reckoning.” The statement advances The 1619 Project’s thesis that all tragedies and disparities within the black community have a direct link to slavery and the racism that justified it. This racism is in white America’s “DNA.” It is white America’s “Original Sin,” to quote The 1619 Project. The thesis is buttressed by Hannah-Jones’s fiction that slavery in America was an exclusively white practice, with whites “kidnapping” slaves from Africa and that no blacks owned slaves in Africa and America.


	The result is a wholesale indictment of white Americans. In a word-analysis of Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, Lynn Uzzell found that in the 77 times the term “<a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/12/its_time_to_acknowledge_anti-white_racism_146391.html">white</a>” appears, 35 times white people are presented as holding “some kind of power or privilege (almost always unearned or illegitimate)” and in 32 cases, “the word is associated with oppression, injustice, or cruelty,” for example, “’widespread white violence.’” Consider this sentence: “In response to black demands for [their] rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.” As <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Race-Crazy-Progressive-Racism-Movement/dp/1642938416/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=1632929318&amp;sr=8-2">Charles Love</a> points out, “it wasn’t some whites who did these things, it was ‘white Americans.’ And the attacks were on all blacks.”


	The anti-white, anti-American animus the Project conveys is reinforced by the “in-depth reading and reflection” questions in the ready-made lessons, such as:

<ul>
	<li>
		What examples of hypocrisy in the founding of the U.S. does Hannah-Jones supply? What evidence can you see for how “some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy”?</li>
	<li>
		How does Hannah-Jones expand on this quote [sic] from sociologist Glenn Bracey: “Out of the ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves”?</li>
</ul>


	Hannah-Jones has risen to the heights of wealth and celebrity on the anti-racism circuit, where to question her claims brings charges of racism. After having ignored or insultingly dismissed numerous historians, she has carried on a Twitter war, tweeting out statements like “teaching that racism was embedded in the American legal system is not a ‘divisive’ concept, just historical fact” (taking as her source Gloria Browne-Marshall’s book on Critical Race Theory!). But as we shall see, when it came to slave ownership, the courts sided with black slaveowners—against the pleas of their slaves.


	The seven contributors to the Education Next forum make no mention of black slave ownership, although a couple do point out the global and transhistorical nature of slavery. Allen Guelzo (<a href="http://www.allenguelzo.com/">Princeton</a>) notes that “forced labor was the ‘normal’ condition of most people in the Atlantic world on the eve of the American Revolution” but that “between the Confederation and the new Constitution,” a shift was taking place, in which servitude and slavery were no longer seen as “inevitable.” As a result, we had the rise of the abolition movement for the first time.


	David Blight (<a href="https://history.yale.edu/people/david-blight">Yale</a>) calls slavery “ancient,” something that “has existed in all cultures and in all times” (yet, oddly, it “is at the heart of our history, a main event, a central foundational story”).


	Ignored is the fact that, while in sheer numbers black slaves owned by whites overshadowed the number of slaves owned by blacks, blacks, when given the opportunity, often eagerly purchased black slaves for exploitative purposes—sometimes upon the granting of their own freedom by their masters.


	The knowledge about blacks enslaving other blacks goes far back. Frederick Douglass, while railing at white slave owners, also condemned the “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html">savage chiefs</a>” of West Africa who sold Africans to Europeans. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Those brought over retained the memory of slave ownership and continued the tradition. While laws in seventeenth-century Virginia established that white people could not become slaves, it did not preclude ownership of black slaves by black owners. In fact, as I point out in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-1619-Project-Exposing-America/dp/1684511771/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Debunking The 1619 Project</a>, the case of Anthony Johnson, one of the original arrivals from Africa, who in 1654 successfully sued his white neighbors who were harboring John Casor, a black man claiming that his term of indenture to Johnson was over and that he was a free man, was the first court ruling in Virginia on slave ownership.


	And the late black historian, John Hope Franklin, whose forebears on his father’s side &nbsp;were not owned by white people, but by Choctaw Indians, revealed in his 1943 monograph The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, that North Carolina law upheld the property rights of a black slaveowner in State v. Edmund (1833).


	In 1830, 10,000 slaves in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana were owned by free blacks. While six percent of white Southerners owned slaves in the antebellum period, about two percent of free blacks did so for exploitative purposes—proportionally, a third as many as whites. (Some were also bought to protect loved ones.)


	Another contributor, Dana Ramey Berry, History Department Chair at the University of Texas at Austin, brought up a currently favored teaching method of having students read primary documents. But would she include the letters reproduced in David Whitten’s 1970 article, “Slave Buying in 1835 Virginia as Revealed by Letters of a Louisiana Negro Sugar Planter” published in Louisiana History? These letters by Andrew Durnford, a black man on a slave-buying trip to Virginia, to his white factor, John McDonogh (ironically an abolitionist), describe how he had “bought a woman a stout able hand with three children, for $1026. One is a girl of 7 in Sepr. [sic] next, the second a boy of or going on 5 years, the last a girl of near three years old. The woman is pregnant.” In his records of slave purchases Durnford did not note family relationships or anything other than first names and ages of his slaves. Durnford complained to McDonogh about the high price of “people” and transporting them, and the loss of his investment in a boy “by a cart running away with him.” In 1858, Durnford and his wife donated “Wainy, a mulatoo girl, aged about 31 years, valued at the price and sum of $1000, and her daughter Merceline, aged about 12 years, valued at the price and sum of $500” to their daughter. There were even some black slave traders. Some black slave owners supported the Confederacy early in the Civil War.


	While new information has been uncovered by those like David Whitten who wrote about Durnford in 1970 a code of silence has evolved.


	One can understand the “psychological reasons” noted by Clyde Dill Wilson in 1905 as he attempted to track down individuals who would have had firsthand knowledge about black slaveowners. In his North American Review article, “Black Masters: A Side-Light on Slavery,” he commented, “Psychologically, after all we have read and heard of the pathos and tragedy of negro slavery, it is of strange interest and unaccountable inconsistency that negroes themselves should at times have had no apparent compunction in regard to buying their fellows on the block.”


	But now, more than a century and a civil rights movement later, such silence seems unjustified—unless it be for political goals, such as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/24/magazine/reparations-slavery.html">reparations</a> and other racially redistributive schemes for which Nikole Hannah-Jones has been agitating.


	Such a dishonest position also keeps blacks in an unimpeachable childlike state, incapable of sin. At the same time, school children are subjected to the inflammatory and divisive lessons of The 1619 Project beginning in kindergarten.


	Yes, slavery should be taught—but in an age-appropriate manner and with complete honesty that reveals what real history reveals: the human propensity to sin and exploitation is not limited to one race.


	Mary Grabar is the author most recently of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-1619-Project-Exposing-America/dp/1684511771/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America</a>.

Teaching about Slavery and Black Slaveowners

Recently, Education Next, spurred by The 1619 Project, “the subject of recent legislative efforts, heated debate, and extensive press coverage,” and the “post-

When Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts,” I thought to myself “good.” A 100-page pastiche of cherry-picked history, research of dubious provenance, memoir, poetry, racial grievance, and Marxist theory in a Sunday magazine format—which is what The 1619 Project is—has no place in any school’s history curriculum.


	That the goals of The 1619 Project have very little to do with contributing to the trove of historical research about our nation’s founding is obvious from the Project’s stated goal to “reframe the country’s history” and from the imperviousness of the editors to criticisms by dozens of our most respected historians, many on left. &nbsp;


	Senator Cotton implicitly refuted those who claim that 1619’s detractors want to present a sugar-coated history. As he explained in an interview with the <a href="https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jul/26/bill-by-cotton-targets-curriculum-on-slavery/">Arkansas Democrat Gazette</a>,

<blockquote>
	
		We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.
</blockquote>


	He quite rightly said that America should be portrayed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind.”


	Left-wing sites have accused Cotton of censorship and a right-wing version of “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/28/tom-cotton-1619-project-cancel-culture">cancel culture</a>.”


	Worse, his remarks have been taken out of context. Ian Millhiser <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/nikole-hannah-jones-misreads-american-political-figure-again/">distorted</a> Cotton’s words, claiming that he said, “enslaving Black people was a ‘necessary evil.’” Project Director Nikole Hannah-Jones ramped it up, tweeting, “If chattel slavery—heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit—were a ‘necessary evil’ as @TomCottonAR says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.”


	At the American Conservative, <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/nikole-hannah-jones-misreads-american-political-figure-again/">Gregor Baszak</a>, claims that even in its full context Cotton’s phrasing is “clumsy” in describing the necessary concessions to the slave-holding states at the Constitutional Convention. He wrote, “Senator Cotton is wrong to seek to ban the 1619 Project from getting taught, at least if it’s part of a healthy and open debate that addresses its perspectives and shortcomings in the classroom.”


	The problem is that few teachers have the ability or the time to teach beyond the materials given to them. And the emotionally manipulative 1619 Project is favored by teachers who claim that it “engages” students. The finer points of the Somerset ruling—as Baszak suggests should be taught alongside 1619—cannot compete with emotionally charged passages about “forced-labor camps, which we like to call plantations” and the beating of Army veteran Isaac Woodward that left him blind, as indicated by trigger warnings about the “<a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf">gruesome material in these pages</a>.”


	John K. Wilson, co-editor of the Academe blog and 2019-2020 fellow at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, also argued for keeping the curriculum and using it in “’two book’ programs with conflicting ideas.” But I have my doubts about this author of <a href="https://www.orbooks.com/john-k-wilson/#:~:text=John%20K.%20Wilson%20is%20the%20author%20of%20seven,of%20AcademeBlog.org%20and%20the%20editor%20of%20Illinois%20Academe.">President Trump Unveiled</a>: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire and Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies.


	Having written a book about the most influential fraudulent history, A People’s History of the United States by the late communist professor Howard Zinn, I could have predicted these reactions. Zinn’s book and related materials have been poisoning minds since 1980 and have inspired the Occupy Wall Street (and Antifa, its outgrowth) and Black Lives Matter movements, but any criticisms have been called censorship.


	Zinn hoped that his presentation of himself as a moral crusader, “exposing” Columbus as having committed genocide, the Founders as setting up a kleptocracy, Americans as worse fascists than the Nazis, and the Viet Cong as democrats teaching villagers “communication skills,” would keep readers from looking too closely at his historical method.


	But as I discovered in writing <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781621577737/debunking-howard-zinn/">Debunking Howard Zinn</a>, in order to establish this false narrative, Zinn used disreputable sources (even a Holocaust denier), twisted others’ words to make them mean the opposite, quoted selectively, ignored critical information, and plagiarized—thus violating all the rules of history writing as set forth by the American Historical Association.


	When in 2017 Arkansas State representative Kim Hendren, introduced a bill to prohibit the use of Zinn’s book in state-funded classrooms, the Zinn Education Project, a nonprofit supplier of lessons founded by one of Zinn’s former Boston University students, framed the attempt as censorship and exploited it for fundraising. They bragged that over 700 Arkansas teachers and librarians had requested copies of his book.


	When in 2013 it was revealed that Purdue University President Mitch Daniels when he had been Indiana Governor, in 2010, had asked staffers about the use of Zinn’s book, calling it “’a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation,’” after hearing about its use in a summer teacher workshop supported with federal National Endowment for the Humanities dollars, the outcry from faculty was fast and furious. They signed denunciatory open letters, held a Zinn “read-in,” and established a graduate fellowship in Zinn’s name.


	The Zinn Education Project is still collaborating with the NEH and last fall, with the Smithsonian Institution, held two teacher workshops, or “<a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/howard-zinns-anti-american-propaganda-takes-smithsonian/">teach-ins</a>.” Emboldened, the Smithsonian then went on to post the notorious <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333">Whiteness</a> sheet (recently taken down after public outcry).


	Zinn in his “history” made the claim that “there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.” Hannah-Jones claims that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”


	But Zinn ignored the racism in the rest of the world—such as in Mauritania where slavery was still legal while Zinn was writing his book and is still practiced to this day. He also ignored the fact that while a vibrant abolitionist movement was agitating to end slavery in the U.S., the Sultan of Morocco in 1842, when asked about abolishing slavery, could not fathom the idea. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Ironically, a month after The 1619 Project was released in August 2019, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy article titled “When the Slave Traders Were African.” Recently, the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53444752">BBC</a> featured a similar article by the great granddaughter of a Nigerian slave trader. She writes that he lived in “a place and time when the fittest survived and the bravest excelled. The concept of ‘all men are created equal’ was completely alien to religion and law in his society.”


	But Hannah-Jones is silent about the role of African slave traders who sold the African slaves captured by African chiefs, often in battle, to the Europeans. Nor does she mention the relatively large number of African Americans who themselves owned black slaves.


	Like Howard Zinn, she implicitly compares the U.S.A. to some mythical utopia, where racism and oppression do not exist.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Senator Cotton <a href="https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&amp;id=1400">called</a> the Project “a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded.”


	Like Zinn’s fake history, it is not intended to teach an even-handed, fact-based history.


	Curriculum goes through a review process for material that is offensive and not sufficiently inclusive. Presumably, those writing textbooks are professional educators. In 2015, an entire <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/05/immigrant-workers-or-slaves-textbook-maker-backtracks-after-mothers-online-complaint/">textbook</a> was rewritten as a result of a mother’s online complaint about the use of the word “worker”—once—in a discussion about the Atlantic Slave Trade, i.e., that “millions of workers” were brought from Africa to the southern United States.


	A curriculum as flawed as The 1619 Project should no more be allowed in the classroom than should a book that repeats the claims of a Holocaust denier or that calls slavery by something other than its rightful name.


	* * *


	<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Howard_Zinn_at_lectern_cropped.jpg">Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons</a>

Fighting 'The 1619 Project' Fake History: Lessons from Howard Zinn’s Fake History

When Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619

As the communist-sympathizing Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/">leads</a> the primary pack by double digits, some journalists, like the editorial board of the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialists-dont-know-history-11559171072">Wall Street Journal</a>, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialists-dont-know-history-11559171072">Ben Shapiro</a>, and <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/02/24/bernie-sanders-just-loves-americas-enemies/">National Review</a> <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/how-can-bernie-sanders-happen-in-america/">columnists</a> made connections to A People’s History of the United States by one-time Communist Party USA member and lifelong promoter of communism, Howard Zinn. While we have a president who has repeatedly vowed that the United States will never be a socialist country, and the Department of Education fights to offer school choice and to restore <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/taking-power-in-the-academy">free speech</a> and the rule of law on college campuses, the Zinn Education Project, blithely uses the resources of the <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/howard-zinns-anti-american-propaganda-takes-smithsonian/">Smithsonian</a> and the <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/2020-neh-teacher-institutes/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a> to spread Zinn’s overtly political, anti-American, and untrue lessons.


	As the popularity of Zinn’s textbook has grown, so has Sanders’ following, with the most <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/02/18/democratic-primary-bernie-sanders-poses-real-problem-democrats-column/4795074002/">devout</a> between the ages of <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/younger-americans-benefit-boomer-socialism-support-bernie-sanders-capitalism-reason-2020-2-1028908562">18 to 29</a>. According to <a href="https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/youth-voting-2016-primaries">Tufts University</a> research, in 2016, Sanders won more primary votes among voters under 30 than “[Hillary] Clinton and [Donald] Trump combined.” And he has been <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/25/why-bernie-was-always-democrats-2020-frontrunner/">running</a> ever since. For some reason, young people are drawn to radical white-haired men, as revealed by the popularity of Zinn’s YouTube talks, ten years after his death, and Sanders’s popularity on college campuses. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education article, “<a href="https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/candidates-on-campus">When the Candidates Come to Campus</a>,” Sanders visited 37 campuses over six months, beating out Biden, Buttigieg, and Warren.


	Sanders’s campaign website, in language redolent of A People’s History, rails against the “establishment” and promises a worker <a href="https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-and-democracy/">takeover</a> of business with government-mandated racial, ethnic, and gender diversity on boards, along with college debt forgiveness and free four-year degrees. Not surprisingly, “<a href="https://www.facebook.com/PeopleForBernie/posts/if-patriotism-were-defined-not-as-blind-obedience-to-government-not-as-submissiv/2022745271279010/">The People for Bernie Sanders</a>” Facebook page features Zinn’s inspirational quotation from his essay “The Problem is [sic] Civil Disobedience,” originally published in Violence: The Crisis of Confidence and republished in the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Zinn-Reader-Writings-Disobedience-Democracy/dp/1888363541/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+zinn+reader&amp;qid=1582127713&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">The Zinn Reader</a>:“If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one’s country, one’s fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.”


	Here, Zinn uses his characteristic sleight-of-hand, presenting patriotism in the form of a straw man (pretending patriots blindly obey government or submissively worship flags and anthems) and then offers “love of one’s country” alongside the contradictory principle of “fellow citizens (all over the world).” Ergo (in Zinn logic) loyalty to principles requires “disobedience”--usually of a violent kind. Civic involvement through voting and legal challenges is hopeless under Zinn’s version of the Founding—a “system” of checks and balances really set up to protect the rich with the middle class as a “buffer” against the suffering masses. Heroes in Zinn’s anti-capitalist epic are gun-bearing revolutionaries, like abolitionist John Brown and Black Panther H. Rap Brown.


	Recently, in an effort to broaden his appeal, <a href="https://freebeacon.com/issues/bloomberg-swipes-bernie-we-tried-communism-and-it-didnt-work/">Sanders</a> began distancing himself from old pro-communist statements. He replied to Mike Bloomberg’s accusations of communist sympathies with the claim that he believed in “‘democratic socialism, not communism.’” Similarly, he accused President Trump of ignorance about communism, claiming—in that timeless fashion—“’<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/482214-sanders-obviously-i-am-not-a-communist-but-maybe-trump-doesnt-know">I am not a communist</a>.’”


	Yet, only months ago, Sanders asserted, “communist China has ‘made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization.’” On the February 23 60 Minutes, Sanders praised the <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/sanders-support-castro-may-doomed-201509941.html">literacy program</a> of Fidel Castro (a Zinn hero) while also condemning the “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/02/27/bernie-sanders-authoritarian-double-standard/">authoritarian nature</a> of Cuba.” (See also Zinn’s criticism of Stalin’s “authoritarianism” and promises that it would disappear under a “people’s” form of communism.) Sanders doubled down during a <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/02/24/sanders-castro-had-a-good-literacy-program-china-has-taken-people-out-of-poverty/">townhall</a> the following night, claiming the Castro regime took more people out of “extreme poverty than any country in history.” He also explained that he has been “extremely consistent and critical of all authoritarian regimes all over the world, including Cuba, including Saudi Arabia, including China, including Russia.” (See the Sanders-defending spin by “authoritarian” equivalence in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/02/27/bernie-sanders-authoritarian-double-standard/">Washington Post</a>.)


	Sanders’s consistency has inspired <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/02/26/by-going-soft-on-sanders-democrats-are-paving-the-way-for-his-nomination-goodwin/">commitment</a>. In the 1980s he claimed Castro “’<a href="https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/02/26/twitter-mistakenly-censors-video-of-bernie-sanders-praising-fidel-castro/?utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=daily&amp;utm_campaign=20200226&amp;utm_content=Final">educated the kids</a>, gave them healthcare, totally transformed the society.’” He praised Castro for “’rising up against rather ugly rich people’” and “blasted the New York Times for not telling the ‘real truth’ about Nicaraguan communism.” In 1972, he claimed that “U.S. military action [in Vietnam] was ‘almost as bad as what Hitler did” (see Zinn on American fascism during World War II). When Jake Tapper recently brought up a recording from 1974 about capping wages, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/bernie-sanders-clashes-with-cnns-jake-tapper-over-old-comments-says-you-go-back-to-my-3rd-grade-essay">Sanders</a> snapped back, comparing the question to one about an essay from his third-grade days, and in the next breath railed about the “Trump billionaire class.” In 1974, Sanders was 33 years old. In response to Trump’s charge that Sanders was married in Moscow, Sanders called him a “’pathological liar.’” Actually, Sanders and current wife Jane honeymooned there in 1988. A <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/vintage-bernie-footage-shows-now-presidential-candidate-praising-breadlines-communist-nations">video</a> shows them lauding Moscow’s public transportation, “youth programs,” and “palaces of culture.” First-hand experiences by <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/21/i-lived-in-soviet-russia-when-bernie-sanders-visited-and-hes-a-communist-dupe/">Katya Sedgwick</a> and a <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/02/18/democratic-primary-bernie-sanders-poses-real-problem-democrats-column/4795074002/">Never-Trumper</a> confirm the facts about “youth [indoctrination] programs” and horrific conditions in Soviet hospitals.


	For those educated with a positive presentation of communism, as Millennials and Generation Z increasingly are, workers councils, and free education, health care, and housing are rightful functions of the state. They do <a href="https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/2019-annual-poll">not know</a> about the Hitler-Stalin pact or the 100 million killed under communism. Though the most “woke” on race, they do not know how the First Black Communist, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, died—horrifically in the <a href="https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/11/lovett-fort-whiteman-the-first-african-american-communist/">Sevvostlag Prison Labor Camp</a>, a gulag.


	Sanders, before he entered politics—like Zinn—produced educational materials (after trying <a href="https://www.keywiki.org/Bernie_Sanders#Early_life">carpentry</a> and writing pornography). In the 1970s he founded a nonprofit “educational filmstrip business,” called, curiously, the American People’s Historical Society. According to the <a href="https://blog.uvm.edu/uvmsc-specialcollections/?p=152">University of Vermont Libraries Special Collections</a>, the first project in 1977 was “standard fare” Vermont history for students in grade 6 and up. Subsequent projects extended to the neighboring states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.


	The nonprofit’s last product, before Sanders became mayor of Burlington in 1981, was a 1979 <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bernie-sanders-documentary-eugene-debs/">documentary</a> about Eugene Debs, written and narrated by Sanders, and portraying Debs as a spotless hero (as he is in Zinn’s book). In the promotional brochure, “Sanders announced that Debs was the first documentary in a series called ‘The Other Side of American History,’ which would deal with people and ideas that the major profit oriented manufacturers of audio-visual material will not cover because of economic and political reasons.” The “other side of American history” echoes the marketing of Zinn’s book (first published in 1980)—as a “bottom-up” history.” Zinn claimed to tell “the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the viewpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees. . . .” and on.


	Sanders campaigner and friend of Zinn, Cornel West, former Ivy League professor, in a recent <a href="http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/cornel-west-mordecai-lyon-missing-zinn">interview</a> recalled the documentary in glowing terms, and claimed that “Because Bernie can’t run as a democratic socialist, he’s running as a radical FDR-like progressive.” Furthermore, “He’s not talking about nationalizing anything, he’s not talking about workers’ councils or anything like that. . . .” Oddly, he charged that Sanders is being unfairly pegged as a democratic socialist “because he identifies with the legacy of Debs and [Norman] Thomas.”


	Professor West echoes Professor Michael Kazin of Georgetown University, a member of the Democratic Socialists, who pretends that socialism is the natural outgrowth of Americanism. He asserted in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/opinion/bernie-sanders-campaign.html">New York Times</a> that Sanders, by virtue of his transformation of the Democratic Party, has “already won”—a claim repeated from the book he co-edited and co-wrote, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=KNWNDwAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=we+own+the+future&amp;hl=en&amp;newbks=1&amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiRmsWh-tjnAhVDC6wKHfitChcQ6AEwAHoECAUQAg#v=snippet&amp;q=kazin&amp;f=false">We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism—American Style</a>. <a href="https://academeblog.org/2013/07/18/what-mitch-daniels-doesnt-know-about-history/">Kazin</a> reversed course on Zinn when a Republican, then-Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, criticized Zinn (by quoting Kazin’s criticisms of Zinn). Kazin admitted that he still did not “think much” of Zinn’s history, but condemned Daniels, claiming Daniels did not understand how history “is written,” i.e., from a “point of view.” (“Point of view” was the alibi Zinn used in presenting his falsified and plagiarized history, as I point out in <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781621577737/debunking-howard-zinn/">Debunking Howard Zinn</a>.)


	But peaceful transformations into a “people’s” voluntary communism are a chimera contradicted by every Zinn’s “interpretation” of historical events: all point to violent socialist revolution. It is no coincidence that paeans to Zinn’s memory are published in the magazine for Democratic Socialists whose name recalls the guillotine of the French Revolution, <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/howard-zinns-life-on-the-frontlines">Jacobin</a>.


	Nor are Sanders’s supporters beyond violence. A “Bernie bro” almost assassinated a U.S. <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/20/after-nearly-dying-at-the-hand-of-a-bernie-bro-steve-scalise-attests-to-their-violence/">Congressman</a>. Young Bernie field organizers call for violent revolution. South Carolina organizer <a href="https://www.projectveritasaction.com/2020/01/28/expose-2020-two-more-bernie-2020-field-organizers-in-south-carolina-sanders-campaign-attracts-truly-radical-people-have-to-make-plans-for-extreme-action/">Mason Baird</a> was captured by the Veritas Project railing against “empire”—a favorite Zinn word to recall a spin-off title, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_American_Empire">A People’s History of American Empire</a>—blithely calling for violence against “property” (which inevitably hurts people physically and financially), and maintaining that the hardships of the “gulags” were exaggerated. In his vision of a presidency involving “dual power” (instead of the three branches), President Bernie would be a strong man leading a “<a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/hiding-inherent-marxism-sen-bernie-sanders-joseph-hippolito/">mass movement</a>”—ala Zinn. Baird’s fellow South Carolinian, Daniel Taylor, called for “extreme action” if President Sanders’s demands were not met (presumably by the other governmental branches). <a href="https://www.projectveritasaction.com/2020/01/21/expose-2020-another-bernie-2020-field-organizer-ill-straight-up-get-armedim-ready-for-the-fing-revolutionguillotine-the-rich-praises-the-so/">Martin Weissgerber</a>, also of that Dixie state, described his fantasies of violently overthrowing the U.S. government and forcing Republicans into reeducation camps, or gulags, recalling the gulags of the Soviet Union, which he maintained were founded as therapeutic reeducation camps. Iowa field organizer <a href="https://keywiki.org/Kyle_Jurek">Kyle Jurek</a> would burn down cities. He extended the gulag invitation to liberals, and would even put them to death.


	The <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-joecks/victor-joecks-sanders-campaign-workers-want-to-guillotine-the-rich-send-republicans-to-gulags-1948876/">Sanders campaign</a> refused to disavow these statements. But Sanders himself once belonged to “<a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/25/why-bernie-was-always-democrats-2020-frontrunner/">a radical left splinter party</a> that advocated the abolition of all restrictions on the Second Amendment.” In his educational film, Sanders expressed admiration for “Debs’ decision to give ‘unqualified support to the Russian Revolution which had just taken place under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky.’” As <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bernie-sanders-documentary-eugene-debs/">Stanley Kurtz</a> pointed out, “Some of the quotations from Debs which Sanders speaks in his own voice and presents in an entirely positive light . . . will take you aback. For example: ‘while there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.’ Crime here is seen as nothing but a product of exploitative capitalism. Sanders also clearly approves of Debs’ attribution of racial animosity in the South to a plot by employers to undercut ‘working class unity.’” Kurtz concludes, “This is classic Marxist doctrine.” It is also classic Zinn, who praised violent black separatists over the peaceful NAACP, asking hopefully, “’Was there fear that blacks would turn their attention from the controllable field of voting to the more dangerous arena of wealth and poverty—of class conflict?’” Zinn praised the “new” and “’more dangerous than civil rights” “’emphasis’” for creating “’the possibility of black and whites uniting on the issue of class exploitation.’”


	Bernie Sanders moved from similarly trying to indoctrinate sixth-graders to revere Eugene Debs instead of George Washington, to a millionaire politician shaking his fist at billionaires. As Cornel West stated, Howard Zinn would no doubt be supporting Sanders.


	Mary Grabar, Ph.D., is a resident fellow at the <a href="https://www.theahi.org/">Alexander Hamilton Institute</a> for the Study of Western Civilization, founder and executive director of the <a href="https://dissidentprof.com/">Dissident Prof</a> Education Project, and author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fake-History-Generation-Against-America/dp/1621577732">Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America</a>.

Bernie Sanders’ Zinn Zombies

As the communist-sympathizing Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders leads the primary pack by double digits, some journalists, like the editorial

[Order Mary Grabar's new book, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1621577732/ref=asc_df_16215777321564657200000?tag=shopzilla0d-20&amp;ascsubtag=shopzilla_rev_463-20;15660358526964652886610070301008005&amp;creative=395261&amp;creativeASIN=1621577732&amp;linkCode=asn">HERE</a>.]


	On “Giving Tuesday,” the Zinn Education Project, a non-profit that provides free downloadable K-12 lessons adapted from the late communist historian Howard Zinn’s bestselling history, A People’s History of the United States, solicited donations. Proudly announcing that the 100,000 mark of teachers registered at the site had been reached, the email declared, “We depend solely on individuals like you for support” and “the Zinn Education Project receives no corporate donations. We depend on individual donations and family foundations.” It reminded potential donors, “Your contribution will make an impact, whether you donate $5 or $500,” and—giving the game away—“Many of the students in high school today will be voting in 2020.”


	The lessons encourage classroom use of Zinn’s “history,” a book first published in 1980 and riddled with deceptive quotations, leading questions, critical omissions, logical fallacies, plagiarism, and blatant falsehoods. The Zinn empire continues to grow, thanks in no small part to its escalating use in classrooms, aided by the revision of the Advanced Placement U.S. History course guidelines to the far-left during the Obama administration. The entire Portland, Oregon, school district has adopted A Young People’s History of the United States for eighth grade.


	The 100,000 registrants have grown from the 84,000 figure I had when I put the final changes into my book, <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781621577737/debunking-howard-zinn/">Debunking Howard Zinn</a>, in the spring. To counteract the force feeding of this blackened history on young teenagers, the <a href="https://www.oregonscholars.org/wp-content/uploads/SavetheChildrenFromZinn_Poster.pdf">Oregon Association of Scholars</a> is hosting a drive to put my book in Portland schools and libraries (details on making tax-deductible contributions <a href="https://www.oregonscholars.org/wp-content/uploads/SavetheChildrenFromZinn_Poster.pdf">here</a>).


	The ZEP lessons reinforce Zinn’s presentation of the United States as redeemable only through a socialist revolution. Major historical events are replaced with instances demonstrating relentless oppression—an effort much in line with the New York Times’ “1619” project, which ZEP emphasized in a December 17 mailing that directed teachers to lessons about the “color line,” the involvement of “one in four” American presidents in “human trafficking and slavery,” the “poetry of defiance,” lessons on Reconstruction, an examination of over a dozen plans for reparations, a “role-play” intended to “upend the traditional narrative of the Constitutional Convention, by including the perspectives of workers, enslaved people, and poor farmers, alongside those of . . . —the wealthy white elite,” and a role-play based on The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.


	Search for “<a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/?s=Pearl+Harbor">Pearl Harbor</a>,” however, and you come up mostly with lessons about the internment of the Japanese. “This Day in History” for December 7 marks not the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the 1874 <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/vicksburg-massacre/">Vicksburg Massacre</a>, described as a massacre by whites of between 75 and 300 African Americans defending black sheriff Peter Crosby, a former slave and Union veteran. The point is that, as “one of many massacres in U.S. history,” it was “designed to reassert white supremacy during Reconstruction.” The “<a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/collection/massacres-us/">parallels</a>” to contemporary America under President Trump are made with Democracy Now! segments, including “Hate Crimes in Kentucky and Pennsylvania” in October 2018—the &nbsp;shooting deaths of two blacks by a white man in Kentucky and the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. Rabbi Fornari drums home the “interconnection of [President] Trump’s language . . . targeting immigrants and Muslims and people of color. . . .” This year’s Presidents Day <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/teach-students-question-president-2019/">lesson</a>, “Teach Students to Question the President,” described him as “louder, coarser, and more explicitly racist, sexist, and nativist than recent presidents,” but sharing “ugly continuities with his predecessors.” In 2017, Teaching for Change, one of the two ZEP “partner” organizations (the other being Rethinking Schools) declared “<a href="https://socialjusticebooks.org/scholastic-childrens-book-on-trump/">victory</a>” in its pressure campaign against Scholastic to drop positive books about President Trump.


	The history lesson for December 4, 2019, “<a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/black-panther-party-assassinated/">Black Panther Party Members Assassinated</a>”--assassinated by the FBI—presents Fred Hampton as “21, radical, clear-eyed, purposeful” and a target by “COINTELPRO &amp; the white supremacist ideology that wrote it.” &nbsp;Another teachable anniversary, “October 15, 1966: The Black Panther Party Founded,” describes them as seeking “justice for African Americans and other oppressed communities.” Co-founder Huey P. Newton’s birthday, February 17, 1942, provides another lesson, pretending that Newton, photographed with “youth of East Oakland community,” was a man who just mostly made visits to “Panther schools and breakfast programs.” <a href="https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/the-black-book-of-the-american-left-the-collected-conservative-writings-of-david-horowitz-paperback/">Left out</a> is Newton’s brutal rape of expelled Panther co-founder Bobby Seale. So are the murders of suspected informants and police by the Panthers.


	The Great Depression is cast as one of the “<a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/what-caused-the-great-depression/">crises under capitalism</a>.” During the Cold War the imperialistic U.S. presented as Communist “<a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/disguising-imperialism-textbooks-get-cold-war-wrong-dupe-students/">anti-colonial efforts</a>” that were intended “to take back land, resources, and power from ruling elites” in Cuba, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Congo, Nicaragua, Chile, Iran, and Vietnam. Other cheery lessons focus on such things as “climate justice” and “police brutality.”


	Not only are ZEP’s history lessons false, but so are its claims to be a grassroots organization funded by family foundations and small individual donations. The false image was reinforced by the announcement that all donations up to $10,000 would be matched by Zinn’s former Boston University student, Dave Colapinto, a goal accomplished by the evening, thanks to “<a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/giving-tuesday-2019/">dozens of individuals</a>.” Colapinto’s testimonial asserted that it was Zinn’s classes and books that inspired him to become an attorney representing “whistleblowers” (a job that enabled him to donate $10,000 this year and last).


	This second solicitation of the day repeated the “grassroots” claim: &nbsp;“Many non-profit education organizations get major corporate donations. The Zinn Education Project does not. We depend solely on individuals like you for support.”


	ZEP partner, <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/donate">Teaching for Change</a> “<a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/donate/">handle[s] donations</a>.” But according to their latest IRS filing available (the 2016/2017 fiscal year) “individuals like you” include movie star Matt Damon, who donated much more than $5 or $500, in fact, $10,000. Damon starred in and co-wrote the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, which grossed not only <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119217/">nearly $226 million</a>, but catapulted A People’s History to even higher sales and more riches for Zinn after Damon, playing a genius, in a key dramatic moment promoted the book as a “real history book,” one that would “knock you on your ass.”


	But Damon’s donation was paltry compared to the $117,150 given by William Holtzman, another of Zinn’s Boston University students—who founded the Zinn Education Project in 2008 after “a <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/about/">successful career</a> in technology,” i.e., in the capitalist system that Zinn sought to destroy.


	<a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/medea-benjamin/">Radical</a> activist and Code Pink co-founder <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/video-highlights-from-the-howard-zinn-dedication/#medea_benjamin">Medea Benjamin</a> also seems to be doing well enough to plop down ten times the maximum suggested amount: $5,000. Zinn’s daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn contributed $30,000.


	The Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which lists over 70 “<a href="https://www.siliconvalleycf.org/our-corporate-partners">corporate partners</a>,” gave $25,000 to the organization that claims it gets no corporate funding. Teaching for Change did not reject 600 shares of Linked In, valued at $117,150, nor 133 shares of Exxon, valued at $11,086 (don’t tell the “climate justice” curriculum writers).


	However, one of the biggest donations, $100,000, came from the New Venture Fund, one of the four “sister” nonprofit funds created and managed by Arabella Advisors, which specializes in “dark money,” i.e., hiding donors, like George Soros. In 2017, New Venture had $359 million in revenues, according to a <a href="https://darkmoneyatm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/CRC_Arabella-Advisors-Dark-Money_small.pdf">Capital Research Center</a> report by Hayden Ludwig. Ludwig writes, “Arabella [Advisors] provides much more to the institutional Left than donor advice—it runs a network of ‘front’ groups,” which are generally “little more than websites created to give the appearance of a full-fledged [independent] ‘grassroots’ organization tackling a ‘niche’ area: protesting President Trump’s judicial nominees. . ., pushing environmentalist causes, propping up Obamacare. . . .” The four Funds “share interlocking boards of directors and officers mainly composed of Arabella Advisors’ own leadership,” and even office space. Further, by offering Funds with 501 (c) (3) designations Arabella offers donors “tax-deductibility” while allowing political lobbying through 501 (c) (4) Funds. Although Arabella gave a modest amount to nonprofits that practice charity such as cancer research, “the bulk of its ‘philanthropy’ remains better described as ‘deep advocacy’: nonprofit political activism hidden beneath numerous layers.”&nbsp; &nbsp;


	On the Teaching for Change website current <a href="https://www.teachingforchange.org/about/donorspartners">funders</a> include the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, but also the <a href="https://mola.dc.gov/page/mola-current-grantees-latino-community-grants-fy20">D.C. Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs</a> (which helpfully offers advice on “<a href="https://mola.dc.gov/page/what-do-if-ice-comes-your-door">What to do if ICE comes to your door</a>”). In 2016/2017 Teaching for Change received $21,750 in government grants. But Teaching for Change is also funded by taxpayers across the country through school taxes that pay for ZEP educators to conduct in-school workshops and for the purchase of their books.


	There are also donors listed as “Anonymous”—perhaps “advisees” of Arabella who may not want the public to know that they are more interested in students’ votes than in their educations.

The Zinn Education Project

[Order Mary Grabar's new book, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America: HERE.]


	On “Giving Tuesday,” the

Recently, in Germany, a gang of Antifa punks broke into the home of a 34-year-old female <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/11/05/antifa-extremists-viciously-beat-female-real-estate-employee-her-own-home/">real estate agent</a> and beat her up for the simple reason that she was a real estate agent, i.e., selling property. In her case it was luxury property. Antifa does not approve of private property, especially expensive private property. So they beat her up.


	Here in the good ole’ USA, Mike Adams wrote a column titled “<a href="https://townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/2019/11/08/three-essential-firearms-for-civil-unrest-n2556087">Three Essential Firearms for Civil Unrest</a>,” the ‘civil unrest’ likely being a “mob of Antifa ‘anti-fascists’” coming into your neighborhood and crossing your property line, Molotov cocktails in hand.


	This may seem farfetched, but I’ve seen things progress at an alarming rate since 2011, when I observed and wrote about the Occupy Wall Street movement from which our present-day Antifa movement has evolved.


	I was living in the Atlanta area so I went to the “occupation” of Woodruff Park downtown. In my article I noted the “<a href="https://pjmedia.com/blog/the-occupations-anarchy-waiting-for-crisis/1/">hippie art festival</a>” atmosphere among the tents, but also wondered, as my title indicated, whether the “occupations” were “anarchy waiting for crisis.” Occupiers protested the sale of a building used as a homeless shelter to Emory University for a medical facility. Back then I saw George Soros-supported “Cop Watch” punks in orange t-shirts putting their video cameras in the faces of police simply trying to stop protestors from blocking a hospital emergency entrance or an ambulance going down a downtown street. Today we have masked protestors with weapons calling for the death of police and attacking reporters and attendees of public events, like campus speeches and political rallies.


	Back then, in response to the lag in police response to a 300-strong, rush hour march up Peachtree Street, and then the mayor’s revocation of his order to end the “occupation” of the park, I asked, “Is it endangering public safety to allow an anarchic group of young people, the homeless (often with mental and substance abuse issues), and ne’er do wells to take to the streets on their own?” &nbsp;Noting the chants against private property and sales of socialist newspapers, I detected “unfocused, but revolutionary” aims of protestors. The young man selling the Socialist Worker told me that he had learned about its publisher, the International Socialist Organization, from his professors at nearby Georgia State University.


	Today we have Dartmouth history professor/Antifa activist <a href="https://bucknellian.net/93341/opinion/letter-to-the-editor-mark-bray-on-antifa/">Mark Bray</a> author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, openly advocating violence. According to Bray’s book, Antifa has been fighting the resurgence of fascism in Europe for decades. This applies not only to the&nbsp; neo-fascist groups (actually few and tiny), but also to anyone owning rental property. Antifa fights for the rights of “squatters.” Their latest <a href="https://itsgoingdown.org/roundup-of-november-29th-nobodypays-transit-actions/">campaign</a> is an international crusade against public transit police and fares. By a historical sleight of hand, transposing European developments, Bray claims that fascism is ascendant in the United States and is leading up to a Holocaust like the one under which his relatives suffered in Europe.&nbsp;


	However, the relatively few fascist sympathizers living in the United States in the 1930s were dispatched with by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the FBI. Still, such “demagogues” as Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst provided grist for Raymond Gram Swing’s Forerunners of American Facism and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, both published in 1935. Lewis’s novel has become a favorite reference point by leftist writers.


	Shortly after Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator, Salon Magazine published “<a href="https://www.salon.com/2015/09/29/it_really_can_happen_here_the_novel_that_foreshadowed_donald_trumps_authoritarian_appeal/">It really can happen here</a>: the novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal,” and the Daily Beast warned, “<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/sinclair-lewis-predicted-trumpand-us">Sinclair Lewis Predicted Trump—And Us</a>.” Jules Stewart drew parallels in the October 9 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/shortcuts/2016/oct/09/it-cant-happen-here-1935-novel-sinclair-lewis-predicted-rise-donald-trump">issue</a> of The Guardian. In the novel, “Buzz” Windrip wins the 1936 election by standing up for “Americanism” and vilifying Mexico, Jewish bankers who refuse to assimilate, and communists. “Substitute ‘Muslim’ for ‘communist’ and ‘Hispanic’ for Jew and there emerges an uncomfortable picture of what is taking place in the US today,” intoned Stewart. A week after the election the novel had <a href="http://money.com/money/4573801/sinclair-lewis-it-cant-happen-here-amazon/">sold out</a> on Amazon. Before the inauguration, the New York Times published “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/books/review/classic-novel-that-predicted-trump-sinclar-lewis-it-cant-happen-here.html">Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump</a>.” (These writers were not quite so original, however. Sociology professor Brian E. Fogarty had reflected back on the George W. Bush administration in his 2009 book, Fascism: Why Not Here?)


	Although fascism rejects traditionalism and shares with Marxism the embrace of progressivism and state control, Communists have associated fascism with conservatism. CPUSA Chairman William Z. Foster, in his 1951 “history,” Outline Political History of the Americas, linked fascism to capitalism.


	That same year, 1951, Howard Zinn was teaching Marxism at the Communist Party headquarters in Brooklyn. In 1980, he published A People’s History of the United States, essentially an updated version of Foster’s book (and of course <a href="https://www.regnery.com/9781621577737/debunking-howard-zinn/">factually wrong</a>). Used widely in classrooms, especially since the guidelines for Advanced Placement US History courses were rewritten under the Obama administration, it has become the bible for such precursors to Antifa as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Willem Van Spronsen, who went out in a blaze of gunfire after he tried to blow up an ICE detention facility last summer, claimed in his “I am antifa” manifesto, &nbsp;“’we are living in <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/26/howard-zinns-anti-american-textbook-inspired-antifa-bombing-attempt/">visible fascism ascendant</a>.” His authority was Zinn. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The addled 69-year-old folk singer was vulnerable to Zinn’s siren song, but so are students who are subjected to Zinn’s book in high school and college, and to the “Young People’s” version in middle schools. A Young People’s History of the United States is the official textbook for eighth-graders in Portland, Oregon—Antifa Central.


	Zinn-indoctrinated Americans see fascism baked into the American character. The Storm Troopers are the police and Nazi Party members are everyday Americans—bank managers, school bus drivers, real estate agents. According to A People’s History, fascism’s “essential elements—militarism, racism, imperialism” have been “absorbed into the already poisoned bones of the victors.” Similarly, Foster claimed that capitalist countries are full of “fascist conceptions,” with “Wall Street imperialists” stoking the “anti-Communist crusade.”


	For Bray, the American equivalent of Nazis are Republicans and capitalists, “Nazis in pinstripes.” Donald Trump supporters are “tuxedoed fascists” who deserved the attack from Antifa for attending the “Deplorables” ball during the 2016 presidential inauguration. Many had belonged to tea parties. Their permitted rallies never disrupted traffic or polluted parks, as I noted in that same 2011 article and others. These solid Americans, mocked by socialist-sympathizing elites as “Babbits” during the 1930s, were also vilified by Democratic political leaders and the media. Bray claims that “Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamophobia, and many more hateful traits,” and warns, “these popular bases of support create the foundation for fascism to manifest itself.”


	Bray admits that the goal is to make such “everyday fascists” fearful of leaving their homes, and to make their views “recede into hiding.” Americans who refuse to yield will find it “politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly to articulate [their views].”


	These are chilling words. Bray has enjoyed a teaching gig at an Ivy League university and has been invited to lecture around the globe. On the eve of the 9/11 anniversary he spoke at Bucknell University at the invitation of the Humanities Center to kick off the year-long series on “Confronting Fascism.” One faculty member wrote an article for The Federalist <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/bucknell-university-to-host-antifa-leader-who-promotes-political-violence/">protesting</a> the choice of this advocate of violence. The student newspaper, the Bucknellian, published no articles before or after Bray’s visit.


	But no fewer than seven articles appeared in that newspaper condemning the visit of Heather Mac Donald, who writes about crime and violent suppression of speech on campuses. The counter-rally to “<a href="https://bucknellian.net/96238/news/students-rally-against-heather-mac-donald/">drown out</a>” Mac Donald’s speech was seen by a student editorialist as a “<a href="https://bucknellian.net/96258/opinion/last-weeks-protest-was-a-good-thing-even-if-you-disagree-with-it/">good thing</a>” because it “served as a key sign that members of the University community” were going outside their “bubble.” It is common now to read about students physically blocking and attacking speakers and those wanting to hear them.


	In 2011, I mocked the plastic drum-beating, kazoo-playing Occupy misfits marching down Peachtree Street, and wrote about student antics on college campuses. Today, “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/politics/los-angeles-homeless-crisis/index.html">tent cities</a>” occupy public spaces in Los Angeles and other major cities, and law-abiding Americans are finding themselves chased out of political rallies, restaurants, and stores, and finding no help from police who have been ordered to “stand down.” &nbsp;


	Antifa home invasions are not far-fetched. We have a generation educated to believe that average Americans are capable of starting another Holocaust by virtue of their “hateful” words, thanks to Communist propaganda handed down from the CPUSA and Howard Zinn, to Mark Bray and other Antifa-sympathizing professors.

Antifa Home Invasions: ‘Can It Happen Here?’

Recently, in Germany, a gang of Antifa punks broke into the home of a 34-year-old female real estate agent and beat her up for the simple reason that she was a

Back to School and Howard Zinn in the Classroom

[Order Mary Grabar's new book, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America: HERE.]


	California has scrapped

To coincide with the day of <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/17/slave-descendant-celebrates-juneteenth-alabama-can/">celebration</a> of emancipation, Juneteenth, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is holding a <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reparations-slavery-house-hearing-tanehisi-coates_n_5d0235eae4b0304a120ab01a">hearing</a> today, featuring the plaints of millionaire movie star <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/danny-glover">Danny Glover</a> and MacArthur “Genius” Award winner ($625,000) Ta-Nehisi Coates, “to examine . . . the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice.”


	In other words, pay-outs to African Americans. It makes even less sense than it did thirty years ago when former Democratic Congressman John Conyers introduced the measure. Since then, historians have added to our knowledge about the complicated issue of slavery, including African Americans’ own participation in the practice. Additionally, their own voting records have instituted the discriminatory practices for which they now seek redress. Such facts add to the host of others being discussed, such as the impossibility of determining damages because some blacks have no slave heritage (including former President Barack Obama.whose Kenyan father enjoyed the privilege of studying in American universities), the number of whites who died in the Civil War that ended slavery, and white immigrants who had come to these shores long after slavery had been abolished.


	Even the case Coates recently made in his <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/ta-nehisi-coates-revisits-the-case-for-reparations">New Yorker</a> interview about the financial losses suffered by African Americans when they were denied federal housing loans and resorted to unscrupulous lenders does not stand up, though it appears to have the hallmarks of a case of limited and traceable losses due to discrimination—as was the case with the Japanese interned during World War II.


	But Coates has gone back to his original call for reparations for slavery. Slavery, however, was an institution in which a surprising number of African Americans participated. As did white slave owners, they became wealthy by exploiting their fellow man. And, discriminatory federal housing policies began under a Democratic president who won his second, third, and fourth terms with a large majority of the black vote.


	The ownership of black slaves by free blacks was a well-known fact. In 1830, by a conservative estimate (due to likely undercounting by the census), there were more than 3,500 slaveholders of African descent in the American South. According to David Lightner and Alexander Ragan, who reviewed census records and four case histories of black (or mixed race) slave owners, and published their findings in the August 2005 Journal of Southern History, “black slave owning was fairly widespread among the free black population.” In fact, the number of black slave owners was “startlingly large”: “almost exactly 2 percent of 182,070, the total free black population of the South.” The figure is considered to be large because only six percent of the white population (3,660,758) owned slaves: “Thus a southern white was just three times more likely to own slaves than was a southern free black.” African American historian Carter G. Woodson in his 1924 book, Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in the 1830s, maintained that such “ownership” was in name only, used only “to preserve family ties” and protect blacks. But Lightner and Ragan estimated conservatively that between 57 percent and 66 percent of black slave owners were exploitative.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title="">[1]</a>


	Indeed, more African Americans probably would have owned slaves if they could have if we read Loren Schweninger’s groundbreaking 1990 study, Black Property Owners in the South: 1790-1915, correctly. Schweninger, a friend of African American historian John Hope Franklin and coauthor of a book about runaway slaves with him, showed that the treatment of these slaves ran the gamut, from paternal benevolence to the selling off of a man’s own children.


	Blacks began owning black slaves as early as 1646-47, a case in point being Virginian Anthony Johnson who “acquired . . . John Casor . . . his slave for life,” according to court documents. By the late eighteenth century, “a small group of profit-oriented black slaveholders was emerging in the South, especially in South Carolina, and along the Gulf Coast.” Even those who had “bought” loved ones also began buying blacks as slaves. At the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, in Charleston District, South Carolina, “[a]mong the approximately 155 free Negro families, . . . nearly one-third had entered the slaveholding class” and owned a total of 277 bondsmen and women.” Most black slave owners during this time were urban craftsmen and shopkeepers. Though the small number of free blacks who acquired large farms, plantations, and slaves, often got them from their white fathers, “those who survived into the early decades of the nineteenth century were often capable businessmen and astute planters,” and “were accepted by their white neighbors as persons of wealth and prestige.”<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title="">[2]</a> As the plantation system expanded, free blacks participated, purchasing field hands.


	Sometimes slaves, through hard work and ingenuity, accumulated wealth and bought their own freedom--and bought and sold slaves. Jean Meullion, a former slave, “purchased Negroes on a regular basis, traveling to the slave market in Natchez, Mississippi, or making arrangements with a slave-trading firm in New Orleans.” Plaquemines Parish sugar planter Andrew Durnford complained that costs were so high that “’even the Negro traders are surprised at the prices demanded.’” His purchase of a “coffle of blacks” included some “’bargains,’” but many who were “’rotten’” and “diseased.”<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title="">[3]</a>


	Alas, “[i]n their treatment of their bondspeople, [free blacks] differed little from white slave owners, ” according to Schweninger. Some kindly kept families together and provided them with “adequate food, clothing, and living quarters.” However, most saw their slaves as “chattel property. They bought, sold, mortgaged, willed, traded, and transferred fellow Negroes, demanded long hours in the workshops and fields, and severely disciplined recalcitrant blacks.”<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title="">[4]</a> Some sold their own children into slavery, or enslaved them themselves. When these children ran away, they advertised for their capture.


	The descendants of these black slave owners continued to prosper even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, as African American journalist George Schuyler informed readers of his autobiography, Black and Conservative. &nbsp;Schuyler had gotten his start as a journalist at the Harlem-based socialist magazine, The Messenger, in 1923, and by the following year was also writing for the black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. The Messenger folded in 1928, but even before then had largely abandoned its socialist mission. In it, Schuyler profiled black capitalists, including Harlem real estate agents and speculators who took advantage of overbuilding, buying cheap from white builders and selling dear and maximizing profits from rents. Much of the merry-making of the Roaring Twenties in Harlem occurred at “rent parties,” where admission was collected to pay the rent.


	Schuyler also worked for the NAACP and was sent to report on abuses of black (federal) levee workers in Mississippi in late 1931. In preparation for his dangerous undercover investigation, Schuyler called upon “old friend Dr. Dumas, former president of the National Medical Association.” Dumas was “a distinguished, courtly, and wealthy mulatto who owned a large white mansion atop a double terrace, six blocks of downtown real estate and a big plantation.” Dr. Dumas, Schuyler writes, “was one of a considerable number of Negroes in the vicinity who were planters and slave-holders before the Civil War over on the Louisiana side.”<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title="">[5]</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;


	A Francis Ernest Dumas of New Orleans appears in Schweninger’s book. A “slave owner and landlord,” he was among “the ten wealthiest free persons of color in the South.” In 1854, his worth was estimated to be $250,000.<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title="">[6]</a> His brother seemed to be of similar means, judging by the manner in which he entertained Union army officer John William De Forest at his New Orleans home. Writing to his wife on September 29, 1862, De Forest described a feast ending with “’a collation of cakes, confectionary, creams, ices and champagne, followed by café noir, cognac and delicious cigars.’” The party for De Forest and “several of his fellow officers, Negro and white,” included piano-playing, singing patriotic songs, and dancing with “’very pretty ladies.’”


	Admittedly, writes Schweninger, “Such social occasions were rare, even in New Orleans, but whites and free persons of color, especially those with substantial property, occasionally disregarded the prevailing taboos against interracial mixing.” Also, declining during the late antebellum period were the number of mixed “’marriages’” that previously had been “relatively common in some parts of the Lower South.”<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title="">[7]</a>


	After Reconstruction Jim Crow laws were instituted, as resentment against the North festered. Yet, by the 1920s blacks and whites continued to mingle in some Southern communities. This is what Schuyler observed when he made a six-month tour through the South in 1925/1926 for the Courier. Although sometimes he would be welcomed with a large sign put out by the KKK as he stepped off the “colored” train car, other times he was pleasantly surprised by the hospitality of some white Southerners and racial integration in some communities. He told William Ingersoll during his oral history interview in 1960, “I remember once going to Galveston, Texas, and the minister there under whose auspices I had come said that I was going to stay with him.” His house happened to be on the main street, “where all the leading people lived.” Schuyler had also been in “blocks in Meridian, Mississippi, and Jackson, Mississippi, where there would be say 20 or 24 homes and half of them would be occupied by Negro families, whereas in many cities in the North you wouldn’t have found that. . . .”<a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title="">[8]</a> (On his travels, he also noted such things as a black dentist in West Virginia treating white patients, along with black. In a 1948 series, audaciously titled “What’s Good About the South?” Schuyler reported on prosperous black farmers and owners of stores patronized by whites and blacks—as well as complaints about government-imposed segregation.)


	As Schuyler asserted, de facto segregation was practiced in Northern cities. It was the same with ethnic groups, as Schuyler’s white Jewish friends, Isaac Don Levine and Sidney Hook, observed about Boston and New York, which had distinct Jewish, Italian, Irish, and German sections. Immigrants tended to gravitate toward neighborhoods with their own kind.


	In the South, however, blacks and whites—unlike the Italians and Irish in the north—had lived closely together for a long time. At least some of the Southern communities practiced integration. But segregation became federal policy, with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—a massive government takeover of farming, housing, charity, retirement, and the workplace. All these programs, as Schuyler pointed out, discriminated against and harmed the black man. He became the real “forgotten man,” as the theme of the 1935 annual NAACP meeting indicated. That meeting featured tenant farmers telling their stories about facing starvation when the federal government paid (white) farmers to keep acreage fallow.


	Schuyler railed against discrimination in PWA projects and complained bitterly for having to pay higher taxes and prices for consumer goods for make-work programs. The patronage system of wealthy whites who paid off black “leaders” became a function of the federal government.


	In spite of such discriminatory policies, African Americans shifted to the Democratic Party in 1936. Roosevelt illegally used his “Black Cabinet” to campaign for him on the radio (whose licenses he allocated to those disposed to support him), bestowed gifts, such as a new chemistry building built by well-paid white WPA workers to Howard University (dedicated in October 1936). As Nancy J. Weiss, in Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, notes, “It was hardly an accident that . . . the establishment of the first CCC camp commanded entirely by black officers came in August 1936.”<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title="">[9]</a> Photos of the First Lady with black children gathered round her were distributed, though without a disclaimer stating that should these same children come down with polio they would be barred from FDR’s Warm Springs facility. As more of the economy became dependent on federal largesse, the black workforce suffered. African Americans lost jobs but increased their dependence on “relief,” outpacing whites proportionately. If they were given federal housing, it was housing officially segregated by the government—with no possibility of local communities deciding their own arrangements—as they had done in Galveston and Meridian.


	The policy was passed on down as the federal government got into the mortgage business. As Coates rightfully complains, these policies were discriminatory and wrong. So were the WPA, the AAA, and Social Security—programs instituted by the party that is still overwhelmingly supported by African Americans. Slavery, of course, was wrong, as President Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural. But why should we be paying the descendants of Dr. Dumas who benefited from the forced labor of fellow African Americans? And how can we trust a massive bureaucracy that has done so much to muck up race relations to be a fair arbiter and dispenser of these funds?


	NOTE: The author welcomes the nomination for a MacArthur Genius Award in order to pursue her research on the Dumas family in Louisiana.

<div>
	Notes:

	<hr width="33%" size="1" align="left">
	<div id="ftn1">
		
			<a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title="">[1]</a> David L. Lightner and Alexander M. Ragan, “Were African American Slaveholders Benevolent or Exploited?” Journal of Southern History, 71 (August 2005),535- 558.
	</div>

	<div id="ftn2">
		
			<a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title="">[2]</a> Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South: 1790-1915, (1990), 23.
	</div>

	<div id="ftn3">
		
			<a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title="">[3]</a> Schweninger, 104-105.
	</div>

	<div id="ftn4">
		
			<a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title="">[4]</a> Shweninger, 105-106.
	</div>

	<div id="ftn5">
		
			<a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title="">[5]</a> George Schuyler, Black and Conservative (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1966),&nbsp; 200.
	</div>

	<div id="ftn6">
		
			<a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title="">[6]</a> Schweninger, 118.
	</div>

	<div id="ftn7">
		
			<a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title="">[7]</a> Schweninger, 134.
	</div>

	<div id="ftn8">
		
			<a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title="">[8]</a> Ingersoll Interview, 192-193.
	</div>

	<div id="ftn9">
		
			<a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title="">[9]</a> Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 200-202.
	</div>
</div>

Reparations Madness

To coincide with the day of celebration of emancipation, Juneteenth, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is

What do college presidents mean by “academic rigor”? Good “judgment” in the classroom? Making the campus “inclusive”? Recent developments on the campus of Hamilton College after the visit of <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/author/paul-gottfried">Paul Gottfried</a>, Horace Raffensberger Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Elizabethtown College, provide clues.


	Gottfried was invited to speak to two classes by Robert Paquette, Executive Director of the nearby Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. As I described at the <a href="https://www.theahi.org/appearance-of-paul-gottfried-sparks-disruptions-at-hamilton-college/">AHI’s website</a>, Gottfried on October 25, 2017, discussed conservatism in the United States in “Modern Conservative Politics” in the Government Department, and then gave a lecture based on his recent book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept, in a history course, “Nazi Germany.” Although he was greeted by students holding signs accusing him of racism, Gottfried gave two informed performances and responded to questions, including hostile ones, with intelligence and courtesy.&nbsp;


	Nevertheless, his visit inspired campus-wide denunciations in a letter from the Government Department, editorials in the student newspaper, and a letter from the college president.&nbsp;


	Two days after the visit, students, faculty, and administrators received the following proclamation:&nbsp;


	We the undersigned full-time members of the Government Department would like to speak out regarding Paul Gottfried’s visit to one of our courses. We are still learning about what transpired on Wednesday. . . .&nbsp; However, we have already heard multiple complaints from students about racist remarks allegedly made by Gottfried.&nbsp; We unequivocally condemn any and all such racist remarks. . . .&nbsp;


	Similarly, the student newspaper vaguely claimed that Gottfried was “<a href="https://spec.hamilton.edu/stopping-the-debate-before-it-begins-gottfried-event-silences-opposing-voices-dbe8791f229b">espousing hateful opinions</a>” and therefore should not have been allowed on campus. It took until December 4 for President David Wippman to reply, which enraged student Katherine Barnes who wrote “<a href="https://spec.hamilton.edu/too-litle-too-late-too-tolerant-president-wippman-fails-to-condemn-gottfried-1542b3e56e59">Too little, too late, too tolerant</a>: President Wippman fails to condemn Gottfried.”&nbsp;


	But Wippman’s letter would be considered laughable if it weren’t so slanderous. “I write to address issues of serious concern to every member of the Hamilton community,” it began as it addressed “the aftermath” of Gottfried’s visit and repeated the Government Department’s hearsay of “’racist remarks.’” Wippman, too, wrote that “racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and all other forms of bigotry are anathema to our core values.”&nbsp;


	“Second,” he intoned, “we are a community that insists upon academic rigor. . . . [W]e should not invite speakers to address subjects on which they have little or no relevant expertise or who espouse views that have no grounding in reason or fact.”


	Wippman then declared his commitment to the “free and open exchange of ideas,” noting the “dozens, if not hundreds,” of invited speakers every year, but added, “Special considerations apply when a speaker is invited to a class, in which attendance is expected. . . . It is essential that all members of our community exercise good judgment. . . .”&nbsp;


	“Academic rigor”? “Good judgment”? History Professor Paquette rightly contends, “no one on Hamilton’s campus <a href="https://spec.hamilton.edu/letter-to-the-editor-re-racists-in-the-classroom-73d0b17564f1">approaches</a>” Gottfried’s level of scholarship. He wrote multiple scholarly books on the topics of his lectures.&nbsp;


	In contrast, we have two members of the faculty recently touted on Hamilton’s website. Ashley Bohrer, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, at Hamilton since at least 2016, has a department web page describing her scholarship as “making philosophy transcend disciplinary and institutional boundaries,” with research focusing “on the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and hetero/sexism in both the early modern period and in the contemporary world.” The page <a href="https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/our-faculty/directory/faculty-detail/bohrer-ashley">advertises</a> her as “a committed activist who has organized with a variety of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist grassroots collectives.” Yes, she served on the “education committee” of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeNnG3U5140">Occupy Chicago</a> and was an “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyM2od1CnrI">activist with SlutWalk Chicago</a> (<a href="https://imgur.com/gallery/fhbWJhs">photo</a>). At Hamilton, she has taught “Philosophy and Incarceration” (with which she appears to have had <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeNnG3U5140">firsthand experience</a>) and “Marxism, Feminism, Antiracism.”&nbsp;


	Bohrer has been bestowed with at least three grants from the college: the “Emerson Foundation Scholars Summer Grant for Collaborative Research,” “Building Inclusive Classrooms Seminar Grant,” and a “Social Innovation and Transformational Leadership Course Development Grant.” Bohrer, though a visiting professor, has been a member of the Hamilton College Humanities Council and of the Arthur Levitt Center Council for Public Affairs. In 2016/2017 she served as an “organizing faculty member” on “problematizing whiteness.”


	Her “scholarship”--spouting Marxist drivel—was displayed at the 2016 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-pid-Mr8gA">Marxist Feminist Conference</a> in Vienna. She claims a forthcoming book bearing the title, “Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism,” information derived from a notice about her presentation on “gender policing” to Red Bloom, a “Communist Collective” in April.


	<a href="https://canarymission.org/professor/Ashley_Bohrer/">Canary Mission</a>, which “documents individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses,” describes Bohrer’s numerous anti-Israel activities, including a “leading role in a campaign to occupy an illegal outpost in Israel, in hopes of building a Palestinian settlement.” She vocally supported Steven Salaita, whose tweet in 2014 wishing that more Jews would be kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists prompted the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to withdraw their job offer to him. She has authored several articles that “demonize” Israel and is a founding member of the Syracuse chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace, a group, which, contrary to its name, engages in disrupting pro-Israel speakers and events, and promotes <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/241108/bds-boycotters-say-boycotting-them-mccarthyism-daniel-greenfield">BDS</a> activities.&nbsp;


	Over in the Anthropology Department, recent tenure-track hire <a href="https://my.hamilton.edu/academics/our-faculty/directory/faculty-detail/Mariam-Durrani">Mariam Durrani</a> is praised for incorporating “feminist and decolonial methodologies” in her research on “Muslim youth and communities, cultural mobilities, higher education in Pakistan and the United States, race, gender, and migration studies”—as well as her use of multimedia and for being “a committed social-justice advocate.” In April 2017, Durrani participated in the “Resistance and Complicity to Empire Through Political Movements” panel at the “Beyond Bans, Beyond Walls: Women, Gender &amp; Islam Symposium” at Harvard Divinity School, along with a Ph.D. candidate, Cambridge City Councilor Nadeem Mazen, the first elected Muslim politician in Massachusetts, and Haley Rogers, Massachusetts Director of Development and Community Relations, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6176">CAIR</a>. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg178i_AzGE">video</a> shows her employing “Marxism” and “praxis,” and denouncing capitalism and the “military-industrial complex.”


	After class, Hamilton students have had many offerings in terms of speakers and workshops, for which they often receive class credit or extra credit for attending.&nbsp;


	On January 18, students were offered the Art Department Visiting Artists Series lunchtime workshop, “Wise Up for Otherwise: Queer Scholarship Into Song,” in which Dr. Kay Turner described “how she writes lyrics from queer texts, and why transforming those texts into song is both an entertaining and necessary mode of queer world making.”


	On April 10, Porsha O. (sic) led a writing workshop titled “Glory: On Radical Self-Love.” The student newspaper described her as the Lead-Teaching Artist &amp; Program Manager at Mass Leap in Boston, and a “<a href="https://spec.hamilton.edu/artist-spotlight-renowned-poet-porsha-olayiwola-visits-campus-7219f73c580c">renowned poet</a>.” A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knsshhqg1a0">video</a> from the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam Finals shows the self-described “Black, poet, dyke-goddess, hip-hop feminist, womanist” shouting that she is so “pissed off” about racism, injustice, and slavery that she is ready to “Break my foot open over everybody’s ass,” and repeating, “I’m pissed the F!*k off.” We doubt that students under her tutelage learned how to write sonnets.&nbsp;


	Two days after this workshop, on April 12, students were tantalized with an email from the Hamilton College Womxn’s (sic) Center, asking, “Do you love amazing music about queer lovin’?” and announcing the evening visit by Be Steadwell* (sic). The mailing included a link to her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knsshhqg1a0">music video</a> containing witchcraft, marijuana-smoking, and lesbianism.


	The following evening, students had two events. From 5 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. in the Chapel they could hear far-left media commentator and professor of African-American Studies Marc Lamont Hill’s “message to inspire hope, courage, and constructive social change.” At 7:00 p.m. they could then learn how to implement such ideas in a workshop titled “Activism 101,” hosted by “Mexican-American spoken word artist David A. Romero.”


	A few days later, on April 18, the Sociology Department presented a talk on “LGBTQ+ Polyamory and the Queering of Intimacy” by Dr. Emily Pain, whose “findings speak to current struggles over LGBTQ sexual citizenship. . . .” In the vital research field of “polyamory,” Hamilton students learned, the “voices of queer people of color, of low-income backgrounds, and of trans* [sic] identities have been virtually silenced.” &nbsp;


	On April 25, professor Durrani gave a late afternoon presentation titled “What Is Islamophobia?” at the Days-Massolo Center, a place of “intercultural dialogue,” which features speakers like <a href="https://www.hamilton.edu/about/diversity/dmc">Angela Davis</a>. Later, students could go upstairs to the Womxn’s (sic) Center to make “zines,” about “healing, surviving, and trauma” and then discuss agitating for vending machines for birth control and abortifacients, like Plan B.&nbsp;


	One would think Hamilton College would value AHI’s generosity in providing speakers on campus and at <a href="https://www.theahi.org/colonel-david-maxwell-delivers-veterans-day-address-on-north-korea/">leadership dinners</a> at our site, as well as <a href="https://www.theahi.org/ahi-sponsors-mary-nichols-lecture-on-thucydides-at-colgate/">reading</a> clusters on classic works of Western civilization. Instead, they have <a href="https://spec.hamilton.edu/letter-to-the-editor-re-racists-in-the-classroom-73d0b17564f1">pressured students</a>, especially African-Americans, to stay away from the AHI, and ignored <a href="http://www.ahienquiry.org/writing-collect/2017/2/21/treatment-of-conservatives-at-hamilton-college">threats</a> against AHI-affiliated students, including in 2016 on the leader of the campus Republican Club, now defunct.


	But in totalitarian regimes alternate views cannot be tolerated. &nbsp;

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How Hamilton College Defines 'Academic Rigor'

What do college presidents mean by “academic rigor”? Good “judgment” in the classroom? Making the campus “inclusive”? Recent developments on the campus of

A campaign ad that Hillary Clinton used against Barack Obama <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yr7odFUARg">in 2008</a> featured images of sleeping children, with a voice asking who would answer the phone ringing in the White House at 3 a.m., “someone who already knows the world leaders . . . the military,” someone “tested and ready to lead”—or (by implication) a first-term U.S. Senator/community organizer?


	Hillary Clinton is running for president again, and of course is ignoring her failure as secretary of state to answer the late-night phone call coming from Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Instead, she is advertising how she wants to send federal emissaries into the homes of parents with newborn infants to teach them how to handle 3 a.m. feedings and baby talk.&nbsp;It’s an extension of her agenda as first lady in the Arkansas governor’s mansion and in the White House.&nbsp; Her political career, after graduating and having written a thesis on friend Saul Alinsky, was launched with the Children’s Defense Fund under the direction of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1531">Marian Wright Edelman</a>, agitator for increased welfare “for the children,” including federally funded childcare workers. &nbsp;


	As president, Hillary Clinton would implement the Edelman/Alinsky domestic vision she put forward, in more palatable terms, in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village to Raise a Child. Of course, it takes someone like Clinton to see the federal government as a “village.”&nbsp; &nbsp;


	In that book Clinton wrote, “government is not something outside us—something irrelevant or even alien to us—but is us.&nbsp; To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that government has a responsibility not only to provide essential services but to bring individuals and communities together.”&nbsp; This is the backwards notion of the community organizer.


	Recently, in a May 21, 2016, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-child-care-now-costs-more-than-rent-heres-how-to-fix-this-crisis/2016/05/20/9055a200-1dd6-11e6-b6e0-c53b7ef63b45_story.html?wpmm=1&amp;wpisrc=nl_headlines">Washington Post</a> op-ed, Clinton revealed her totalizing domestic plans by reiterating her commitment to paid family leave legislation and to the “big idea” of “increasing federal investments and incentivizing states so that no family ever has to pay more than 10 percent of its income for child care.” &nbsp;


	She also proposed doubling the investment in programs that she helped develop as first lady: Early Head Start and the Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership program. Parroting bureaucrats, Clinton claimed, “These programs bring an evidenced-based curriculum to child care and make sure kids get the best possible start in life. . . . .”&nbsp;


	She, however, ignores the <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/01/head-start-impact-evaluation-report-finally-released">studies</a>, including one by the agency administering the program, that show that when Head Start does have a positive impact, it is slight and disappears by third grade. &nbsp;


	Even so, Clinton wants to expand federal daycare, and also to send government agents into homes, following her efforts as first lady of Arkansas when she introduced the “Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters,” or “HIPPY.” Her campaign <a href="https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/early-childhood-education/">website</a> boasts of a more recent feat, “As a leader at the Clinton Foundation,” when she “started a national public awareness campaign called ‘Too Small to Fail’ or ‘Pequeños y Valiosos’ aimed at closing the ‘word gap.’”&nbsp;


	The Clinton Foundation, a purported charity (in reality a campaign <a href="http://nypost.com/2016/05/22/how-corporate-america-bought-hillary-clinton-for-21m/">slush fund</a> with contributions helping friends’ <a href="http://nypost.com/2016/05/15/the-clinton-sleaze-never-ends/">business</a> pursuits), is using the latest “gap” as the basis for the programs she hopes to enact as&nbsp; president. The campaign site explains: “This gap refers to the 30 million fewer words heard by lower-income children by the time they are 4 years old, which leads to disparities in language development and school readiness.”&nbsp; Low-income students already receive free breakfasts and lunches, even in the summer.&nbsp; Under the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act they can look forward to attending “<a href="http://thepulse2016.com/jane-robbins/2016/01/13/13401/">community schools</a>,” where they will receive homework help, family dinners, and health and dental services.&nbsp;


	Under Clinton’s plan, the federal government would provide childcare subsidies to families, raise the wages of childcare workers, and provide “<a href="https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/what-you-need-know-about-hillary-clintons-plan-cut-child-care-costs-america/">home visiting services</a>”—the latter to teach parents to talk to their children.&nbsp; In It Takes a Village, Clinton celebrated England’s tradition of providing home visits through its national health service.&nbsp; (She also bragged about her work on Goals 2000, the precursor to Common Core.) &nbsp; &nbsp;


	Initiatives, like the one to end the “word gap” may sound head-scratching-ly bizarre to people who have been around babies, and made idiots of themselves by cooing and lapsing into inane talk. &nbsp;


	But the studies that show that many low-income (i.e., single and government-dependent) parents do not speak to their young children are borne out by observation. &nbsp;


	It is an uncomfortable subject for many leftists.&nbsp; Anyone who has taken public transportation in cities like Atlanta, where it is mostly used by those who cannot afford cars, knows this--including one of my leftist friends. In traffic-choked Atlanta it made sense for her to commute to her job downtown via the rail line, a straight shot from her apartment.&nbsp; She would save on time, car wear-and-tear, gas, and parking—not to mention “The Environment.” &nbsp;


	But she stopped, explaining in an agonized voice that she couldn’t bear to watch how young mothers treated their children, with slaps and pulls, screaming abuses at them, at the train station. &nbsp;


	Of course, no one would dare reprimand such parents.&nbsp; &nbsp;


	So my friend retreated.&nbsp; Leftist parents retreat by sending their children to private schools, while arguing for more funding for public schools.


	The reaction is to retreat, to one’s car, and to vote for and advocate more government social programs so that “experts” can deal with such parents.&nbsp; Leftists refuse to acknowledge that government programs that incentivize family breakdown and interfere with natural communities are the problem.&nbsp; &nbsp;


	Conservatives, frustrated by the inability of political representatives to cut back on detrimental government programs and despairing at the takeover of education by radicals, retreat to far-flung suburbs, where they undertake the dual tasks of parenting and teaching.&nbsp; No one can or should blame them.&nbsp; In fact, they are to be commended.&nbsp; When I taught college I could count on homeschooled students to be better educated and more motivated than students from public schools.


	But with the retreat of such parents, public schools suffer.&nbsp; It’s a vicious cycle, but the progressive’s solution (or opportunity) is to use the deterioration as an entrée to more government meddling. &nbsp;


	Now, especially in Obama’s final year, we are witnessing the Washington overlords hounding the middle-class citizens into their retreats.&nbsp; They are forcing “individuals and communities together” under Obama’s <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/435477/affh-has-no-basis-fair-housing-act?target=author&amp;tid=1841">Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing</a> regulation of 2015.&nbsp; The suburbs are being forced to build housing for the poor, who will bring their dysfunction to everything from the playground to the shopping mall.&nbsp; As the feds impose their diktats on public spaces and private businesses, the homeschooling family will find fewer and fewer places where they are comfortable.&nbsp; Under Obama’s Department of Education, they have found themselves forced to adhere to crazy Common Core standards if they want to pass GED tests, college entrance exams, and AP exams.&nbsp; They find that many colleges now use Common Core test scores for placement in classes.&nbsp; This overreach inspired many conservatives into activism and made Common Core part of the presidential campaign.


	But as the presidential election approaches, many of the same conservatives are retreating--from the voting booth.&nbsp; Morally repulsed by the profligate past, rhetoric, and impure ideology of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, they vow to back a third-party candidate, write in a name, or just stay home and pray. They are impervious to arguments that their retreat makes a Hillary Clinton (Obama.2) presidency likely.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;


	Surprisingly, the anti-Trump super PAC, Our Principles, as part of their attacks on Trump’s sexism, has been using statements about fatherhood that he made on the Howard Stern show <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/donald-trump-thinks-men-who-change-diapers-are-acting-like-t?utm_term=.tpXx72AOd#.csZ7RDKXP">in 2005</a>.&nbsp; Like the leftists, these Republicans take umbrage at <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/our-principles-pac-ad-trump-women">Trump’s comments</a> about husbands who relent to pressures and “act like the wife.” &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;


	Trump expressed traditional sentiments and said he believed in supplying “funds,” but not changing diapers or pushing a stroller through Central Park.&nbsp; In contrast, I am reminded of one of many absurd helpful hints about fatherhood coming from the Obama administration.&nbsp; Early on, a Father’s Day campaign that encouraged fathers’ involvement showed a picture of a burly father with his young daughter.&nbsp; They were both painting their fingernails. &nbsp; &nbsp;


	Voters should be asking themselves if they want the Big-Nanny-in-Chief sending government agents into homes.&nbsp; Or do they want to become breadwinners again? &nbsp;

No Retreat from Hillary’s Village

A campaign ad that Hillary Clinton used against Barack Obama in 2008 featured images of sleeping children, with a voice asking who would answer the phone

No Retreat from Hillary’s Village 

In 2015, leftists in the media and academia began criticizing the leftist mobs seeking to shut them down.&nbsp; Kirsten Powers, the left-of-center commentator at Fox News, came out with a book titled, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Silencing-Left-Killing-Speech/dp/1621573702">The Silencing</a>: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.&nbsp;


	Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis, after being slapped with a Title IX lawsuit for her essay “<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes/190351/">Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe</a>,” made it to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “<a href="http://chronicle.com/specialreport/The-2015-Influence-List/22">2015 Influence List</a>.” The 1972 law was intended to protect against sexual discrimination and misconduct. &nbsp;Kipnis’s crime was to criticize new consensual-relations codes governing professor-student dating.&nbsp; For opining that the codes infantilized students and increased the power of administrators, she was accused of creating a hostile environment and was greeted by mattress-carrying protestors (following Columbia art student, Emma Sulkowicz who claimed an ex-boyfriend raped her).


	After the kangaroo court proceedings, Kipnis wrote “<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/">My Title IX Inquisition</a>” for the Chronicle, expressing surprise that students would protest someone like herself, a feminist who hadn’t sexually assaulted anyone.&nbsp; Kipnis had assumed that “academic freedom would prevail.”


	“The whole thing seemed symbolically incoherent,” she mused, claiming that most of her academic colleagues, including “feminists, progressives, minorities, and those who identify as gay or queer,” live “in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster.”


	This rang true.&nbsp; A piece in Vox titled “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Students Terrify Me” by an anonymous professor had gone viral.


	Kipnis noted, “It’s astounding how aggressive students’ assertions of vulnerability have gotten in the past few years. Emotional discomfort is regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.”


	Todd Gitlin, proud veteran leader of the 1960s “youth movement,” also criticized the youth, after some students at Columbia had proposed that syllabi contain “trigger warnings.”&nbsp;&nbsp; He told them “<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/A-Plague-of-Hypersensitivity/229963">You Are Here to Be Disturbed</a>.”&nbsp; By “here” he meant the college classroom, a place where many veterans of the 1960s campus takeovers found themselves comfortably ensconced with tenure.&nbsp; Gitlin himself is at Columbia.&nbsp; In character with those of his generation, he referred back to the “changes for good” they had instituted, including recognizing that speech acts can lead to a hostile environment and accordingly changing word usage, for example, replacing “girl” with “woman,” and “Negro” with “African-American.”&nbsp; But, Gitlin warned, that does not justify “censorious policy.”&nbsp;


	Kirsten Powers, who was born at the height of the “youth movement,” in 1969, believes the grizzled veterans, and writes, “While watching the illiberal left in action, it’s easy to forget that it was the political left that championed free speech in America.&nbsp; During the Vietnam War era, the targeting of left-wing anti-war activists at the University of California-Berkeley for their dissent launched what came to be known as ‘The Free Speech Movement.’”&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Powers takes the self-defined “free speech movement” at Berkeley as true to its name,&nbsp; perpetuating myths promulgated in school lessons and in the media—by veterans of the movement, Todd Gitlin, being one of the most influential.&nbsp; What we are seeing today as we close out 2015 with the forced or attempted ouster of insufficiently politically correct faculty and administrators, is a continuation of the policies of the 1960s New Left.


	“Silencing” is in the DNA of the New Left and its progeny, today’s student protestors.


	Mario Savio, the Berkeley student credited with beginning the free speech movement, admitted that the issue of “free speech” was a “pretext” to “arouse the students against the existing role of the university.”&nbsp; That existing role is the search for truth through reasoned debate and evidence, and the appreciation for higher and beautiful things.&nbsp;


	The acquiescence to Savio’s demands to use university space for political mobilizing led to waves of student protests.&nbsp; But “debates” were conducted through bullhorns.&nbsp; Negotiations were conducted by commandeering buildings and taking hostages. &nbsp;Scientific labs and scholarly papers were destroyed.&nbsp; People were hurt, sometimes killed.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;


	The goal was to subvert the academy, and its methods, and make it into an adjunct for activism.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2210">Todd Gitlin</a> easily segued from leader of the largest student activist group, SDS, to teaching a self-glorifying history of the SDS.&nbsp; History professor Howard Zinn did the same.&nbsp; Today, City University history professor Angus Johnston <a href="http://studentactivism.net/">describes himself</a> as both a “historian and advocate of American student organizing.”&nbsp;


	In his recent article in the Chronicle, “<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Student-Protests-ThenNow/234542">Student Protests, Then and Now</a>,” Johnston attributes the resurgence of student protest to racial discrimination, sexual assault and harassment, and rising tuition and debt.&nbsp; He and the student protestors, however, give little empirical evidence of discrimination or harassment.&nbsp; He states, “The origins of today’s student complaints are deep and in many cases intractable, and the more accustomed activists become to protesting, the more readily they will mobilize in response to new provocation.”&nbsp; Indeed.


	It is a wonder that left-wing professors should complain now that their intellectual progeny have turned the p.c. microscope on them, and increasing its magnification.&nbsp;


	The tenured leftists ignored or disparaged warnings of those like New York University Philosophy Professor Sidney Hook, who wrote in 1968, “If the university is conceived as an agency of action to transform society in behalf of a cause, no matter how exalted, it loses its relative autonomy, imperils both its independence and objectivity, and subjects itself to retaliatory curbs and controls on the part of society on whose support and largesse it ultimately depends.”&nbsp; &nbsp;


	Hook, in that same article, stated a truth that few dare utter today: “it is preposterous for callow and immature adolescents who presumably have come to the university to get an education to set themselves up as authorities on what research by their teachers is educationally permissible.” Yet, many of the 1960s student protestors retain their youthful arrogance into old age.&nbsp; &nbsp;


	One of these is Mark Rudd, leader of the Columbia takeover in 1968, co-founder of the terroristic SDS offshoot group Weatherman, and retired math professor.


	&nbsp;Writing in his 2009 memoir, Underground: My Life in SDS and the Weathermen, the then 61-year-old Rudd sees nothing wrong with his actions as an undergraduate student who refused to listen to professors who were refugees from Nazi Germany.&nbsp; They pled for free speech as students planned to block CIA recruiters on campus.&nbsp; Believing in the “’neutral’ and ‘objective’ character of the university,” the refugees “identified SDS’s antiwar activities with the actions of Nazi students at German universities in the thirties.” &nbsp;


	Rudd recounts, “This was a frightening image, even to us in SDS.&nbsp; ‘What if every small group had the power to silence whomever they wanted—such as you?’ asked the old liberals.&nbsp; ‘Isn’t there an absolute right to free speech?’”&nbsp;


	Rudd, however, aligns CIA recruiters with the Nazi SS, citing the Nuremberg Trials that “established that it is the legal and moral responsibility of the individual not to comply with orders that constitute war crimes.” &nbsp;Blazing forward with the false analogy, Rudd bars further discussion.&nbsp; The intervening decades have brought him no enlightenment or humility.


	Like many of his generation, Rudd spent his career proselytizing to the young, captive audiences in his classroom.&nbsp; He brags about it in his memoir.&nbsp; His website features photos of his 1968 mug shot and the Columbia takeover, and description of his work organizing student activists for environmental justice, unionization, and Palestinian rights, and against “war and militarization.”


	The eight-day occupation of Columbia University was repeated metaphorically in faculty votes in the ensuing decades. As dissenting professors like Sidney Hook retired they were replaced by hires who put up <a href="http://www.dissidentprof.com/bookstore/137-exiled.html">barricades</a> to traditionalists. They even held workshops on how to get past the old “mossbacks” on hiring committees.&nbsp; I experienced this as a graduate student at the University of Georgia in the 1990s.&nbsp; The Chronicle of Higher Education gave space in the 1980s and 1990s to “Ms. Mentor” for a column in which she advised aspiring feminist academics on how to get through the academic gates with subterfuge that ranged from altering modes of dress to scholarly papers. &nbsp;As a result, the humanities have been transformed.&nbsp; History <a href="http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161398">specialization</a> that focuses on the environment, gender, and sexuality predominates.&nbsp; My field, English, is now an auxiliary for gender and ethnic studies.


	Ironically, on the Chronicle’s “influential list,” next to Kipnis, are such notables as “Trigger-Warning Catalyst” Bailey Loverin, “Sexism Fighter: Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett,” and “Silence Breaker: Concerned Student 1950.” &nbsp;The last is a group that used megaphones to make “demands” at the University of Missouri, which spurred a nationwide rash of similar “demands,” so far at 73 campuses.&nbsp; They forced out the president.&nbsp; The clenched fist is their symbol.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;


	I must admit to feeling a bit of schadenfreude as I read about leftist professors and administrators being in fear of their students.&nbsp; As a traditionalist and an adjunct professor, I lived in fear too—of department chairs and administrators.&nbsp; These fears proved real, when I was told no classes were available for me, after my dissenting views became known to higher-ups.&nbsp; &nbsp;


	In contrast, Kipnis, rather than losing her job, received kudos from fellow liberals. Conservative outlets came to her <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/415885/pc-police-arent-fragile-theyre-vengeful-and-malicious-david-french">defense</a>.&nbsp; It was a conservative publishing house, Regnery, that published Kirsten Powers’ book.&nbsp; &nbsp;


	But without fundamental changes, we can expect to see more inquisitions.&nbsp; Another <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/14/professors-threatened-with-investigation-for-questioning-rape-documentary/?utm_source=Clarion+Call+12%2F16%2F15&amp;utm_campaign=Clarion+Call&amp;utm_medium=email">inquisition</a> is underway against Harvard University professors for daring to question the accuracy of a documentary about rape on campus.&nbsp; But I wonder: Will liberal academics defend the free speech of conservatives and allow them on campuses?&nbsp;


	Or will the mobs of “callow and immature students” finally shut down the little fiefdoms that leftist academics have carved out for themselves?&nbsp; I would not be sad about that.

2015: The Year of Self-Criticism for Leftist Speech Codes?

In 2015, leftists in the media and academia began criticizing the leftist mobs seeking to shut them down.&nbsp; Kirsten Powers, the left-of-center commentator

2015: The Year of Self-Criticism for Leftist Speech Codes?

On October 24, 2015, the Obama administration <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/24/obama-calls-for-less-standardized-testing-in-schools-addressing-nationwide/">condemned</a> “over-testing” in schools. It called for a cap on testing, limiting it to two percent of a child’s class time.&nbsp; It called on Congress to enact this cap and on teachers to “step back and make tests less onerous and more purposeful.”&nbsp; This accompanied the release of a study by the Council of the Great City Schools.


	In a smooth move, the Obama administration called on Congress to fix a problem that had been foisted on the people without the consent of Congress—namely the national Common Core standards, even as the widely hated name was scrupulously avoided.&nbsp; The Obama administration also told teachers to fix tests that they had not devised and were forced to administer. &nbsp; &nbsp;


	In an even smoother move, the New York Times summed up the blame this way:


	The administration’s move seemed a reckoning on a two-decade push that began during the Bush administration and intensified under President Obama. Programs with aspirational names — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top — were responding to swelling agreement among Democrats and Republicans that higher expectations and accountability could lift the performance of American students. . . . .”


	Alas, the push began “during the Bush administration.”


	It is true.&nbsp; NCLB was a misapplication of “compassionate conservatism” through the federal government in hopes of ensuring that children (mostly in urban schools) would not be denied a basic education.&nbsp; You see, while “urban schools” teachers were assigning group projects in “social justice” per the philosophy of Bill Ayers, students were left virtually illiterate and unable to do basic math. &nbsp;


	Cecilia Munoz, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/author/cecilia-mu%25C3%25B1oz">Assistant to the President</a> and Director of the Domestic Policy Council (but prior to that “Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation at the National Council of La Raza”), said that all the testing “can sap the joy and fun out of the classroom for students and for teachers” (unlike <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2011/08/22/anti-americanism_disguised_as_ethnic_studies_in_tucson_schools/page/full">Raza Studies</a>, perhaps).&nbsp;


	The lead designer of one of the two national Common Core tests was head of the Obama education transition team, Linda Darling-Hammond.&nbsp; She was also <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-ayers/obama-and-education-refor_b_154857.html">Bill Ayers’s pick</a> for Secretary of Education and a close colleague of his.&nbsp; She had promised that these tests would be so much better; they wouldn’t even be like tests at all.&nbsp; In the August 2009 Harvard Educational Review, she claimed the tests would go beyond “the narrow views of the last eight years” of measuring knowledge objectively.&nbsp; She would make tests that measure “deep understanding.”&nbsp; They would support “developing creativity, critical thinking skills, and the capacity to innovate.”&nbsp; In November 2009, in her speech to the Grow Your Own organization in Chicago (later published as part of a collection titled Grow Your Own Teachers, under the Columbia Teachers College “Teaching for Social Justice” series edited by Bill Ayers), she rejected “the imaginary model classroom where every student is learning in the same way at the same pace at the same time.”&nbsp; She envisioned a classroom culture of “revision and redemption.”&nbsp; On April 28, 2010, in an Education Week article titled “Developing an Internationally Comparable Balanced Assessment System,” <a href="http://sfppr.org/2012/10/the-truth-about-common-core-2/">she claimed</a> that the new assessment system is “designed to go beyond recall of facts and show students’ abilities to evaluate evidence, problem solve and understand context.” &nbsp;


	<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/10/24/obama-schools-test/74536886/http:/www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/10/24/obama-schools-test/74536886/">Obama</a>, in his Facebook <a href="http://cgcs.schoolwires.net/cms/lib/DC00001581/Centricity/Domain/4/Testing%2520Report.pdf">video</a> released on the day of the “over-testing” announcement, repeated Darling-Hammond’s promises from several years back, and said, “Learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble.’’&nbsp; In a newfound spirit of cooperation, he pledged, ‘‘we’re going to work with states, school districts, teachers and parents to make sure that we’re not obsessing about testing.’’ &nbsp;


	Candidate <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9EkX_gX6R8">Obama in 2007</a>, in his best black dialect, before the National Education Association, railed against No Child Left Behind, standardized tests, and inequitable resources among schools.&nbsp;


	<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/J9EkX_gX6R8" width="420"></iframe>


	At a town hall in Washington <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/28/obama-standardized-tests_n_841464.html">in 2011</a> President Obama, said, “’Too often what we have been doing is using [standardized] tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools.’”&nbsp;


	In 2013, at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) meeting, as educators held protest signs against the new Common Core assessments, Secretary of Education Arne <a href="http://sfppr.org/2013/06/common-core-teaching-to-the-new-test-part-iii/">Duncan</a> praised Darling-Hammond. <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/marygrabar/2013/05/15/bill-ayers-bringing-down-america-destroying-education-n1596641/page/2">Duncan</a> promised a “sea-change in assessments,” with new tests measuring “growth” and “non-cognitive” abilities.&nbsp; Most likely Ayers and Darling-Hammond applauded him, for they participated in several panels at the conference.


	Funny, though, in spite of the best-laid plans, teachers didn’t like it.&nbsp; Students were failing and teachers’ evaluations tied to the test scores were suffering.&nbsp; Under Common Core, first-graders have to write op-eds.&nbsp; Older students have to draw pictures for crazy math problems.&nbsp; English Language Arts is dull and dreary.&nbsp; Common Core tests punish bright students—those who can think abstractly, do equations, and read at a level that goes beyond retrieving bits of information.&nbsp;


	The Common Core tests, of course, had to test for a minimal level of knowledge. The sales pitch was that it prepared “workers in a global twenty-first century economy.”


	Teachers, after having invested so much in Democrats, were miffed at not being invited to the Common Core standards writing party.&nbsp; In 2011, I heard them grousing at one of the panels at the <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2011/04/_after_spending_four/">Conference on College Composition and Communication</a> meeting for college and high school writing teachers.&nbsp; They were upset because the “social, civil, and aesthetic,” purposes like the Native American greetings, analysis of protest signs at rallies for illegal aliens, and descriptions of ladies undergarments that were discussed at the conference were not factored in. &nbsp;


	So now Obama is asking Congress to overturn policy that he imposed by stealth, bribery, and arm-twisting—much like the health care legislation. &nbsp;


	Funny, isn’t it, how the Obama administration has reversed course, now that an election is coming up and the teachers are unhappy about Common Core.


	No longer are opponents of Common Core a “conspiracy in search of a conspiracy” or “white suburban moms” frustrated that their “brilliant” kids weren’t doing well, as Arne Duncan had jibed.


	Democratic contender <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/obama-cap-class-time-devoted-standardized-student-tests-160034927--politics.html">Hillary Rodham Clinton</a> (who sits on the <a href="http://nationalmockelection.org/board-of-directors/">board</a> of a Council of the Great City Schools “partner” that teaches kids about elections) “embraced the principles laid out by Obama,” and said in a statement, ‘We should be ruthless in looking at tests and eliminating them if they do not actually help us move our kids forward.’” &nbsp;


	Maybe she too can blame Bush.


	&nbsp;


	&nbsp;&nbsp;

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

Obama Administration Condemns Own Common Core Tests

On October 24, 2015, the Obama administration condemned “over-testing” in schools. It called for a cap on testing, limiting it to two percent of a child’s

Obama Administration Condemns Own Common Core Tests

<a href="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/03/climateeducation-a9117b32fbeba1efc3ce45c4e9d8a2a2a390927b-s6-c30.jpg"><img alt="climateeducation-a9117b32fbeba1efc3ce45c4e9d8a2a2a390927b-s6-c30" src="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/03/climateeducation-a9117b32fbeba1efc3ce45c4e9d8a2a2a390927b-s6-c30.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>Remember the children singing praise songs to Obama back in 2008?  Remember young teenage boys marching in formation and shouting out thanks to Obama for their promising futures?
The appointment of <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/no-more-carrots-lots-more-stick_756487.html">Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education</a> initially was seen as a savvy bipartisan move.  But under his watch the Department of Education has become a propaganda arm used to influence the next generation to accept the idea of catastrophic man-made climate change as per the UN, the Environmental Protection Agency, and such groups as the National Wildlife Federation.
In a multi-pronged approach, the Department is teaming up with various non-profit and government organizations and curriculum companies to promote “fun” contests and activities for students, while promoting the next phase of Common Core “State Standards”—in science.
For example, the Department’s latest Green Strides newsletter (February 28) announced three contests for K-12 students who display their agreement with the government's position on climate change.
In that newsletter, the Department of Education announced that another federal agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and its National Environmental Education Foundation, have “launched an exciting video challenge for middle school students called <a href="http://epa.gov/climatestudents/contest.html">Climate Change in Focus</a>.”  In this contest, middle school students are asked to make a video that “expresses why they care about climate change and what they are doing to reduce emissions or to prepare for its impacts.”  To win loyalty to the EPA, it is announced that winning videos will be highlighted on the EPA website.  The effort sounds like the kids’ cereal box promotions of yore: the top three entries will receive “cool prizes like a solar charging backpack,” winning class projects will receive special recognition for their school, and the first 100 entrants will receive a year’s subscription to National Geographic Kids Magazine.
Another contest, National Wildlife Federation's <a href="http://www.nwf.org/Young-Reporters-for-the-Environment.aspx">Young Reporters for the Environment</a>, invites students “between the ages of 13-21 to report on an environmental issue in their community in an article, photo or photo essay, or short video.”  Entries should “reflect firsthand investigation of topics related to the environment and sustainability in the students' own communities, draw connections between local and global perspectives, and propose solutions.”
Students are also encouraged to make nominations for “<a href="http://www.unep.org/champions/">Champions of the Earth</a>,” a “UN-sponsored award for environment, Green Economy, and sustainability.”  Among the 2013 laureates are Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo, who orchestrated a public-private biosphere reserve status for a region in Mexico, and <a href="http://www.unep.org/champions/laureates/2013/McClendon.asp">Brian McLendon</a>, of Google Earth.
Students already get exposed to climate change and sustainability in textbooks which are bought with taxpayer funds, as well as in videos and online materials produced by taxpayer-supported <a href="http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/search/?q=climate+change">Public Broadcasting</a>.  Many students, of course, have had to sit through Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
Quite obviously, a middle school student does not have the necessary scientific knowledge to make videos about climate change—a particularly challenging scientific problem.
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—the next phase of Common Core—will make the situation worse, however.  Students will be even less capable of distinguishing science from propaganda.  These standards, like those for math and English Language Arts, were produced by Achieve, a nonprofit education group started by corporate leaders and some governors.
As in the standards for English Language Arts and math, the NGSS are intended to be transformative, or as Appendix A states, “to reflect a new vision for American science education.”  They call for new “performance expectations” that “focus on understanding and applications as opposed to memorization of facts devoid of context.”
It is precisely such short shrift to knowledge (dismissively referred to as “memorization”) to which science professors Lawrence S. Lerner and Paul Gross object.  The standards bypass essential math skills in favor of “process,” they asserted last fall at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation <a href="http://edexcellence.net/next-generation-science-and-college-readiness">blog</a>.
Common Core standards, in all disciplines, are written with a lot of fluff to conceal their emptiness.
Lerner and Gross discovered “inconsistency between strong NGSS (and Appendix C) assertions and what was actually found by the mathematicians, among others, of our reviewing group.”
(The Common Core math standards themselves have garnered much criticism among teachers, parents, and students; focusing so much on “process,” they make simple problems bizarrely confusing, as a collection of <a href="http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/03/01/how-10-troubling-homework-assignments-reveal-the-truth-about-common-core/?singlepage=true">examples</a> illustrates.)
Lerner and Gross condemn the “Slighting of mathematics,” which does “increasing mischief as grade level rises, especially in the physical sciences.”  Physics is “effectively absent” at the high school level.
“Several devout declarations” appear, however, the authors sardonically point out, as they note this one from Appendix C:
<blockquote>In particular, the best science education seems to be one based on integrating rigorous content with the practices that scientists and engineers routinely use in their work—including application of mathematics.</blockquote>
Lerner and Gross attack the “practices” strategy, as an extension of the “inquiry learning” of the early 1990s, which had “no notable effect on the (mediocre) performance of American students in national and international science assessments.”
With some sarcasm, they write, “It is charming to say ‘. . . students learn science effectively when they actively engage in the practices of science.’”  However,
<blockquote>Students will not learn best if they practice science exactly as do real scientists.  A firm conclusion in cognitive science contradicts that claim.  Beginners don’t and can’t ‘practice’ as do experts.  The practices of experts exploit prior experience and extensive build-up in long-term memory of scaffolding: facts, procedures, technical know-how, solutions to standard problems in the field, vocabularies—of knowledge in short.</blockquote>
Not only do the <a href="http://www.nextgenscience.org/">Next Generation Science Standards</a> shirk the necessary foundations in math and science knowledge, but they explicitly call for including ideological lessons, such as “Human impacts on Earth systems.”  For grades K-2, students are to understand, “Things people do can affect the environment but they can make choices to reduce their impact.” In grades 3 through 5, students will learn “Societal activities have had major effects on the land, ocean, atmosphere, and even outer space.  Societal activities can also help protect Earth’s resources and environments.”  This is from part ESS3.C of the NGSS standards.
“Human impacts on Earth systems” are huge topics, when approached legitimately.  They present quandaries to scientists at the top levels.  Yet NGSS imposes them on kindergartners.  The objective, of course, is not teaching legitimate science, but indoctrination.
Amazingly, ten states have already voluntarily adopted the Standards.
Such efforts, coordinated by the Department of Education, threaten the future of science itself.
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Common Core's Little Green Soldiers

Remember the children singing praise songs to Obama back in 2008?  Remember young teenage boys marching in formation and shouting out thanks to Obama for their

<a href="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/02/milan_zajec.jpg"><img alt="milan_zajec" src="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/02/milan_zajec.jpg" width="278" height="245" /></a>Milan Zajec, one of three survivors who made his way out of the pit of a thousand dead and dying fellow Slovenians at Kočevski Rog in 1945, recently died in Cleveland, I learned from Pavle Borstnik’s column in the Slovenian American Times.  As in other Communist countries, Slovenian freedom-seekers were forcibly repatriated as deals were made with Stalin.  The war was over, but 10,000 refugees staying in a British-controlled camp in Austria were told they were going to Italy.  As they looked out the slats of the rail cars and saw Partisan soldiers, they knew that they were going to their gruesome deaths in their homeland under the rule of victor Marshall Tito.  Slovenia, which gained independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, is the size of New Jersey, but has over 600 mass, unmarked graves of victims of the Communists.
Borstnik describes Zajec as a “simple, country boy,” from the village of Veliki Gaber, who along with his brothers wanted to lead a simple life.  “Then came war and revolution and Milan soon recognized the real aims of the people claiming to be waging a ‘liberation war’ against the foreign occupier.  Together with most of his brothers he chose to resist this philosophy. . . .”
Borstnik writes that Zajec retreated into “total privacy” during his last years.
Those who were killed in the pits are often accused of being Nazi collaborators, Communist propaganda repeated in the schools and media.  In my most recent copy of Slovene Studies, Professor Oto Luthar of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Ljubljana calls the Partisans “liberators.”
In the United States, scholars studying Communism are exiled from universities.  Communist <a href="http://www.aim.org/aim-column/gay-rights-aside-is-obama-working-for-putin/">propaganda</a> continues to come from Russia, even as the Olympics take place.
A former political prisoner of Tito, whom I met a few years ago at a Slavic studies conference, pointed out all the “red” academics and journalists who had flown to Philadelphia from Slovenia, or who were comfortably ensconced in American universities.  These academics do “gender analysis” or “semiotics” as they deny firsthand accounts of survivors—and history.
Real life doesn’t fit the neat categories of theory or ideology.
Borstnik explains that the Communists in Slovenia began their social revolution by forming a vaguely “anti-imperialist front.” Heeding Stalin, they launched an insurrection in Yugoslavia on July 4, 1941 under the pretense of fighting the Germans.  One thousand out of the 300,000 population of Ljubljana were killed by the secret police.
In the countryside, the Communists terrorized farm families, demanding food.  They were “armed bands, roaming the country, executing the known or suspected ‘enemies of the revolution’ and pillaging their property.”  The Slovenians were then accused by the Italians of supporting Communists and sent to concentration camps.
So the men decided to form independent Village Guard units for self-defense.  After Italy went to the Allies, the Germans came in.  Under German occupation, Village Guards became the Home Guards to protect Slovenians from the Partisans.
When Tito’s forces became victorious at the end of the war, the British shifted their support to him from Draza Mihailovich, the military commander of King Peter, in exile in Britain.  The 20,000 Home Guards (Domobranci) who had fled to Austria were disarmed by the British and repatriated until Canadian Major Paul Barre confronted the British commanders, thus saving 10,000 from the same fate.
In order to advance their pro-Communist theories, the professors overlook the complicated stories of life under Nazi occupation, as Communists terrorized the people.  Borstnik expresses contempt for the Nazis who treated Slovenians like slaves, as they did all Slavs.
Metod Milac who was born in 1924 in Slovenia and wrote a first-hand account in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Imprisonment-Forced-Labor-European/dp/0820457817/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1392248789&amp;sr=1-1">Resistance, Imprisonment &amp; Forced Labor</a>: A Slovene Student in World War II, also describes how most Slovenians felt about the Nazis.  Only a teenager, Milac was captured by the Italian fascists, then the Communist Partisans, and then again by the Italians.  He resumed his studies briefly after recovering from near starvation in the Rad concentration camp.
Milac describes the day in 1944 when the Germans forced the Home Guard (which his older brother, Ciril, had joined) to take an oath of allegiance: “I felt pain and despair that day, knowing that many of my friends, acquaintances, and schoolmates who participated had no intention of pledging any alliance to the Third Reich nor did the majority of those taking part.”  He expresses relief that his brother’s unit was not selected to take part in the oath-taking.
Milac had decided to join the pro-Anglo-American underground group, “Slovene National Clandestine Resistance Force,” diverting from his brother’s choice.  He was captured by the Gestapo and eventually sent to Auschwitz, where he survived the labor camp.  One of the 200,000 displaced persons, he immigrated to New York, then Cleveland, and finally Syracuse.  He earned advanced degrees in music and then in library science and becamea librarian at Syracuse University.  He tells this story in his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Land-Bright-Promise-Refugee-Reflects/dp/1433118467/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1392248789&amp;sr=1-2">A Land Bright with Promise</a>.
Milac knew Milan Zajec and another one of the three survivors of Kočevski Rog, France Dejak.  It was through Dejak’s account that Milac learned about the fate of his brother, who was with Dejak’s group imprisoned at the school, Bishop’s Gymnasium, which the brothers had attended.  Milac writes,  “Having spent four years as a student in the Bishop’s Gymnasium only a few years before, he must have suffered even more at being a prisoner in the chapel where he attended daily mass as a student.  Dejak did not know much more, except that he last saw Ciril, wired to another man, when they were loaded on the trucks to the place of execution.  Thus, I can assume that his murder took place on Saturday, 9 June 1945.  He was 22 years old.”
Zajec, as Borstnik writes in his most recent column, was “chosen to survive.”  Fortunately, he recorded his memories. This is Zajec’s description of being transported with other prisoners (quoted in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Slovenia-1945-Memories-Death-Survival/dp/1848855346/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1392248935&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=slovenia+1945+memories+of+death+and+survival+after+world+war+ii">Slovenia 1945</a> by John Corsellus and Marcus Ferrar):
<blockquote>We were all between 18 and 24 years old.  The wire cut into our flesh.  We were beaten by the Partisans at the corners of the truck.  I started to sob.  If I moved, everybody was hurt and we all fell on top of each other. . . We started to pray aloud and get ready for death.  We had been preparing for death ever since the Partisans got hold of us . . . I was afraid I would be sick and I could not get off the truck at Kočevski Rog.  The sun was strong and I was thirsty.</blockquote>
They approached “the killing site in a valley”:
<blockquote>We heard shooting and screaming of domobranci being killed.  Nobody cried yet.  We were just waiting.  I could not feel my legs any more.  They cut my shoe-straps and removed my shoes.  The knife went into my flesh and it bled.  I saw an 18-year-old boy with his eyes gouged out and his skull smashed.  He was still conscious, sitting quietly, not moaning, just sighing . . . We were forced to sit down and stand up, still tied together with wire that cut into our flesh.  We had to walk several metres and then back again.  It seemed to take about an hour.  We were made to sing Communist songs.  Some had their heads cut by the knives and were dragged along unconscious behind.</blockquote>
Speaking Slovenian and wearing British uniforms, Partisans tore gold teeth out of the jaws of living Domobranci.  The prisoners were forced into a pit with bloody corpses. The dying moaned beneath Zajec, new victims fell over him, and blood flowed into his mouth.  He wrote, “I wanted to die, but death would not come.”
Zajec attributed his survival to his Holy Mary of Carmel medallion.  The dying prayed for their atheistic Communist enemies, and a priest chanted in Latin.  The Partisans fired shots and grenades into the pit.
Zajec survived five days.  Eventually pulling themselves out of the pit by a tree that had fallen in from blasting that was intended to cover the bodies, the survivors got out and walked 35 kilometers to safety.
Milac expresses his disbelief that all this happened without any trials, in violation of international rules. It was evidence that the goal of the Communist Party was “a Soviet-style dictatorship under Tito.”
With the sadness that overtakes him when he talks about the war, Milac writes, “It is also hard to believe that in the small Slovene nation one would find so many people who would be able, willing, and possess so a complete disregard for another human being to execute acts of such unbelievable sadism.”  His book is filled with accounts of kindness and cruelty on all sides.
My own parents escaped Yugoslavia (specifically Slovenia) in the late 1950s with me as a toddler.  I knew only bits and pieces about the war from overheard conversations among the adults.  They told about being forced by the occupiers to learn the Hungarian language and about soldiers demanding food from villagers.  There were secret signals among women to avoid rape.  There were stories of survival in forests.  There was the story of the young man in the village, whose name I don’t recall, who was shot just as he looked over his shoulder.  There was the uncle recruited to fight, with a gun pointed at him, more than once.  But we did not learn this history in school.
In his epilogue to Resistance, Imprisonment, &amp; Forced Labor, Milac writes that the enforced repatriations that killed his brother and several friends are “among the deepest wounds that are still bleeding.”  Efforts to cover them up, he writes, will last forever.
Borstnik continues to write about the political situation in Slovenia.  He calls Milan Zajec’s story “the final testimonial to the banality and criminality of the red ‘philosophy’ which, unfortunately, to this very day, continues to claim for itself the right to rule and judge the life of our unhappy homeland.”
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Milan Zajec, Survivor of Communist Horrors in Slovenia, R.I.P.

Milan Zajec, one of three survivors who made his way out of the pit of a thousand dead and dying fellow Slovenians at Kočevski Rog in 1945, recently died in

<a href="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/02/ATWG_1.jpg"><img alt="ATWG_1-300x225" src="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/02/ATWG_1.jpg" width="300" height="225" /></a>Over at a place called Diversity, Inc., founder and CEO Luke Visconti runs a regular column titled “Ask the White Guy.”  Recent advice columns have concerned “Why is Trayvon a White-on-Black Crime?” “Can a White Man Speak with Authority on Diversity?” and “Do Blacks Need to Relax Their Natural Hair to Get Promoted?” 
No kidding.  There is also another white guy who profits from his presumed sensitivity to racism as he makes the <a href="http://speakoutnow.org/userdata_display.php?modin=50&amp;format=event">rounds</a> on college campuses, <a href="http://www.speakoutnow.org/userdata_display.php?modin=53&amp;uid=8569">coming next</a> to Princeton. His name is Tim Wise and he has written a book titled, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son.
Diversity, Inc., as to be expected, <a href="http://www.diversityinc.com/news/is-thug-the-new-n-word/?utm_source=SailThru&amp;utm_campaign=newsletterLuke&amp;utm_medium=DI&amp;utm_content=2014-01-29&amp;utm_term=news">weighed in</a> on Seattle Seahawks football player Richard Sherman’s claims that accusations that he displayed thug-like behavior in an interview immediately after he made a game-saving deflection is evidence of racism.  But Sherman’s statement to a FOX reporter, “I’m the best corner in the game! When you try me with a sorry receiver like [San Francisco 49er Michael] Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get! Don’t you ever talk about me! … Don’t you open your mouth about the best or I’m gonna shut it for you real quick!” is hardly sportsmanlike behavior.
But as usual, Diversity, Inc., seeks out racism.  In this article they allow Sherman’s quotes about online comments to end the article: “mind-boggling the way the world reacted,” Sherman said. “I can’t say the world, I don’t want to generalize people like that because there are a lot of great people who didn’t react that way. But for the people who did react that way and throw the racial slurs and things like that out there, it was really sad. Especially that close to Martin Luther King Day.”
(Democrats are now studying ways to monitor “<a href="/2014/dgreenfield/13-dems-propose-bill-to-study-hate-speech-on-the-internet-outside-zone-of-first-amendment-protection/">hate speech</a>,” including online comments to which Sherman referred; this bone-headed idea came from a project for a geography class at <a href="http://now.humboldt.edu/news/geography-of-hate-mapping-the-origins-of-online-hate-speech">Humboldt State University</a>.)
Even after his team won, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/seahawks/2014/02/03/richard-sherman-super-bowl-seahawks/5176007/">USA Today</a> referred to this incident in the headline, “Seahawks’ Richard Sherman is full of smiles, not quotes, after Super Bowl win.”
Companies like Diversity Inc. who capitalize on the fear of discrimination lawsuits continue to exploit minority communities, as such white guys like Norman Mailer and Howard Zinn did in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
In his 1957 essay, “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer advanced the idea of “Hip,” “the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.”  According to Mailer’s hipster theology, God is “located in the senses of his body, that trapped, mutilated, and nonetheless megalomaniacal God who is It. . . . not the God of the churches but the unachievable whisper of the mystery within the sex, the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm.”
Mailer rationalized the behavior of the psychopath: “The psychopath murders—if he has the courage—out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love, his being is frozen with implacable self-hatred for his cowardice.”  Mailer presented the case of two eighteen-year-old thugs beating up a candy-store keeper.  Such murder is not therapeutic because it’s not murder of an equal.  Still, wrote Mailer, “courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well.”
Howard Zinn, the late communist history professor too saw the “Negro,” specifically, the “ghetto Negro,” as someone who could fulfill his aims of tearing down capitalist institutions.  In a 1969 essay titled “Marxism and the New Left,” Mailer wrote, “Marx envisioned the industrial proletariat as the revolutionary agent because it was in need, exploited and brought together in the factory.  The Negro is in need, exploited and brought together in the ghetto.”  The New Left, the “loose amalgam of civil rights activists, Black Power advocates, ghetto organizers, student rebels, Vietnam protestors” would then recruit the ghetto “Negroes” to revolutionize “cities, universities, corporations.”
The respectable middle class was seen as the biggest obstacle to a communist revolution.  The 1960s was the time when the black community was making its biggest inroads into the middle class and into higher education.  Radicals like Zinn did not want blacks to acquire middle class status and values.  Some professors argued for admission of low-achieving black students to their campuses over high-achievers.  The New Left’s promotion of “smashing monogamy” and welfare dependence encouraged the decline of the black family.
Mailer gained notoriety and rationalization for his own thuggishness that included stabbing one of his wives and championing killer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer">Jack Abbott</a>, who would go on to murder again.  That led to sales of his books.  Zinn enjoyed the benefits of a tenured position in academe and sales of his books.  Visconti and Price today rake in consulting and speaking fees for hammering on the distorted and depressing charges of never-ending and ever-present racism.
There were some black leaders during the Civil Rights era who objected to such stereotyping and presumptuousness.
In his speech before the 84th Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention, in 1964, Reverend Joseph H. Jackson, President of the National Baptist Convention, indirectly criticized such agitators.  He advised that “Negroes must still make their own leaders.”  The leaders should come from the fields of politics, civil rights, religion, and business:
“We have athletes and comedians.  Let us still applaud our athletes when they achieve on the field of competition, and let us join with others and freely laugh at the jokes that our comedians give.  But we must not confuse these various fields.  There must not develop any dictatorship of any one field, and athletes and comedians must not make the mistake of assuming the role of political, religious, and cultural leaders.  We as a race must see to it that each man serves in his field, and we must not allow the white community to pick our leaders or to tell us what Negro we should follow.”
Jackson advanced a more measured approach to ending racial injustice and cautioned against a “spirit of revenge, blind emotions, and uncontrolled temper.”  Reminding his audience about how direct action led to “mob violence and vandalism,” he suggested instead using the vote and respectful debate.
Like Frederick Douglass, Jackson expressed hope that the American founders’ ideals would be fulfilled:
“America was born in a struggle and as a struggle for freedom, and for the opportunity to develop the highest resources of mankind.  The Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution were the results of our fathers’ attempts to put on paper the ideals that inspired the birth of the nation, and those principles by which and on which the nation was erected and sustained.  There have been errors, mistakes, and gross sins committed against this American venture, but this high venture has not been repudiated or negated.”
You will not see mention of Jackson in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, widely used in high school and college classrooms.  You will not likely hear mention of him at the Diversity, Inc., workshops and conferences.  Students on college campuses are not likely to hear a respectful reference to him from speakers like Tim Wise.  Conservative black leaders like <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/08/allen-west-tea-party-congressman">Allen West</a> are not treated respectfully by liberal <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/authors/tim-murphy">white</a> journalists.  It seems that such “white guys” still have an agenda.
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The Agenda of Racially Sensitive 'White Guys'

Over at a place called Diversity, Inc., founder and CEO Luke Visconti runs a regular column titled “Ask the White Guy.”  Recent advice columns have concerned “

<a href="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/01/763249ef91c88c9287c8c69d628e4beb.jpg"><img alt="763249ef91c88c9287c8c69d628e4beb" src="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/01/763249ef91c88c9287c8c69d628e4beb.jpg" width="315" height="237" /></a>There were many who had reason to be outraged by President Obama’s State of the Union address: the military whose funding has been cut, and who have been besmirched as <a href="http://eaglerising.com/4382/democrat-says-military-veterans-mentally-ill/">emotionally unstable</a> while they are forced to be sitting ducks in battle and then face the potentiality that the administration will <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iraqi-airstrikes-artillery-target-militants-in-fallujah-at-least-7-dead-in-city/2014/01/26/9fcdec52-86d3-11e3-916e-e01534b1e132_story.html">abandon</a> what others had died for, like Fallujah; the millions in the middle class whose health insurance has been dropped or whose premiums have doubled and who are losing jobs to illegal aliens and are insulted by the idea that a job that pays $10.10 is something to aspire to. 
But I want to focus on Obama’s continued efforts to re-educate America, to re-educate her people so that they become shriveling dependents who long for a leader who will unilaterally make decisions for the masses.
Only such a people could believe Obama’s claim of having “a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class.”
Only a well-educated, independent-thinking populace could feel the chill of words regarding “congressional action.”  Conflating America with himself, Obama said, “America does not stand still, and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that's what I'm going to do.”
Once again, there was discussion of government job-training programs.  (Has anyone actually gotten a job as a result?)   To prepare “tomorrow’s workforce” (and that’s all it is: a workforce, not an educated citizenry), we must guarantee “every child access to a world-class education.”
Translation: indoctrination into world citizenship.
Obama referred to one “Estiven Rodriguez,” who “couldn’t speak a word of English when he moved to New York City at age nine.”  Apparently, Rodriguez “led a march of his classmates – through a crowd of cheering parents and neighbors – from their high school to the post office, where they mailed off their college applications.  And this son of a factory worker just found out he’s going to college this fall.”  Obama referred to the army of tutors and teachers that helped him, but immigrants have done far more with only night classes, and often working two or three jobs.
Then, said Obama, “Five years ago, we set out to change the odds for all our kids.  We worked with lenders to reform student loans, and today, more young people are earning college degrees than ever before.”
There is a reason why this government wants to monopolize student loans to produce more “peace and environmental justice studies” graduates: Democrat voters.
Obama invoked the misleadingly named “Race to the Top” contest (really a race for stimulus funds attached to federal education standards called Common Core).  He claimed, it “has helped states raise expectations and performance.  Teachers and principals in schools from Tennessee to Washington, D.C. are making big strides in preparing students with skills for the new economy – problem solving, critical thinking, science, technology, engineering, and math.  Some of this change is hard.  It requires everything from more challenging curriculums and more demanding parents to better support for teachers and new ways to measure how well our kids think, not how well they can fill in a bubble on a test.  But it’s worth it – and it’s working.”
Notice how he didn’t reference Common Core, now dubbed Obamacore.  After test scores plunged and mass confusion ensued, even the <a href="http://neatoday.org/2014/01/28/new-york-teachers-union-says-no-to-common-core-standards-as-implemented/">New York NEA</a> teachers union came around to opposing Common Core. “Problem solving, critical thinking” are hallmarks of <a href="http://sfppr.org/2014/01/common-core-whats-behind-arne-duncans-race-card/">progressive educators</a>, like Linda Darling-Hammond, close pal of Bill Ayers, who has been in charge of designing one of the two Common Core <a href="http://sfppr.org/?s=mary+grabar">national tests</a>.  And what, exactly, is wrong with filling in a bubble?  It means the test-taker has to know something and the grader can’t give extra points for correct attitudes.
What, also, is the “new economy”?  Did we not need science, technology, engineering, and math in the old, twentieth-century economy?
By stating “It requires more challenging curriculums,” Obama admitted what Common Core proponents deny: it does change the curriculum.  These are curriculums that eliminate most history, except that which advances the U.S. as <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/terrencemoore/2014/01/13/racebaiting-101-the-common-core-on-civil-rights-n1777289">racist</a>, sexist, homophobic, imperialistic, etc.
The reference to “New ways to measure how well our kids think” is not reassuring when the Department of Education <a href="http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USED/bulletins/96fac8">promotes</a> the idea that “educational strengths” include “social competence” and “ethnic awareness.”
The new standards do not involve knowing about the country’s founding or the Constitution.  Such students might understand this pre-speech message from Jon Carson of Organizing for Action:
“Friend --
“Tonight, President Obama made sure everyone knows:
“He's not waiting for Congress. He's taking action now, and he's going to explore every method in his power to restore real opportunity for all Americans.”
Then he asks for a $5 donation.
But kindergarten is not early enough.  Said Obama, “The problem is we’re still not reaching enough kids, and we’re not reaching them in time.  That has to change.”
He cited “research” to justify making “high-quality pre-K available to every four year-old”: “Research shows that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education.”  Funny, how they always say “research,” but not which research or what the research actually says about <a href="http://news.heartland.org/editorial/2013/11/12/government-preschool-treating-cancer-band-aid">government-funded preschool</a>.
Nonetheless, “As a parent as well as a President, I repeat that request tonight.”
What if Congress doesn’t snap to and fulfill his “request”?  Well, Obama has friends: “And as Congress decides what it’s going to do, I’m going to pull together a coalition of elected officials, business leaders, and philanthropists willing to help more kids access the high-quality pre-K they need.”
Such “coalitions” must ensure that Obama fulfills his promises: “Last year, I also pledged to connect 99 percent of our students to high-speed broadband over the next four years.  Tonight, I can announce that with the support of the FCC and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint, and Verizon, we’ve got a down payment to start connecting more than 15,000 schools and twenty million students over the next two years, without adding a dime to the deficit.”
Of course, Microsoft is in the “coalition” of “business leaders and philanthropists.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the biggest funder for Common Core; all tests must be taken online.  The other companies surely appreciate the business, too.
Obama’s Department of Education is redesigning high schools: “We’re working to redesign high schools and partner them with colleges and employers that offer the real-world education and hands-on training that can lead directly to a job and career.”  It seems all bases for government control are being covered.  Oh, and “real-world education”?  It means being <a href="http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_120/mary-grabar-gradgrinds-of-common-core-213672-1.html">trained</a> for a job—only.  (See my <a href="http://sfppr.org/2014/01/dumbing-down-the-nations-classrooms/">review</a> of Terrence O. Moore’s book The Story-Killers.)
The feds have not only taken over financing, but they now want to rate colleges.  But this is how Obama put it: “We’re shaking up our system of higher education to give parents more information, and colleges more incentives to offer better value, so that no middle-class kid is priced out of a college education.”
The Education Department is appealing to the youth vote by holding “summits,” inviting college “<a href="http://www.ed.gov/blog/2014/01/duncan-invites-student-feedback-on-college-access-and-affordability/">student experts</a>” to weigh in on college “accessibility” and “affordability.”  The youth experts have spoken and Obama heard: “We’re offering millions the opportunity to cap their monthly student loan payments to ten percent of their income, and I want to work with Congress to see how we can help even more Americans who feel trapped by student loan debt.”
The scary part came when he used himself and Michelle as examples: “The bottom line is, Michelle and I want every child to have the same chance this country gave us.  But we know our opportunity agenda won’t be complete – and too many young people entering the workforce today will see the American Dream as an empty promise – unless we do more to make sure our economy honors the dignity of work, and hard work pays off for every single American.”
Oh, you mean college students should write <a href="http://obamaprincetonthesis.wordpress.com/">theses</a> like Michelle Obama’s?  Can we all write “Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community” and investigate how “attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society”?
Education was bad enough back then.  As a result, we have her in the White House with her Columbia and Harvard educated husband.  It can only get worse when he invokes “widely shared” prosperity, calling on Americans to “toil” together, and summoning “what is best in us, with our feet planted firmly in today but our eyes cast towards tomorrow. . . .”
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.

The State of the Dis-Union: Preparing World Citizens

There were many who had reason to be outraged by President Obama’s State of the Union address: the military whose funding has been cut, and who have been

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