Category Archives: Education

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Are the teachers’ unions writing purportedly straight news pieces for The Washington Post?

The Washington Post got the headline wrong. The editors make it sound as though the students were the ones in the wrong for reporting a teacher who broke the law!

Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again?

Mary Wood’s school reprimanded her for teaching a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now she hopes her bond with students can survive South Carolina’s politics.

by Hannah Natanson | Monday, September 18, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

CHAPIN, S.C. — As gold sunlight filtered into her kitchen, English teacher Mary Wood shouldered a worn leather bag packed with first-day-of-school items: Three lesson-planning notebooks. Two peanut butter granola bars. An extra pair of socks, just in case.

Everything was ready, but Wood didn’t leave. For the first time since she started teaching 14 years ago, she was scared to go back to school.

Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.

The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.

The story was originally entitled “South Carolina students reported their teacher’s lesson on Ta-Nehisa Coates,” or so I judge from the blurb that appears on the article tab using Microsoft Edge. Someone changed it to the headline you see above, which includes “Can she trust them again?” But what Mrs Satterwhite[1]While the teacher did not respect her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, enough to have taken his last name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect to him, and always refers to married … Continue reading did was in blatant defiance of the law in the Palmetto State. Do the editors of the Post support teachers breaking the law?

Reading Coates’s book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people,” one student wrote.

Let’s be clear here: Mr Coates, who has had material published previously in the Post, something the Post article does not mention, which is a violation of standard journalistic ethics, strongly concentrates on race relations in the United States. Wikipedia’s section on Mr Coates’ views on race in the US states:

In an interview with Ezra Klein, Coates outlined his analysis that the extent of white identity expression in the United States serves as a critical factor in threat perceptions of certain European Americans and their response to political paradigm shifts related to African Americans, such as the presidency of Barack Obama.

I note here that Ezra Klein was the creator of JournoList, so the above statement concerned a left-wing “journalist” reporting about a left-wing subject. While I was obviously not present during Mrs Satterwhite’s lessons, I don’t find the student’s complaint that the book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people” to be improbable.

At least two parents complained, too. Within days, school administrators ordered Wood to stop teaching the lesson. They placed a formal letter of reprimand in her file. It instructed her to keep teaching “without discussing this issue with your students.”

Wood finished out the spring semester feeling defeated and betrayed — not only by her students, but by the school system that raised her. The high school Wood teaches at is the same one she attended.

Oh, she felt “defeated and betrayed” because students reported her to teaching a lesson which broke the law? People might genuinely disagree about the merits of the law in question, but it is still the law.

Here is the crux of the teacher’s problem:

Wood believes trust is fundamental to the classroom. She has to trust her students. They and their parents have to trust her. But trust, she believes, is impossible without authenticity. And for Wood, teaching authentically means assigning writers like Coates — voices unfamiliar, even disconcerting, to students in her lakeside town. Because of what happened last year, though, Wood now worried anything, from the most provocative essay to the least interesting comment about her weekend, might be resisted, recorded and reported by the children she was supposed to be teaching.

And if she couldn’t trust them, how was she supposed to make them trust her?

That trust was broken when Mrs Satterwhite began teaching her students something prohibited by law, yet she somehow sees the trust as having been broken by the students reporting her, not her teaching of a prohibited lesson. If the lessons she taught made some students feel “ashamed to be white,” how does that not violate “a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students ‘feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress’ on account of their race”?

Mrs Satterwhite was not discharged. She had a letter of reprimand placed in her file, and was admonished not to teach inappropriate lessons. Yet she has returned to the classroom this school year.

How can she trust her students? She can record her lessons herself, to prove that she has remained within the state’s and the school board’s guidelines.

And Wood believed the school district had come to accept her — respecting her students’ 80-plus percent AP exam passage rates year after year, above the national average — even if not everyone liked her methods. Chapin was her hometown. Chapin High School had been her school, the place she began to question the conservative, Christian views espoused by her classmates, friends and family.

No teacher ever assigned her someone like Coates, Wood said, but her father Mike Satterfield, a teacher and later principal at Chapin, encouraged her to pursue whatever outside reading she found interesting. That led her to left-leaning authors. By the time she graduated from University of North Carolina Wilmington, she was a self-professed liberal.

The Post reporter tried to put that innocuously, but the meaning is clear: Mrs Satterwhite is not just “a self-professed liberal,” but she was choosing to teach that liberalism to the students in a mostly conservative area. Lexington County, in which Chapin is located, gave 92,817 votes, 64.20% of the total, to President Trump in 2020, versus 49,301 votes, 34.10%, to the dummkopf from Delaware.

But amid a red sea, Chapin’s English department was a blue island. And Wood was known as the bluest of the bunch — conspicuous for decorating her classroom with posters of Malcolm X, Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes and LGBTQ pride stickers.

Though the Post didn’t want to say it directly, the above paragraph tells us all that we need to know: Mrs Satterwhite was bringing her politics into the classroom.

As one would expect, Mrs Satterwhite attempted to use an “I know better because I am a professional” argument, the type of thing the liberal teachers’ unions try, but it didn’t work: parents have, and should have, the ultimate authority over what their children are taught.

The Post article is a very long one, and it is a left-leaning editorial, slanted to make Mrs Satterwhite a martyr, attempting to masquerade as a news piece.

References

References
↑1 While the teacher did not respect her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, enough to have taken his last name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect to him, and always refers to married women by their proper names, though we do not change the direct quotes of others.
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Kendra Brooks just can’t handle the truth!

We reported yesterday evening on Philadelphia City Councilwoman Kendra Brooks and her posturing in front of Edward T Steel Elementary School. It was noted that Steel Elementary, which both defeated mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty and she touted as a victory for public schools, as Mrs Flaherty fought successfully to keep from being privatized, but Steel Elementary is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, in which 8% of students tested grade-level proficient in reading, and a whopping 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math. Perhaps, we suggested, keeping Steel Elementary public rather than charter wasn’t that great a move. After all, it’s difficult to imagine that students could perform much worse than they already have!

It would be, of course, unfair to write an article on Miss Brooks and not let her know that I had done so, so I tweeted a reply to her. I do not know if Miss Brooks read the linked article, but, as of 8:18 AM EDT, Twitter analytics indicates that there were three clicks on the link, along with three profile visits generated by my reply.

Well, I got my reply from the Councilwoman, in a manner that doesn’t really surprise me. 🙂

So funny! Miss Brooks is a member of the Philadelphia City Council, which makes her a person of some political power, and one would think that information on the public school she touted ought to be important to her. But, rather than worrying about Steel Elementary’s, a school she said her daughter attended, poor performance, Miss Brooks chose instead to stick her head in the sand. Political posturing trumps actually doing something to help.

I attended the public schools. When I was in Mt Sterling High School, 1967 to 1971, we had exactly one teacher who had his master’s; all of the others topped out with baccalaureate degrees. A 1937 WPA/CCC building, we had no air conditioning, the teachers had no union, the building was heated by radiators via a boiler in the basement, there had been no cafeteria until the Elementary School across the street was built in 1961, there was no school bus service, and this was well before personal computers and that internet thingy Al Gore invented. Yet somehow, some way, everyone who was graduated could actually read his diploma. We had no metal detectors or security guards, and boys traded pocketknives and argued whether K-Bar or Buck made better blades, on the school’s right front portico, at the top of the tall steps. Oddly enough, no one was stabbed, nor was anyone worried about it. If there was a fight in the parking lot, as happened at least a few times, it was two guys, with a circle of spectators cheering on one or the other, and the odds were good that at least one, if not both of them, had knives in their pockets, but the knives never came out.

Of course, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which endorsed Mrs Flaherty for Mayor, which supports Miss Brooks, would be absolutely aghast at all of that. Why, they’d sputter, teachers have to get their master’s degrees within just a few years, but it has to be asked: why, if advanced degrees are so necessary, did a small-town school in the South do a better job in actually educating its students when every teacher but one had only a bachelor’s degree?

Is it possible, just possible, that everything that the teachers’ unions have been pushing is exactly the wrong thing?

That, of course, is the kind of question that Working Families Party politicians like Kendra Brooks does not want asked, and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers most certainly don’t want answered. They just can’t handle the truth!

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Kendra Brooks fouls up. Perhaps celebrating a clearly failing public school isn't a good look

Kendra Brooks is an at-large Philadelphia City Councilwoman, who won on the Working Families Party line, with the WFB being even further left than the already far-left Democrats. She has also been affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America.

Upon hearing that Commonwealth Partners will be supporting pro-school choice candidates, Miss Brooks tweeted:

My path to politics began when school privatizers tried to close my daughter’s school. We fought privatization then and will keep fighting it now.

No amount of GOP money can buy community support.

Her tweet included a photo of the Councilwoman, her arms defiantly crossed, and a stern look on her face, in front of the Edward T Steel Elementary School.

We’ve reported on Steel Elementary before, because then Democratic mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty campaigned in front of that school, proudly proclaiming that she saved the school from ‘going charter.’ Miss Brooks, a strong supporter of Mrs Flaherty’s, then tweeted:

I met @HelenGymPHL over a decade ago when my daughter’s school was going to be privatized. We were a few moms saying we want something greater. We DESERVE something better.

That’s what her education plan is about. That’s why I’m standing here today because since day one, she’s been fighting for communities like mine. And winning.

To this day, Edward T. Steel Elementary is a public school.

Being a numbers kind of guy, I did some research. Yes, Steel Elementary is still a Philadelphia public school. But how good a school is it? Steel Elementary is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, in which 8% of students tested grade-level proficient in reading, and a whopping 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math. Perhaps keeping Steel Elementary public rather than charter wasn’t that great a move. After all, it’s difficult to imagine that students could perform much worse than they already have!

Fortunately, Mrs Flaherty finished third in the Democratic mayoral primary, and her public school teacher supported campaign simply failed.

The primary was three months ago, but apparently Miss Brooks hasn’t yet learned the lesson: if you pose in front of, and celebrate a particular public school, maybe, just maybe, you ought to have some idea of just what the school’s performance is, because there will always be someone like me who will check the numbers.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! * Updated! * Stupid is as stupid does.

Kevin Lentz, photo by Fayette
County Detention Center, and is a public record.</span<

As we are all aware, the teachers unions in our country, including the Fayette County Education Association, have nothing but the best of intentions when it comes to students in our public schools. Nothing, nothing! can stop them in the pursuit of a top notch education for students!

Lexington high school teacher charged with 17 sexual offenses involving minors

by Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Tuesday, August 8, 2023 | 4:01 PM EDT | Updated: 5:32 PM EDT

A Lexington teacher charged with multiple counts of sexual offenses involving minors was placed on leave by the Fayette County district Tuesday, according to officials and records.

Kevin Lentz was an English teacher at Henry Clay High School, Fayette County Public Schools spokesperson Dia Davidson Smith told the Herald-Leader.

The 49-year-old Mr Lentz faces these charges:

  • KRS §531.310(2)(b), 7 counts: Use of a minor in a sexual performance, which is a Class B felony if the minor us under 16 years of age. Under KRS §532.060(2)(b), the sentence for a Class B felony is imprisonment “not less than ten (10) years nor more than twenty (20) years”. The sentence shall include an additional five (5) year period of postincarceration supervision which shall be added to the maximum sentence rendered for the offense.
  • KRS §531.030(2), 10 counts: Distribution of obscene matters to minors, which is a Class A misdemeanor if a first offense, and which is how Mr Lentz is charged. Under KRS §532.090(1), the sentence for a Class A misdemeanor shall not exceed twelve (12) months.
  • KRS §524.100, 6 counts: Tampering with physical evidence, which is a Class D felony. Under KRS §532.060(2)(d), the sentence for a Class D felony is imprisonment “not less than one (1) year nor more than five (5) years.”

The charge of tampering with physical evidence requires that the accused believes “that an official proceeding is pending or may be instituted,” so to be guilty of this, Mr Lentz had to know that the police suspected him of the other offenses, that he knew the authorities were closing in.

Mr Lentz has been employed by the Fayette County public schools for 18 years, since August 11, 2005, which leads me to wonder: is this something he (allegedly) recently started, or has this been going on for years and years?

Public school teachers are (supposedly) not stupid, and Fayette County requires that teachers of Mr Lentz’s seniority have attained a Master’s degree. If you are a teacher, you just can’t not know that this kind of thing means a very long and unpleasant stay in the state penitentiary. As Leroy Jethro Gibbs said, to some college students he was interrogating, “Believe me, son, you will not do well in prison.” Just how can someone be that stupid?

These are the kinds of charges that the Commonwealth’s Attorney should not allow to be the subject of any lenient plea bargain; if convicted of use of a minor under 16 in a sexual performance, he should get the maximum sentence of twenty years, which will almost certainly be run concurrently rather than consecutively, as I would prefer — keep him locked up for 140 years! — which would keep him in prison until he’s 69 years old, something he might not survive anyway.
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Update! 11:05 AM EDT

I had wondered, even though I didn’t include it in my original, which was posted at 8:47 AM, whether Mr Lentz’s alleged victims were male or female, since Mrs Spears’ original never mentioned the sex of the victim or victims at all. Now, we know.

Henry Clay teacher exchanged obscene photos in texts with 9-year-old boy, citation alleges

by Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Wednesday, August 9, 2023 | 9:24 AM EDT | Updated: 9:59 AM EDT

A Henry Clay High School teacher induced a 9-year-old boy to send photos of his genitals in a text and also sent the boy adult pornography, a police citation alleges.

Kevin Lentz, 49, asked the boy to delete the conversations “so his parents wouldn’t know,” according to the Lexington Police Department citation. Lentz reportedly sent the child more than 10 images of pornography.

The incident occurred in July, the citation said.

There’s more at the Lexington Herald-Leader original.

Yeah, Mr Lentz, if convicted, will not do well in prison.

More, while part of Mrs Spears original that I did not quote stated that the county schools’ spokeswoman simply referred reporters to the police as far as to whether the alleged victim was a Henry Clay High School student, if he is a nine-year-old boy, the victim is too young to have been in high school. It turns out that he was also a church ‘youth volunteer,’ and though Mrs Spears did not identify at which church it was, it has been reported elsewhere that it was at Lexington’s Faith Lutheran Church.

Fayette District Judge Lindsay Thurston set a $50,000 bond and ordered Lentz to not have contact with minor children as a condition of his release, according to court documents. He remained in the Fayette Detention Center Wednesday morning.

Mr Lentz is innocent until proven guilty, so a reasonable bail amount had to be set; In Kentucky, only those accused of murder can be denied bail. Now that this information has been exposed, I suspect that Mr Lentz time at the Fayette County Detention Center will be disagreeable if he doesn’t make bail quickly.

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Odd question: will LGBTQ+ population decrease with end of Affirmative Action?

The Wall Street Journal is on top of the trends in business, as you’d expect, and reported that Chief Information Officers are worrying that employee ‘diversity’ — and how I’ve come to hate that word — will decrease following the Supreme Court’s  decision  in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, declaring what we all knew, that the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment prohibited Affirmative Action using racial preferences in collegiate admissions.

CIOs Say Affirmative Action Ruling Could Set Back Progress in Tech Diversity

Executives are questioning what a landmark Supreme Court decision on college admissions means for diversity hiring efforts

by Belle Lin | Monday, July 17, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

Business technology leaders said that last month’s Supreme Court’s ruling that colleges can’t consider race in admissions policies could have a chilling effect on initiatives aimed at diversifying the information-technology workforce.

The court’s decision is likely to alter the pipeline of diverse graduates entering the job market, they said, and may introduce challenges to companies’ existing hiring and promotion practices.

By removing race from college admission considerations, the pool of tech talent entering the workforce may not only be less diverse, it could also be smaller if underrepresented minorities don’t see the field as a welcoming or viable option, those executive say.

There’s more at the original.

The Court’s decision applied to universities, public and private, that accept federal money, including in the form of student financial aid. However, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in the Court’s opinion, roughly 60% of colleges and universities admit all applicants. If the pool of graduates from certain technical specialties from Ivy League colleges becomes less diverse — there’s that word again! — then corporations might look at graduates from Middle Tennessee State (Acceptance rate = 87.1%) or Eastern Kentucky (Acceptance rate = 98.3%) or Jacksonville State University of Alabama (Acceptance rate = 76.3%), Robert Stacy McCain’s alma mater. After all, Alissa Heinerscheid proved that being a Hahvahd graduate was no guarantee that stupid decisions wouldn’t be taken!

Then I saw these interesting paragraphs in another Journal article:

The elevation of victimhood over achievement has led many to misrepresent their racial and gender identities in pursuit of advantages in professional and academic positions. Students at selective colleges are identifying as non-heterosexual at rates several times higher than historic or national averages, though University of London political scientist Eric Kaufmann noted that there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in sexual behavior tied to those identities. I’ve heard of parents at elite private high schools using genetic testing services hoping to identify any ethnic heritage that would boost their children’s college applications and of young professionals falsely identifying as bisexual for a career boost.

Racial and gender quotas result in liberals’ willful hypocrisy and convoluted rationalizations when they are confronted with the reality that aptitudes, interests and effort aren’t always evenly distributed among their superficial and shifting politicized racial categories. Liberals have translated their calls for increased diversity into demands that colleges admit and employers hire black and Hispanic applicants in proportion to their group’s share of the U.S. population.

Wait, what? “Students at selective colleges are identifying as non-heterosexual at rates several times higher than historic or national averages” but “there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in sexual behavior tied to those identities”? From the linked report:

  • When we look at homosexual behavior, we find that it has grown much less rapidly than LGBT identification. Men and women under 30 who reported a sexual partner in the last five years dropped from around 96% exclusively heterosexual in the 1990s to 92% exclusively heterosexual in 2021. Whereas in 2008 attitudes and behavior were similar, by 2021 LGBT identification was running at twice the rate of LGBT sexual behavior.
  • The author provides a high-point estimate of an 11-point increase in LGBT identity between 2008 and 2021 among Americans under 30. Of that, around 4 points can be explained by an increase in same-sex behavior. The majority of the increase in LGBT identity can be traced to how those who only engage in heterosexual behavior describe themselves.
  • Very liberal ideology is associated with identifying as LGBT among those with heterosexual behavior, especially women. It seems that an underlying psychological disposition is inclining people with heterosexual behavior to identify both as LGBT and very liberal. The most liberal respondents have moved from 10-15% non-heterosexual identification in 2016 to 33% in 2021. Other ideological groups are more stable.

So, what do we have here? A significant increase in the number of younger people who are also mostly self-identified liberals? Does this mean that these people might be more open to take a walk on the wild side, but mostly haven’t yet, or is it some sort of ‘siding with the oppressed’ help, or could it possibly, just possibly, going the Elizabeth Warren/Rachel Dolezal route of ‘identifying’ with a particular minority for some real or perceived Affirmative Action benefit?

  • Very liberal ideology and LGBT identification are associated with anxiety and depression in young people. Very liberal young Americans are twice as likely as others to experience these problems. 27% of young Americans with anxiety or depression were LGBT in 2021. This relationship appears to have strengthened since 2010.
  • Among young people, mental health problems, liberal ideology, and LGBT identity are strongly correlated. Using factor analysis in two different studies shows that assuming one common variable between all three traits explains 40-50% of the variation.

LOL! I have long believed that “very liberal ideology” is indicative of some sort of mental problem, because, especially with the new #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left, to be that far left requires a delusional mindset, ignoring the reality that is all around us. As we have previously reported, the areas in Philadelphia which were most seriously impacted by violent crime recently voted for a tougher-on-crime candidate, while the more ‘progressive’ candidates had far greater support in the wealthier, whiter — Philly is very internally segregated — areas.

You can’t pay attention to the news in Philadelphia without realizing that crime is a serious problem, but the anti-police, anti-incarceration leftist candidate won her votes in the areas experiencing far less crime.

There is, at least at the margins, some socialization concerning what is and is not acceptable when it comes to sex. For boys growing up, the idea of fellating another boy, or receiving anal intercourse from such, is strongly reinforced as something which is humiliating, completely unmanly, and just about every other negative connotation that can be put on it. It is at least arguable that forces pushing acceptance of male homosexuality can lessen the effects of the normal socialization, and perhaps some teenaged and twenty-something males might not be quite so averse to trying something, if the right situation arose. Porn has lessened the stigma against female homosexual liaisons.

But if actual homosexual activity is being reported at significantly lower rates than abnormal sexual identification — and let me be explicit here: anything other than strictly heterosexual identification is considered abnormal by me — then there must be some other incentive for people to identify as something other than normal.

  • College students majoring in the social sciences and humanities are about 10 points more LGBT than those in STEM. Meanwhile, 52% of students taking highly political majors such as race or gender studies identify as LGBT, compared to 25% among students overall.

Realistically, what can the incentive be other than politics or some perceived advantage to be gained? And if the perceived advantage would be the shortcuts offered by Affirmative Action, shouldn’t the elimination of Affirmative Action in collegiate admissions reduce the percentage of those claiming abnormal sexual orientations and identities?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Today’s #woke left sure do hate Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, and democracy . . . when those things go against leftist values

I will admit it up front: when I saw the article on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page, and cited below, I expected one dripping with liberal bias, but it was actually mostly balanced reporting.

Why Moms for Liberty was designated an ‘extremist’ group by the Southern Poverty Law Center

Born out of opposition to COVID-19 mandates in schools, Moms of Liberty pivoted to targeting diversity education and how LGBTQ issues are handled by schools.

by Maddie Hanna | Wednesday, June 28, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Moms for Liberty calls itself a parent empowerment group. But as the polarizing organization arrives in Philadelphia this week for its annual summit, it’s being identified as something else: an “antigovernment extremist group.”

That’s according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the veteran civil rights organization that tracks domestic extremism. This year, the group added a number of “parental rights” groups — the Southern Poverty Law Center refers to them as “anti-student-inclusion” — to its tally of hate and antigovernment extremist groups.

Robert Stacy McCain has done a lot of reporting on the Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, and pointed out, in an article asking “What counts as hate?“, writing:

by continually expanding the definition of “hate” and “extremism,” and by encouraging censorship and suppression of anyone who dissents from their liberal agenda, the SPLC compels people with more or less mainstream beliefs to engage in the kind of activism practiced by Moms for Liberty. Furthermore  (and, again, I think SPLC staff are too stupid to grasp this), by denoting mainstream groups as proponents of “hate,” the SPLC undermines its own credibility and causes people who are not remotely “extremist” to question the whole rationale of this type of “hate”-hunting enterprise. Like, why should we even care if someone is prejudiced against gay people or black people or Jews or whatever? So long as they are not engaged in any actual criminal behavior, or advocating violence against others, people are free to form their own opinions. This whole business of “exposing” people as holding allegedly dangerous beliefs — which is to say, acting as Thought Police — is antithetical to liberty. And I think more Americans are beginning to reject the type of Thought Police agenda that SPLC pursues.

Of course, in heavily Democratic Philadelphia, where so many seem to despise freedom of speech for the people they oppose, the staff at the American Revolution Museum in Philadelphia, a revolution against the British government spread by freedom of speech and of the press, don’t support allowing the Moms being allowed to speak.

Back to the Inquirer:

Moms for Liberty has accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of espousing “hate” toward its members. Here’s why the organization says Moms for Liberty warrants the designation:

What makes Moms for Liberty an antigovernment group?

Founded in Florida in 2021, Moms for Liberty was born out of opposition to COVID-19 mandates in schools and now claims 285 chapters across 45 states. It pivoted to targeting diversity education and how LGBTQ issues are handled by schools, as part of a broader conservative movement that has accused schools of indoctrinating students around race, gender, and sexuality.

Heaven forfend! Some parents are opposed to the public schools, which have, due to the compulsory education laws in every state, what is, in effect, a captive audience, been teaching, been indoctrinating, beliefs which are opposed to some people’s religious beliefs, and opposed to simple, common sense. It wasn’t so very long ago that girls who like rough-and-tumble, who would go out and get dirty and sweaty playing ball with the boys were called, sometimes admiringly and sometimes not, tomboys, but everyone knew that they were still girls. There was a time in which boys who liked to play with dolls or do somewhat ‘girly’ things were called, never admiringly, sissies, but everyone knew that they were still boys. Now? Now, they’re not what they were born, but one of 1 × 10n new ‘genders,’ you’ve got to call them that, and it’s time to reach for the puberty blockers and surgical scalpel. No one would ever say that public school libraries should have materials showing girls fellating boys, but today’s left — which includes a lot of public school teachers and administrators — are aghast that some people are opposed to having materials in public school libraries which depict boys fellating boys. Many concerned parents do not want this kind of stuff normalized, but if you are a parent who doesn’t want that, the SPLC says that you are a hater and an anti-government extremist.

That messaging is what landed Moms for Liberty on the SPLC’s list, said Maya Henson Carey, a research analyst with SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

“It’s really looking at their overall narrative: that public educators and public schools are attempting to indoctrinate and sexualize children through this radical Marxist agenda,” Carey said.

The SPLC notes statements from Moms for Liberty leaders, including the group’s slogan that “we do not co-parent with the government,” comments referring to “government schools,” support for abolishing the federal Department of Education, and accusations that teachers unions are responsible for indoctrination.

In one example flagged by the SPLC, Moms for Liberty said last year that “the K-12 cartel — also known as the national teachers union (NEA) — met and drafted a proposal to replace the word ‘mother’ with ‘birthing person.’” Describing the proposal as “insane,” Moms for Liberty said that “as the teachers union pushes an agenda focused on everything but educating our children, American parents are rising up, taking back our school districts and putting the focus back on educating our children.”

We have previously reported how The Washington Post kowtowed to the #woke by headlining an article with “pregnant people” in both the title and body, and a site search of the Inquirer’s website returned 2,905 references to “pregnant people,” 1,062 references to “pregnant person,” 1,643 references to “birthing person,” and 4,669 references to “birthing people.” Is that what the Inky’s stylebook now requires? Is it surprising that sensible people would note these assaults on language and attempts to normalize transgenderism and the notion that men can get pregnant and have babies?

Well, perhaps the SPLC were not surprised at that, but Maya Henson Carey said that the SPLC cited such objections as part of the reason Moms for Liberty was declared to be an “anti-government extremist” group.

After several paragraphs in which Dr Carey claimed that the Moms must be raaaaacist, comparing their objections to critical race theory, the education of which has a strong political component, she went on:

Moms for Liberty has also opposed policies accommodating transgender students and has referred to gender dysphoria as being “normalized by predators.” And while Moms for Liberty has said it’s focused on removing inappropriate sexual content, efforts to ban books from libraries have disproportionately targeted stories about LGBTQ people or people of color, Carey said.

It’s certainly true that the Moms are fighting the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism in the public schools, but that’s what they should be doing. It’s an obvious question: why on earth would the public schools be pushing normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism in the first place? Why would the public schools be pushing something which is opposed by many religions, why would they be pushing something that is directly contrary to the religious faiths of many parents?

Is not the state pushing a particular issue which violates a lot of people’s religious faith in itself a state establishment of religion?

Carey said the education groups represent a trend of “a shift to public spaces” by extremist groups, that “comes with them showing up for school board meetings and running for public office. A lot of these antigovernment and hate groups are really infiltrating the lives of everyday Americans.”

And there you have it: an SPLC spokeswoman is complaining that conservatives are exercising their freedom of speech, and, in what must surely be a horrific attack on democracy, are doing something really radical like running for office in democratic elections!

 

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Molly McGhee and student loan forgiveness A clue: don't flash around how well you live and expect charity from others

Molly McGhee’s library, via this tweet. Click to enlarge.

Molly McGhee describes herself in her Twitter biography as:

200% class rage. Novelist. Debut out Oct 2023: Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind @astrahousebooks. I teach @columbia. prev: @torbooks @fsgbooks. rep: @gelrdrgz

Here’s another view.

That’s pretty awesome for a home library, wouldn’t you say? Miss McGhee certainly thought it awesome enough to put a photo of it on Twitter for her 14.4K followers, as well as an ‘in progress’ photo last September.

I’ve got to say, I have library envy here, especially since much of my library is now on my Kindle! When we moved to our retirement home, we downsized, a lot, because our current house is significantly smaller than the one in Jim Thorpe. One of the first things to go were all of the paperbacks, and some of the hardbacks as well. We have just two bookcases left, a fairly standard sized one, and a smaller one. That’s really all for which we have room!

But the seemingly well-to-do Miss McGhee thinks that it’s horrible that she has to do something really radical like pay off her student loans!

She tweeted:

student loan repayment is more than my rent and due starting in october. @POTUS how do you expect americans to pay this?

student loans and their interests are a class tax on people with working class heritage. It is antithetical to the American dream.

Of course, she does have a way to pay for this!

what if I told everyone I think student debt relief should come from defunding our police state 😙

LOL! Our “police state” seems pretty lawless as you get into a lot of neighborhoods in our major cities, including New York City, where Miss McGhee lives, all of which are governed by mostly liberal Democrats. But somehow, some way, our “police state” has enabled her to build a great looking personal library in her under $1,300 per month apartment in Flatbush — a neighborhood in Brooklyn — and to publish a book which is supposed to be released in October.

What Miss McGhee wants, as she tells us that she earns less than $35,000 a year as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, an Ivy League college, is for other people, working-class people, to pay off her student loans. Of course, she doesn’t particularly respect the working class people who’d have to pay their taxes to pay off her student loans, does she?

One would think that an Ivy League-educated New Yorker would have heard of the word introspection, “a reflective looking inward; an examination of one’s own thoughts and feelings”, and thought that maybe, just maybe, publishing photos of a seemingly great personal library, and trashing the working class people whose taxes would have to make up the difference for the student loans she wants forgiven, might not be great ideas to get the public support for student loan forgiveness.

Perhaps the woman working as a waitress because she couldn’t get a job in her field, sharing in a fifth-floor walkup on 94th Street with four other girls, or the guy in Morgantown, West Virginia, who somehow thought his degree in 17th Century French Literature would get him a job as a professor but missed out in the competition for those jobs, and now working the counter at AutoZone, might generate some sympathy for their ’cause.’ But they’ve forgotten about the people who didn’t get to go to college at all, who are still working as waitresses in diners, or greeters in WalMart, or loader operators at aggregate yards, who might wonder why they should have to pay higher taxes due to the deficits that student loan forgiveness would increase.

But one job that Miss McGhee could never do is sales, because she has proven that her salesmanship skills are not just zero, but less than zero, in flashing around the views of her personal library while begging for people to forgive her debts. And the left wonder why there’s so little support for their great idea.

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The left want to control your thoughts by controlling your language

To the surprise of exactly no one among The Philadelphia Inquirer’s dwindling readership, the Inky has gone all-in on the so-called Pride Month, with three out of five articles in the opinion section relating to homosexual and transgender activism.

Philadelphia Inquirer screen capture, 6-3-23 at 10:00 AM EDT.

At Central Bucks, transphobic slurs are common and adults are unwilling to intervene

Many faculty members refuse to defend LGBTQ students from the words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill-intent that other students throw their way.

by Leo Burchell and Ben Busick, For The Inquirer | Updated Thursday, June 1, 2023 | 11:00 AM EDT

We are two trans students in the Central Bucks School District, which the American Civil Liberties Union has alleged is a “toxic environment” for LGBTQ students. In our time at Central Bucks, both of us have endured homophobic or transphobic bullying from our peers.

This bullying and discrimination has impacted our ability to learn, and Central Bucks does nothing about it.

One of us — Leo — came out as transgender and changed his name at the beginning of his senior year at Central Bucks West last September. He emailed all of his teachers about his pronouns and name. However, throughout the entire school year, one teacher consistently misgendered him, while only occasionally correcting themself.

It is hard to learn in a classroom when your teacher misgenders you to all the students present.

The authors have written this as though “Leo” Burchell is actually male, and the teachers and students must accept her as being male. It’s clear from their first paragraph, in which they stated that “both of us have endured homophobic or transphobic bullying from our peers,” that many of their fellow students have not accepted such as reality.

When entering one of the very few gender-neutral bathrooms for students to use, Leo was called a “tranny” by a student passing by. That gender-neutral bathroom also frequently lacks toilet paper, paper towels, or both. Another student hurled a homophobic slur at Leo as he handed out flyers about a protest before school one morning.

It is a legitimate complaint if the school, which has gone to the effort to establish ‘gender-neutral’ bathrooms, is not servicing them adequately. But that’s about the only legitimate complaint the authors made.

Central Bucks South, for Ben, has unfortunately not been much better. Homophobic and transphobic phrases are commonplace, and often targeted at Ben. They came out as nonbinary in their sophomore year of high school in 2021. Fortunately, many of their teachers have made a real effort to get their pronouns right and use them correctly. Their lovely AP Spanish teacher even taught Ben’s class (with Ben’s permission) about the Spanish word for nonbinary and the gender-neutral pronouns and conjugations of gendered words. She will probably never realize what an impact that simple gesture had.

“They” is, of course, a plural pronoun, making the short sentence, “They came out as nonbinary in their sophomore year of high school in 2021”, grammatically incorrect and jarring to the ears of an English-speaking person.

However, some faculty members do not try to integrate their pronouns into everyday language. These faculty often use strategies like, “I am just going to use your name so I don’t have to get your pronouns wrong,” which seems like an attempt to be inclusive at first glance but is really just a cop-out. Most transgender and nonbinary people would much rather someone make a mistake, correct themselves, and move on. (If someone with good, inclusive intentions makes a mistake, no big deal.)

Some faculty and most students at Central Bucks South, however, do not appear to have good intentions and rarely use Ben’s pronouns correctly. Even worse, many teachers witness students using the incorrect names and pronouns for transgender and nonbinary students — and do nothing about it.

If “some faculty and most students . . . do not appear to have good intentions” in this, as Miss Burchell and Mr Busick wrote, that is a clear indication that those faculty and students do not accept the claim that Miss Burchell is now a guy and Mr Busick is something other than a male. The authors have an absolute right to claim to be what they are, and to say so publicly, but just as their freedom of speech allows them to do that, the freedom of speech of other people allows other people to not only disagree with the authors’ claims, but say so publicly.

Many faculty members refuse to defend their LGBTQ students from the words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill-intent that other students throw their way. As such, we know many LGBTQ students who often dread going to school.

Sticks and stones, we were once told, could break our bones, but names would never hurt us. However, for Miss Burchell and Mr Busick, “words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill intent” do hurt, and they are demanding protection from those words. One wonders: if the homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered are to be protected from “words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill intent” aimed at their sexual orientation and identity, from what other “words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill intent” should other students, normal students, be protected, because “words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill intent” occur all the time in schools, for a myriad of reasons and just general dislike.

Perhaps they could submit a Hurt Feelings Report Form?

This is, to me, serious, because there are all sorts of attempts to legislate, censor, or otherwise ‘do something’ about ‘hate speech,’ and while the OpEd piece I selected is by high school seniors, there are (supposedly) serious adults who want the government to somehow take action against speech the left don’t like. The attempt to regulate and control speech is an attempt to regulate and control thought: if the government can somehow compel people to use language that agrees with the claims of the ‘transgendered,’ it becomes an effort to legitimize transgenderism, to push the thoughts of people who have a perfect right to reject the cockamamie claim that people can change their sex into avenues which accept that claim. Not just no, but Hell no!

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If you’re scared, say you’re scared! But don't be afraid of stupid stuff.

That things get stupid following a mass shooting, such as the one in Louisville, or school shooting like the one in Nashville, is expected. But there’s a point at which stupidity gets squared. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Parents say Bala Cynwyd fifth graders texted about who should be shot in the next school shooting

“Everyday i think of school shootings and hope the most people die,” one student wrote, according to a screenshot of an exchange shared by two parents.

by Maddie Hanna | Friday, April 14, 2023

Three weeks ago, parents say fifth graders at Bala Cynwyd Middle School had a conversation over text about school shootings.

Bala Cynwyd is not exactly a depressed area. The mean household income is $128,94574.9% of residents 25 or older have at least a baccalaureate degree, 76.8% of homes are occupied by their owners with a median value of $568,200. 77.1% of the population are non-Hispanic whites.

These aren’t disadvantaged kids stuck in a rotten school. Unlike the disasters that Philadelphia Mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty champions, Bala Cynwyd Middle School ranks 8th best out of 877 middle schools in Pennsylvania, with 87% of students ranked as grade-level proficient in reading, and 71% in math.

“Everyday i think of school shootings and hope the most people die,” one student wrote, according to a screenshot of the exchange shared by two parents. The exchange continued: “I hope the following people will get shot,” before listing names that were blacked out.

The parents who provided the exchange to the Inquirer said they knew who the listed names were — because one was their child.

The Lower Merion School District has not informed most parents of the details of the incident — referring in a message to the community Thursday to “text messages that included threatening language.”

Lower Merion police assisted the district in investigating, “and concluded that no credible threat to the safety of the school community ever existed related to those text messages,” Acting Superintendent Megan Shafer said in the message Thursday.

I turn 70 in just a few more days, but I can still remember some of the [insert slang term for feces here] that my classmates and I said when we were middle school aged. Sixth, seventh, and eighth graders aren’t exactly the type for serious plotting.

To reach that conclusion, Shafer said the district followed its threat assessment process — using a model developed by University of Virginia researchers involving “multiple data points” and “various staff members and outside agencies, including law enforcement when indicated.”

That isn’t assurance enough, said the parents who spoke to the Inquirer, who asked not to be named to protect the anonymity of their child. They said other parents were similarly frustrated following a town hall Wednesday night with Shafer and Bala Cynwyd’s principal, Jeffrey Hunter, during which the parents said administrators disclosed that students involved in sending the messages would be allowed to return to school Monday.

“If you’re going to deem this to not be a credible threat …there still needs to be a little more transparency as to why parents should feel safe with these children being readmitted,” one of the parents said.

Paranoia much?

Look, I get it: with all of the sensationalized stories in the media, some parents are just panicked. But just a little bit of self-awareness, of remembering the [insert slang term for feces here] that they said when they were those ages, ought to bring them to the realization that middle schoolers just say stuff, silly stuff, and stupid stuff. Heck, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades are when kids are going through puberty, and that only increases the stupidity.

Our society has been permeated with fear, oftentimes unreasoning fear. Don’t give in to fear.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.