The Slippery Slope of the Subjective Left | Mark Goldblatt

Glenn Loury and John McWhorter talk with Mark Goldblatt about the mistaken epistemological premises of wokeism, which prioritizes subjective experience over objective fact.

The following is with a hat-tip to and an “adding to” Mark Goldblatt’s book, I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism (New York, N.Y.: Bombardier Books, 2022), 40-43.  

I will be adding links and graphics to the post… the graphic is linked to a larger one upon clicking it.

Why then do CRT advocates simultaneously reject the real­ity of racial categories yet embrace racial essentialism (a contra­diction that would be deadly except in an avowedly postmod­ern movement)? Because they need to account for the failure of black people to measure up to non-black people in a number of statistically significant ways; they therefore need to argue that the criteria of measurement themselves reflect a bias against black people. To make that case, however, you must presup­pose that black people are in some sense essentially distinct from non-black people. You must presuppose that, on a fundamental level, black people are wired differently.

Think about it. If black people are wired differently, you have a ready-made narrative of victimization. To take the most obvious example: you have a full explanation for why the scores of black kids lag behind others on standardized tests, and you have compelling proof of how past racism–in this case, the assumption of “white wiring” as the intellectual norm—contin­ues to hold back black people.

The normalization of the way white minds work thus becomes a quintessential tool of white supremacy. That’s the premise behind the notorious “Whiteness” education portal sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The original centerpiece of that portal was a chart (later withdrawn, after a public outcry) titled Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture. [RPT says see NATIONAL REVIEWWASHINGTON TIMES, and the WASHINGTON EXAMINER for more.] What “aspects” and “assumptions” are we talking about? Here’s a partial list:

  • Objective, rational, linear thinking
  • Cause and effect relationships
  • Quantitative emphasis
  • Hard work is the key to success
  • Work before play
  • Heavy value on ownership of goods, space, property
  • Plan for the future
  • Delayed gratification
  • The nuclear family: father, mother, 2.3 children is the ideal social unit
  • Follow rigid time schedules
  • Decision-making
  • Written tradition
  • Be polite

VIA: Where Progressives and the Alt-Right Meet: How vicious racial stereotypes got repackaged as “anti-racism.”

These, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, are essentially white things. Black people cannot be expected to adapt to them or value them in the same way white people do; it’s not in the nature of black people to do so.

Of course, the notion that black people are just different didn’t spontaneously evolve in the halls of the Smithsonian. It’s commonplace among critical race theorists. So, for exam­ple, we hear educational consultant and Columbia University Professor Maria Tope Akinyele explain:

Black people, we are relational people. We are people of context. Like, it’s very Western and European to dissect and analyze and take apart things, whereas [in] Afrocentric schooling or Afrocentric spirituality or African epistemology or ways of knowing, everything is connected. So this is why education is not working for so many students of color because we are context-driven people. We can’t tell a story without telling the ten things that happened that led up to that moment. There’s no such thing as like thinking in isolation—isolating yourself from nature, from your family. It’s just not part of our ways of knowing and being in the world. So when we tap into the ways that we understand the world, students are able to make wonderful connections and unleash their brilliance and their wisdom. (Black on Black Education)

Sounds like a straightforward endorsement of racial essen­tialism. Except twenty minutes later, in the same You Tube talk, she recounts a training session she held for a group of predomi­nantly white instructors at which, “….about seventy percent of them did not know that race was a made-up thing. Like did not know! And I was like, ‘Who is teaching you?’ This is disrespect!”

CRT, again, has three legs: Collective grievance. Subjective historiography. And racial essentialism. The glue that holds it together is the postmodernist rejection of rationality as an arbi­ter of truth. Postmodernism is the reason it’s fruitless to point out that Professor Akinyele is contradicting herself. What possi­ble difference would that make to her? What difference could it make within a CRT framework?

THOMAS SOWELL DEBUNKS LIES ABOUT BLACK EDUCATION

THE ORIGIN OF THE LEFT’S WAR ON WHITE PEOPLE IN AMERICA

Forcing Gender Affirmation In California (Animal Farm “Parenting”)

As the Daily Mail reported:

Under the revision to the Family Code, courts would be given complete authority to remove children from their homes if their parents do not affirm their gender.

The change would also make it so that schools, churches, and other organizations would need to affirm the gender identity of a child or face repercussions.

(DAILY FETCHED)

First, the schools confuse young minds, then, if those confused minds do not find celebration of their confusion at home, the state can take them. This is some Animal Farm crap!

Here is the DAILY SIGNAL’S story on it:

recently amended California bill would add “affirming” the sexual transition of a child to the state’s standard for parental responsibility and child welfare—making any parent who doesn’t affirm transgenderism for their child guilty of abuse under California state law.

AB 957 passed California’s State Assembly on May 3, but a co-sponsor amended it after hours in California’s State Senate on June 6. 

Assembly Member Lori Wilson, D-Suisun City, wrote the bill and introduced it on Feb. 14. State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, co-sponsored it. Wilson’s child identifies as transgender.

Originally, AB 957 required courts to consider whether a child’s parents were “gender-affirming” in custody cases. Wiener’s amendment completely rewrites California’s standard of child care.

AB 957 post-amendment “would include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child,” altering the definition and application of the entire California Family Code.

California courts would be given complete authority under Section 3011 of California’s Family Code to remove a child from his or her parents’ home if parents disapprove of LGBTQ+ ideology.

By changing the definition of what constitutes the “health, safety, and welfare of [a] child,” schools, churches, hospitals, and other organizations interacting with children would be required to affirm “gender transitions” in minors by default—or risk charges of child abuse.

AB 957 could also expand which organizations provide “evidence” of gender “nonaffirmation” to California’s courts.

Because of the addition of “gender affirmation” to the qualifications of California’s standards for “health, safety, and welfare,” California’s courts would now be able to accept reports of gender “abuse” from progressive activist organizations—as long as they claim to provide “services to victims of sexual assault or domestic violence.”

In essence, a boy could report his parents to his local school’s Gay-Straight Alliance club or other LGBTQ+ organization, who could then report the boy’s parents for child abuse.

Incredibly, the bill provides no definition whatsoever of what would qualify as “nonaffirming” to a child’s gender. 

As Susannah Luthi of The Washington Free Beacon points out, “The bill makes no distinctions regarding the age of a child, how long a child has identified as transgender, or affirmation of social transition versus medical sex-change treatments.”…..

A Positive Way To Tackle “Gay Pride” In the Classroom

During a kid’s birthday party (a classmate of my niece) — the birthday boy’s father and I had a discussion partly spawned by my hat.

We discussed the current indoctrination push during “gay-pride” month, among other things. I discussed some of my past letters to the parents/teachers/and principles I had written when my boys attended school.

(5th Grade) Kwanzaa: Racism in Disguise
(6th Grade) Indians vs. Settlers – Letter from a Concerned Parent
(9th Grade) “Racism” Invoked in the Classroom

(My boys are 31 and 27 years of age now, so the indoctrination on all fronts has gotten worse for sure.)

He mentioned that it is bad, and I responded roughly like this:

  》》 Cray Cray 《《

 


Not the school his kids
go to, but nonetheless,
Craaazy!


  • My boys are 31 and 27 years-old, but I wonder what I would do if they were in school right now. For instance, if my kid told me [or on a parent teacher night I saw] there was a gay-pride flag in the classroom. I think what I would do is offer the teacher a similar sized flag which I would buy her [almost always a “she” touting “equality”] to hang in the classroom as well. And is she refused to show equality of flags representing sexuality [which flags representing sexuality shouldn’t be allowed in the classroom, but that is neither here-nor-there], I would take the next step and discuss this with the principle. And if that met a dead end, the next step may be legal action. And by adding something to the “equality” stance, rather than asking them to take something down, I think would offer a more positive legal outcome.

When I mentioned this part of the conversation to my son he spoke like the teacher and said what would your response be to when she flatly refuses and says the flag is homophobic. To which I responded:

  • If someone in the classroom refused to include the “heteronormativity flag” (straight pride) – and it got to that point where they didn’t want to put it up because of “bigotry” or “homophobia” – you would argue: Well, I’m, in fact, the one that wants both sides to be represented. I am not telling you to take something down or to put this one up exclusively, again, I’m the party who wants both sides to be represented. So if any “phobic” term is to be used, it’s “heterophobe” here in this conversation.

That was just one part of the convo with some dads and friends of dad at the birthday party. I thought that that solution to one of the many problems faced by parents of kids in state-schools is worthy to catalog here for others to say, “Oh yeah, I think that is something I can do in my little corner of the community.”

Two flags repping heteronormativity:

 

Brainwashing Sixth-Graders About Their Gender (Art Class Obfuscations)

(FOX NEWS) A Colorado mother said her daughter was among a group of sixth-graders recruited to a deceptive after-school “art” club that turned out to be much more than it seemed.

“When she got there, she very quickly learned it was actually a gender and sexuality awareness club,” Erin Lee told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner on Tuesday.

“The art teacher had invited in an outside presenter into the classroom that day, and this woman did absolutely unthinkable things with the kids.”

Lee explained that the guest presenter proceeded to use flags to describe “umbrella terms” and told the students they were transgender if they were not fully comfortable with their biological sex. The presenter also told students they could describe themselves as “queer” if they had not yet figured out their sexuality.

“She talked to them about polyamory. She told them that these new labels that they had just adopted made them more likely to commit suicide and talked to them extensively about suicide,” she continued.

The presenter also allegedly discussed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, warning those in attendance that their parents may not be “safe” people to turn to as they struggle with certain identities.

“She [the speaker] runs an organization called ‘Skittles’ for kids five to eleven to discuss gender and sexuality,” Lee said, noting that her daughter’s art teacher pulled her aside and told her “you don’t have to tell your parents.”

[….]

“These are taxpayer-funded teachers who are doing this,” she said. “And we want to send a nationwide message to these school systems, these parents and these school boards that parents govern their children, not these teachers, and we’re going to give them the tools that they need, our parents, to protect them against indoctrination and all of these crazy things that they’re doing.”…..

Black Mother Calls Out Democrats For Racially Brainwash Her Kids

Based Black Mother Calls Out White & Black Liberals For Trying To Racially Brainwash Her Kids

Yeonmi Park: My Terrifying Escape from North Korea (#Merica)

  • I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea and that I escaped from North Korea. Both of these events shaped me, and I would not trade them for an ordinary and peaceful life. Yeonmi Park

UPDATED VIDEO INTERVIEW: exactly one year from original posting

Yeonmi Park, North Korea defector and author on her defection from North Korea and how Columbia University has echoes of her past on ‘Kudlow.’

  • Kudlow: “somehow God was looking after you”
  • Park: “Yes”
  • Kudlow: “Really.”
  • Park: “He did.”
  • Kudlow: And, it’s a great story” [….] “It’s a blessing you made it through.”

Amen. (Concordia has a good posting on Yeonmi)

One commenter on the Fox Business’ YT channel says it all:

  • I feel so embarrassed for our country when a foreign warrior comes here for freedom and still can’t escape the war.

Her accent is hard to follow, but you get a rhythm going as you listen to understand here | GOD and North korea – Why the North Korean Christians Face the Most Extreme Persecution” (YouTube). She mentions the “real God” in the video speaking of the Judeo-Christian faith.

ORIGINAL POSTING

Born in North Korea, Yeonmi Park shares her harrowing journey to escape the hunger, thought control, and violence she experienced living under authoritarian regimes. Grateful to have found acceptance and justice in the United States, she cautions Americans to see the early warning signs—here in America—of the communist nightmares she fled in North Korea and China.

Virginia Magnet School Withheld National Merit Awards (#woke)

A top-ranked Virginia high school is accused of depriving students of National Merit awards because “they didn’t want to hurt the feelings of other students who weren’t being honored.”

More via ACE OF SPADES:

  • “Top Virginia Math and Science Magnet School Refused to Tell Students They Were National Merit Finalists, Preventing Them From Putting That on Their College Applications, For the Sake of Racial ‘Equity'”

It’s Harrison Bergeron all the way down.

Virginia parents are outraged after a top-ranked high school allegedly delayed notifying students of national academic honors in the name of “equity,” making them unable to account for the recognition in some college applications.

Fairfax County parent Asra Nomani joined “Fox & Friends First” on Wednesday to discuss why the school delayed the awards and the importance of meritocracy in the classroom.

“This year the entire controversy just blew up because the kids got their certificate, weeks after early college application deadlines, just dropped on their desks as if it was just another piece of paper,” Nomani told co-host Todd Piro.

“And this amazing mom named Shawna Yashar started asking questions, just like every parent’s got to do,” she continued. “From issues of the drag queen story hours to indoctrination in the schools, this is another form of this race to the bottom that the schools are going through right now.”

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Alexandria, Virginia, allegedly delayed academic awards for years, according to Nomani, because of its ploy to advocate “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.”

The school has even implemented a policy awarding students a 50% just for showing up to class, and administrators have eliminated zeroes entirely.

The delayed awards in question are given by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, which recognizes top-performing high schoolers nationwide. TJ received the 2022 honors in October but did not distribute them to students until a month later, after early-application deadlines had passed, according to Nomani. Nomani’s son, a 2021 TJ graduate, was honored as a Commended Student in September 2020 but was never notified, she wrote in City Journal.

When Yashar, the mother who originally sounded the alarm on the school’s delay, brought the issue to the forefront, she was met with pushback from the school, Nomani said.

“The school wanted to recognize students as individuals, not their achievements, as if the two had to be separated,” she said.

Nomani wrote about this bizarre — and highly litigable — practice at City Journal.

For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.

An intrepid Thomas Jefferson parent, Shawna Yashar, a lawyer, uncovered the withholding of National Merit awards. Since starting as a freshman at the school in September 2019, her son, who is part Arab American, studied statistical analysis, literature reviews, and college-level science late into the night. This workload was necessary to keep him up to speed with the advanced studies at TJ, which U.S. News & World Report ranks as America’s top school.

Last fall, along with about 1.5 million U.S. high school juniors, the Yashar teen took the PSAT, which determines whether a student qualifies as a prestigious National Merit scholar. When it came time to submit his college applications this fall, he didn’t have a National Merit honor to report–but it wasn’t because he hadn’t earned the award. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit based in Evanston, Illinois, had recognized him as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide–one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction. Principals usually celebrate National Merit scholars with special breakfasts, award ceremonies, YouTube videos, press releases, and social media announcements.

But not at TJ. School officials had decided to withhold announcement of the award. Indeed, it turns out that the principal, Ann Bonitatibus, and the director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, have been withholding this information from families and the public for years, affecting the lives of at least 1,200 students over the principal’s tenure of five years. Recognition by National Merit opens the door to millions of dollars in college scholarships and 800 Special Scholarships from corporate sponsors.

I learned–two years after the fact–that National Merit had recognized my son, a graduate of TJ’s Class of 2021, as a Commended Student in a September 10, 2020, letter that National Merit sent to Bonitatibus. But the principal, who lobbied that fall to nix the school’s merit-based admission test to increase “diversity,” never told us about it. Parents from earlier years told me that she also didn’t tell them about any Commended Student awards. One former student said he learned he had won the award through a random email from the school to a school-district email account that students rarely check; the principal neither told his parents nor made a public announcement.

“Keeping these certificates from students is theft by the state,” says Yashar. Bonitatibus didn’t notify parents or the public. What’s more, it could be a civil rights violation, says local parent advocate Debra Tisler, with most TJ students in a protected class of “gifted” students, most of them racial minorities, many with disabilities, and most coming from immigrant families whose parents speak English as a second language….

In a call with Yashar, Kosatka admitted that the decision to withhold the information from parents and inform the students in a low-key way was intentional. “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” he told her, claiming that he and the principal didn’t want to “hurt” the feelings of students who didn’t get the award.

Sue them. Sue them personally, if possible.

The Sexualization of Children

Who should decide when and how to discuss issues like sex and gender with young children? Just a decade ago, this was thought to be the sole purview of parents. But that is no longer the case. Why is this shift happening, and who’s behind it? Karol Markowicz addresses these important questions.

Did I Harm Students By Asking This Question? (Peter Boghossian)

[Editor’s Note: I do wish to note what Dennis Prager does, that is, the driving force of this view and its “advocacy” is women. Especially white progressive women.]

Following the unexpected cancellation of our Reverse Q&A at Brown University, we created an ad hoc event on the streets of Portland. Here, we are exploring the reasoning behind agreement or disagreement with the claim: “There are only two genders.” We were approached by a group of students and here’s what happened.

This video was filmed on May 11, 2022 outside a Portland State University building that houses the department of social work.

Is “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) Good or Bad?

In this excerpt of ARMSTRONG AND GETTY, the reading of and commentary about an article by Frederick Hess goes a long way to uncover an aspect of education that is the “new” product to push via the “educational industrial complex.” The article is entitled, “How Social and Emotional Learning Became a New Front in the Culture Wars” (AEI).

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Hess’s article:

…..There’s much about SEL that appeals. It’s stuff that good schools (and parents) have always done, and it’s been a healthy course correction for an education system that’s been test-obsessed in recent decades while giving short shrift to character development and civic formation. As CASEL board chair Tim Shriver and I noted a few years ago, “Since the dawn of the republic, teachers and schools have been tasked with teaching content and modeling character,” and, pursued responsibly, SEL can help with all of that.

In fact, while SEL can seem like a new idea, it’s more of a variation on a historical theme—that educators cannot focus only on academic mastery but must also develop the “whole child.” Readers who are so inclined can trace this impulse to John Dewey, Rousseau’s Emile, and all the way back to Plato’s Republic.

Given all this, SEL’s surging popularity is no great surprise—especially after the dislocations of the pandemic. In fact, SEL was already flying high in 2019 when that Aspen commission issued a blockbuster report, backed by an impressive array of funders and endorsees. The research on persistence that fueled Angela Duckworth’s New York Times best-seller Grit? That’s SEL. So is psychologist Carol Dweck’s influential research on “growth mindset.” And two years of pandemic, during which kids were lonely, isolated, and suffered walloping blows to their social and emotional well-being, have only turbocharged SEL’s ascent.

But as with so many well-meaning education reforms, SEL has a Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect. As has been true with the Common Core and “anti-racist education” (née critical race theory), SEL can be reasonably described both as a sensible, innocuous attempt to tackle a real challenge and, too often, an excuse for a blue, bubbled industry of education funders, advocates, professors, and trainers to promote faddish nonsense and ideological agendas. The latter is why SEL invariably comes up as a justification for doing away with traditional grading, eliminating advanced math, subjecting students and staff to “privilege walks,” or teaching first-graders about gender identity.  

[….]

Should parents be concerned about SEL? Well, look. If you’re getting sensible notes from the principal suggesting that teachers are making a concerted effort to promote tolerance, cultivate relationship skills, and encourage better decision-making, that’s generally a terrific thing. But if school SEL missives are dotted with talk of microaggressions and implicit bias, parent-teacher night features a pitch for eyebrow-raising disciplinary strategies, or classrooms are cluttered with feeling thermometers and privilege maps? I’d say concern is in order.

Yet again, as with Common Core or “anti-racist education,” an idea that makes some intuitive sense gets sucked into our roiling culture war by the smug aggression of woke reformers and the inevitable counterpunching from the right. Teachers and parents wind up trapped in between. And something that can and should be useful, when employed wisely and well, instead gets used clumsily and carelessly, sparking yet another radioactive shouting match.

READ MORE ABOUT IT HERE:

FLIPSIDE:

 

 

Narcissists Use Government To “Act Out” Their Malcontent

This first part is really a set up to add context to the more important aspect of the conversation I listened to between Scott Adams and Dr. Drew. While I do not subscribe to everything discussed herein, I believe that what is discussed can help pastors and people who disciple others better note and respond to our cultural “rumblings.” The Bible calls it pride, but yes, “everyone else is to blame and the battle is not me and my sin nature.” Excellent conversation. (The full Dr. Drew episode can be found HERE)

I would not have uploaded that portion to my RUMBLE if it weren’t for this “2nd PART” I isolated by itself. This is a major explanation in my mind’s eye and even the noting of the majority women is something Prager notes that it is predominantly women destroying education and leading the #WOKE mobs.

(THE PIC IS JUST FOR LAUGHS, IT ADDS NO INSIGHT OR CONSTRUCTIVE VALUE OTHER THAN AN LOL — THE LINK IN THE PIC IS SERIOUS HOWEVER)

….Feminist groups describe the state of American women in dire terms. Young middle-class and upper-class women, many attending the most expensive universities — paid for by their parents — are among the greatest malcontents in American life.

In fact, women today, including young women, who lead lives the very opposite of those described in “The Feminine Mystique,” are about twice as likely to be depressed as men. And that statistic is true for women across all economic, racial and ethnic groups.

So, then, what was my big and troubling thought?

If women are as likely — perhaps more likely — to complain about being oppressed today when they aren’t oppressed as they did when they were oppressed, and if women today are nearly twice as likely as men to be depressed, and if women at elite colleges — where they are pampered and more assured a financially successful future than most men living now or who lived in the past — are particularly angry and malcontented, simple logic suggests two choices: Either women remain as oppressed as in the past, or women tend to be malcontents.

Given that the reality is that American women — especially the ones who do the most complaining — are not oppressed, we are left to conclude that the female of the human species may tend toward being malcontents. The simple-minded will respond to this exactly as they were indoctrinated to respond — not by asking, “Is it true?” but by accusing the person who offers this suggestion of sexism and misogyny.

So, allow me to respond in advance: This is no more an attack on women than describing men’s nature as aggressive is an attack on men. Each sex has built-in issues that an individual has to overcome in order to develop into a mature and good person. Men have to deal with aggression and the sexual predatory aspect of male nature in order to develop into mature and good men. Women have to overcome the power of their emotions and their chronic malcontentedness in order to mature into good women. But in our disordered society — a society that has rejected wisdom — in raising their children, two generations of Americans have told only their sons, not their daughters, that they had to fight their nature. The feminization of society has brought with it the destructive notion that only males have to suppress their nature. Feminists really believe females are superior, so why would women have to fight any aspect of their inherently beautiful nature?……

(DENNIS PRAGER, “Are Women Malcontents?”)

SEE MORE HERE: