With Democratic primary candidate Senator Bernie Sanders pledging to end all private charter schools in the United States, Larry looks at just how effective charter school and voucher programs are in this country, especially for minority community members. He also points out a certain former president who derided charter schools but spent his entire education in elite private institutions.
Biased Education
Star Wars Failing | A Female Thor (and More)
So between the failure of Solo, the divisiveness of The Last Jedi and the falling interest in Galaxy’s Edge, our good friends in the news media have concluded that Disney Star Wars isn’t doing too well. And I for one am shocked!
Great news! I was so pleased to learn that we’ll finally be getting what we all wanted in Marvel Phase 4 – a female Thor.
So I was excited to hear that talks between Sony and Marvel have broken down, and as a result there will be no more Spider-Man movies in the MCU. This can only be good news, right?
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, what a truly incredible trainwreck. Rian Johnson’s complete inability to craft anything even resembling meaningful (or coherent) plotline is truly remarkable to behold. Six months out from this farce, let’s take a closer look at everything that went wrong.
RED LETTER MEDIA
FLASHBACK
(RED LETTER MEDIA) Finally it’s here! The truly epic review/critique/analysis/film making educational video of the 1999 film “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” There was so much to discuss with this film it had to be long so please don’t complain. If you think it’s too long then don’t watch it. In this opening segment I discuss the major flaw of The Phantom Menace which is the characters and the lack of connection with the audience.
Girls’ Civil Rights Violated By Trangender “Athlete”
More via THE DAILY WIRE:
The U.S. Department of Education Office has agreed to investigate a violation of girls’ civil rights in Connecticut following a complaint filed in Boston concerning two biologically male transgender teens triumphing over biologically female competitors in high school track.
“The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights Wednesday granted the request of three teen track athletes to investigate their allegations of illegal discrimination,” The Alliance Defending Freedom announced in a press release sent to The Daily Wire.
“Ever since the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference [CIAC] adopted a policy that allows biological males who claim a female identity to compete in girls’ athletic events, boys have consistently deprived Selina Soule and two other female athletes of honors and opportunities to compete at elite levels,” the release noted.
ADF is representing the three athletes who filed the complaint in June.
The CIAC policy forced Soule to compete against female-identifying biological males in a high-stakes track competition where two transgender sprinters beat the field, taking first and second place by significant margins. Soule landed in 8th, missing an opportunity to compete in front of college coaches by two places.
[….]
“Forcing female athletes to compete against boys is grossly unfair and destroys their athletic opportunities,” she argued. “Title IX was designed to eliminate discrimination against women in education and athletics, and women fought long and hard to earn the equal athletic opportunities that Title IX provides. Allowing boys to compete in girls’ sports reverses nearly 50 years of advances for women under this law. We shouldn’t force these young women to be spectators in their own sports.”…….
“The Medias” Change Elections By Many Millions Of Votes
This is with a HAT-TIP to MOONBATTERY:
- Google is the main villain. The company is fundamentally ideological (as this site has been documenting) and has already used its massive power to shift millions of votes. Ever more energized to impose its extreme political views, Google threatens to reduce democratic elections to a farce.
Here are two videos with descriptions:
SOCIAL MEDIA BIAS
Dr. Robert Epstein told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Tuesday that Google can manipulate votes by using tools that they have at their disposal exclusively, and that no one can counteract them. Epstein warned the senator of big tech election meddling during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on “Google and Censorship through Search Engines” on Tuesday.
More from BREITBART:
Dr. Robert Epstein’s testimony before the Senate concerning Google’s search manipulation and its impact on elections.
More from PRAGER U:
The media has a bias sway as well. Here Larry Elder notes the 8% to 10% advantage the Media give to Democrats typically. He offers some poignant examples to prove his point of media bias.
NEWS MEDIA BIAS
I was in a conversation with a younger person when they said that Fox News was biased. I mentioned that when you remove the “opinion pages” from Fox, they are slightly biased to the right… as much as CNN (once their “opinion pages” are removed) is biased to the left.
No kidding, twice they mentioned Sean Hannity, and I pointed out these were the opinion pages… then they f-i-n-a-l-l-y started tracking with me. I then mentioned that what they said is like someone coming up to me and telling me “the New York Times opinion pages lean left.” Or, “the Wall Street journal opinion pages lean right.” …
Fox News: Enraging Liberals for 10 Years (L.A. Times):
….What explains all this hysteria? Success, of course.
The propaganda charge is unfair, at least when it comes to the network’s presentation of news. In the 2004 presidential race, Fox pollsters consistently underestimated President Bush’s support. In its final preelection poll, Fox had Kerry winning by a couple of points, one of the only polls to show the Democrat on top. I’m not sure a right-wing fifth column would do that.
A recent comprehensive study by UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and University of Missouri-Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Milyo found Brit Hume’s “Special Report” — Fox’s most straightforward news show — more centrist than any of the three major networks’ evening newscasts, all of which leaned left.
The program is a model of smart news television….
Book: Liberal Media Distorts News Bias: Drudge, Fox look more conservative against mainstream’s liberal bent (US News and World Report):
…In a crushing body blow to the pushers of the so-called “Fox Effect,” which claims the conservative media is dragging the left into the center, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose in Left Turn claims that “all” mainstream news outlets have a liberal bias in their reporting that makes even moderate organizations appear out of the mainstream and decidedly right-wing to news consumers who are influenced by the slant. [Read Fox’s Huckabee slams MSNBC’s Matthews, Scarborough over bias.]
“Fox News is clearly more conservative than ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and National Public Radio. Some will conclude that ‘therefore, this means that Fox News has a conservative bias,'” he writes in an advance copy provided to Washington Whispers. “Instead, maybe it is centrist, and possibly even left-leaning, while all the others are far left. It’s like concluding that six-three is short just because it is short compared to professional basketball players.”
What’s more, he says, “this point illustrates a common misconception about the Drudge Report. According to my analysis, the Drudge Report is approximately the most fair, balanced, and centrist news outlet in the United States. Yet, the overwhelming majority of media commentators claim that it has a conservative bias. The problem, I believe, is that such commentators mistake relative bias for absolute bias. Yes, the Drudge Report is more conservative than the average U.S. news outlet. But it is a logical mistake to use that to infer that it is based on an absolute scale.”
And in further analysis sure to enrage critics of conservative media, Groseclose determines that Drudge, on a conservative to liberal scale of 0-100, with 50 being centrist, actually leans a bit left of center with a score of 60.4. The reason: Drudge mostly links to the sites of the mainstream media, with just a few written by Matt Drudge himself. “Since these links come from a broad mix of media outlets, and since the news in general is left-leaning, it should not be surprising that the slant quotient of the Drudge Report leans left,” he writes. [Read Poll: Fox, O’Reilly most trusted news sources.]…
Above Video Description:
UCLA Professor Tim Grosclose has a new book out Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. In his book, he outlines what conservatives have known for years, that the mainstream media has turned more and more leftist which in turn promulgates, influences, rewords, redefines, and imposes leftist doctrine.
From the book:
Using objective, social-scientific methods, the filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is. Instead, we see only a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass—a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see….
That bias makes us more liberal, which makes us less able to detect the bias, which allows the media to get away with more bias, which makes us even more liberal.
NATIONAL REVIEW wraps this up in a bow nicely for us:
…An interesting study in this regard was recently done by Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago. They devised a method of measuring press bias based on the way members of Congress cite various think tanks. By looking at their rating on a liberal/conservative scale based on votes, they were able to determine which think tanks were viewed as conservative or liberal. They then looked at how often these think tanks were cited in the media.
The conclusion of the Groseclose-Milyo study is unambiguous. “Our results show a very significant liberal bias,” they report. Interestingly, they found that the Internet’s Drudge Report and “Special Report” on Fox News were the two outlets closest to the true center of the political spectrum, despite being widely viewed as conservative.
Groseclose and Milyo also look at the political orientation of journalists relative to the population. They note that just 7 percent of journalists voted for George H.W. Bush in 1992 versus 37 of the voting public. This means that journalists are more liberal than voters in the most liberal congressional district in the U.S., the 9th district in California, which contains the city of Berkeley. Even there, Bush got 12 percent of the vote, almost twice his support among journalists….
Classroom Size Misunderstandings
Before concluding these necessarily very sketchy suggestions, I ought to say why I think it necessary, in these days, to go back to a discipline which we had discarded. The truth is that for the last 300 years or so we have been living upon our educational capital. The post-Renaissance world, bewildered and excited by the profusion of new “subjects” offered to it, broke away from the old discipline (which had, indeed, become sadly dull and stereotyped in its practical application) and imagined that henceforward it could, as it were, disport itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium without passing through the Trivium.
[….]
But one cannot live on capital forever. A tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And to-day a great number—perhaps the majority—of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits—yes, and who educate our young people, have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.” What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers—they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilisation that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING
I am posting this because I wanted in one place some information on the classroom size, or, teacher-to-pupil-ration throughout some of our recent history. As well as compared to the world. Also, part of the reasoning for this post other than I have debated/discussed this matter over the years is a recent article I have seen on a couple friends Facebook walls, entitled: “Betsy DeVos Wants Larger Class Sizes and Fewer Teachers.” So I wanted to have the reasoning and history of the other side… BUT FIRST…
Let me say… that classrooms in our history were filled with children — even in the public schools — that came from deeply religious backgrounds. So that the student was acting in the sight of God. Not only that, but ost families remained intact, either through devotion to faith or the impracticality of divorce. There are other reasons as well, but this list of teacher complaints from the 1940’s has been for years in my history bank of memory (via NATIONAL PARENTS ORGANIZATION):
So often I write about the effects of fatherlessness. Being who I am, I tend to express myself from the standpoint of the social science on the matter. I’ll point out that children raised without both parents tend more to commit crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, drop out of school, be unemployed, etc. than their peers raised in intact families. I say that because it’s true. I know it’s true because decades of social science establish the facts. Fine.
But occasionally, something comes along that hits the nail harder than I do (Meridian Star, 4/21/16).
I read that in a survey of public school teachers in 1940, the top disciplinary problems listed included talking out of turn, chewing gum, running in the halls, dress-code violations, and littering. More than a half century later, the problems teachers contend with are drug and alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. Teachers and administrators say that things are worse for students now than ever before. One junior high school teacher commented, “I can’t believe the things they do to themselves and to each other.” A kindergarten teacher recently told me that her five and six year old students are restless, angry, and some even have the addictive habit of cutting themselves. A grandmother told me that her grandson, whom she is raising, has admitted to having suicidal thoughts. He is ten years old.
What a comparison. What teacher today wouldn’t fall on her knees and shout Hosannas to have the problems teachers did in 1940? “Andy, is that gum in your mouth?” “Yes, teacher.” “Go to the principal’s office!” Can anyone even imagine?
Of course, many things have changed since FDR was in office, so there’s no single trend we can point to that’s caused the drastic change in our children and the world they face every day. But one of the main things that’s changed for kids is that so many of them have either no father in their lives or one who’s so remote as to be ineffective at being the father they need. Fatherlessness produces exactly the type of dysfunctional behavior in children that we see every day to our dismay and that the Meridian Star writer so aptly describes……
So, really, teachers can never have a classroom small enough to fix students from backgrounds like these, or our culture. Which is a great spot for Larry Elder, who quotes Barack Obama:
RELATED:
- Fatherless (Black) Homes in Milwaukee – 85%
- Fatherless Homes and Poverty – Europe and America
- Fatherless Homes The Problem – Denzel Washington
Okay, the above reasons (there are more obviously [sex-ed has played a big roll as well, so has quick divorce laws, etc], but those are biggies: religion, discipline, family intact) notes some of the acting out by our culture which is becoming more secular as I type. Even in secular countries we see discipline as holding together the fabric of the classroom, more on this later.
Here is an article from the ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER that introduces us to some of the issues of classroom size (I will add a graphic from another article to help the point):
Under the leadership of its combative President Alex Caputo-Pearl, the United Teachers of Los Angeles is planning to strike, very possibly in January. The union has a laundry list of demands, some of which the Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to, in part. But unlike the union, LAUSD is constrained by fiscal realities, and has county and state auditors waiting to pounce if it missteps.
UTLA’s main order of business — not surprisingly — is a salary increase for its teachers. But a close second is the class-size issue. The union is calling for an across-the-board cut, while the district is offering to reduce class size in 90 “high-need” schools. According to the latest data, the pupil-to-teacher ratio in Los Angeles is 19.7, not exactly an unreasonable number. While that is above the national average of 14.5 to one, it is far below the 1955 level when the ratio of teachers to students in public schools was 26.9 to one.
As a former teacher, I know that a small class makes life easier — fewer papers to grade and parents to deal with, for example. That said, there is no evidence that it makes any difference in student learning. In fact, a massive meta-analysis — results from multiple studies – was released in October that shows that small class size is a red herring. The report, produced by the Danish Centre of Applied Social Science examined 127 studies, eliminating many that did not meet strict research requirements. The researchers found that there may be tiny benefits to small classes for some students when it comes to reading. But in math, it found no benefits at all, and the researchers “cannot rule out the possibility that small classes may be counterproductive for some students.”
So 127 studies later, it’s basically a wash. The Danish analysis did nothing more than underscore Hoover Institution economist Eric Hanushek’s results of his class-size research in 1998. Examining 277 separate studies on the effect of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement, he reported that 15 percent of the studies found an improvement in achievement, while 72 percent found no effect at all and 13 percent found that reducing class size had a negative effect on achievement. While Hanushek admits that in some cases, children might benefit from a small-class environment, there is no way “to describe a priori situations where reduced class size will be beneficial.”
In his 2018 book “World Class,” Andreas Schleicher, director of the education and skills unit at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, debunks the myth that smaller classes yield better results. He points out that top-performing nations, such as Japan, South Korea and China tend to have much larger classes than we do, yet manage to produce more successful students.
Additionally, EdChoice researcher and economics professor Benjamin Scafidi found that between 1950 and 2015, the number of teachers increased about 2.5 times as fast as the uptick in students. He adds that despite the staffing surge, students’ academic achievement has stagnated or even fallen over the past several decades……
The above graphic comparing historical class sizes comes from an article at THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, to wit is a section I wish to highlight:
Growth in Staffing Far Outpacing Student Population. In addition to increases in non-teaching staff positions, more teachers are also now teaching fewer students. From the nine years spanning the 1997–98 school year to the 2006–07 school year, student enrollment in public schools increased 6.8 percent. Over the same time period, the number of teachers in the classroom increased 15.8 percent.[7]
Student-teacher ratios have been on the decline since the mid-20th century. In 1950 for example, there were 27.5 students for every one teacher; by 2006 that number had declined to 15.5 students for every public school teacher.[8] For high school students during the 2006-07 school year, the average student-teacher ratio was just 12:1.[9]
While public schools and districts throughout the country continue to reduce class size, there is little evidence that such reductions have improved student learning. For instance, Florida began implementing sweeping education reforms in 1998, including strong state standards, the transition to an “A–F” system for grading schools, ending “social promotion,” and alternative teacher certification.[10] These systemic education reforms appear to have had a positive impact on student achievement, particularly minority students. However, a 2002 reform to reduce class size found “no detectable benefit” of the class-size mandate and found that “monies restricted for the purpose of funding class-size reduction mandates are not a productive use of limited educational resources.”[11]
In other words… where is the beef. In fact, *Dr. Wilda V. Heard…
* Dr. Wilda V. Heard, or “Dr. Wilda,” has a J.D. from Yale Law School and a doctorate in education leadership from Seattle University. She has been a volunteer at Legal Voice, formerly the Northwest Women’s Law Center.
…quotes Bob Nave saying: “It’s fairly common sense that smaller classes should result in improved student performance…. The problem is the research just doesn’t back that up.”
Here are some graphs to help visualize this topic. The first is noting that classroom sizes are pretty close to a historical low:
Here are primary averages compared to the world:
Of course China has the the largest classrooms (students to teacher ratio)… BUT… #2 is…
SINGAPORE – 35.5 PER CLASS
Singapore is a lot smaller than China with a population of 5.399 million (2013), but it’s class sizes are not far behind them. However, despite the larger class sizes, it was stated by the OECD in 2015, that Singapore actually has one of the best education systems in the world.
Fun fact: Singapore schools are all taught in English as well as their native tongue. This means that Singapore has one of the highest fluency rates of English in South-East Asia.
In other words… class size is not the issue. It is what you are teaching and the culture of learning. Instead, the public schools are centered not around teaching classical education, but making sure that what is taught is separating us as a body-politic. A good example of this comes from the ST. PAUL STAR TRIBUNE:
…Students from several groups at South St. Paul Secondary— including the Black Pride Organization, Comunidad de Latinos Unidos, the Women’s Society and the Sexuality and Gender Alliance (SAGA), a group for LGBT students — want to wear sashes, also called stoles, to celebrate their identities.
Immigrants, gay students and students of color face extra obstacles during their education, said Jenaye Vergin, a junior and one of four students who addressed the board.
Allowing students to wear the special sashes would “give energy to a collective voice,” Vergin said. “I’m able to repurpose what was once an obstacle into a source of energy and pride.”…
CAUSING RACISM, NOT DEALING WITH IT
California high school English teacher Kali Fontanilla was curious when she noticed many of her students were failing one of their other classes: ethnic studies.
Then she took a look at the ethnic studies class lesson plan and learning materials. What Kali saw shocked her.
“We hear about Critical Race Theory in our schools, well here it is right in front of you, and almost every single lesson had some sort of element of Critical Race Theory,” Kali says. “There was even a slide on Marxism, and these are like interactive slide presentations that were given to the students.”
Kali dedicated years of her life to teaching children in California, often censoring herself so that she wouldn’t run afoul of her school district’s liberal agenda. But now, she’s finally had enough.
“My views and what I believe is now considered white supremacist,” she says. Kali left California and moved to Florida to continue her career as a teacher.
Critical race theory says racism permeates every American institution and exists to uphold white supremacy.
Daughters Are Coming Back From College, Men
- Mother of a daughter: “She went from being a feminist /pro women’s rights to hating white males to now wanting to become one…” (Mothers In Shock As Daughters Come Home From College With Mustaches, Breasts Removed)
Dennis Prager discusses a topic that is really a new piece of Leftist propaganda (within the past 5-years), that is, rapid onset gender dysphoria. Over the years of studying cults, brainwashing, separating children from family, etc., I see much of this in the inundation of these ideas in concentrated forms and peer pressure at the university.
The articles referenced by reading from the College Fix are these:
- Mothers In Shock As Daughters Come Home From College With Mustaches, Breasts Removed (MAIN ARTICLE READ FROM);
- Brown U. Censors Study That Found Gender Dysphoria Can Be Caused By ‘Social And Peer Contagion’ (College Fix);
- Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria In Adolescents And Young Adults: A Study Of Parental Reports (Open Access Journal, PLOS ONE:
- WSJ: Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Is ‘Social Contagion’ (Breitbart references WSJ);
- Brown University Censors Gender Dysmorphia Study (Washington Free Beacon);
- When Your Daughter Defies Biology (Wall Street Journal — I will reproduce this below in case it is behind a “pay-wall”);
- ‘Rapid Onset’ Gender Dysphoria Plagues Young College Students (Louder with Crowder [bonus link]).
This is a travesty! The Left and Leftist parents and doctors start to block hormones in pre-teen children, when about 90% of young people who have “gender dysphoria” settle on being either gay or straight, and not trans. It is child abuse, number one. And number two, it is no different than the “psychosurgery” that was popular in the 40’s-60’s – that of lobotomies. It is sick. It was wrong then just as it is wrong now. Doctors and psychologists were wrong then JUST as they are wrong now. Which brings me to number three… it is not scientific.
WSJ: “When Your Daughter Defies Biology“
By Abigail Shrier — Jan. 6, 2019
A reader contacted me under a pseudonym a few months ago. She turned out to be a prominent Southern lawyer with a problem she hoped I’d write about. Her college-age daughter had always been a “girly girl” and intellectually precocious, but had struggled with anxiety and depression. She liked boys and had boyfriends in high school, but also faced social challenges and often found herself on the outs with cliques.
The young woman went off to college—which began, as it often does these days, with an invitation to state her name, sexual orientation and “pronouns.” When her anxiety flared during her first semester, she and several of her friends decided their angst had a fashionable cause: “gender dysphoria.” Within a year, the lawyer’s daughter had begun a course of testosterone. Her real drug—the one that hooked her—was the promise of a new identity. A shaved head, boys’ clothes and a new name formed the baptismal waters of a female-to-male rebirth.
This is the phenomenon Brown University public-health researcher Lisa Littman has identified as “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” ROGD differs from traditional gender dysphoria, a psychological affliction that begins in early childhood and is characterized by a severe and persistent feeling that one was born the wrong sex. ROGD is a social contagion that comes on suddenly in adolescence, afflicting teens who’d never exhibited any confusion about their sex.
Like other social contagions, such as cutting and bulimia, ROGD overwhelmingly afflicts girls. But unlike other conditions, this one—though not necessarily its sufferers—gets full support from the medical community. The standard for dealing with teens who assert they are transgender is “affirmative care”—immediately granting the patient’s stated identity. There are, to be sure, a few dissenters. “This idea that what we’re supposed to do as therapists is to ‘affirm’? That’s not my job,” said psychotherapist Lisa Marchiano. “If I work with someone who’s really suicidal because his wife left him, I don’t call his wife up and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come back.’ . . . We don’t treat suicide by giving people exactly what they want.”
But giving in to patients’ demands is exactly what most medical professionals do when faced with ROGD. Like fashionable and tragic misdiagnoses of the past, this one comes with irreversible physical trauma. “Top surgery,” a euphemism for double mastectomies. Infertility. Permanent rounding of facial features or squaring of the jawline. Bodily and facial hair that never goes away.
Planned Parenthood furnishes testosterone to young women on an “informed consent” basis, without requiring any psychological evaluation. Student health plans at 86 colleges—including those of nearly every Ivy League school—cover not only cross-sex hormones but surgery as well.
ROGD-afflicted adolescents typically suffer anxiety and depression at a difficult stage of life, when confusion is at least as pervasive as fun, and there is everywhere the sense that they ought to be having the times of their lives. I spoke with 18 parents, 14 of them mothers—all articulate, intellectual, educated and feminist. They burst with pride in daughters who, until the ROGD spell hit, were highly accomplished, usually bound for top universities. Except for two mothers whose daughters have desisted, all insisted on anonymity. They are terrified their daughters will discover the depth of their dissent and cut them off. They are determined to use whatever influence they have left to halt their daughters’ next voluntary disfigurement.
Nearly every force in society is aligned against these parents: Churches scramble to rewrite their liturgies for greater “inclusiveness.” Therapists and psychiatrists undermine parental authority with immediate affirmation of teens’ self-diagnoses. Campus counselors happily refer students to clinics that dispense hormones on the first visit. Laws against “conversion therapy,” which purports to cure homosexuality, are on the books in 14 states and the District of Columbia. These statutes also prohibit “efforts to change a patient’s . . . gender identity,” in the words of the New Jersey law—effectively threatening counselors who might otherwise dissuade teens from proceeding with hormone treatment or surgery.
Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram and YouTube host an endless supply of mentors, who cheerfully document their own physical transitions, omitting mention of dangerous side effects and offering tips on how to pass as a man and how to break away from unsupportive parents. For anxious teens who tend toward obsession, these videos can be mesmerizing. Though the stars are typically pictured alone in a bedroom, they project exuberance and social élan. As one female-to-male YouTube guru who goes by “Alex Bertie” puts it: “Taking testosterone is the best decision I’ve ever made. I’m so happy within myself. It did not solve all of my problems, but it’s given me the strength to make the most out of life and to battle my other demons like my social issues.”
Brie Jontry, a spokeswoman for Fourth Wave Now, an international support network for these families, is one of the two mothers who spoke on the record. She tells me ROGD teens often come from politically progressive families. Many of the mothers I spoke with say they enthusiastically supported same-sex marriage long before it was legal anywhere. Some of them describe welcoming the news when their daughters came out as lesbians. But when their daughters suddenly decided that they were actually men and started clamoring for hormones and surgery, the mothers begged them to reconsider, or at least slow down.
“If your kid went off and joined the Moonies, people would feel sorry for you, and they would understand that this is a bad thing and that your kid shouldn’t be in the Moonies,” one mother, a former leader of the pro-gay organization Pflag, said. “With this, I can’t even tell anybody. I talk to my husband, that’s it.” The couple have faithfully covered their daughter’s tuition, health-care and cellphone bills—even though she refuses to speak to them.
Under the influence of testosterone and the spell of transgression, ROGD daughters grow churlish and aggressive. Under the banner of civil rights, they assume the moral high ground. Their mothers take cover behind pseudonyms. As ROGD daughters rage against the biology they hope to defy, their mothers bear its burden, evincing its maternal instinct—the stubborn refusal to abandon their young.
Ms. Shrier is a writer living in Los Angeles.
Everything the Left Touches is Harmed (Military Standards)
(Originally Posted December 2013)
This UPDATE comes by way of MOONBATTERY, and is followed by the an excerpt from the larger piece:
By necessity if not design, political correctness corrodes standards of value. That’s why its first victim is excellence. Those who draw attention to the corrosion are punished as thought criminals.
Progressives are in the process of reducing the military to a social engineering laboratory. It provides an example:
Two Army Green Berets are fighting for their military careers after being associated with an anonymous email that accused their commanders of lowering standards to enable more soldiers — particularly female — to graduate from its prestigious Q-course.
The anonymous email, signed, “A concerned Green Beret,” accused the leaders of the school of “moral cowardice” for lowering the standards…
The author of the email has already been punished. Now the Army is rooting out people who seem likely to agree with it….
Here is more information via BREITBART:, one can understand some of the disciplin, IN THAT, it became widely public. Here is a bit from the email that could have been more constructive… maybe?
- “[The school] has devolved into a cesspool of toxic, exploitive, biased and self-serving senior officers who are bolstered by submissive, sycophantic, and just-as-culpable enlisted leaders,” the email said. “They have doggedly succeeded in two things; furthering their careers, and ensuring that Special Forces [are] more prolific but dangerously less capable than ever before.”
However TRUE it may be… someone’s macheezmo was butt hurt. Here is more on the other two Green Barretes:
Now, the two additional Green Beret instructors, Sergeant First Class Micah J. Robertson, 33, and Sergeant First Class Michael Squires, 31, say they are being punished by association.
Robertson said in an interview that after the email was sent out, commanders put together a list of about seven suspects, including them. He said he believes they were suspected because they had previously brought up concerns during town halls with leaders that were held to solicit their feedback.
Both have been instructors since 2016, before Sonntag took command in June 2017, and say they have witnessed the changes.
“Although Micah and I had nothing to do with it, it spoke true to what’s happening in the regiment. This guy Sonntag, who’s basically the one who’s trying to screw us over — he’s trying to make his career about putting a female through the course,” Squires said. He added that he did not oppose women in Special Forces, but opposed lowering the standards.
“Not only doing that, he’s changed it to where the guys who are coming through the Q-course are not even the same quality of guys we had back in the day. Guys who should have been kicked out for several different things … As instructors, they took our power away.”
Both Robertson and Squires were also served with Article 15s related to the email, as well as to an online app they started building in September 2017 named Kayu, aimed at helping travelers and veterans with similar interests connect.
The Article 15 accused both men of using their positions as instructors “for the purposes of personal gain” by “sourcing information from students that had no relevance to training,” or having their students sign up for the app. Robertson called that “hogwash.”
[….]
Former Green Beret and Ultimate Fighting Champion superstar Tim Kennedy said Army recruitment challenges hit the Green Beret force especially hard.
“[For] Special Forces specifically, we are gonna have the biggest deficit of eligible… population, to select from,” he said on The Joe Rogan Experience on May 17. “You have to have a certain level of intelligence, a certain level of physicality, just to be eligible for Special Forces to pick you… that pool is the smallest that has ever been in history.”
Sonntag himself acknowledged those challenges shortly after taking command. He said at a symposium in November 2017 that all three of the Army Special Operations regiments are facing serious challenges in “force structure changes, pipeline production, and recruiting.”
“We are currently not meeting our production numbers. The restructuring of the 85th [Civil Affairs] Brigade has created an imbalanced CA force structure. And our recruitment is down. If something doesn’t change soon, we will short the operational force drastically over the next five years,” he said.
Robertson said lowering standards in order to produce more Green Berets goes against a fundamental SOF truth that every Green Beret is taught….
I wanted to post some commentary on this issue, the first comes from a Marine posting some open thoughts on this “social engineering” grab by the Marines… joining the other branches in making it less safe on our front-lines in the name of Political-Correctness:
Didn’t see this coming Female Marines have received ample time (over a year) to prepare for this test which, oh by the way, still isn’t to the same standard that it is for males. Sure, they have to get the same bare minimum of 3 that males get. However, their max is 8 whereas mine is 20. So, on a maximum 300 point physical fitness test (PFT) where each of the 3 events (pull ups, crunches, 3 mile run) has the potential to give you 100 points, a female Marine only has to do 40% of the work I have to in order to get 100 points for her pull ups on her PFT. I call bogus. That enables her to be as competitive for promotion as me without having to do the work that I do. Not to mention that she can run her 3 miles in 21 minutes to receive 100 points for that while I have to run it in 18 minutes. If you’ve ever run a 5K, 3 minutes is an eternity between two runners.
Some of you will say “Well, that score is only part of what is looked at when considering promotion.” I will submit this to you. Every promotion board for E-6, E-7, and E-8/E-9 (this board is conducted jointly) in the Marine Corps has an after action review written for it. In every one of those after action reviews, the board members are asked “What is the first tie breaker between two Marines if there is one spot left in their MOS field to promote?” The answer is ALWAYS “Their PFT score.”
Now, some on this site will say that I am butt hurt because 3 females passed our infantry course. That is mentioned in the article. Not the case. When I know that 16 females began the course and only 3 passed, I’m not worried. Of the 16, 9 failed due to performance reasons. That leaves 7. Of those 7, 4 broke due to hip and knee problems. Those are the classic female breaking points that I’ve seen in most female injuries. Those occur very frequently at Parris Island as well. So, we have the 3 left. Now, for males, approximately 79% make it through infantry training. 10% of them are dropped for medical reasons. That leaves approximately 11% for performance/legal issues. For those of you who are Marines, it’s the classic, always spoken of, 10% that fail. Also of note, the females were required to carry each other during casualty evacuation, movement courses, etc. So, a female weighing 110lbs-140lbs is carrying around her equivalent weight while the males are slinging whichever casualty they see over their shoulder.
Again, I call bogus. I’m not a big fan of this social engineering crap. DADT was another issue. I wasn’t a supporter of that. It wasn’t performance based. A gay guy can fireman’s carry a casualty just as effectively (though the casualty may be uncomfortable) as a straight guy. But the vast majority of females cannot do the same. This is a performance thing for me. It is a logistical thing. It is a morale thing. Our military is the best in the world yet we want to mess with the very core of its competence. The members of it. I’m not a big fan.
Technicalities of Gender Differences in Injuries
The above graph comes from a 1998 journal article in The Royal Society of Medicine (you may enlarge the graph by clicking it). The below is from Runners Connect:
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The risk of running injuries in women
From looking at the scientific literature, we can see that women indeed do, on the whole, get injured more often than men do. But the difference is not quite as drastic as popular wisdom might hold—a 2002 study of around two thousand patients at a Vancouver, Canada sports injury clinic found that women represented 54% of injuries, with men taking up the other 46%. But among some specific injuries, women are at significantly higher risk.
In particular, the following injuries are 50% more common in women than men:
- Patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS or “runner’s knee)
- Iliotibial band (IT band) syndrome
- Stress fractures
- Medial tibial stress syndrome (“shin splints”)
- Achilles tendonitis
- Plantar fasciitis
The LEFT loves to try and change, yes, even what nature has wrought!
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Libertarian Republican opines on the topic as well:
…About 55 percent of female recruits tested at the end of boot camp were doing fewer than three pullups; only 1 percent of male recruits failed the test. Upper body strength critical for combat
Continuing:
The Marine Corps has been using it to test upper body strength for men for more than 40 years. And that upper body strength, they say, is necessary to serve in ground combat: to pull yourself out of a canal in Afghanistan, to climb over a mud wall, to carry an ammunition box.
Exit question – So, how many male Marines have to die in combat in order to satisfy the liberal PC affirmative action crazies before women in combat is repealed?
To which I respond, a maximum amount can never satisfy the Left, look at the MILLIONS killed by the progressive Left’s attack on the black African’s lives via the non-existent DDT scare!
As I do in these cases, I always like to post David Mamet’s depth on this topic. I say depth because as a lifelong liberal… he finally applied common sense to his views and you have the following:
There is a Liberal sentiment that it should also punish those who take more than their “fair share.” But what is their fair share? (Shakespeare suggests that each should be treated not according to his deserts, but according to God’s mercy, or none of us would escape whipping.)
The concept of Fairness, for all its attractiveness to sentiment, is a dangerous one (cf. quota hiring and enrollment, and talk of “reparations”). Deviations from the Law, which is to say the Constitution, to accommodate specifically alleged identity-group injustices will all inevitably be expanded, universalized, and exploited until there remains no law, but only constant petition of Government….
Another legislative act talked about in the shop after this conversation about polygamy took place, are politicians listening to environmental activists and legislating the regular light-bulb illegal. In January it will be officially against the law to sell most forms of the standard — incandescent — light-bulb (Breitbart). The idea is that if we use higher efficiency bulbs we will “save the planet” from those evil* fossil fuel emissions. (*I picture ‘blood’ dripping from the word as well as evil laughter off in the distance somewhere)
The problem? In every bulb that researchers tested they found that the protective coating around the light creating ‘phosphor’ was cracked, allowing dangerous ultraviolet rays to escape (RPT). You got it… through legislation, the power of government has made many people, in their own homes mind you, at a far greater risk for skin-cancer. A risk that this Irish-man knows all too well. What sounded good and altruistic, “saving the planet,” ironically has deadly consequences.
(RPT post on Polygamy)
We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law’s treatment.
But “fairness” is not only a nonlegal but an antilegal process, for it deals not with universally applicable principles and strictures, but with specific cases, responding to the perceived or proclaimed needs of individual claimants, and their desire for extralegal preference. And it could be said to substitute fairness (a determination which must always be subjective) for justice (the application of the legislated will of the electorate), is to enshrine greed—the greed, in this case, not for wealth, but for preference. The socialistic spirit of the Left indicts ambition and the pursuit of wealth as Greed, and appeals, supposedly on behalf of “the people,” to the State for “fairness.”….
….But such fairness can only be the non-Constitutional intervention of the State in the legal, Constitutional process—awarding, as it sees fit, money (reparations), preferment (affirmative action), or entertainment (confiscation)….
….“Don’t you care?” is the admonition implicit in the very visage of the Liberals of my acquaintance on their understanding that I have embraced Conservatism. But the Talmud understood of old that good intentions can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immediately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and State statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would, in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others….
…. I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity; and, further, that so did everyone I knew. Many, I saw, were prepared to pay more taxes, as a form of Charity, which is to say, to hand off to the Government the choice of programs and recipients of their hard-earned money, but no one was prepared to be on the short end of the failed Government programs, however well-intentioned. (For example—one might endorse a program giving to minorities preference in award of government contracts; but, as a business owner, one would fight to get the best possible job under the best possible terms regardless of such a program, and would, in fact, work by all legal and, perhaps by semi- or illegal means to subvert any program that enforced upon the proprietor a bad business decision.)*
Further, one, in paying the government to relieve him of a feeling of social responsibility, might not be bothered to question what in fact constituted a minority, and whether, in fact, such minority contracts were actually benefiting the minority so enshrined, or were being subverted to shell corporations and straw men.✣
* No one would say of a firefighter, hired under rules reducing the height requirement, and thus unable to carry one’s child to safety, “Nonetheless, I am glad I voted for that ‘more fair’ law.”
✣ As, indeed, they are, or, in the best case, to those among the applicants claiming eligibility most capable of framing, supporting, or bribing their claims to the front of the line. All claims cannot be met. The politicians and bureaucrats discriminating between claims will necessarily favor those redounding to their individual or party benefit—so the eternal problem of “Fairness,” supposedly solved by Government distribution of funds, becomes, yet again and inevitably, a question of graft.
David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), 116-117, 122, 151, 154.
You see… the left loves to feel good. In doing so they ruin the quality of what they touch. From the lives of those who have contact with our first responders, to even composers looked at as the best in history:
Further poisoning musical judgment is the Left-wing value of diversity. In 2011, Anthony Tommasini, music critic of the New York Times, published his list of the ten greatest composers who ever lived. Absent from the list was Haydn, who Tommasini acknowledged was the father of the symphony, father of the string quartet, and father of the piano sonata. Indeed, one of the avant-garde’s most celebrated modern composers (and a justly celebrated conductor), Pierre Boulez, “thinks Haydn a greater composer than Mozart,” and one of the greatest pianists who ever lived, Glenn Gould, thought Haydn’s piano sonatas were superior to Mozart’s. So, why did the New York Times music critic omit Haydn? Because, he wrote, “If such a list is to be at all diverse and comprehensive, how could 4 of the 10 slots go to composers—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert—who worked in Vienna during, say, the 75 years from 1750 to 1825?” Diversity, not greatness, helped determine the New York Times list of the greatest ten composers. That is why Bartok, Debussy, and Stravinsky made the list but Haydn (and Handel) didn’t.
Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2012), 52-53
Professor Sommers & the Tyranny of Niceness
“The ideal of liberty and freely speaking your mind is so quintessentially American.”
FIRE Board of Advisors member Christina Hoff Sommers is no stranger to speaking her mind. As the author of books such as The War Against Boys and One Nation Under Therapy, Sommers has taken firm stances on many hot button issues.
But in FIRE’s latest video, Sommers argues that today’s students are afraid to express their own potentially controversial viewpoints. She believes students are enveloped within a cultural phenomenon she calls “the tyranny of niceness.” So concerned with not offending their peers’ beliefs, students are hesitant to take a stand for what they believe in.
“What [students] are supposed to be doing is developing ideas and challenging them, learning how to debate,” says Sommers. “We have a generation of kids who can’t argue. They think that will create tension or there’s something wrong with it. Well, if you can’t argue, you can’t think.”
F.I.R.E. has a FaceBook (https://www.facebook.com/thefireorg), a YouTube account, as well as a Twitter account.
Education is the same… the dumbing down of children in the pursuit of “fairness” and “equality” is one of these examples that harms our children’s future. First a commentary about high-school, with a video as an example of the harm done to higher education by the PC crowd ruining education:
It has been no secret that we are having an educational crisis in the United States. Public schools are doing worse and worse, unable to compete with private schools, homeschooled children, and for that matter the rest of the world. Some suggest that this is on purpose. By dumbing down our children we are preparing the future generations for more easily accepting authoritarian control by leftist systems of governance.
We are raising young people in our public schools that are illiterate. We are cramming them with bad information from experimental teaching techniques, political correctness, and liberal philosophies so that they will be good, obedient citizens. Informed voters think for themselves, and seek freedom. A dumbed down population is always eager to depend on the government overlords. Mind-numbed followers don’t ask questions.
History is our students’ worst subject. They can’t even answer the simplest questions about history in regards to the Revolutionary War, World War II, or the Korean War. The fault partly lies in the fact that history textbooks are poorly written, and partly because they are not being taught the information in the first place. I remember when my nephew came to me upset because in his History Class they skipped the chapter about the U.S. Constitution. When he inquired why, the teacher explained to him that the class was limited in time and had to skip unnecessary lessons.
In addition to skipping over important parts of history, new history uses political correctness, and caters to pop culture and particular groups in an effort to appease the same groups the leftist political wing-nuts are also trying to appease. As a result, the generations of students that come out of our schools don’t know our past, and as the old dictum goes, he who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.
Educational malpractice in the public schools is not only a problem presented by liberal democrats and Marxists that have infiltrated our educational system, but is also the fault of bone-headed, and unconstitutional, legislation like the “No Child Left Behind” Act. The law that was Bush 43’s baby, despite its good intentions, worsened our education system, took the emphasis away from knowing our history, and of course was unconstitutional just like the Education Department. The federal government has no authority over education in this country. That is a local issue, and for good reason.
The problem is, the local systems have been so influenced by federal dictate that they have also become a part of the madness that is dumbing down America. An example revealed itself recently in Florida schools where, because only 27% of the students were able to pass a fourth grade state written exam, the Florida Department of Education lowered the performance level standard. The decision was made by a four-three vote, reasoning that the kids did so poorly because the test was too hard.
Yes, I just defended that our schools belong in local hands, and here we are with a state board doing stupid things too. Understand, though, that is because of the federal, and hard left, influence.
- The Dumbing Down of America – Human Events
- Liberalism and the Dumbing Down of America – American Thinker
- Florida Lowers Passing Grade for State Writing Exam After Over 70 Percent of Fourth Graders Fail – Fox News
See also FIRE’s list of “10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2013”
Diversity In Everything But Thought
This comes via a recommend by POWERLINE:
I have an unofficial “No TED-Talks” policy for Power Line, because of the overproduced style of the things, and the vacuousness of 90 percent of the content. This “thought leader” spoof gets the problem just right. Also this one. And this one, too. And . . . yeah, they’re almost endless.
But I do make occasional exceptions. Such as anything by the late Hans Rosling. Especially his talk on “the magic washing machine,” which is guaranteed to infuriate ideological feminists everywhere.
Another exception is a recent talk by political science professor Joshua Dunn of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who recently delivered a TED Talk on “What Universities Missed in Their Fight for Diversity.” Josh is the co-author, with Jon Shields of Claremont-McKenna College, of the highly recommended book Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University……
Harvard’s Racism Coming To An End?
(MOONBATTERY hat-tip)
Affirmative Actions Unequal Consequences
UPDATE!!
The trial itself began October 15th in a federal court with Harvard as the accused (HOT AIR). FOX NEWS reports on the trial’s revelations so far:
Harvard University’s dean of admissions has testified the Ivy League school applies different SAT score standards to prospective students based on factors such as race, but insisted the practice is not discriminatory.
Students for Fair Admissions, a group headed by legal strategist Edward Blum, sued Harvard in 2014 claiming Asian-Americans, who have the highest academic records, unfairly receive the lowest admission rate at the elite school.
Regardless of the outcome of the three-week, non-jury trial in Boston that began Monday, the lawsuit involving affirmative action and backed by the Trump administration is expected to reach the Supreme Court.
William Fitzsimmons, the 30-year dean of admissions, who oversees the screening process of about 40,000 applicants and narrows them down to 2,000 acceptance letters that are handed out each year, testified that African-Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores out of a possible 1600 combined math and verbal, are sent recruitment letters with a score as low as 1100, whereas Asian-Americans need to score at least 250 points higher – 1350 for women and 1380 for men.
“That’s race discrimination, plain and simple,” argued John Hughes, a lawyer for SFFA.
“It is not,” Fitzsimmons shot back, adding that the school targets certain groups to “break the cycle” and convince students who normally wouldn’t consider applying to the Ivy League school.
[….]
Chinese-American Harvard graduate Lee Cheng, a lawyer for the Asian-American Legal Foundation, supports the lawsuit as a simple and straightforward case for the right not to be discriminated against based on race.
“It’s about saying Harvard cannot set different and more difficult standards for admitting Asian students relative to students of any other ethnic group,” Cheng said. “It’s that simple – and it’s undeniable that Harvard has.”
Blum told Fox News he’s confident after four years of evidence gathering that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies are “unconstitutional.”….
Here is Mark Levin reading about this discrimination from August of last year:
Continuing with older post (from February 2017)
Here is part of a LOS ANGELES TIMES article regarding the above (hat-tip, CONSERVATIVE TREE HOUSE):
…“Let’s talk about Asians,” she says.
Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
Censorship On Largest Scale In Human History
(Don’t forget the IRS scandal or lying to FISA Court judges, or the JournoLIST scandal or the ClimateGate issue [and the MANY others] in order to weaponize the government against conservatives or to push Leftist ideology by way of obfuscation of the truth.)
Bozell says, “This is the emerging of the greatest censorship of free speech worldwide in the history of man. Now, let me explain this, the left is on a jihad against conservative thought. It’s happening in academia, entertainment, business, religion, everywhere.” More from NEWSBUSTERS:
….The Media Research Center has undertaken an extensive study of the problem at major tech companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube — and the results are far more troubling than most conservatives realize. Here are some of the key findings:
- Twitter Leads in Censorship: Project Veritas recently had caught Twitter staffers admitting on hidden camera that they had been censoring conservatives through a technique known as shadow banning, where users think their content is getting seen widely, but it’s not. The staffers had justified it by claiming the accounts had been automated if they had words such as “America” and “God.” In 2016, Twitter had attempted to manipulate election-related tweets using the hashtags “#PodestaEmails” and “#DNCLeak.” The site also restricts pro-life ads from Live Action and even Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), but allows Planned Parenthood advertisements.
- Facebook’s Trending Feed Has Been Hiding Conservative Topics: A 2016 Gizmodo story had warned of Facebook’s bias. It had detailed claims by former employees that Facebook’s news curators had been instructed to hide conservative content from the “trending” section, which supposedly only features news users find compelling. Topics that had been blacklisted included Mitt Romney, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Rand Paul. On the other hand, the term “Black Lives Matter” had also been placed into the trending section even though it was not actually trending. Facebook had also banned at least one far right European organization but had not released information on any specific statements made by the group that warranted the ban.
- Google Search Aids Democrats: Google and YouTube’s corporate chairman Eric Schmidt had assisted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The company’s search engine had deployed a similar bias in favor of Democrats. One study had found 2016 campaign searches were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. Even the liberal website Slate had revealed the search engine’s results had favored both Clinton and Democratic candidates. Google also had fired engineer James Damore for criticizing the company’s “Ideological Echo Chamber.” The company had claimed he had been fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” Damore is suing Google, saying it mistreats whites, males and conservatives.
- YouTube Is Shutting Down Conservative Videos: Google’s YouTube site had created its own problems with conservative content. YouTube moderators must take their cues from the rest of Google – from shutting down entire conservative channels “by mistake” to removing videos that promote right-wing political views. YouTube’s special Creators for Change section is devoted to people using their “voices for social change” and even highlights the work of a 9/11 truther. The site’s very own YouTube page and Twitter account celebrate progressive attitudes, including uploading videos about “inspiring” gay and trans people and sharing the platform’s support for DACA.
- Tech Firms Are Relying on Groups That Hate Conservatives: Top tech firms like Google, YouTube and Twitter partner with leftist groups attempting to censor conservatives. These include the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Both groups claim to combat “hate,” but treat standard conservative beliefs in faith and family as examples of that hatred. George Soros-funded ProPublica is using information from both radical leftist organizations to attack conservative groups such as Jihad Watch and ACT for America, bullying PayPal and other services to shut down their funding sources. The SPLC’s “anti-LGBT” list had also been used to prevent organizations from partnering with AmazonSmile to raise funds.
- Liberal Twitter Advisors Outnumber Conservatives 12-to-1: Twelve of the 25 U.S. members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council – which helps guide its policies – are liberal, and only one is conservative. Anti-conservative groups like GLAAD and the ADL are part of the board. There is no well-known conservative group represented.
- Tech Companies Rely on Anti-Conservative Fact-Checkers: Facebook and Google both had partnered with fact-checking organizations in order to combat “fake news.” Facebook’s short-lived disputed flagger program had allowed Snopes, PolitiFact and ABC News to discern what is and is not real news. Google’s fact-checkers had accused conservative sources of making claims that did not appear in their articles and disproportionately “fact-checked” conservative sources. On Facebook, a satire site, the Babylon Bee, had been flagged by Snopes for its article clearly mocking CNN for its bias. YouTube also had announced a partnership with Wikipedia in order to debunk videos deemed to be conspiracy theories, even though Wikipedia has been criticized for its liberal bias.
(Full Special Report can be found here.)
How Fake Subjects like Women Studies Invaded Academia
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton is an English philosopher and writer who specialises in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views. In recent years he taught courses in Buckingham University, Oxford University and University of St. Andrews. In this clip he talks about fake subjects like women studies that invaded academia with their postmodernist views. (Full video lecture is HERE.)