Category: Democrats acting badly

Pamela Paul on the problem with “progressives”

November 20, 2023 • 12:30 pm

I hate writing the word “progressives” when I refer to people like AOC and her squad, and especially to people like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, whom I see as regressives, hoping for some form of Islamism to infect America. But the “progressives” are also regressive in not adopting the values of classical liberalism, including freedom of speech, unity instead of divisiveness, and the rejection of identitarian politics.  “Progressives” favor a form of gender activism that abrogates certain rights of women and, more important, are liable to engage in “cancel culture”. They are self-righteous, authoritarian, and not prone to compromise.

But the latest identifying marks of “progressivists” are their embrace of Hamas and the Palestinian cause, an animus towards Israel, and, as evidenced in calls for a cease-fire and an approval of BSD, an apparent indifference about whether Israel should even exist.

So no, I’m not a progressive but a diehard liberal, and, as Bill Maher says, I never moved to the right: the Democrats simply shifted way leftward.

This NYT op-ed by Pamela Paul, the former Sunday book-review editor for the paper, shows her credentials as a liberal, which in the NYT’s op-ed section, puts her almost on the Right.  Click on the headline; I also found it archived free here.

According to Paul, self-described liberals are increasing in number (17% of Americans in 1992 to 25% in 2021), though “still lower than the proportions of those who said they were ‘conservatives’ or ‘moderates’.” Progressives are less numerous, constituting constitute 6-8% of the population, but they are LOUD. And their ranks will grow as younger college students grow up and regurgitate the political pabulum they were fed in college.

Here’s how Paul distinguishes progressives from “normal” liberals:

In an increasingly prominent version of the progressive vision, capitalism isn’t something to be regulated or balanced, but is itself the problem. White supremacy doesn’t describe an extremist fringe of racists and antisemites, but is instead the inherent character of the nation.

Some aspects of contemporary progressivism look less like actual progress and more like a step in reverse. Whereas liberals hold to a vision of racial integration, progressives have increasingly supported forms of racial distinction and separation, and demanded equity in outcome rather than equality of opportunity. Whereas most liberals want to advance equality between the sexes, many progressives seem fixated on reframing gender stereotypes as “gender identity” and denying sex differences wherever they confer rights or protections expressly for women. And whereas liberals tend to aspire toward a universalist ideal, in which diverse people come together across shared interests, progressives seem increasingly wedded to an identitarian approach that emphasizes tribalism over the attainment of common ground.

More reactionary still is the repressive nature of progressive ideals around civil liberties. It is progressives — not liberals — who argue that “speech is violence” and that words cause harm. These values are the driving force behind progressive efforts to shut down public discourse, disrupt speeches, tear down posters, censor students and deplatform those with whom they disagree.

Divisions became sharper after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, when many progressives did not just express support for the Palestinian cause but, in some cases, even defended the attacks as a response to colonialism, and opposed retaliation as a form of genocide. (One might argue that it is similarly illiberal for universities to suspend or cut funding to student groups that support Palestinian rights, as several have done, though those actions often came after chants by the groups that administrators considered threatening toward Jews.)

All this stands in marked contrast to the liberal stance that more speech is better speech, allowing for the free exchange of ideas. As David Frum, not generally considered a liberal himself, wrote recently in The Atlantic, “how is a society ever to settle its most important questions if it follows the rule ‘The more important a question, the more strictly its discussion is forbidden’?”\

And, of course, the cancel culture:

. . . .This brings us to the most troubling characteristic of contemporary progressivism. Whereas liberals tend to pride themselves on acceptance, many progressives have applied various purity tests to others on the left, and according to one recent study on the schism between progressives and liberals, are more likely than liberals to apply public censure to divergent views. This intolerance manifests as a professed preference for avoiding others with different values, a stance entirely antithetical to liberal values.

What a strange paradox that at the very moment the word “liberal” is enjoying a renaissance, liberalism itself feels on the wane. Many liberals find themselves feeling lonelier than ever.

It only feels on the wane because progressives are so damn loud. Liberalism is increasing, but perhaps not fast enough to keep Trump from being reelected.  Here are the latest poll numbers from FiveThirtyEight; and they’re are damn depressing (click to enlarge)


As for the Presidential polls of Trump vs. Biden, Trump can’t lose for trying. Yes, this is within the margin of error, I think, but it’s way too close for me.

 

Emily Yoffe on Biden’s rollback of Title IX regulations

June 27, 2022 • 1:00 pm

I keep saying that one good thing that the Trump administration did was to reform of the disciplinary procedure for sexual assault and harassment on campus as stipulated by Title IX (see posts here).  Those determined to maintain that everything that the Trump government did was bad has to argue that the DeVos reforms, which really created a fairer procedure for prosecuting these accusations, was somehow bad. But DeVos’s reforms included allowing the accused to know the charges against him (yes, usually a male), giving the accused the right to face the accuser, and with a lawyer or “helper”, and allowing a form of cross-examination. Further, in many cases, the investigator was the same person who judged whether the accused was guilty or not. That was ditched under DeVos.

Finally, the DeVos rules stipulated that guilt required not just a “preponderance of evidence” (greater than a 50% that the accused did the act) but a higher bar: “clear and convincing evidence”. That is, conviction required that it must be “highly probable or reasonably certain” that harassment or assault was done by the accused. This is conventionally interpreted to mean a likelihood of 75% or higher.

When I took a poll of what standards readers thought were best, they went with “take it to the police first”, and only then, if the accused was convicted, would they go with the “clear and convincing evidence” standard in a college investigation. In fact, since these are crimes (with the exception of some forms of what is defined as “harassment”), that’s a good idea.

Here are the results of our poll (note: this is not a scientific poll!):

 

And as I noted in June, one of the bad things that the Biden administration is now doing is rolling back DeVos’s reforms to the days when the rules (suggestions, really) were  codified in a “Dear Colleague” letter from Obama.

Now Emily Yoffe, whose writings I’ve found eminently sensible and who specializes in writing about Title IX and accusations of sexual misconduct, has a piece on Bari Weiss’s site agreeing that Biden’s changes are for the worse. Click to read (it’s free, but  subscribe if you read Weiss often).

A few quotes. I like this one because I’ve agreed with it (emphasis is mine):

Joe Biden has fulfilled one of the first promises he made upon becoming president. His administration has just announced a comprehensive set of regulations—701 pages worth—that will gut due-process rights for college students accused of sexual misconduct.

. . .Then Donald Trump was elected president, and Betsy DeVos, decided to reform what the Obama administration had done. In one of the most uncharacteristic acts of that chaotic presidency, DeVos went through the lengthy and burdensome process of writing actual regulations (the Obama administration had only issued “guidance”). The rules she released were, on balance, careful and thorough, providing necessary protections for the rights of both accuser and accused. I spent several years reporting on what was unfolding on campuses, and I wrote at the time that the DeVos regulations were an example of an immoral administration doing the moral thing. (See, for example, here and here.)

The DeVos rules went into effect in August of 2020, in the midst of campus covid shutdowns, so they have hardly had a chance to be tested. Now they will be struck. They will be replaced by some of the most pernicious procedures of the Obama era. (These dueling Department of Education regulations come under the aegis of Title IX, the fifty-year old federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education.)

And so it’s back to the bad old days:

The new rules recommend a return to a “single investigator” model that was barred under the DeVos reform. This means one administrator can act as detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury on a Title IX complaint. The new rules also undo many of the procedural protections for the accused—including the right to see all the evidence, inculpatory and exculpatory, gathered against him. “It’s an evisceration of the procedural protections given to the accused,” says historian KC Johnson, co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities.

Under the DeVos rules, adjudication of a formal complaint required a live hearing be held that included cross examination. The Biden administration lifts this obligation. The Biden rules also call for a return to investigations initiated by third parties, even if based on rumors or misunderstandings, in which male students can be subjected to Title IX proceedings over the objection of their female partners. (Robby Soave at Reason has a good summary of the Biden proposals.)

“It’s a document that validates all of the concerns we had about due process and free speech being on the chopping block,” says Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.  He adds that the administration is giving schools the blessing of the Department of Education “to cut many corners that are essential for fundamental fairness.”

I can’t imagine how people could say that the new rules make the process fairer than using the DeVos rules. How can it be fair when the prosecution is identical to the jury? How can it be fair to not see all the evidence against you? How can it be fair to prohibit cross examination of the accuser? After all, this process can ruin your life; so it must be adjudicated with at least the care of a court case. (And the standard for legal guilt is even harsher: guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.)

As predicted, men found guilty under the Obama-era procedure began filing lawsuits against their colleges for “unfair treatment”. There have been around 675 of these, and many that have been adjudicated have decried the college procedures and fined the universities.  That itself should raise a red flag for Biden’s proposed regulations.

There are other things discussed in Yoffe’s piece, including Biden’s stipulations about gender identity, participation in sports, and the new industry of hiring thousands of Title IX bureaucrats, but I’ll leave you to read and judge these issues for yourself.  Here’s just one more quote:

But no matter what the new regulations demand, it is likely that at the end of the Biden administration, the president will have to concede that he failed to make a dent in accusations of sexual misconduct on campus. This won’t be because campus administrators are indifferent to mass criminal activity by male students. It will be, in large part, because of the bureaucratic expansion the Obama administration instigated. They helped establish an industry of Title IX officials, investigators, lawyers, and consultants.

. . . Then there is human nature itself. Young men and women are going to engage in sexual exploration. Sometimes it’s going to go badly. In many cases, no matter how many hundreds of pages of regulations are churned out by the federal government, turning to Title IX bureaucrats is not going to make things better.

I’m a Democrat, and I voted for Biden. But I am not going to lionize everything that his administration does. The return to the old Title IX regulations for trying cases of sexual misconduct is one of the Biden administration’s clear mistakes.

Why both Left and Right distort CRT for political ends

January 28, 2022 • 11:00 am

I’ve written several posts trying to explain Critical Race Theory (CRT) as it is understood by scholars (see here and here, and here, for instance), and I won’t reiterate the definitions, which, of course differs from scholar to scholar. There is no “approved” definition.  But the variants all have certain things in common, including the concept of “white privilege,” intersectionality, systemic racism, and, usually, reparations and the complicity of oppressors (in this case, white people) in oppressing minorities. CRT is identity-centered rather than individual-centered.

I was going to write a corrective to the misconceptions of the Left about CRT, which are actually distortions because anybody who cares to can find out what CRT really is.  Likewise, the Right distorts CRT in an attempt to minimize the extent of racism. Both ends of the political spectrum, in fact, tailor their own definitions of CRT to meet their goals

Mona Charen at the Bulwark (see first article below) has written a sensible article on CRT (click on screenshot) which makes these points. It turns out that the Right-wing concept is closer to the real CRT than is the Left-wing version, but both sides distort what happens when an dumbed-down version of CRT is taught in schools.

Like me, Charen, doesn’t think there should be any laws against CRT on the books (most of them have been confected  by Republicans). In my case, given the various conceptions of CRT, telling schools what’s legal and not legal to teach infringes the freedom of teachers to teach what they think is best. (Note to creationists and IDers who will use my last sentence to justify the teaching of their nonsense: CRT is not evolution, which is a “theory” that happens to be a true theory as well, and, unlike CRT, one can’t with any rationality debate the truth of evolution.)

So, as Charen notes, the Left (including, recently, Paul Krugman) characterizes CRT simply as the idea, which is true, that there was slavery and oppression of black people for centuries, and that there is still racism, and both the history and current racism injures minorities and violates the tenets of our democracy. As we see below, most Americans agree with these claims. But they are not CRT!

.Charen (my emphasis below):

The laws some Republican-dominated states are passing to curtail CRT and its progeny are bad ideas for many reasons. But the depictions of those laws in big outlets like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post are frequently wrong or incomplete. A recent CNN report about Florida’s new law that would prohibit teaching methods that make people “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin” mangles the facts. The law, CNN claims, is a response to critical race theory, which the network defines as “a concept that seeks to understand and address inequality and racism in the US. The term also has become politicized and been attacked by its critics as a Marxist ideology that’s a threat to the American way of life.”

Not quite, though CNN is hardly alone in describing CRT in such an anodyne fashion. Paul Krugman argues that most people don’t know what CRT is (which is true), but goes off the deep end claiming that Republican “denunciations of C.R.T. are basically a cover for a much bigger agenda: an attempt to stop schools from teaching anything that makes right-wingers uncomfortable.” [JAC: I think there’s some truth in what Krugman says!] One news outlet suggested that anti-CRT bills “may make it even harder to discuss African American history,” and it is common to see anti-CRT bills described as “efforts to restrict what teachers can say about race, racism and American history in the classroom.”

If you were judging by much of the mainstream press coverage, you would think that CRT is just a movement to ensure that the history of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow is not neglected in America’s classrooms. But 1) large percentages of both Republicans and Democrats favor teaching those things, and 2) that’s not what CRT is.

So what does Charen see as the “real” CRT? Here:

In their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic state forthrightly that “Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, rejects the notion that racism is a character flaw in some individuals, declaring instead that “White identity is inherently racist.” That marks a dramatic departure from the traditional understanding of racism.

Critical race theory adherents favor teaching techniques that most Americans believe violate our commitment to colorblindness, such as “affinity groups” wherein people are segregated by race to discuss certain issues. In Massachusetts, the Wellesley public schools hosted a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American students and others in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community.” An official email explained that, “This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.”

And, contra Krugman and Scientific American, this kind of stuff, and not just the history of racism and slavery is actually taught in some schools.

In Virginia’s Loudoun County, teacher training materials encouraged educators to reject “color blindness” and to “address their whiteness (white privilege).” Each teacher was exhorted to become a “culturally competent professional who acknowledges and is aware of his or her own racist, sexist, heterosexist or other detrimental attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and feelings.” The training strayed into racial essentialism like this: “To the African, the entire universe is vitalistic as opposed to mechanistic. . . . This precept suggests that African Americans have a psychological affinity for stimulus change, often exhibit an increased behavioral vibrancy and have a rich and sometimes spontaneous movement repertoire.”

Democrats often object that CRT is “not taught in K-12 schools,” which is evasive. It’s true that third graders are not being assigned the works of Kimberly Crenshaw or Ibram X. Kendi, but affinity groups, “anti-racism” (in the sense of rejecting the ideal of color blindness), and other CRT-adjacent ideas are making their way into classrooms. New York City has spent millions on training materials that disdain “worship of the written word,” “individualism,” and “objectivity” as aspects of “white-supremacy culture.”

I’ve given other examples, such as the Smithsonian’s ill-advised (and now removed) characterization of white and black “culture”, and explicit demonizing of whiteness in classrooms, which is divisive and sometimes traumatic, and the recounting by students and parents in New York’s fancy prep schools about the divisive propaganda those schools purvey. There is no shortage of examples.

Republicans and righties aren’t immune, either, attacking perfectly warranted and sensible school units on racism. Charen gives the example of Republicans attacking a school district in Tennesee because on grade had a “Civil Rights Heroes” module that the plaintiffs said was “Anti-American, Anti-White, and Anti-Mexican [sic]”. There’s little doubt that their attempts to ban teaching CRT in schools is motivated at least in part by racism and a continuing attempt to efface American history.

So a pox on both ideological houses, especially because both Republicans and Democrats agree (as do I) that the nature, history, and damage of racism need to be taught.

It’s so easy—and remunerative—for progressives to characterize opposition to CRT as straight-up racism, and for conservatives to reach for heavy-handed, overbroad laws to restrict teaching they resent. But it is possible to oppose CRT for non-racist reasons, in fact for pro-national unity reasons, and even if Republicans are not making the case well or at all, it still needs to be made.

Large majorities of both Republicans and Democrats favor teaching about slavery, racism, and other sins of American history. Eighty-eight percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans favor teaching that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Ninety percent of Democrats and 83 percent of Republicans believe textbooks should say that many Founding Fathers owned slaves. Nearly identical percentages of Democrats (87) and Republicans (85) say textbooks should include the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and slightly higher percentages want children to learn about the theft of Native American land.

That is not the picture of a nation (or even one party) that is refusing to grapple with the history of racism. Where you do get partisan divergence is on whether schools should teach the concept of “white privilege.” Seventy-one percent of Democrats say yes, but only 22 percent of Republicans agree.

This is getting long, so I’ll refer you to Eric Kaufman’s long survey of the divisions in America about CRT (click on screenshot below). A lot of it is age-related, with young people approving the teaching of “dictionary CRT” while older people oppose it.  Kaufman draws a distinction between “cultural liberalis” (those “classical liberals” who oppose the strict construal of CRT, and “cultural socialists” (those who stress the importance of identity groups over individual rights and favor the teaching of CRT). The ratio of the former to the latter in the U.S. is now 2:1, but Kaufman thinks as the young people of today age, they’re going to remain cultural socialists.

(You can see Kaufman’s full data and analysis here—in a much longer article.)

The cultural socialists on the Left apparently include the editors of Scientific American. A comment the other day on my post “The inanities of Scientific American—almost all within just one year,” went as follows.

The commenter:

This aways confuses me. I have been reading Scientific American in magazine form for years, and I haven’t seen ANY of this offensive stuff. Indeed, the February 2022 issue has an editorial by the Board of Editors basically blasting “wokeness” in American History curricula, and recommending more material covering the treatment of minority groups both historically and currently.
It would really help me if all these critiques of the “failing Scientific American” could cite issues and pages, so I could see for myself.

I have the article below, which I’ll send to anyone who wants it (it’s in the paper edition). Scientific American makes the mistake of conflating CRT with “reality”, using the construal that CRT is simply teaching about racism and its history in the classroom. The article (no link):

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract:

The authors emphasize the importance of critical race theory (CRT) to a fact-based education in the U.S. They cite the implication of the election of officials who opposed CRT and enactment of legislation banning CRT from school curricula in some states for children’s education. They mention the significance of lessons about equity and social justice to young people. They point out that truth and reality will be removed from education if conversations around race and society are eliminated.

I won’t go on except to say that the editorial flirts with the classical definition of CRT, but then says that that all it does is teach us our “true history” and that it “teaches children about reality.”  This is a good example of how the Left deliberately misconstrues CRT so that they can call people who oppose the theory “racists.” But that’s not true.

The title tells all.

Matt Taibbi worries that the Dems are shooting themselves in the foot again

December 31, 2021 • 1:00 pm

In Matt Taibbi’s latest piece on Substack (click below for free access, but subscribe if you read often), he’s worried that the Democrats aren’t really parsing what happened when a Republican, Glenn Youngkin, defeated Democratic incumbent Terry McAuliffe in the recent race. A lot of it was about schooling, and about McAuliffe’s comment that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” which apparently drove a lot of voters towards Youngkin.  Taibbi sees this gaffe as on par with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment during her run against Trump, and thinks that Democrats are dismissing McAuliffe’s statement as one that simply appeals to racists.

Taibbi, on the other hand, thinks there’s more to it than that, and Dems should be thinking hard about education. 23 Democrats are planning not to run for re-election in Congress next year, and that’s a big worry.

Click the screenshot to read (if you’re paywalled, try a judicious inquiry):

Once again this falls in the category of words and actions that make Democrats look like elitists in the eyes of Middle America, and there’s something to that. The dismissal of parents’ concerns is exemplified, says Taibbi, by recent words of Nikole Hannah-Jones, head of the NYT’s 1619 Project:

On the full Meet the Press Sunday, Todd in an ostensibly unrelated segment interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work. He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor’s race, which seemingly was decided on the question, “How influential should parents be about curriculum?” Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Todd asked her, “How do we do this?”

Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.” This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”

Even odder were her next comments, regarding McAuliffe’s infamous line about parents. About this, Hannah-Jones said:

We send our kids to school because we want our kids to be taught by people with expertise in the subject area… When the governor, or the candidate, said he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that, but that’s just a fact.

In the wake of McAuliffe’s loss, the “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach” line was universally tabbed a “gaffe” by media. I described it in the recent “Loudoun County: A Culture War in Four Acts” series in TK as the political equivalent of using a toe to shoot your face off with a shotgun, but this was actually behind the news cycle. Yahoo! said the “gaffe precipitated the Democrat’s slide in the polls,” while the Daily Beast’s blunter headline was, “Terry McAuliffe’s White-Guy Confidence Just Fucked the Dems.”

If Hannah-Jones abjures expertise in educaiton, why is she trying hard to foist the message of the 1619 Project on American secondary schools? She’s being disingenuous.

What’s happened, says Taibbi is that Dems are fobbing off McAuliffe’s loss as on racist parents who don’t want their kids to learn about Critical Race Theory, and those Democrats who still adhere to mantra “defer to the experts” that they use, usually justifiably, for science. But it didn’t work for economics or foreign policy, and, says Taibbi, is certainly doomed to fail when it comes to education:

But parenting? For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.

Implying the opposite is a political error of almost mathematically inexpressible enormity. This is being done as part of a poisonous rhetorical two-step. First, Democrats across the country have instituted radical policy changes, mainly in an effort to address socioeconomic and racial disparities. These included eliminating standardized testing to the University of California system, doing away with gifted programs (and rejecting the concept of gifted children in general), replacing courses like calculus with data science or statistics to make advancement easier, and pushing a series of near-parodical ideas with the aid of hundreds of millions of dollars from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that include things like denouncing emphasis on “getting the right answer” or “independent practice over teamwork” as white supremacy.

When criticism ensued, pundits first denied as myth all rumors of radical change, then denounced complaining parents as belligerent racists unfit to decide what should be taught to their children, all while reaffirming the justice of leaving such matters to the education “experts” who’d spent the last decade-plus doing things like legislating grades out of existence. This “parents should leave ruining education to us” approach cost McAuliffe Virginia, because it dovetailed with what parents had long been seeing and hearing on the ground.

So, he says, it’s not merely resistance to teaching Critical Race Theory in schools. All of us hear constantly about the trend to lower school standards in the name of equity, and if you care about your kids’ education, that rankles, especially if you want your kid to excel.   I’ll give just one more quote:

The complaints of most Loudoun parents I spoke with about curriculum were usually double-edged. The first thing that drove many crazy was the recognition that whatever their kids were learning in school, it was less and less the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Kids were coming home showing weird deficiencies in obvious areas of need, forcing parents, and especially working mothers, to devote long evening hours to catching their kids up on things like spelling and multiplication tables. “I grew up laughing at the idea of homeschooling. I thought that was an idea for religious kooks,” one mother told me. “But after a while, I caught myself thinking, ‘I’m doing all the teaching anyway, why not just cut out the middleman?’”

Parents talked incessantly about the lowering of standards in Loudoun, whether it was the dropping of midterms and finals in 2015, or the school’s new “Retake Policy,” which not only set an arbitrary floor of 50% on all “summative assessments” (the word “test” has been mostly out of use for at least a decade there, apparently because it puts too much pressure on students), but automatically allowed students to retake tests if they scored below 80%. The rule also required teachers to accept a humorous euphemism called “late-work.”

School bureaucrats are motivated in almost every case to not only avoid giving bad grades, but to pre-empt efforts to track children as ahead or behind by slotting them in certain classes. In a phenomenon replicated in other parts of the country, kids in Loudoun take the same math classes all the way through their junior years in high school, when they’re finally allowed to take advanced courses. As a result, students who are ready for calculus sit in the same classrooms as students still struggling with pre-algebra, putting teachers in a nearly impossible bind — how do you design “summatives” for kids on such different levels? — and all but guaranteeing that the bulk of kids don’t learn much, or near enough.

Some version of this dysfunction story is going on in districts all over the country. If you drill down into reasons, they usually come down to local bureaucrats discovering that lowering standards and eliminating measurable forms of achievement works as a short-term political solution on a variety of fronts, from equity politics to dealing with parent groups, teachers’ unions, and public and private funding sources.

Those who lower standards never admit what their real reasons are, but you’d have to be without neurons not to know the real reason.

I think all of us who mourn the lowering of standards will understand that: it’s not just about CRT, but about all the changes being made for one reason only, to ensure “equity” in achievement and representation.  Middle America, apparently, isn’t as woke as Upper (Middle) Class America, and they want their children challenged to achieve. Eliminating SATs, homework, tracking, and so on, will, assets Taibbi, help “Bring back Trump”, for it tells worried parents that the message of the Democrats is “we know how to raise your kids better than you.”

I am no pundit, but at least this makes sense. And I’m sure James Carville would agree.

Biden administration poised to impose CRT on American public schools

April 20, 2021 • 10:15 am

“CRT”, of course, is Critical Race Theory, which rests on a number of assumptions and assertions that are sometimes dubious (e.g., inequality of representation purely reflects current racism). When Biden got elected, I worried—and, I think, predicted—that he would be too woke for my taste. (I may not remember correctly.) And, sure enough, that’s exactly what is happening on a number of fronts. I hasten to add that Biden and Harris are infinitely better than Trump and Pence.  I support much of what he’s done, and I don’t much care if Biden hasn’t become the “unifier of Congress” that he promised. Given Republican intransigence, that would be impossible.

But the Biden administration isn’t perfect, and I’ll criticize it when I see fit—like now.

This article appeared in the conservative venue The National Review, and I was sent it by reader Bill who suspected, correctly, that it is “not one of my preferred news sources.” Indeed! But who else would publish something like this: a notice that the Biden administration has set out a proposal to get schools to teach Critical Race Theory in one of its more objectionable forms? Click on the screenshot to read the National Review piece, but be warned that a lot of it is right-wing kvetching:

The upshot of the report, leaving aside the kvetching about CRT and the criticism of Biden, is that his Department of Education has just put out a proposal for grants to secondary schools in the area of American History and Civics Education. You can see the pdf of the government proposal here, or click on the screenshot below:

The aims of these proposals are these, set out in the government document:

The purpose of the National Activities program is to promote new and existing evidence-based strategies to encourage innovative American history, civics and government, and geography instruction, learning strategies, and professional development activities and programs for teachers, principals, or other school leaders, particularly such instruction, strategies, activities, and programs that benefit low-income students and underserved populations.

Note the “evidence-based” slant. I have no quarrel with the aims, nor with the second area of funding that I won’t discuss (“Promoting Information Literacy Skills”). But the first part, “Projects That Incorporate Racially, Ethnically, Culturally, and Linguistically Diverse Perspectives into Teaching and Learning”, is objectionable and invidious.  I’ll let you read for yourself from these screenshots:

 

Note the exemplar module: the New York Times‘s “1619 Project”, which has been severely criticized for both ideological zealotry and historical inaccuracy. But this is exactly what the New York Times wanted—not journal, but an injection of the paper’s own ideology as propaganda in the public schools. Notice also the approbation for Kendi’s dubious claim that any racial inequities in any area, say in evolutionary biology, are the result of “racist policies.”  While that may be true of policies in the past, Kendi means it to reflect current racism. And he’s not always right about that; but this is what our kids are going to learn.

Again, I emphasize that some redress is needed in teaching American history for the decades of teaching that more or less erased the fates of oppressed minorities in this country. I have no problem with such redress. I do have a problem with redress via the methods of The 1619 Project and the views of Ibram X. Kendi.

When a school or school system writes a proposal to be funded under this aegis, this is what it must do:

I don’t have to dwell on the problem with this program: its divisiveness, its one-sidedness, its questionable claims about systemic marginalization (that is, marginalization built into form structures of governments, schools, and other organizations), and the laughable bit about “critical analysis”, for you know that no criticism of the program will be tolerated once it’s in the classroom. That is, this is an ideology to be foisted on students, and perhaps a violation of the First Amendment.

Now I don’t agree with state laws that have been enacted (Trump also ordered one) prohibiting the teaching of CRT in the classroom. The government should not be in the business of saying what students shouldn’t learn beyond forbidding violations of the First Amendment (e.g., you can’t teach creationism or Intelligent Design because they’re forms or religion) or the purveying of arrant lies, which should be handled by schools themselves.

But by giving money to schools in this one specific area, the Biden administration is ensuring that cash-strapped schools are going to board the CRT train. And once they do, that’s it. As Ignatius of Loyola might have said, “Give me the children until they are ten and I will give you the future, including politics, universities, and the liberal media.”

According to author Kurtz, this is only the beginning. I have no knowledge of this area, so I just present his claim:

The programs immediately targeted by Biden’s new priority criteria for American history and civics grants are small. Once in place, however, those criteria will undoubtedly influence the much larger and vastly more dangerous “Civics Secures Democracy Act.” That bill would appropriate $1 billion a year, for six years, for history and civic education. Support for leftist “action civics” is already written into the priority criteria of the bill itself. I have argued that additional anodyne-sounding priority criteria in the Civics Secures Democracy Act — criteria favoring grants targeted to “underserved” populations and the mitigation of various racial, ethnic, and linguistic achievement gaps — would be interpreted by the Biden administration as a green light to fund Critical Race Theory in the schools. The new draft federal rule for grant priority in American history and civics education makes it clear that this is indeed the Biden administration’s intent.

And Kurtz may well be right.

I’m not sure how Uncle Joe let his agenda be hijacked by the Woke, as it wasn’t clear that this would happen, but I can assume only that he has loud voices yelling in his ear to get this stuff done. We already know that the Woke are louder than the Rational. It’s up to us to fix that disparity.

Two congresspeople, including AOC, threaten to delay passage of stimulus bill

March 27, 2020 • 11:00 am

I’ve pretty much written off Republicans, but among us Democrats there’s one annoying snake in the grass, a snake who goes by the monicker of AOC. Truly, I am amazed at the number of people who admire her, and even suggest she’d make a good president. I see her as having some good positions. and is generally on the right side of issues (even though her solutions are often ludicrous), but someone who’s not that bright, and is following a script laid out by the Justice Democrats, who recruited her to run for Congress. I also believe she’s an anti-Semite and somewhat of a narcissist—as well as a social-media “influencer” along the lines of Trump. And now she (along with a Republican in the House) is threatening passage of the stimulus bill (see also here).

Passage of largest ever American relief bill could be delayed. 

With many lawmakers scattered around the country, House leaders will attempt on Friday to pass the $2 trillion economic stabilization plan by voice vote, but the plan could be delayed a day if any lawmaker insists on a recorded vote.

At least one Democrat and one Republican have suggested they might do so.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan for a voice vote is highly unusual for a measure of such consequence. Leaders settled on it so that lawmakers who wanted to speak could make their views known and others would not be required to be physically present.

But there is a risk: Technically, the House cannot legislate without the presence of a quorum, defined by the Constitution as a simple majority. (The House currently has 430 members; 216 are required for a quorum.) If even one member asserted that the House lacked a quorum and called for a recorded vote, the House would have to cease its business until 216 lawmakers arrived.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, warned on Wednesday that she might do so. Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, has also hinted that he might try to slow the bill’s passage, stoking anger among fellow lawmakers.

“If you intend to delay passage of the #coronavirus relief bill tomorrow morning, please advise your 428 colleagues RIGHT NOW so we can book flights and expend ~$200,000 in taxpayer money to counter your principled but terribly misguided stunt,” Representative Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota, wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

This will not endear Ocasio-Cortez to Nancy Pelosi or AOC’s home-state Senator Chuck Schumer, both of whom are supporting a voice vote that won’t require the Congress to be physically present at the Capitol.  AOC’s opposition to the bill, and desire to delay its passage, comes from her view that it gives too much to corporations. But the bill will pass, and AOC is making trouble as a kind of juvenile tantrum, something she’s quite adept at.

Elizabeth Warren chews on her metatarsals

February 1, 2020 • 9:00 am

As the campaign proceeds, I become less and less enamored with Elizabeth Warren, once my favorite candidate for President. (Now I have no overwhelming favorite, though according to the New York Times “issue quiz” I’m a centrist whose views align more with the policies of those like Yang and Biden. But, like most of us here, in November’s election I’ll be voting for whichever Democrat gets nominated. Trump is and will be a disaster for America.)

Still, I don’t like Warren’s dissimulation, her hectoring tone, her Medicare For All policy (which seems to be morphing into “Optional Medicare”), or the desperation she evinces as she falls ever farther behind Bernie and Joe in the polls.

That desperation is the only way I can account for Warren’s behavior this week during the impeachment hearings. As you probably know, Senators were allowed to submit written questions to Chief Justice John Roberts, who was formally presiding over the trial. Roberts vetted the questions, and Warren submitted one that had nothing to do with the trial per se, but everything to do with making herself look good. I found it embarrassing and irrelevant.  Here’s the question, with a video of Roberts reading it below that:

“At a time when large majorities of Americans have lost faith in government, does the fact that the chief justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican senators have thus far refused to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the chief justice, the Supreme Court and the Constitution?”

This isn’t relevant in any way to the impeachment save for reiterating something we all knew: the Republicans have made a sham of the hearings by refusing to admit evidence or witnesses, something I find disgusting and reprehensible. But Warren was asking Roberts to speculate ask others whether the Republicans’ actions delegitimized not just the Supreme Court, but Roberts himself. Yes, the court is highly politicized toward the Right, which is scary. But Warren’s question not only flaunts her “virtue,” but also accomplishes nothing besides trying to embarrass Roberts. It’s unprofessional and snarky.

Indeed, in the video below (sadly supplied by HuffPost, who probably thinks Warren’s question was great), Representative and Democratic trial manager Adam Schiff repudiates Warren’s question, properly saying that the GOP’s behavior reflects badly not on the Supreme Court, but on the Senate itself. Schiff’s statement is measured and eloquent.

And in the article below, CNN court reporter Ariane de Vogue suggests that Warren’s question might even have been counterproductive, getting at least one Republican to withhold a vote to bring in witnesses and evidence (it would have actually taken two more Republican defectors beyond Romney and Collins to get a 51-49 vote for the Democratic position).

de Vogue:

In announcing that she would vote against the Senate calling witnesses, Sen. Lisa Murkowski suggested that her decision was made in part to spare Chief Justice John Roberts from having to face a 50-50 tie, allowing him to avoid a legal and political storm.

“It has also become clear some of my colleagues intend to further politicize this process, and drag the Supreme Court into the fray, while attacking the chief justice,” the Alaska Republican said Friday afternoon.

Her statement appeared to be a direct response to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a Democratic presidential candidate who had essentially forced Roberts to speculate about his credibility on national television.

Warren had submitted a question for the chief to read. . .

. . . Roberts, as part of his prescribed duties, read Warren’s query from the dais. Word for word without expression.

Now it seems Warren’s question was part of the reason Murkowski came to a “no” vote.

Murkowski said, “We have already degraded this institution for partisan political benefit, and I will not enable those who wish to pull down another.”

“I will not stand for nor support that effort,” she said.

Well, of course Murkowski and almost all the Republican Senators had already degraded the Senate by refusing to allow witnesses or written evidence, so her statement is hypocritical. And perhaps Murkowski would have voted the way she did without Warren’s gaffe.  Nevertheless, Warren has slipped yet another notch in my estimation, and I doubt I’ll be voting for her in the primaries. Even Bernie, who doesn’t dissimulate, seems a better choice if you want a “progressive”. But, as a registered Democrat, I’ll likely be voting more centrist, though I haven’t made up my mind.

Stephen Colbert on the Democratic candidates’ favorite comfort foods

June 22, 2019 • 2:30 pm

Oy, it’s gonna be a long 17 months. Not only do we get to hear Trump brag about how savvy he is as he strives to get reelected, but we have to see two dozen Democrats tear each other apart. And if the campaign so far is any clue, that won’t be pretty, or even productive (viz., Joe Biden getting demonized for even mentioning that he tried to work with racist senators).

I predict that the Dems will pander to the public by trying to out-woke each other, which may be a losing strategy. On the lighter side, but still indicative of this tactic, here we see Stephen Colbert’s response to the candidates being asked by the New York Times about, among other things, their favorite comfort food on the campaign trail (you can see the NYT article here and the response to the food question here). But, as you see below, Colbert exaggerates things.

Colbert also spoofs answers to some of the other questions, but it’s useful to see the NYt videos for many of the other questions, which do involved substantive policy issues. Kudos to the paper for their useful comparison of views.

But are all the answers that I compiled from the NYT video:

  1. Veggies on the go
  2. Vegan cupcakes
  3. Pulled pork
  4. M&Ms
  5. No comfort food
  6. Beef jerkey
  7. A glass of whiskey
  8. Any kind of fast food
  9. Hamburger
  10. Baked potato
  11. Italian sausage sandwich
  12. Pulled pork
  13. Kind bars (?)
  14. “There’s too much comfort food” (Bernie Sanders)
  15. Iced tea
  16. Coffee
  17. French fries
  18. Grilled chicken sandwich from McDonald’s, without sauce
  19. Little bowls of M&Ms or mints
  20. Used to be M&Ms but abjured on weight-gain grounds
  21. Ice cream
  22. Chips and guacamole
  23. French fries
  24. Ice cream

Well, it’s not nearly as bad as Colbert makes out, but there’s still some yuppie-pandering here. Scratch my vote for Mr. Veggies on the Go, Ms. Vegan Cupcakes, Bernie (“tut tut”) Sanders, and Mr. Iced Tea.