The WOKE Generation!

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I think that the reports being referenced of supposed harm of CRT being done or proposed are about the same as reports saying that vaccines cause autism or that girls can't get racism. You might have had some semi-professional person do a report, which under peer review shows that numbers are being manipulated, taken out of context, or far too small of a sample, which has the report discredited, but then a bunch of people just assume that it is right and keeping making assumptions.

For the record, that is literally what the theory of vaccines causing autism is based on, a single paper that was discredited, I think it was a Seth Mnookin, who lost his license over actions. The name I am seeing as largely behind the more recent conservative definition of CRT, in being against, is a Christopher Rufo, who started doing it to get attention in response to the George Floyd protests. It is all a made up idea of what CRT is. It is kind of the All Lives Mater sort of response to Black Lives Matter, to have an excuse to not do anything, and not want to think about things that make them uncomfortable.

The Woke-Industrial Complex
Christopher Rufo is a magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the the Manhattan Institute

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is a conservative 501 non-profit American think tank

I have been a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago for the past 10 years. I work on topics ranging from climate change to the possibility of life on extrasolar planets using mathematics, physics, and computer simulation.

I have never considered myself a political person.

But I started to get alarmed about five years ago as I noticed an increasing number of issues and viewpoints become impossible to discuss on campus. I mostly just wanted to do my science and not have anyone yell at me, and I thought that if I kept my mouth shut the problem would eventually go away. I knew that speaking out would likely bring serious reputational and professional consequences. And for a number of years I just didn’t think it was worth it.

But the street violence of the summer of 2020, some of which I witnessed personally in Chicago, and the justifications and dishonesty that accompanied it, convinced me that I could no longer remain silent in good conscience.

In the fall of 2020 I started advocating openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations. I recorded some short YouTube videos in which I argued for the importance of treating each person as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means giving everyone a fair and equal opportunity when they apply for a position as well as allowing them to express their opinions openly, even if you disagree with them.

As a result, I was immediately targeted for cancellation, primarily by a group of graduate students in my department.

That group of graduate students organized a letter of denunciation. It claimed that I threatened the “safety and belonging of all underrepresented groups within the department,” and it was presented to my department chair. The letter demanded that my teaching and research be restricted in a way that would cripple my ability to function as a scientist. A strong statement in support of faculty free expression by University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer put an end to that, and that is where things stood until the summer of 2021.

On August 12, a colleague and I wrote an op-ed in Newsweek in which we argued that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as it currently is implemented on campus “violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment” and “treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.” We proposed instead “an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.” We noted that this would mean an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants.

Shortly thereafter, my detractors developed a new strategy to try to isolate me and intimidate everyone else into silence: They argued on Twitter that I should not be invited to give science seminars at other universities and coordinated replacement speakers. This is an effective and increasingly common way to ratchet up the cost of dissenting because disseminating new work to colleagues is an important part of the scientific endeavor.

Sure enough, this strategy was employed when I was chosen to give the Carlson Lecture at MIT — a major honor in my field. It is an annual public talk given to a large audience and my topic was “climate and the potential for life on other planets.” On September 22, a new Twitter mob, composed of a group of MIT students, postdocs, and recent alumni, demanded that I be uninvited.

It worked. And quickly.

It’s worth stating what happened again: a small group of ideologues mounted a Twitter campaign to cancel a distinguished science lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because they disagreed with some of the political positions the speaker had taken. And they were successful within eight days.

The fact that such stories have become an everyday feature of American life should do nothing to diminish how shocking they are, and how damaging they are to a free society. The fact that MIT, one of the greatest universities in the world, caved in so quickly will only encourage others to deploy this same tactic.

I view this episode as an example as well as a striking illustration of the threat woke ideology poses to our culture, our institutions and to our freedoms. I have consistently maintained that woke ideology is essentially totalitarian in nature: it attempts to corral the entirety of human existence into one narrow ideological viewpoint and to silence anyone who disagrees. I believe that these features ultimately derive from the ideology’s abandonment of the principle of the inherent dignity of each human being. It is only possible to instrumentalize the individual in order to engineer group-based outcomes within a philosophical framework that has rejected this principle. Similarly, it is easy to justify silencing a dissenter if your ideology denies her individual dignity. Clearly, wokeism has not reached a terrible nadir of destruction yet, but the lesson of history is that we need to name and confront totalitarianisms before they cause disaster, while it is still possible to do so.

Principals at elementary schools in a Michigan school district are canceling Halloween and Valentine's Day celebrations over equity and inclusion concerns raised by parents.

East Lansing Public Schools elementary principals sent a joint letter to families Wednesday announcing there would no longer be Halloween or Valentine’s Day celebrations in the classroom due to potential distractions and an increasing number of uncomfortable families.

“It's not uncommon to see students crying on Halloween "because they don't have the same kind of costumes that other kids have or they didn't bring the same amazing valentines that other kids do," Assistant Superintendent Glenn Mitcham said. "We're striving hard at East Lansing Public Schools to be a district that is equitable and inclusive for all families."

But the district is by no means canceling Halloween or Valentine's Day, Mitcham said. Instead, celebrations can be built into the curriculum. He used the example of a class measuring a pumpkin while learning about circumference.

The schools will also look to hold alternative celebrations throughout the year celebrating students meeting academic or behavioral goals.

Halloween and Valentine's Day continue to be celebrated at MacDonald Middle School and East Lansing High School in the school district, Mitcham said, but to a lesser extent.

In recent years, some families have kept their children home from school or picked them up early on Halloween, according to the letter. The costumes, parades and parties can also make it difficult for children to concentrate and for teachers to teach, the principals wrote.

Valentine’s Day brings its own set of “unintended consequences,” the principals wrote. Some students bring valentines to exchange at school while others do not, leading to “drama and teasing” in upper elementary classrooms.

Meanwhile, some families and students "do not feel comfortable with the idea of boys and girls exchanging valentines or participating in a celebration that focuses on 'love,' " the principals wrote.

Facebook has "permanently disabled" the ads account of a conservative children's book publisher, claiming that Heroes of Liberty – which has published books about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, former President Ronald Reagan and author Thomas Sowell – violated the company's rules against "Low Quality or Disruptive Content." Facebook originally locked the ads account on Dec. 23, and after Heroes of Liberty appealed the ruling, the company permanently disabled the account

The question is: is a children's biography of Ronald Reagan no longer permissible on Facebook? We don’t know. But apparently promoting one may well kill a business," Heroes of Liberty editor and board member Bethany Mandel told FOX Business on Sunday.

"We began investing in Facebook four months before we launched our first book," she added. "We invested most of our marketing budget on the platform, and now our budget (the money we’ve already spent), as well as our assets and data are gone. Marketing-wise we are back in square one, financially it's even more challenging."

Mandel confirmed that the ads account remained disabled. She hesitated to describe the move as an example of anti-conservative bias on the part of Facebook.

We are not in politics, we are in the business of creating beautiful stories about great people that will entertain children and give them life lessons," she said. "To cancel children's books because they celebrate American values that 90% of Americans believe in isn’t even anti-conservative bias, it's anti-American. Pure madness."

"This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled because it didn't comply with our policy on Low Quality or Disruptive Content," Facebook said in a message disabling the account on Dec. 23.

After Heroes of Liberty appealed, Facebook sent another message. "After a final review of this ad account, we confirmed it didn't comply with our Advertising Policies or other standards," the message reads. "You can no longer advertise with this ad account and its ads and assets will remain disabled. This is our final decision."

Heroes of Liberty used the ads account to promote and sell the books. During its last month on the platform – between Nov. 23 and Dec. 23 – the account promoted 68 ads, and 95.2% of the money spent on ads in this period went to ads that were ranked "average" or "above average" in Facebook's quality score. Only three ads were rated below "average," according to Heroes of Liberty.

Mandel suggested that Facebook caved to a vocal minority of users who claimed that Heroes of Liberty was disruptive.

There was a small but noisy group of responders to our ads who didn't like the fact we published books about Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell and Amy Coney Barret; people we called Heroes of Liberty," she told FOX Business. "They made nasty comments, especially about Reagan, and about us for publishing these books and even shared their desire to burn them."

While the loss of the Facebook ads platform will cost Heroes of Liberty, Mandel laid out a path forward. She said that the publisher has "received a warm welcome, sold tens of thousands of books and learned that many Americans are looking for a wholesome alternative to the current contemporary woke children's literature."

"We learned our lesson, and won't risk building our business relying on the whims of Big Tech again," she added. "We are very happy with our initial decision to create a subscription model that will allow us to create a more meaningful one-on-one connection with families that can't be disrupted by a censor."

Georgetown University is looking into tweets made by one of its newest law school faculty members.

On Monday, the University decided to place Ilya Shapiro on leave one day before he was scheduled to start his new role as the university’s senior lecturer and director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.

Dean William Treanor sent a letter to the law school’s faculty, staff and students, saying in part, "Over the past several days, I have heard the pain and outrage of so many at Georgetown Law, and particularly from our Black female students, staff, alumni, and faculty. Ilya Shapiro’s tweets are antithetical to the work that we do here every day to build inclusion, belonging, and respect for diversity."

The tweet in question has since been deleted. But it was shared by Ilya Shapiro who said that President Biden would nominate not the objectively best pick but a "lesser" Black woman to be the next Supreme Court justice.

Shapiro's tweets were met with backlash from the law school’s Black Law Students Association and over 600 other Georgetown Law students and alumni who signed a petition calling for the school to fire Shapiro, citing his "racist rhetoric."

Meanwhile, some students are demanding Georgetown rescind Shapiro’s appointment and terminate its relationship with him entirely.

Talks about a sit-in are circulating on social media along with a reported "cry room" for upset students to voice their concerns.

An anti-Trump professor at Georgetown University is taking heat for a tweet saying white Republican senators who were at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's hearing Friday should be castrated and endure a miserable death.

Dr. Carol Christine Fair, an associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown, said white Republican senators, specifically Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, who defended Kavanaugh in a fiery speech, “deserve miserable deaths." Fair went on to say in her Saturday message that the living should “castrate their corpses and feed them to swine."

“Look at [this] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement,” she wrote. “All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

A Georgetown University spokesperson told Fox News the views of faculty members expressed in their private capacities are their own and not the views of the university.

"Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable,” the statement said.

A Seattle teachers' union is offering "affinity groups" for "white Jewish and white co-conspirators" in order to "…grow their anti-racist skills." The groups can be counter towards teachers' "clock hours" as part of their required continuing education.

The Seattle Education Association (SEA), the union for teachers in Seattle Public Schools, sent an email obtained by The Post Millennial, to their members on February 8 advertising the event.

According to the description of the event, "The SEA White Co-Conspirators Affinity Group is a space for our white co-conspirators to work intentionally on understanding white culture, white supremacy, and white privilege. It is a time for White Co-Conspirators to critically analyze their personal and structural actions within our jobs and outside world in order to grow their anti-racist skills."

"We are also holding a White Jewish Co-Conspirators Affinity Space from 4:30-5:30 PM to help every educator feel brave in our anti-racist work!"

Brooke told The Post Millennial, "'Progressive' educators are pedaling the same racist stereotype driving the persecution of Jews since the beginning of time: that we are monied and privilege, stepping on the rest of society. Most members of polite society now condemn when Hitler and the Nazis peddled this rhetoric. Now, the antisemites have realized it’s kosher to peddle the same hatred as long as they lump all Jews with whites and persecute us in the veneer of Social Justice, or in this case, 'anti-racism,' which generalizes one entire race of people that they owe something to everybody else and must ‘pay back’ for somehow wronging the rest of the world."

"Jews are White now that it’s considered bad to be White. When it was considered bad to be non-white, we were non white."

Brooke continued, "It seemed like the hosts of tonight’s re-education session were only going allow the 'good' Jews in the meeting who apologize for being Jewish and adopt their narrative about us. I was forced to say whether or not I 'identify as Jewish.' What has changed since the times when academic institutions placed racial quotas on admitting Jews?"

Co-conspirator–The proactive phase
Co-conspirators work alongside the communities they support. They have, seek, and create meaningful relationships with the people they actively support. Co-conspirators show up with (not just for) BIPOC people and/or LGBTQIA+ folks and they listen. They do not co-opt the cause, instead, they respect the work already being done by leaders in justice spaces and offer meaningful support. Co-conspirators are not trying to be saviors and do not fancy themselves superior to the people they work alongside. Instead, they are conscious of their privilege and they use it as fuel to help erode barriers that are tougher for affected constituencies to surmount. Co-conspirators ask how they can show up for the people already doing the work and they leverage their privilege in service of freedoms that they already enjoy. I believe what separates co-conspirators from allies is the willingness to put yourself on the line. Whether it’s assets, reputation, time, connections or other resources––co-conspirators always have skin in the game.

I wish Jimmy would post!

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot Critical Race Theory is not taught in public schools.

But, But, But 1. This is not critical race theory 2. This is an affinity group, not a curriculum.

What this is is "anti-racism" training which is heavily influenced by CRT principles.
That teachers that attended this group are not going to teach these principles strains credulity.

Seems he's joined the long list of members who have taken a break from WP

But is this teacher training not CRT for kids?

Did you have to scan the whole internet to find one teachers union (Jewish?) in Seattle who had a somewhat confusing idea and call it CRT? The language is admittedly provocative, however, these Jewish? teachers are mature enough and educated enough to know the purpose of "affinity groups" and co-conspirators here. I don't think this is any more controversial than Jane Elliot's "blue eyes brown eyes" exercise which has been part of teacher training since 1968

Jimmy suffered a very bad stroke but after a lot of hard work and to the enrichment of WP is posting here again.

This is apparently being sponsored teachers union for the Seattle public schools meaning it is not a Jewish teachers union. The affinity groups are for white teachers and white Jewish members of the teachers union.
I specifically said that anti racism training is not CRT but is based heavily on CRT principles. I would assume those that attend these groups are supporters of these “provocative” principles and that being human some of these beliefs will slip into the lessons.