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Subversive Education

Last year, the Wake County Public School System, which serves the greater Raleigh, North Carolina area, held an equity-themed teachers’ conference with sessions on “whiteness,” “microaggressions,” “racial mapping,” and “disrupting texts,” encouraging educators to form “equity teams” in schools and push the new party line: “antiracism.”

The February 2020 conference, attended by more than 200 North Carolina public school teachers, began with a “land acknowledgement,” a ritual recognition suggesting that white North Carolinians are colonizers on stolen Native American land. Next, the superintendent of Wake County Public Schools, Cathy Moore, introduced the day’s program and shuffled teachers to breakout sessions across eight rooms. Freelance reporter A.P. Dillon obtained the documents from the sessions through a public records request and provided them to City Journal.

At the first session, “Whiteness in Ed Spaces,” school administrators provided two handouts on the “norms of whiteness.” These documents claimed that “(white) cultural values” include “denial,” “fear,” “blame,” “control,” “punishment,” “scarcity,” and “one-dimensional thinking.” According to notes from the session, the teachers argued that “whiteness perpetuates the system” of injustice and that the district’s “whitewashed curriculum” was “doing real harm to our students and educators.” The group encouraged white teachers to “challenge the dominant ideology” of whiteness and “disrupt” white culture in the classroom through a series of “transformational interventions.”

Parents, according to the teachers, should be considered an impediment to social justice. When one teacher asked, “How do you deal with parent pushback?” the answer was clear: ignore parental concerns and push the ideology of antiracism directly to students. “You can’t let parents deter you from the work,” the teachers said. “White parents’ children are benefiting from the system” of whiteness and are “not learning at home about diversity (LGBTQ, race, etc.).” Therefore, teachers have an obligation to subvert parental wishes and beliefs. Any “pushback,” the teachers explained, is merely because white parents fear “that they are going to lose something” and find it “hard to let go of power [and] privilege.”

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Leader of Viral ‘Birds Aren’t Real’ Movement Swears He’s Not Joking

It’s no secret that conspiracy theories are spreading like never before, thanks to the internet. Whether they’re dangerous and toxic ideologies like QAnon, or outlandish claims that are incorrect but less threatening (think: the flat-Earth theory), conspiracies have become part of the fabric of daily life in America.

One “theory” that seems intentionally nonsensical but is nonetheless gaining traction on social media is the “Birds Aren’t Real” movement, which is built around the claim that, well, birds aren’t real.

The unsubstantiated theory alleges that, between 1959 and 2001, the government killed off all birds and replaced them with surveillance drones. It’s such a bizarre idea that it almost seems like a parody of other conspiracy theories—and it very well might be, despite what the movement’s apparent leader insists.

According to its website, the Birds Aren’t Real movement started in the 1970s, although its frontman, Peter McIndoe, told Newsweek that it started in the ’50s—an inconsistency that might be a sign from McIndoe that the whole thing is one big gag.

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The Left’s Culture War Is A Dangerous Distraction That Warrants Total Resistance

Bill Maher made an interesting point on his show last Friday, arguing that America’s obsession with political correctness is crippling its institutions, leaving the country hobbled in the geopolitical race with China. That’s an accurate assessment, one that also tasks the defenders of cultural sanity with resisting wokeness while not getting bogged down by trivialities at the cost of basic efficiency.

That’s an impossible balance to strike. Despite the left’s false but emergent narrative that conservatives are foolishly and disproportionately obsessed with the culture war, I’d contend the response is largely proportionate. That isn’t to say flashpoints like the fight over Dr. Seuss are never milked or depicted inaccurately by some. Of course they are.

But it’s clear that ignoring and conceding perceivably small battles like, for instance, six Dr. Seuss books or Mr. Potato Head is what empowers the left’s culture warriors to take control of everything. By dismissing flare-ups of insanity on college campuses or in the legacy media, leftists normalized their radical new standards before the public even saw it coming. It’s like the metaphor of the boiling frog. Death by a thousand cuts.

Standards are set in the small dust-ups. The legacy press covers them from the left, then corporations and government institutions respond to the pressure, sometimes convinced the cost-benefit analysis suggests it’s easier to roll over. But rolling over sets the standards, and the standards are unjust.

But those standards are also now the ones by which we’re forced to live, lest we face social and professional consequences for alleged bigotry. Bear in mind that workers without the financial means of a canceled celebrity or journalist are hurt most by those rigid strictures of cancel culture, forced to violate their consciences or suffer financial consequences for perceived transgressions.

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The Myth That the US Leads the World in Mass Shootings

If you asked me this morning which nation has the most mass shootings in the world, I would have said, with perhaps a flicker of hesitation, the United States.

This is a tad embarrassing to admit because I’m pretty familiar with shooting statistics, having written several articles on gun violence and the Second Amendment. Below is a basic overview of gun violence in America. While gun homicides have been steadily declining for decades in the US, mass shootings have indeed been trending upward.

This fact alone probably would not have led me to believe that the US leads the world in mass shootings, however. An assist goes to the US media and politicians.

The Dominant Narrative

“Let’s be clear,” President Obama said in 2015 after a shooting in North Carolina. “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

Sen. Harry Reid echoed this sentiment. “The United States is the only advanced country where this kind of mass violence occurs.”

Media headlines have left little doubt that the US leads the world in mass shootings. In fact, according to CNN, it isn’t even close.

The comments and data seem to conclusively say that the US leads the world in mass shootings and the violence is unique, a product of “America’s gun culture.”

It’s a slam dunk case except for one thing: it’s not true.

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Self-Proclaimed Black Lives Matter Leader Indicted For Spending Donations On House, Guns, And Prostitute

A self-proclaimed Black Lives Matter movement leader in Atlanta allegedly defrauded donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and used a “substantial portion” of the funds on personal expenses, such as buying a house and paying a prostitute.

Sir Maejor Page, 32, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Cleveland last week on three counts of money laundering and one count of wire fraud, the Department of Justice announced. Page is accused of creating a 501(c)(3) Facebook page called “Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta” and then using the page in 2020 — after the IRS revoked its tax-exempt charity status — to raise more than $450,000 from donors.

As alleged by the Department of Justice, Page suggested through his actions that the donations would be used to fight for racial and social justice even though the organization was no longer an official charity. Instead, Page allegedly used a “substantial portion” of the donations for his personal benefit, spending money on “entertainment, hotel rooms, clothing and firearms,” as well as purchasing a home in Toledo, Ohio, and paying a prostitute, according to the Department of Justice.

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