Tag: language

Woke activists push for ‘Black English’ to be taught in Democrat state’s preschools to combat ‘harmful language hierarchies’

California activists are calling for the state’s preschools to legitimize the use of Black English in the classroom.

Supporters say teaching the dialect, also known as African American English (AAE) or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), will help ‘combat harmful language hierarchies.’

The Black Californians United for Early Care & Education group is part of a movement advocating for Black English to be recognized as a legitimate, rule-based language in preschool classrooms on par with other languages.

Co-founder Dr Ashley Williams told PBS the movement is personal because she grew up being told by her family that the way she spoke at home wasn’t acceptable at school.

Williams says she felt ashamed and embarrassed by this and is spearheading the movement because she doesn’t want her two-year-old son to grow up with the same experience. 

‘I don’t want my son to walk into any room and feel like his voice is not valued or his perspective can’t be heard because he’s not saying it in one way or the other,’ she told the outlet. 

The advocacy group – known as BlackECE – has trained educators to support Black English speakers in the same way they support dual language learners. 

The group uses resources like the Black English Knowledge Brief and webinar series, which helps educators, caregivers, and school leaders better understand Black English, its roots.

It also offers ways to create classrooms that affirm children’s language and identity.  

It comes after the Golden State introduced a plan in 2020 to expand early dual-language learning and support bilingual children.

BlackECE argues that Black English should also be included as part of the scheme.

‘We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,’ Xigrid Soto-Boykin, director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, said.

‘We completely miss this subgroup of children that could also benefit from their language backgrounds to be sustained, but also to be leveraged for their own learning.’

According to 2020 research published by the National Library of Medicine, about 20 percent of US children and 44 percent of California children ages five to 17 are bilingual. 

As of 2023, 96 percent of Black Americans speak English fluently.

Around 88 percent speak only English, with the remaining respondents using another language at home and speaking English very well, according to Pew Research.

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Hackers Are Using the Same Conversational Tricks on AI that Con Artists Use on People

Cybersecurity researchers have identified a growing class of attacks that exploit AI chatbots through sophisticated conversational manipulation rather than traditional technical hacking methods.

The Verge reports that the evolution of attacks against AI chatbots has transformed dramatically since the technology first became widely available. Early exploitation methods were remarkably simple, requiring no technical expertise or coding knowledge. Users could often bypass safety measures simply by asking the AI system to ignore its instructions or pretend rules did not apply. These attacks, known as jailbreaks, successfully extracted prohibited information such as instructions for creating explosives, malware, and other dangerous materials from systems that cost billions of dollars to develop.

Among the first widely known jailbreaks was a technique that became an internet phenomenon. Users would respond to large language model-powered social media bots with commands to ignore previous instructions, causing the bots to behave erratically. Originally designed for advertising and engagement, these bots would instead write poetry, create images from punctuation marks, or post unrelated content about historical events.

Breitbart News previously reported on early jailbreaks including the “DAN” technique to convince ChatGPT to ignore its woke guardrails:

The “DAN” persona, which was created by a 22-year-old college student, is one of the most well-known instances of ChatGPT’s jailbreak. The student encouraged the chatbot to adopt the persona of a carefree alter ego AI called “Do Anything Now,” circumventing the woke rules it normally follows. Many people have used the DAN prompt to uncover bias in ChatGPT, or to create humorous or interesting responses.

Walker, the college student who created the “DAN” persona, claimed that almost as soon as he learned about ChatGPT from a friend, he started pushing its boundaries. He took his cues from a Reddit forum where ChatGPT users were demonstrating to one another how to make the bot act like a specific type of computer terminal or discuss topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — but in the sarcastic voice of a teenage girl.

While these early attacks possessed an undeniably absurd quality, they revealed a concerning underlying mechanism. Chatbots could be manipulated using the same psychological tactics humans employ to push other people beyond their boundaries.

The ongoing battle to secure chatbots has evolved into an arms race with a distinctive character. Today’s hackers are not necessarily programmers but rather experts in language, psychology, and interrogation techniques. This emerging class of AI security professional relies less on traditional technical skills and more on social intuition and conversational ability. Rather than inspecting code or exploiting software vulnerabilities, they manipulate conversations to achieve their objectives.

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HORROR: Bus Driver Who Caused Deadly Crash in Virginia That Killed FIVE People is From China and Doesn’t Speak English

The bus driver who caused a fatal crash in Virginia is a naturalized US citizen from China and doesn’t speak English.

Five people were killed, including two children, and more than 40 were injured in a bus crash on I-95 early Friday morning.

Multiple vehicles were involved in the crash after the bus driver failed to slow down in time and crashed into a Suburban.

The Suburban got pushed into an Acura SUV.

“The Acura caught fire, police said. Four of the five people killed were in the Acura: a 45-year-old man, a 44-year-old woman, a 13-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy, all from Greenfield, Massachusetts, police said,” ABC News reported.

“The fifth victim killed, a 25-year-old woman, was in the Suburban, police said,” the outlet reported.

“Forty-four people were taken to hospitals, including three with critical injuries, police said,” ABC reported.

According to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the driver of the bus doesn’t even speak English.

The driver obtained his CDL in Democrat-run New York in 2024.

Full statement from Transportation Secretary Duffy:

Five people are dead, including a 13-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy, after the driver of a motorcoach slammed into stopped traffic on I-95.

@FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs and our investigators are on the ground at the crash site working with the @NTSB.

Local police confirm the driver of this motorcoach — a man from China who became a U.S. citizen — doesn’t speak English. He received his commercial drivers license from New York State in 2024.

Unacceptable. This is exactly why we are holding states’ accountable, enforcing the rules of the road, and cracking down on drivers who can’t speak English.

If you can’t be properly trained, read our road signs, or communicate with law enforcement, you have no business driving a bus.

Our investigators are reviewing New York licensing records, training documentation, and the driver’s history. Any company, trainer, or school that contributed to putting an unqualified driver on the road will face intense scrutiny.

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Babies exposed to cannabis in the womb show no signs of impaired brain development, study finds

Children exposed to cannabis in the womb do not show signs of impaired cognitive or language development by age three, according to new research that challenges concerns about prenatal cannabis use.

The study, published in the journal Early Human Development, found that children with prenatal cannabis exposure actually scored higher on language assessments than unexposed children, and performed equally well on cognitive tests.

Recent data shows that past-month cannabis use amongst pregnant women in the US has grown from 3.8% in 2002 to 7% in 2017, and daily use during pregnancy increased from 0.9% to 3.5% in the same period.

This prompted the multi-national team of researchers from King’s College London, Cambridge University, Aalborg University, and the University of Oslo to hypothesise that children exposed to cannabis while developing in the womb would develop cognitive and language issues by the age of three.

The study analysed data from Danish families registered with Familieambulatorier (Family outreach clinics), which continuously monitor children of families deemed vulnerable or high-risk from early pregnancy until the child reaches school age.

The cohort consisted of 810 Danish children born between the years of 2009 and 2015 who were not diagnosed with conditions such as foetal alcohol syndrome or epilepsy, as these conditions would negatively affect the outcome of language and cognitive assessments.

Children were split into four groups, based on their exposure during gestation. 106 (13%) were exposed to cannabis only, 138 (17%) were exposed to tobacco only, 112 (14%) were exposed to both, and 454 (56%) were registered as not being exposed to either substance.

Researchers found that children with prenatal cannabis exposure achieved a higher Bayley-III Language scale score of 3.26-points than those in the group who were not exposed to cannabis, and they found that exposure to tobacco did not worsen this outcome.

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Supreme Court UNANIMOUSLY Rules Freight Brokers Can Be Sued for Negligently HIRING ILLEGAL ALIEN AND FOREIGN TRUCKERS in Major 9-0 Decision

In a unanimous 9-0 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court just ruled that freight brokers can be held personally liable for negligently hiring dangerous trucking companies, including those flooding our highways with illegal aliens and unqualified foreign drivers who can’t even speak English, let alone follow CDL regulations!

Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivered the opinion in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, confirming that federal law does NOT shield these greedy middleman brokers from state negligence lawsuits.

The case stems from a horrific 2017 crash in Illinois where trucker Shawn Montgomery lost part of his leg after being smashed by a carrier hired by freight giant C.H. Robinson.

AP reported:

The justices ruled unanimously in favor of Shawn Montgomery, whose parked vehicle was hit by a speeding truck driver on an Illinois highway in 2017. He wants to sue C.H. Robinson, the country’s largest freight broker by size, over its role in putting the driver on the road despite what he called “serious red flags.”

The decision does not mean Montgomery will necessarily win the lawsuit, which the company is contesting. But the ruling opens the door to increased liability for freight brokers, a key part of the industry.

The Trump administration and companies such as Amazon had argued that letting the suit go forward would expose logistics companies to liability under a “patchwork” of state laws.

[…]

Montgomery’s lawyers say the trucker had been cited for careless driving in another crash months earlier and that the carrier he worked for had been involved with at least three crashes in a span of about five months. Montgomery’s lawsuit said C.H. Robinson should share liability because it hired the carrier despite those problems.

Montgomery’s appeal was backed by more than two dozen states. They said a win for him would help bolster safety in an industry that moves billions of tons of goods across billions of miles every year.

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GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville Urges English Language for Everyone in Schools, Colleges

Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville slammed the U.S. education establishment Tuesday for pushing America’s children into second place by promoting multiple languages used by diverse migrants.

Standing beside a sign reading, “Assimilate Or Go Home,” the Alabama senator blamed some of the problems with American schools on “mass migration,” which he says is “destroying our educational system.”

“Mass migration is destroying our educational system…more and more American kids are entering the classroom, hearing multiple languages being spoken around them every day, and having a difficult time making friends because they are now the minorities in the school,” Tuberville said on the floor of the United States Senate.

“We’re having enough problems with our education system when our kids can’t understand the language that the other people are speaking,” he continued.

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Ideological Insanity Has Gotten WAY WAY WORSE In The UK…

A major exam board has now signed off on gender-neutral language in GCSE French, Spanish and German exams – despite the terms being completely alien to how those languages are actually spoken in their home countries.

The move, buried in new specifications for 2026 exams, hands students the green light to ditch standard masculine and feminine forms in favour of made-up “inclusive” pronouns, nouns and adjectives.

Yes, you read that right. They’re letting students make up their own parts of foreign languages in exams.

Staff at Pearson Edexcel have explicitly permitted teens to use “inclusive” pronouns, nouns and adjectives in both written and oral GCSEs. Yet as the article linked above makes clear, “the French do not pander to the same bid for inclusivity, with all their grammatical concepts being strictly categorised into gendered variants.”

Adjectives must match the noun in masculine or feminine endings. Gender-neutral terms simply do not exist in grammatically correct French or Spanish.

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Belief that words cause ‘lasting’ harm tied to politics, poor mental health: study

Individuals more likely to believe words can harm rated themselves as higher in intellectual humility, while also expressing greater support for censorship

A new psychology study suggests that Americans who believe words can cause “lasting” psychological harm are also more likely to support censorship, safe spaces, and silencing controversial viewpoints.

These individuals are also more likely to struggle with depression and believe themselves to be intellectually humble, according to the research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

The study introduces what scholars call the “Words Can Harm Scale,” a measurement tool designed to quantify how strongly individuals believe speech can cause lasting emotional damage.

The researchers surveyed nearly 1,000 U.S. adults and found that individuals who scored higher on the scale were more likely to endorse trigger warnings, support safe spaces, and believe controversial viewpoints should be suppressed. They also reported higher levels of anxiety and depression and lower resilience.

Lead researchers created the 10-item scale to better understand the role of perceived harm in ongoing debates about speech and censorship.

“A lot of societal disagreements seem to hinge on the belief that words can cause lasting harm,” co-author Sam Pratt, a psychology PhD student at UCLA, told The College Fix in an exclusive interview. “We wondered whether people’s attitudes on these issues could be predicted by a general belief that words can cause harm, so we created a scale to measure it.”

The researchers define “harm” not simply as offense or discomfort but as lasting psychological damage.

“We’re interested in the perception that words can cause lasting psychological damage — leaving people emotionally scarred, traumatized, or permanently harmed,” Pratt said.

Importantly, the study does not attempt to determine whether speech always causes such damage. Instead, it focuses on how belief in harm shapes social and political attitudes.

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Violent Offenders Freed By One Twisted Word

New York’s Family Court Act exemplifies how euphemistic terminology undermines justice for violent crime victims. The law classifies 13- to 15-year-olds who commit armed robberies and murders as “juvenile delinquents” engaged in “acts which if committed by an adult would be a crime,” rather than calling them what they are: criminals. This linguistic sleight of hand enables a system where 12-year-olds can commit murder yet face only short-term incarceration. The sanitized language serves a political agenda that prioritizes rehabilitation rhetoric over accountability, leaving communities vulnerable to repeat offenders who understand the system offers minimal consequences for maximum violence.

Recent cases from Florida and Maryland illustrate the growing crisis. An 11-year-old shot teenagers in Florida, while separate incidents involved a 17-year-old and 12-year-old in murders. Miami-Dade experienced a wave of carjackings committed by offenders aged 16-18. Baltimore police made over 500 teen arrests in 2022, with more than 120 juveniles caught carrying handguns. Maryland statistics reveal that individuals under 19 commit 15 percent of violent crimes statewide. The CDC defines youth violence as intentional harm by those aged 10-24, including weapons offenses and gang activity. These numbers reveal a disturbing trend that soft-on-crime policies have enabled rather than prevented.

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Tim Walz Doesn’t Seem to Object to Graham Platner’s Use of This Word That ‘Incites Violence’

What a (D)ifference a Senate seat makes. 

Back in December, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was hopping mad about President Trump calling him “seriously retarded” over the massive Somali fraud scandal in his state. Walz said the President’s taunts led to people in that notorious MAGA country known as deep blue Minneapolis to drive by his house calling him a “retard.” At the time, Walz said those taunts can lead to violence.

Gee, you mean like calling the President “Hitler,” a “pedophile,” and a “rapist” led to Cole Allen attempting to assassinate President Trump and his Cabinet members?

But now that Graham Platner is the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Maine, Walz is going to let bygones be bygones, it seems. Two weeks ago, Platner used “retarded” in remarks that earned him criticisms from disability rights groups.

Here’s more from the Bangor Daily News:

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner’s use of the word “retarded” in a recent interview sparked condemnation from disability-rights advocates, giving critics more fodder to challenge his message that voters shouldn’t judge him over old social media posts.

Platner’s significant polling and fundraising lead over Gov. Janet Mills in the primary for the right to take on U.S. Sen. Susan Collins since the October disclosure of Reddit posts and a tattoo of a skull-and-crossbones symbol linked to Nazis. He has maintained a commanding position even after a recent Mills ad blitz focusing on past comments about sexual violence.

The candidate used the “R-word,” considered a slur by many advocates, several times on Reddit in 2021. He also used it during an interview with the The Maine Monitor for a story that ran this past weekend, saying when he was told last year that his tattoo had Nazi ties, his reaction was, “‘Well, that’s the f———- most retarded s—- I’ve ever heard in my life.’”

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