Tag: political correctness

“Vast DEI Bureaucracy” Hurting U.S. Armed Forces; ASU Study Finds

A new Arizona State University study suggests that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts in the United States military are ineffective.

The study done by the university’s Center for American Institutions argued that there is a emphasis on training new soldiers about social issues like “unconscious bias” and “intersectionality” in a way the center says runs contrary to typical American ideals. The study examined DEI plan’s in different sector of the military, including DEI office staffing and education at academies like West Point.

“The massive DEI bureaucracy, its training and its pseudo-scientific assessments are at best distractions that absorb valuable time and resources,” the executive summary states. “At worst they communicate the opposite of the military ethos: e.g. that individual demographic differences come before team and mission.”

Donald Critchlow, director of the center, wrote in the introduction it was focused on looking at the influence of Critical Race Theory in the United States Armed Forces training.

“The Commission on Civic Education in the Military began as a project to review civic education in the military. Our research team did not expect to find Critical Race Theory so embedded and pervasive. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are found throughout the U.S. Armed Forces and our service academies,” Critchlow wrote. “This year long study documents just how pervasive these training programs are in our Armed Forces and Service Academies and that DEI extends well beyond just formal training programs in the military and service academies.”

“The Founders of our nation understood and feared a politicized military. History had shown them that a politicized army easily became the tool of tyranny. The Armed Forces of the United States has proudly upheld this long tradition of separating mission from politics,” he continued.

In terms of recommendations, the study suggests that DEI offices be completely scrapped, but said it may be politically unlikely for the time being.

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California teachers were right to severely punish girl, 7, for writing these words under Black Lives Matter drawing she gave to friend, judge rules

A California judge has ruled that teachers were right to punish a seven-year-old girl over a Black Lives Matter drawing because ‘she’s too young to have First Amendment rights.’

The first grader was banned from recess and drawing pictures at Viejo Elementary in Orange County after she added the words ‘any life’ below Black Lives Matter on a picture she drew and and gave to a black friend.

The picture showed the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ with four round shapes in various different tones of brown, beige and yellow, which was intended to ‘represent her friends’ who were ‘racially-mixed’. 

The girl’s family filed a lawsuit last year against the Capistrano Unified School District, claiming her First Amendment Rights were violated during the 2021 incident.

But US Central District Court Judge David Card ruled that ‘Students have the right to be free from speech that denigrates their race while at school’. Card added that the drawing was not protected by the First Amendment because of the age of the girl, named B.B. in the suit, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Judge Card wrote: ‘An elementary school … is not a marketplace of ideas… Thus, the downsides of regulating speech there is not as significant as it is in high schools, where students are approaching voting age and controversial speech could spark conducive conversation.’

Moreover, Judge Card wrote, ‘a parent might second-guess (the principal’s) conclusion, but his decision to discipline B.B. belongs to him, not the federal courts.’

Card added that ‘Undoubtedly, B.B.’s intentions were innocent… B.B. testified that she gifted the Drawing to M.C. to make her feel comfortable after her class learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’

B.B. was punished by her school after her friend, known as M.C. in the suit, took the picture home, where a parent saw it and found it offensive, emailing the school and demanding they take action.

This prompted principal Jesus Becerra to tell B.B. the drawing was inappropriate and racist. He then punished B.B. by making her publicly apologize on the playground to her classmates and teachers. B.B. was also banned from recess and from drawing pictures for two weeks.

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The Neo-Tribes of Anthropology

Anthropology’s main purpose is to teach us about others—other cultures and people from other times. The study of the other was meant to show us human diversity and similarities. This helps us figure out what stems from culture and what lies in our biology, often with a focus on the shared biology that makes us human.

Anthropology is a wondrous field with research that takes us from the depth of the Amazonian jungle, where Napoleon Chagnon conducted his groundbreaking research on the “fierce people” (the Yanomami), to the Siberian steppes, where anthropologists discovered tattooed ice mummies of the Iron Age buried with their horses. In order to draw conclusions about their discoveries, anthropologists integrate, form bonds with, and converse with those whom they are studying. They also practice archaeology, one of the four subfields of anthropology, which includes, in its data, structures as grand as the Giza pyramids in Egypt and the slender bone needle found in Idaho’s Buhl Burial, which is over 10,000 years old.

Archaeology is the science of what’s been left behind. Physical anthropologists, now often called biological anthropologists, look at fossils such as those of our nearly two-million-year ancestors Homo erectus to reconstruct past lives—the lives of those who couldn’t leave a written record. All of these aspects of traditional anthropology, and the many more I haven’t covered, are fascinating, data-driven, and reveal clearly why anthropology is a true social science.

Anthropologists have provided us with better ways to extract DNA from badly deteriorated human remains. Techniques used in Neanderthal studies are now employed in all sorts of fields, including forensics. Anthropologists have also helped us understand the origins of diseases, for example through their work on the prion diseases (like mad cow and Kuru) tied to cannibalism. Anthropologists have brought us together by figuring out adaptive purposes and other causes of human variation, thereby explaining away discriminatory myths about human differences.

Throughout the U.S., biological anthropology has been a popular choice for students looking to fulfill their science general-education requirement. Cultural anthropology and archaeology often fulfill other general-education requirements, too. Thus, in the U.S., many students of all majors take at least one anthropology class.

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Mission Creep and DEI in the Secret Service

If you ask most people about the role of the Secret Service, they would say it protects the president and presidential candidates. However, the Secret Service now has various other functions unrelated to presidential protection, raising the question of whether guarding the president should be an “also.”

Additionally, the president used to be guarded by big, strong men. Why is it wrong to consider that men and women have different skills and sizes, and perhaps guarding the president should remain the domain of big, strong men?

The “Our Protective Mission” section of the Secret Service website explains that its original mission of presidential protection was approved by Congress in 1906. However, the current mission is much broader, stating: “One Integrated Mission, Protect our nation’s leaders and financial infrastructure.” It outlines four mission areas:

National Security: Protect world leaders, major events, and key locations.

Public Safety: Share threat assessment expertise for public safety.

Economic Safeguard: Protect the integrity of U.S. currency.

Cyber Investigations: Fight cybercrime to safeguard America’s financial infrastructure.

Mission creep could be one reason the Secret Service has struggled with its original mission, leading to numerous failures. This includes two dead presidents, one dead presidential candidate, and attempted assassinations on six U.S. presidents, two of whom were shot.

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Harvard Leftist Summer Reading List Recommends Book On How To Indoctrinate Students With CRT

Harvard University’s summer reading list includes various books covering topics like transgenderism, feminism, and racism, including one book that states that educators should teach their students ideas related to Critical Race Theory.

We’ve got recommendations from the Harvard community, titles from Harvard authors, and a glimpse inside some new releases,” the school’s website reads.

A page titled “Need a good book?” under Harvard’s “Summer Reads” section advertises “We Want to Do More Than Survive,” a book that argues that “the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color.”

Harvard doctoral student, DeAnza Cook, says the book is a “powerful appeal to build transformative educational homeplaces rooted in abolitionist pedagogies for liberation,” and recommends it for “[diversity, inclusion, and belonging] educators and enthusiasts.”

The book urges that educators “must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements.”

The author of the book, Dr. Bettina Love, is a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who previously said her work focuses on “help[ing] white people become less racist.” She also previously wrote that educators should “[r]emove all punitive or disciplinary practices that spirit murder Black, Brown, and Indigenous children.”

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Three Columbia deans permanently removed over disparaging texts containing ‘antisemitic tropes’

Three Columbia University deans have been “permanently removed” from their posts for sharing “very troubling” texts that “disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes,” school officials said Monday.

The three administrators — Susan Chang-Kim, Matthew Patashnick and Cristen Kromm — have been on leave since last month since it emerged they’d been involved in the disparaging text exchange that unfolded during a panel discussion about antisemitism on campus.

“This incident revealed behavior and sentiments that were not only unprofessional, but also, disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes,” Columbia president Minouche Shafik said in a statement.

“Whether intended as such or not, these sentiments are unacceptable and deeply upsetting, conveying a lack of seriousness about the concerns and the experiences of members of our Jewish community that is antithetical to our university’s values and the standards we must uphold in our community.”

Provost Angela Olinto said that “the three staff members involved have been permanently removed from their positions at Columbia College and remain on leave at this time.” It was not immediately clear what their current status was on staff.

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Outraged Citizen Unleashes on City Council For Passing One of the Nation’s Toughest Hate Crime Laws

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, now has one of the nation’s toughest hate crime laws.

The Coeur d’Alene City Council unanimously approved a new hate crime ordinance, introducing a significant addition to the municipal code. 

This new chapter establishes a separate offense for individuals who commit an existing offense with a bias motive, Krem2 reported.

The Idaho Tribune described the law as “draconian,” arguing it “will basically make it illegal to think the wrong way.”

“If found guilty, you’ll be sentenced to ‘[re]education.’”

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America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris

There is a raging debate in corporate America on the future of DEI, aka Diversity ­Equity and Inclusion, because it is literally destroying businesses that go there.

And yet the American public may soon be subjected to DEI writ large in the next president of the United States, if Kamala Harris finds her way to the top of the Democratic ticket while Joe Biden wilts away as the party’s presidential nominee after his horrific ­debate performance. 

Yes, maybe the most irrepressibly fatuous politician in America may become the leader of the free world because the Democratic Party is unable to break its DEI stranglehold. 

Harris is already being hailed as the president-in-waiting as her boss Sleepy Joe — despite his defiant TV vow to George Stephanopoulos Friday night to stay in the race — increasingly faces reality that his chances of besting Trump are slim.

Calls that he should step down are mounting, paving the way for his VP to land at the top of the ticket.

Even if does stay and achieves the near impossible by pulling out a victory, you can bet he won’t survive four years.

Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default. 

For the American people it would be such an unfair and odd coronation.

Remember, she’s part of an administration that gave us inflation, world chaos and an open border that literally invites terrorists to enter the country and kill people.

She has spent nearly four years as Biden’s No. 2 flubbing every assignment given to her, including the border mess. 

That’s on top of her manifest ­unlikability; her word salad whenever she tries to sound smart; her cackle when she laughs; her vaulting ambition.

She once suggested during a 2020 primary debate that her current boss was a racist for being against federally mandated busing.

But Biden’s busing stench wasn’t nasty enough to stop her from jumping at the chance to serve as his VP when DEI came calling. 

Following the 2020 death of ­George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, the pressure on Biden to pick a woman of color as his running mate was intense.

(And he boxed himself in by publicly saying his running mate would be a woman.)

Harris checked all the boxes: Her father, an academic with a Ph.D., is from Jamaica; her late mother, a biologist, was Indian.

VP Harris was a California state attorney general and a US senator. 

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Schoolchildren Are Being Indoctrinated With Hard Left Ideology Under the Guise of Teaching Them to be ‘Inclusive’

Not so long ago I rewatched the original Jurassic Park and was struck by Ian Malcolm’s monologue in which he says to John Hammond, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” It struck me that this unintentionally captured the essence of a growing problem in today’s education system: EDI. School managers and teachers are so eager to rush into whatever is trending in EDI. So convinced are they, without any evidence, of EDI’s supposed moral, ethical, educational and societal benefits that they neglect to consider whether they should be promoting it. 

The virtues of EDI are extolled throughout the education system and my own school is no different. Schools openly bow down to EDI and an entire industry has developed to ensure EDI is embedded across the education system, despite evidence that it has had detrimental effects in the workplace. It is commonplace now to see schools advertising themselves as “inclusive” and numerous websites have popped up to promote EDI, such as the Inclusive Schools Network. The EDI approach has ostensibly been embraced because Britain is now a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society and it’s supposedly essential to help tackle discrimination, break down stereotypes, facilitate better communication and foster social cohesion. However, I think the push for “inclusivity” distorts education, disempowers the individual and poses a threat to a free society.

One assertion that’s frequently made these days is that “inclusive language” should be used in lessons. But what, exactly, is it? Who defines it? And how can such a thing exist in any case? The economist Ludwig von Mises observed in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis how Marxism thrived on “dialectic artificialities” and a “word-fetishism” which made it “possible to unite incompatible ideas and demands” (e.g. Queers for Palestine). This linguistic sleight of hand can be used to brainwash the broader population, and this is exactly what “inclusive language” does. Those who advocate “inclusive language” claim it’s a tool for promoting open conversations. But for “inclusive language” to exist and function, it must by its very nature be at odds with intellectual diversity, free speech and democratic values. It requires a central authority to dictate what is or is not inclusive, thereby strengthening that authority’s power, while discriminating against those who are deemed to have said something offensive. 

The drive to use “inclusive language” and to be “inclusive” is in reality exclusionary and intolerant. A cursory glance through some typical ‘guidance’, such as that produced by the University of Leeds, reveals that it usually focuses on what not to say rather than on what to say. The implications of this are worrying as it’s a method of importing identity politics and ideological authoritarianism into schools. As John Stuart Mill noted in On Liberty, “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility”. By pursuing “inclusive language”, school managers are going along with this linguistic totalitarianism and, in my experience, are never open to any discussion about whether they are embarking on the best approach for pupils and staff. 

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Use ‘parent’s sibling’ instead of ‘uncle’: Biden’s Department of the Interior releases ‘Inclusive Language Guide’

The Department of the Interior has released a 24-page guide instructing bureaucrats to use “inclusive language” to prevent and combat discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. The guide instructs individuals to avoid using gendered terms like “uncle” or “aunt” and to use “parent’s sibling” instead. 

Obtained by the Daily Wire, the guide suggested using inclusive, bias-free language and provided a list of over 100 terms as alternatives to gender-specific terms. For instance, it recommended replacing “husband” and “wife” with “spouse,” “partner,” or “significant other,” and using “flight deck” instead of “cockpit.” It also suggested referring to the “different sex” rather than the “opposite sex” and describing a “gay” person as an “LGBTQIA+ person.”

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