All the mandates. All the fanatical insistence that naturally acquired immunity, let alone religious or medical scruples, will suffice to avoid vaccination against COVID-19. And now we read this, regarding the $3,000 vaccine bonuses that Democrat Governor Dan McKee negotiated with government employees in the Council 94 labor union:
Workers can get the bonus without being vaccinated for COVID-19 if they are granted a religious or medical exemption.
They truly are a class set apart living by different standards, and they really don’t care if we know it. In fact, they very much want us to know it, because there’s nothing we can do about it.
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In October, the national good-government group Judicial Watch published training documentation from the Westerly, Rhode Island, school department received from a whistleblower. The training was developed by Rhode Island’s Highlander Institute, which recently transformed from a legitimate educational organization helping students with “learning differences” into one of the state’s leading promoters of the racist ideals of critical race theory.
The common thread is that “learning differences” provides the reasonable cover under which the activists smuggle radical left-wing concepts into the classroom. The idea is that “critical consciousness… can be a gateway to academic motivation and achievement for marginalized students.” Behind this reasonable objective, two tricks are played. The first is to assume that “marginalized students” have greater affinity for a left-wing ideology, and the second is to brush aside the opposing ideology that, presumably, has been serving non-marginalized students well.
How this works is going to take several posts to explain, but for the moment, let’s focus on one concept to which Judicial Watch makes direct mention. Slide 36 of 53 introduces the concept of “Individualism vs. Collectivism,” wherein a “sense of self & success is defined by one’s individual goals or defined by collective wellbeing & belonging.”
On its face, this seems like a straightforward lesson in cultural theory. Indeed, reading the side-by-side comparison of the two concepts on slide 37, Americans may recognize a need for balance. The success of Western Civilization has arguably been that it leverages both “independence and individual achievement” and “interdependence and group success.” Free marketers, in particular, make the point that the Western system of freedom, democracy, and capitalism maximizes our ability to collaborate even as we are driven by our own incentives.
One needn’t accept that theory in whole, however, to think that we can value “self-reliance” while also valuing “collective wisdom or resources of the group.” A healthy society wouldn’t see this question as either/or.
But the Highlander Institute does see it that way, as indicated by a box the slide puts around the “collectivism” column, making the choice. Another box in the upper right corner of the side explains why: “Many *BIPOC* students come from collectivist cultural backgrounds.”
The theory is, in other words, that minority students were raised into a collectivist perspective (trick #1), so teachers would help them to learn and achieve by structuring their lessons and activities in a way that leverages their cultural comfort.
The question not asked (trick #2) is whether the majority of students, who are not “BIPOC,” are more comfortable learning within a framework of individualism. Seventy-nine percent of Westerly students are white. To the extent there really are racial differences in learning styles, shouldn’t Westerly schools build their training and curricula around those students, while accommodating the other 21%?
As we’ll discuss in later posts, when it comes to the majority of students the standard shifts. The goal ceases to be maximizing motivation and achievement and becomes the enforcement of “equity.” Favored (minority) groups have their heritage, experiences, and cultures reinforced as positive and defining, while disfavored (majority) groups have their own heritage, experiences, and cultures deconstructed and maligned.
Featured image from a Rhode Island Department of Education report that includes only a single, blurry white student among its many photographs.
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An interesting (and long) article appeared in the Huffington Post today, in which Daniel Marans details the friction within Rhode Island’s progressive movement. The tone is of fair reportage, but a point of view does come through, starting with the implicit critique of the Political Co-op in the headline: “A Progressive Civil War Threatens the Left’s Power in Rhode Island.” In other words, “get your act together, Matt Brown & Co., and stop throwing rocks at your own team.”
Generally, the article is worth a read for two reasons. First, it counts as evidence that the national progressive movement (and its big donors) are paying attention to Rhode Island. And second, it lays bare the two strategies Rhode Islanders can expect from leftist politicians: lure Rhode Islanders toward the same end-goal incrementally over time or push for complete power and radical change at the greatest possible speed. Per Marans:
The battle lines are basically: organized labor, the Rhode Island Working Families Party and many mainstream environmental groups arrayed on one side. The Co-Op, the Sunrise Movement’s Providence chapter with which the Co-Op is closely aligned, Black Lives Matter Rhode Island, and many members of the Providence chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America are on the other. Prominent members of the rival factions are barely on speaking terms.
Take particular note that organized labor, in Rhode Island, is fully a part of the progressive movement in Rhode Island. I’ve been saying this for a long time, but it’s clarifying to see a national publication put it beyond question. Member services may be how the unions raise their money and gain in influence, but the reason for their existence — which all members ultimately endorse if they don’t leave their unions — is to advance radical change across the spectrum of economic and social issues.
Republicans, in particular, ought to consider these paragraphs, as well:
In November 2020, Republican candidate Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung ousted Mattiello by a whopping 18 percentage points. She did it with quiet help from progressive volunteers.
“It wasn’t about her,” said a Rhode Island progressive activist who knocked doors for Fenton-Fung. “It was about the larger power structures of what it would mean for him to not be speaker any more. And one more Republican in that chamber doesn’t mean a thing.”
Republicans in Cranston were had. Whether as thanks for the help or because she’s much more radical than most people expected, the progressives didn’t just get another “meaningless” Republican in Fenton-Fung, they got one who is actively advancing their policies.
The most important thing for actual Republicans and other conservatives in Rhode Island to understand is that there is no comparable support for our side. Moreover, we cannot expect some sort of dramatic shift or backlash as progressives increasingly edge out moderates and other non-radicals. We have to make that happen, ourselves, and help each other to do so.
Featured image by Tengyart on Unsplash.
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A network of Democrat and progressive legal teams has developed over the past two decades, and last year it arguably succeeded in frauding Joe Biden into the White House. Now Harvard University is turning on the spicket to create more, as Mark Hemingway reports for RealClearInvestigations:
Reporting the launch of the Election Law Clinic in April, Harvard Law Today said participating students will get course credit for working on political campaigns, as well as “hands-on litigation and advocacy work across a range of election law areas, with an initial focus on redistricting and voter suppression cases. Clinic offerings include federal and state litigation projects, as well as some advocacy opportunities.”
We’re past the time when it was reasonable to see these activities as anything other than a partisan and ideological effort to transform our country. That doesn’t mean they’re not within their rights, but it should mean we stop treating these institutions as non-partisan and non-ideological players in our society.
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Here’s an interesting section from William Jacobson’s running notes from the Rhode Island Superior Court hearing in the case of the National Education Association of Rhode Island and Nicole Solas:
The court then moved onto that anti-SLAPP portion of the case. Union attorney says Solas didn’t present evidence of bad faith or motive of harassment. Point out that Solas didn’t file an affidavit, or other evidence, so can’t invoke summary judgment. (My note – Solas relied on pleadings and admissions of NEA-RI for her motion, so not true no evidence presented.) Says Solas presented no evidence on “why” NEA-RI brought the suit.
SLAPP is an acronym for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” meaning that the plaintiff is using the process of the law to intimidate people who oppose them in the public sphere.
The first commenter on Jacobson’s post, Andy, puts his finger on an important point: “How is the fact that they are also trying to get her kicked off twitter NOT evidence in this case?” Add into the mix the union’s director diminishing her status as a stay-at-home mom on television.
While we’re at it, although this would be more difficult to prove as relevant, we can’t ignore that the only reason Nicole Solas is famous is that the South Kingstown school department (the other party the union sued) almost filed its own lawsuit against her. Unwanted attention led the school committee to pull up short of stepping into its own SLAPP suit, but the union had to know it was contributing to a pattern.
A bigger pattern is important to recognize, however.
Intimidation of one form or another is central to the operations of public-sector labor organizations, especially (lamentably) the teacher unions, usually with a veneer of plausible deniability. For instance, they’ll go to public hearings in order to disrupt and intimidate elected officials, which they’ll often do by shouting out things that seem unrelated, such as “speak up” or “you have to move the meeting.” I’ve seen them show up together to lay in wait for people they don’t like (such as former Providence Journal editorial page editor Ed Achorn) and then scatter when they see somebody (i.e., me) who will notice and report on it. In negotiations, they’ll go in nearby rooms and put on a performance of shouting to intimidate the managers.
These examples aren’t even getting into others that are more unions’ bread-and-butter strategies, like picketing fundraisers, inflating giant rat balloons, forcing elected officials to walk through gauntlet lines of same-colored t-shirts to get to meetings, and so on.
The biggest difference, here, is that their antics typically work to keep ordinary folks like Nicole Solas from stepping into the mix. Now that one has, it would be extremely refreshing for Judge Linda Rekas Sloan to acknowledge that the union has been caught out this time, but such an outcome would be surprising in the extreme in a Rhode Island court.
Featured image adapted from Eskay Lim on Unsplash.
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Robert Shibley highlights the story of Carl Neuss, whose alma mater, Cornell University, was seeking a donation in the millions from him. He expressed concern about liberal indoctrination in the college, so the alumni relations folks found a few non-radical professors from among its 1,695 faculty members to talk with the potential donor. This “best foot forward on free speech” (as Shibley puts it) backfired, because the moderate professors confirmed Neuss’s concerns.
Many institutions of higher education are no longer places of free inquiry and genuine tolerance. They are, as Neuss feared, indoctrination mills, even if they’ll teach some useful skills along the way.
That is very strongly the impression I’ve been getting from my alma mater, the University of Rhode Island, over the past year, which (let’s just say) reduces my enthusiasm for the school as a graduate and as a parent.
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Yes, of course an anecdote is not data, but this story rings the strange tone that’s been heard throughout public debates about COVID-19 and related treatments.
An elderly man on a family visit to the United States from Hong Kong was hospitalized with COVID-19. The hospital treated him with Remdesivir, and it didn’t work. The hospital refused to allow the patient to try Ivermectin, so the family went to court and won the right to bring in a doctor willing to administer it. Then the hospital refused to allow that doctor in because he wasn’t vaccinated, so the family went to court and won again.
He immediately began to recover and was out of the hospital within weeks.
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Disturbing. Discouraging. Depressing. Evil. Pick your adjective, but in its succinctness and utter refusal to acknowledge contrary points of view, an argument that I’ve seen with some mild variation around the Internet recently feels as if, finally, we’ve gotten to the rotten core of a worldview:
Here’s the thing, guys.
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter when life begins.
It doesn’t matter whether a fetus is a human being or not.
That entire argument is a red herring, a distraction, a subjective and unwinnable argument that could not matter less.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a fertilized egg, or a fetus, or a baby, or a five year old, or a Nobel Prize winning paediatric oncologist.
NOBODY has the right to use your body, against your will, even to save their life, or the life of another person.
That’s it.
That’s the argument.
You cannot be forced to donate blood, or marrow, or organs, even though thousands die every year, on waiting lists.
They cannot even harvest your organs after your death without your explicit, written, pre-mortem permission.
Denying women the right to abortion means we have less bodily autonomy than a corpose.
Of course, this isn’t really a new argument, as the replies to the above-linked tweet assert, but something about the social media tone makes it feel as if it’s been brought to a fresh level of clarity. So much can be seen to be wrong in that sharp, peremptory phrasing that one is tempted to throw up one’s hands in despair at finding an entry point that might reach anybody who is so far gone that she or he is unable to see it without guidance.
Perhaps the key point at which distortion enters the logic is with that three-word phrase, “against your will.” To accept the relevance of this phrase to the abortion argument is to ignore biology that human beings have understood since the dawn of understanding. In all cases that sexual intercourse is consensual, that act is the expression of will. It is the invitation. Even if there is only a one-in-a-thousand chance that somebody will respond to the invitation, it is still being offered.
If you bring life into being, you have a responsibility to the child. You are her or his mother or father. Under the logic above, a woman could deliberately bring countless children into the world for the thrill of killing them before they’re born. Yet only a week or two ago, our nation was contemplating whether Kyle Rittenhouse would have lost his right to self-defense if he could be shown to have provoked others to attack him.
If you don’t have responsibility for lives that you create, then who does? Here’s where dishonesty appears in the bodily-autonomy argument. Those who express it in these terms are very unlikely actually to believe it in other cases. Even among the replies to the link above some spot the problem that it creates for those who support vaccine mandates. The response: “We do not force-vax, but we fine them or exclude them from society. Which is not the same at all; they are all free to go live in a cave somewhere else.” Fine, but just so, we could, per this person’s logic, fine women who have abortions and exclude them from society. More mildly, we could point out that it is not forcing birth for a community to decline to support the practice of abortion with licensure, subsidies, and the approval of the law. (Please note that I’m not offering a suggested regime, merely addressing the illogic of the opposing proposition.)
If we, as a community, have a right to protect children if we so choose, then the refusal to acknowledge women’s responsibility toward their own children opens the door to regulation of the activity that creates them.
Thus we come to the wide field of conflicts that the abortion argument has with other positions typically asserted by those who support it. Do fathers have an obligation to provide child support? Do doctors have an obligation to “use their bodies” to provide all legal forms of care to all people? Do people who work have an obligation to devote a portion of the earnings of their bodies to supply food and housing for others?
We can take up difficult cases separately, but categorically denying a mother’s responsibility to her children means the utter destruction of human society at its very core. Everything that is good about the human condition crumbles under this logic, which is why I think I’ll settle on “evil” as the most appropriate adjective.
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News about former Providence principal Michael Redmond, and the fact that for a period of time he was working full time (during the same hours) for both the school district of Providence and the Washington, D.C., school district (remotely), has been broadly reported in Rhode Island. Unfortunately, the public debate falls quickly into the lines that divide Rhode Island insiders, above the heads (as it were) of regular parents and residents.
Redmond was a hire of former superintendent Harrison Peters, who was hired by Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green after a report by Johns Hopkins University researchers horrified the nation. Consequently, the divide between the commissioner and the teachers’ unions defines every such controversy.
I’d recommend stepping back, however, and attempting to read Alexa Gagosz’s Boston Globe coverage independently of that inside-politics framing:
Michael Redmond, who was hired as E-Cubed Academy’s new principal in July 2020, admitted to continuing to work virtually as the assistant principal at the Stephen E. Kramer Middle School in Washington, D.C., for 17 weeks after he started working full-time for Providence Public Schools.
According to a violation notice issued by the District of Columbia’s Board of Ethics and Government Accountability earlier this month, Redmond admitted to working on weekdays from 8:30 a.m. until 3:15 p.m. at Providence Public Schools while also working weekdays from 8:45 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. for D.C. Public Schools.
Rhode Islanders might note, sardonically, that it was D.C. that caught Redmond, not RI, but that could just be the luck of D.C.’s having had a whistleblower who cared. The observation shining forth from the story is that he managed this for more than four months, and it took somebody “alerting” the D.C. district for it to come to light.
At least according to Redmond, speaking to the Washington Post, he had “highly effective ratings” in D.C. and was “receiving excellent marks” in Providence. From his perspective, he was able to perform to expectations at both jobs.
There is the key question that the insiders don’t want to ask. Is this true? Was he meeting expectations? If so, his achievement doesn’t excuse his actions, but it does lead to another very important question: How pathetically low are expectations for school principals in Rhode Island (and D.C., for that matter) that somebody could work two jobs at the same time and still meet them?
That question gets to the core of Rhode Island’s public education problem — indeed, the problem with our public sector across the board. Thanks to labor unions, the system is set up as a jobs program for adults, not an organization to accomplish critical community tasks and meet the needs of children and others. Consequently, the system focuses more on what it can reasonably request of workers than what it can reasonably expect on behalf of the people being served.
Professionals in the private sector tend to see their jobs as their responsibility, and however many hours it takes to do the work, that’s what they do, often without being able to bill somebody for their time. Not so in the public sector, where powerful political players work to reduce accountability and ensure that every second is compensated at taxpayer expense.
If you want to know how a case like Redmond’s can happen, the answer lies there, not in the spat between the state, the district, and the union about who is ultimately calling the shots.
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HillFaith has compiled a baker’s dozen of facts pertaining to unborn children at 15 weeks of gestation (via Mark Tapscott on Instapundit), such as these:
- The baby’s body responds to both touch and pain.
- The baby responds to light touches over most of the body.
- If something touches the palm of the baby’s hand, the baby will bend his or her fingers as if to grasp the object.
- Neurotransmitters specific to pain processing appear between 10 and 14 weeks’ gestation. The spinal nerves needed to transmit pain to the thalamus have formed by 15 weeks’ gestation.
In a pluralistic society recognizing a variety of rights and respecting differing religious beliefs, we can debate where different lines can be drawn, how much opinions can differ from one state to the next, and what the best approach to safeguarding life should be, but the truly extreme and totalizing approach of Roe v. Wade is a monstrous travesty.
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