Note this closing paragraph, reported as fact, at the end of Melanie DaSivla’s WPRI report on Rhode Island officials’ glee at the anticipated influx of borrowed money for infrastructure from the federal government:
The transformational legislation will also create millions of good-paying, union jobs across the country, reduce inflationary economic pressures, and ease supply chain bottlenecks.
I’m tempted to generalize this to younger generations’ conflation of stated intent with probable outcome (at least when they feel like they’re on the same side as the speaker), but I don’t want to cross that older-middle-age line just yet.
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Stacy Langton, who went viral when she read from school library books at a school committee meeting (without censoring the material), has reportedly been banned from entering the library at her son’s school.
At the same time, I’m hearing from parents in Rhode Island who seem surprised about the relentlessness of schools’ push to complete their “equity audits.”
That’s been one of the more chilling aspects. The administrators and activists are 100% they’re in the right and (probably) that objections are only evidence of systemic bigotry, so they’re going to plow on, tilling up our children so that seeds of wokeness may grow.
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The tone of Rhode Island podcaster Bill Bartholomew’s reaction to U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia) gives a disconcerting feeling:
I always knew it. My whole life, there was always this certain kind of person that gave me chills like I encountered a snake. Tossed the dodge ball in my face at gym class. Harassed me for wearing pink clothes or being vegan. Its a strain of human; she is one of them
On one level, I get it. Before I came to my senses, I fancied myself a progressive rebel and wore clothes that drew conspicuous attention. (Nothing pink, of course, but pants painted with psychedelic imagery, for example.) One has to understand while making such decisions that when you wear clothes and proclaim positions that you know will be provocative, people will be provoked. That doesn’t make the dodge ball bullies and harassers right, but it does make them not not human.
That’s the disturbing part of Bartholomew’s tweet, and it has a representative feel to it, as something that is common among people who share his beliefs. Language like “a strain of human” who gives you “chills like [you] encountered a snake” evokes sci-fi horror imagery. And what do the protagonists of sci-fi horror stories typically wind up doing to the monsters they encounter?
Yesterday in the Daily Wire, Ben Johnson recalled a 1972 episode of Bill Buckley’s Fireline featuring “a socialist agitator named Dotson Rader.” I’ll return to Johnson’s article in later posts, but for now, note this part:
Rader freely admitted that the Left had little interest in treating individuals fairly; it wanted to settle the issue of “justice” between groups of people. “One of the differences between this generation and revolutions, say, of the nineteenth century, is we’re not interested fundamentally in equality. We’re fundamentally interested in justice, which means we have greater tolerance of liquidating a class,” he said. [Conservative intellectual Arnold] Beichman immediately interjected, “We’re talking about murder. This is the way people get categorized. A class – Jews, Catholics, and gypsies. You don’t see people. You see Jews, Catholics, and gypsies. … When you talk about the word ‘class,’ don’t you see people? Is it that fixed that you can say, ‘You are to be shot, and you are to live?’ And who the Hell are you to say so?”
Rader clarified that mass violence is part and parcel of the revolutionary Left. “The whole ability to function as a revolutionary … depends upon the ability to depersonalize your enemy. If you personalize your enemy, you can’t act.”
They want “equity,” not “equality,” and that means some people have to suffer, perhaps even die, and that requires seeing those who oppose the Left as non-persons, which brings us back to progressive Democrat state senator Kendra Anderson and that creepy scene from Silence of the Lambs. You’ll recall that when the kidnapper-murderer’s victim starts crying that she wants to go home and see her mommy, he visibly struggles to maintain his cold “it puts the lotion in the basket” veneer. To do what he thinks must be done, he has to see her as an “it” — at best, “a strain of human.”
In our continuing conversation, Bartholomew cited “anarcho-syndicalism in Franco Spain” as the closest system to what he desires, although he does insist he shrinks from the violence of the Spanish Civil War. His faith, however, is in the proposition that “there is a way for population to control the levers of production, ensure baseline equity, and still encourage and reward scientific, artistic and other advances via competition.”
Important word, that: “control.” Conservatives tend to want a guard-railed, but uncontrolled system, in which various interests balance out organically, which seems to work well for everybody but system-disrupting radicals. Legal equality and regulated freedom are how the “population,” which is a community of unique individuals, “controls” those levers. Folx like Bartholomew, though, need the word to be literal. Somebody has to be “in control” and making decisions, somehow.
There has to be a gym teacher to send the dodge ball bully to the vice principal’s office, because otherwise that evil strain of human may use his equal standing within the rules of the game to win. The danger arises when a charismatic figure comes along to convince people that they are the ones they’ve been waiting for.
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Approach Paloma Esquivel’s Los Angeles Times article about schools’ “ditching the old way of grading” with the appropriately skeptical eye, and it produces a curious effect. On one hand, teachers’ desire seems reasonable to conduct a true assessment of what students have learned rather than relying on a rigid grading system that reflects their ability to perform tasks at particular times during the school year.
On the other hand, every time the word, “equity,” pops up, the reader may wonder what that has to do with the subject at hand. Is the claim really that, say, race intrinsically affects how well students can keep up with assignments and testing milestones but does not affect the ability to learn the subject matter by the end of the year? That’s the implication that has people like Andrew Sullivan responding thus:
Eradicate measurable standards and everything is fine. This is core to CRT: the end of standards.
Returning to the two hands described above, the strategy appears to be to motte and bailey through to this eradication of standards. The proposition (the bailey) is that grading standards are contrary to social justice, but when this argument is challenged, disputants retreat to the motte, which is the claim that the important goal is to ensure that students understand the material by the end of the class.
About midway through the article, Esquivel inadvertently shines light on a puzzle many of us have been pondering for the past year. Why has critical race theory (CRT) seemed to emerge at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic? One might hypothesize that CRT and the extreme reaction to COVID were only coincidental and incidental to some other goal (like unseating the President of the United States). Another possibility is that the crisis of COVID presented an opportunity to push for unrelated goals, like the “equity” agenda. That’s the piece that Esquivel puts into place here:
[Educational grading consultant Joe] Feldman, a former teacher and administrator who wrote the book “Grading for Equity,” had been working for several years with school districts across the country as they reconsidered grading policies. In October and November of the 2020-21 academic school year, he suddenly found himself fielding a “tidal wave” of calls from districts, as teachers issued progress reports and realized that Ds and Fs were skyrocketing.
“Our traditional grading practices have always harmed our traditionally underserved students,” Feldman said. “But now because the number of students being harmed was so much greater, it got people more aware of it and ready to tackle this issue.”
One needn’t be very cynical at all to think the “tidal wave” of inquiries came from administrators and teachers looking for ways to sell lower of standards to cover up the terrible results they were producing (despite an actual increase in funding). It is doubtful that they expected students to finish the year in the same place they otherwise would have; the districts just needed some way to convince students, parents, and other stakeholders that some other grading system is better capturing the learning that students continued to do. As Sullivan suggests, if there are no measurable standards, then everything is fine, which is great for well paid professionals in a failing educational system.
Feldman’s experience indicates that this institutional incentive makes our education system vulnerable to a prior agenda tied to CRT, “equity,” and “anti-racism.” That step returns us to an analysis in this space last month suggesting that the idea might be to eliminate objective standards so that the natural human tendency to measure and compare would shift to less-relevant factors, like identity, where differences can be exploited for political advantage. This, in turn, points to the underlying goal of preventing students from being able to function in a Western society so as to bring about its collapse.
Featured image from the RI Dept. of Education.
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I have to admit that I found Kenneth Singletary’s write-up for the Boston Globe about a Saturday Night Live skit involving Rhode Island to be more humorous than the skit itself:
Singletary plays the straight man (that’s a comedy term, for the woke out there) with his straight-news report:
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The newscast continues. “I think some areas will be completely flattened. We should expect many, many casualties,” Culkin says.
We learn that the Boy Scouts have been washed out to sea, and the storm is still raging.
And yes, Culkin is wearing his turkey hat.
“I decided to keep it on in case you wanted to hear the rest of the rap after the storm.”
Yeah, social media is the land of wacky statements, but when themes emerge, they’re worth considering. One theme that has emerged as the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse falls apart is threats that he’d be safer in jail than on the street or that the jury better find him guilty no matter what.
The most prominent in the latter group came from a video posted by George Floyd’s friend, Cortez Rice, claiming the jurors are being photographed, suggesting that they will be in danger if they don’t convict:
George Floyd’s nephew, Cortez Rice, makes a claim that he knows people taking photos of jurors during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His goal is to dox jurors if they do not convict. pic.twitter.com/uwLuV2ftfV
— John Curtis (@Johnmcurtis) November 7, 2021
Townhall reporter Julio Rosas says he was in the courtroom and saw no evidence to support this claim, but whether it’s true or not one lesson is clear: Anybody who takes this attitude is not concerned with justice, at least in the sense of the term that requires an objective review of the facts to ensure to fairly assign blame and consequences.
Of course, the political Left isn’t interested in justice, but social justice. In the latter case (which means something different than it did when it was a associated with Christian social policy), blame and consequences are assigned based not on facts, but on group associations. Viewed most charitably, the claim is that the harm done to Black Americans has been so massive and pervasive, that individual White Americans may have to bear consequences for things of which justice-justice might find them innocent.
The slightly more extreme version is to insist that Western justice-justice is, itself, an unjust means of suppression. Ultimately, though, it comes down to people making judgments of right and wrong based on their feelings and group associations and not really interested in notions of right and wrong outside of those two guides.
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Once upon a time, we were taught that the U.S.A. allowed states to experiment and compete with each other. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida sure does seem to be taking that opportunity to heart:
[Open full post]“Authoritarian edicts from the Biden regime stop here,” [House Speaker Chris] Sprowls said.
“The ‘Keep Florida Free’ agenda represents the strongest response in America against attacks on personal health decisions, livelihoods and liberty.
“From exploring separation from the federal Occupational Standards and Health Administration, to affirming parents’ rightful role to decide whether their child wears a mask, or gets a vaccine.”
A bill sponsored by state Senator Travis Hutson (R-St. Augustine) and state Representative Ardian Zika (R-Land O’Lakes) will develop a proposal to withdraw from OSHA and will “assert state jurisdiction” over issues dealing with occupational safety and health in the workplace.
Germany, for example:
Since the beginning of July in Germany, where that family lives, if you can demonstrate proof of being COVID-recovered and then have a subsequent negative COVID test, you are considered immune. For six months anyway, according to the German government.
Jennifer Margulis’s Epoch Times article goes on to describe some of the research finding that naturally acquired immunity is as good or better than vaccination immunity.
One piece of the puzzle I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere explains why some studies support skepticism of acquired immunity: The tests that diagnose people as positive for COVID are too sensitive. That means our case counts have been dramatically inflated with people who were never actually infected and should not, therefore, be expected to be immune. (The chart at that link suggests false positives could be nearly half of all “cases.”)
This also inflates all hospitalization and death counts, because people hospitalized for other causes were counted if they falsely tested positive.
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A student at Providence College tells Anchor Rising that vandalism depicted in a widely dispersed TikTok video was planned beforehand.
According to the source, students who live in the area of Pembroke Avenue, a short walk from the campus, heard about the plans among non-students, calling it a “riot.” Some students remained in their dorms in response to the information.
The video shows a few individuals denting an SUV and smashing its windows while a larger crowd watches.
Speaking to WJAR, Providence Police Commander Thomas Verdi confirmed the existence of an investigation, in which a spokesperson for Providence College says the institution is cooperating. Articles have not yet reported that some sort of activity was expected or indicated whether the vandalized property was targeted or became the focus of general mayhem.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The vices they’re in in North Kingstown
- McKee’s non-public public schedule
- Picking and choosing which healthcare pros lose their jobs
- Progressive podcasters and senators’ campaign of dehumanization
Featured image by Jonny Gios on Unsplash.
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