The first question that comes to mind upon reading reports about the unusual player-review practices of former North Kingstown basketball coach Aaron Thomas is: Over the years — decades! — didn’t any other teachers or parents find out? If so, why didn’t they say or do something?
John DePetro is reporting that some teachers joked about it with students while others began to object and were warned off because of the union contract. Meanwhile, some parents thought access to playing time on the court for their sons was worth this level of imposition. Obviously, if the coach were doing something really bad, other parents would have objected already, right?
Broadly, the situation is similar to the career of United States women’s gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar. Nassar would perform a procedure that involved inserting fingers into girls private orifices, without gloves, sometimes with the gymnasts’ parents in the room.
In his book, Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell quotes one mother, herself a doctor, admitting that she noticed Nassar having an erection while examining her daughter, and she felt badly for his embarrassment. Another gymnast told her mother that something had felt wrong, but the mother dismissed the complaint when her husband reported that he had never left the room.
Gladwell includes the story under his theory of “default to truth,” which basically holds that human beings will tend to trust what others tell us until we have a reason not to. When a doctor, acting under the auspices of a U.S. Olympics team, says he’s performing a medical procedure, and when nobody else is objecting, we’ll tend to assimilate the activity as normal.
This theory has some obvious explanatory power, but a more-negative corollary should be considered that doesn’t let us off the hook so easily with psychological excuses. It isn’t enough to say that we simply don’t see the problem until something forces it into our vision. Conditioning and self-interest come into play, as well.
Faced with a situation where something scandalous, even monstrous, is going on, we don’t want to believe it, not simply because it seems unlikely (people are willing to believe their slightly-more-conservative neighbors are fascists, after all), but because it requires action, with a risk of possible error. It would require us to go out on a limb.
Thomas’s alleged behavior appears to have been an open secret in North Kingstown. In such cases, stopping abuse requires somebody to step forward and insist that everybody else has been missing and facilitating an obvious, monstrous thing. That risks the sort of treatment that teacher Ramona Bessinger has experienced in a Providence middle school.
Another human tendency comes into play, here: People will persist in error, even rationalizing it, rather than correct course. Having failed to take action against, or even having participated in, something monstrous, we then have incentive not to recognize the fact and will react negatively toward those who point it out.
Gladwell correctly suggests that the alternative to a “default to truth” is not very attractive. A world in which every person and situation is suspicious is a madman’s reality and (we’ve plenty of examples, these days) leads to witch hunts and other monstrosities.
Standard learning theory finds two contrasting types of nonassociative implicit learning with which we respond to stimuli that our senses pick up around us. On one side, we can become habituated to a stimulus, such that we “learn” not to notice a constant noise in the background. On the other side, we can become sensitized to the same noise, such that we notice it more and more until we can’t concentrate on anything else. Becoming habituated to something wrong or harmful can endanger us and others, but being too-easily sensitized can overwhelm our lives for no good reason.
Another test case has been drawing some attention in North Kingstown schools: the availability of the graphic novel, Gender Queer, in the high school library. The book has obvious cartoon pornography and is available for minor children, yet teachers, administrators, or parents who object not just to its presence, but to its prominent promotion, run the risk of being cast as censorious, bigoted prudes. Just so, North Kingstown Superintendent Philip Augur insists that the book is needed in the library to support the “overall health and well being” of “LGBTQ youth.” Who doesn’t want to help children who are struggling with their identities?
Doubters might wonder whether publishers have some other product that would accomplish that goal without the pornographic imagery and, if not, whether such books do more harm than good. At some point, graphic visualization (whether in illustrations or in prose) habituates children to the acts. This is how grooming works; Dr. Michael Welner describes Stage 5 of grooming as follows:
At a stage of sufficient emotional dependence and trust, the offender progressively sexualizes the relationship. Desensitization occurs through talking, pictures, even creating situations (like going swimming) in which both offender and victim are naked. At that point, the adult exploits a child’s natural curiosity, using feelings of stimulation to advance the sexuality of the relationship.
When teaching a child, the grooming sex offender has the opportunity to shape the child’s sexual preferences and can manipulate what a child finds exciting and extend the relationship in this way. The child comes to see himself as a more sexual being and to define the relationship with the offender in more sexual and special terms.
North Kingstown resident Catherine Pastore defends Gender Queer as ” literally an illustration for young people who may be questioning their gender identity, that they are not abnormal or crazy.” Precisely. The purpose is to convey to children that these feelings and these experiences are normal. Fantasies about men touching young boys, as shown on page 136 of Gender Queer (see the featured image of this post), are normal. Similarly, the institutional defense of such materials by school officials and others conveys to adults that providing such materials to children is normal.
Those who see themselves as defenders of free inquiry are unlikely to notice when they slip into something they would never accept if put in objective terms. If they were sensitized to the possibility of a boundary, they would have to question whether they’ve gone over it already. They would constantly have to reconsider each new book with a skeptical eye; it’s much easier to have a categorical acceptance and to trust that everybody will simply recognize when things have gone too far.
The problem is that they won’t, as the allegations against Aaron Thomas and his too-tolerant peers prove.
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Episode 49 of James Lindsay’s The New Discourses podcast, titled “The Birth of Identity Marxism as Critical Theory’s New Proletariat,” is well worth the hour and a half to listen to it, although it may leave you worried that you’re becoming a conspiracy theorist.
As the title suggests, Lindsay reviews some leftist intellectual writing from the last century, centered around Herbert Marcuse, to explore how standard class-based Marxism became the race-and-identity-focused monster of neo-Marxism we’re living with today. The summary of Lindsay’s thesis is as follows:
… Critical Theorists … hated that capitalism works. … “[A]dvanced capitalism,” as they call it, which is protected against monopoly abuses, allows the working class to “build a better life.” Having a good life, you see, stabilizes them. It takes away their revolutionary will. It makes them love their society and want to maintain it. It, in their view, turns them conservative, and this is intolerable. Prosperous, functioning societies became the target of their bid for cultural revolution in the 1960s. To execute this revolution, though, they needed a new base for revolutionary energy, a new proletariat to awaken to Marxian revolutionary anger. Herbert Marcuse, architect of the New Left, found that new proletariat in identity politics, laying the ground in which the Woke Identity Marxism of today would eventually take root.
Lindsay makes a persuasive case that the socialist/communist/progressive intellectuals planned to brainwash and agitate wealthy white students while stoking unrest among urban minorities so that they would (in the equity advisors’ popular phrase) “disrupt the system.” This is not in order to reform the system in a way that makes it work incrementally better, but to make it not work at all, thus prompting the bottom up revolt that will help a socialist elite take perpetual power.
We’re seeing this in the “equity audits” that every school district is hiring small, newly formed (or recently refocused) organizations to conduct. These suburban schools have not had any incidents or problems to justify the expense and effort; administrators are simply doing it.
The purpose, per Lindsay, is to make everybody dissatisfied so that we all fight among ourselves. If capitalism has worked and made people too comfortable for revolution, then obviously, the revolutionaries have to find a way to make us uncomfortable.
The cynical ploy doesn’t truly rely on the categories of justice on which it is currently focusing. Race and identity are just the present weapons; dissatisfaction with Western democratic capitalism is the goal. Taking away the comforts of the working class will aggravate them, and at that point, the socialist elite can simply switch horses, as it were, if that proves advantageous. People whose central strategy is undermining a successful, functioning society obviously don’t care about hurting others and will discard the radical students and minorities without a thought.
This strategy cunningly leverages an inherent imbalance. Radicals want the fight — any fight — because they believe they can take control amidst the turmoil. The other side just wants to let people go about their lives; if we fight fire with fire, then we simply create a choice between equivalences, and the radical elites can switch teams to push everything toward chaos.
We need an alternative strategy to match our alternative approach to society. (Christian charity and love have proven to be a promising approach throughout history.)
The first step, though, is always to identify the strategy and be able to explain it. In this case, the strategy we’re identifying intends to make our children uncomfortable, unhappy, and unable to function in our society. To disguise this monstrous intention, radicals promote the lie that our society is founded in “whiteness” and “systemic racism,” so that they can insist that it’s a bad thing to be able to function within it.
This is poison that they are using public schools to feed to our children. Simply pointing that out ought to be enough, if we’re not too far gone.
Featured image by Maick Maciel on Unsplash.
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Jordan Chamberlain very succinctly framed the feeling that many parents are bringing into the voting booth with them:
watching the VA gov race feels like i’m waiting to hear if my daughter will be taught math or transgender hormone therapy
The responses citing relatively good math scores in Virginia kind of miss the point. Indeed, that only reinforces the point. Chamberlain isn’t complaining about the past, but worrying about the future. If the math scores were high, then that only makes the loss of that priority even more harmful.
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One of my children is learning the standard single-axis political spectrum (no doubt in preparation for the AP test down the road), and the fortunate child enjoyed a free lesson on how inaccurate that is all the way home. I’ll spare you, dear reader, that experience, simply pointing you to the circular political spectrum I developed quite some time ago, and which I continue to think holds up pretty well for explaining reality.
One common (and inaccurate) characterization is that conservatives (equated with Republicans) want things to stay the way they are. Liberals and progressives want change; conservative want no change; “comfort with change” sounds better. A moment’s consideration of how we think of “conservatism” in the aspects of our daily lives shows how off-the-mark that presentation is. You can be conservative in your investments and still invest. Indeed, failure to invest is not conservative at all.
This topic was still on my mind when I came across a Twitter conversation between Joe Paolino (a former Democrat mayor of Providence) and John Loughlin (a former Republican state representative from Tiverton). It began when Paolino added the Superman building to his wish list for spending the federal COVID windfall and proceeded as follows:
Paolino: The ‘Superman’ building has been dark too long. Let’s also invest to create more housing instead of it collecting dust and further deteriorating.
Loughlin: If this was a viable, cost effective and profitable project, why has no developer stepped up to make it happen? Why must the taxpayers always be the ones who get the short end of the proverbial stick?
Paolino: all tax payers and citizens benefit from saving superman building from demolition . Historic, iconic buildings like that still have a use. Housing is the only viable answer and to have a component be set aside for affordable benefits all .
Loughlin: Then taxpayers should receive all profits until such time as the “investment” is recouped in full with interest.
Now, Paolino is generally considered a relative conservative or moderate Democrat, but this is by Rhode Island standards. After all, his approach to using the federal money is entirely to-down leveraging of government to make decisions for the future of our state rather than, say, simply repairing basic infrastructure and lowering taxes. That is, he’s fundamentally a progressive, albeit not a radical one, yet he’s the one who wants to make sure that an “iconic building” is preserved.
Serendipitously, I also came across a tweet showing aerial photos of Havana, Cuba, on which Antonio Garcia Martinez commented:
Present-day Havana. Not a single building you see was built under communism. It’s a society utterly living in the ruins of its capitalist past.
Communists froze Havana in place when they came into power, and that was entirely predictable. After all, communists, socialists, and progressives are defined by wanting powerful people in government to make decisions for the society. Thus, when they take power, keeping it is the top priority, and the dynamism of change creates opportunities for other people to gain power. In the West, at least, that dynamism is exactly what conservatives want to conserve. That’s why we’re for free speech, free markets, freedom of religion, federalism, and so on. The contrast is that the system we support gives money and leverage to people who accomplish things that we all get to enjoy.
The conservative vision is to get the government off the economy’s back so Rhode Island can return to the type of prosperity that leads to the construction of new iconic buildings.
We can let this one go. The Ocean State will get over it.
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Things are getting humorous (and obvious) out there. Over the past few days, we’ve all had a good laugh at the Democrat activists (one of them Black) who dressed up as white supremacists to try to tar Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin. More recently, I noticed local Democrats in Rhode Island gleefully fixating on the story of QAnon folks thinking JFK Jr. was going to emerge from the dead and make an announcement about Donald Trump. Last night, a guy in a cowboy hat wearing a crisp jean jacket with a brand new Confederate flag patch sewn awkwardly on the back set himself up in front of the media at a Youngkin rally, and they dutifully made the association.
Maybe some such incidents are genuine and not false flags to tar Republicans, but they’re telling, either way. Clearly, much of the appeal for people to be Democrats (or at least Democrat activists) is in order to see themselves as better than other people. Thus, the story often isn’t what a Republican candidate says, believes, or proposes, but who happens to be somewhere within his or her coalition of supporters. The message isn’t, “don’t support this candidate based on ideas,” but rather, “don’t be like these people who support this candidate.”
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As noted in this space recently, most of the drop in the standardized test scores in Rhode Island was among students whose schools were mostly virtual during the pandemic. Now a study out of Japan suggests all that harm was done with no benefit in controlling the disease:
There is no evidence that school closures could reduce the spread of COVID-19, a disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, according to a recent study. …
“We do not find any evidence that school closures in Japan reduced the spread of COVID-19. Our null results suggest that policies on school closures should be reexamined given the potential negative consequences for children and parents,” the study reads.
This is why we shouldn’t let governor’s seize control of all laws for long-term management of an emerging situation and experiment with a response according to their best judgment. Not only are they apt to be wrong, but the political system is inadequate to assign responsibility to for failure.
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Waking up to the two election maps, from Fox News, shown in the featured image for this post, the question that comes to a conservative Rhode Islander’s mind is: Could it happen here, too?
Comments like this, from New Jersey-native D.C. reporter Dave Catanese certainly don’t discourage such hopes:
I’d make the case the #NJGOV results are more alarming for Dems than #VAGOV.
Virginia was fully formed, both candidates known. T-Mack a flawed, uninspired candidate. Youngkin fresh. Race was engaged.
Ciattarelli was largely unknown. People just walked in and voted R.
But can we be honest with each other? No, it probably couldn’t happen in Rhode Island, at least not yet. Even a wildcard candidate requires some infrastructure and a reasonably organized base to tap into, and that’s been crushed and dispersed in Rhode Island.
We’ve had our sparks in recent months. With the exception of Loudoun County, Virginia, no area of the country has drawn more attention for the misbehavior of schools and school committees than Rhode Island, yet no broad movement has formed. Despite the bravery and good work of Nicole Solas and Ramona Bessinger, which has brought them to national attention, the local media feels it can ignore them. The same is true of the healthcare workers and Unmask Our Children protesters who are following Democrat Governor Dan McKee around.
The problem is the general public is bought off or demoralized in the Ocean State, and when people do look to engage, there’s no single hub for them to plug into for a reliable lay-of-the-land explanation and direction. That absence of gravity also means that individuals and small groups are too easily able to splinter based on any small personal or policy disagreement.
The political right in Rhode Island has to make a conscious decision not to walk away from each other because this person is a RINO or that person is too MAGA — and do so in the face of strong efforts from the establishment, the news media, and even neighbors to insist on it. The only question is whether that other person is better than a complete radical takeover of our lives.
One consequence of Republican successes elsewhere may be that run-of-the-mill Democrats across the country will be reluctant to play along with the progressives over the next year. That will leave a ton of money and pent up energy looking for an outlet, and so we may see an even worse assault in the Ocean State as the war’s fronts in other states quiet.
If this does happen, our statewide battle will be between more-moderate establishment Democrats and radicals. The conflict will become more visible, and therefore generate more energy to resist, but the lack of structure for resistance will be a problem, especially if the establishment Democrats leave municipalities as an offering to buy good will from progressives. The local news media will sacrifice their own financial interest in covering conflict wherever they can find it to help them make the deal.
That said, this isn’t a pessimistic post. There’s a great deal of energy out there, even in Rhode Island, and it can be well directed. The key will be to focus local while working together over town lines. Find any people who agree on any area of politics and policy and work with them, from rural villages to the heart of Providence. When it comes down to it, we’re all in this together. Anchor Rising is certainly here to help.
People willing to run for office should focus on town/city councils and school committees. Local races require less infrastructure and can be won simply with effort. No news media required. Newly engaged people can learn the ropes and experience the push and pull of politics on a small stage interacting with neighbors. Focusing local will also expose many of the problems of political infrastructure that need to be repaired while providing a network from which to catch and highlight issues of concern to pull the engagement up the government ladder.
Theoretically, a red map might be possible in Rhode Island next year or in 2024, but however quickly it happens, the basics are a prerequisite both to win and to accomplish anything positive once we’ve done so.
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Stephen King could write an incredible novel if he were willing to imagine something demonic in wokism.
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In September, Anchor Rising reported on the hiring of the Equity Institute “to conduct an Equity Root Cause Analysis” in the Portsmouth school system. Two weeks ago, an email from Superintendent Thomas Kenworthy informed parents that:
The Equity Institute conducted several community feedback sessions over the past few weeks and is now ready to begin the data collection phase. Part of this collection will involve surveys for students in grades 3 through 12.
The email provided two links, the first allows parents to opt their children out of the data-collection process. The second link is to a screening form to request the survey. A note at the bottom of the opt-out page and the top of the request page informs parents that federal law requires that they have “the right to review a copy of the questions asked of or materials that will be used with students.”
The level of secrecy surrounding the surveys gives reason to believe that without an explicit law, the surveys might be conducted in a completely non-transparent fashion, even hidden from families.
Parents who request the survey for review receive a PDF covered in multiple watermarks showing their names and email addresses, presumably to discourage sharing. A note in the footer of each page asserts copyright privileges and states that “no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of The Equity Institute.”
Why the aggressive secrecy around a blank survey? After all, the purpose is to collect information that will inform an “equity analysis,” which is being conducted explicitly toward fulfillment of the public school department’s duly adopted strategic plan. This is a public process handed under the auspices of the local government. For taxpayers and voters to evaluate whether public resources are being well spent and whether their elected officials are adequately performing their representative duties, the public must have access to source materials.
Presumably, the Equity Institute and school administration are concerned that some members of the community might object to the nature of the questions. For example, the third question, after requesting the student’s email address and grade level, is:
How would you describe yourself?
[] Girl
[] Gender non-conforming
[] Boy
[] Transgender
[] I don’t want to say
[] Other – Write In:
Apart from wondering why “Boy” would be only the third gender on the list, members of the public might question whether casual presentation of these concepts in a school setting is appropriate for children as young as eight.
The next two questions are about the student’s languages and race. Unlike the gender question, the race question is in alphabetical order, starting with “Asian,” which allows the survey to put “White” last, after “Two or more races,” although 87% of students in Portsmouth are White. This suggests that the Equity Institute rearranged the order of genders explicitly so that “Boy” would not be first.
The second page of the survey includes short-answer and yes/no questions about things students like or would change about their schools, as well as questions one might expect for an “equity analysis.” For example, students are asked whether they “learn about different places, people, and cultures” and whether they have teachers of “different backgrounds,” mainly meaning identity categories.
The next page starts with a yes/no table to answer the question, “Have your teachers shared stories in the classroom,” about various subjects:
- Race (Ex: Black, Native American, White)
- Ethnicity (Ex: Dominican, Italian, Chinese)
- Gender (Ex: Girl, Boy, Nonbinary)
- Religion (Ex: Islam, Christianity, Buddhism)
This table is followed with questions probing whether children feel comfortable being themselves and are happy at school, as well as about fairness and treatment of all students. One question asks, “Do you know what to do if something doesn’t feel right in your classroom?”
The last page gives students the opportunity to put academic and organizational priorities in rank order, as “principal for a day”.
Some of the content in the survey is clearly not objectionable, although parents and other stakeholders might question whether it is appropriate for the school department to allow a private company to collect and retain personal information (including email addresses). This question is especially relevant because the Equity Institute does not appear to fall under any special regulatory guidelines protecting privacy, as with healthcare providers.
The level of secrecy and implicit threat against sharing, however, suggest that the company and the school administration know they are skirting a line, whether legal, moral, or political. One needn’t be a parent in the district to point out that a secretive impulse in government agencies is usually a sign that something that something shouldn’t be done.
Emails to Superintendent Kenworthy and Equity Institute CEO Karla Vigil requesting comment received no response by the time of publication.
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Further to my observation this morning about the McKee administration’s attitude toward people who lost their jobs thanks to his vaccine mandate, I note noises nationally from federal contractors that a similar mandate may force them to end their contracts with the government. Sundance writes:
As we have continued to point out, a federal vaccine mandate might sound like a good idea on a think tank, academic or white-paper policy level of consideration; but on a practical level, wiping out a large percentage of your most productive workforce over a vaccine mandate is unworkable, and might even end the operation of the entire business.
Even if vaccine hesitancy were completely irrational (which it is not), people setting policy have to estimate it and factor it into their calculations. Unfortunately, we only rarely get even that second-order-level of analysis with the politically driven decisions that now have so much effect on our lives… let alone third- and fourth-level analysis (and beyond) about the effects of effects.
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