Dear Mom and Dad, My first semester of college is almost over. Exams start this week with organic chemistry. Can you believe it? Your daughter’s dreams of one day becoming a doctor are underway! I promised I would not waste this opportunity, and I haven’t.
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A member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has written to Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan (R), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, warning that Joe Biden’s sweeping executive order embedding radical woke equity ideology in all agencies of the executive branch is a “Trojan Horse” that represents “a major step toward socialism.”
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The Georgia Senate passed a bill Friday requiring that school curricula only teach kindergarten through high school students that all races are equal, banning the concepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT) that teach students that races in America are inherently unequal.
SB 377 says schools cannot teach “divisive concepts” to school children. It mandates the same for government agencies.
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Lia Thomas, a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, shattered records after transitioning from male to female and joining the women’s team.
Thomas, who is biologically male, competed for three years on the men’s team before moving to the women’s team after transitioning, the Daily Mail reported. NCAA rules require males to undergo at least one year of testosterone suppression treatment before they can compete in the women’s category.
Thomas’s top time for the 500 Free event in the male category was 4:18.72. Thomas won the 500 Free while competing against Villanova and participated in eight regular season events as a male in the 2019-2020 season.
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School districts, teachers unions, student groups and parents lined up at the Ohio House to testify against two bills that would stop schools from teaching what sponsors called “divisive concepts” in the classroom.
The House State and Local Government Committee heard more than three hours of testimony Wednesday during the third hearing for both House Bill 322 and House Bill 327. Each prohibits teaching concepts that are part of the nationwide critical race theory movement critics say purports the U.S. is a fundamentally racist country.
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On April 12, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the appointment of Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, a career Foreign Service Officer and former ambassador to Malta, as the State Department’s first chief diversity and inclusion officer (CDIO). On July 21, Blinken sent an unclassified cable to U.S. diplomatic and consular posts around the world to introduce Abercrombie-Winstanley — who, in her new position, reports directly to the secretary of state — and to tout the new Office for Diversity and Inclusion.
A State Department that welcomes, and offers opportunities for advancement, to all Americans is a priority. Yet the lofty rhetoric of diversity and inclusion has often provided a cover for imposing ideological conformity and distributing benefits and burdens based on race. Therefore, Blinken’s new undertaking gives cause for concern. His near silence in the two official pronouncements about the personal qualities, educational attainments, professional achievements, and areas of expertise that the State Department values in building a workforce that responsibly conducts American foreign policy heightens apprehensions.
To advance U.S. interests abroad, the State Department must live up to America’s highest principles by ensuring that service in the nation’s diplomatic corps is open to all citizens based on skills, talents, and character. Individuals with diverse experiences, opinions, and training enrich understanding within the department of the vast array of jobs, opportunities, and threats that the United States faces abroad. These range from efficient processing of visa requests and effective operation within international organizations to protect health and the environment to cooperating with friends and partners to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s aim in every region of the globe to reorient world order around Beijing’s authoritarian imperatives.
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Thursday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Southeastern Legal Foundations director of litigation Braden Boucek to the newsmakers line to discuss a current lawsuit in Evanston, Illinois which misinterprets equality as equity.
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Teachers, friends, and colleagues of mine from the Claremont-Hillsdale school (or “CHS,” after where most of us were trained, and many now teach) have spent years making a concerted effort to find common ground with fellow travelers on the Right who may be broadly understood as paleoconservatives.
I’m happy to say that, to a large extent, the effort has borne fruit. Many paleoconservatives have been published in the Claremont Review of Books and American Greatness, while many Claremont and Hillsdale scholars (myself included) have written for Modern Age and The American Conservative. There is more cross-pollination and friendly dealing today between the two groups than ever, with each side attending and speaking at the others’ conferences and so on. I think we’ve even learned from each other. I know I have. Exposure to paleo ideas has influenced my thinking on trade, immigration, and foreign policy, among other subjects.
My commitment, however, to the core tenets of the Claremont-Hillsdale school—which I consider to be nothing more (or less) than an attempt to understand Americanism, without any alterations or admixtures—has never shaken. That’s not to deny that I’ve become increasingly dismayed at the way this understanding of Americanism is often deployed, especially by what Charles Haywood of the excellent book review blog The Worthy House calls “the catamite right.” My own preferred term is “Cracker Jack Claremontism,” after the tiny comics that used to come inside the boxes of caramel corn. Too small for anything but a few pictures and words, and meant for little children, they had to convey a simplistic story very briefly.
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Staunton City Schools (SCS) are developing an equity committee to solve achievement and opportunity disparities between students. The twenty members of the committee will focus on “ensuring equitable practices” within curriculum, teaching, student and parent experiences, school policies, and hiring.
Half of the committee will be comprised of individuals involved in the school, with the other half from the surrounding community.
Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) paid critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi $20,000 to give an hour-long virtual presentation. Kendi is the bestselling author of “How to Be Antiracist,” a book of circular definitions used to explain critical race theory.
The average teaching assistant earns $23,000 a year; the staff spent nearly that much for a 45-minute lecture and 15-minute Q&A.
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by George Rasley In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of “the ruling class” back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a “cold civil war.” Now in an essay “Our Revolution’s Logic“ that should be a wake-up call to every conservative in America Codevilla applies the “logic of revolution” to the escalating “Resistance” to the results of the 2016 election and says its sentiments’ spiraling volume and intensity have eliminated any possibility of “stepping back.” The 2018 Congressional elections are the Democratic “Resistance” strategy’s first major test. Regardless of these elections’ outcome, however, this “resistance” has strengthened and accelerated the existing revolutionary spiral says Prof. Codevilla. In an erudite review of Thucydides’ account of Corcyra’s revolution in 427 BC, the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, Codevilla outlines a paradigm of revolutionary logic and elucidates the striking parallels with today’s American political dynamics. Revolutions, says Codevilla, turn upon the logic of mutual hate that drives them, and on their consequences, and the consequences for constitutional liberty are already driving us away from our constitutional republic’s essence: The American republic’s essence had been self-restraint toward fellow citizens deemed equals. The…
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During Monday’s broadcast of The Gill Report – live on WETR 92.3 FM in Knoxville – conservative political commentator and Tennessee Star Political Editor Steve Gill questioned whether the left truly understands the dynamics of equality and economics and how mandating the rise of minimum wage may inadvertently deplete a human work force. Gill pondered, “Among the many things that kind of make me scratch my head and wonder about, well the left and those that don’t understand basic economics – kind of like the woman NBA player complaining about not getting paid as much as men.” He continued: When the WNBA creates 25 million a a year in revenue and the men’s NBA creates 7.4 billion in revenue. You can only pay what’s produced at the gate and until women’s basketball produces more fans more interest more viewership more butts int the seat. Women’s’ basketball players aren’t going to get paid what men’s basketball players get paid when they generate the eyeballs. It’s simple economics. You’re also seeing folks on the left complain that we’ve got to raise the minimum wage. And were seeing it take place around the country. Where some places are seeing $15.00 minimum wage at fast…
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