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Minnesota Will Soon Make Teachers Endorse Child Mutilation to Get a License


BY: RYAN MACPHERSON | JANUARY 10, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/minnesota-will-soon-make-teachers-endorse-child-mutilation-to-get-a-license-2659092268.html/

Minnesota teacher with a lesbian sign
To be state licensed in Minnesota starting in 2025, every teacher must personally advocate critical race theory and transgender ideology.

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Minnesota’s teaching licensure board will soon require all teachers to be card-carrying Marxists. The card will literally say “licensed teacher,” but recently approved revisions redefine state licensure in expressly Marxist terms: Academic knowledge is out, and power struggle among the classes is in. To be licensed in Minnesota starting in 2025, every teacher must not merely teach about, but personally advocate, the core tenets of critical race theory and transgender ideology.

The state’s insistence that every teacher positively affirm homosexual behaviors and transgendered identities understandably aggravates consciences among moral traditionalists, but the issues run deeper than the “culture war.” What is at stake is the nature of knowledge, the future of liberty, and the prospects for a sustainable social order. In a word: civilization.

A perfunctory hearing on Aug. 24, 2022, and the resulting order for implementation with slight revisions by a solitary administrative judge in December cemented the new regime. The revised Standards of Effective Practice require radical changes to teachers’ curriculum selection, classroom management style, and self-understanding of the teaching vocation. The education departments at colleges and universities also must document their fulfillment of the new standards or else have their program certifications rescinded by Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB).

The new requirements require teachers to positively affirm extremist leftist positions about human nature and sexual practices in order to be allowed to teach in government schools.

Teachers will be required to choose “anti-racist” — i.e. critical race theory — instructional strategies for students. An administrative judge told the state to amend No. 4 here requiring teachers to expose children to sexual identities. It will likely still go into effect, with slightly different language.
The new license requires teachers to affirm transgenderism.

The revisions represent only the latest attack against American heritage in Minnesota’s public schools. In 2013, the state education department successfully removed the four presidents featured on Mount Rushmore from social studies standards.

Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan also got the ax that year, as did the Magna Carta. References to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were relativized, as students were to be instructed that those documents do not contain universal principles of ordered liberty, but merely the opinion of one powerful group of 18th-century men.

A decade later, the vanguard has advanced again. The revised teacher licensing rules strike the following from the mathematics standards: “addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages.” They insert this for teachers of all subjects: “The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves.”

It no longer suffices simply to discuss the controversies of radical reform; teachers and students must also become advocates for change: “The teacher creates opportunities for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empowers learners to be agents of social change to promote equity.” Minnesota’s Scandinavian ancestors must be turning over in their graves at this new smorgasbord of Marxist truffles.

The PELSB’s “Statement of Necessity and Reasonableness” for the licensure changes draws support from two states just as blue as Minnesota. From New York, PELSB gleans: “Inclusive curriculum and assessment … works toward dismantling systems of biases and inequities, and decentering dominant ideologies in education.” In Illinois, each teacher must internalize a Marxist mentalité: “The culturally responsive teacher and leader will explore their own intersecting identities, how they were developed, and how they impact daily experience of the world.”

Illinois has expressly abandoned what Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, called “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” In place of objective truth, “what is seen as ‘correct’ is most often based on our lived experiences.” As in New York, so also in Illinois — and soon in Minnesota — all teachers must practice what cultural Marxists preach: “Assess how their biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.).”

Back in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, conservative watchdogs encouraged citizens to participate in open forums and public hearings, which fomented large protests against the licensure revisions, to no avail. The ever-active Child Protection League, the stalwart Center of the American Experiment, and a 2021 start-up called the Foundation against Intolerance and Racism sounded the alarm.

But to whom? Neither the people nor their elected officials decided the matter. A solitary administrative judge, appointed by the governor, ordered the implementation of the radical licensure changes after merely recommending a few tweaks.

The labyrinth of administrative procedure affords limited opportunity for appeal, but one can hope that a teacher, a parent, or a teacher-preparation college will petition for declaratory relief. If nothing else, PELSB’s radical rewriting of human nature smacks of a state-imposed religion, in violation of the First Amendment’s no establishment clause, not to mention the dereliction of duty when schools jettison mainstream academic content in favor of extremist ideology.

If recourse to the courts should fail, another remedy remains, modeled for the free world in Norway in 1942. When the National Socialists ordered parents to enroll their children in indoctrination camps with just three weeks’ notice and required all school teachers to implement a Nazi curriculum, the people simply would not have it. Five out of every six teachers resigned.

A similar proportion of parents flooded the Norwegian education bureau with letters — literally, laundry baskets full of letters — registering their protests. Adolf Hitler’s henchmen were grossly outnumbered, and the Nazis’ outward control of state agencies never penetrated to the hearts and minds of the people. The fusion of Viking blood with Lutheran “here I stand” courage made otherwise docile Norwegians invincible. Whether the Minnesotans can muster similar resolve soon will become evident to all.

Ryan C. MacPherson, Ph.D., is a Minnesotan and author of “Rediscovering the American Republic: A People’s Quest for Ordered Liberty.”

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The Left Has Effectively Banned Christian Kids from Public Pools, Libraries, And Summer Camps


POSTED BY: JOY PULLMANN | MAY 23, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/23/the-left-has-effectively-banned-christian-kids-from-public-pools-libraries-and-summer-camps/

girl scouts at camp

Forcing children to sleep and undress next to kids of the opposite sex effectively puts up a ‘Christian kids need not apply’ sign on public recreation activities.

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This spring I got an email from 4-H, a club I participated in as a child, effectively communicating that my Christian family need not apply to summer camps and other activities sponsored by the quasi-public organization. (County governments often sponsor 4-H activities.) This email was signed by a 4-H staffer who put pronouns in his signature and told me, “Youth are assigned cabins based on gender indicated on the 4-H camp application and registration,” suggesting children were roomed by gender identity rather than sex.

Naturally, I was concerned that my tween daughter and son might be roomed overnight with an emotionally disturbed camper or counselor if I enrolled them in this camp. Based on numerous reported stories, I know that if this did happen, the camp likely would not even tell me, so I’d only hear about it after the fact from my kids. When I emailed again to confirm I was understanding this correctly, the staffer refused to answer definitively whether campers could be placed in private facilities such as bedrooms and bathrooms with transgender individuals. That’s an unacceptable risk to children’s well-being, as well as a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Given how socially contagious LGBT identification is, it’s not just about transgender issue but also exposing children to sexual information and pressures far earlier than they are ready. Hand in hand with grouping children by gender identity is forcing conversations about what that means, which pushes children earlier and earlier to declare and investigate sexual behaviors. This is destabilizing to their identity, not “affirming” it.

Given 4-H national’s commitment to the toxic “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology, the fact that my Christian kids now cannot equally access lots of their programming due to 4-H’s choice to sexualize their activities was no surprise. But I still wanted to see in writing that my red county in my red state was indeed giving tax breaks and other government privileges to an organization that might room children overnight with troubled people of the opposite sex against their parents’ will. The answer is yes. (Thanks, Republicans!)

Everywhere We Go, Someone Wants to Talk Dirty to My Kids on the Public Dime

It’s not just places kids get naked. It’s everywhere. I cannot take my children to the public library anymore, either, because the shelves are so full of pornographic and hostile books that it’s not a safe place for them. There, too, self-righteous LGBT activism has resulted in effectively banning my children from yet another public place and weaponizing my own tax dollars against my children’s safety. The shelves and displays in our library are full of books telling my children lies such as that “men can become women” and “some boys have girl brains” and “gender is a social construct.” I’m happy to have these conversations with my children when they are ready, but I know my six-year-old, and he is not ready. My eight-year-old is not ready, and neither are my 10- and 11-year-old, frankly. It’s grotesque and evil to put books at their eye level that deliberately aim to confuse them about something so deep and important. To do this is to usurp not only my parental wisdom and authority over my own children but to usurp my children’s right to an innocent, emotionally secure childhood.

It Won’t Happen, And When It Does, You Bigots Will Deserve It

These all prove that rapidly rewriting American laws to ignore sexual differences has effectively banned Christian families from equal participation in public facilities and activities. It’s not just Christian families, it’s any family that thinks it imprudent to lodge their sometimes-undressed daughters with an emotionally traumatized male at summer camp or to obtain swimming lessons at a public pool. This all descends from the massive bait and switch inherent to the LGBT policy agenda. We were told it was only about extending government sanction to what consenting adults do behind closed doors. We were told it was about allowing people to visit loved ones in hospice and inherit without legal difficulties. It wasn’t going to affect our families, remember?

Anyone who raised concerns about how calling sexual activities that cannot create a family “marriage” would affect children, faith, and families was smeared as a know-nothing bigot. Anyone who wanted to logically think through how legally equating men to women in the social keystone of marriage would have a domino effect on many other laws and social arrangements was also smeared as a hateful bigot, all the way up to highly intelligent and reasoned Supreme Court dissents. It’s the same toxic play we’ve seen work ever since: Anyone with a contrary opinion or even unanswered questions is not engaged, but simply smeared.

Men and Women Are Different, And That Matters

The fact is that equating homosexual relationships to marriage very often requires explaining adult sexual behaviors to tiny children. Erasing the differences between the sexes in marriage also leads irrevocably to erasing the differences between the sexes everywhere else, from bathrooms to pools to summer camps. Breaking down all sexual differences also results in discrimination against religious expressions that acknowledge men and women are different, and these differences are divinely ordered.

Thus upending the natural sexual order has resulted, not in the falsely promised “equality,” but in simply flipping which social system will rule. For what we were prevented from discussing or even seeing was the fact that these two regimes — treating the sexes as different and complementary versus seeing them as neutered and interchangeable — are mutually exclusive.

You cannot have both transgender swimmers and single-sex sports competition. You cannot have both the sexual profligacy pushed by the dominant LGBT activist class and protect children from sexualized childhoods and predatory social situations. You must have one or the other.

In the absence of clarity about this reality combined with effective use of power on reality’s behalf, abrasive, antisocial activists have fully taken over every public space. Any further sorties are merely tinkering around the edges of their all-encompassing kingdom.

Children Are No Longer a Protected Class, They’re Targets for Groomers

So instead of achieving equality, what we have really achieved is the subversion of children’s developmental needs to adult desires. Instead of equality, we have replaced legal preferences for the only sexual arrangement that produces the most stable future citizens — lifelong married biological parents — with legal preferences for sexual arrangements that harm children and send religious folk to the back of the public bus.

Therefore, all who believe in protecting children from marinating in sexual imagery and ideas everywhere they go are the new underclass in our political regime, and in many cases no Republican officials will even recognize our legitimate concerns, let alone fight for our daughters. That’s certainly the case here in Indiana, where Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb won’t sign bare-minimum legislation protecting girls’ sports and nobody is even talking about making our libraries, camps, and pools safe for families (even though that’s one of the few value-added policies a state like Indiana can offer its citizens).

Many of our major public and private institutions are making the public square completely hostile to a happy childhood and faith. Their “solution” to alleged bigotry was institutionalizing actual bigotry. “Our kind” aren’t wanted in “their” territory, you see. Maybe we would be allowed to have separate pools and summer camps funded by our own money, as long as the ACLU doesn’t sue them out of existence like they do Christian hospitals and foster care agencies.

What we weren’t told was that letting homosexuals out of the closet would require stuffing all the children and Christians inside.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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You’re Not Crazy. The New Left Really Is at War with Reality


COMMENTARY BY: MIKE GONZALEZ | FEBRUARY 01, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/01/youre-not-crazy-the-new-left-really-is-at-war-with-reality/

Marx's grave, London

In debates about critical race theory and other manifestations of identity politics, Americans are being confronted with a particularly virulent form of Marxism, which some call cultural Marxism. Its adherents think they can create a new reality, because at bottom they do not believe in objective nature. Conservatives engaged in an important conversation over the exact proportion of natural law and natural rights must ensure their attention is not diverted from sworn opponents who deny the existence of either.

Very roughly, the natural-law crowd emphasizes society’s “common good,” while those on the natural-rights side stress individual liberties. They have bigger problems than each other though.

Adherents of a new left have no time for fundamental truths, but believe that each era’s conceptual framework is what creates reality. Man may apprehend natural phenomena through his senses, but he can only comprehend the world through society’s reigning concepts.

Marxist Belief

Marxists believe those in power create this perceptional superstructure. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” Marx himself wrote in “The Communist Manifesto.” Max Horkheimer, the neo-communist who led the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and ’40s and first came up with Critical Theory, was as usual more wordy, but essentially said the same thing.

“The power of healthy human understanding, or common sense … are conditioned by the fact that the world of objects to be judged is in large measure produced by an activity that is itself determined by the very ideas which help the individual to recognize that world and to grasp it conceptually,” Horkheimer wrote in a foundational 1935 essay.

To critical race theory, an American mutation of critical theory, that powerful conceptual framework is white supremacy. In fact, the first task of CRT, wrote the editors of the 1995 collection of essays that serves as the theory’s tablet (which they refer to as “The Big Red Book”), is “to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America.”

It is embedded in the “‘ordinary business’ of society,” wrote Richard Delgado in his far slimmer primer on CRT.

Man Creates Reality

The obvious implication is that, if you eliminate the conceptual framework — presto! you change nature and reality. Horkheimer says this is what happens with each passing historical era: “There are connections between the forms of judgment and the historical periods. A brief indication will show what is meant. The classificatory judgment is typical of prebourgeois society: this is the way it is, and man can do nothing about it…. Critical theory maintains: it need not be so; man can change reality” (italics added for emphasis).

From this, we can extrapolate why members of this new left believe that man can change his sex, which is just “assigned” at birth: because they are both Godless and materialist, they believe man is omnipotent. Things are not as they are because God or nature made them that way. Things are as they are because we conceive them so. Man creates reality.

This turns philosophy and theory on their head. Philosophy studies the true nature of things. But since there is no fundamental truth, philosophy becomes the motor to create a new reality.

Marx himself, once again, started it, writing in 1843, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Five years later, he added in the Manifesto, “Communism abolishes eternal truths. It abolishes all religion and all morality.”

CRT’s Goals to Dismantle Society

About a century and a half later, Harvard University’s Derrick Bell, the godfather of CRT, wrote, “As I see it, critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it.” The works of CRT are suffused with calls for “theoretical deconstruction” and the like.

These are the true foes of those who want to conserve what is good about America (i.e., conservatives). They see all of American society as an oppressive hegemonic narrative that should be destroyed and replaced with a counter-narrative. “I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society,” says Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter, a force that has already done a lot of cultural dismantling.

But starting in late 2020, a force has risen to push back: parents. “It didn’t take long for parents of all races to figure out that their children were being indoctrinated into a repellent ideology. Since the implementation of CRT at the school level began, genuine parental resistance to it bubbled up,” writes Abe Greenwald in a Commentary piece chronicling the counter-revolution.

Conservatives Shouldn’t Forget Common Enemy

Bright conservative minds engaged in an intellectual debate over the future of conservatism cannot forget this other fight against our common enemies. On one side of the conservative debate (and this is an oversimplification) are some who believe the emphasis should be on natural law (the eternal precepts that govern man’s action); on the other are those who stress the natural rights, or the individual rights, that man has because of his nature.

As Catholic University’s Melissa Moschella recently told me, they are tied at the hip, however. We have a natural right to free speech because our nature permits us to speak, but also because free speech is a prerequisite for discovering truth, an aspect of human flourishing. Our nature also permits us to commit murder, but we have no right to exercise that capacity because it is contrary to human flourishing, and therefore to natural law. These distinctions, let me assure you, are lost on Marx, Bell, or Garza.

I have good friends and mentors on both sides of the conservative debate. They are intelligent, patriotic, and courageous. Their issues do matter. But let’s remember who are the real enemies of fundamental truth, and not become immersed in internal debates over theological principles, as the Byzantines did in 1453 when the Ottomans were at the gate.

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Catholic Teacher Fired for Criticizing Black Lives Matter Movement: Conservatives ‘Need to Be on Offense’


Reported by ROBERT KRAYCHIK | 

URL of the originating web site: https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/06/24/catholic-teacher-fired-for-criticizing-black-lives-matter-movement-conservatives-need-to-be-on-offense/

Demonstrators raise their fists as a fire burns in the street after clashes with law enforcement near the Seattle Police Departments East Precinct shortly after midnight on June 8, 2020 in Seattle, Washington. Earlier in the evening, a suspect drove into the crowd of protesters and shot one person, which … / David Ryder/Getty Images

Conservatives must always be on offense to secure political victories, said Timothy Gordon, a Catholic high school theology teacher who was fired for criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement, offering his remarks on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host John Hayward.

Gordon described Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization on Twitter. He recalled, “I said Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization. BLM was declared a BIE — a black identity extremist movement — which is a form of home-spun terror, according the FBI.”

“[Black Lives Matter] is essentially a non-falsifiable religious cult that sets itself specifically against Christianity, just like the French Revolution did,” said Gordon. “They want to destroyed the Western nuclear family. They want to destroy private education. They want to destroy the basis for the Western nuclear family, which is heterosexual marriage.”

National Review’s John Hirschauer reported about Gordon’s firing:

Until recently, Tim was a theology teacher at a Catholic high school. Between his two books, his podcast, and his full-time job as a teacher, Gordon was able to support his family and the expansive medical needs of his daughter.

His daughter, who had been suffering from relentless bouts of seizures, recently underwent a hemispherectomy, a rare form of neurosurgery in which a large portion of one of the brain’s hemispheres is removed. It is an expensive procedure, and Tim was fortunate to have insurance from the Catholic high school that employed him to defray some of those expenses.

Members of that high-school community emailed Tim, wishing his daughter well during the surgery. They prayed for her on the morning announcements. But after Tim said something unfashionable about Black Lives Matter in public, his employment at the school was swiftly terminated. No longer covered by the school’s insurance, his daughter’s expensive recovery would have to be financed out-of-pocket.

Gordon issued a statement on social media about the firing:

Gordon, the sole breadwinner for his family, said he is grateful for the financial support he is receiving from fellow Catholic conservatives who are donating via his website. He told Breitbart News Tonight that the ordeal of being fired enabled him to draw on the lessons he outlined in his latest book, Rules for Retrogrades: Forty Tactics to Defeat the Radical Left.

“[A] retrograde is a deplorable 2.0,” Gordon explained, “And it’s an intellectual who understands Western Civilization, [and its] key figures like Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas and Suarez and Bellarmine. They like to fight, and they’re willing to take their principles to the mat. They hate the tepid conservatism that came to really characterize conservatism in the early 21st century.”

Gordon continued, “The first [rule] is just always be on offense. Chess masters know it. Military generals know it. Defensive coordinators in football know it. You always need to to be on offense. Defense doesn’t win championships.”

“Cowardly conservatives” operate on defense, Gordon stated. “You can’t really throw a strong punch from your back foot. You need to counterpunch, and you need to counterpunch with all your weight behind it. The only way to to win a football game is to get the ball, maintain possession some of the time, and actually score points. It doesn’t matter how good your defense is. You need to be on offense.”

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“Never negotiate with the radical left, because they’re always on offense,” added Gordon, “They’re excellent at these rules. Circle the wagons around other conservatives the way leftists circle the wagons [around other leftists]. Never ever give up a conservative or a retrograde. Never forfeit or apologize on their behalf. Defend their jobs. Defend their livelihoods. Defend their ways of life.”

Humor is indispensable as a tool of political persuasion, explained Gordon.

“Effective, punchy, time-efficient jokes out of the mouth of a great rhetorician on the right-wing are incredibly effective,” Gordon said. “They’re effective tenfold — or maybe a hundred-fold — compared against a Socrates walking around using logic to prove what we already know are right-wing truisms [and] propositional axioms about Western Civilization.”

Gordon went on, “If you can sit there and make jokes against these jokers on the left, then you can be very, very effective. That’s why Trump was so effective in 2016, and yes, that’s why they’re extra-aggressive, counter-aggressive against jokes, especially funny jokes and punchy punchlines on Twitter.”

“If all of us return to making jokes and being sacrilegious against the sacrileges of the left, they can’t get us all at once,” Gordon added.

Hayward said, “The right was scared away from using passion and morality in its arguments. They were told they have to be dispassionate and never talk about moral issues, and the left basically just ran the field on both of those things. [The left is] nothing but passionate appeals and nothing but moralizing, now.”

The right must include passion alongside its reason, Gordon replied.

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

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