The Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020 were the largest and most successful shakedown in American history. These “mostly peaceful protests” — which burned more than 200 American cities and wreaked more than $2 billion in damages — achieved more than anyone could have predicted: changes in laws, private sector policies, and perhaps most importantly, a historic transfer of wealth to racial and leftwing causes. As a result, American corporations gave or pledged more than $83 billion to either BLM or BLM-related causes.
We created a database tracking contributions and pledges made to the BLM movement and related causes, which we define as organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda, and which were made in the wake of the BLM riots of 2020. To date, our data spans more than 400 companies and $83 billion in pledges and contributions.
The famed consulting firm McKinsey and Company thinks the number is far larger. They calculated that from May 2020 to October 2022 companies pledged about $340 billion “to racial equity, specifically for Black Americans after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.” Our number is conservative by comparison. But unlike McKinsey, we provide details about the pledges and contributions of specific companies.
We are surprised at some of the incredulity in our calculations. So too is BLM, which suggests that objections to wealth transfers of this scale are rooted in “white supremacy,” and “a pathology that Black organizations don’t deserve to be funded.”
BLM called for reparations. In a sense, they succeeded, as these reparations were paid out to BLM itself (approximately $122 million) and to its vast NGO archipelago and other racialized causes and schemes under various names.
While the money was given or pledged in different ways, it was unmistakable for so-called “racial justice.” Sometimes this meant cash transfers to partners of BLM, like the Color of Change, the NAACP, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the ACLU.
Sometimes it meant cash or pledges to other “reparative” initiatives including race-based, discriminatory hiring programs; race-based, sub-prime lending; race-based scholarships; and partisan voter initiatives. Sometimes it meant Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which are the polite versions of BLM calibrated to middle-class, middle-management tastes. The DEI ideology disagrees with BLM in few ways, if any.
DEI and BLM share one mission: to punish white America, through different means. The latter through riots and pressure campaigns, the former through preferential hiring and promotion of members of protected groups. Both aim to redistribute honor, privileges, and money to black Americans. Both are extorting special privileges and money by using white guilt.
Moreover, both are attempting to do so by cultural revolution, and both stand openly against meritocracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and individual rights. Correctly understood, DEI is an expression of BLM’s broader agenda.
We already know the exorbitant amount of money given or pledged by large banks like JPMorgan ($30 billion), Bank of America ($18 billion), and Silicon Valley Bank ($70 million) in the wake of the 2020 BLM riots to subsidized and sub-prime race-based lending, race-based investment targeting, supply chain diversity initiatives, and nonprofits advancing racial justice.
But BLM was so effective that even seemingly middle-America companies shelled out big. For example, Cargill, the Minnesota-based food producer, launched its “Black Farmer Equity Initiative,” a redistributive program that attributes declining numbers of black farmers to “the legacy of systemic racism” and seeks to “dismantle Anti-Black racism” and “operationalize equity across the food and agriculture system.” Cargill pledged $11 billion to the initiative through 2030.
Kroger, a ubiquitous neighborhood grocery chain, spent at least $13 million to advance racial division, including $5 million toward its “Framework for Action: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” initiative and a $500,000 contribution to LISC’s Black Economic Development Fund, a discriminatory investment fund that promotes BLM. Kroger also partnered with the discriminatory, race-based hiring platform OneTen, which aims to “hire, promote, and advance one million Black individuals who do not have a four-year degree into family-sustaining careers over the next ten years.”
Caterpillar, the producer of heavy equipment, donated $500,000 each to the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative. It too partnered with OneTen. John Deere donated $1 million to the NAACP, again, an official partner of BLM.
Defense contractors, traditionally neutral and dedicated to keeping America safe, also submitted to BLM’s demands. Northrop Grumman donated $1 million to the NAACP and an additional $1 million to organizations promoting social justice as part of an employee charitable gift matching program. It also partnered with OneTen.
Raytheon pledged $25 million over five years to “advance racial justice, empowerment, and career readiness in underserved communities.” The commitment includes donations to the NAACP, Equal Justice Initiative, and National Urban League; community outreach; public policy lobbying; and a supplier diversity initiative.
Boeing pledged a minimum of $25 million by 2023 toward racial “equity” and “social justice.” In 2020, it contributed $15.6 million to organizations addressing “racial inequity,” including $1 million to the Equal Justice Initiative.
The list goes on, and should be further explored by journalists in order to understand the full extent of the shakedown. By caving to BLM, American companies not only became the tools of radicals but also laid the groundwork for future violence and extortion.
The Center for the American Way of Life is a branch of The Claremont Institute. The mission of The Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.
They are now.
Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution — including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies, and major retail brands — has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning.
From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.
Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations, and accrediting associations that support their efforts.
“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms). Yet however defined, it’s clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.
“It’s an industry in every sense of the word,” says Peter Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale. “My suspicion is that many of the offices don’t do what they say. But they’re hiring people, giving them titles and pretty good money. I don’t think they do nothing.”
It’s difficult to know how large the DEI Industrial Complex has become. The Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t assessed its size. Two decades ago, MIT professor Thomas Kochan estimated that diversity was already an $8 billion-a-year industry. Yet along with the addition of equity, inclusion, and like terms, the industry has surely grown an order of magnitude larger. Six years ago, McKinsey and Company estimated that American companies were spending $8 billion a year on diversity training alone. DEI hiring and training have only accelerated in the years since.
“In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace,” writes Marti Gurri, a former CIA analyst who studies media and politics, “nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.”
Yet in our time, no Roman Emperor has demanded a complete cultural transformation. No law was passed mandating DEI enactment. No federal court ruling has required its implementation. There was no clarion call on the order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” warning. No genuine public crisis matched the scale of the response.
The sources of this transformation are both deep and fairly recent. On one level, they can be traced back to the egalitarian movements that have long shaped American history — from the nation’s founding, through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the battles for women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and same-sex marriage. In other ways, the rapid transformation can seem no more explicable than an eccentric fashion trend, like men of the late 18th century wearing periwigs. However, a few pivot points of recent history bent its arc in DEI’s direction.
The push for affirmative action is the most obvious influence, a program first conceived during the Reconstruction era but then abandoned for nearly a century. Although triumphs for social justice, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights acts of the late 1950s and 1960s didn’t stop discrimination; the country would need to take more affirmative steps toward assisting minority groups and achieving more equitable outcomes, proponents argued. A controversial policy from the start (with the Supreme Court expected to curb its use in college admissions this term), affirmative action was further complicated by immigration reforms that allowed for more non-European immigrants, setting off a seismic demographic shift that continues to reverberate.
The diversity movement of the early 1990s was in part an attempt to capitalize on the new multicultural reality. Stressing individual and institutional benefits rather than moral failings, early corporate diversity training programs hewed to traditional values of equality and meritocracy. Creating a diverse workplace, R. Roosevelt Thomas wrote in the Harvard Business Review, in 1990, “should always be a question of pure competence and character unmuddied by birth.”
But in other ways, the recent explosion of DEI initiatives reflects shortcomings of earlier efforts, as suggested by the headline of a 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Diversity Fails.” Even as high-achieving first- and second-generation immigrants have thrived in certain industries, particularly STEM fields, people of color remain scarce in senior institutional positions. There is also the deeper issue of what many in the post-George Floyd era have taken to calling systemic or structural racism, citing major disparities for black Americans in education, health care, homeownership, arrests, incarceration, and household wealth.
More recently, a spate of widely publicized police killings of unarmed African Americans has galvanized a growing belief, especially among progressives and especially since Donald Trump’s election, that America is an irredeemably racist nation. In 2020, in the wake of the Floyd murder and in advance of a fraught election, a moral panic set in. Having increased their ranks, social justice entrepreneurs and bureaucrats were poised to implement an ideological agenda and compound their institutional power.
Although no hard numbers exist on the exact size of the industry, the “DEIfication” of America is clear. From Rochester, New York, to San Diego, California, cash-strapped municipalities have found the funds to staff DEI offices. Startups and small companies that once relied on their own employees to promote an inclusive culture now feel compelled to hire diversity consultants and sensitivity trainers to set them straight.
At Ohio State University, for example, the average DEI staff salary is $78,000, according to public information gathered by economist Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute — about $103,000 with fringe benefits. Not to be outdone by its Big Ten conference rival, the University of Michigan pays its diversity officers $94,000 on average — about $124,000 with benefits. Until he retired from the position last summer, Michigan’s chief diversity officer, Robert Sellers, was paid over $431,000 a year. His wife, Tabbye Chavous, now has the job, at the vice provost rank and a salary of $380,000.
For smaller organizations that cannot afford a full-time equity officer, there are other options for shoring up social justice bona fides — namely, working with any of the hundreds of DEI consulting agencies that have risen like mushrooms after a night’s rain, most of them led by “BIPOC” millennials. With some firms, the social justice goals are unmistakable. The Racial Equity Institute is “committed to the work of anti-racist transformation” and challenging “patterns of power” on behalf of big-name clients like the Harvard Business School, Ben & Jerry’s, and the American Civil Liberties Union. With others, the appeal has less to do with social change than exploring marketing opportunities and creating a “with-it” company culture, where progressive politics complement the office foosball tables and kombucha on tap.
“Diversity wins!” declares the management consultancy McKinsey & Company. Certainly diversity officers have been winning, although opposition is building in Florida and elsewhere, where the wider woke agenda that includes DEI has advanced. Even minimally trained practitioners are in high demand, and signs of their influence abound.
Major tech companies like Google publicly chart the “Black+ and Latinx+” people they’ve hired and assure the public that Artificial Intelligence will prioritize the DEI political agenda. ChapGPT, an AI model that can generate remarkably cogent writing, has been designed with a liberal bias, summarily rejecting requests that don’t conform to the algorithm’s notions of “positivity, equality and inclusivity.”
In education, college students are required to take DEI-prescribed courses. Community college employees in California are evaluated on their DEI competencies. Loyalty oaths to the DEI dogma are demanded of professors. Applicants to tenure-track positions, including those in math and physics, are rejected out of hand if their mandatory DEI statements are found wanting. Increasingly, DEI administrators are involved in hiring, promotion, and course content decisions.
“Academic departments are always thinking, ‘We need to run this by Diversity,’” says Glenn Ricketts, public affairs officer for the National Association of Scholars.
The industry’s reach can also be seen in the many Orwellian examples of exclusion in the name of inclusion, of reprisals in the name of tolerance. Invariably, they feature an agitated clutch of activists browbeating administrators and executives into apologizing for an alleged trespass against an ostensibly vulnerable constituency. When that has been deemed insufficient or when senior executives have sensed a threat to their own legitimacy, they’ve offered up scapegoats on false or flimsy pretexts. That might be a decades-long New York Times reporter, a head curator at a major art museum, an adjunct art history professor, a second-year law student, or a janitor at a pricey New England college. (The list is long.)
Often enough, the inquisitions have turned into public relations debacles for major institutions. But despite the intense criticism and public chagrin, the movement marches on.
The expansion “happened gradually at first, and people didn’t recognize the tremendous growth,” Perry says. “But after George Floyd, it really accelerated. It became supercharged. And nobody wanted to criticize it because they would been seen as racists.”
Not playing along with the DEI protocols can end an academic career. For example, when Gordon Klein, a UCLA accounting lecturer, dismissed a request to grade black students more leniently in 2020, the school’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office intervened to have him put on leave and banned from campus. A counter-protest soon reversed that. However, when Klein also declined to write a DEI statement explaining how his work helped “underrepresented and underserved populations,” he was denied a standard merit raise, despite excellent teaching evaluations. (He is suing for defamation and other alleged harms.)
Scores of professors and students have also been subject to capricious, secretive, and career-destroying investigations by Title IX officers, who work hand-in-glove with DEI administrators, focusing on gender discrimination and sexual harassment. As writer and former Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis recounts in “Unwanted Advances,” individuals can be brought up on charges without any semblance of due process, as she was, simply for “wrongthink” — that is, for having expressed thoughts that someone found objectionable.
With activist administrators assuming the role of grand inquisitors, “the traditional ideal of the university — as a refuge for complexity, a setting for free exchange of ideas — is getting buried under an avalanche of platitudes and fear,” she writes. And it would appear that students and professors would have it no other way. By and large, they want more bureaucratic intervention and regulations, not less.
As more institutions create DEI offices and hire ever more managers to run them, the enterprise inevitably becomes self-justifying. According to Parkinson’s Law, bureaucracy needs to create more work, however unnecessary or unproductive, to keep growing. Growth itself becomes the overriding imperative. The DEI movement needs the pretext of inequities, real or contrived, to maintain and expand its bureaucratic presence. As Malcolm Kyeyume, a Swedish commentator and self-described Marxist, writes: “Managerialism requires intermediation and intermediation requires a justifying ideology.”
Ten years ago, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg found that the ratio of administrators to students had doubled since 1975. With the expansion of DEI, there are more administrators than ever, most of whom have no academic background. On average, according to a Heritage Foundation study, major universities across the country currently employ 45 “diversicrats,” as Perry calls them. With few exceptions, they outnumber the faculty in history departments, often two or three to one.
At Michigan, Perry wasn’t able to find anyone with the words “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” in his job title until 2004; and for the next decade, such positions generally remained centralized at the provost level, working for the university as a whole. But in 2016, Michigan president Mark Schlissel announced that the university would invest $85 million in DEI programs. Soon after, equity offices began to “metastasize like a cancer,” Perry says, across every college, department, and division, from the college of pharmacy to the school’s botanical garden and arboretum, where a full-time DEI manager is now “institutionalizing co-liberatory futures.” All the while, black enrollment at Michigan has dropped by nearly 50 percent since 1996.
Despite the titles and the handsome salaries, most DEI administrative positions are support staff jobs, not teaching or research positions. In contrast with the provisions of Title IX, DEI is not mandated by law; it is entirely optional. DEI officers nevertheless exert enormous influence, in part because so few people oppose them. The thinking seems to be that if you’re against the expanding and intrusive diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, you must be for the opposite — discrimination, inequality, and exclusion.
“By telling themselves that they’re making the world a better place, they get to throw their weight around,” says Ricketts. “They have a lot of money, a lot of leverage, and a lot of people who just don’t want to butt heads with them — people who just want to go along to get along. People who are thinking, ‘If we embrace DEI, nobody can accuse us of being racist or whatever.’ They’re trying to cover their backsides.”
Some organizations, it seems, are merely trying to keep up with cultural trends.
Consider Tucson, Arizona, where diversity is not a buzzy talking point but an everyday reality. With a population that is 44 percent Hispanic, 43 percent white, and only 4.6 percent black, the city has had no major racial incidents in decades. Yet like hundreds of others communities, Tucson suddenly decided in direct response to the Floyd murder 1,600 miles away that it needed an office of equity.
To many observers, it seemed that the city was just “getting jiggy with it,” pretending to solve a problem that didn’t exist. After a two-year search, it hired Laurice Walker, the youngest chief equity officer in the country, at age 28, with a salary of $145,000 — nearly three and a half times what Tucson’s mayor, Regina Romero, earns.
Not that the mayor is complaining. “I think this position is about putting an equity lens into all that we do,” Romero said in May, by which she means — well, nobody is quite sure what “equity” means, particularly with respect to federal legislation clearly prohibiting positive and negative discrimination alike.
But trying to get out in front of the DEI train can also result in getting run over by it.
When the city council of Asheville, North Carolina, hired Kimberlee Archie as its first equity and inclusion manager, its members probably didn’t anticipate being accused of having a “white supremacy culture.” After all, city manager Debra Campbell is black, as are three of the seven women making up the city council. The council had cut police funding and unanimously approved a reparations resolution.
Archie nevertheless complained that her colleagues still weren’t doing enough to advance racial equity. “What I describe it as is kind of like the bobblehead effect,” she said in 2020. “We’d be in meetings … and people’s heads are nodding as if they are in agreement. However, their actions didn’t back that up.”
The drama in western North Carolina illustrates a dilemma that organizations face going forward. They can pursue an aggressive political agenda in which white supremacy is considered the country’s defining ethos (per The New York Times’ “1619 Project“) and present discrimination as the only remedy to past discrimination (see Ibram X. Kendi). Or they take the path of least resistance, paying rhetorical tribute to DEI enforcers as the “bobbleheads” that Archie disparages but doing little more than that. After all, they still have universities, businesses, and sanitation departments to run, alumni and investors to satisfy, students to teach, research to pursue, roads to be paved, sewage to be treated, costs to be minimized, and profits to be maximized.
Perhaps, too, senior administrators and executives are beginning to realize that, despite the moral panic of 2020, the most culturally diverse country in the world might not be irredeemably racist, even if it’s no longer acceptable to say so. The United States twice elected an African American man named Barack Hussein Obama as president. His first attorney general was a black man, who would be replaced by a black woman. His vice president would pick a woman of mixed race as his running mate. The mayors of 12 of the 20 largest U.S. cities are black, including the four largest cities.
Likewise, many of the people whom Americans most admire — artists, athletes, musicians, scientists, writers — are black. Lately, most winners of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants are people of color. Gay marriage is legal, and enjoys wide public support, even among conservatives. The disabled, neurodivergent, and gender-divergent are applauded for their courage and resilience. And nonwhite groups, particularly Asians, Latinos, and African immigrants, have been remarkably upwardly mobile (often without official favoritism).
Clearly, troubling disparities persist for African Americans. What’s much less clear is that racism, systemic or not, remains the principal cause of these disparities or that a caste of equity commissars will reverse them. And now, it would seem that narrowing these disparities runs counter to their self-interest.
“I don’t want to deny that there’s genuine goodwill on the part of some of these programs,” says Prof. Schuck, stressing that he hasn’t examined their inner workings. “But some of these conflicts are not capable of being solved by these gestures. They have to justify their own jobs, their own budgets, however. And that creates the potential for a lot of mischief. They end up trafficking in controversy and righteousness, which produces the deformities we’ve been seeing in policies and conduct.”
Still, to hear DEI officers, it’s they who are beleaguered and overwhelmed. Yes, they have important-sounding jobs and rather vague responsibilities. They are accountable to nobody, really. Rather than fighting “the man,” they now are the man, or at least the gender-neutral term for man in this context. But this also means that they are starting to catch flak, particularly as the evidence mounts that the institutions they advise and admonish aren’t actually becoming more fair, open, and welcoming. They’re not even becoming more ethnically diverse.
Like other DEI advocates, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education has declined to answer questions for this article. Its officers are too busy traveling to conferences to do so, a spokeswoman said.
But at a recent association meeting, Anneliese Singh of Tulane University invoked Rosa Parks’ refusal to take a back seat to discrimination. Although Parks was a housekeeper and diversicrats have comfortable university sinecures, their struggles are analogously distressing, Singh suggested. The latter, too, are on the “front lines” in a harrowing war. However, she said, her colleagues needed to remember what mattered most: Looking out for themselves.
“It is not self-indulgence,” she said, now quoting the feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lord. “It is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare.”
For the moment, it’s a war Singh and her DEI colleagues are clearly winning.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
The Pentagon’s investigation into the U.S. military in 2021 found about 100 individuals engaged in extremist activities out of a force of 2 million. It appears investigators were looking in the wrong place. The search for extremists might have yielded better results had they examined the Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA), the government agency that administers K-12 education to the children of military personnel.
The Claremont Institute’s recently released report“Grooming Future Revolutionaries” describes shocking indoctrination taking place at overseas schools. It is a must-read, especially for military parents of the nearly 70,000 children in these schools.
I am a military spouse and the mother of a former DODEA student. The particular teacher training that was the focus of Claremont’s report is the reason, in part, why I lost all trust in the system.
In May 2021, I saw that DODEA would be holding an “Equity and Access Summit” for teachers and administrators. Knowing that “equity” means different things to different people, I wanted to get a sense of what it meant at DODEA. When I managed to gain access to the recordings, I was absolutely floored by what I saw and heard.
As the Claremont report shows, the summit featured hours of teacher training steeped in critical race and gender identity theories.
Claremont released a video of summit clips in which a principal talks about a student who felt like he’d done something wrong because he’s a “young, white male.” The teacher said she didn’t know what to tell him — but she seemed pleased with the breakthrough. Perhaps she was just following the lead of DODEA’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) chief Kelisa Wing, who is currently under investigation by DOD for a history of disparaging comments toward white people.
Video Evidence of Teachers Pushing CRT
The report also highlights literature teacher Gregory DeJardin’s presentation called “Combating 1- Sided Narratives (Decolonize the Curriculum).” DeJardin insists teachers become social activists and interviewed several students in his class at Vicenza High School in Italy about their difficulties with “majority culture.” It was painfully apparent in their answers that they were parroting his dogma, as one student said: “[School] is getting better about being more diverse and not taking a very normative perspective but there are definitely issues and I feel like it is still incredibly skewed to the white, male, heterosexual and Protestant gaze.”
Betty Roberts, an educator at Robinson Barracks Elementary School in Germany, talked about critical literacy. She wants her students to look deeply into textbook versions of events to find hidden biases. She asks her students questions like: “Is the American Revolution still being fought today?” She presses further and asks if the American Revolution was just a “transition from one group of rich white men to another group of rich white men.” Roberts goes on to express her gratefulness to the teachers’ union for its training on white fragility because she recognized her need for cultural humility.
Normalizing Transgenderism
Aside from the relentless instruction on anti-racism and white privilege, a clear effort was underway to normalize transgender identities and the notion of a gender spectrum. Genevieve Chavez and Lindsey Bagnaschi, presenters of “Ally 101 — Creating an Inclusive Classroom for LGBTQ+ Students,” talked about gender transitions they have facilitated for students at their schools in Spain and Germany, respectively — sometimes without parental knowledge or consent.
And many LGBT educators apparently belong to a system-wide resource-sharing group on Schoology curated by a DODEA educator. Chavez recommends resources from the group such as “Teaching with Mx. T” and “Teaching Outside the Binary.” But there is another similar group that’s passcode protected — and it’s for students. Teachers can add students to their own LGBT chat rooms in Schoology, and parents are not invited.
If teachers run out of content from people like “Mx. T,” they can use Discovery Education, which many recommended during the summit. One of the programs is “Speak Truth to Power.” This program offers lesson plans that are “flexible, standards-aligned digital resources, designed to educate, engage and inspire the next generation of human rights defenders.” Sounds good, doesn’t it — until you see that transgender activist Jazz Jennings is one of those human rights defenders. But Discovery Education is password-protected, with one portal for students and another for teachers, so we really have no idea what’s being promoted to our children via third-party content creators who can update information in real-time.
Congress Needs to Do More
Our children deserve to learn in an environment free from divisive ideologies, and thankfully, DODEA’s activism has not gone unnoticed by Congress. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., wrote a letter to DOD asking why teachers are being trained to secretly “transition” children at overseas schools. After a year, she still had not received an answer. She also introduced H.R. 4764, the No CRT for our Military Kids Act.
In the Senate, Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2023 to prevent DODEA schools from hiding important medical information from parents — but it was voted down.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., introduced a Servicemember Parents Bill of Rights amendment to the NDAA to provide for more transparency and accountability in DODEA schools. It was adopted in committee with bipartisan support by a vote of 39-19 and is in the House-passed NDAA.
But Congress needs to do much more to ensure the safety of our military children and also that of any DODEA educator who is being intimidated into conformity. It will likely take years to sort out the mess at DODEA, so in the meantime, Congress could consider extending the military’s Non-DOD Schools Program to all students instead of only to those who are not in close proximity to a DODEA school.
Whatever the case, it looks like an extremist stand down is in order for DODEA, and it just might net more than the .005 percent found among our uniformed force.
Amy Haywood is a former senior legislative assistant for a U.S. House representative and an educator with years of experience working in a research-based program to help third culture kids adjust to life overseas. She holds a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College.
U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., speaks during the Polk County Democrats Steak Fry, Saturday, Sept. 30, 2017, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has been under intense pressure amid growing concerns over diversity that saw top staffers resign Monday after those conflicts boiled over into the public arena.
DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos (D-IL) has been facing complaints from Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus members who have been unhappy with the lack of minority representation within the DCCC.
“There is not one person of color — black or brown, that I’m aware of — at any position of authority or decision making in the DCCC,” Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH) said. “It is shocking, it is shocking, and something needs to be done about it.”
Bustos flew back to Washington D.C. to hold an emergency meeting to address the internal strife within the organization. Tensions boiled over, and DCCC executive director Allison Jaslow quit during the meeting.
Politico reported:
At the beginning of the meeting, Jaslow resigned and left the session immediately. The meeting — which was described by several sources as spirited and pointed — lasted more than an hour and a half.
“When I was in eighth grade, I decided that my life would be dedicated to serving my country. I did that first in uniform but since have tried to be a force of good in our politics,”Jaslow, an Iraq War veteran, said in a statement later. “And sometimes selfless service means having the courage to take a bow for the sake of the mission — especially when the stakes are so high.”
Tensions continued to boil over, and the domino effect continued:
And in the next 10 hours, much of the senior staff was out: Jared Smith, the communications director and another Bustos ally; Melissa Miller, a top DCCC communications aide; Molly Ritner, political director; Nick Pancrazio, deputy executive director; and Van Ornelas, the DCCC’s director of diversity.
Jacqui Newman, the chief operating officer for the campaign arm, will serve as interim executive director and facilitate the search for a permanent replacement, Bustos said in a statement late Monday.
According to the Hill, one lawmaker called Monday evening’s mass shakeup a “Monday Night Massacre.”
“Cheri campaigned as all things to all people, telling blue dogs one thing, telling progressives another. So inevitably once in office she would disappoint them,” the lawmaker added.
Bustos said that it was a “sobering day filled with tough conversations”and promised to put the DCCC “back on path to protect and expand our majority, with a staff that truly reflects the diversity of our Democratic caucus and our party.”
The high tensions within the DCCC mirror the bigger power struggle between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the far-left members of the “Squad” – Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) – who aim to move the Democrat Party farther left in terms of ideology and self-imposed racial-based quotas. However, moderate Democrats worry that the extreme left-wing flank will alienate moderate voters and cost them crucial elections.
This was not the first time Bustos has faced criticism for being too “moderate.”
In January, Bustos received push back from groups such as the Justice Democrats who said she needs to support more progressive policies.
“We do not support Cheri Bustos as leader of the DCCC,”said spokesman Waleed Shahid. “Bustos has not supported progressive policies like Medicare for All, free college, a Green New Deal, or ending private prisons and immigration detention facilities.”
Justice Democrats also criticized her for receiving campaign funds mostly from corporate political action committees and not small donors, according to USA Today.
Bustos did not respond to Politico‘s request for comment.
On his June 16th radio show, Mark Levin said, “I made a suggestion to the gay community. I said you better exercise your second amendment rights while you still can. What did I mean by that,” asked Levin. “What I meant was that you need to acquire weapons to defend yourselves, because you’re being targeted by the Islamo-nazis.”
That’s a good piece of advice, as Levin is known to give. However, his advice runs up against the perceived reality of a lot of today’s youth. This reality is that for today’s youth, from 20-somethings (maybe older), all the way down to elementary school children, the fight instinct has been beaten out of them (figuratively speaking) with the bat of political correctness – leaving only the flight instinct.
Along the same vein as Levin’s advice, I wrote a piece the other day calling for more Americans, particularly millennials, to fight back, become sheepdogs and stop acting like sheep, so when the wolves come calling, as one did in Orlando, you can and will stand up and protect the innocent.
Sadly, far too many young men and women (and other) have been conditioned to hide or flee, rather than fight. Obviously the parents bear some of the blame, but our education system, such that it is, also bears a great deal.
Children are no longer taught about real threats – the kind that can and will “break your bones” and much worse. Instead, they are being brainwashed by leftist educators and advisors to fear words more than actions.
One shining example of this bass-ackwards thinking is on the campus of the University of Northern Colorado. Last year Katrina Rodriguez, Dean of Students and the Title IX Coordinator (the most harmful thing to hit college campuses since the introduction of co-ed dorms), ordered 680 signs to be hung in various places across campus.
One off the wall, politically correct poster after another was hung proclaiming things like: “Language matters because, whether it is intentional or not, the impact of words can reinforce oppression and feelings of discomfort, fear and shame.”
Rodriguez told HeatStreet.com that, “The intent is to educate to foster civility—not to take punitive action,” and “We believe that fostering dialogue on a college campus so that multiple perspectives are explored and debated is the essence of free speech.”
Leftists are all about the precious “dialogue.” This way they can talk and talk, while achieving absolutely nothing. That’s not exactly accurate. They do achieve something quite important – the termination of “free speech.”
Another such poster is a rebuttal of the slogan, “All Lives Matter.” The poster reads” You are dismissing the Black Lives Matter [BLM] movement and the brutality impacting the Black community.”
You want brutality, coddled young black men?! Try being black in Africa, mercilessly slaughtered by Muslims just because you dare to exist! And look at the picture of the 49 killed in Orlando. Look – there’s a black guy – and a black girl – and another and another. Looks to me to be 12 out of the 49.
So pitiful have things gotten on the Northern Colorado campus that they’ve formed and implemented a rapid “Bias Response Team” (BRT). In March there was an incident on campus and the BRT was called into action.
It seems the BLM poster had been defaced. Across the poster was scrolled “All Lives Do Matter,” and “Free Speech Matters.” The BRT quickly removed and replaced it with another poster that read: “This was the site of a bias related behavior.”
If you are shaking your head in disbelief and disgust, join the club, but this is emblematic of the fragile nature of America’s youth.
If young skulls full of mush (attribution – Rush) are taught that there is nothing more evil than an offensive word or silly slogan, how will America’s youth ever be expected to fight back against actual evil – the kind that may say little or nothing while they actual brutalize and kill you?
It is surprising to me how many people continue to allow their children to be brainwashed in the state-run schools. It should not be a hard connection to make between the loss of our children and the fact that they attended the same education system. But, one would think that they would at least wait until the second grade to begin the mush mind program. But this is not the case.
A four-year-old girl in Colorado has been booted from preschool after her mother expressed concern over diversity teaching in the classroom that included books on homosexuality and gender identity.
R.B. Sinclair told the Denver Post this week that her daughter’s preschool teacher at Montview Community Preschool and Kindergarten had been reading books to the children on same-sex “couples” and about worms questioning their gender.
There seems to be no limit to how early they will start the reprograming of the children. Why would a preschooler need to learn about homosexuality? Why are we talking with them about sexuality at all? The reason is simple; falsehood takes longer to sink in.
These children have to hear this filth over and over before it becomes second nature to them. But does this not prove that they instinctively know that it is not normal or right? Does this not show that this is a perversion?
But the “Uneducators” see things differently or at least that is what they would have us believe.
Christian News continues
“Biases start as kids get older and start to see differences as negative. At a young age, kids are exploring all different kinds of things,” Kim Bloemen, director of early childhood education for the Boulder Valley School District, told the Denver Post. “It’s about just providing them with all these experiences.”
The reality is we have left our moorings. We have nothing to keep us bound securely to truth. Without God’s word or Law, there are no bounds to our perversion. I discuss this in my book: An Everlasting Covenant. Buy at Amazon.
RUSH: Open Line Friday. So Mary Jo in Grand Rapids. It’s great to have you with us. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I’m calling about the presidential Democratic candidates, and I am — Democrat candidates. And they are constantly speaking about a life of “equality” and “diversity.” But ultimately, they are living a life of elitism. As I watched those five candidates up on the stage — all over 60, white, one female — I compared that to the Republican candidates who are numerous candidates under 60, Indian, Cuban, an Italian female. It’s… The difference is staggering. And if people would just stop and think. But the problem is that those who follow the Democrats are exactly that: They’re followers. They’re told not to question.
RUSH: Well, they react to what they hear. The Democrats preach a good game of diversity and fairness, equality, and all that, and the people eat it up. And they mean it, and they also believe it when they are told the Republicans are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes. And as you say, when you look at the Republican debate field you see practically an element of every possibility in this country, ethnically. You’re right. You have Cuban and Canadian ethnicity. He have African-American. You have white rich, you have white poor, you have white middle class.
You have African-American middle class. It covers the gamut. There’s all kinds of diversity. And yet the reality of what people see is over shadowed it might not have by years and years and years of the Democrats in the media accusing the Republicans of not being diverse and hating everybody who isn’t white. Yet when you look at the Democrats all you see is white. All you see is aged — seasoned citizens in most cases. You don’t see minorities, ethnic or otherwise, and you can’t say Hillary is minority because women…
There’s no way that she could be tagged as a minority. She had five people up there: Four men, one woman, all white, all over 60, not exactly diverse. But you want to hear the piece de resistance on this? I am not making this up. The Washington Post watched the same debate you and I did. They saw Bernie Sanders: Aged white guy. They saw Lincoln Chafee: Dumb, close-to-aged white guy. They saw Hillary Clinton: Aging, obviously, white woman. They saw Jim Webb, and in Jim Webb, you kind of say, “What’s he doing here?”
But still you saw an upper-middle class, almost-aging white guy. And then Bernie Sanders: An obvious seasoned citizen, bitter and angry white guy. The Washington Post saw all of that, too, and it didn’t register. The Washington Post wrote a story going after CNN for not having diversity in the moderators! No. I’m not making this up. The Washington Post went after CNN in an article on Wednesday titled, “Where were CNN’s black and Latino moderators all night?” The Washington Post accused CNN of “talking a big game about equality and inclusion but broadcasting just the opposite.”
So when the Washington Post saw the same debate you and I did they missed the fact that every Democrat was old and white. And instead they focused on CNN and they saw Dana Bash, and they saw Anderson Cooper. Hell, CNN had more diversity than the Democrat candidates had. They had a woman, they had a gay/homosexual. Besides, there was Anderson Cooper and Dana Bash and who…? Did they have somebody else that was moderating or just those two? Seems there were three people last… Oh, there was an Hispanic guy. There was an Hispanic guy asking Hispanic-related questions.
Oh, yeah, Don Lemon, a black guy. He got in… Well, he got to read a question off Twitter or Facebook. But at least he got some face time. That’s exactly right. So the Washington Post sees Don Lemon, black guy; Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash, white; Hispanic guy. You had homosexual in that group. And they accused CNN of not being diverse, and they miss entirely the Democrats on the stage. You’ve gotta be trying to get that story. I mean, how do you…? I mean, ridiculous. But they go after CNN and give every Democrat on that stage a pass. Mary Jo, I appreciate the call.
This is Tom in Baltimore, you’re next. Great to have you on Open Line Friday. Hello.
CALLER: Hi there. It’s great to be on the show again. I talked to you as a Rush Baby, and I just wanted to say what an honor it is as a Rush Baby to be able to talk to you.
RUSH: Thanks very much. I appreciate that.
CALLER: My point here is this. After watching the Republican debate I saw that many of them did have good conservative points to make. But overall there was a lot of infighting and a lot of areas where they were not presenting themselves as conservatives. There were many that stayed conservative the whole debate. But they overall were not unified. They did not present themselves as an ideologically pure conservative party. But if you compare the Republican debate to the Democrat debate, they all presented themselves as supporters of big government or reduction in individual freedom, redistribution of wealth. They all presented themselves as that. And in that way, I feel like Democrat Party is very ideologically pure and unified, and they use that power to their advantage when they’re trying to create legislation.
RUSH: Well, there’s no question. Look, this cuts both ways. I mean, you can say the Democrats are in lockstep, and they are. On the Republican side, you could say they’re not monolithic. There’s all kinds of different points of view welcome in the Republican Party, i.e., the big tent, that we’re not exclusionary of people. But that doesn’t seem to persuade anybody. It doesn’t seem to say to people, “You know, the Republican Party is pretty good. They allow all kinds of different ways of thinking.” That doesn’t seem to work. The Republican Party’s actively trying to suppress conservatives, Tom. And the Democrats are indeed unified on the fact that you and I are not qualified to lead our lives. They must do that for us.
I remember when the mantra of “every kid gets a trophy” began to take hold in our youth athletic programs. Well, now that philosophy of social utopianism has permeated throughout our culture and now in a place where it absolutely has no place. In life, there are standards and no one’s entitled to “have” anything — well, besides life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. However, that is not the societal vision of the liberal progressives; theirs is based upon egalitarianism. That, however, is not consistent with the duty and mission of our armed forces.
I was sent the following article from a distinguished retired Special Forces officer, Brigadier General Remo Butler, who was and continues to be a role model for me. As reported in USA Today:
Many of the Pentagon’s elite commando units — including the Navy SEALs — are overwhelmingly led and manned by white officers and enlisted troops, a concern at the highest levels of the military where officials have stressed the need to create more diverse forces to handle future threats.
Black officers and enlisted troops are scarce in some special operations units in highest demand, according to data provided by the Pentagon to USA TODAY. For instance, eight of 753 SEAL officers are black, or 1%.
An expert at the Pentagon on the diversity of commando forces said the lack of minorities robs the military of skills it needs to win.
“We don’t know where we will find ourselves in the future,” said Army Col. Michael Copenhaver, who has published a paper on diversity in special operating forces. “One thing is for sure: We will find ourselves around the globe. And around the globe you have different cultural backgrounds everywhere. Having that kind of a diverse force can only increase your operational capability.
Special Operations forces, including SEALs and the Army’s Green Berets, are often the face of the American military in foreign hot spots where they rescue hostages, raid terrorist camps and train local troops. SEAL Team 6 famously raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and killed him. As the military sheds conventional forces — the Army will pare 40,000 soldiers in the next few years — special operators’ ranks continue to be filled as demand for their unique capabilities remains high.
US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) based in Tampa, does not track that information on its nearly 70,000 civilian and military personnel, said Kenneth McGraw, a spokesman. Gen. Joseph Votel, SOCOM’s commander, declined to speak to USA TODAY for this story, said Col. Thomas Davis, another SOCOM spokesman.
Votel did address the issue last month at the Aspen Security Conference and stressed the need for diverse commando units, which operate in almost 90 countries. The average enlisted special operator is 29, married with two children and has deployed four to 10 times, Votel told the audience.
What he didn’t say is that most of them are white.
“SOCOM needs diversity, we need people of color, we need men, we need women to help us solve the problems that we deal with today,” Votel said. “So we need good people; men, women, people of all colors.”
What we need is a highly trained, well-resourced military focused on defeating our enemies. What these folks fail to understand is that in the community of warriors, no one cares about pigmentation. They care about honor, integrity, character and fierceness.
What I don’t want to see is all of a sudden the focus turn to having “black faces” instead of elite warriors. Diversity is not the goal of the U.S. military; it is to fight and win the nation’s wars. On the battlefield, bullets don’t seek out someone based on skin color. This design of social egalitarianism has no place in our military.
And spare me the diatribe about the integration of blacks into the U.S. military. From the days of Crispus Attucks, black men have shown they’re brave and willing to stand and fight for one single objective: liberty. The men of the 54th Massachusetts and the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry didn’t seek preferential treatment. As well, the 369th Harlem Hell Fighters, Tuskegee Airmen and Montford Point Marines achieved not because of their skin color, but because of their character.
There’s no need for “diversity agents” to try and manipulate the composition of our armed forces, sacrificing our effectiveness in pursuit of fairness, under the guise of enhanced increased capability. And what’s most disconcerting is the infiltration into the military of this ill-conceived mindset — namely the Pentagon joining in on this folly. The statement from an “expert at the Pentagon on the diversity of commando forces” — since when did the U.S. military need an expert on diversity of commando forces? I can tell you right now, if I were Secretary of Defense, that’s the first position I’d eliminate! The deduction of this so-called expert — “the lack of minorities robs the military of skills it needs to win” — is utterly disrespectful to the men and women serving, sacrificing and committing themselves in fighting for this nation today.
The strength of our military is we do not see color; we only see the oath we take to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And in doing so, each man and woman who takes up that oath serves in their best capacity — not one based on respective differences, but rather united in the commonality of being an American.
Our elite forces are elite because of their standards — and “monkeying” around with their composition based on some insidious research about diversity is stupidity. There are things that must be earned in life, and so it is with titles such as Green Beret, Ranger, Delta Force, Navy SEAL, Recon Marine and Air Force PJ. These are not just little plastic trophies to be handed out by the gods of diversity. They represent time-honored impeccable standards of excellence and elitism that only a few are called to seek, and even fewer attain.
On my chest I wear three sets of wings: Army Master Parachutist, Army Air Assault and the Navy/Marine Corps Parachutist. Those were not given because I was a minority. They were earned because I sought to “Be All I Could Be.” I didn’t get these through some diversity-approved course; rather, I entered as others and proved myself worthy.
At a time when we’re facing countless global enemies from Russia, China, Iran and Islamic jihadism, it’s not about the skin color of the person pulling the trigger to send our enemies to hell. It’s about the qualifications and their ability to do so. Diversity in our Special Operations forces means committed men and women who have diversified skills and talents enabling us to defeat the enemy. The policies of our Defense Department MUST not be about meeting quota goals, but rather in placing the MOST qualified, trained and ready force on the field of battle. No one cares about skin color, save those who only care about inane statistics they can show for their own elevation.
Once upon a time, the government said every American had a right to own a home and boasted of an increase in minority home ownership. Standards were lowered and what ensued 30 years later, in 2008, was a financial collapse. The folly here will result in an even greater collapse with ramifications on the national security of this republic.
For America, it’s never been about the skin color of the warrior. It has been, and must always be, about their oath of service and commitment to victory — not diversity.
Political conservatives are the greatest threat to the nation, President Barack Obama suggested in a kid-glove interview with the New York Times.
“The president mused, the biggest threat to America — the only force that can really weaken us — is us,” said the interviewer, Thomas Friedman.
“Our politics are dysfunctional… societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions,”said Obama, who repeatedly claims to be a moderate stymied by the GOP’s supposed obstructionism and radicalism.
“And the more diverse the country is, the less it can afford to take maximalist positions,” Obama added.
That comment about diversity was likely a warning to conservatives, who are expected by many Democrats to lose power as the nation absorbs more foreigners who do not share conservatives’ small-government ideals.
“Increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme maximalist positions… and sooner or later, that catches up with you,” Obama warned.
The GOP was first on the list of causes that Obama blamed for the political divisions that are blocking his agenda, such as increased immigration. However, his list also included a series of subsidiary causes that are actually consequences of underlying ideological conflicts and economic factors.
“While he blamed the rise of the Republican far right for extinguishing so many potential compromises, Obama also acknowledged that gerrymandering, the Balkanization of the news media and uncontrolled money in politics — the guts of our political system today — are sapping our ability to face big challenges together, more than any foreign enemy,”said Friendman, who is an Obama supporter, and a champion of progressive-style expansive government.
Obama and Friedman did not put any blame on the Democratic Party or Obama himself, whose own aggressive use of big-government to promote the progressive goal of social diversity caused voters in 2010 to give the Republicans a majority in the House.
Obama’s complaints come as the GOP and public opinion have blocked his top priority for the second term — increasing immigration. That failure — despite near-universal support from Democrats, media, big business, Wall Street and many billionaires — recently prompted Obama to say he plans to provide an unilateral amnesty to several million illegal immigrants, and award them work-permits. That’s a high-risk threat, because many recent polls shows that the public very strongly opposes illegal immigration, and gives him very low ratings for his immigration policy.
But Obama didn’t suggest he’s responsible for the nation’s political divides.
Obama’s claim of moderation is contradicted by much evidence.
For example, in October 2013, during the dispute over the 2014 budget, Obama used one speech to describe Republican legislators in the House as akin to arsonists, kidnappers, deadbeats, butchers, lunatics and extortionists, obsessives, out-of-touch hostage-takers, nuclear-armed bombers, and unserious irresponsible extremists.(RELATED: Obama Offers To Fairly Negotiate With GOP Terrorists)
“I’ve shown myself willing to go more than halfway in these conversations,”he also told the TV cameras during the same speech.
It’s official…LA IS La-La Land. In a frenzied attempt to prove their “diversity”, the Los Angeles City Council adopted a resolution on Wednesday recognizing the contributions of the Muslim American community and declared July 2014 as Muslim American Heritage Month.
Seriously, people…put down the Bong and back away, slowly…
This decision begs the question: Was everyone on the LA City Council conscious during this vote?
Not only has the Islamic community NOT contributed to the United States in any beneficial way, BUT they have not benefited freedom NOR humanity since the inception of Islam in the 7th Century.
A blood-thirsty ideology, started by a tyrannical politician (Muhammed), who…not unlike the world despots today…destroyed all his non-supporters. His devout followers today follow ever-so-carefully in his bloody footsteps. Obedient to the words of the Quran, the Hadiths (sayings of the prophet) and the Sunnah (practices of the prophet)…these religious zealots commit some of the most heinous acts in the world today.
Click on picture to go to link providing a detailed list of Islam atrocities.
The list of acts by Muhammed’s minions is interminable (because it has never ceased). According to The Religion Of Peace, Islamic terrorists have carried out more that 23,000 deadly terror attacks since 9-11 (see link for complete list or click on the image to the Left). And THAT does not include kidnappings, child marriages, female genital mutilations, sex slavery, floggings, privation, etc…which sores into the millions.
Was this what LA’s City Council was thinking about when they declared a month for Islam?
It’s ostensible that the Leftists in CA are obsessed with proving to the world that they are fair, tolerant and generous to all (well, all those who either agree with them or are deemed not as “evolved” as they and needing care). But to laud an ideology that has brought destitution, fear, disease, imprisonment, slavery, destruction and death wherever they plant their barbaric behinds, is not only feckless to the freedoms we treasure…but pernicious to our national security.
John Quincy Adams (for the Left: He was our 6th President) described the Quran in one of his essays as follows:
“The precept of the koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.”
And quoting a Muslim Scholar from the 14th century, Ibn Khaldoun, clarifying that holy war is the duty of every Muslim. From his famed work, Muqaddimah: “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the (Muslim) mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”
There is nothing honorable about this ideology. What has been exhibited…historically by its founder, and today by its followers…is a hateful, intolerant system that seeks to annihilate those who oppose it.
So, to the REST of LA: I believe you are much more intelligent and humane than those on this council. For the sake of democracy and freedom…prove me right and condemn this proclamation.
As society progresses, we lose small pieces of what made us human. We replace these little pieces with dangerous facsimiles of what originally filled us. Above all else, we lose our sense of moral integrity. What comes with a loss of moral integrity is an animus toward others who still hold values which many have left behind. We reach a certain point—which I fear we are quickly approaching—when that animus evolves into hostility, and that hostility into tyranny. Once we have reached tyranny, we cannot go back; we are trapped behind a glass wall, only able to see in our minds what once was possible, and who we once were. We are no longer humans, but animals, fighting for territory and scraps of food.
As we have progressed, we have lost tolerance. The Left will tell you that they are the most tolerant people the world has ever seen. That is, of course, a lie. The Left is only tolerant of those with whom they agree—which isn’t tolerance at all.
According to Town Hall, a Army Chaplain’s Assistant is being targeted for her religious beliefs. After watching a documentary in which a Pastor was condoning homosexuality, telling his gay parishioners to embrace who they are, the Chaplain’s Assistant posted a response on her personal Facebook page. This is the response in full:
“A lot ticked off, now to all my gay friends you know I care about you so don’t think otherwise. I’m watching this documentary and this gay guy went to a church and the Pastor was telling him that he needs to embrace his way and know that it is not a sin. Ok umm wow, dude it is. I’m sick of people making Gods word what it’s not. Yes God loves you as a person but He hates the sin. Tired of hearing about Pastors being ok with homosexuality.”
In response, her Commander told her to remove the post, or face demotion, and a salary decrease. Her Commander said that she was creating “a hostile and antagonistic environment in the unit.”
The Assistant says that she will not remove the post, and that she will not be intimidated into hiding her beliefs. “I haven’t taken it down, and I won’t take it down…
I’ve never gotten in trouble for anything. And there’s nothing hostile or antagonistic in the post…Where does it stop? If they are going to silence me on Facebook, where will it stop?”
Todd Hudnall, her Colorado Pastor, came to the defense of the Assistant, saying:
“I read what she posted and there was absolutely no trace of animus, disrespect or hostility. Instead, she expressed love for her gay friends but insisted that biblical values should not be compromised. Her issue wasn’t with anyone who is gay but with pastors who refuse to acknowledge scriptural teaching about homosexual behavior…I was struck by the fact that the military was denying her right to privately exercise her freedom of expression and freedom of religion.”
Where is the tolerance on the part of the Military? I can guarantee that if someone of a faith besides Christianity posted something similar to what the Assistant posted, the response would not be the same. That, right there, is intolerance.
Tolerance–in a sense–means dealing with the world around you; it means seeing people for who they are, not what they are. Tolerance means that although you may not agree with someone, you respect them as a human being, and treat them as you would want to be treated. The Military cannot violate freedom of speech. The Assistant has every right to express her beliefs in a way that doesn’t create an uncomfortable environment for her peers. She did that. She respectfully addressed her biblical understanding on her privateFacebook page.
Finally, what the Chaplain’s Assistant said is correct. If the Military silences her on Facebook, where and when will they act next? If they can reach their arms into the personal lives of soldiers–specifically and deliberately targeting religious beliefs–what is stopping them from going further? The answer is nothing. Nothing is stopping them. Animus will turn into hostility, and hostility into tyranny.
I don’t care if you agree with the Chaplain’s Assistant or not. I don’t care if you think her beliefs are wrong. If you care about our country, if you care about the future of our liberties, you will stand with her. With this case, a small, fragile piece of our collective freedom is teetering on the edge of a cliff. If it is allowed to fall, it will shatter into a million tiny pieces which we will never be able to put back together. It will be just one more piece of humanity lost, pushing us further toward tyranny.
“Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity—symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others–these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it. If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs—if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.”
Barack Obama is quite adept at saying one thing, while meaning another. Taken at face value, the essence of what the President said is accurate: fear and resentment may harden us to others; and it discourages cooperation. So, if one were to take out of context what the President said, it might make for a delightful sound bite; making Obama seem as wise and urbane as the media makes him out to be.
However, by reading the entirety of his speech, it is quite clear that Obama is directly comparing racial segregation to religious education. Let’s break down what the most powerful man in the world said:
1. He first establishes that segregation is a despicable thing. Ok, that’s accurate.
2. He then goes on to compare religious education among Catholics and Protestants to segregation. In essence, Obama is claiming that sending your child to be educated in an environment that you believe is better suited to your views is comparable to not wanting your children around black people.
3. He makes sure to evoke the everlasting tension between Catholic and Protestant so that it doesn’t appear as though he is talking directly about racial segregation; but rather religious and social segregation.
4. Beyond the obvious absurdity of comparing religious education to racial segregation, this has implications beyond the scope of school. By chastising the Catholic schools and Protestant schools for “segregation,” Obama is essentially taking a shot at religion in general. Is he saying that because many of us choose to be either Catholic or Protestant, that we are segregating ourselves? Is he saying that practicing one faith over another is comparable to black segregation? If so, he is making a clear and dangerous move against freedom of religion.
5. The President also links religion and religious education directly with hatred and resentment. He is taking liberties in terms of speaking about faith that no President should take. At its core, Obama’s message is that this school, and religious “segregation” is a source of resentment; that it creates and fosters resentment.
6. Finally, it’s Democratic policies that cause this supposed segregation in the first place. If the Democrats were to actually implement a voucher school choice program, parents would be free to choose the schools best suited for their kids. In that case, poor kids, whose parents cannot afford Catholic or Private school, would not be locked into an awful district. With choice, I’m sure many parents—even non-religious parents—would rather have their kids in a faith based school over a public school. Regardless, this “segregation” comparison is absolute garbage.
What Obama loves to do is speak these elegant and striking words that mean absolutely nothing. When taken apart, and understood clinically, Obama’s words often represent the exact opposite of his apparent intention. With this speech, apparently intended to provoke thought and discussion regarding a divided people, Obama has insulted schools of faith, religion at large, and those who simply desire a better education for their children.
Apparently, reptiles aren’t the only creatures with forked tongues.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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June 18, 2016
suggestion to the gay community. I said you better exercise your second amendment rights while you still can. What did I mean by that,” asked Levin. “What I meant was that you need to acquire weapons to defend yourselves, because you’re being targeted by the Islamo-nazis.”
This reality is that for today’s youth, from 20-somethings (maybe older), all the way down to elementary school children, the fight instinct has been beaten out of them (figuratively speaking) with the bat of political correctness – leaving only the flight instinct.
been conditioned to hide or flee, rather than fight. Obviously the parents bear some of the blame, but our education system, such that it is, also bears a great deal.
shame.”
slaughtered by Muslims just because you dare to exist! And look at the picture of the 49 killed in Orlando. Look – there’s a black guy – and a black girl – and another and another. Looks to me to be 12 out of the 49.
removed and replaced it with another poster that read: “This was the site of a bias related behavior.”
their children to be brainwashed in the state-run schools. It should not be a hard connection to make between the loss of our children and the fact that they attended the same education system. But, one would think that they would at least wait until the second grade to begin the mush mind program. But this is not the case.
You have African-American middle class. It covers the gamut. There’s all kinds of diversity. And yet the reality of what people see is over shadowed it might not have by years and years and years of the Democrats in the media accusing the Republicans of not being diverse and hating everybody who isn’t white. Yet when you look at the Democrats all you see is white. All you see is aged — seasoned citizens in most cases. You don’t see minorities, ethnic or otherwise, and you can’t say Hillary is minority because women…
So when the Washington Post saw the same debate you and I did they missed the fact that every Democrat was old and white. And instead they focused on CNN and they saw Dana Bash, and they saw Anderson Cooper. Hell, CNN had more diversity than the Democrat candidates had. They had a woman, they had a gay/homosexual. Besides, there was Anderson Cooper and Dana Bash and who…? Did they have somebody else that was moderating or just those two? Seems there were three people last… Oh, there was an Hispanic guy. There was an Hispanic guy asking Hispanic-related questions. 
It’s official…LA IS La-La Land. In a frenzied attempt to prove their “diversity”, the Los Angeles City Council adopted a resolution on Wednesday recognizing the contributions of the Muslim American community and declared July 2014 as Muslim American Heritage Month.
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