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and universities also must document their fulfillment of the new standards or else have their program certifications rescinded by Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB).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.).”
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.
A visitor watches the work of US artist Wardell Milan, “Amerika: Klansman, David” (2019), representing a deconstructed face with a KKK hood, during a preview on December 4, 2019, ahead of the opening the following day of the Art Basel international fair that takes place annually in Miami Beach the first week of December. – Climate change, pollution, racial issues and social commentary are some of the issues addressed by hundreds of artists showcased in Art Basel by more than 200 galleries from all over the world. | AFP via Getty Images/Leila Macor
The recent controversy surrounding Thomas Achord, a classical Christian school headmaster exposed for running a white supremacist Twitter account, has proved instructive on a number of fronts. It demonstrates that real racism and white supremacy do exist, a point that the grade inflation to which these terms have been subjected by the professional anti-racists of the last few years has served only to obscure. We must not allow the trivialization of racism to blind us to the places where it actually is. It is also a reminder that a radical right that cannot effectively operate a pseudonymous Twitter account is unlikely to be seizing control of America by force any time soon.
The views Achord and his Twitter cronies expressed were vile; their impotent online posturing unintentionally comedic. And then there was the personal abuse to which Alastair Roberts, the man who exposed the situation, was subjected by professing Christians — a reminder that for some Protestants, all Scripture is inspired and perspicuous, but some parts (e.g., the imprecatory bits) are apparently more inspired and perspicuous than others (e.g., the references to kind words deflecting wrath, turning the other cheek, observing the Ninth Commandment, and those pesky sections on not insulting brothers in the faith).
Beyond the bluster, though, two other issues struck me as noteworthy. First, it is clear that identity politics has a home on the reactionary right just as it does on the progressive left. This is no real surprise: In a world where everything has become politicized, such a scenario was bound to come to pass. The danger for Christians is that the apparent polarizing of society makes the stakes of political debates seem extremely high. In such a situation, extreme positions become attractive, even irresistible. As otherwise ordinary Christians see the country slipping away from them and into the hands of those whose culture war seems to have no moral limits, there is a temptation to repay like with like and to become the mirror image of the other side. This has to be resisted. And that resistance has to start in the pulpit, where the tone and direction are set for Christians in the pews.
Some may resist and argue that this is to bring politics into the pulpit. Unfortunately, in a world where everything is political, everything said in the pulpit is already political to some degree. And as we live in a world where the central contested political questions of our time all connect to the question of what it means to be human, then everything has to be political at some level. Now, this is not to say that preaching should be party-political, nor that its primary focus should be this world rather than the next. But it is to say that, after the commandment to love God, the commandment to love one’s neighbor is next in order of importance. And loving one’s neighbor — knowing how to live in the polis — is political. Thus, if there is in Christ no Jew or Gentile, then the racism of the right and of the left has no place in the Church.
The second issue that the Achord controversy touched to some extent is that of Christian nationalism. The term itself seems rather slippery, covering everything from hard-right racism to what many of us would simply have regarded as old-fashioned patriotism. In this context, a recent essay by Brad Littlejohn is a most welcome and helpful intervention. Until there is a stable and agreed-upon definition, “Christian nationalism” seems likely to function for the left as “cultural Marxism” does for the right: a convenient pejorative for discrediting that person just to the right — or the left — of what you yourself find acceptable.
Here it might be useful for Christians of all sides to rehabilitate the term “patriotism.” Unlike many Americans, it seems, I (along with thousands of other immigrants and aspiring immigrants) actually think America is on the whole a basically good country and one that her citizens should love. There is nothing wrong with that, because love for one’s country does not logically entail that one must despise and look down on all others. Christian patriotism avoids that. Take marriage as an analogy. If a husband declares his wife to be the most beautiful woman in the world, he is not saying that every other woman is ugly. What he is actually doing is expressing his special love for her and his deep gratitude for the joyful companionship she brings to his life. To love one’s country, to be patriotic, is thus not to sneer at every other nation or to look with scorn upon other peoples. It is simply the appropriate response of gratitude and love for the place where one belongs, that gives one an identity, that provides one with community and with purpose. Seen in that light, to be unpatriotic or to espouse chauvinistic nationalism are both morally wrong.
The tawdry Achord affair has revealed an ugly side to a certain part of the American Christian world. Real white supremacy really exists and is a real sin. It requires real action and real repentance from those Christians who espouse it. But in reacting to this, we need to be careful not to fall into the sin of ingratitude for other things — such as the country, warts and all, that we call home.
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Rise and Triumpth of the Modern Self, The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life, and Histories and Fallacies.
Paivi Rasanen must make God laugh. The 27-year member of Finland’s Parliament on trial for tweeting a Bible verse confounds so many pagan slogans.
She’s a mother of five children and grandmother of 10 who didn’t need abortion to simultaneously pull off two demanding careers: medicine and politics. An empathetic woman who eagerly shows pictures of grandbabies on her phone and expresses concern for strangers’ travel plans, Paivi (pie-EE-vee) also refuses to subjugate her reason to emotional manipulation.
She holds fast to Christian teachings about sex as reserved exclusively for lifelong marriage between one man and one woman, for which she’s been prosecuted and investigated now for three years and will be in court again this November. Her case could affect international law and is a foreboding example of where identity politics policies are quickly heading across the world.
“If we break the gender system and if we break the natural marriage system between one man and one woman, then we have dangerous consequences, especially to children,” Paivi told The Federalist in person this summer in Chicago.
This woman of science also firmly believes in supernatural revelation. In her pamphlet on Christian marriage that Finland’s top prosecutor is seeking to ban as “hate speech,” Paivi writes that “Jesus’s death and resurrection is the core of the entire Christian faith. On this the Bible stands or falls. If one does not believe it, there is nothing left of Christianity. And … if I believe this, it follows logically that I must believe everything else Christ teaches in the Bible through the Apostles and Prophets.”
Paivi speaking to a sold-out audience of Christians in Chicago, Illinois, this summer. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)
Persecution Spreads the Gospel
As it has often in history, persecution has created global opportunities for Paivi to spread Christian theology: about sex, its design for lasting human happiness, and Christianity’s warm welcome to those struggling with every kind of sin from the God “who hates nothing He has made.” The 2004 booklet “Male and Female He Created Them,” which prosecutors want to ban entirely and fine Paivi for writing, has gone from a few copies in a few conservative Lutheran churches to translated into half a dozen languages and read all over the world.
Rasanen’s 2004 booklet, printed from the online PDF and in its new second edition distributed worldwide.
Paivi and her husband Niilo (nee-loh) spoke this June in Budapest alongside megastar Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and his wife. Paivi said she’s seen especially strong support from Eastern European countries because many there still remember the Communists interrogating people about the Bible, as Finnish police did to Paivi three times for a total of 13 hours.
The Rasanens flew to Chicago right after Budapest so Paivi could speak at the sold-out Christian “Issues, Etc.” conference on June 25. In pearls, a flowered dress, and silvered golden hair, the petite 62-year-old asked the American crowd to pray that her case would “allow for more chances to preach the gospel in public.”
Rasanen’s case is on appeal in Finland and may end up in the European Court of Human Rights, developing precedents that could affect the world. If she loses in court, Paivi told a Christian outlet last year, “It will also affect religious freedom in other Western countries. LGBT groups have a very good network across national borders. They will try to achieve the same in other countries in Europe.”
In Q&A after her talk, Paivi said Finnish Prosecutor General Raija Toiviainen is expected to push the case as far as possible because Toiviainen has said identity politics is her top priority. Paivi’s legal help from Alliance Defending Freedom International has told The Federalist they are also prepared to appeal her case as far as possible should she lose.
Image courtesy Issues, Etc.
Persecution Amplifies Word of God’s Mercy for Sinners
Toiviainen claims agreeing with the Bible that sodomy is a sin is a criminal expression of hatred toward homosexuals. Paivi and her legal team have pointed out that if the court interprets the law this way, it will effectively outlaw Christianity and free speech in Finland.
Rather than rejecting homosexuals, as she’s been accused in court, Paivi glows with happiness when relating that gay people have disclosed her “Bible trial” has brought them to faith. In speeches and court testimony, Paivi has emphasized she not only bears no animosity toward homosexuals or transsexuals, she earnestly desires them to join her Christian family by receiving the eternal life that Jesus Christ offers freely to every person.
Paivi has been dragged into European courts and smeared in the press for years as a spewer of “hate speech.” Yet while battling severe jet lag that her husband said often gives her migraines, Paivi expressed not even a flicker of animosity toward her persecutors in Chicago.
Instead, when The Federalist asked if her three-year-and-counting prosecution might be orchestrated by political enemies, she seemed stumped. She conferred with her husband and finally suggested she was simply an easy target as a well-known figure in Finland.
“In all my career I have been known as a Christian and as a biblical Christian who doesn’t accept abortion and homosexual acts and so on,” Paivi told The Federalist. “And that’s why I think that perhaps it is the reason why the prosecutor has targeted just me.”
Family Unites to Fight for Other Families
Acknowledging the Biblical directive that only men serve as pastors has never tied Paivi to the kitchen — although perhaps she’d like to retire there given the suffering her political career has inflicted. Niilo prodded Paivi into running for office nearly three decades ago to try to stop Finland from forcing doctors like her to perform abortions, they told The Federalist.
Niilo Rasanen is a pastor and theology professor at a Lutheran Bible college. Niilo’s widowed mother lived with the couple while their children were young, and Paivi’s parents moved nearby and “helped a lot,” Paivi said. That, with Niilo’s flexibility while earning his doctorate, allowed Paivi to enter public service without sacrificing their children’s needs, they said.
During the five years when Niilo was writing his dissertation, “he was always at home when the children came home” from school, Paivi noted. Paivi and Niilo occasionally pulled out their phones to translate Finnish words into English or check they were using the right words, but Finns learn at least two foreign languages in school, Swedish and English.
Niilo and Paivi Rasanen in Chicago, Illinois, in June 2022. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)
In response to a question from the Chicago audience, Paivi revealed threats against her family. When she campaigned against child pornography, she said, a convicted pedophile entered their front yard and threatened their children: “It was quite a difficult time because we had to keep safe our children and they were a little bit afraid many years after that.” The most violent of the recent threats include a rape threat against her son, she said.
These external threats may have helped strengthen family bonds. Paivi and Niilo’s faces light up when they talk about their now-grown children, whom the Rasanens say are a great joy and regularly text their parents Bible verses and prayers.
“The task is communal, we do it together,” Niilo said of their marriage and family. “It has been so busy and hard time in this politic area — very, very busy, very long days. If you are not doing it together, it will not work.”
“I think what has been a great power in our life is that we have felt that these callings and tasks that we have, that they are common,” Paivi added.
From Church Only at Christmas to Global Witness
Born in 1959, Paivi grew up in a remote area near Finland’s border with Sweden, in the village of Konnunsuo. Her father was the agricultural director for a prison there. He oversaw the prisoners raising vegetables and animals to feed and support themselves. Paivi remembers as a girl watching piglets being born.
Her parents went to church only at Christmas, she said, but she learned the Bible from Sunday School and at prison church services. Her family also hosted missionaries to the prison, and they explained Christianity to Paivi and her two younger siblings.
A skilled student, especially in mathematics, young Paivi read all the books in her tiny village library that was open only two hours per week, she said. An adult biography of Nobel Prize-winning Polish scientist Marie Curie particularly inspired Paivi: “I admired her. I thought that I would like to be like her, to do something great.”
At the University of Helsinki, she studied both mathematics and medicine for a half year, but it was too much. So Paivi decided to focus on medicine because “I wanted to work with people.”
Organizing up to 70 Christian students for five years of weekly door-to-door evangelism in university deepened her faith, Paivi told The Federalist: “It was a very important time for me because there were students from different faculties and I had to defend my views, and I had to know [the] Bible because they asked difficult questions.”
She met Niilo doing summer missionary work among immigrants in London, and they married in February 1985, a year after Paivi started working as a doctor. They welcomed their children in 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996.
Because Paivi kept organizing debates and speakers about abortion among fellow medical students and doctors, the Christian Democrat political party asked her to run for office. The Christian Democrats are a small party that focuses on faith and family. From 2011 to 2015, Paivi served as Finland’s Minister of the Interior as part of a coalition government.
She Fights Like a Woman
Paivi has fought steadfastly not by disposition, but by compunction. She and Niilo chuckled quietly when noting that in university, she flatly refused all public speaking offers and leadership positions.
In person, the two Finns are true to type and their “Minnesota nice” American cousins: polite, soft-spoken, and deferential. In Chicago, Paivi and Niilo attempted for some 15 minutes to get the Uber app to work on their Finnish cell phones before they could be prevailed upon by this journalist to accept a ride.
She would have walked the mile to the conference, Paivi assured, as they had the day before, but that morning’s rain would bedraggle her hair and dress right before her speech. After a bit of emotional discomfort at allegedly imposing, followed by a quick, rain-unaffected arrival, Paivi laughed softly, expressed thanks, and commented that this would be a good anecdote for The Federalist profile.
Paivi Rasanen during audience Q&A in Chicago. Because English is a second language for Paivi, she was given the written questions in advance.
Although she’s a public figure who regularly appears on TV, including a variety show that dressed her in a bear costume to sing to her grandchildren (she showed photographic evidence), Paivi habitually asks for others’ thoughts rather than discussing her own. It’s yet another contradiction to women’s mag-celebrated attributes: expressing her femininity not only doesn’t abrade Paivi’s character, it complements it.
Paivi doesn’t assert herself as a “girl boss” who assumes masculine prosthetics, despite years of public leadership that could have taught her to do so. Her apparent emotional security in being the woman God made her bestows its own authority and charm.
Only Men and Women Fit Perfectly Together
That acceptance of one’s sex as a gift from God is also a foundation of the theological booklet that helped land Paivi in court indefinitely. Cultural Marxism foments a war between the sexes, but the Bible teaches that love means total self-giving: Husbands sacrifice everything to love their wives, and wives submit to their husbands as they do to God. The true war is not between the sexes, but against them, and in war clear chains of command are necessary to protect everyone.
The 1960s feminist war fomented between the sexes has now expanded into a war on sex itself. Now even recognizing the differences between men and women and the exclusive fertility of natural marriage is heading toward being criminalized across the West, and with it the Christianity that protects and celebrates these natural realities.
When she wrote the booklet, Paivi was already well-known as a Christian member of Parliament representing Hame, a rural Finnish province about an hour north of Helsinki. Pastor Juhana Pohjola, elected bishop of Finland’s non-state Lutheran church in 2021, had asked Rasanen to respond to proposals for government licensing of homosexual relationships. Here was a government endorsement of severing natural biological bonds between parents and children that raised both political and theological concerns.
Rasanen’s resulting 24-page booklet is a succinct summary of Christian sexual ethics. “People who submit themselves to God’s guidance in the Bible are repeatedly amazed at how the very Bible teachings hardest to understand contain God’s deep wisdoms,” Rasanen writes in the English translation.
“No choice of policies is ethically neutral,” she notes. “…In actuality, the acceptance of homosexual partnerships meant a more profound change in values than was willingly acknowledged at the time.” For example, she notes, in Finland, those proposing a homosexual partnerships act promised it would affect adults only. Yet immediately after the act passed, the proponents moved to make taxpayers pay for lesbians to be artificially inseminated and for homosexual couples to adopt children who could never know either a father or mother.
The act’s proponents also promised that Finland’s state church could maintain Christianity’s historic teachings if state recognition of homosexual couples passed. Paivi’s trial today, under a law passed seven years after the booklet was published, directly refutes that claim. It also highlights how impossible it is to reconcile the hard-won natural law framework that protects everyone equally with the identity politics that provides special rights to only government-favored groups.
Seeking an Internet Interdiction
Writing the booklet is one of three charges Toiviainen has filed against Paivi. It forms the sole count against Pohjola, the pastor who published the booklet. The two other counts against Paivi relate to her tweet of a Bible verse at the nominally Lutheran state church for sponsoring a homosexual pride parade and comments in a public radio debate she participated in years ago.
How can the #church ’s doctrinal foundation, the #bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of #pride ?” #lgbt#helsinkipride2019 Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture – Premier
How can the #church ’s doctrinal foundation, the #bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of #pride ?" #lgbt#helsinkipride2019 Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture – Premier https://t.co/0GEJ5tZEb6
In 2019, several Finns lodged complaints against Paivi’s tweet. Police investigated, interrogating Paivi about her beliefs three times. Although the police ultimately recommended against prosecuting Paivi, prosecutors sifted through her three-decade public record. They dug up the three alleged hate crimes and charged her.
The charges against Paivi fall under the legal category of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The prosecutors have asked for Paivi’s writings and audio clips to be completely banned from the internet and for her, Pohjola, and his church to be fined up to a third of their annual incomes, but courts could put Paivi in prison for up to six years if she’s found guilty. Pohjola could be imprisoned for up to two years.
During Paivi and Pohjola’s trial in early 2022, thousands of Finnish supporters gathered in Helsinki outside the court. Free speech supporters in other countries rallied at Finnish embassies. The American Family Research Council sent Pastor Andrew Brunson, whom Turkey detained for two years for preaching Christianity, to give Paivi a pledge of prayers from Christians around the world. U.S. members of Congress, international human rights groups, and coalitions of religious believers have also petitioned the Finnish government to stop prosecuting Rasanen and Pohjola’s human rights to free speech and religious exercise.
“It is important that we have the freedom of speech and freedom of religion,” Paivi told The Federalist in Chicago. “Freedom of speech because it is important for everyone. It is important for every minority and majority. For Christians, it is crucial because we have the commandments of Jesus to tell the good gospel to all people…”
“Also I think that it is important to respect in society also everyone’s right to speak and argue and oppose you,” she continued. “So this is [a] fundamental issue.”
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.
The American Academy of Pediatrics called for “reproductive justice” and advocated for pediatricians helping minors get abortions without their parents’ knowledge in the July issue of its official journal Pediatrics. Like other pro-abortion advocates who exploit young and vulnerable girls to advance their agenda — as in the recent viral story of the 10-year-old Ohio rape victim — the article used the story of a 14-year-old Guatemalan immigrant girl to argue for a more “holistic approach to reproductive rights that considers factors such as race, language, and socioeconomic status on the reproductive health of women.”
According to the article, the girl experienced complications after taking the abortion drug misoprostol and went to a facility that gave her a surgical abortion and helped her with the “judicial bypass” process so she could do it without her parents’ knowledge. After the abortion, the girl received a Nexplanon implant — a type of birth control that increases the chance that any pregnancy that occurs will be ectopic and puts the female at greater risk of blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes.
The academy’s takeaway from this story, which it foisted upon its readers, was that the “pediatric community” should “advocate for reproductive policies that expand access to care for adolescent patients.” In other words, it thinks doctors should push for making it easier for kids to abort their own children. Further, the American Academy of Pediatrics wants to hide this from minors’ parents and couches its concern in terms of the “deeply intertwined social, economic, and cultural barriers” of racial minorities.
“Now more than ever, training programs should ensure that pediatric residents competently provide culturally sensitive, nonjudgmental counseling around abortion care, contraception, and judicial bypass,” the article said.
Dr. George Fidone, who has a large private practice with five clinics in Texas, told The Federalist that the journal has become increasingly left-leaning. “Years ago the lead article might be on meningitis or pneumonia or a new vaccine or whatever,” he said. “Now it’s all about trans health, gender fluidity, how we’re supposed to counsel people, starting at very young ages, about the notion of gender fluidity or whatever.”
The article also said the academy “joined 38 other physician groups in opposing the passage of Texas Senate Bill 8,” which prohibits abortions after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected.
“So the American Academy of Pediatrics is advocating for the wholesale murder of unborn children,” Fidone said. “What? What has the state of our academy become?”
Olivia Hajicek is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at Hillsdale College studying history and journalism. She has covered campus and city news as a reporter for The Hillsdale Collegian. You can reach her at olivia.hajicek@gmail.com.
While the right continues to undergo a process of factional introspection, it can be easy to forget that our opponents in the culture war aren’t a monolith either. And while it seems that the Cathedral pushes our society to the left via a unified front, the progressive coalition’s unity is not just sustainable, it’s artificial.
The left’s ability to patch together a truly bizarre coalition is, however, undeniably impressive. It’d appear they’ve learned how to apply the Saul Alinsky-esque tactics of community organizing across, rather than just within, communities. How else can one explain the puzzling composition of the coalition? Consider just how divergent the interests and identities of so many of the Democratic Party’s supporters truly are.
What, for example, do the drug-addled Antifa of Seattle, the residents of CHOP, have in common with old money East coast liberals with summer homes in Nantucket? What do the technocratic middle managers in the hills of Palo Alto share with illegal immigrants on the other side of Silicon Valley? What does your average attendee of the Women’s March share with an H1B recipient from China or India, and what do either have in common with a hardcore Black Lives Matter activist? Perhaps more glaring than the rest, what is it exactly that a transgender activist in San Francisco and a traditional Muslim can bond over?
Is the progressive mythos of “global citizenry” really that binding? The reality that this coalition is maintained while leftwing messaging amplifies, not downplays, the role of identity makes it all the more intriguing. Unifying this bloc is no small feat.
Progressivism’s Enemies Provide Scapegoats
In trying to discern how the left has effectively bound together a coalition of disparate interests, it is vastly more useful to examine what they oppose rather than the policies they support. It’s much easier too.
One would think that natural political discord would occur between those who want to “eat the rich” and the rich themselves, or between those who abide by a patriarchal sexual ethic and a movement that endured a collective aneurysm when Florida told them teachers couldn’t talk about sexuality with elementary schoolers. The natural splintering of this leftwing coalition is delayed through what the French philosopher Renee Girard referred to as the scapegoat mechanism.
Through the scapegoat mechanism, internal social conflict between groups or individuals can be deferred by identifying a villain, the scapegoat. The scapegoat is held responsible by the conflicting parties, who mutually, although not always consciously, cast the blame on those who simultaneously fulfill the role of the victim and the villain.
This scapegoat then cannot be regarded as a guiltless Christ figure who dies with the sins of its sacrificers, but is identified as the very source of the sin — the inciter of conflict. Accordingly, overcoming this scapegoat is naturally regarded as a necessary prerequisite to the avoidance of conflict.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains: “the victim must be thought of as a monstrous creature that transgressed some prohibition and deserved to be punished. In such a manner, the community deceives itself into believing that the victim is the culprit of the communal crisis, and that the elimination of the victim will eventually restore peace.”
Identifying our woke regime’s scapegoats isn’t difficult. Simply observe the cultural messaging from any of the institutions that are owned and operated by progressives. The regime media and their allies throughout much of the government, academia, and the non-profit complex offer frequent reminders of who you are supposed to disdain.
Masculine men are turned into scapegoats when they are dubbed toxic, sexist enforcers of patriarchy. Christians similarly face accusations of oppressing women and those who are LGBT. White people are also approved targets, thought to be inherently racist and privileged, simultaneously the beneficiaries and the managers of an intangible but ever-present system of oppression. Even stable nuclear families are to be viewed with skepticism, either for perpetuating gender roles or straining the environment by daring to have kids.
The terms for the regime’s scapegoats are many. Hostility for the “deplorables,” the sexists and the racists, the rednecks and the retrogrades, the bigots, the “karens” and all different stripes of -phobes, is what holds together such a fragile coalition. Party operatives blame their internal conflicts on those who are regarded as the oppressors and pit Americans against one another. The terms differ but serve the same purpose: to designate a scapegoat as a regime-approved target.
Those who fall into one of the several oppressor identity categories but align with the left are offered the opportunity to prove themselves – but never absolve themselves – as dutiful allies through ritualistic self-degradation. If they’re servile enough, they might even get promoted to the rank of “co-conspirator,” delaying their inevitable designation as scapegoats until their expediency runs dry.
The grand irony is of course that none of these collectives wield significant power and are instead openly maligned by the ruling class. Nevertheless, we are constantly told that America and her institutions are engaging in organized oppression on a mass scale.
In the left’s worldview, our institutions enforce the patriarchy and the gender binary, all while they are governed by white supremacy. It’s a self defeating argument when one realizes that it is these very power structures that pay diversity consultants their exorbitant fees, fund pride parades, push transgenderism, and adopt discriminatory affirmative action policies. It is, of course, vital to note that the right’s gripe should be with these hostile institutions, not the everyday Americans who are influenced by them, to the detriment of all.
Bloc-Busting
The simplest way to expose the incongruity of the leftwing coalition is to merely ask questions that highlight the absurdity of the progressive bloc. Raise ethical inquiries about abortion or transgenderism among Democrat-aligned Muslims, or ask Austin tech workers why they support H1B visa programs that threaten their job security. Ask progressive white women if they truly believe that they and their “white tears” will be able to maintain their rapidly deteriorating status among the oppressed and the immunity that comes with it.
Question radical feminists who rage against toxic masculinity, asking why they support mass immigration from highly patriarchal Islamic countries. Or ask a Seattle communist what the appropriate tax rate is for the millionaire who funded the neoliberal candidate he ended up voting for.
This must be done without trafficking in the same dangerous divisiveness that the left used in their ascent to power, without engaging in scapegoating ourselves. The goal is not to weaponize the coalition’s parts against itself because the coalition isn’t the problem — it is the institutions that sought to bind their base together by haphazardly casting blame on entire collectives.
Done correctly, this approach will offer much needed nuance and obstruct the woke regime’s attempt at fostering conflict. It will also expose how Democrat apparatchiks and their co-conspirators across sectors have taken advantage of their constituency while they constructed it, weaponizing identities in cynical power games.
It’s a necessary step in ensuring that whatever unity our country attains is based on healthy, sustainable foundations — not institutionally manufactured disdain for the regime’s scapegoats.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
The Biden administration continues to make bizarre recruiting decisions for top government jobs on the basis of toxic identity politics. A recent addition to President Joe Biden’s motley crew of dubious hires is drag queen Sam Brinton, who was tapped last month as the “Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy.”
Rather than touting his qualifications for the job, Brinton — who lists his pronouns as “they”/”them” — bragged on Twitter about his unique status as the “first gender fluid person in federal government leadership.”
In a biographical statement on an LGBT website provided by Brinton, he boasted about having “worn his stilettos to Congress to advise legislators about nuclear policy and to the White House, where he advised President Obama and Michelle Obama on LGBT issues.”
The bio continued: “He shows young men and women everywhere he goes that they can be who they are and gives them courage. Once, while he was walking around Disney World in 6 inch stilettos with his boyfriend, a young gay boy saw Sam with his boyfriend and started crying. He told his mother, ‘It’s true, Mom. WE can be our own princess here.’”
Brinton is an active member of the Washington, D.C., chapter of a drag queen society known as the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” the National Pulse reported Thursday.
The drag queen has referred to White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci as “Daddy Fauci” and even called him a “saint.”
There are also photos on social media where he displays his fondness for “pup play,” a sexual role-playing game.
In a 2016 interview with the LGBT-focused Metro Weekly magazine, Brinton discussed his fetish in detail.
“Pup and I have what I feel is one of the most ideally perfect connections between our personal and kink life,” he said. “Both of us have other partners, so we come into this space, and then we come out of it, knowing the boundaries of where your kink and non-kink relationships begin and end.”
Brinton acknowledged that others didn’t understand his activities.
“One of the hardest things about being a handler is that I’ve honestly had people ask, ‘Wait, you have sex with animals?’” he told Metro Weekly. “They believe it’s abusive, that it’s taking advantage of someone who may not be acting up to a level of human responsibility. …
“The other misperception is that I have some really messed up background, like, did I have some horrible childhood trauma that made me like to have sex with animals.”
This is who’s helping Biden run the country right now, which is in shambles amid record inflation, soaring crime, race wars and ongoing border invasions.
People can do whatever they want in the privacy of their homes (provided it’s not illegal or hurting anyone), but the fact that the kinky sex life of a high-level Department of Energy executive overshadows his qualifications is truly alarming. This is how empires crash and burn.
Under Biden, we are witnessing the real-time destruction of America — economically, culturally and socially. And we’re only in Year 2 of his reign.
Davis Joint Unified School District in Davis, California, pushed leftwing distortions of gender and critical race theory through its Office of School Climate, which taught staff that “gender is a scam” and advertises the White Privilege Conference on March 9-12, 2022. The office is “responsible for supporting district staff and recommending and piloting ways to address structural oppression and to enhance school climate, equity, diversity, and inclusion,” according to their website.
The district, which includes approximately 8,500 TK-12 students throughout 16 different schools, also recently voted to adopt an Ethnic Studies requirement, which a press release notes will “explore issues of identity, analyze systems of power” and “examine social movements.”
Distortions Of Gender
The district’s site features a number of different resources that pushed radical leftwing distortions of gender. One presentation called “Supporting LGBTQ+ Students and Staff” was given to staff members at Harper Junior High School in May 2021 by two of the school’s teachers, both of whom use “they/them” pronouns. One also uses the abbreviation “Mx.” in lieu of Mr., Ms., or Mrs.
One slide bore a pride flag with transgender colors and black and brown stripes, both of which “sought to further represent the queer and trans identities of black and brown people.” Another one linked to a video titled “Gender is a Scam,” which compels audiences to “decolonize their language,” while a linked article called “15 Things LGBTQ people of colour want you to know” tells you “Why you might be guilty of white fragility.”
The slideshow instructed staff to use the pronouns they/them until someone says his pronouns and told them that “Posters/flags that support LGBTQ+ people are just the beginning” before going on to ask, “does your curriculum center primarily white/cis/straight voices?” The same slide warns against using medical and scientifically accurate terminology in regard to gender.
Meanwhile on the office’s LGBTQIA+ Supports page, a link to the activist group Human Rights Campaign promoted “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Picture and Middle School Books,” some of which are even aimed at children in pre-k. A link to the USC Rossier School of Education’s site “Students and Gender Identity Guide for Schools” also features a “Gender Identity Glossary for Schools” with woke vocabulary terms like “deadnaming,” “gender expansive,” “polygender,” “third-gender,” and “two spirit.”
Critical Race Theory and the White Privilege Conference
The office also promotes a trove of critical race theory resources intended for students, families, staff, teachers, and administrators under the subheading “Anti-Bias and Racial Justice.” The site opens by promoting free webinars from Embrace Race, a left-wing organization aimed at young children. Their webinars bear titles like “Addressing Racial Injustice with Young Children” and “RaceTalk among White Families Post-Floyd. Now What?”
The White Privilege Conference, a project of The Privilege Institute, is also promoted to staff members. The annual conference, not to be confused with the institute’s similarly named White Privilege Symposium, intends to provide “an opportunity for participants to discuss how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life while giving strategies for addressing issues of privilege and oppression and advancing social and economic justice.”
Last year’s conference hosted Robin DiAngelo, who discussed the subject of her latest book “nice racism,” which condemned all white people, including the far-left white people who comprise her audience, as definitionally racist.
The conference featured myriad workshops each day, which boasted titles like “Critical Race Theory/Critical Race Feminism: Creating a Plan of Action during the Biden-Harris era,” “A Good Womyn is Hard to Find,” and “The Making & Remaking of Whiteness.” The institute also hosts the Youth Action Project, with one-day institutes geared towards middle schoolers and high school students.
The district’s office also advertises the 1619 Project curriculum alongside a site called Learning for Justice, which they note “offers excellent, teacher-developed classroom curriculum.”
‘Dismantle White Supremacy’
Included under the heading “For Teachers, Staff, and Administrators” are K-12 frameworks for anti-bias and social justice education from Learning for Justice, a project of the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center whose mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and “strengthen intersectional movements” by pushing critical race theory into schools.
One such video from The New York Times titled “A Conversation with White People on Race” features white people expressing guilt over their alleged privilege, with one person remarking “We’re all implicated in a racist system, and I play my part in it as a white person.”
The office adds that they have a library of books and videos for staff, including one titled “Cracking the Codes and Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.”
Meanwhile, students and families are also directed to a number of critical race theory-inspired resources, including one link to a site titled “100 Race-Conscious Things You Can Say To Your Child To Advance Racial Justice,” which includes quotes of things parents have told their children when discussing race. Particularly striking is number 53, which makes the claim that “if you are White and you commit a crime … police might say ‘that was wrong, don’t do that again,’ and that’s all…but if you are Black and commit the same crime, they might arrest you and you might go to prison.” One quote under the subtitle “police violence” discusses black victims of police brutality, writing“The man who killed them didn’t like brown skin. He had white skin like us.”
The list isn’t exclusively focused on race, however, also promoting left-wing distortions of sex with quotes like“You know, some people are born with penises but feel like girls on the inside and some people are born with vaginas but feel like boys on the inside. We can’t always tell if someone is a boy or a girl just by looking at them and that’s okay.”
“Guidelines for Strong White Allies” is also included on the district’s list. Among the guidelines were requests for “resources,” “money,” and even “your body on the line.” Author Paul Kivel also told “white allies” to “understand and learn from the history of whiteness and racism” and to “assume racism is everywhere, every day.”
An anti-racist book list for children promoted by the district explains how parents can ease children into CRT by first starting “very gently” with entirely unobjectionable books that “just show kids that racial diversity exists.” The goal, however, is to eventually employ books that discuss “racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.”
The district’s previous superintendent John Bowes signaled his belief in the leftist claim that America is fundamentally racist when, after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, he sent out a message explaining that he was reminded of the need to “rid our country of the systemic bias and institutional racism that exists in all parts of our society.” He went on to explain that “public education, including DJUSD schools, are part of the solution.”
Davis Joint Unified School District’s promotion of both critical race theory and leftist distortions of sex are part of a broader leftwing push in K-12 institutions throughout the country. In California alone, other districts have lied about teaching CRT, hosted LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, paid extremist organizations to “disrupt whiteness,” and promoted material that tells students to use witchcraft against those who say “all lives matter.”
The politicized nature of California’s government schools, along with general concerns regarding quality of education, may lead some to support a recently launched bipartisan campaign to pass a school choice initiative in the golden state.
Neither Superintendent Matt Best nor Climate Coordinator Kate Snow responded to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
The woke-o-meter in public schools is about to ramp up. Parents who think they don’t have time to homeschool may soon realize that, compared to the effort involved in monitoring and countering the nonsense from leftist classrooms, homeschooling is the relaxing alternative. Not all teachers buy into the leftist narrative of race-obsessed anti-Americanism. But leftist K-12 administrators want to ensure that, eventually, all teachers will present only approved ideas and counter any wrongthink children are taught at home. Many of these educrats are now embracing a technological fix.
Trade publication Education Week recently reported that about 500 school districts around the country are rating teacher applicants according to their “cultural competency,” another code for “wokeness.” Many of these districts are contracting with a teacher-hiring company called Nimble, which uses artificial intelligence to examine applications and interview answers to determine which candidates harbor the correct political and cultural attitudes.
A central concern of Nimble and its leftist clients is mindsets about race. The goal is to hire only teachers who are “anti-racist” activists, who will reject equal treatment of all students in favor of discrimination against some (whites) for the supposed benefit of others (racial minorities). Note that under this rubric, Asian students, who as a group work hard and consequently excel, don’t qualify as an oppressed racial minority.
“Now that we’ve become a little more aware of the concept of anti-racism and maybe a little more woke as a culture, I do think that districts have started to emphasize these questions a little bit more,” Nimble CEO Lauren Dachille told EdWeek. “They might be more common, they might be more explicit.”
Anti-racism as a motivating societal force was popularized by Ibram X. Kendi, who along with other savvy race grifters is profiting handsomely from the concept. Getting points for honesty if not integrity, Kendi teaches that discrimination against white people is a positive good, and indeed necessary to establish the “equity” of equal outcomes for all regardless of intelligence or effort. This is what is meant by anti-racism: “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.”
Note the racism inherent in anti-racism. “Anti-racists” assume that black and brown children are “less than” white or Asian kids—they can’t excel in academics, they can’t follow basic rules of personal conduct. It’s necessary to change all standards to accommodate these presumed “inferior” beings. Such a theory ensures minority kids will never overcome personal obstacles because they’re told they don’t have to. This is the system that, with Nimble’s help, many schools are trying to establish and perpetuate.
EdWeek identified a Boston elementary school principal who “will tell candidates the school’s priorities around anti-racism and ask them to respond.” To make crystal clear the political attitudes expected from successful candidates, “she will ask them what they’ve done personally or professionally to be more anti-racist.” Presumably, getting arrested at a Black Lives Matter riot would be, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, a resume enhancement.
Applicants in Indianapolis may be asked “how [they would] ensure that student outcomes are not predictable by race, ethnicity, culture, gender, or sexual orientation.” Of course, there’s only one way to ensure such an outcome: manipulate it to guarantee that all students end up at the same low level. Any students who threaten the leveling by working too hard or achieving too much will have to be brought to heel—at least, if they’re the “wrong” race.
Indianapolis teaching applicants may also be asked, “Why do you think that low-income students predictably perform lower on standardized tests than their more-affluent peers?” One would be pretty safe to assume a preferred answer would be “because of systemic racism,” not “because those students, largely due to decades of misguided government policies, are more likely to come from fatherless families and grow up in a dysfunctional environment.”
Throughout the article, district officials emphasize the importance of hiring teachers who are amenable to the schools’ “priorities” and “values.” But how is it appropriate for a public institution, funded by taxpayers who hold a wide range of political opinions, to institutionalize one set of those opinions? Even worse, how is it appropriate for the institution to guarantee the propagation of those opinions by limiting hires to candidates who agree with them?
These questions illustrate the bubble mentality of the left. Leftists are so certain of the objective correctness of all their views that they cannot conceive of any person of goodwill taking a different position. In the leftist mind, anyone not willing to engage in discrimination against whites or Asians in the name of “equity” is the moral equivalent of a Klansman. And who would object to screening out Klansmen from the teacher corps?
Parents who hope the public schools are still salvageable might want to reconsider. The skyrocketing wokeness of administrators who control teacher hiring will ensure that all classrooms are increasingly devoted to indoctrination rather than education.
How exhausting it is for parents to constantly monitor what their children are being fed in every class and then try to repair the intellectual and moral damage at home. Viewed in this light, does choosing another schooling arrangement really seem so hard?
Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.
Entrenched leftists within the U.S. State Department are supporting the effort to demote Viktor Orban from prime minister of Hungary, if a report in Financial Times is correct. The Biden administration also left Hungary off its invitation list for a forthcoming international virtual Democracy Summit on Dec. 9 and 10 to which some 100 countries were invited.
“Trump and his enablers and those who invaded and attacked our Capitol, they don’t like the world we’re living in and they have that in common with autocratic leaders from Russia to Turkey, from Hungary to Brazil, and so many other places,” Hillary Clinton explained to MSNBC.
Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó retorted that Clinton’s remarks about the Democracy Summit proved that “the event has a domestic political character, with invitations withheld from countries whose leaders had good ties with former President Donald Trump . . . We need nobody to judge the state of Hungarian democracy as if in a school exam.”
A superficial reading of this would conclude it’s the big bad Central Euro authoritarians complaining about another American-backed regime change, but there’s more to it and this is just the latest connection to a broader ideological war unfolding across the Euro-Atlantic.
The European Culture War
Hungary has been an important point of discussion among U.S. conservatives. Orban’s party, Fidesz, leads a family-friendly conservative government, where women are tax free if they have more than three kids. Orban’s government has also crushed gender studies and other disciplines, defunded universities, closed Hungarian borders to illegal mass migration, stopped LGBT programs targeted towards children as propaganda, and cut down on abortion.
Alongside Poland, Hungary has formed a semi-alliance of Christian conservative central European powers, and has been an example of sorts for Western conservatives. Hungary offers what Sweden does to leftists: an functioning example of what a social-conservative government might look like in practice.
This is drawing attention from liberals and conservatives alike. Rod Dreher of the American Conservative lived in Hungary on a fellowship often writing about it, and Tucker Carlson of Fox News shot a whole documentary for a week from Budapest.
It’s also invited transnational opposition. Germany’s new center-left coalition of red and green parties insisted they will start a full-on culture war with Poland and Hungary while making the European Union a stronger transnational government.
“Countries which do not live up to the EU’s standards should not expect to receive EU money—a clear message to Poland and Hungary. This general approach applies to the United Kingdom as well,” a recent analysis stated, adding that the German coalition wants to make it legal for “trans people to self-identify.”
Meanwhile, Belgium and Netherlands are planning to fund abortion across Poland and Hungary, which limit the practice. “The Dutch parliament adopted a resolution approving the use of state funds to help Polish women obtain abortions, reports Deutsche Welle… The decision follows a similar move in September by Belgium, whose government agreed to provide funding for women in Poland to obtain terminations abroad, as a growing number have done since the near-total abortion ban was introduced,”according to a report.
Just to take one example, consider the implications of Germany allowing self-identification of transgenders, a process that fundamentally goes against biological reality. Given the Schengen borderless mandates within the EU, German transgender individuals could travel everywhere and use their EU special protections to undermine individual national policies about transgenderism, as well as the religious traditions of Hungary and Poland, which are stricter (and, one can say, more democratic) about such rules.
That likely sequence further indicates these countries are not “liberal democracies” (the key word here being liberal), opening them up for further charges of growing authoritarianism, and further clashes in EU courts, the rulings of which are increasingly considered superior to national democracies and lawmaking. In the past that has resulted in the EU clashing with Poland over fossil fuels and with Hungary over LGBT legal preferences and national courts.
Intellectual Compatibility Across Borders
The Polish conservative government, as well as Orban, bear similarities to the socially conservative section within the Republican Party, which consolidated under Donald Trump with increasing exchanges of intellectuals and conferences. The left’s reaction to that ascendence of social conservatives across the globe was therefore somewhat expected, given the new Biden administration staffed with Hillary-era culture warriors. The culture war is transnational, and the battle lines being drawn are naturally ideological as well. On one hand, there’s evangelical internationalist liberalism, which is imperial in nature and is therefore clashing with localist reactions from Virginia schools to villages in Hungary.
“Hungarian-American relations were at their peak during the Trump presidency,” Szijjarto of Hungary also noted when the FT reporter asked why Hungary was the only EU country left out of the planned Democracy summit by Joe Biden. “We have a great deal of respect for the former president, a respect that is mutual. We give the same respect to every elected U.S. president — regardless of what we get in return — but it is clear that those who were on friendly terms with Donald Trump were not invited.”
Hungary was the only country in the EU to be snubbed even when the U.S. State Department coyly added that that was not the case. “As an important part of our bilateral agenda, we continue to press our Hungarian counterparts when we have concerns about developments that erode space for independent media and civil society, curtailed LGBTQI+ rights, and undermined judicial independence,” the State dept said, according to FT. Within hours of its report, someone leaked an old speech of one of Orban’s closest allies that heightened political tensions in the nation.
Democracy Isn’t the Issue; Sexual Chaos Is
Ultimately, however, there are two emerging questions to ponder. One, the complete hypocrisy of the Biden administration is visible. New Zealand, which is growing rapidly authoritarian with vaccine passports, second-grade citizenships, and lockdowns, is invited, but not Hungary, where people can move freely. The undertone of this decision is not lost on conservatives across Europe and possibly the United States: it is not about democracy at all, but about liberalism and sexual rights.
Are Republicans astute enough to see through this, and understand the potential long-term damage the left’s culture war is causing to America’s reputation as the ruling Democratic Party turns increasingly woke, revolutionary, and ideological? Democrats are actively building ideological solidarity and fellowship with other leftist parties across the world, but there’s no such equivalent among conservatives. If it is coming down to a battle of ideas across national boundaries, perhaps cultivating that is something to think about.
The second, and far more crucial, question is: what next for Poland and Hungary and how long can they survive within an openly hostile EU? The combined GDP and manpower of the four conservative central V4-Euro powers led by Poland and Hungary can compete with Germany and France. But at translating that into power, hard and soft, there’s no visible effort of unity.
France and Greece, for example, recently made a bilateral treaty that consolidated their foreign policy into one. There’s no such treaty between Poland and Hungary, or one alongside the UK, for example. Nor is there any visible effort of promoting a socially conservative order across Europe even when the situation is ripe with right-wing voters opposed to a leftist social revolution feeling increasingly voiceless, especially across Northern Europe.
Glimpses of that ideological movement building were once seen in an Orban speech asking Christian refugees from Europe to head to Hungary: “Of course we can give shelter to the real refugees: Germans, Dutch, French, Italians; scared politicians and journalists; Christians who had to flee their own country; those people who want to find here the Europe that they lost at their home,” he said.
If Orban wins re-election this time, against the odds, will we see the consolidation of a conservative bloc right at the heart of Europe? Because the days of hedging might soon be over. When the world turns binary, fence-sitting is usually no longer an option.
Dr. Sumantra Maitra is a national-security fellow at The Center for the National Interest; a non-resident fellow at the James G Martin Center; and an elected early career historian member at the Royal Historical Society. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, and can be reached on Twitter @MrMaitra.
Photo Image courtesy International Lutheran Council
Meet the man who appears to be the first in the post-Soviet Union West to be brought up on criminal charges for publishing long-held Christian beliefs. Juhana Pohjola wouldn’t be cast to play his own part if Hollywood made a movie about a bishop put on trial for his faith. The Finnish pastor has inherited a place in the church of Martin Luther, but it appears none of Luther’s pugnacity or vitriol. In person, Pohjola, 49, is forthright but unassuming, and gentle. Stereotypically, the Finn is thin and tall. He often pauses while speaking to carefully consider his next words. He listens attentively to others with far less impressive resumes.
In more than two decades as a pastor, Pohjola has ministered to congregations as small as 30. He has spent his life building a network of faithful churches across Finland, many of which started with a few people gathered for prayer, Bible study, hymn-singing—and communion, if they can get a pastor. In an in-person interview with The Federalist, Pohjola urged fellow Christian leaders to be willing to seek out “one lost sheep” instead of crowds and acclaim.
This is the man who appears to be the first in the post-Soviet Union West to be brought up on criminal charges for preaching the Christian message as it has been established for thousands of years. Also charged in the case that goes to trial on January 24 is Pohjola’s fellow Lutheran and a Finnish member of Parliament, Paivi Rasanen. Rasanen’s alleged crimes in a country that claims to guarantee freedom of speech and religion include tweeting a picture of a Bible verse. Potential penalties if they are convicted include fines and up to two years in prison.
Finnish Authorities: The Bible Is Hate Speech
Rasanen and Pohjola are being charged with “hate speech” for respectively writing and publishing a 24-page 2004 booklet that explains basic Christian theology about sex and marriage, which reserves sex exclusively for within marriage, which can only consist of one man and one woman, for life. The Finnish prosecutor claims centuries-old Christian teachings about sex “incite hatred” and violate legal preferences for government-privileged identity groups.
Writer Rod Dreher pointed out the witch hunt nature of this prosecution: “Räsänen wrote that pamphlet seven years before LGBT was added to the national hate-speech law as a protected class. She was investigated once before for the pamphlet, and cleared — but now she’s going to undergo another interrogation.”
Rasanen and Pohjola both have adamantly affirmed“the divinely given dignity, value, and human rights of all, including all who identify with the LGBTQ community.” Christian theology teaches that all human beings are precious, as all are made in God’s image and offered eternal life through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In advance of the trial, Rasanen and Pohjola have been interrogated by police for hours about their theology. Pohjola told me in the interrogation police treated Christian beliefs as thought crimes. In a statement, Rasanen noted that the police publicly admitted their interpretation of Finland’s law would make publishing the Bible a hate crime.
“It is impossible for me to think that the classical Christian views and the doctrine of the majority of denominations would become illegal. The question here is about the core of Christian faith; how a person gets saved into unity with God and into everlasting life though the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus. Therefore, it is crucial to also talk about the nature of sin,” Rasanen told Dreher. “As we are living in a democratic country, we must be able to disagree and express our disagreement. We have to be able to cope with speech that we feel insults our feelings. Many questions are so debatable and contradictory that we have to have the possibility of discussing. Otherwise, the development is towards a totalitarian system, with only one correct view.”
Major International Implications
Humans rights lawyer Paul Coleman, who spoke to The Federalist from his Alliance Defending Freedom International office in Vienna, Austria, says Pohjola and Rasanen’s cases are a “canary in the coalmine” for freedom of speech across the West. ADF International is providing legal support for Pohjola and Rasanen’s cases.
“Although all European countries have these hate speech laws, and these hate speech laws are increasingly being used against citizens for things that they say, this is the first time we’ve really seen Christians face criminal prosecution for explaining their biblical views,” Coleman said. “…It’s unprecedented. We’ve not seen attacks on free speech on this level in Europe, and that’s why they are extremely important cases, not just for the people of Finland and Paivi Rasanen and the bishop themselves, but for all of Europe. If this is upheld in one jurisdiction, we will no doubt see it in other jurisdictions as well.”
Such “hate speech” laws exist in every European country and Western countries such as Canada and Australia, and descend from Soviet influence. Coleman called them “sleeper laws,” saying that in other countries “they could be used any time just like they are in Finland. People need to mobilize against these laws and overturn them.”
Legally privileging certain sexual behavior has thus broken western countries’ promises of equality before the law for all citizens, as well as enabling government discrimination against citizens who exercise their free speech and religious liberty, as in the Baronnelle Stutzman and Jack Phillips cases in the United States.
“Establishing standards of identity” also lets government meddle in theological controversies that are none of its business, said the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Shaw, who directs church relations for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) and has known Pohjola for decades. Pohjola’s church is an international partner of the LCMS.
From a natural law and historic Western perspective, “the government isn’t supposed to get into people’s brains and tell them what’s right and wrong to believe and say,” Shaw noted in a phone interview. “That’s not their realm. Their realm is in externals, things like protect people in their bodies, go to war when necessary, and punish criminals… This is really what’s at stake [in the Pohjola case]. Government has lost its moorings and doesn’t know its purpose.”
From Part-Time Pastor to Bishop
After theological study in Finland and the United States, Pohjola’s first congregation in Helsinki started with about 30 members, he says. It was only able to support him part-time at first. He remembered his wife accompanying the congregation’s hymn-singing on a piano while their firstborn daughter, a baby at the time, laid on a blanket on the floor nearby.
Finland’s state church began openly disobeying Christian theology concerning sex differences amid the global sexual revolution of the 1960s. So, Christians alienated by the state church’s embrace of anti-Christian cultural demands sought faithful pastors like Pohjola, who are known as “confessional” for adhering to historic Christian confessions. The resulting growth of his tiny congregation gradually led to establishing a seminary, then dozens of mission churches, which grew as the theologically unfaithful state church shrank. In 2013, 25 of these new confessional congregations formed the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of Finland. Today, that diocese oversees 45 congregations and missions and is training 64 pastors.
That growth has been accompanied by suffering, including persecution first from Pohjola’s own church.
First Persecuted By His Own Church
In 2009, Pohjola was awarded the theological journal Gottesdienst’s Sabre of Boldness Award, which is granted “for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity on behalf of the Holy Church of Christ, while engaged in the confession of His Pure Gospel in the face of hostile forces, and at the greatest personal risk.” The award honored Pohjola, with other faithful Finnish pastors, for standing firm as Finland’s state church sought civil charges against them for refusing to disobey the Bible’s commands that only men be sent to lead spiritual warfare as pastors.
Like Luther before him, Pohjola was expelled by his own church body in 2014 for adhering to God’s word on this matter. The notice of his discharge declared Pohjola was “obviously unfit to be a pastor.” At the time, he responded with grief but also by saying that he must obey God rather than men, lamenting: “Instead of the Church being purged with God’s Word, she is being purged from God’s Word.”
In the interview last week, Pohjola said being defrocked from “his baptismal church” grieves him to this day. On his mother’s side, Pohjola said, his family includes Lutheran pastors in that church going back to the 17th century Reformation. But he could not disobey God’s commands to retain his social status or employment.
Division or Unity? Yes
Pohjola’s separation from Finland’s state church also had the consequence of uniting him and his flock with other confessional Christians across the globe. The International Lutheran Council is a global network of theologically unified churches, and like the confessional churches in Finland, that network is growing.
Mathew Block, the ILC’s communications manager, noted that the heightened contradictions between increasingly unnatural pagan practices and historic Christian teachings are causing a global “confessional realignment.” It’s forcing people to make a real decision about where they stand rather than allowing them to inhabit the increasingly nonexistent, indecisive middle. This is affecting churches all over the world. While it means divisions in some areas, it also is leading to unity in others. For example, despite other important theological differences, all the world’s largest Christian bodies agree with the doctrines for which the Finnish government is persecuting Pohjola. That allows them to speak in chorus to government leaders.
Already many dozens of top religious leaders across the world have formally raised their concerns with Rasanen and Pohjola’s prosecution to the Finnish government and the United Nations. Several U.S. members of Congress have also asked U.S. agencies to take action against Finland for these human rights abuses.
“I encourage Roman Catholic ecclesiastical leaders and all those who care for souls to speak up and join hands and lock arms with us as we talk about the absolute necessity of our historic Christian values of one man, one woman, marriage, and the freedom to be able to believe it, to say it, to publish books about it, and find practical ways through hospitality, education, and other social engagement to make society strong that way,” Shaw said. “All churches—one could even say all religions but in particular the Roman Catholic faith—this reflects their historic commitments as well.”
The Shepherd Faces Wolf Attacks for the Sheep
In August 2021, the international Lutheran church recognized Pohjola’s steadfast leadership amid persecution by supporting his election to bishop of Finland’s confessional diocese. The ILC hosted Pohjola’s November 2021 speaking tour in the United States, and is raising funds across the world to raise awareness of his case.
“Our mission has been that, if the shepherd sees that one sheep is missing, he knows,” Pohjola said of the churches he oversees. He noted that many people coming to faithful Finnish churches are seeking love and connection from a church family as the secular world becomes increasingly isolated and family-less, in no small part because of pagan sexual behavior and beliefs.
“People don’t go to church for social capital now. This is a serious life and they want to be serious with God. So, churches have to build communities that stand on solid Lutheran, biblical doctrine,” Pohjola says.
While he may not share Luther’s temperament, Pohjola’s response to his own persecution by church and civil authorities does mirror Luther’s simplicity four centuries ago: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” He adds a pastoral message to Christians watching governments turn on them today.
“We have to learn from the past, Christians who have suffered under persecution, and be prepared,” Pohjola said. “But it’s not something to be worried about, because Christ remains faithful to His church and wherever he is leading us, He will come with us. He will provide everything that is needed for the future of His Christians and His church.”
In this case, NBC was the middleman in an Olympics where many of the athletes were less than thrilled to be representing the United States.
On July 26, for example, there were only 14.7 million people watching primetime coverage — a 49 percent drop from the 2016 Olympics and a 53 percent decline from the 2012 Olympics, Fox News reported. These ratings are so poor that the network began re-airing commercials for advertisers at no additional charge.
The Monmouth University Polling Institute released a poll showing that 43 percent of Americans did not have much interest in watching the games whatsoever. Patrick Murray of the polling institute told Fox News that the reason might have been the politicization of the games by some athletes.
“The Olympic spirit is a bit dampened this year,” he said.
“The delay from last year and lack of spectators have taken the edge off the typical anticipation and excitement for this event. But the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the sports world has also led to a backlash among some Americans.”
“I’m just here to represent, man,” she said last week, CNN reported.
“I know a lot of people like me, a lot of athletes like me, a lot of people are scared to succeed or speak out. As long as I can represent those people, I’m fine.”
Berry also had an “X” written on her hand in protest during the final.
Fencer Race Imboden did the same thing, saying he did so in “support of athletes of color, Ending Gun violence, and all the athletes who wish to use their voice on the platform they’ve earned,” according to CNN.
Shot-putter Raven Saunders crossed her arms during her medal ceremony, explaining later that the “X” was “the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet.”
Then there is U.S. soccer captain and social justice connoisseur Megan Rapinoe, who led the charge in kneeling in protest before her team’s games.
“It’s an opportunity for us to continue to use our voices and use our platforms to talk about the things that affect all of us intimately in different ways,” Rapinoe said, according to The Associated Press.
“We have people from Team USA, from all over the country, from all backgrounds, and people literally from all over the world for every other team so I obviously encourage everyone to use that platform to the best of their ability to do the most good that they possibly can in the world, especially as all eyes are on Tokyo these next couple weeks,” she later added.
Rapinoe and her team went on to finish a disappointing third in Tokyo.
While they certainly have the right to protest, Americans have the right to turn off the television when they feel their country is being insulted or disrespected.
Tamyra Mensah-Stock—the first black woman to win gold in wrestling for the U.S.A.—also shared her contagious love for America: “I’m so happy I get to represent U.S.A.!” 🤼♀️🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/mqDL2G9qzM
There were many athletes who were extremely patriotic on the world stage, but the social justice warriors have become martyrs in the establishment media and have monopolized the coverage.
Cable television is already a dying medium, and wokeness could be the nail in the coffin.
Cameron Arcand is a political commentator based in Orange County, California. His “Young Not Stupid” column launched at The Western Journal in January 2021, making Cameron one of the youngest columnists for a national news outlet in the United States. He has appeared on One America News, and has been a Young America’s Foundation member since 2019.@cameron_arcand
And listen for the “Tsk, tsk, you don’t really understand what we’re about, dear.” That’s how it will be in Minnesota and probably elsewhere if a leftist teachers union can spread its ideas on how to respond to its promotion of critical race theory.
Before reading the following, you might want to take a deep breath and exhale or whatever it is you do to reduce stress. You might have to do that after reading it, too.
Education Minnesota is trying to counter growing community pushback against CRT around the state, so it has published a guide on how teachers should respond, a copy of which was obtained by Powerline and publicized by Minnesota’s Alpha News. First of all, the union tells teachers not to call what they’re teaching critical race theory. They know parents are catching on. And the guide presents buckets of mush designed to obscure the issue and talk down to critics.
It’s a classic snow job using the special language of “educanto,” a term coined by the late Paul Greenberg, public school critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning Arkansas newspaper editor. Education Minnesota tells teachers that when asked why they teach kids that all white people are racist, they should give the following response:
“First off, I’m thrilled you’re taking such a deep interest in how and what our kids are taught, a conversation that I feel is long overdue.
“What I know most Americans believe is that we expect our students — whatever their color or background — to be able to learn hard truths and handle honest history and civics.”
May I pat your head?
“I believe in children’s potential to meet new challenges and have an honest reckoning, and when we try to edit and distort our history, we are doing them, and our future, a disservice. My loyalty is to children and who and what they can become.”
That’s how teachers should respond to your question about their “evil white people” push. And, of course, as the left always says: It’s for the children.
Education Minnesota does more than purr in its teacher voice. In its guide for its union members, it provides does some hard-knuckle political messaging against CRT critics by presenting “Key Concepts for Responding.”
Here are excerpts:
“Seize the moral high ground and engage on our terms. With attention on education, let’s talk about the teaching and curricula we support and communicate how it benefits all students.”
“Ascribe motivations to the opposition. Instead of reflexively repeating the opposition’s claims to dispel them (e.g. ‘we are not teaching grade schoolers about XYZ’) talk about why they’re attacking standards, equity and classroom educators.”
“Bring the conversation back to what we want. Don’t stay on defense.”
“Avoid the academic term ‘critical race theory. This phrase, unfamiliar to most audiences, has been redefined by the political right as an all-purpose racial dog whistle. Talk instead about the more honest and more complete education our students deserve.”
“[I]t is so disappointing to see that a few billionaires, and the promoters and talking heads they pay for, have launched a national campaign to mislead Americans about the lessons educators teach about history, culture, gender and politics.”
“Once again, they’re trying to distract and divide us so we don’t demand the richest 1 percent and the largest corporations pay what they owe for what our communities need, like affordable health care for all.”
Leftist educators try to hide what they’re teaching, but word is getting out. The Center for the American Experiment has been monitoring CRT in Minnesota and produced a video noting instances of it. It found that in Burnsville, fourth-graders were reading a book that said police officers were “mean to black people but nice to white people” and deliberately shot black men.
The video cited officials in the Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins as saying school operations were built on “white supremacy” values of logic, linear thinking, perfectionism, objectivity and “requiring black students to turn in assignments on time.” Letter grades are gone since they are part of “a dominant white culture.”
White Bear Lake sixth-graders were divided into groups based on race, sex, religion and place of birth and told to address issues of oppression and privilege.
Edina kindergarteners through second-graders did an exercise on how to identify themselves by their skin color. Kindergarten through second grade!
St. Louis Park scrapped the gifted and talented program, opening it to everyone and focusing on “anti-racist talent development.”
Minnesota teachers are taking anti-racism training, which, in effect, advocates new forms of racial discrimination, according to the video.
It’s not known if Minnesota schoolchildren are learning, like first- and second-graders in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, that “whiteness is a bad deal” and that if you are white, you essentially are a devil oppressing people of color, as reported Wednesday in a RealClear Policy piece that included shocking curriculum photos.
Education Minnesota defines CRT as “an academic framework that is more than 40 years old and is centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not just a product of individual bias or prejudice, and embedded in our policies legal structure.”
Indeed, CRT came from legal theorists during the 1970s and ’80s. The problem is it left the campus, and no matter how groups like Education Minnesota try to hide it, it is gumming up primary and secondary education.
Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist scholar and social commentator whose gravitas stems from also having been a farmer, points out a problem with woke nonsense being dreamed up on the college campus. College professors, Hansen has said, were once like court jesters of old. They could say all kinds of crazy things and no one was offended, not even the king, because everyone knew professors, like jesters, had no real power. Now, according to Hansen, crazy ideas have escaped the campus and are setting public policy.
Classic Marxism may have hit some resistance since its call for dividing people by income and class could be hindered by the relative affluence of most of the U.S. population, at least by world standards. But for sure, today’s Marxists are focused on dividing by race and gender to class. And critical race theory fits right in.
There’s a lot to process here: lying teachers, overt racism, emotional oppression upon very young children. You might want to take that deep breath.
Mike Landry, PhD, is a retired business professor. He has been a journalist, broadcaster and church pastor. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on current events and business history.
Democrats spent the weeks before the 2020 election ridiculing black men considering voting for President Trump as sellouts who could derail Joe Biden’s presidential bid. Biden himself said as much with his “you ain’t black” comment.
Some Biden supporters went even further. One professor claimed black men just wanted proximity to the patriarchy and power structures white men have maintained for generations. Once the media announced Biden crossed the 270 electoral vote threshold, the left’s approach changed from proactive intimidation to a retrospective explanation for the fact that exit polls indicated 19 percent of black men voted for Donald Trump.
One Democratic candidate for Congress said one in five black men voted for Trump because “they hate Black women.” The same outlets that declared white Trump voters in 2016 were misinformed, ignorant racists claimed black Trump voters—including the 9 percent of black women who voted for him—were self-loathing victims of “disinformation” campaigns.
Former President Barack Obama joined the chorus in a recent interview with The Atlantic. His entire analysis of the increase in black male support for Trump was that black men were attracted to “the bling, the women, and the money” that characterize both Trump’s public persona and hip hop culture. Hearing such a simplistic and dismissive explanation from someone as politically savvy as Obama was disappointing but terribly predictable. Therein lies the problem.
Today’s Democratic Party relies more on marshaling votes based on identity rather than ideas. That clearly didn’t work for many black men.
Stop Treating Black Voters Like We’re Stupid
Some black men may have been influenced by rappers who publicly endorsed Trump, but it is deeply insulting to assume black men in general are less attuned to their own political interests than any other group is.
Democrats have convinced black residents in the cities with the highest rate of violent crime—almost all run by Democrats—that they should be more afraid of the Boogaloo Boys than the Bloods and the Crips. It’s not hard to imagine some black voters being skeptical of such an obvious reality inversion.
Black fathers also care about their children getting a quality education. President Obama hasn’t made the case for why low-income black students shouldn’t have the same types of education options as his children. In 2008, he stated he was enrolling his daughters in private school because DC Public Schools weren’t going to meet their educational needs.
Yet one of the first things he did upon entering the presidency was attempt to defund the program poor DC families use to give their children access to private schools. With an average voucher of $9,531, the grant is less than one half of what DC’s traditional public schools spend per student and one-quarter of the tuition of Sidwell Friends, the school the Obama girls attended.
President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos increased funding for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program and publicly support charter school expansion. In contrast, Biden has pledged to eliminate the voucher program once in office and his supporters in the National Education Association oppose charter schools that are extremely popular with black parents.
Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza can’t go into a black barbershop in Atlanta and satisfactorily explain why the men there should support her organization that is committed to “disrupting” the nuclear family. Asking that question, as well as why BLM removed the language from their website, would seem like a natural response to an organization that claims to care about the lives of black people.
Garza also can’t explain why a dad who coaches his daughter’s track team should get behind the Equality Act—a bill Biden has pledged to sign—which would allow a biological male who identifies as a girl to compete against his daughter at a high school track event where awards and college scholarships are on the line. When Flo-Jo, the fastest woman in history, posts a world record in the 100-meter dash that wouldn’t even land her among the top 6,000 men’s times, I think any father has a right to question the impact this law would have on fairness in girls’ sports.
Earn Our Votes, Don’t Just Assume Them
The pitch to black voters from Biden’s surrogates was straightforward: “You may not be excited about him, but we need to get Trump out first and get to policy specifics later.” For a certain segment of black voters, that wasn’t enough.
Some black voters have always been conservative but others considered Trump’s record on the pre-COVID economy and other important issues more important than his tweets, brash persona, and frequent accusations of racism. That is why conservatives should treat black voters like people—rational individuals with deeply held values and specific interests—not indistinguishable components of an amorphous melanated blob.
That doesn’t mean Republicans should run from issues involving race. Leftists incorrectly attribute disparities in social and economic outcomes to systemic racism, but there should be substantive conservative responses to allegations of racial arrest quotas in New York City and unconstitutional stops and searches in poor black neighborhoods in Baltimore. Failure to do so will embolden Democratic politicians to continue their attempts to whip voters in the booth the same way they whip votes in Congress.
A smart, self-interested Democratic Party would ask itself whether Trump’s increase in non-white support may indicate a larger trend underway. Unfortunately, the party’s intellectual wing and its allies in corporate media are among the most incurious and condescending people in this country.
If self-hatred and selfishness are the best explanations party operatives can come up with, they’ll get even less of the black male vote the next election cycle. Instead, they should take time to explain to black voters why Democrats think government bureaucrats and special interest groups should have more influence on where children go to school than their parents do.
They should also have to explain why celebrities and multi-millionaire donors living in gated communities support paying bail for violent criminals who go back to terrorize working-class neighborhoods. And the ultimate question is why the party that claims to oppose all systemic racism and value black lives vigorously promotes abortion policies that disproportionately reduce the black population—a goal shared by today’s white nationalists as well as Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizards of the past.
All of these questions deserve honest, thoughtful responses, not empty platitudes and predictable euphemisms. The lack of answers to this point shows that black men don’t need to defend their choices. Democrats need to defend their ideas.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Delano Squires is the creator of the blog Truth, No Chaser, and has also written about race, religion, relationships, and culture for Black and Married with Kids, The Root, and The Grio. He holds a B.S. in computer engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and an MPP from The George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter at @Mr_Squires.
One of the biggest stories in this election is how President Trump, whom leftists and their media allies have constantly called a “racist,” made great inroads with minorities. The left is clearly shocked. Rather than humbly spending some time on self-reflection, however, they are doubling down on identity politics by blaming minority Trump voters.
Since Election Day, leftists have been attacking minority Trump voters from two angles. First, they claim minorities who voted for Trump are “white” voters who shouldn’t be classified as minorities. This nonsense is nothing new. Prior to the election, Joe Biden famously said black voters who vote for Trump “ain’t black.”
Immediately after the election, this nonsense came up again courtesy of none other than Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the now-debunked 1619 Project. When it became clear that Trump would win Florida thanks to enthusiastic support from Latino voters, Hannah-Jones tweeted: “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains [sic] why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate.”
National Public Radio’s Gene Demby quickly endorsed Hannah-Jones’ assertions. In an NPR post-election segment, titled “Who is the White Vote?” Demby said:
It’s important that, you know, we think about the ways that there are many, many white Latinos. And because whiteness so thoroughly informs voting behavior, we should probably be asking better questions about Latino voters, like whether they identify as white or not. That might be more illuminating than simply whether someone refers to themselves as Latino in some ways.
No, Democrats Don’t Own Brown People
Here is the thought process behind these kinds of comments Only white people vote for Republicans. Since skin color trumps ethnicity, of course, light-skinned minorities would vote for a Republican candidate because of their “whiteness.” They shouldn’t be counted as minority voters at all.
This thought process is deeply flawed. Dividing the Latino community by skin color is possibly the most racist thing to do. Latino voters are unique, both as individuals and based on their diverse Latin American countries of origin, but it’s wrong to use colorism to explain Latino voters’ behaviors. Regardless of skin color, many Latino immigrants have suffered or watched their families suffer under socialist policies in their home countries. Many came to America to escape socialism, so naturally, they will not vote for Democrats, whose party enthusiastically embraces it.
Further, claiming skin color drives a voter’s behavior is an insult to minority voters’ intelligence. During Trump’s first term and prior to the pandemic lockdowns, both black and Hispanic unemployment rates were at historic lows. The black and Hispanic household median annual income increase (adjusted for inflation) more than doubled during Trump’s term compared to the Obama years. Minority voters, like any other voters, will naturally support the candidate whose policies have benefited them.
By the same token, minority voters will reject candidates whose policies might bring them harm. Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, explained to a puzzled NPR journalist why Biden lost Latino support in Texas. “For example, a lot of the Border Patrol law enforcement are heavily Latino in the Rio Grande Valley,” Garcia said. “So when you are talking about defunding the police, and you don’t stand up to those types of rhetoric, then it leaves an opening for Republicans to come in and take advantage of that.”
When will leftist pundits such as Hannah-Jones and Demby ever realize it is the radical policies and ideas they support that have driven away minority voters?
The Left Believes Minorities Have No Agency
Apparently, blaming minority Trump voters’ “whiteness” doesn’t go far enough for some on the left. Charles M. Blow, a New York Times columnist, complained that some minority Trump voters have Stockholm syndrome, a psychological response that occurs when abuse victims bond with their abusers.
In his most recent article, Blow listed statistic after statistic showing that “a larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016,” including Trump doubling black women’s support from 4 percent in 2016 to 8 percent in 2020, and increasing black men’s vote from 13 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2020. “It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists,” Blow said, calling all Trump voters either racists or accomplices of racism.
There’s more. According to Blow, the number that really put him on his heels was “the percentage of L.G.B.T. people voting for Trump doubled from 2016, moving from 14 percent to 28 percent. In Georgia, the number was 33 percent.”
Although none of the statistics Blow presented even remotely support the title of his piece, “Exit Poll Points to the Power of White Patriarchy,” he found a way to blame white patriarchy and demean minority Trump voters in the end. According to Blow, Trump’s widening support across racial and gender groups “points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. … Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.”
In the eyes of leftists such as Blow, nonwhite voters and non-straight voters who supported Trump are nobody but coattail riders who have neither personal agency nor the ability to make it on our own in the world. I had never read anything more racist, more divisive, and more insulting than this, and I am not the only one. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist and a fellow at the Hoover Institute, tweeted: “This is the dumbest, most divisive drivel I’ve read in a long time. We should be talking about what unites us now. Not doubling down on ID-Politics. Shame on you!”
Minorites Had Good Reason to Vote for Trump
It is obvious that leftist pundits are dumbfounded by Trump’s widening support among minority voters in 2020. Since the 2016 election, rather than trying to understand half of the country who voted for Trump the first time, these talking heads turned toward nurturing their hatred of Trump and getting him out of office as their full-time jobs.
They thought that after repeating “Orange Man Bad” day after day for four years, the electorate would just follow their lead. They have no clue why someone they despised so much could have attracted even more minority votes this time around. Since they are unable to come up with any reasonable explanation, let me shed some light on the matter.
Minorities like me voted for Trump because we like his policies: lower taxes, fewer government regulations, and strong national security. American people, especially minorities, have seen real economic benefits during Trump’s first term. He stands up to socialism and promises, “America will never be a socialist country,” and his unconventional foreign policy approach has brought a historical breakthrough of peace in the Middle East.
We want a safe environment to raise our families. We don’t want to see our cities burned, our shops looted, and our statues toppled. We want good-paying jobs so we can enjoy the lifestyle we desire through our own hard work. We want all families, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to be able to choose the best school that matches their children’s educational needs. We want to continue to express ourselves without being censored or canceled.
We certainly don’t believe race and sex are the roots of nor the answer to every social ill. We are tired of identity politics, critical race theory, and cancel culture, all of which have sucked the fun out of life and shut down the exchange of ideas. We know our country has room for improvement, but it is not a racist nation. We take pride in being Americans and in all the progresses our nation has made, and we are tired of the left condemning our country’s founding and the American ideal.
As long as leftists continue to weaponize identity politics and dress us down as if we are mindless cattle, their candidates will continue to lose our support.
Helen Raleigh, CFA, is an American entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. She’s a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her writings appear in other national media, including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Helen’s new book, “Backlash: How Communist China’s Aggression Has Backfired,” is available for pre-order with a release date of October 20, 2020. Follow her on Twitter: @HRaleighspeaks.
My wonderful readers often have questions for me, particularly in what every TV commercial calls “these uncertain times” when we’re all “in this together” and must give hourly thanks to “our heroes.” So, as I have in the past, I wanted to take a moment to reply to questions that have been pouring in from, again: no one.
1) What do you think of Joe Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris as his V.P.?
I think Susan Rice or Keisha Lance Bottoms would have been better, but inasmuch as I predicted Kamala as the Democrats’ next presidential candidate back before she’d even won her Senate seat, I strongly support his decision for making me almost, kind of, in the ballpark right.
2) That’s an amazing prediction — but what on earth made you predict her?
Because the Democratic Party is entirely about identity politics these days, meaning race, ethnicity, immigration status, gender and sexual orientation, but having absolutely nothing to do with economic class, social standing, occupational category or geographic location.
They already had Obama, so what’s better than the first black president? The first black woman president, of course!
3) But she’s half-Indian and half-Jamaican, not a foundational black American. No reparations for her! In fact, her Jamaican father admits their family owned slaves.
Yeah, yeah. The only people who care about foundational black Americans are Tariq Nasheed and me. As described in my book Mugged, Democrats were always annoyed by the idea that civil rights should have anything to do with black people. That’s why “civil rights” quickly came to mean abortion rights, gay rights, the right not to see construction signs that say “Men at Work.” (That’s according to the Kentucky Commission on Civil Rights .) Black Americans should breathe a sigh of relief that Biden didn’t pick a transsexual and expect their gratitude.
4) Wait a minute! Are we going to have to engage in Nazi-era genetic coding to determine who gets slavery reparations?
Not at all. We have very reliable census records back to at least the 1870s, so we can count foundational black Americans to their grandparents. One American grandparent and the rest Nigerian — you get 25 cents on the dollar.
5) Oh, that’s too complicated! Why not just say: Everyone who’s black gets a check?
Fine, then give me one. Prove I have no black blood. You’re going to have to do the genealogical research one way or another.
6) Why don’t we have the concept of foundational WHITE Americans?
EXCELLENT POINT. I can’t help but notice that most of the people denouncing Confederate monuments are neither foundational black Americans nor foundational white Americans. Of course recent immigrants don’t care about Confederate monuments! They weren’t here. That’s our issue. We don’t respect the South’s cause, but we do respect their honor. It’s OUR history. Not yours.
We ought to have the same rule on tearing down the nation’s history as for reparations: You have to have at least one American grandparent to denounce our traditions, statues and monuments. Nikki Haley, for example, can take down monuments to Bush, Facebook or “American Idol” — all of which she was present in the country for.
7) Speaking of tearing things down, why are all the antifa girls fatties?
Because attractive girls know that all the talk about “toxic masculinity”and “patriarchy” is nonsense. Good-looking girls, even average-looking ones who bathe semi-regularly and don’t resemble elephants, know that they rule the world.
8) And why are antifa boys scrawny beta males?
White men who go around denouncing other white men as “fascists”are wimpy losers who think they’ll attract women with suck-up speeches about racism. But even stupid left-wing girls prefer alpha males. Sissy boys should drop the left-wing politics and try lifting weights and making money. Freud was a fool and reductionist, but sexual strategizing by losers is the source of nearly all left-wing ideology.
9) That’s total crap! And I know what I’m talking about because I had a show on MSNBC for 20 years and —
Look, Chris, everyone thinks you got screwed when you were fired from “Hardball,” but could you please not crash this Q&A?
10) Do you think Trump will replace Mike Pence with Nikki Haley as his vice president to win the Asian women’s vote?
The crucial industrial Midwest can’t stand her and of course, in February 2016, Haley compared Trump to a Klan member and vowed never to stop fighting him:
“I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we want as president. We will not allow that in our country.”
A protester holds a Captain America Black Lives Matter shield while four symbolic funeral processions converge in downtown at the intersection of 1st St and Broadway on June 8, 2020, in Los Angeles.
It’s never been clearer that far-left ideologies have overtaken American universities. Political correctness, critical race theory, Marxism, gender theory and social justice are all concepts being taught mostly radical, leftist academics.
A person purporting to be a University of California, Berkeley professor has had enough of these ideologies, however, and decided to speak out against them in an anonymous letter. The letter was first shared on Twitter by Tracy Beanz, editor in chief of UncoverDC. Wilfred Reilly, an assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University, who is referenced in the letter, confirmed to The Western Journal that the letter had been sent out, but could not confirm the identity of the sender.
“I can’t confirm the sender. I was sent the letter, and will note that it contained direct e-mails for me, [economist Thomas Sowell] (via National Review), and what looked like much of the Berkeley History Department,” Reilly told The Western Journal in an email.
The letter began with the alleged professor apologizing for the need to remain anonymous, citing the prevalent nature of cancel culture in modern-day America.
“I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field,” the anonymous party wrote.
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“In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.”
The letter then went on to explain the illogical reasoning behind critical race theory, the academic theory that played a major role in the popularization of ideas such as white privilege and systemic racism.
“The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions. Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly,” the letter read.
“Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.”
The purported professor then proceeded to take the Black Lives Matter movement head-on, explaining his rejection of its “problematic view of history.”
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“I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.”
“The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.”
Rather than contending with the many counterpoints that the alleged professor made to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the U.C. Berkeley history department openly condemned the letter as “against our values as a department and our commitment to equity and inclusion.”
UC Berkeley History@UCBHistory
An anonymous letter has been circulating, purportedly written by a @UCBHistory professor. We have no evidence that this letter was written by a History faculty member. We condemn this letter: it goes against our values as a department and our commitment to equity and inclusion.
By dismissing the letter’s arguments out of hand, the department all but proved the writer to be correct in his or her evaluation of U.C. Berkeley and other Black Lives Matter advocates. The least Berkeley’s faculty could have done was put together a thoughtful rebuttal, but even that seemed to be too much to ask of them.
James Lindsay spoke to The Western Journal about the reported professor’s letter and what it meant for the social justice movement at large. Lindsay is a mathematician, political commentator and co-founder of the website New Discourses, an apolitical resource for those opposed to political correctness and the various ideologies of social justice.
When asked if this open condemnation of social justice politics was a trend in the right direction for American colleges, Lindsay seemed unconvinced.
“Colleges are not yet trending in a positive direction. It is probably the opposite, but there is still time to reverse that course if more academics and professors speak up like this. This is the kind of reply scholars should be making and then debating,” he told The Western Journal in an email.
When asked about claims made by the letter, he affirmed the anonymous professor’s assessment of critical race theory.
“I cannot speak to the specific data-driven claims, but the academic theory he cites (Critical Race Theory) is accurately described in terms of how poisonous, anti-intellectual, anti-society, and even intrinsically anti-black it is.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany doesn’t read the newspapers. Maybe AOC should try reading what McEnany actually says before she launches an attack that basically accuses the press secretary of racism — even subconscious racism.
In a social media dispute that flared up Monday, New York’s best-known democratic socialist tried to paint the Harvard Law graduate McEnany as too ignorant to know the office Ocasio-Cortez holds, apparently thanks to a Politico summary of McEnany’s comments during a White House news briefing.
“@PressSec wouldn’t be the first person to mistake a women of color for having a lower position or title than she does, but Kayleigh – in case you haven’t picked up a newspaper in two years, I’m a Congresswoman,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
“The@PressSec comment is steeped in a long, hurtful, & horrendous history of stripping women of color of titles and diminishing them to ‘the help.’ Perhaps she isn’t aware that what she did is mired in racist history. If that is the case, I look forward to her apology tomorrow.”
First of all, since it’s unlikely McEnany has been living under a rock since the 2018 election season, it’s a good chance she knew full well who the Bronx-Queens Democrat is even before becoming White House press secretary.
Second, Ocasio-Cortez appeared to be triggered by Politico reporter Jake Sherman’s suspiciously snarky Twitter post that implied McEnany had referred to AOC as simply an “adviser” to Joe Biden, the elderly, white male who’s somehow become the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee for 2020.
Also, since McEnany was referring to Ocasio-Cortez’s status as co-chairwoman of a panel advising Biden on “climate change,” there’s an argument to be made that McEnany was complimenting AOC by elevating her beyond the ranks of an ordinary member of Congress to a powerful player in presidential politics.
Finally, as Alyssa Farah, White House director of strategic communications noted, Ocasio-Cortez was just dead wrong.
Had the congresswoman taken more than a minute to look, and resisted the urge to leap immediately at Sherman’s cc’ed Twitter bait, she would have known McEnany had fully described her, as well as AOC’s equally obnoxious “squad” mate Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan.
The two women came up when McEnany was fielding a question about the Democrats’ insane push to defund American police departments.
At a Friday night debate, according to the U.K. Independent, Ocasio-Cortez called for the “reduction of our NYPD budget and defunding a $6 billion budget, that costs us books in the hands of our children and costs us very badly needed investment in NYCHA and public housing.”
.@PressSec wouldn’t be the first person to mistake a women of color for having a lower position or title than she does, but Kayleigh – in case you haven’t picked up a newspaper in two years, I’m a Congresswoman. https://twitter.com/jakesherman/status/1270057686990819329 …
“The president is appalled by the ‘defund the police’ movement,” McEnany said, according to the transcript.
“The fact that you have sitting congresswomen wanting to defund the police — notably Rashida Tlaib, notably Biden adviser Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — former Clinton and Eric Holder spokesperson Brian Fallon wanting to defund our police across this country, it is extraordinary.”
In other words, Ocasio-Cortez fired off Monday apparently on the basis of a reporter’s tweet that seemed designed to get a rise out of her, and she jumped right at it. That’s not exactly the behavior voters should expect of their elected officials, but it’s the kind of action Americans have learned to expect from Democrats and “progressives” who have spent the Trump years demonstrating the maturity of middle schoolers.
As is usual with anything coming out of the Trump White House, McEnany’s tweet drew plenty of liberal responses as AOC’s supporters flocked to the congresswoman’s defense like the flying monkeys of “The Wizard of Oz” — but McEnany had plenty of backers, too.
.@PressSec wouldn’t be the first person to mistake a women of color for having a lower position or title than she does, but Kayleigh – in case you haven’t picked up a newspaper in two years, I’m a Congresswoman. https://twitter.com/jakesherman/status/1270057686990819329 …
Read your own transcript, you literally called her an adviser in the same sentence, I’ve highlighted it below to help you out.
Becky Frady@CRNA_Pred
I’ll go slow, try to keep up…she said sitting congressWOMEN (meaning multiple), then gives examples of those congressWOMEN, the second of which, AOC, is ALSO an advisor to Biden. AOC has TWO JOBS, congresswoman AND Biden advisor, BOTH mentioned. Got it?
Following the example of former press secretary Sarah Sanders, whose tenure was a textbook example of how the White House should handle an unrelentingly hostile press corps, McEnany has made it clear from the beginning that she wasn’t going to be intimidated by the divas in the briefing room.
Even the most vainly obtuse (say, Jim Acosta?) should be learning by now that attacking McEnany without a decent cause is going to be an exercise in failure.
Maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will learn the lesson too — assuming she reads enough about it.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Many parents are outraged at the idea of inserting a student’s adversity when scoring the S.A.T. exam. Many feel this is a backdoor way of using race as a factor over merit.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
Why do Muslim politicians push identity politics? Watch our video narrative by Clarion’s National Correspondent Shireen Qudosi.
Qudosi argues that Muslims have a choice — between old school Islam, which many of their parents fled, and the opportunities offered in America. Which will it be?
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
NEWSMAX
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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
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
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
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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Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
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