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Trump will cut funding of schools that teach 1619 Project fantasy as history

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She's saying that her decision to be a whale is your fault, and you must pay her money
The results of her decisions are your fault, so pay her reparations

American schools often teach secular leftist fantasy to young children, in order to undermine their parents’ values. You may remember when teachers presented the oscillating model of the universe to children through atheist Carl Sagan, to get around the need for a Creator. The model was later disproved theoretically and experimentally. Now the schools are trying again with the 1619 Project.

The 1619 Project is a fantasy work, authored by Nicole Hannah-Jones, a person with no training or demonstrated ability in any discipline connected to the real world.

Who says so? The author says so, in this tweet, reported by Red State:

I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 27, 2020

This article from the centrist National Review lists some of most fantastical parts of her work.

Here’s an excerpt:

The most dramatic and controversial assertion in Hannah-Jones’s essay was that, in 1776, “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Her essay cited nothing to support this, nor did it show even the slightest awareness of how radical a claim this is. She continued:

By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South . . . we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not . . . believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.

So, she’s claiming that the Britain ended slavery at some point prior to 1776, and that this ending of slavery applied to the colonies in America, and that the American Revolution was a response to this ending of slavery being pushed to the colonies. Is that true?

The first real strike against slavery was the 1772 Somerset judicial decision in Britain, which declared that slavery was alien to the English common law and thus could not exist within Britain without a positive act of Parliament. As Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz has noted, however, the reaction to the Somerset case, which did not apply to British colonies, was relatively muted even in the southern colonies; it provoked nothing even vaguely resembling the furious responses to the Tea Act the following year.

Early anti-slavery movements before 1776 had no effect on the “British colonies”, e.g. – America. But more importantly there was no UK ban on slavery until way after the American Revolution:

Organized, popular movements against slavery, and laws restricting or abolishing slavery and the slave trade, were considerably more advanced in the American colonies in the 1770s than in Britain, where Parliament would not ban slavery in Jamaica and other British colonies until 1833, after many years of failures by William Wilberforce and other anti-slavery leaders. The world’s first organized anti-slavery society was formed in Pennsylvania in 1774, and the first legal ban on slavery anywhere in the world was in Vermont in 1777. Five of the original 13 states followed suit either during or immediately after the Revolution, passing bans on slavery between 1780 and 1784. The first federal ban on slavery, in the Northwest Territory, was drafted in 1784 by Thomas Jefferson and passed by the Confederation Congress in 1787. Its language would later be adopted directly into the 13th Amendment.

If slavery was not banned in the UK and pushed on the colonies prior to the Revolution, then the Revolution cannot have been a reaction to slavery being made illegal. In fact, America was far ahead of the UK at banning slavery. And far, far ahead of the rest of the world.

I just want to emphasize this – this is the problem with so many on the secular left:

[…]Hannah-Jones openly scoffs that there is “no such thing” as objective history…

This is the person the secular left believes and celebrates. A writer of anti-American fantasy. A liar.

Should we teach BLM rioter fantasies in our schools?

Well, I’m not very impressed with her work, and fortunately for us we have a Republican president who won’t bender over backwards to appease shoddy scholarship.

Fox News reports:

President Trump said Sunday that the Department of Education is examining the use of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project in schools, and warned that institutions that teach this alternative narrative of American history could lose federal funding.

The project is based on the premise that American history began in 1619 — cited as the date African slaves arrived in Virginia — and that everything following this should be viewed through that lens.

[…]Trump responded to a tweet stating that California would be using it.

“Department of Education is looking at this,” Trump said. “If so, they will not be funded!”

Trump’s tweet echoes the sentiment of a bill Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., introduced in July. That bill proposed denying funds to any school that uses the 1619 Project in its curriculum. At the time, schools in areas including Chicago and Washington, D.C., had already amended their history curricula to reflect the project’s messages.

This will be the policy for the next 2 months. If Biden wins, that will almost certainly be changed. How would you like to see Nikole Hannah-Jones as Secretary of Education?

What’s really going on here?

Although Hannah-Jones’ work is filled with errors, it’s very appealing to the secular left. It tells them things that they want to hear. Specifically, it makes them feel superior to others, and it excuses their own poor decision-making by shifting the blame to other people. The 1619 Project is similar to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in that it affirms poorly-educated underachievers who blame their own failures on people of a different race. This is a very attractive message to socialists on the secular left, as it was in 1930s Germany. We should be careful about allowing racist rhetoric into our public schools to influence our children. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for our nation.

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Three cheers for the Janus SCOTUS decision and right-to-work laws in 27 states

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Political contributions from unions are overwhelmingly given to Democrats and leftists
Contributions from unions are mostly given to Democrats and leftists

Some people think of unions as a force for good. Perhaps they were in the past, but a little reading of economics shows how they actually produce very bad results for workers. In addition to that, unions are actively trying to influence the outcome of elections in 2020, using the money collected from their members. Fortunately, there have been two great developments recently that limit their power.

Here’s a recent story from Just the News:

Leaders of several public and private sector unions are threatening to organize walkouts this fall for teachers, truck drivers and service workers in an effort to protest police killings.

“The status quo — of police killing Black people, of armed white nationalists killing demonstrators, of millions sick and increasingly desperate — is clearly unjust, and it cannot continue,” said a statement issued over the weekend by various arms of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, and National Education Association.

[…]The union leaders also called for defunding police departments and universal health care.

You can see their progressive convictions coming out in how they distribute the money they collect from their members.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Organized labor has given more than $1.3 billion to Democratic Party organizations and liberal nonprofit and activist groups since 2010, while 1 percent went to conservative groups or causes, according to a survey of federal data.

The giving is starkly different from the beliefs of most rank-and-file union members, many of whom lean Republican.

Having said all of that, there were two pieces of good news about labor unions that I think we should celebrate during Labor Day.

First of all, there was a very good decision to allow teachers to opt out of having to pay union dues in all 50 states. Second, a large number of states have enacted right-to-work laws, which allow employees in union-dominated jobs to be able to work without being forced to join a union.

This article explains both:

While every public sector employee across the country now enjoys right to work protections under the First Amendment as a result of the 2018 National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation-won Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision, private sector workers in the 23 states that have yet to pass a right to work law can lose their job for refusing to tender dues or fees to a union.

Right to work protects each worker’s freedom of choice, but the advantages of right to work hardly stop there. Enshrining workplace freedom also brings significant economic benefits to the 27 states that have passed right to work laws.

Between 2009 and 2019, right to work states saw the total number of people employed grow by 16.9%. That’s nearly double the 9.6% gain in non-right to work states, according to an analysis of federal government statistics compiled by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, or NILRR.

The study also found that, after adjusting for the cost of living, the mean after-tax household income in right to work states was about $4,300 higher than for households in forced-unionism states in 2018, the most recent year for which household income data is available.

The connection between right to work laws and better economic performance is not a surprise. Business experts consistently rank the presence of right to work laws as one of the most important factors companies consider when deciding where to expand or relocate their plants and facilities, where they will create new jobs and new opportunities.

Take the manufacturing sector, for example. The NILRR analysis revealed that employment in the manufacturing sector increased by 10% in right to work states from 2009 to 2019, over three times the 2.9% gain forced-unionism states saw over that same period.

Right to work laws clearly make economic sense, but protecting employee freedom has always been their central feature.

I really liked the Janus decision and right-to-work laws, because I don’t think that conservative workers should be forced to join a union in order to earn a living. The unions should not get access to worker money for free – unions should have to earn their worker’s money by providing value. And the worker should decide whether there is value there, or not.

You can see a full breakdown of union contributions by political affiliation for 2019-2020 here at Open Secrets.

News

Trump ends taxpayer-funded indoctrination in anti-American critical race theory in federal agencies

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She's saying that her decision to be a whale is your fault, and you must pay her money
Her poor choices were caused by your racism, so you must pay her reparations

Good news, everyone! I think most people who are following the election closely know that there is almost no overlap between the Republican party and the Democrat party. It’s common sense that we not use taxpayer money to spread hatred and division. The Democrats have been using taxpayer money to do that in federal agencies. But Trump has put an end to it.

Here’s the story from Daily Wire:

The Trump administration announced late on Friday that it was cracking down on “critical race theory,” a far-left anti-American ideology that promotes racial division, from being taught in federal agencies and paid for by federal money.

The memo released by Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, called critical race theory “divisive” and “anti-American propaganda,” adding that the far-left ideology falsely promotes the notion that “there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.”

The memo states:

These types of “trainings” not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce. We can be proud that as an employer, the Federal government has employees of all races, ethnicities, and religions. We can be proud that Americans from all over the country seek to join our workforce and dedicate themselves to public service. We can be proud of our continued efforts to welcome all individuals who seek to serve their fellow Americans as Federal employees. However, we cannot accept our employees receiving training that seeks to undercut our core values as Americans and drive division within our workforce.

“The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions,” Vought wrote.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my impression of the Republican party is that they were mostly fine with letting the Democrats warp the culture towards anarchy. Not just passively with Hollywood , Big Tech and professional sports, but actively, by subsidizing the universities, public schools, and public sector unions with taxpayer dollars. So this move comes as a big surprise to me. I would expect this from Jim Jordan or Mark Meadows, but not Donald Trump.

Critical Race Theory is nothing more than an attempt to remove responsibility from certain underperforming groups for the low results that are caused by their own poor decision-making. Not just their poor decision making with education, career, finances, but also with premarital sex, drugs, marriage and children.

White people are doing a bad job of keeping non-whites down
White people are doing a bad job of keeping non-whites down

We should be telling everyone, regardless of race, to act like East Indians and Asians and Africans in order to have success. Date like East Indians and Asians and Africans, Marry like East Indians and Asians and Africans. Educate yourself like East Indians and Asians and Africans. Work like East Indians and Asians and Africans. Follow the law and don’t antagonize the police. This is not “acting white”. This is taking responsibility to make good decisions and be disciplined. We need to teach people of all races to work backwards from the results that other non-white races are achieving, to the decision-making that produces those results. Critical race theory is teaching people the wrong message – don’t make good decisions, cry racism when you fail to achieve good results. Awful.

In America, your success is largely determined by your decision-making, not by how other people treat you. We have non-white populations who are able to achieve far above whites, because they work harder, study harder, obey the law better, marry earlier, etc. than white people do, on average. The problem of failure to succeed cannot be caused by skin color when so many non-white groups are achieving far above native-born whites.

There is no path to stability and success that involves making decisions like the woman in the photo above. If a woman watches TV all the time, doesn’t study in school, is overweight and makes babies with bad boys in order to go on welfare, then the solution to her problems won’t be found in critical race theory. She’ll have to start to control herself and make better decisions if she wants different results.

Instead of having taxpayer funded indoctrination to blame others for poor decision-making, we should remove all taxpayer-funding for failure, including student loans for non-STEM degrees and single mother welfare, and just pay people who try hard in school, who marry, and who have children after they are married. We should penalize people for divorce and drug use. We are getting failure in this country because we make excuses for people who make poor decisions. It’s nice to see Trump at least stopping the flow of money from successful workers who pay taxes to irresponsible, reckless losers who think that teaching racism is a real job.