Firing Line Friday: Resolved: That We Need Not Fear the Religious Right

Posted on September 8, 2023 by The Political Hat

In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

Thirty years ago, the Republican coalition still included, in its “three legged stool” coalition not only the small-government libertarians and national defense conservatives, but also the Religious Right. Back then, the consequences of the “Satanic Panic” had weakened that “leg” of the proverbial stool. Let us look back at a debate from the early ‘90s between William F. Buckley, Jr., Cornel West, Ira Glasser, henry J. Hyde, Jacob Neusner, Harriett Woods, Barry W. Lynn, and Pat Robertson who debated the resolution “that we need not fear the religious right”.

Until next Friday.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Firing Line Friday | 1 Comment

California Legislature Trying To Legalize Discrimination… Again

Posted on September 5, 2023 by The Political Hat

In 1996, California voters passed Prop. 209 to outlaw affirmative action. It has survived for over a quarter of a century and remains the law of the land—at least on paper—for now. The main operative part of it reads plainly:

“The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”

In 2020, the California grand soviet legislature put Prop. 16 on the ballot which would have outright repealed Prop. 209.

It failed by double digits margins, even with non-Hispanic Whites not even being a plurality of the state’s population.

Now, the California grand soviet legislature is at it again, except this time they are being more subtle. Instead of outright repealing it, it allows the Governor to grant the state to discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or on behalf of “marginalized genders, sexes, or sexual orientations” based on “research”. The main new operative section would read:

“Notwithstanding paragraph (1) but subject to approval by the Governor pursuant to the procedures in subparagraph (B), the State may use state moneys to fund research-based, or research-informed, and culturally specific interventions or programs in any industry, including, but not limited to, public employment, public education, and public contracting, if those interventions or programs are established or otherwise implemented by the State for purposes of increasing the life expectancy of, improving educational outcomes for, or lifting out of poverty specific groups based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or marginalized genders, sexes, or sexual orientations.”

This is incredibly broad and would allow discrimination for practically any reason whatsoever with just a fig leaf of excuses. It also isn’t even about promoting equality of outcomes, but rather equity. Even is one group has higher average life expectancy, higher educational outcomes, or higher wealth, they can benefit while other groups (e.g. “cis” heterosexual White males) may be ground into the dust.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Democrats, Kyriarchy, Leviathan, Mood Music, Social Justice | 1 Comment

News of the Week (September 3rd, 2023)

Posted on September 3, 2023 by The Political Hat

News of the Week for September 3^rd, 2023

Continue reading →

Posted in News of the Week | Tagged news | Comments Off

Quick Takes – Modern Schools: Zero Proficiency; War On Math; Cutting Back School To Four Days

Posted on August 31, 2023 by The Political Hat

Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

The focus this time: Making sure the children are mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence.

First, a little mood music:

Carrying on…

So, how’s schooling in that paragon of Leftist success, Chicago, doing?

“Wirepoints released the findings that stem from 2022 data from the Illinois Department of Education, which indicated that in 55 Chicago public schools, no students were reported proficient in either math or reading.

“There were 22 schools that had no students who could read at grade level; another 33 schools claimed that no students could perform math at grade level.

“Statewide, there were 53 schools that reported no students who were proficient in math; another 30 schools reported zero students who were able to read at grade level.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Progressives | Tagged derp, FacePalm, Leviathan, Mood Music, Quick Takes, Social Justice | Comments Off

Move Over Gender Unicorn, Here Comes The Gender Minotaur

Posted on August 30, 2023 by The Political Hat

Pictured: The latest new “gender”.

Genders are becoming increasingly diverse… diversely stupid. Tumblr lever “genders” are now urged to be accepted blindly by professionals. Transgenderism has become a Children’s Crusade (by proxy).

“‘I totally agree we are in the midst of a gender revolution and the children are leading it. And it’s a wonderful thing to see. And it’s also humbling to know [children] know more than we do about this topic of being gender expansive,’ she said during a 2018 talk at the San Francisco Public Library.

“Ehrensaft believes the transgender revolution is the next phase of the 60s feminist movement, which featured challenging stereotypes about gender.

“‘Now, we’ve got genders moving boulders, and it makes a lot of people nervous,’ she said.

“Ehrensaft believes that transgenderism is derived by a ‘gender web’ which is influenced by culture, upbringing and nature.

“‘Each person’s web will change over time as they age,’ the event’s description said. “What’s Your Gender? Don’t answer until you hear all your options… Ehrensaft wants you to get off the binary measurement scale.’

“She introduced language such as ‘genderfluid,’ ‘non-binary’ and ‘gender expansive.’ She then predicted the language will evolve beyond that, and cited her conversation with a 7-year-old as proof that there can be ‘gender minotaurs’ and hybrids.

“‘And as you know, language is political. So what’s good today will be politically incorrect tomorrow. So we’ll just keep changing as we go,’ said Ehrensaft. ‘This is a whole group of kids you all should know about.’”

How wacky are things getting?

Well, as of five years ago, valid “genders” included:

Gender fluid children. Children who defy the norms of binary gender and either slide along a gender spectrum or weave their own intricate individual patterns along the gender web. The word fluid here refers to the potential for movement through further development of one’s understanding of their gender.

Gender smoothies. Gender smoothies are a variation on the theme of gender fluid. As one teenager vividly described it, “You see, you take everything about gender, throw it in the blender, press the button, and you’ve got me—a gender smoothie.”

Gender hybrids. Children who combine or alternate between genders, often in a binary way. Among gender hybrids are the following:

Gender Prius. Half girl/half boy: This gender label was invented by a schoolage child who, from the front, looked like any boy in basketball shorts, tank top, and basketball sneakers, and, from the back, had a long blond braid tied at the end with a bright pink bow: “You see—I’m a Prius, a boy in the front, a girl in the back. A hybrid.”

Gender minotaur. A descriptor for the children who explain that they are one gender on the top and another on the bottom, this usually to account for genitals at odds with the gender they know themselves to be.

Gender-by-season children. Children who freely express their authentic gender (identity, expressions, or both) during summer and school vacations but never at school, or alternatively use school as the safe place to be their true gender self but keep it under wraps during home-based summers or vacations.

Gender-by-location children. A close cousin to gender-by-season, a child who knows the locations or is told the locations where free gender expression will be accepted and other locations where it is not, and chooses or is told to keep their authentic gender muted or under wraps in the unwelcoming locations, such as conservative Aunt Mary’s wedding reception.

Genderqueer youth. Not only a category of gender but also a social movement of young people who ask us, “Why do you even bother? We are so beyond gender.” They are any and all, never either/or, and they challenge our thinking and carve a new path in which they invite us all to both imagine and embody a world where gender is no longer a defining category. They may also identify with the term nonbinary.

Protogay children. Children who start out exploring and pushing the margins of gender on the way to discovering their sexual orientation identity, typically exploring their gender expressions rather than gender identity, though not always.

Prototransgender youth. Children who travel in the exact opposite direction from the protogay children. In the process of exploring their sexual orientation identity, usually in adolescence or young adulthood, they discover, often through their romantic or sexual liaisons, that it is not actually their sexuality but their gender that is in question, and move to understand themselves as transgender.

Gender Tootsie Roll Pops. Children who exhibit one gender on the outside but experience another gender on the inside. To follow the metaphor, the crunchy outside is often the gender that accommodates to the expectations of the surrounding world, and the soft, gooey inside is the stuff of authenticity and realness. The hard candy is in place to protect or shield the inside chewiness from an unaccepting world or an internalized unaccepting part of one’s own self. It should be noted that the gender Tootsie Roll Pops, if not provided with resilience building, are often the most at-risk TGE children.

Gender-ambidextrous children. Children who use both their girl self and their boy self interchangeably. It may be the child who is a sister to her brother but a male playmate to the boy across the street, or the child who is full-out “femme” one day but totally masculine-style buff the next. If children can use both their left and right hand on par with each other, so too can they use their girl and their boy part of self, not to mention all the parts in between and beyond those two genders; ergo, the gender-ambidextrous child. They may also identify with the term bigender.

Gender Teslas. The gender Tesla is the transgender state some children reach after a stint being a gender hybrid or gender ambidextrous. Some simply go from zero to 60 to get there, meaning from the sex assigned to them at birth to their affirmed gender identity. Some go more slowly. We could say that any child in the transgender category would count as a Tesla, but we are preserving this term for children who are in motion toward an all-one-gender status. Agender youth. A close cousin of, if not the same as, genderqueer youth. We can play with the word agender, seeing its double entendres—“I’m a gender, but not any particular gender,” or “I’m devoid of gender [similar to asexual],” which is the more common referent to the meaning of agender. These are youth who, similar to their genderqueer compatriots, are also pushing beyond the limits of constricting gender confines to say, “You can’t catch me,” if it means pinning down a particular gender or any sense of gender at all as being relevant to living a life. Indeed, many agender youth also reference themselves as genderqueer or nonbinary.

And yes, this was accepted and published by the American Psychological Association.

The future is “gendered”…

Education As Woke Politics

Posted on August 29, 2023 by The Political Hat

The woke Left are holistic, totalitarian, and systemic. Everything is political and the faunt of politics and society as a whole is education. This is why politics, for them, must be political.

1/
One way that woke activists were able to take over the education system and get away with it was to make the claim, phrased in various different ways, that education is and always has been utterly political.

Woke activists politicizing education,

A thread 🧵 pic.twitter.com/x78aRJYFAO

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

2/
They claim education is always political. This is why you often see articles in academic journals dedicated to education that say thing like: “education is inherently political,” “education was always already political,” “teaching is a political act,” and so on and so fourth.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

3/
As such. Critical Social Justice activists in education set about developing a theory of teaching in which the values, goal, agenda, perspective, worldview, and ideology of Critical Social Justice/wokeness are built into the fabric of how teaching is done.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

4/
This idea is deeply flawed, but it persists because the woke theorists in education do what woke theorists always do: marry the truth to a lie. So we must pull out the kernal of truth that they have, and divorce it from the lie that they have weaved into their argument.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

5/
in wokeness, “political” does not just refer to things that go on in the political realm, but in fact refers to anything that has an impact on politics, social order, social hierarchies, or who has social power. Anything that has any impact on society is thus “political.”

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

6/
Armed with this view of the world, the woke think that the goal of education is teaching students how to view the world through the lens of Critical Social Justice/wokeness.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

And how this all end up affecting education is frightening.

7/
The woke theorists have reasoned that if all education is political, then it is a perfectly good move to use the education system to create political activists who will agitate for the preferred political outcomes of the woke left.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

8/
Woke education theorists believe that k-12 classroom is and ought to be the "site of political struggle." They believe that the k-12 classroom is and ought to be a battlefield where the political war over the mind of children ought to occur. pic.twitter.com/NtSv5eVtk4

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

9/
They think that children ought to be taught the woke political worldview right from the get go. There is a reason why Ibram X. Kendi wrote a book called “Anti-Racist Baby”; because even babies are not to young to be socialized into woke ideology. pic.twitter.com/nSjUCKr2O0

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

10/
they believe it is appropriate to get children to accept and internalize woke ideology. For this reason one criteria for successful teaching according to wokeness is the degree to which they succeed in using the classroom to create the political change they want.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

11/
the reason this argument has gotten traction in spite of it falseness is that The Critical Social Justice scholars are trading on an ambiguity in the word political. There is a legitimate way ( in a benign and obvious sense) in which education is in a way political:

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

12/
We have to choose what will be taught is school, how it will be funded, how it schools will be set up, ets. In the sense of “education decisions are made by elected official which we can throw out of office if we don’t like their decisions,” education is political.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

13/
This is not how the woke see education. They see education as a place of political struggle and political battlefield where they are entitled to try to advance their political ideology by indoctrinating their students into wokeness.

This is not how education should be done.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

14/
Most people see education as the place where children are taught the skills required to make it in the larger world. The goal of the teacher is to teach children reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking, and civics (how our liberal democracy is supposed to function).

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

15/
With all that on the table we can highlight some of the problems with the woke view of education.

The first objection to woke education theory comes to us (again) from John Searle who wrote this about the challenges to the liberal vision of education: pic.twitter.com/WrUol1iprq

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

16/
This is exactly correct. It does not follow from the fact that everything might have unintended political consequences that the criteria for education assessment is political. Politicizing educations turns university classrooms into factories of political indoctrination.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

17/
Even if I accepted everything was political in the way they say it is, they still need to provide an argument for why woke politics ought to be the politics taught to children. But the woke can’t make an objective argument in favor of injecting their politics into classrooms

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

18/
The woke have accepted a postmodern view of the world which makes nearly everything about power and self-interest. If everything is really mask for political power, self-interest, cultural biases, hidden agendas, power-seeking, and clout chasing, then any argument the woke…

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

19/
A second problem that arises for woke theorists comes from their adoption of postmodernism. One of the most radical Critical Theorists of education, Henry Giroux, writes this in speaking about his friend and mentor, the Marxist critical theorist Paulo Freire: pic.twitter.com/B5tgFLqotG

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

20/
Giroux highlights three things that are very important in the work of Freire:

1. No transcendent ethics

2. No epistemological foundations

3. No political teleology.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

21.
The problem with having no transcendent ethics is that if there is no transcendent standard of right and wrong Freire has no objective reason why we should accept his moral prescriptions. By what standard does Freire make his moral judgements, and should we accept them?

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

22/
If Freire accepts that there are no epistemic foundations which anchor knowledge claims then we have no reason to accept Freire’s claims about education, society, truth, knowledge, democracy, or anything else. Put simply, Freire is making a number of truth claim while denying…

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

23/
Freire has his own political program with its own goals and ends, and he asks that we all participate in achieving these goal and ends. He then tells us that there are no transcendant ethics, no epistemological foundations and no political teleology.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

24/
If that’s that case then Freire can provide no objective reason for us to accept his political program, and all the only motivations for accepting his program is subjective moral convictions, naked self-interest, or the pursuit of political power.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

25/
The objections that Critical Social Justice launches against the liberal vision of education can also be turned back on the woke vision for education. The arguments they use to undermine the liberal vision for education also undermines their own.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

26/
Given that absolute neutrality in the sense of giving every idea and every view equal time is not possible (here are too many ideas and not enough time in a day, or in a lifetime, to give every single idea full and proper treatment) what are we to do?

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

27/
We ought to do is give children the skills needed to think about the world and to engage the world thoughfully and carefully with an eye to truth. We want to create a system that incentivizes the search for truth and rewards those who do the best job of pursuing the truth.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

28/
We do not want to accept the relativistic and nihilistic claim that all ideas are equally valid and that saying some ideas are better than others is nothing more then a mask for power. What we want to put together the best possible ideas that we can.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

29/
If you have given up on saying that some things are better then others, and some things are worse, if you have given up on which work has the quality and which work does not have the quality then you have given up on the whole idea of education.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

30/
The woke argument for politicizing the classroom rests on the idea that all education is political right to it’s core, and that therefore the primary goal of education is to teach politics. As we have seen, this idea rests on a number of bad and self-refuting arguments.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

31/
The goal is to teach students how to think critically and clearly so they can become competent, thoughtful, productive members of society. Only once they have those skills are they capable of freely engaging in political thought and action in a thoughtful and careful way

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

32/
The woke have it exactly backwards, truth is not political…Politics is downstream of truth.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

33/
I wrote a more detailed version of this essay on Sub/stack, complete with sources!

Please have a read, and support me with a free or paid subscription. I sincerely appreciate it.

Thank you for reading😀😀😀https://t.co/5e0W9eDpP7 pic.twitter.com/zF5XJeYX4u

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) August 10, 2023

That version can be read here.

If you want to defeat the woke Left, you have to pull them out from the root, and that root is firmly planted in education and the pedagogy.

Posted in Education, Progressives | Tagged Communism, Higher Ed, Leviathan, Social Justice | 1 Comment

The Fix Is In: The Real GOPe In Nevada Strikes Again

Posted on August 28, 2023 by The Political Hat

Nevada will have a Presidential primary with all Republican active voters receiving a ballot. Most Republicans in Nevada will assume their vote will count, but it won’t. The Nevada Republican Party executive officers (not even as of yet the full state central committee) have declared that they will hold a separate caucus on a Thursday early evening, after most Republicans have finished a full day of work, when people are tired and not want to blow the evening on some caucus after voting in a government primary?

The Nevada Republican Party is doing this in order to rig the vote for their preferred candidate, though that isn’t quite accurate, for the people in control of the Nevada Republican Party establishment actually is the campaign team for their preferred nominee. So, which candidate is the actual establishment running the state party apparatus as the de facto campaign for?

Donald Trump.

The NVGOP really, really, wants to keep Nevada Republicans from deciding who wins Nevada’s Presidential vote. Not only are they doing this to circumvent the primary that hundreds of thousands of Republicans will be using, they are holding this on a THURSDAY.

Most Republicans in 2008, 2012, and 2016 didn’t even know there was a Presidential Caucus. How many of them won’t even bother to see if there is a separate party run caucus after voting by official government ballots that they were sent? Not many, and that’s the point. Most Republicans in Nevada will not know is occurring, especially since they think their primary vote in the state-run Presidential primary will count, meaning they won’t even bother looking to see if their is a caucus.

But it gets worse! Continue reading →

Posted in Elections | Tagged derp, DOOM, FacePalm, FAIL, GOP, Nevada, WTF | 1 Comment

The Political Hat