On August 15, 2022, Scott Coburn, Chief Marketing Officer for Patriot Mobile, presented Southlake Carroll ISD with a batch of beautifully framed “In God We Trust” signs. The donation included framed posters for every school in the district, each conforming to the requirements outlined in S.B. 797. Coburn, an 18-year resident of Southlake, made a point to thank Trustees and District employees for their service, noting that a full 15% of Patriot Mobile’s employees also live in the community and have children in the district.
Southlake CISD Trustees pose with Patriot Mobile representatives and donated signs (photo courtesy of Southlake CISD).
Most citizens greeted the donation with warmth and gratitude, but a few online commenters objected to the donation as an attack on the separation of church and state. Others labeled the motto overtly Christian and a cynical attempt to push religion in the classroom. These objections demonstrate a failure to understand the motto’s history and its relationship to our country’s founding.
False equivalence of signs to Christianity betrays ignorance of natural law ingrained in America’s founding (snapshot of Carroll ISD facebook page)
While the motto’s origin is traceable to the Psalms, it enjoyed early secular use on the battle flag of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania militia in 1748. Since then, the motto has appeared in various literary works, as well as coins, postage stamps, and the paper money we use today. There were always some who objected to these secular printings, but unlike contemporary detractors their concerns were about avoiding a sacrilegious use of the phrase, not preventing religion from interfering in government.
Congress’ eventual adoption of the motto in 1956 was driven more by Cold War anticommunist sentiment than religious fervor. Recent decades have seen numerous failed petitions from progressive groups seeking to remove the motto from currency and public property. This is because the courts have consistently ruled that government endorsement of the motto should be accommodated because its use is largely ceremonial, stripping it of any sectarian religious connotation.
This doctrine of accomodationism, in which religion, rationalism and irreligion co-exist, harkens to the enlightenment principles of the nation’s founding as seen in the Declaration of Independence. Chief among these principles is the idea that governments instituted among men exist to secure the natural rights of the people, “unalienable rights endowed by their Creator.” It follows, therefore, that Government is subordinate to “Nature’s God,” and positive law subordinate to natural law. In addition to these references to a higher power, we find the founders’ appealing to the “Supreme Judge of the world” and “divine Providence” to bless America’s struggle for independence.
Interestingly, among these four titles, three correspond to the framework the founders would later establish in the Constitution: as the author of nature’s law, God is legislator; as the “Supreme Judge,” God is judge; and, as “divine Providence,” God is executive. In other words, our nation’s founding recognized an eternal power from which all authority flows to our three co-equal branches of government.
This conception clearly aligns with the founders’ Christian culture, but it does not preclude competing cultural views on the nature of God. The founding’s Lockean underpinnings affirm the natural law as an ethical code granted by God and accessible through human reason. From this natural law stem the various natural rights, including those of self-preservation, self-defense, the requirement to avoid excessive force, ownership of labor and property, and the obligation to respect the rights of others, to cite but a few examples.
Therefore, the natural law is a ballast for our natural rights now codified in the Constitution and applicable to all people regardless of race, creed, sex, religion, or any identity trait whatsoever. It is only through this eternal and unchanging moral law, embodied in the words “In God We Trust,” that we have any guarantee of the rule of law and the preservation of our rights. That this principle parallels the Judeo-Christian precept that all people are created in the image and likeness of God only strengthens that guarantee, ensuring that it extends to all “the People.”
A society that rejects obeisance to any power outside itself denies itself any standard, other than its own corruptible will, by which to measure the common good. Rejecting the national motto, therefore, is tantamount to rejecting the very idea of eternal truth and reflects a loss of filial devotion and respect for country. In such a society the natural law ceases to function as a ballast and instead becomes driftwood no longer fit to check government or oblige it to control itself (see Federalist 51).
Is this where we are now? One might be forgiven for thinking so, given government’s recent track record. We have endured repeated attempts to usurp parental authority in public schools, including the forced masking of children for extended periods, the implementation of neo-Marxist critical social justice pedagogy, and the celebration of age-inappropriate “educational” materials. We’ve endured unjustified lockdowns. We’ve seen powerful figures attempt to redefine sex and gender, to label a tragic exit from Afghanistan an immense success, and to gaslight us about the definition of a recession. We continue to witness a two-tiered application of criminal justice. We seem to be on a glidepath away from the rule of law and toward the rule of man, which inevitably puts us under the tyrannical boot of a state arrogating to itself the power to redefine history and reality for the sake of ever-changing partisan political ends. We must act to arrest and reverse this trajectory, and we do so by affirming that, whatever our own personal religious convictions, we know that neither We nor government are God!
Therefore, we thank Patriot Mobile for taking that first step through its kind and generous donation. It is exactly what we need at this moment because “In God We Trust” is a light that shines in the darkness, keeping the darkness at bay…and the darkness does not comprehend it.
[Note: WGT was forced to create a CENSORED version of this podcast for Facebook. Clearly, Facebook doesn’t want parents to be aware of the pornographic filth in our public schools. Therefore, when searching for Wise Guy Talks, EP 81 “NOT ALL BOOKS ARE CREATED EQUAL!” on Facebook, you will only find the censored version. You can find that link below, along with a link to the uncensored version on Free Speech Rumble.]
In this episode, “Not All Books Are Created Equal,” the Wise Guy Talks (WGT) team examines the recent progressive claim that parental concern over inappropriate books at school is a coordinated conspiracy to “erase” LGBTQ+ kids and people of color by banning books. In line with their penchant for calling anyone who disagrees with their assessment a Nazi, they have labeled these parents “Book Burners!” Indeed, this has quickly become a rallying cry to energize their base, with leftist activists, politicians, and the legacy media colluding to push Democrat talking points and influence elections at every political echelon from local to federal. Southlake Carroll ISD (CISD) school board candidates Stephanie Williams and Laura Durant, as well as their NBC cheerleaders Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton are no exception.
But history tells a different tale, namely that progressive Democrats have been at the forefront of book banning and the suppression of unpopular ideas for decades. Whether they’re pulling classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the works of Shakespeare, stifling the transgender debate by cancelling recent works like When Harry Became Sally and Irreversible Damage, or uncritically labeling Dr. Suess’ vivid imagination as a marker of “white supremacy,” the progressive left seems hell bent on denying access to any idea failing to conform to its chosen orthodoxy. As if yanking books from school libraries were not enough, the leftist hive mind demands wholesale cancellation by organized Twitter-mob hit jobs on major book sellers, like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, who all too often cave to a vocal and hysterical minority lacking in reason, logic, and basic coping skills.
Yet even as progressive activists work to memory hole any semblance of actual dialogue, they insist upon the presence of intrinsically hateful and pervasively vulgar books in school and classroom libraries. They use these works to instruct your children about sex and sexuality, that America was irredeemably founded on white supremacy, and that boys and girls can change their gender…and are encouraged to experiment to that end. Works like This Book is Antiracistand Not My Idea teach young children that their essence as humans is irrevocably bound to their innate and immutable demographic characteristics, especially skin color. Meanwhile, other books like Kiss #8, Lawn Boy, Beyond Magenta, and Gender Queer include explicit passages and depictions of sexual activity between children, sometimes as young as six years old! In some cases, these depictions are so graphic that Twitter and Facebook overtly censor them as violations of community standards. The same progressive activists that deny your ability to see the material on social media have no problem showing it to your kids in the classroom and without your knowledge!
But isn’t it illegal to distribute pornographic materials in schools? Section 43.24 of the Texas Penal Code would seem to support that assertion, but the law is toothless in the face of claims that these materials are intended for “scientific, educational, governmental, or other similar” reasons. This loophole allows progressive activists to push sex on small children, and child pornography on middle and high schoolers with impunity, and with the goal of forming future activists for progressive causes. It is no accident that young children are a primary target for social & emotional learning (SEL), the gateway drug for pedagogy influenced by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Queer Theory. If these monsters can reach your children before they develop abstract thinking skills, typically around age 8, they can severely weaken the authoritative bond between parent and child as they seek to forge new bonds that suit their ends. As if legal protections were not enough, powerful corporations like Disney use social justice campaigns like “reimagine tomorrow” to unapologetically “queer” your children. Unfortunately, in addition to destroying children’s mental development, these materials cause lasting emotional damage to young children and open them to potential abuse at the hands of child predators.
The good news is that parents are waking up to reality and taking positive action. They see the ideas of the race-baiters and the LGBT activists infiltrating curricula through teachers’ unions, professional associations like TASA and TASB, and bureaucracies like the Department of Education, the TEA and Educational Service Centers. With the veil dropping on the leftist agenda, parents are working to reclaim their God-given authority from entrenched bureaucrats and woke school board trustees. Parents are taking a stand against what they rightly perceive as state-sponsored child abuse at the hands of those entrusted with public education.
But this fight is just beginning. The radical activists are attempting to counter with new narratives:
That parents can decide what their children read, but not what other people’s kids read.
That these books have a clear educational purpose and serve to let gay and trans kids know they are not alone.
That teaching children sex is geared toward biological realities and reproductive health.
That these books are not pornographic because they are not intended to “arouse excitement,” and so people who object must have their own “arousal” issues to address.
That these books are works of social justice.
But as usual, the leftist narrative ignores objective truth:
When librarians and teachers place these books on school shelves, they ARE deciding what OTHER people’s kids read, namely YOUR kids.
Letting kids, of any persuasion, know they are not alone doesn’t require talking about sex and sexuality, let alone exposing them to pervasively vulgar materials.
Keeping child pornography out of the classroom does not “erase” anyone.
Sex education is only appropriate for certain age groups and under controlled conditions. There is never a reason to discuss sex with prepubescent children at school. If kids have questions, tell them to ask their parents!
Masturbation, oral and anal sex acts have absolutely nothing to do with reproductive health.
Pornography is the depiction of explicit sexual activity. Whether something is pornographic does not depend upon whether anyone is “aroused,” and it DOES NOT BELONG IN SCHOOLS!
Social justicepornography is still pornography. Social justice race hate is still race hate.
The presence of these materials in schools is not trivial. We miss the point when we dismiss these initiatives as the inklings of a few lunatics with no real power. Indeed, cancel culture and the weaponization of the Twitter mob has proven their reach. But it is not enough to understand what they do. We need to understand WHY they do it so that we can stand against these nefarious actors wherever we find them, beginning with those who aim to weasel their way onto your local school board.
At the end of the day, we know that the galactic liars Stephanie Williams and Laura Durant, and their propaganda team at NBC, do not really care about books. They do not care about censorship, or they would acknowledge their own party’s history of idea suppression. They do not care about children either, or they would be working to ensure that every child had access to age-appropriate educational content that facilitates critical thinking and the exchange of ideas. No, they care about their agenda and their power. This is about politics, and they are all too happy to use your children as convenient political props, but that is not all. This is also about poisonous ideologies with real and lasting detrimental effects on children, as well as our country and its future.
The political left loves to make demands. At every echelon of society and government, demands are the order of the day, so it was no surprise when the Southlake Antiracism Coalition (SARC), a group of young adults that recruits a few high school kids to boost their social credit, published an open letter in the Summer of 2020, demanding “intersectional anti-racist change” at Southlake Carroll Independent School District (CISD). It was also unsurprising that the demands included the incorporation of a “critical pedagogy approach (including critical race theory),” an unequivocal affirmation of the Black Lives Matter movement, the removal of school resource officers (SROs) from campuses (because “defund the police”), implicit bias training linked to staff employment status and student graduation, mandatory reporting and tracking of microaggressions, and passage of the Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP) as a starting point for this radical leftist agenda.
Behind these demands were the usual suspects agitating for change in the community, always with an eye toward undermining liberty by promoting social narratives over evidence and feelings over facts. Among them was the local left’s latest darling, Stephanie Williams, their favored school board candidate who enthusiastically signed SARC’s demands. Williams went on to help found Dignity for All Texas Students (DATS), an organization committed to fostering diversity and inclusion of every kind, except for diversity of perspective and thought. But because story-telling suits the goals of the left far better than facts ever could, Williams now demands that everyone dismiss her signature on SARC’s letter, which she insists shows nothing more than her willingness to “listen.” Her signature on a non-binding, non-legal document, she opines, in no way conveys support for any of SARC’s demands, least of all those that happen to be unpopular with the electorate!
Not one to be left out, the fearless but undeclared ally of SARC and DATS, and Williams by extension, Mike Hixenbaugh was sure to describe the events unfolding in Southlake over the past year in the language of demands. In the final episode of NBC’s Southlake podcast, Hixenbaugh and Hylton return to the opening scene of episode one (1), a CISD board meeting from May 2021, in which Hixenbaugh describes “a familiar cast of characters” approaching the lectern to “DEMAND [emphasis mine] that the school board bend to the will of the majority.” Apparently, the dynamic duo has forgotten President Obama’s bromide that “elections have consequences,” prompting political tears over the 70/30 vote split in favor of two conservatives in CISD’s school board election earlier that month. These conservative parents making demands, they observe, were a harbinger for parental uprisings across the country. According to Hylton, “an NBC news analysis found that in the four months after Southlake’s May 1st election, at least 220 school districts across the country face backlash against diversity and equity initiatives.”
But a question not explored is whether there is any similarity between parents’ demands and those of SARC and its supporters, like Stephanie Williams. Is the insistence that schools stick to education and leave parenting to parents really similar in kind to SARC’s demand that critical race theory be incorporated into the curriculum? Is the conservative outcry that the people, rather than sitting trustees, be permitted to choose the replacement of a recent resignee somehow unreasonable, or is it simply a call to use democratic processes to ensure representative and accountable government? On the one hand, the left and its allies voice demands based on false platitudes like social justice, or diversity and inclusion, always using the ends to justify the means. On the other, conservatives articulate a requirement for government to adhere to constitutional principles that guarantee ordered liberty, the will of the majority tempered by the protection of minority rights. It is quite apparent that this is a concept found lacking in the progressive critical pedagogy approach and the education of mainstream journalists, and that is quite unfortunate, both for students and the future of American society.
The insistence of parents in Southlake CISD, and across the country, for full transparency in the actions of district administrators and the decisions of school board trustees, is the heart of the battle between conservative and progressive in this country. Consider the implications of this battle, which are far greater than simply what happens in any given classroom in any given town on any given day. At stake is more than just the instruction of mathematics, vocabulary words and history lessons. Rather, the prize is the didactic formation of children as full-fledged stakeholders in society, and whether they grow into responsible citizens able to wield the power necessary to ensure an enduring republic, or become the obedient subjects of an authoritarian regime mandating equity in all outcomes.
At issue is whether the principles of constitutional conservatism that value individuals and families as the basic building blocks of society prevail, or whether modern progressivism will re-order society around a dialectical paradigm of oppressed and oppressor groups defined by race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. Will our schools honor and uphold the enlightenment principle that “all men are created equal” and find their equality in the dignity bestowed upon human beings by virtue of their creation in the image and likeness of nature’s God? Or will our institutions of learning and formation posit into the minds of children that their value and essence is bound to their ability to harness a “socially imposed identity as an anchor of subjectivity” [1] and a means to power? Will our children be cognizant of higher principles and eternal truths that call us to become better humans, or will they be trained to look no higher than the horizon of their usefulness to changing environmental conditions and economic realities?
PAC vs PAC
The stakes being what they are, it is only logical that societal division would follow and the battle lines between conservative and progressive made clear. Between episodes three (3) and six (6) of its Southlake podcast, NBC highlighted this division by focusing its lens on the Southlake Families PAC. The PAC is an alliance of concerned parents committed to organizing resistance to the authoritarian left’s imposition of political agendas in the classroom, and pooling resources to support this fight by selecting candidates and supporting political initiatives. That’s what PACs do! But Hixenbaugh and Hylton would have you believe that this organization is a mean and dirty political machine looking to smear good citizens who disagree with its political leanings. An examination of the facts tells a starkly different story.
Hixenbaugh and Hylton spend considerable time doing to the PAC and conservative parents exactly what they accuse the PAC of doing, which isn’t surprising considering how psychological projection seems to be a feature of progressivism in the modern age. Recall how in episode three (3) the pair deliberately mischaracterized the PAC’s understanding of the CCAP, even subtly suggesting an undertone of racism by having Hylton, who is black, explain what the CCAP says, and Hixenbaugh, who is white, provide the PAC’s interpretation. As Hylton reads three excerpts from the CCAP, she lends a false air of credibility to the current progressive talking point that critical race theory (CRT) is not in the document. Still, nowhere in NBC’s reporting, from start to finish, are conservative objections addressed in a straightforward manner. Regardless of the mischaracterization, it is an unassailable fact that the CCAP calls for embedded diversity and inclusion training for students as an “enrollment to graduation” process, mandates consequences, as well as reporting and tracking, for microaggressions, and foresees the adoption of “appraisal indicators” into staff evaluations as a measure of commitment to “cultural competence” and “equity.” [2] Moreover, Hixenbaugh and Hylton completely ignore the attempt by district officials in February 2020, to tie the tracking of microaggressions to the potential receipt of more than $380,000 of grant funds under the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA). That funding, meant to aid and compensate victims of violent crimes like sexual assault, would have been diverted from poor districts with real issues to one of the most affluent public-school districts in the state with no discernible population of crime victims by appealing to a plague of non-verbal, unintentional microaggressions.
The NBC reporters then proceeded to highlight the PAC’s fundraising prowess, citing its ability to raise over $125,000 in the week of its inaugural event in August 2020, including a $2,000 contribution from conservative firebrand Dana Loesch. In episode four (4), NBC insinuated that monied interests aligned with the District Attorney gained control of the PAC, allowing it to bankroll a lawsuit brought against five named school board members for violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act (TOMA), resulting in the arrests and indictments of Board President Michelle Moore and Vice President Todd Carlton. Never mind that the suit was not brought by the PAC, but rather by one mother justifiably concerned that administrators and board members were conspiring to impose progressive orthodoxy in the classroom under the guise of diversity and inclusion. Had board members done their jobs appropriately, there would have been no lawsuit, no criminal investigation, and no arrests or indictments.
It is telling that Hixenbaugh and Hylton lay the blame at the feet of Southlake Families rather than of those who knowingly made bad decisions and violated state law. According to Hylton, it’s rare for prosecutors to pursue charges for TOMA violations in Texas. One wonders whether her opinion on the rarity of process crime prosecutions might also apply to Michael Flynn or Roger Stone, or whether she believes that trespassing on government property should be referred to in the media as “insurrection.” In any case, it is difficult for reasonable people to disagree with Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson, who affirms that the “TOMA embodies the most basic values of democracy” and that its requirements “ensure that the citizens of Texas can STAY INFORMED ABOUT AND PARTICIPATE IN [emphasis mine] their local government.” Once again, transparency in representative government is at the heart of the debate.
Desperate to show the PAC as an underhanded, “dirty tricks” organization, Hixenbaugh and Hylton highlight a political mailer sent to Southlake residents last Spring. According to local mom, Jennifer Hough, the PAC began targeting a message of racism and fear toward Southlake’s white majority population. In episode five (5), Hixenbaugh tells us how Jennifer, “a white mom of two Dragon students,” found a Southlake Families PAC newsletter with information about the CCAP and the lawsuit in her mailbox. Oh, the horror! Hixenbaugh then tells us how Jennifer believed the political mailer, “disguised as a newspaper, was probably aimed at people like her, white, Christian, Southlake moms who want to protect their kids.” The simple fact is that Southlake Families PAC acted well within the scope of its purpose, clearly marking the mailer as political campaign material by Hough’s own admission. That such a newsletter would bear a layout similar to that of a newspaper is simply the principle of form following function, rather than some deceitful attempt to “disguise” itself as a news periodical. The same could not be said, however, for NBC’s podcast series masquerading as objective reporting, or the products of the local progressive PAC, Move Tarrant Forward (MTF), bankrolled by leftist activists like Bjorn Bennett, Angie Darden, Laura Durant and Roshni Chowdhry, all of whom also signed the same SARC demand letter supported by Stephanie Williams. [3] Though not a donor, found among MTF’s notable followers was Pam Francis, the Co-Chair of the District Diversity Council (DDC) responsible for producing the CCAP.
Unlike Southlake Families PAC, which stuck to the issues, MTF spent almost the entirety of its budget, including a $4,285 donation from ActBlue Texas, on name-calling campaigns and false narratives. In one mailer, MTF depicted four local mothers, not even running for office, as clowns because of their support for conservative principles. In another, MTF accused Hannah Smith, a candidate for school board at the time, of being behind the lawsuit resulting in the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against the CCAP, as well as the arrests of Moore and Carlton for TOMA violations.
Not only were MTF’s tactics with political opponents unseemly, but its treatment of its own supporters could often be just as vicious. Several Southlake residents, unhappy with MTF’s ongoing smear campaign, asked to be removed from the PAC’s mailing list only to find themselves added to MTF’s “Chronicles of Hate” page, where they remain to this day, complete with legible personal email addresses that encourage MTF’s supporters to engage in doxing. Perhaps this kind of behavior is useful to explain why Southlake Families maintains such a large war chest in comparison to MTF. It’s simple mathematics – more people support Southlake Families than MTF. Southlake Families is transparent in its mission, whereas MTF follows a model of antipathy for diverse political viewpoints!
NBC’s most damning allegation against Southlake Families was that it demanded candidates for political office be in complete lockstep with Christian conservative positions. As evidence Hixenbaugh and Hylton treat their listeners to a secret audio recording of the PAC’s candidate interview process, including questions about who candidates voted for in 2020, the candidates’ positions on the CCAP, whether candidates supported Black Lives Matter, and whether they would bravely refer to the city’s annual holiday tree lighting as a “Christmas event.” However, because the source of the recording allegedly feared retaliation, it was necessary for the pair to maintain the anonymity of both the source and the candidate being interviewed. This also meant that they would be unable to play the answers to the questions, but undeterred, Hylton insisted that “the questions themselves paint a picture of the PAC’s priorities.”
These priorities, according to Hixenbaugh, were about more than the culture battle surrounding CCAP. They implied the use of dirty politics. In the recording we hear one PAC interviewer asking a candidate whether there were any scenarios, “either in the past or in the future, where if you knew the two people in a race were a republican and a democrat, where you would vote for the democrat.” Subsequently, Hixenbaugh informs us that “one PAC member asked, point blank, if the candidate would commit to never appointing any democrats to serve on any advisory boards or committees.”
If this recording is supposed to be the coup de gras for the Southlake Families PAC, it falls flat. In part this is because in today’s political environment, the cultural questions are relevant indicators of a candidate’s propensity to back radical leftist ideologies with no business in a K-12 classroom. On another level, the questions designed to indicate adherence to a strict partisan line lose their color once it is revealed that the source of the “secret” recording and the candidate being interviewed are one and the same person, and not just any person, but a once-failed progressive city council candidate who attempted to brand herself as a conservative in the run up to the local elections this past May. It isn’t clear whether the Southlake Families PAC knew this candidate was really a progressive in conservative clothing, or why it unwisely gave her the time of day. What is clear is that the candidate went into that interview with every intention of making the recording and turning it over to the media. In the recording we clearly hear a PAC member stating that every candidate “gets the same questions,” but it’s safe to assume that questioning likely deviated from one candidate to another based upon voting records, personalities, and personal histories. If there was any dirty politics at play in this scenario, it was clearly on the part of the progressive candidate mendaciously attempting to infiltrate a conservative organization, but NBC wants you to believe the opposite is true.
Media Matters
Hixenbaugh and Hylton also lament the influence of Southlake Families in the media, focusing particular ire on Dana Loesch’s appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight in the weeks leading up to the local elections. Keen to remain the only game in town, the pair appeared miffed that Fox would dare to muscle in on their story, and doubly unhappy that Loesch would plug Southlake Families in a way that might help conservatives gather strength through additional donations. In response to the segment highlighting how radical leftist activists had attempted to use the CCAP to inject CRT into the curriculum, Hylton complained that “Carlson dropped that warning to nearly three million nightly viewers, and Loesch gave them a way to fight back by sharing the link to Southlake Families PAC.” For conservatives, however, turnabout was fair play. After all, Hixenbaugh and Hylton had been broadcasting a message of systemic racism in Southlake and CISD, as if it were an incontrovertible fact, to untold millions through print media and television for months. They had even amplified Demi Lovato’s buffoonish bellowing over “parents…literally fighting to uphold white supremacy,” as if pushing false narratives to Lovato’s 100 million Instagram followers wasn’t enough! So much for objective reporting.
Not content to discredit national media messengers, Hixenbaugh and Hylton also did their best to undermine local podcast, Wise Guy Talks (WGT), and its host, Guy Midkiff. To do this required them to place Robin Cornish squarely back into the spotlight, if only to paint Midkiff as a bully unfairly beating up on a woman of color. At issue is WGT Episode 38 (Media Malpractice, Part 2), which refers to Cornish’s financial woes before and after the tragic passing of her husband, Frank, in 2008. Specifically, Hixenbaugh describes how an unidentified guest, known only as “Robert,” provides details on the bankruptcy and movements of the Cornish family, followed by the quick reminder that Cornish had only moved “half a mile outside Southlake city limits…a seven-minute drive to Carroll Senior High School.” Even Cornish herself is featured in NBC’s fourth episode asking, “What does my financial history have anything to do, tie into, my children, them getting their education, and having the racist, bigoted experience that they had?”
The answer of course, is that it has EVERYTHING to do with it! The financial troubles are not the point, but they provide the relevant context and background for Cornish’s actions. The fact is that Cornish, whether she was invited to keep her kids in the district or whether she lived seven minutes or seven hours down the road, made the decision to do exactly that. She kept her kids in the district through to their graduations, even as she now declares to God and country that their experience was racist and bigoted. “These are not the actions of a woman protecting her family from a racist town,” we hear “Robert” stating in episode four (4). “These are the actions of a woman desperately trying to keep her kids in a great school district.” THAT IS THE POINT! OWN IT! For what it’s worth, the community continues to grieve for Ms. Cornish, and if she would simply admit the truth, not a soul would attack her for it. However, NBC’s continual dragging of Ms. Cornish and her situation back into the light for political points is disgusting and shameful, and it must stop!
While true that WGT provided its listeners context on Cornish’s financial woes, it was necessary to disprove her narrative of systemic racism and bigotry in the school. Hixenbaugh and Hylton, however, went out of their way to expose the history of a private citizen solely for her opposition to the progressive agenda. At issue is the history of conservative mother Kathy Del Calvo, who suffered legal troubles in another state almost 30 years ago. NBC’s implication is that WGT selectively targeted Cornish because she’s black, but not Del Calvo, who is white, notwithstanding the multicultural makeup of Del Calvo’s family. But the distinctions are clear. In the first place, Del Calvo’s grandchildren are students in the district, so she has skin in the game in a way that Cornish does not. Secondly, Del Calvo has been a critic of the CCAP at board meetings where she has presented evidence of its flaws. Cornish and her colleagues, by contrast, maintain the narrative of systemic racism and white supremacy with no evidence whatsoever. Third, the Del Calvo family, along with most conservatives, insist that the way to address immature and bad behavior from students is primarily through enforcement of the Student Code of Conduct (SCOC). Yet Cornish was the first person, just two weeks after the viral n-word video hit national media, to stand before the school board demanding changes to the curriculum without a single mention of the SCOC. All told, these facts make Robin Cornish’s background extremely relevant to the issues at hand, whereas Del Calvo’s background is entirely irrelevant except to make her a punching bag for progressive activists in both social and legacy media. Congratulations, Mikey and Antonia, your naked political advocacy is showing. Let all with eyes to see behold the truth in plain sight.
Centering the Discussion: Students or Sexuality?
While political machinations, like train wrecks, might be horrific but difficult to tune out, we are reminded that the politics of the CCAP are leaving out a very important constituency. “A viewpoint conspicuously absent from the debate was that of Carroll Students themselves, who even as the adults in town went on bickering, were learning to live with the consequences of a broken system,” Hylton informs us at just over 16 minutes into episode five (5). Such an exhortation to listen to the voices of students might carry more weight if NBC even made the tiniest attempt to showcase the diversity of opinion among teens regarding the CCAP. Like the adults in the community, conservatives favor stronger and more consistent enforcement of the SCOC, a course of action clearly linked to the drivers of behavior. The children of progressives, by and large, insist that no change is possible without the implementation of new diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, yet they are hard pressed to give any evidence to back up the theory that policing microaggressions and mandating implicit bias training, among other initiatives, could ever result in “unity.” But instead of facilitating an open and honest debate among students, NBC is at pains to present one narrative that confirms its political bias.
Enter the story of a girl called “M,” a self-identified “queer, non-binary” child who announces her preferred pronouns as “she” and “they,” and “came out in, like, 8th grade.” M’s story pulls at heart strings as she relates how she was subjected to snide comments from other 13-year-olds upon revealing herself to be gay, and how she was always fearful when going to her school approved Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) club meetings, checking the hallway before ducking into the classroom unseen. According to M, she didn’t want people to “do something to me before I get to my little club.” But the worst of it comes as M describes herself as the subject of harassment at the hands of four male classmates, during a Dragon Virtual Academy (DVA) class, within an Instagram group chat called the “debate channel.” M is understandably upset by the boys’ use of foul and misogynistic language, but less understandable is her emotional pain at being misgendered by others whose opinions she clearly does not understand, accept, or care about beyond insisting on conformity with her own preferences.
After reporting the incident to Principal Shawn Duhon, M is invited to converse with him online. Unbeknownst to Duhon she decided to record their conversation on the advice of a friend. During the surreptitious recording, we hear Duhon attempting to ascertain the facts of the case, most pointedly how M came to be part of the debate channel. Hixenbaugh tells us that “he seems to be trying to figure out whether she consented to be part of the debate,” before continuing to explain, “for the record, she didn’t have to accept anything to be added to the Instagram chat.” As lost as Duhon appears to be with respect to how Instagram’s direct message function works, Hixenbaugh is equally oblivious to the possibility that being involuntarily added to a group chat does not prevent one from subsequently leaving it.
It’s here that Hixenbaugh does his best to depict Duhon as decidedly uninterested in M’s plight or the accusations of bullying, and laser focused on whether she joined the chat voluntarily. In other words, the podcast makes Duhon look like just another part of a bigger problem of ongoing abuse at CISD, stemming from the lack of a “diversity and inclusion plan.” Listening closely to the dialogue, however, reveals that this is another case of cherry-picking facts to bolster the narrative. Duhon isn’t uninterested in bullying, at one point telling M, “Hold that thought…I want to get to that.” The man is trying to do his due diligence in performing a thorough investigation, which is exactly what we expect of school principals. If there is any failing, it’s that more facts of the investigation, with the relevant personal identification being redacted, have not been released to district parents.
At issue is more than simply the fact that M was reading words she didn’t like. How many people were in the group chat? How did M know that references to preferred pronouns being compared to mental illness were specifically directed at her, rather than someone stating a position? “They didn’t add anyone else,” M cries, “they started being mean to me.” As she continues to tell the story, one gets the sense that the boys were certainly out of line and deserved punishment for their language, but without more details it’s impossible to know whether M’s assertion of being the center of the harassment is reasonable. Why didn’t she leave the chat if she found it distasteful, and what does she mean when she claims that there was “no one else in the group chat?” Does she mean she is the only girl, or the only self-identified “queer” person, or perhaps the only individual using non-standard pronouns? Hixenbaugh and Hylton don’t tell us. Instead, we hear the desperate and emotional cries of a teen girl. “It was all directed at me! They called me a cunt, they called me slurs, they called me all this stuff because THEY DIDN’T CLARIFY IT WAS TOWARD ANYONE ELSE [emphasis mine]!” But even as he acknowledged the caustic nature of the comments, Duhon wasn’t buying that the comments were necessarily directed at M, especially since by her own admission she says that she never responded, indeed never interacted with the chat at all.
A parallel story routinely ignored by the likes of Hixenbaugh and Hylton is the fragile mental state of these kids who deliberately set themselves apart as members of a victim class, as well as the parents and mentors who encourage this mentality. Consider how M repeatedly uses the words “hurt” or “hurting” to describe her state when other kids use the word “gay” to indicate something is dumb, or when they refuse to use her preferred pronouns. At one point she even claims that her call with Principal Duhon “was more hurtful than even what the people were saying in the chat!” In episode six (6), M returns to tell us how difficult she found it to deal with the results of the municipal elections, saying, “It broke me last night…Southlake sucks.” Is it really reasonable for a child to feel broken over the results of a municipal election?!? There is clearly a larger problem here.
For her part, Hylton would have us believe that this vignette shows “the limitations of the code of conduct when enforcement is left in the hands of an administrator who they [M’s parents] said did not seem to understand why a queer student would be hurt by comments mocking their gender identity.” The clear implication is that membership in a “marginalized” group conveys special knowledge both inaccessible to and unassailable by anyone not part of that group, hence the need for a DEI plan. Aside from being completely untethered from reality, this idea is a tenet of post-modernism and critical race theory as applied to the concept of intersectionality, and a child would not know this or be able to apply it but for the indoctrination she must have received prior to this point. This isn’t education. This is brainwashing, and it is corrosive both to the well-being of the children in its grip and the society they inhabit.
M’s pain appears reflected in her father’s voice. “She’s looking for help,” he states, “these things really are happening…to have that fall on deaf ears is really discouraging.” Unfortunately for M, her dad doesn’t seem to realize that the help she needs most is from a strong father who can stand against the progressive madness that foments all this mental and spiritual fragility. That might include teaching M that not everyone in the world is willing to pretend that humans aren’t created male and female, and calling the fathers of those boys using the c-word, a far more despicable slur than the n-word. No conservative father known to this writer would ever stand for his son calling any girl the c-word, regardless of political differences between the families involved! But the fact that this isn’t happening is not surprising given the fact, not revealed by NBC, that M’s parents are progressive activists, one of whom is a member of DATS and gladly signed the aforementioned SARC demand letter. We choose not to reveal her identity for the sake of the child, but a burning question looms. Do parents become activists because of a child’s declaration of a “non-binary” gender or other sexual preference, or do children travel this road to victimhood because their parents are activists for leftist causes? It would seem to be the problem of the chicken and the egg, and which came first.
If there’s one good thing that has come out of NBC’s Southlake podcast so far, it’s to clarify the divisions in this community and around the country. Though the mainstream media continue to advocate for political positions through one-sided reporting, we remain thankful for the opportunity to expose facts they conveniently ignore. While they continue to insist that we defer to the “experts” in all things, and always and only the experts of THEIR choosing, we relish in our trust of “the people” and their ability to discern facts and evidence from political narrative built upon an emotional bed of sand. The fact that national media continues to keep Southlake and CISD in the crosshairs only confirms for us that we are in the right to push back. We will not stop. We will never quit. We will keep telling the truth, and whether any particular people don’t appreciate it is not our concern.
Until next time…
Notes:
[1] Crenshaw, Kimberle. (July 1991). “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6., p. 1297.
[2] For language concerning diversity and inclusion training requirements linked to graduation, see CCAP Strategy 1.1.1., Action Step 2. Punitive action for microaggressions is accomplished by incorporating microaggressions into the student code of conduct (SCOC) and then strengthening the consequences for violations of the same (see CCAP Strategy 3.1.1., Action Step 7; Strategy 3.1.2, Action Step 2; and Strategy 5.2.1). The imposition of a cultural competence and equity appraisal indicator is laid out in CCAP Strategy 1.4.3, to include all subordinate Action Steps. Additionally, the CCAP alludes to cultural bias training for students in Strategy 1.1.3, Action Step 2, but does not specify how it plans to implement it. Also notable is the fact that each of these initiatives within the CCAP is mirrored in some way by various demands in the SARC letter signed by a plethora of local progressive activists, including current school board candidate Stephanie Williams.
[3] It is important to note that among the signatories of SARC’s demand letter we also find Ken Heymann, Jennifer Hough and Srivan Krishna, each of whom is either a founding member or has held a leadership position in the progressive 501(c)(4) organization, Dignity for All Texas Students (DATS). Stephanie Williams and Roshni Chowdhry also hold the distinction of a similar association with both SARC and DATS. For her part, Laura Durant formed the LGBTQ advocacy network, Love Every Dragon (LED), which has transformed itself into a repository for some of the “500ish” unvalidated testimonials of “abuse” that progressive activists have tried to leverage to justify passage of the CCAP. Other signers of the SARC demand letter include Lynda Warner, Elisha Rurka, and Jennifer Shutter, two being for public office this past May, and one being the spouse of a candidate in that same election.
“It is impossible to hold (suppose) the same thing to be and not to be.” – Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book IV, Section 1005b24)
You Can’t Have It Both Ways
Among the most basic rules of logic is the law of non-contradiction, which holds that contradictory propositions cannot both be true at once, in the same sense at the same time and in the same place. The firmest of all metaphysical principles, Aristotle held that without it we could know nothing that we know. Yet, in NBC’s fourth (4th) installment of its Southlake podcast, Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton would have us believe that this basic underpinning of ontological reality – the bedrock of logical thought, scientific discovery, and human knowledge for over 2,000 years, is merely an elaborate smoke screen. Regurgitating the talking points of their media overlords and progressive allies, we are encouraged to believe that critical race theory (CRT) is not being “taught” in the K-12 public school system, and even if it is, it’s not so bad after all. We, however, not being foolish enough to believe anything NBC tells us, aim to show that CRT is every bit as toxic as we thought, and that the progressive left is indeed attempting to actualize it in our schools.
Undeterred by our lack of faith in them, Hixenbaugh and Hylton seek to persuade by continuously redefining and repackaging CRT into a kinder, gentler version of itself, while simultaneously denying its existence in K-12. Within the first minute of episode four (4), Hylton can be heard recycling an innocuous definition of CRT as “a decades old academic study of systemic racism and its far-reaching impact on society.” It’s the kind of subject more appropriate for a university curriculum than a high school, we’re assured, and “not the kind of thing that busy parents…can easily learn in the car on the way to a school board meeting.” In other words, there’s no way a bunch of single-toothed deplorables from Texas would ever understand such a complex subject, so they’d all be better off shutting their mouths and allowing the journalists to break it down for them! And where’d they get such a crazy conspiracy-laden idea, anyway?
Conspiracy Theory: Chris Rufo Made Me Do It
The scapegoat dujour is none other than Chris Rufo, an influential conservative activist and scholar who serves as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a think tank with an emphasis on free-market economics. It’s all his doing, we’re told, that conservatives in Southlake latched onto President Donald Trump’s CRT bandwagon. Rufo had dared to appear on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on the evening of September 1st, 2020, to raise alarms about CRT. On that show, he told millions of conservative viewers that “critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government,” and that conservatives must recognize it as an “existential threat” to the country. “The President is well within his authority,” he continued, “to issue an executive order abolishing CRT trainings [sic] from the federal government.” Rufo had found “a willing audience in Donald Trump,” our interlocuters inform us, because just three (3) days later the White House would issue a memo that Hylton claims falsely defined CRT as “a philosophy teaching that people of certain races are ‘inherently racist or evil.’”
Had our fearless narrators bothered to read the memo they might have noticed that it did NOT define CRT at all. Rather, it directs the heads of executive agencies and departments to “identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” OR [emphasis mine] any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”
The memo cites, as its justification, the need to resist “the divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory MOVEMENT [emphasis mine]” that is “contrary to all we stand for as Americans.” Clearly, the “inherently racist or evil” philosophies identified in the memo are related to a larger CRT movement, but not included in the definition of CRT itself. For what it’s worth, we do hold that CRT is definitely racist and evil!
Before the reader decides that we are being Clintonesque in our parsing of the language, consider the word games NBC itself routinely employs. In episode two (2) we are told of an incident in which some of the girls who had appeared in the 2018 racist n-word Snapchat video, upon their return from a three-day suspension, unfairly received 100’s on a quiz they had missed during that time. Hixenbaugh, eager to highlight the lack of explicit rules against the use of racial slurs in CISD’s 2018 student code of conduct (SCOC), explains, “In fact, any bullying based on race COULD [emphasis mine] be treated by teachers as a lowest level offense in the student handbook, on par with chewing gum or spitting.”
By using the word “could”, Hixenbaugh permits himself to mislead even as he maintains his technical accuracy. But the line between truth and fiction is even more stark when one examines what the 2018-2019 SCOC actually said. True, the SCOC gave teachers wide latitude in addressing these types of offenses, and true enough, it did characterize “bullying or engaging in harassment…including harassment MOTIVATED [emphasis mine] by race, color, religion, and national origin” as a Level One (1) offense, but that same offense was also characterized AS A LEVEL TWO (2)…AND AS A LEVEL THREE (3)! Indeed, the only time the term “racial slur” appears in the SCOC is in a quick reference guide located on page 11, which categorizes the use of a slur as a Level Three offense. So, the idea that the use of racial slurs was considered “on par with chewing gum” is not only misleading, but also absolute fiction.
Not content to tell outright fibs about the contents of the SCOC, Hixenbaugh also implies that conservative opponents of the Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP) in Southlake were somehow unaware of CRT before Rufo served it to them as a winning wedge issue on a silver platter. This contention is patently false. Several prominent community members were discussing CRT’s impact on the CCAP the very day it was up for a school board vote, August 3rd. These comments appear on the closed Facebook page, “Southlake Conservative Values,” including one made by our own Guy Midkiff! And what of other high profile public figures, like Dr. James Lindsay, who were talking about CRT long before the Rufo appearance on Fox? Therefore, we reject NBC’s insinuation that “Chris Rufo made me do it” as a means to explain how the issue became central to the debate in Southlake!
Returning to Trump’s prohibition of CRT in government agencies, it is useful to examine the Executive Order (EO) that was promulgated after the aforementioned memo. EO 13950, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” published on September 22, 2020, has as its purpose to “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating.” The administration had witnessed such divisive ideologies through Treasury Department training that promoted the idea that “virtually all White people…contribute to racism,” as well as the Smithsonian Institute’s publishing of a graphic that labeled “objective, rational linear thinking…hard work…[and] the nuclear family” as “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.” The EO upheld the founding creed of the United States, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s “electric cord” address, and Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech. It prohibited agencies from employing divisive concepts in their diversity training programs, namely those promoting the superiority of any race or sex, or the idea that any individual or class of people are inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive by virtue of race or sex. It’s worth noting that the EO did not prohibit the promotion of diversity or inclusiveness consistent with its specified requirements, nor did it preclude the discussion of concepts like CRT, for academic instruction, “in an objective manner and without endorsement.” In our view, EO 13950 was in line with the finest traditions of equality fundamental to America’s founding, and we defy anyone to demonstrate an objectionable passage anywhere in it. Indeed, it’s a shame that Biden revoked the EO on his first day in office in favor of the divisive concept, equity.
Critical Race Theory: The Face that Only a Mother Could Love
Because Hylton and Hixenbaugh are playing for keeps, they decided to turn to the big guns. Enter Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University who specializes in race and gender issues and is famously known for introducing the concept of intersectionality into CRT, as well as for assisting Anita Hill’s legal team during the Justice Thomas Senate confirmation hearings. If Derrick Bell is the “Father of CRT,” then Ms. Crenshaw is the “Mother of CRT.” By appealing to her unique expertise in the field, Hylton and Hixenbaugh hope to stymie all opposition to the dual narratives that, on the one hand CRT has not “trickled down” to K-12 education, and on the other that conservatives, as “average people,” don’t really know what it is.
By Crenshaw’s telling, the idea that K-12 education has adopted CRT into its curricula is ridiculous. She denies seeing “this conversation” happening anywhere and says that conservatives conflate CRT with “conversations about diversity.” She opines that these conversations are about “a curriculum that says some people were already here, some people came in slave ships, and some people came voluntarily; I should certainly hope so.” In her view, the conservative “crusade against CRT” is a “runaway train” that will lead to educational deficiencies for students of all races. “Students of color, as well as white students, are going to have an education that is less preparatory,” she declares, “less robust than we have even right now.”
It’s difficult to know how anyone could make such assertions with a straight face. Can NBC’s reporters, or Ms. Crenshaw, produce a single public-school curriculum from ANY conservative-majority school district anywhere in the country over the last four decades that fails to acknowledge the occurrence of these events in our history? Carroll ISD’s curriculum certainly does, fully acknowledging the facts of colonization, slavery, and expansion in America’s history. What it doesn’t do is engage in the kind of revisionist history we see in curricular initiatives like the 1619 Project, in which some facts are overtly changed, and others reinterpreted to undermine the philosophical underpinning of America’s founding. Yes, it’s true there was slavery in America, and it even existed prior to 1619, and while it’s important to discuss these subjects to understand their genesis and proliferation, that doesn’t justify teaching outright falsehoods, such as the idea that America was founded on slavery or that it fought the Revolutionary War to protect slavery as an institution.
Crenshaw had staked out her talking points on the politics of CRT long before pinch-hitting on Hylton and Hixenbaugh’s podcast. In a televised appearance with MSNBC’s Joy Reid on June 21, 2021, Crenshaw asserted that “CRT isn’t so much a thing as a way of looking at a thing…a way of looking at race…a way of looking at why, after so many decades, centuries actually, since emancipation, we have patterns of inequality that are enduring.” She went on to explain that as a legal theory, CRT was intended to understand how law contributed to the subordination of marginalized groups and the resulting failure of the republic to realize the hopes that were “encoded in law.” Focusing on the 70’s and 80’s, the period immediately following the conclusion of the Civil Rights movement, Crenshaw bemoaned that the “law wasn’t just the neutral referee,” but had been against African Americans who needed to “tell these stories in order to do better with the promises that are embedded in the Constitution – that’s what’s in CRT.”
Nevertheless, the idea of CRT as mere legal approach doesn’t square with its most highly regarded practitioners’ assertion that it is more political movement than legal theory. A 1995 textbook, “Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,” edited by Crenshaw and others, describes CRT as a “politically committed movement” that rejects traditional civil rights discourse, including the “liberal legalist tradition.” It rejects equality before the law, as well as the concepts of integration, assimilation, and colorblindness, which it likens to genocide. For Crenshaw these are the tools of white supremacy that distract from inequalities among social relations, and they promote the false consciousness that philosophers like Marcuse had described some 30 years earlier.
Indeed, Crenshaw’s entire project has always been about leveraging identity politics for the cultivation of power. In her seminal 1991 essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” published in the Stanford Law Review, Crenshaw makes the case for weaponizing identity for materialistic ends. Her conclusion posits that the application of identity politics “where categories intersect” is “more FRUITFUL” [emphasis mine] than rejecting categories altogether. Crenshaw used the concept of intersectionality to “denote the various ways in which race and gender interact” to describe the disempowerment of marginalized groups, most notably the “Black feminist,” whose experiences heretofore were relegated to a “location that resists telling.” Applying the neo-Marxist critical analytical method, Crenshaw demonstrates that the feminist movement, dominated by white women, had failed to interrogate race, and the antiracist movement had failed to interrogate patriarchy. In so doing, each had “implicitly denied the validity of the other,” resulting in the reproduced and reinforced subjugation of “women of color.” Given that CRT’s postmodern roots reflected an anti-essentialist critique that views all social categories, including race and gender, as social constructs, Crenshaw needed intersectionality to give them power in the real world. By assuming intersectional identities in a collective manner, disempowered groups of people engage in “the most critical resistance strategy” by occupying and defending “a politics of social location.” In other words, minorities should engage in identity politics to cultivate social and political power.
Highlighting a critical distinction, Crenshaw demonstrates how “different subordinated groups” can make identity “a site of resistance for members.” She compares the phrase “I am Black” with the phrase “I am a person who happens to be Black.” The first, she tells us, takes a socially constructed identity and “empowers it as an anchor of subjectivity,” forming a statement of resistance and a “positive discourse of self-identification.” The second, which happens to coincide with the ideals of the Civil Rights movement, asserts personhood first. For some, this statement evokes memories of striking sanitation workers in Memphis demanding equal justice under the law and holding iconic signs reading, “I AM A MAN.” For Crenshaw, this statement seeks identity by “STRAINING [emphasis mine] for a certain universality…and the dismissal of the imposed category as contingent.” In her view this is simply “vulgar constructionism” that “distorts the possibilities for meaningful identity politics.” Marginalized groups, therefore, must embrace their socially constructed identities (i.e., “Black feminist”) to manifest power and cause it “to have SOCIAL AND MATERIAL CONSEQUENCES [emphasis mine].”
The CCAP: Weaponizing the Curriculum
For Crenshaw and her colleagues, legal theory is particularly suited toward this weaponization of identity, having materialistic promises (racial equity) as its ends. This makes law schools, according to her 1995 text, ideal for promoting “a theoretical vocabulary for the practice of racial politics.” In other words, the legal curriculum would become the seed bed for the “politics of social location,” as she had termed it four years earlier. Clearly, adjusting the curriculum is key when the desire is to create a new vocabulary designed to support the implementation of identity politics.
Recall Robin Cornish’s words near the close of her remarks at the November 2, 2018, school board meeting after the infamous n-word video made national headlines. “You’ve got to understand,” Cornish pleaded, “you’ve got to change the curriculum.” In a previous essay we asked why one would seek to modify student behavior by adjusting the curriculum vice addressing and enforcing behavioral consequences through the student code of conduct (SCOC). The answer is that there was always more at play here than simply encouraging students to treat each other with dignity and respect. The goal was always, as CRT prescribes, the sabotage of foundational American concepts, like “the liberal order, equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
About halfway through episode four, NBC’s dynamic duo tell us that in the days and weeks following the release of the CCAP, progressives who supported the document were exasperated by attacks on it as a Trojan Horse for CRT. Former Dallas Cowboy, Russell Maryland, who participated in the District Diversity Council (DDC), forcefully opined that “CRT is NOT in the DDC’s well thought out comprehensive plan,” but discerning eyes would disagree. While not specifically cloaked in the mantle of CRT, the CCAP was rife with the “theoretical vocabulary of racial politics” praised in Crenshaw’s 1995 text. The document mentions the terms “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” some 135, 104, and 108 times each. The terms are never defined, but it’s clear from context that diversity refers to demographic status, equity refers to equality of outcome, and inclusion is loosely related to the first two terms. The term “microaggression” is used 24 times, and is defined as “everyday verbal or nonverbal, snubs or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized or underrepresented group membership.” The document hardly reflects the “careful and conscious practice of diversity and inclusion” Hylton emphasizes in episodes two and three, unless she means the “inclusion” of weaponized ambiguity so common to the radical left’s projects.
Though the document does not explicitly cite the terms “systemic racism” or “white supremacy,” it’s clear that these tenets of CRT are present in the plan and centered on the reporting and tracking of microaggressions. Recall that microaggressions refer to negative messages directed at “marginalized or underrepresented groups,” and so the concept of intersectionality is central. Under this construct, it is impossible to micro-aggress a heterosexual, white male. The CCAP specifically calls for consequences for microaggressions to be codified within the SCOC, implying that subjective judgments concerning nonverbal, unintentional snubs, could result in punishments at the whim of the recipient. Not only that, but a tracking mechanism would ensure that a record of such microaggressions would follow the offender through his school career. Lacking any means of redress for a person falsely accused, the CCAP provides students and staff alike with the means to weaponize personal animosities, or to be victimized by the personal animosities of others.
Still, the SCOC is only a first-tier objective. The real change comes with the weaponization of the curriculum. In this vein, the CCAP calls for implicit cultural bias education for students, and it makes embedded diversity and inclusion training a condition for graduation. Not content to settle on students, staff also are to be held accountable for their commitment to “cultural competence” and “equity” by the adoption of an appraisal indicator into staff evaluations. In other words, adherence to these principles, clearly informed by CRT, becomes a condition for promotion and advancement. Worse, any failure to accept this line of progressive orthodoxy could become the basis for staff termination!
Where does the imposition of CRT concepts into a school’s curriculum lead? The effects of such thinking are clear. For several years news reports have detailed programs that treat students differently according to their race or ethnicity, leading to a return of segregation across the country. In 2016, Harvard University announced it would hold blacks-only and “Latinx” graduation ceremonies. By 2019, at least 75 colleges programmed black-only graduations, and the University of Portland held a “QTBIPOC (LGBTQIA and/or BIPOC)” graduation this past May. In 2019, Williams College endorsed “affinity housing” for black and minority students, claiming that removing white students would make them “more welcoming, supportive and safe…for minoritized students.” Just last month a black mother in Atlanta filed a federal complaint with the Department of Education for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, alleging that the principal at Mary Lin Elementary School, who is also black, segregated 12 black students from their second-grade classmates.
With these facts at hand, it is impossible to take seriously any argument that the CCAP was anything other than a naked attempt to foist CRT onto the children of Southlake CISD. Mr. Hixenbaugh can lament that CRT is much too complex a subject for the average person to understand. We answer that we are far above average. Ms. Hylton may intone platitudes about the “careful and conscious practice of diversity and inclusion.” We see neither careful nor conscientious effort reflected in the CCAP or the work of the DDC more generally. Mr. Maryland might promote the CCAP as well conceived and comprehensive. We question the basis for its objectives and deny its merit. Ms. Crenshaw may attempt to conflate the teaching of a crackpot legal theory in university settings with the activation of toxic ideologies in K-12 education by appealing to her own expertise. In response to Joy Reid’s assertion that parents showing up at school board meetings were Republican activists in disguise, Crenshaw answered ironically, “You’re going to hear all these stories, cherry-picked stories. Turns out a lot of them were not verifiable…that the other side is putting out there.” We wonder, would Ms. Crenshaw insist on the same verification of SARC’s 300ish online “testimonials?”
And we answer that we are parents, not activists, and we love our children more than she hates them. We will go to the ends of the earth and the limits of our lives to protect them from the evil ideology that is CRT, no matter what name Ms. Crenshaw decides to give it.
Two Little Birdies
One last word for our friends at NBC. I regret that I have but two middle fingers to send your way. A “noble” agenda does not make a half-truth into a whole truth, and a half-truth is still half a lie.
The Colonel (Son of a Soldier) Posted Friday, Sep 11, 2021
PART 2: GRIEVANCE & GASLIGHTING
Episodes two (2) and three (3) of NBC’s six-part “Southlake” podcast bring to mind two of Chesterton’s more famous quotes:
“There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth.”
“The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.”
It is by the wielding of half-truths that our ears receive the scandal of systemic racism in Southlake, a hidden wound festering just below the surface of paved streets lined with million-dollar homes and upscale markets. It is by the sin of omission that our emotions are primed to believe that the issue is black and white, and that all the answers lie in the passage of a panacean diversity plan. But the truth matters, and it is a disservice to the citizen to receive it only in part. It must be digested as a whole to be efficacious in the transformation of scattered facts into logical choices.
As the second episode begins, we are treated to a mental image of a high school homecoming dance at the Hilton Dallas/Southlake Town Square. It is the evening of October 20th, 2018, and kids are moving to the rhythms and singing the lyrics of the most popular contemporary songs. For the most part they are enjoying themselves, as their parents would probably suspect, except that a very few are not. For it turns out, as many parents might NOT suspect, that many of the most popular songs on the DJ’s playlist require significant modification to be considered appropriate for consumption at a school-sponsored event. Yet while the DJ plays the “clean” version of these tunes, most teens decide to sing along with the actual words they have grown accustomed to hearing, including the extremely misogynistic pseudo-poetry of a tune called “Mo Bamba,” by a performer named Shek Wes.
What does not sit well with a small group of mostly minority students, including Raven Rolle, is not the steady drumbeat of music celebrating drug use, prostitution and murder. It’s not even the students mouthing the words in public, but rather the expression of one word in particular, the n-word. And the concern isn’t even that students in general would use that word, but that WHITE kids would dare to sing it. As Rolle speaks, it’s apparent she isn’t even sure the song version played that night was fit for a public venue, stating, “The DJ…I THINK [emphasis mine] he was playing the clean version of all the songs; I THINK [emphasis mine] you have to do that at school dances.”
The narrators quickly remind us that the DJ did indeed play only the sanitized versions of these songs, and this song specifically because it “included words that administrators wouldn’t want students screaming at an official school function, MOST IMPORTANTLY [emphasis mine], the n-word.” But NBC conveniently forgot to tell the rest of the story,including the part where the DJ encouraged kids to chant the n-word, and repeatedly coaxed young girls to respond with “f- me for some money” in response to his “where are my women out there?”
One local mother, Cynthia Reekers, speaking before the school board at a special meeting just 13 days later recounted seeing this behavior on several Snapchat videos. Her statement acknowledged the “bleeping out” of n-words and f-words, having studied the snaps after noticing the emotional dismay of her twin daughters and their three friends after what should have been an uplifting evening. Greatly concerned as to why administrators failed to stop this behavior on the spot, she called the high school vice principal to complain.
It’s not clear that she ever received a satisfactory answer, but we know with certainty that no answers were provided to the community. Indeed, by Summer 2020, in conjunction with the release of the Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP), progressives on social media were keen to deny these incidents had ever happened, even as they worked diligently to keep the infamous n-word video, recorded by a student at an off-campus after-party, front and center of the discussion. At least one board trustee attempted to imply an investigation was completed by conflating the two separate, but related events. At a school board meeting on February 22nd, 2021, Trustee Dave Almand objected to one parent’s complaint concerning the lack of action on the DJ. Interrupting the parent, Almand directed his comments to the viral n-word video rather than answer the question at hand. “It was not with a DJ at a school event,” Almand insisted. “It’s that rumor…I know you’ve heard that before, but we also asked for an investigation and the principals and that…that absolutely did not happen at a school event.” But Almand’s explanation was irrelevant, given that no parent had ever asserted the Snapchat video had been recorded “with a DJ at a school event.”
Knowing that any parent reading the lyrics of “Mo Bamba” would be horrified, 26 year old Antonia Hylton, one of NBC’s podcast narrators, does her best to explain it away as an impactful song for today’s teens. According to Antonia, this song is “to kids Raven’s age what ‘Hot N-Word’ by Bobby Shmurda was in 2014, or ‘No Hands’ by Waka Flocka was in 2010…an unmistakably Black song that a certain group of young white people absolutely lose their minds to…and that’s what happened in the ballroom that night.” In other words, it’s almost understandable that kids would sing the n-word in the moment, but still unforgivable that they would do it on a Snapchat video at home or in a car. If these track titles leave the reader scratching his head, don’t fret. It’s clear that no one over the age of 30 would have the first clue about the cultural relevance being cited.
Truly, there has always been music that pushes the bounds of the prevailing social norms, from Elvis’ pelvic gyrations, references to “acid” rock of the 60’s, the free love of the 70’s, George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex,” 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” and Ice-T’s experiment with heavy metal and the Body Count album, which included the controversial song “Cop Killer.” But in terms of sheer profanity and offensiveness, only “Cop Killer” is on a par with the three songs highlighted by Hylton, but it was never a playlist mainstay for high school dances, even as a “clean version.”
We encourage readers to review the lyrics for themselves, taking note of how frequently the n-word is used, along with f-bombs and sexually explicit and extremely violent turns of phrase. As offensive as the n-word is, it boggles the mind that only the n-word would be of foremost concern to administrators. Parents concerned for the mental and spiritual welfare of their children would be horrified to learn that administrators believed substituting “brother” for the n-word and bleeping out a few f-bombs would make everything okay. Parents concerned with the cultivation of virtue, the kind that proscribes bullying, name calling or the use of racial epithets, would rather see such products of the modern culture relegated to the DJ’s scratch list, vice the playlist.
Whether any of this justifies the use the n-word is beside the point. The fact of the matter is that administrators, working under a progressive social justice paradigm, were leveraging the events of that night to implement a program to fundamentally undermine the curriculum. But while they were attempting to program children to recognize “microaggressions,” they failed to understand the causal factors of these behaviors – not just the chanting of the n-word, but all the bullying and harassment. Fingering racism as the single cause was the ultimate cop out – the easy button that permitted parents, teachers and administrators to escape any responsibility for the behavior of kids under their charge. By calling it “systemic racism,” the blanket of immunity was extended to all of society, except for white people, who would be saddled with the blanket of guilt. In so doing, the white progressives could still escape responsibility by taking the knee to the left’s anti-racism project, and no one would ever need to question the quality of the inputs in any child’s social environment.
There would be no concerted effort to examine the prominent culture of moral decay, where obscenity, misogyny and violence are celebrated, and which spills over into hookup culture with apps like Tinder, recreational drug use, pornography and abortion. After all, aren’t these simply the logical conclusion of the sexual revolution – the “lingering effects” of boomer sex culture? Like movies and television, the producers of extreme music continue to push the envelope far beyond acceptable bounds, all in the name of trying to “begin a dialogue” while enriching themselves off the misery of young people. There would be no need for parents and educators to develop any awareness of the soul-sapping garbage being marketed to young people. Instead of trying to protect children from moral depravity, it became necessary to protect depravity from our children. They would have us believe that all our problems were due to white supremacy, and that the CCAP would fix all of it.
But the truth is that we have facilitated a culture of death, replete with visual and auditory cues including foul, self-deprecating, abusive and racist language and imagery. Parents of all ethnicities, either by their lack of awareness or their misplaced desire to be “cool,” have allowed all manner of spiritual venom to inundate the minds of their children over prolonged periods of their growth. Is it any wonder then that these very same cultural toxins would emerge in their self-expression? One cannot expect to send kids into a moral cesspool and have them avoid stepping in sewage. Those who believe that the CCAP, or any “diversity plan,” will right the ship are misguided. The CCAP attempts to address symptoms even as it ignores root causes. It is NOT the silver bullet.
Any parent should be appalled that his child would show such a lack of self-respect by belting out the filthy and offensive words of a song like “Mo Bamba,” but it was clear that Ms. Rolle and her supporters in this fight were offended, not by the fact that kids were singing the real lyrics, but that the kids doing so were white.And if it it’s okay for black kids to sing the n-word, but not white kids, one must wonder whether Ms. Rolle herself would be allowed to partake, given that she is half white. This points to a deeper problem…one that underpins the genesis of the CCAP and why conservatives felt the need to forcefully reject it.
If politics (and behavior) is downstream from culture, as researcher Don Eberly informed us some 20 years ago, then culture is downstream from religion. It’s worth noting here that the word “religion” finds its root in the Latin word “religare,” which means “to tie or to bind.” And what is it that binds our culture in the modern age? Until very recently, Americans put a premium on natural rights – things like freedom of thought and expression, the freedom to defend oneself, and the freedom of association, all of which find themselves codified in the Constitution. However, the modern progressive movement places its values elsewhere, in things like diversity, equity and inclusion. Perhaps these values could find a place in a free society, but the progressives’ refusal to define them, or to assert the primacy of natural rights as a limiting factor, has set our society asunder in ways unimaginable only a decade ago.
Within this context, the left seeks to weaponize the culture against children. The primary targets are white children, but the corrosive effect of this ideology, branded “anti-racism,” is harmful to people of all ethnicities because it teaches them that their worth is tied up inextricably with their immutable physical characteristics.
Racism is the belief or doctrine that inherent differences among various human ethnicities render some superior to others by virtue of race, and while racism exists in some quarters it is viewed as thoroughly incompatible with the Constitution and the founding principle that all men are created equal. However, the modern social justice view, articulated by Ibram X. Kendi (aka Henry Rogers), redefines racism as anything that results in racial inequity. In so doing, it affirms that discrimination based on race or ethnicity is not always wrong and can be a positive force if used to achieve racial equity. Such “positive” discrimination undermines the classical notions of equality of opportunity and equality before the law, which cannot exist one without the other. It is also the basis of the microaggression, which is only relevant when directed to “marginalized” groups. For the progressive, it is not possible to micro-aggress a straight, white male, given the inherent privilege attached to skin color or sex.
In this rejection of Dr. King’s dream, in which he famously called for a day in which people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character,” the shared humanity and dignity of men is likewise rejected. The idea of a “colorblind” society, characterized by the neutral application of constitutional principles without regard to race, is derided as “cultural blindness.” The modern anti-racist blames all racial inequities on structural racism, unwilling to consider that inequities have multivariate origins, and that no society in the history of man has ever achieved the Shangri-la of perfect racial equity. Therefore, people must be judged primarily by their epidermal hue, and character is no more consequential than personality.
These ideas form the basis of critical race theory, a movement that adapts Marxist conflict theory to recognize and establish oppressed and oppressor groups through the lens of race. It’s adherents, white and black alike, are the new priests of the woke religion, fanatically unable to change their minds and adamantly refusing to change the subject. The pillars of their religion are diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which form the basis of the CCAP and other “diversity plans” in school districts across the country.
Unfortunately, the progressive conception of diversity refers only to ethnic, gender or sexual identity. Those with a different perspective or holding differing opinions, especially political opinions, need not apply. Equity refers to disparate impact as related to intersectionality, or the jumble of identity characteristics used to taxonomize human beings into categories on a scale of oppression, a function of privilege derived from immutable physical characteristics. The most privileged in the leftist lexicon are the straight, white, males, considered top-rung oppressors. At the bottom of the oppression stack are black, lesbian, females. Lastly, the woke define inclusion as the creation of welcoming environments for the marginalized. However, this also indicates the exclusion of anything remotely offensive to oppressed identity groups, resulting in safe spaces where freedom of expression is unwelcome, and speech codes to silence ideas said to be “unsafe” because they may cause “trauma” to marginalized groups. Such are the bedrock foundations of the CCAP.
It is here that NBC engages in some fairly blatant sleight of hand by comparing the official CCAP language with the Southlake Families PAC’s “interpretation” of the document. In alternating voices, Ms. Hylton, who is 3/4’s black, provides three examples of what the document actually says. We are told that the CCAP calls for age-appropriate diversity and inclusion lessons by grade level, creating volunteer diversity councils at each campus, and rewarding students who demonstrate excellence in the area of diversity and inclusion. Mike Hixenbaugh, who is white, proceeds to lay out the PAC’s take on these same three points, namely that kids will be forced to comply with social justice training in order to graduate, that the plan calls for the formation of a diversity police on patrol for unintentional microaggressions, and that staff and students will be required to take cultural competence exams that might be used to shame them. One can only speculate as to why Hixenbaugh, rather than Hylton, needed to represent the “mostly white” PAC, but theatrics aside the narrators (Antonia Hylton and Mike Hixenbaugh) are clearly implying that the PAC’s interpretation is alarmist and not in tune with the facts.
In their haste to provide some color to the debate, the narrators fail to adequately describe those areas of the CCAP that raise real concern for conservatives and should logically concern all parents. In the first place, the CCAP calls for embedded diversity and inclusion training for students as an “enrollment to graduation” process (Strategy 1.1.1, Action Step 2), so the first conservative observation is absolutely true. In the next place, the CCAP mandates strengthening consequences for violations of the student code of conduct (SCOC), which is fine as far as it goes, but then the document ties SCOC violations to microaggressions, which we have already explored (in our response to episode one) as being too subjective to justify punishment (Strategy 3.1.1, Action Step 7). Furthermore, the CCAP clearly alludes to learning about cultural bias for students (Strategy 1.1.3, Action Step 2), though it does not specify how that will be done. However, we are told that staff members will be held accountable for their commitment to “cultural competence” and “equity,” through the adoption of an appraisal indicator incorporated into staff evaluations (Strategy 1.4.3, all Action Steps). In other words, toe the progressive orthodox line or your chances at promotion and advancement may be curtailed!
But there are other major concerns with the CCAP that were not addressed in the least during episodes two and three. The district had planned to hire an outside firm to conduct an equity audit at a cost of over $50,000, ostensibly to find instances of racial inequity that the CCAP itself admits is non-existent in CISD. Fortunately, the audit never happened, but the CCAP called for implementing the findings by importing them into the CCAP itself, and then using this document to adjust the curriculum (Strategy 1.3.1). In essence, this would be tantamount to handing over CISD’s award winning curriculum to strangers in the name of chasing racial equity. The CCAP also called for the creation of a systemic process to consistently track and report microaggressions (Strategy 5.2.1) and SCOC offenses (3.1.2). As has already been demonstrated, the CCAP ties these two categories together, and this is concerning because the document calls for SCOC offenses to become part of a student’s “discipline offense history” that effectively follows him throughout his school career. Strategy 3.1.2, Action Step 2, dealing with this issue deliberately includes the tracking of “microaggressions and discriminatory behaviors.” If this doesn’t describe the mission of a “diversity police,” then we are at a loss to say what does!
NBC would have done well to ask why the CCAP places so much emphasis on the tracking of microaggressions as SCOC offenses.If the reporters had done actual journalism instead of engaging in leftwing advocacy, they might have discovered that administrators had applied for a grant under the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) in late February 2020. Grants provided under VOCA are meant to provide funding for victim assistance and compensation programs supporting those affected by violent crimes, like sexual assault. Administrators at Carroll ISD, one of the most affluent districts in the state, worked diligently to link microaggressions to criminal activity in the hopes of securing over $380,000 in VOCA funding, and using their connections with Dr. Adolph Brown’s “Doc & Friends Education & Corporate Business Speakers’ Bureau” to do it.
Dr. Janet McDade, the then CISD Assistant Superintendent for Student Services, had established a relationship between the district and Dr. Brown, having helped organize efforts for him to speak on resilience the previous October, and to provide a 90-minute presentation on diversity, at a cost of $7,500, just days prior to submitting the grant application. All told, the district paid Dr. Brown over $38,000 for student training sessions, staff professional development and a book study on his 2017 publication, Two Backpacks, a book claiming to instill educators with a “trauma-informed perspective” to “create alliances and teams who develop a climate for learning where ALL experience success.”
McDade herself, who was and continues to be listed as a motivational speaker with Doc & Friends, collaborated with another Doc & Friends associate, Dr. Dawn Marie Baletka, a professional grant writer. Together they would massage CISD’s grant application before sending it to the Office of the Governor (OOG) for approval. They opened the application by summarizing the national epidemic of violence in US public schools during the 2017-2018 school year, to include statistics on physical attacks, threats, sexual assaults, rapes and robberies, none pertaining to Southlake Carroll ISD. Nonetheless, they did their best to equate the infamous n-word Snapchat video with violence, claiming that students who had seen it were subjected to abuse and suffered from “psychological and traumatic injuries.” The grant writers assured the OOG that CISD had “learned the hard way that many types of victimization on K-12 campuses do not involve physical damage,” and that implementing training to speak out against violence and providing focused services to students who “identified as victims of the event was NOT enough.” Instead, the administrators argued, “when this type of violence occurs, ALL students become traumatized and victims.”
Under a heading labeled “Project Approaches & Activities,” McDade and Baletka assured the OOG that CISD would “not limit themselves [sic] to focusing solely on the trauma and/or abuse a victim might have experienced.” They detailed the need to offer individually tailored services spanning the range from crisis intervention to intensive advocacy, “all using a trauma informed approach,” with leadership and culture coaches serving as student advocates, and Dr. McDade’s husband, Eric, as the district’s head Leadership and Culture Coach. The writers also detailed the “addition of a Licensed Professional Counselordedicated to solely counseling and trauma informed care” to meet student victim needs, as well as a pledge to provide victims and families with “information, access to resources, and a meaningful opportunity to participate in the healing process.” Of course, the need to secure additional mental health services would be paramount, given that when time and effort was expended to “change the offender’s behavior and to rehabilitate them [sic]…it was often the victim who ended up feeling ALMOST RE-VICTIMIZED [emphasis mine] by the lack of services available to them [sic].” But the lack of funding for these services would mean that victims would continue to “feel forgotten.”
The potential to score “equity grift” seems to have made administrators giddy with delight. Their excitement, as seen in text messages between McDade, Baletka and an unnamed administrator, was palpable. We suspect, but cannot confirm, that the unnamed administrator in the text thread wasJulie Thannum, the then Assistant Superintendent for Board and Community Relations.
“I don’t make enough,” McDade texted.
“Agree,” responded the unnamed administrator, “but I don’t know about the fringe,” before continuing with a list showing $155,118 base funding, $720 for cell coverage and $4,200 for automobile support.
“I am going to decrease your time on grant and put more money in that one salary not 50/50 instead 75/25,” texted Baletka.
“Woohoo!!” McDade giddily responded.
The unnamed administrator weighed in, “She’s all for anything where you decrease her time or increase her pay.”
Baletka then offered additional advice. “NOT free lunch if it makes you look rich,” she warned, before continuing in preparation for final submission of the application and notification to Superintendent,Dr. David Faltys.
In a poor attempt at humor, and showing disdain for conservatives, Baletkarefers to a rather egregious typo as a “TRUMP word.”This contempt for the former president is a recurring theme among the proponents of the CCAP. From episode one, we recall the narrators highlighting Robin Cornish’s memories of struggling with whether to keep her children in the district “the day after the election” in 2016. In episode two, Russell Maryland and Nikki Olaleye are heard discussing how the killing of George Floyd and the fear surrounding months of BLM protests threatened to derail the efforts of the DDC, with Olaleye complaining that Trump had referred to BLM rioters as “thugs.” As Olaleye coordinated a BLM protest in Southlake Town Square for June 6th, 2020, Cornish bemoaned the idea that shop owners were concerned about the potential for violence. “They were going by what they were seeing on TV…by the narrative that Donald Trump was spinning on TV,” she stated.
Whether Olaleye chose June 6th as a rebuke of D-Day and the memory of American troops fighting actual Nazis, or due to a lack of cultural competence isn’t clear. We note, however, that the concerns of townspeople were not misplaced. Despite the verdict from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) that 93% of BLM protests were peaceful, over 570 protests in 68 cities would spiral into violence over the summer of 2020, killing at least 25 people, injuring over 2,000 police officers, and causing over $1 billion in property damage across 20 states. Lest we forget BLM’s history of inspiring violence, a sniper by the name of Micah Xavier Johnson, upset over the false narrative that white cops were hunting down unarmed black men, made it his mission to “kill white people, especially white police officers,” which he accomplished by killing five officers at a BLM protest in Dallas in July 2016.
By August 28, 2020, the verdict was in on the VOCA grant. The Governor’s office wasn’t buying it, sending a terse email to Faltys informing him that CISD didn’t make the cut. “Thank you for your grant application,” the message read, “The Office of the Governor (OOG) appreciates your interest and effort but declines to fund your application at this time.” The effort to link nebulous microaggressions to violence, trauma and crime had failed, at least for the time being.
Content to omit these facts from their narrative, Hixenbaugh and Hylton continue to focus their attention on the Southlake Families PAC, described as an organization with the singular goal of killing the diversity plan. The truth is that like any PAC its mission was not limited to fighting against the CCAP, but rather to raise and distribute campaign funds to support political initiatives and to fund candidates seeking political office.While most of the conservative parents cited in episode three, including this writer, have no formal connection to the PAC, it’s true that most of them have donated to the cause, and rightly so. Organizing the voices of concerned parents into a cohesive team and pooling resources is of utmost importance when fighting against un-elected bureaucrats looking to push political agendas. Not all the conservative voices highlighted in NBC’s podcast or documentary agree with the PAC’s every position, but on the issue of the CCAP they are united for the reasons already mentioned.
Oddly, NBC is at pains to describe conservative parents opposing the CCAP as “mostly white or Latino,” which looks like an attempt to explain away the presence of minority parents aligning with the PAC on this issue. In essence, the reporters are covering their bases, probably after learning that one prominent parent shown multiple times shouting, “wrong is wrong; racism in reverse is racism…shame!” at a school board meeting is Hispanic. Enter the concept of white adjacency, or the woke idea of a person from a marginalized background who is somehow a recipient of privileges normally identified as “white.” Recall that in the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) religion, physical identity is paramount and meritocracy is rejected. It’s not possible to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and success and acceptance of a minority figure by white dominant society can only be explained in terms of a false consciousness that is opposed to his own self-interest. In other words, “you ain’t woke,” and, “You didn’t build that!” Such thinking allows the progressive to dismiss the inconvenient minorities who do not fit the narrative of systemic racism, and it underwrites ugly attacks by white leftists on black conservatives like Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell and Allen West, effectively providing them “woke” insurance against being labeled racist, regardless of what they might say or do.
The podcast narrators also appear to be tied to an ideological bias that insists they paint any and all actors, even those loosely associated with the PAC, as untoward. It’s a sort of “genetic fallacy” that permits the progressive to dismiss any viewpoint based upon its origin, without addressing the truth claim at the heart of the assertion. “Stop listening to Fox because it’s just right-wing garbage and conspiracy theory,” is one prominent example that is sure to make Alinsky proud. Such is the case with the PAC, given its ability to raise over $125,000 in under a week after its “coming out party” on August 30, 2020, including a $2000 contribution from Dana Loesch, $500 from Guy Midkiff and $200 from Hannah Smith, who would later earn a seat on the school board. NBC’s implication is clear – such contributions somehow taint the PAC’s message and initiatives. After all, these funds were raised in the aftermath of LTC (Ret) Allen West’s speech, in which the narrators and their leftist allies take pride in pillorying his statement that outsiders should “go back to where you came from!”
Given the typical progressive lack of familiarity with scripture, it’s understandable how they missed the context. Just before this statement, West had said that people moving here from progressive enclaves should learn “the lesson God told Lot.” As most Jews and Christians would know, that lesson is “don’t look back!” It is a warning to rid oneself of any attachments to the evils of Sodom and Gomorrah that had so offended the Lord God. In other words, West’s core message wasn’t “go back where you came from,” but rather, “all are welcome, but leave destructive progressive ideologies behind you.”
The PAC is also assumed to be behind the lawsuit brought against five named school board members for violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act (TOMA), but the suit itself was brought by one concerned mother, Kristin Garcia, not the PAC. Progressives have complained since the filing on September 2, 2020, that this lawsuit has cost the district tens of thousands of dollars and amounts to a simple “process crime,” but the fact is that Board President Michelle Moore and four of her colleagues violated the law. In fact, the violations were serious enough that by Spring 2021, Moore and one other trustee would be arrested and indicted for TOMA violations. Ironically, progressives unconcerned with “process crimes” aren’t so forgiving when it comes to Trump associates like Roger Stone or Michael Cohen. But the narrators go further, insinuating that by refusing to speak on the record, Garcia and the PAC are doing something shady.There is no consideration given to the fact that Garcia’s lawyers have advised her not to speak publicly on this matter while the case remains in litigation.
Likewise, there is no light shed on the activities of a progressive PAC every bit as invested in this fight as Southlake Families.Move Tarrant Forward (MTF)was formed specifically to oppose Southlake Families and to push for passage of the CCAP or some other diversity plan. Like Southlake Families, it too has its heavy-hitting donors, including radical leftist activists Bjorn Bennett, who donated $5,100, and Angela Darden, donating $1,155. An additional contribution of $4,285 was made to MTF by ActBlue Texas, a progressive donation processing organization that has helped pool over $1.67 billion in corporate donations to BLM. It also has its high-profile followers, including Ms. Pamela Francis, the Co-Chair of the District Diversity Council (DDC), the “non-partisan” committee responsible for developing the CCAP!
MTF was also behind several hateful mailers in the run up to the school board and municipal elections in May 2021, including one accusing Hannah Smith of being behind the Garcia lawsuit, costing the district $250,000 in legal fees, and denying the rights of LGBTQ students. A subsequent MTF mailer portrayed certain prominent PAC leaders and donors, including Leigh Wambsganss, Kristine Kemp, Kathy Delcalvo and Kristin Garcia as cartoon clowns.Some residents, unhappy with these tactics, asked to be removed from MTF’s mailing list only to find their own names added to a section of the MTF website titled “Chronicles of Hate.” This prominent display of the names of people no longer wishing to receive classless hate mail is akin to a sort of passive digital doxing. In the progressive view, anyone not actively fighting against Southlake Families must be for them.There is no neutral ground. In this, MTF showed its parallel to the modern anti-racist justification of discriminating to fight discrimination. They would label unwilling participants bullies, and then fight their bullying with bullying.
Toward the end of episode three, Hixenbaugh and Hyltondo make at least one observation with which we agree. Despite the influence of partisan organizations, the fight over the CCAP is less about politics than it is about questions of authority.From the beginning conservative parents have objected to the administrative overreach apparent in the work of the DDC and the behind-the-scenes antics of certain administrators, acting without authority from the school board. They objected to the failure of trustees to provide effective oversight and stand for the rights of parents regarding the curriculum, as well as the implementation of certain aspects of the CCAP that had begun without specific authorization to do so. These included making sweeping changes to the Student Code of Conduct, developing a specialized culture survey, appointing a leadership & culture coach, including race as a criterion to evaluate potential staff hires, requesting proposals for a professional “equity” audit, drafting a district equity policy, developing and implementing a “diversity calendar,” and documenting and tracking microaggressions. At issue isn’t simply the question of who calls the shots in Southlake Carroll ISD. There is a larger question about what kind of society we are and should be. Do we insist, as citizens, on a government accountable to the “we the people” at all levels, or do we make ourselves subjects, accountable to a bureaucracy of experts that know better than us? Conservatives are betting on the Constitution and on freedom, and they are prepared to fight for that principle to the bitter end.
With the first two episodes of its six-part “Southlake” podcast, released on August 30th, NBC has pulled out all the stops in its continuing public assault on Southlake, Texas. Its creators describe it as a story “about belonging and backlash” from within one Texas community’s ongoing fight over a school diversity plan.
The podcast’s hosts, Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton, attempt to frame the story around two opposing viewpoints. One side is decidedly progressive and values diversity, while the other is simply described as largely “conservative, and votes Republican.” Indeed, in his behind-the-scenes interview on August 26th, Hixenbaugh painted the progressive side as complaining about “real problems causing trauma to…people of color, LGBTQ students and students who are Muslim.” His description of the conservative alliance was as “…a lot of white parents…saying, ‘that’s exaggerated; you’re painting a false picture of our town.’” He agrees with the interviewer when she states that conservatives don’t even want to acknowledge the existence of the problem in the first place.
This is the tone of the entirety of the first episode, despite Hixenbaugh’s stated desire to leverage the power of long-form audio to help the two sides hear each other more clearly and bridge divides. After all, growing up in a small Ohio town without classmates of color surely robbed him of any relevant “cultural skills or knowledge,” leaving him FEELING [emphasis mine] unprepared “to function in diverse communities.” Only stories have the power to help him bridge that gap.
For her part, Hylton, in an opinion piece published on September 2nd, admittedly brings her own bitter and humiliating memories of high school in Lincoln, Massachusetts, to the podcast, citing “unmistakable parallels” between Southlake and the suburbs of Boston as “diversifying but majority-white American” communities engaged in a backlash against people of color. It must be extraordinarily tough to grow up as a high-performing ethnic minority in an affluent family and with all the breaks. Unlike Ms. Hylton, this author wouldn’t know, having been a high-performing ethnic minority from a family of lesser means, and who learned the meaning of the word “struggle” early in life. The well of sympathy runs dry.
With origin stories like these, it would be difficult to imagine our heroes possessing the ability to frame the debate any other way. It’s quite a shame for the community, really, considering that the inability to shed an internalized progressive political lens makes productive debate impossible. No conservative in Southlake has ever denied the existence of racism, or that a conversation on these issues isn’t worthwhile. No conservative would agree that he values diversity any less than the progressive, but he would insist on diversity of thought and be unconcerned with diversity of skin tone. Unfortunately, the two reporters begin their journey by accepting the premises that bigotry is systemic, that only a “diversity plan” can resolve these issues, and that conservatives wish to kill any such plan to maintain their supremacy.
Hixenbaugh and Hylton even repackage critical race theory (CRT) as a harmless “framework for studying the societal legacy of racism,” and believe it has become a “catch-all for diversity and inclusion efforts that some believe are unfair to white students.” Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado, the Father and co-founder of CRT, respectively, would be proud of such a subversive attempt to redefine CRT. After all, they themselves described CRT as a movement to be activated against the constructs of white power, but neither would be able to verify the accuracy of the NBC definition with a straight face. But we who have studied the history of CRT and the writings of its founders and proponents are not fooled. We know that CRT is a neo-Marxist paradigm that explains social conflict as the result of systemic racism constructed by white people to maintain cultural dominance, and it has no place in the K-12 curriculum.
That Hylton and Hixenbaugh believe conservatives have used CRT as a political bogeyman reveals something important about their shared worldview. It’s a philosophical tell, that knowingly or unknowingly, each has embraced at least some of the tenets of CRT. These tenets include the belief that racism is the ordinary state of society, that when whites work against racism it is only because of the convergence of interests, and that minority status conveys a presumed competence to speak on race and racism that is immune from criticism and inaccessible to whites [1]. “It’s worth pointing out,” Hixenbaugh narrates toward the end of the first episode, “that [Board President] Michelle Moore is the only non-white school board member,” though we are quite sure she possesses no special knowledge on these issues. Even the deliberate capitalization of “Black” in their articles telegraphs a penchant to engage in identity politics, as advanced by Kimberle Crenshaw’s 1991 essay, “Mapping the Margins,” published in the Stanford Law Review [2].
These observations are not meant to paint either Hixenbaugh or Hylton unfairly with the broad brush of CRT, nor is this author impugning their characters or motivations, for we can see into no man’s heart. Rather, this is simply an acknowledgement of the pervasive influence of critical theory and its many off-shoots, including CRT, on the thinking of educated Americans over the last few decades. These concepts have so thoroughly embedded themselves into the intellectual soil of academia that they are now germinating into activism in K-12 education. On the one hand this ideology creates significant communication barriers that makes finding common ground extremely difficult. On the other, it is responsible for awakening conservative parents, largely from Generation X, to the threat it represents to our constitutional liberty. But we must also acknowledge that we are late to this fight.
Still, it is frustrating to see the conservative position on the Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP) so completely misrepresented by a major media outlet with global reach. From the moment the CCAP was released to the public, conservative parents (and many students and teachers who shall remain unnamed) have been clear on the reasons for their opposition to its adoption and implementation. In the first place, the CCAP would fail to promote authentic cultural competence, a concept that is never even defined in the document. Like the reporters, the CCAP accepts the premise of systemic racism as a fact of life. It promotes a critical social justice agenda, which is inherently unjust, in seeking after equality of outcome (equity) over equality of opportunity. It prescribes methods and objectives that elevate or oppress the freedom, spirit, or aspirations of one group of students over another on the basis of immutable characteristics, such as race. Some of these methods include the reporting of microaggressions, which are defined as “verbal or nonverbal snubs or insults, whether intentional or unintentional,” communicating hostile or derogatory messages toward persons based upon their “marginalized or underrepresented group membership.” Conservatives reject the very concept of the microaggression, especially where it is nonverbal and unintentional, but the CCAP allows for the tracking of these “offenses” as if they were criminal behavior, and describes no system of redress for the falsely accused.
It is a blatantly false assertion to claim that the CCAP was developed by a 63-person District Diversity Council (DDC) and district leaders over a period of years. The document was largely written by two Assistant Superintendents with just enough critical social justice pedagogy under their belts to be dangerous, and the recommendations of the 63, of which only two were conservatives, were largely dismissed out of hand. In fact, many of the DDC members barely made an appearance at meetings, and this writer has it on good evidence that one prominent DDC member who relishes being in the news since his glory days as a Cowboys player, participated in somewhere between zero and two meetings during the entirety of the effort!
Aside from the lack of transparency in the development of this document, its blatant disregard for the concept of due process, its lack of specificity and definitions, its stifling treatment of everyday human expression, and its infusion with a nefarious social justice agenda, conservatives also decried the effort as an attempt by administrators to undermine parental authority. Conservatives have articulated these positions on multiple occasions, in multiple venues, to include in interviews with these very reporters! Yet, these same reporters have failed to convey these positions in any of their reporting to date, all while bemoaning the lack of conservative parents willing to speak with them on the record.
The truth is that parents are tired of media dishonesty and partisan behavior. They simply want their children to receive the best education possible from the public school system, an education driven by the development of logic, reason, and critical thinking – all things the modern left has described as propping up “white supremacy.” What parent, not already aligned with the radical left, wouldn’t be wary of being misrepresented?!? This author, the progeny of Mexican immigrants, gave a 13-minute interview to Ms. Hylton, on the record, and his views were never accurately portrayed in any NBC reporting. A first-generation Vietnamese immigrant, a survivor of the war, did the same. Neither interview was used. One can only wonder why. Is it because they don’t fit the progressive narrative? We hope this will change in future airings of the podcast, but if history is any indication, our hopes are not high.
Instead, we’re treated to highlights of Southlake’s purported racism. The Rolle family, a famous Power Ranger duo, openly lament that, while housing prices here are a bargain compared to failing California, they come “with a catch,” namely that the people here “don’t look like you.” In the opening scenes of Episode One, a school board meeting is compared to a political rally, and a woman is described as holding a sign with the image of a pig-tailed girl in a mask saying, “I can’t breathe.” This is said to be insensitively appropriating George Floyd’s dying words.
But even here the reporters show their true colors by failing to ask questions other than those that confirm their own implicit biases.Why are the Rolles (Reggie and Amy) given a blanket pass for saying that having white neighbors is some kind of trade-off for low housing prices? How committed to “diversity” are people who are overly concerned that their neighbors “don’t look like” them? Or what about that woman engaging in “cultural appropriation” and disrespecting the memory of the convicted felon and violent criminal, George Floyd? Had the reporters done a modicum of research, they might have discovered that most conservatives present that day did not know the woman, this being her first time to participate in any gathering of conservatives for any reason. Conservatives also found it a bit suspicious that her photo, provided by Bjorn Bennett, a known far left activist, appeared in the Dallas Morning News’ reporting with the head cropped. We suspected a plant. However, a little digging revealed her to be a Finnish immigrant concerned that, on top of her children being new to the district, masks were making it exceedingly difficult for them to make friends and integrate into the community. She did not have George Floyd on the mind! Granted, we cannot confirm her story, but at least we asked. Should a national news media outlet do any less prior to reporting it as an inflammatory show of disrespect?
Enter Robin Cornish,Southlake’s First Lady of racial grievance. Her story has been covered ad nauseam in Wise Guy Talks Episode 38 (Media Malpractice, Part 2). There’s no reason to re-litigate it here. Suffice it to say that she suffered a major loss in her life, an actual trauma unlike that associated with hurt feelings from nonverbal, unintended microaggressions imagined by obtuse, but overly sensitive teenagers. The community grieved for and with her at the passing of her husband, which was a monumental tragedy for all involved. We sincerely wish this had never happened. Furthermore, the act of vandalism at Frank Cornish Park was and remains despicable. We are glad the city council condemned this act and rededicated the park with a new plaque with all due haste. Our lingering regret is that the police department was unable to conduct a fruitful investigation into the incident to bring the culprit to justice.
But this leads to another point, which is that all incidents, whether criminal conduct like the defacing of the Frank Cornish plaque, or acts of stupidity, immaturity, and small-mindedness frequenting the halls of the average public-school building, deserve to be investigated in a thorough and transparent manner. We cannot rely on email and Twitter testimonials in which feelings and perceptions replace facts and evidence, and it’s not fair to use such testimonials to paint an entire community as racist, systemically or otherwise.
And who, precisely, are these racist people? Inquiring minds want to know. Were they the same outraged parents that flooded the district with angry messages in the aftermath of the viral “n-word” video? If the sentiment of an overwhelming majority of the people in the community was outrage at this incident, how is it that an overwhelming majority of the people in the same community are against the CCAP? Are we sure systemic racism is the cause, or could it be that our educational “experts” tried to pull a fast one and the community revolted? We tend to believe the latter, and we do so based on evidence, not feelings.
Truly, hurt feelings appear to be something very difficult for the two reporters to process. In his behind-the-scenes interview, Hixenbaugh makes the claim that the origin of the story was the result of “real people, not politicians, not partisan people…coming forward and saying, ‘I got HURT [emphasis mine] in the school district. The school district is supposed to be excellent…the best.’” That the origin of the issue is real people with real complaints is fair enough, but we tread dangerous ground when we conflate feelings with “hurt.” Words can be offensive, but it is unwise to conflate hurt feelings with trauma. This opens the door to conflating words with violence, and suddenly a wise crack with a poor choice of words becomes an “attack” on someone’s “dignity,” against which he or she feels justified in responding violently. That is an unacceptable outcome completely at odds with an environment conducive to an authentic education, and we will not tolerate it.
But can an authentic education be had without a “diversity plan?” In a teaser video released on August 31st, Ms. Hylton seems to think not, saying, “without a diversity plan in place, some students may not feel the value of their education in Southlake.”Once again, the emphasis is on feelings rather than critical thinking. Is an education really worthless without a contrived “diversity plan?” Are learning math, science, history, and literature not enough to develop critical thinking skills? Ironically, Nikki Olaleye, one of the diversity plan’s fiercest advocates, inadvertently makes OUR case well, advising other students that “your worth is not equivalent to how people treat you, how they look at you, or how they feel about you.” Bravo, Miss Olaleye! This has been our point all along!
This brings us to the close of episode one, which is disturbing for another reason. Within two weeks of the viral “n-word” video making the national spotlight, the district held an emergency school board meeting to address the issue. As luck would have it, the first speaker was Mrs. Cornish, who proceeded to call for a change to the curriculum. The curriculum?Are behaviors moderated by a school’s curriculum, or by consequences laid out in the code of conduct? Logic would dictate the code of conduct would be the emphasis, yet somehow the narrative jumped far past the code directly to the curriculum. One is left to wonder where that idea originated, and by whom and for what purpose. We smell political motivations and the machinations of the Democratic Party machine, though time will tell.
Until next time…
Notes:
Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, New York & London: New York University Press, 2001, pp. 6-9.
Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (July 1991), p. 1297.
•July 2020 – SARC forms & issues demand letter; DDC reconvenes (virtual); Draft CCAP released; Southlake Families PAC formed
•August 2020 – DDC presents CCAP to School Board; CCAP not approved; TRO issued against implementation of CCAP
•April 2021 – Two Trustees arrested for TOMA violations
•May 2021 – Conservatives win big in local elections (70/30)
•School Board – 2 places
•City Council – 2 places
•Mayor
•NOW WHAT?
Post-Modernism
•Post-Modernism – rejection of modernity that denies foundations of epistemology; radical skepticism about accessibility of objective truth (cynicism)
•Themes
•Skepticism of objective reality & culturally dominant “metanarratives”
•Perception of language as the “contructor” of knowledge
•The “making” of the individual
•Role played by power in all the above
•Pillars of Post-Modernism (Walter Truitt Anderson, 1996)
•Social construction of the concept of the self – formed by environment
•Relativism of moral/ethical discourse – morality is not found, but made
•Deconstruction of art & culture – also applies to language
•Globalization – breaking of boundary between what’s objectively true & what’s experienced
Critical Race Theory (CRT)
•Critical theory – adapts Marxist conflict theory to recognize & establish oppressed/oppressor groups thru lens of culture
•Oppressors attempt to hide their oppression
•Oppressed aid in their oppression through a false consciousness
•Liberation from systemic oppression attached to cultural identity; “Repressive Tolerance” (Marcuse); epistemology upended into political regime
•CRT – applies critical theory thru a lens of race (takeoffs include sex, gender, sexuality, body type, religion, national origin, age, etc)
•Derrick Bell, Angela Davis, Kimberle Crenshaw (Mother of CRT)
•Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” (1991) married critical theory to post-modernism: Systemic Oppression is objective reality
•Objectivity of oppression through intersectionality (Combahee River Collective): queer, black feminism at the margins of black liberation
•Anti-essentialism & politics of social location: “I am black” vs “I am a person who happens to be black”Loading…
Critical Race Theory (CRT)
•Zillah Eisenstein, “Combahee River Collective Statement,” 1978 –
“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression,…analysis based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.”
“This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics.”
“We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon…”
•Kimberle Crenwhaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (July 1991), pp. 1241-1299 –
“I consider intersectionality a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory. In mapping the intersections of race and gender, the concept does engage dominant assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories. By tracing the categories to their intersections, I hope to suggest a methodology that will ultimately disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable. While the primary intersections that I explore here are between race and gender, the concept can and should be expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color.”
“‘I am Black’ takes the socially imposed identity and empowers it as an anchor of subjectivity…..[it’s] a positive discourse of self-identification…”
“’I am a person who happens to be Black,’ on the other hand, achieves self-identification by straining for a certain universality (in effect, ‘I am first a person’) and for a concomitant dismissal of the imposed category (‘Black’) as contingent, circumstantial, nondeterminant.
”…the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it.
What CRT Believes
Defines itself as movement; considers same issues as traditional civil rights, but from a broader perspective (economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, feelings, unconscious)
Richard Delgado & Jean Stafancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, New York University Press, 2001
“The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power…Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” – Delgado & Stefancic, pp. 2-3
“…color blindness will allow us to redress only extremely egregious racial harms, ones that everyone would notice and condemn. But if racism is embedded in our thought processes and social structures as deeply as many crits believe, then the “ordinary business” of society—the routines, practices, and institutions that we rely on to effect the world’s work—will keep minorities in subordinate positions. Only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery.” – Delgado & Stefancic, p. 22
“Crits are also highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights…Moreover, rights are almost always cut back when they conflict with the interests of the powerful. For example, hate speech, which targets mainly minorities, gays, lesbians, and other outsiders, is almost always tolerated, while speech that offends the interests of empowered groups finds a ready exception in First Amendment law.” – Delgado & Stefancic, p. 23
What CRT Believes
•Tenets: Richard Delgado & Jean Stafancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, New York & London: New York University Press, 2001, pp. 6-9.
•Racism is ordinary, not aberrational – colorblind equality resolves only most blatant discrimination
•Interest convergence – systemic racism advances interest of both white elites & working class; society has no incentive to eradicate it
•Race is a social construct – category invented, manipulated or retired when convenient
•Differential racialization – dominant society racializes different minority groups IAW shifting needs (i.e. to maintain power)
•Intersectionality & anti-essentialism – identity over universal humanity
•Unique voices of color – minority status conveys presumed competence to speak about race/racism immune from criticism) & not accessible to whites
Antiracism Then & Now
•Prior to 1960s – denoted opposition to racism and the promotion of racial equality (common dignity before the law)
•Post 1960s – modern social justice view promotes racial equity and affirms discrimination as a positive means to achieve that end
•Opposes any law, process or rule that results in racial inequity (always the result of racism)
•There are no neutral policies in human society, so discrimination for the sake of racial equity is necessary.
“If racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.”
– Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, New York: One World (Random House), 2019, p. 19.
•No disparate impact among ethnic populations in academic performance
•Only 1.8% of CISD’s 8,600 students (< 100) considered low-income and/or qualify for Free and Reduced Lunch, largely attributable to lower income whites!
Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP)
•Changing demographics used to justify need for DEI Plan (CCAP)
•Asian, Hispanic & bi-racial/multi-racial students comprise largest increase
•Employee demographics showed increase in Black staff among teaching/admin pay families and Hispanic staff among auxiliary pay family; Asian/Indian representation lags behind corresponding student groups:
Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP) – ABOVE.
Director of Equity & Inclusion – ABOVE.
SARC Demand Letter
•Thesis is need to implement CRT (neo-Marxist approach) – “We need a comprehensive education that incorporates a critical pedagogy approach (including critical race theory)…”
•USA is systemically racist – mostly BLM based (“Black” is capitalized; AP style manual)
•“Racially fueled murders of Black Americans”
•Systemic racism is the norm; need to “dismantle racism” with “direct action”
•Listen to unique voices of color seeking “equitable change and accountability”
•Systemic Racism in CISD
•Incidents “widely ignored or under disciplined” (apoliticism & appeasement of parents); no “substantive punishment”
•Cornish plaque defaced, 2 x N-word videos, SARC testimonies, school vandalism
•Students unable to “recognize & stand up to racism”; need critical understanding of bigotry
•White-dominated conversations in history classes & inaccurate historical portrayals
•Indoctrination is the goal & enforcement must fulfill that end (Machiavelli meets Lucifer)
•“OUR MISSION: SEEK INTERSECTIONAL ANTI-RACIST CHANGE AT CISD”
•“We hope to transform the tradition that CISD protects to one of equity, inclusion and justice.”
– Reporting system; Extend consequences off campus; Black-led organizations; Implicit bias screening; Mandatory student forums; Socio-economic support for minorities; New policies/curriculum/holidays; DEI plan
Phase III: Exploit Success – keep pushing the envelope
– Implicit bias screening; anti-racist literature/staff training; Update policies/curriculum & add holidays; add Psychologist to staff; improve DEI plan
– Mandated staff diversity (intersectionality quotas); Proactive accountability & anti-racist education; Adjust CMA curriculum; Additional policy reform; Mandatory anti-racist courses to graduate; continuous updates to DEI plan
SARC Demands
•Repressive Tolerance: direct action required; if you’re not anti-racist, you are racist
•“By ignoring critical conversations of race, Carroll is complacent in graduating actively racist students who consequently negatively impact the world.”
•“…inaction, silence, or inadequate response demonstrate you are not committed…”
•They admit their motivations are political
•“…remaining apolitical is inherently a political stance, and it shows your students of color that their teachers and leaders are unwilling to stand up for them.”
•“Racism is not merely a political issue; it is a human rights issue.”
•“We hope you acknowledge the need for reform at all levels in this country”
•They appeal to interest convergence, but their list of civil rights leaders is a mixed bag of classical liberal apologists and anti-liberal Hegelian philosophical activists
•In their criticism of CCAP they reveal their true intent
•“We endorse and support the passage of the CCAP…[but] we demand its improvement…”
•“…this plan does not adequately respond to the decades of injustice endemic to CISD…”
•“…we do not simply need a plan promoting “cultural competence” or “multiculturalism” in school, but rather a foundationally anti-racist approach…”
•“Equity and justice are [the] goals…”
•No objective data to support conclusions, just anecdotes and stories (other means of knowing)
•Obama’s coalition of the ascendency – unwitting political pawns
SARC Demand Letter
•Organize online & in-person – this is probably your Center of Gravity!
•School board & administration responsive & accountable to community (parents & taxpayers)
•Parents & taxpayers properly engaged in district affairs
•Anti-American progressive political activism purged/banned from district
•Curriculum & extra-curricular programs teach truth and focus on cultivation of virtue (tradition of excellence)
•Truth: eternal & unchanging moral law, in line with the natural law and discoverable through reason
•Virtue: the excellence of perfection of a thing produced (in this case the student)
Centers of Gravity
•Center of gravity – source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action or the will to act; “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends”
•Strategic Level
•Progressives – media (legacy mainstream AND social media)
•Conservatives – rule of law (constitutional processes & court system)
•Operational/Tactical Level
•Progressives – control over school board through administrators/experts
•Conservatives – lines of communication among allies
Parents & Taxpayers Adequately Engaged
Conservative Majority on School Board
END STATE:
SB/Admin responsive & accountable; parents/taxpayers engaged; anti-American activism purged/banned from the district; curriculum & extra-curricular programs teach truth & cultivate virtue (tradition of excellence)
Transparent Curriculum & SCOC
Transparent Staff Training & Hires
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LOE #1: Community Engagement
LOE #2: Political/Legal Engagement
LOE #3: Board Engagement
LOE #4: Exposing Radicalism
COG:
School Board & Admin
Anti-American Ideologies Banned
Campaign Plan Lines of Effort (LOEs)
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1 – LOCs secured among conservative groups/individuals
2 – Orgs established to pool funds for conservative causes
•They’ll never mention Democrat Party’s affiliation with slavery, KKK, Jim Crow…the welfare state, etc.
•There was NO “big-switch” – the Dems have always been the party of hate & these demands prove that trend continues
•Democrats must own this history; Joe Biden was buddies with KKK grand wizard Robert Byrd – how about that history?
Demands – Exploit Success
Basic Terminology
•End state – broadly expressed conditions that exist when campaign/major operation ends (related to friendly, enemy, adversary, neutral conditions)
•Center of gravity – source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action or the will to act; “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends”
•Means with the inherent capability of executing Ways
•Typically, one enemy & one friendly COG at strategic & operational levels of conflict, but may be more than one
•COG equivalents at the tactical level are objectives
•Operational approach – the manner in which one contends with a center of gravity; may be direct or indirect (focusing on decisive points)
•Decisive point – a geographic place, specific key event, critical factor or function, that, when acted upon, gives one a marked advantage over an adversary or contributes materially to success (keys to attacking or protecting centers of gravity)
•Identify decisive points that offer the greatest leverage against COGs; seize, retain or exploit them
•DPs point to decisive, attainable objectives that directly contribute to establishing the end state
•Lines of Operations (LOOs) / Lines of Effort (LOEs) – link tactical & operational objectives to the end state & bridge broad concept of operations across to discreet tactical tasks
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COG
Obj
END STATE
Strategic COG for Progressive Educator/Activist
•Ends – achieve/retain power & undermine constitutional order
•Disrupt right to assemble, freedom of speech/worship, 2A/right of self-defense, law & order
•Destroy Trump, GOP & libertarians
•Destroy free market, traditional values, rule of law
•Ways – impose rule by “experts”; elected leaders defer to bureaucrats
•Extend & exploit disasters/emergencies to leverage executive emergency powers
•Cultivate culture of fear (mask mandate, lockdowns, vaccine, etc)
•Exploit citizens’ humanitarian impulses (care for sick/infirm, anti-racism, homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, etc)
•Disenfranchise legal voters to dilute the voice of the people (vote by mail; illegal immigration)
•Means – divide & conquer by pushing false narratives & suppressing truth
The U.S. Navy has decommissioned the USS Bonhomme Richard docked off San Diego nine months after flames engulfed it in one of the worst U.S. warship fires outside of combat in recent memory
A new report on Navy preparedness for core mission – To win a war and protect American interests is in serious question. [Authorship: Lieutenant General Robert E. Schmidle, USMC, Ret. & Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, USN, Ret.]
Distracted Leaders More Focused On Bureaucracy
Ship Commanders Being Micromanaged
Excessive Fear Of Bad Publicity
Emphasis On Diversity Not Warfighting
Quote from active duty officer, “ They think my only value is as a black woman. But you cut our ship open with a missile and we all bleed the same color.”
I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself. 1/x
Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them. 2/x
Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc). 3/x
These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them. 4/x
Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew. 5/x
This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff – who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t – all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake. 6/x
At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov’t when it didn’t happen. 7/x
We know as fact: a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op, c) Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious, d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying. 8/x
Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution – agencies, the press, Congress, academia – gaslit them for another year. 9/x
Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin. 10/x
This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper. 11/x
GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election. 12/x
It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem. 13/x
They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them. 14/x
The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period. 15/x
This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true. 16/x
They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots. 17/x
They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don’t. It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence. 18/x
Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution. 19/x
Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now. 20/x
Re: “fake impeachment”, we now know that Trump’s request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden’s $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request. 21/x
Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a “mistake” – but, ya know, the election’s over, so who cares? 22/x
Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr’s laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn’t have been banned. 23/x
Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information. 24/x
The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process. 25/x
And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew. 26/x
Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real. 27/x
Media & Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange – the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc – but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!). 28/x
Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof. 29/x
Even the courts’ refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence. They’ll say, w/good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house? 30/x
It’s a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were “protests”, but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too. 31/x
Forget the ballot conspiracies. It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system. 32/x
They knew it was unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct. 33/x
a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, b) The press is part of the operation, c) Election rules were changed, d) Big Tech censors opposition, e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, f) Trump is banned from social media. 34/x
They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive. /end
As long as you’re here, check out my podcast. The most recent episode was on the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. There’s also a series on the early history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and one on Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple movement.
Did massive, widespread voter fraud happen? Yes, we believe it did. But even those who do not believe so should read this thread to understand why our perspectives on the election will not be swayed by those who have made lying to us their profession.
Wise Guy Talks 
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