The following is an article that appears in the British paper the Guardian.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of How Fascism Works, How Propaganda Works, and 3 other books. He has also written for the New York Times philosophy blog “The Stone”.
In other words Professor Stanley is one of those overrated Academic Fools that inhabit the halls of “Higher Learning”. Being an “Academic” he is not only fully versed in leftwing lunacy, he passes it on to future leaders of Business and Government.
The following article is the perfect example of the lies, idiocy, and propaganda, he and his ilk spew from their lofty positions inside the echo chamber of idiocy that our Universities have become.
Let’s discuss it shall we.
Banning ideas and authors is not a ‘culture war’ – it’s fascism
Jason Stanley #JasonStanley
The media’s framing of measures like Florida’s African American studies ban is a dangerous falsification of reality.
The only false reality is the nonsense these loons are teaching to our children. A false reality these laws are trying to prevent from poisoning the minds of our youth.
A wave of Republican enthusiasm for banning concepts, authors and books is sweeping across the United States. Forty-four states have proposed bans on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, and 18 states have passed them.
Republicans in the States where they have the political power to do so, are fighting against the lies, hacks, and propaganda that fools have slipped into our children’s education.
Florida’s Stop Woke Act bans the teaching of eight categories of concepts, including concepts that suggest that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex”. Many of the laws also target Nikole Hannah-Jones’s influential 1619 Project.
The Professor is upset because the “concept” that children should be punished for the crimes of their fathers is abhorrent to civilized people. It has been for millennia. The Bible even makes note of it. Ezekial : The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. I’m sure even mentioning the Bible or Torah to the Professor would cause his head to explode. He adds that he pines over the treatment of Ms. Jones work of fiction, fantasy, and hate, the 1619 Project. A delusional attempt at rewriting America’s history.
These laws have already started to take effect. Administrators and teachers have been forced out of their positions on the suspicion of violating these laws, and what has started as a trickle may soon become a flood.
Any administrator or teacher peddling this nonsense should rightfully be forced out for forcing lies and propaganda down the throats of children, and not one has been removed for “suspicion” the Professor needs to prove that accusation. Don’t hold your breath though waiting for that proof.
Unlike a culture war, the GOP’s recent turn has no place in a democracy
In January, Florida’s board of education banned AP African American studies, on the grounds that it included concepts forbidden by Governor Ron DeSantis’s law, including critical race theory and intersectionality, as well as authors such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Roderick Ferguson, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The College Board chose to remove these authors and subjects from its curriculum, claiming, as it turns out dubiously, that it did so independently of Florida’s pressure.
The AP African American studies was banned along with those authors and their works because they were based on and filled with lies and propaganda. Serving not to educate the child, but to manipulate the child into a false narrative.
These laws have been represented by many as a “culture war”. This framing is a dangerous falsification of reality. A culture war is a conflict of values between different groups. In a diverse, pluralistic democracy, one should expect frequent conflicts. Yet laws criminalizing educators’ speech are no such thing – unlike a culture war, the GOP’s recent turn has no place in a democracy. To understand why, consider their consequences.
Pompous arrogant bull. The lies this Professor and his collogues are pushing is the falsification of reality. These laws do not criminalize educators speech in any manner. These laws are designed to prevent educators from teaching their personal fantasies as history. To prevent them from placing their twisted cultural views as historical fact and modern day reality.
The concepts these laws centrally target include addressing structural racism, intersectionality and critical race theory.
Three Academic Fantasies created out of whole cloth being pushed as Academic Gospel.
Structural racism is the view that certain persisting structures and practices have resulted in unjust racial outcomes, for example the American racial wealth gap, where Black Americans have 10% of the wealth of white Americans.
There is no structural racism. Any man or woman, no matter their race, color, or religion can achieve anything that they choose, if they put their heart into it. People like Barrack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Clarence Thomas, Willie L. Williams, Danielle Outlaw, and the millions of men and woman of color that hold not only the highest offices in the land, but own and run their own businesses. These people would not exist if this fantasy they are peddling were true.
In a celebrated essay for the Atlantic, Coates – one of the banned authors – investigated banking and mortgage practices of redlining and lending that left Black Americans for generations unable to acquire wealth through purchasing homes.
Redlining is Illegal and has been since 1968, it was started in the 1930’s by Democrat President FDR. The federal government was not involved in housing until 1934 when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created as part of the New Deal.
Intersectionality, introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw in widely cited and impactful work, is the concept that certain groups are at the intersection of multiple oppressions – for example, Black women face discrimination not just for their race but also for their gender (and that such discrimination takes its own unique form).
Intersectionality the catch all. If you give them enough time they will find a way to assign and blame any person of colors failures on anyone except the person themselves.
Finally, critical race theory is, in essence, the study of these concepts: the ways practices in various domains – in housing, schooling, banking, policing, and the criminal legal system – entrench persisting racial disparities and inequalities (such as the racial wealth gap, or segregated schools), even when there is no individual racist intent.
CRT is designed to sow division and promote segregation. It is literally punishing children for being born who they are. If you are of color you are oppressed, if you are white you are an oppressor. Both the sins and suffering of your fathers is the burden of the child.
The laws are manifestly incoherent. The failure to teach about structural racism will make Black children born into poverty feel that their parents and grandparents are responsible for their own impoverished position relative to white children, and so will make Black children feel “anguish or other forms of psychological distress” because of “actions … committed in the past by other members of the same race”. The “anguish” and “psychological distress” these laws forbid are only anguish felt by the dominant racial group, white Americans.
The fact that there are more white children in poverty than any other race or color in this country is irrelevant. It’s a version of the old joke. “The World ended today, woman and minorities affected most”. These people want to teach division and hate to the children, nothing else.
In other national contexts, everyone would clearly recognize the problematic nature of laws of this sort. Germany’s teaching of its Nazi past creates clear anguish and guilt in German children (and perhaps for this reason, Germany is the world’s most stable liberal democracy). If the German far right passed laws forbidding schools from teaching about the sins of Nazism, on the grounds that such teaching does in fact quite obviously cause anguish and guilt in German children, the world would not stand for it for one moment. Even Israel’s far-right government strenuously objected when Poland drafted a law that would make it illegal to suggest that Poland had any responsibility for Nazi atrocities on its soil. Why isn’t there greater outcry when such laws are passed to protect the innocence of white Americans?
The Professor just labeled every white person a NAZI. If you aren’t born a person of color you were born to force people of color into ovens to exterminate them.
It is frequently claimed by proponents of such laws that banning discussion of structural racism and intersectionality is freeing schools of indoctrination. And yet indoctrination rarely takes place by allowing the free flow of ideas. Indoctrination instead rather takes places by banning ideas. Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as “freedom from indoctrination” is as Orwellian as politics gets.
Professor Stanley is using his skill at propaganda to accuse Republicans of doing the very thing these courses in lies actually do. Convince children through indoctrination that they are either the oppressed or the oppressor’s. Yes very Orwellian indeed.
So what is the ultimate goal of these bans? In the first instance, these laws are there to protect white innocence – that is why they are so popular with many white parents, who carry their own burdens of guilt (similar laws would be popular with many Germans, for the same reason). But there are deeper and more problematic aims of these laws.
Once again the Professor labels all white people NAZI”S, their crime? Besides having the nerve to be born white is that they want laws that insist the truth is taught, rather than the racist propaganda of the three subjects listed above.
Democracy involves informed decision-making about policy. These laws are intended to render such deliberation impossible when it comes to minority groups. The United States suffers from immense racial disparities, which result in periodic outbreaks of political protest. Without an understanding of the structural factors that keep schools and cities segregated, and certain populations impoverished, Americans will not be able to react to these outbreaks with understanding – they will find them befuddling. These laws eliminate the knowledge and understanding required to react democratically to Black political protest to structural injustice.
In other words the American people are stupid. They are incapable of looking around them and seeing reality. The reality that anyone can succeed and anyone can fail. That whether they succeed or fail is based solely on the history of their race, color, or sex. Individual merit means nothing. They must be allowed to lie to the children to convince them otherwise. To not be able to brainwash them with their false narrative will destroy Democracy. When the true reality is teaching these lies will do more harm to democracy and civil discourse than anything else.
The authors targeted by these laws do not just theorize about problematic structures – their work is also essential for understanding solutions. For example, Roderick Ferguson writes about social movements for liberation, including student movements. These laws make it illegal to teach students about the history and strategy of social movements targeting structural injustice. More generally, these laws make it illegal to teach students about how to form social movements to challenge dominant interests and structures.
The only solutions any of these “Educators” want to teach is division and violence. It should be illegal to teach both. Neither leads to a civil democratic change of anything. They lead only towards hate and violence. Organizing the destruction of Statues and Monuments, the cancelation and harassments of anyone with an opposing view, the crushing of opposing views are not what children should be taught.
Most frighteningly, these laws are meant to intimidate educators, to punish them for speaking freely by threatening their jobs, their teaching licenses, and more. The passing of these laws signals the dawn of a new authoritarian age in the United States, where the state uses laws restricting speech to intimidate, bully and punish educators, forcing them to submit to the ideology of the dominant majority or lose their livelihoods, and even their freedom.
Every University in the U.S. is supported by Tax Payer Money, including Yale. That means that they can and will be held to standards. The number one standard being the truth, which is either totally missing or distorted beyond recognition by the the 3 fantasies these educators wish to push. None of the laws prevent the teachers from discussing their views and interpretation of the facts and events of history, but the laws do guarantee that the real record of history is not only included in the teaching, but that those presenting it, defending it are granted the ability to do so without retribution. As it stands at Yale and the majority of Universities, Conservative speech is not allowed. Students that dare to espouse any are blackballed, harassed, cancelled, and failed.
It is clear that the chief agenda of the GOP is to advance a set of speech laws that criminalize discussion in schools of anything but the white heterosexual majority’s perspective. The media’s portrayal of these laws as moves in the “culture wars” is an unconscionable misrepresentation of fascism.
Brainwashing children with lies, and propaganda combined with the violent crushing of dissenting speech are the two primary tools of Fascism. Both these tools are used everyday in the universities under the direction of the educators. That is the undeniable reality of the American Educational system.
Professor Stanly lives in his own little bubble of a world. Regretfully it is a bubble in which he does not exist alone. The entire American Educational system has been taken over by the same true fascist thinking and control of Professor Stanly’s of Academia.
From Kindergarten to a Doctorate our children are no longer taught to think. To evaluate things honestly, logically, through the real Scientific Method. They are indoctrinated with feel good or feel bad stories manipulating them through their emotions rather than their minds.
Very few benefit from a Higher Education, most walk away with a massive debt they can never repay and have to find work doing anything except what they put themselves into that debt for. It’s not that the jobs aren’t there, they are. The problem is what they were taught by these sanctimonious fools has absolutely nothing to do with earning a living and supporting a family.
The whole system needs to be brought down and reestablished to educate our children so that they can compete in the world through mathematics, science and innovation. Not radicalized into mobs that riot because they’ve been taught they are owed something.
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