90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

The powers that be that force us to live like we do ....They'll fall to ruin one day...

The powers that be

that force us to live like we do

Bring me to my knees

when I see what they've done to you

But I'll die as I stand here today

knowing that deep in my heart

They'll fall to ruin one day

for making us part

Los Angeles Public Schools Host Critical Race Theorist To ‘Challenge Whiteness’ While Saying They Aren’t Teaching Critical Race Theory

L.A. government schools told parents critical race theory isn't being taught despite bringing in a known critical race theorist to train teachers to 'challenge whiteness.'

The Los Angeles Unified School District Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity prepared a presentation told students critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools while the district made presentations that did precisely that. The district also mandated that teachers take an “antiracism” course taught by a known critical race theorist who told them to “challenge whiteness.”
LAUSD Lies, Denies That Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught In Schools

A LAUSD presentation titled “Critical Race Theory and Racism in K-12 Education” starts out by defining the theory as a “Theoretical Framework through which researchers and scholars try to understand how structural and racial inequities exist and endure in our society.”

The PowerPoint implores students to rename a headline referring to critical race theory, “since we now understand that Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools.” A separate document, which claims “there is no evidence that CRT is widespread in K-12 education,” is also listed on LAUSD’s website.

Although administrators at LAUSD claim CRT isn’t taught in their schools, the district created lesson plans that embed the corrosive theory in their very own classrooms, all after the district brought in a critical race theorist to tell teachers how to “challenge whiteness.”
K-12 Students Subjected To Critical Race Theory By Diversity And Equity Team

The LAUSD Office of Human Relations, Diversity and Equity introduces its advisory lessons by highlighting their desire to speak with students “about power, privilege, oppression, and resistance.” The section of the website labeled “Human Relations, Diversity & Equity” lists several critical race theory-inspired presentations, including slideshows that teach Thanksgiving is evil and propose an alternative holiday.

One presentation told students to check their privilege and included a video called “What is Privilege.”It shows people engaging in a privilege walk, an activity that I had to do six years ago as a freshman at my California high school. In it, people line up and take steps forward or backward depending on their answer to a series of questions. It is incredibly easy to manipulate the results through selective questioning in order to make people believe CRT’s sweeping claims of privilege and oppression based on skin color.

The presentation claims that white people, among others, are uniquely privileged, before telling students how to become an ally of left wing social justice movements. There’s also a slideshow about the Black Lives Matter movement that includes a note signed by the LAUSD Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team. The presentation mocks the phrase “all lives matter” in a comic.

It also includes the infamous tagline “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and featured a grab bag of intersectional insanity, imploring students to “celebrate queer people,” “dismantle patriarchal practices,” and undermine “hetero normative thinking.” One graphic demanded that our society “fund counselors not cops” and “mandate black history and ethnic studies.”

The presentation discussed white supremacy, which it defined as “The belief that white people are better than other races” and claimed that “Some systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.”

The administrators are evidently not fazed by the irony of peddling the conspiracy theory that America’s schools are fundamentally controlled by hegemonic white supremacy while they, as influential members of the nation’s second-largest school district, engender animosity against their white students by offering a state-sponsored crash course on racial identity politics.

A wide variety of other presentations also peddled the same themes and pushed for CRT.

Teaching critical race theory and then lying about its presence in schools isn’t new. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, has claimed CRT isn’t taught in schools after her organization boasted of teaching it on...

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #86

A Tale of Two Cities: Kenosha vs. Waukesha

The media’s blatant lies amount to racial arson.

Both Wisconsin towns, Kenosha, and Waukesha, about 50 miles apart by car, were the recent sites of multiple deaths. The violence in both made national news. Yet in contradictory ways both reflected the common themes of America’s current legal, media, and societal corruption.

The relevant public prosecutors in both were in the news for alleged ideological bias. Specifically, they habitually calibrated the charging, indicting, and trying (or not) of defendants through ideological lenses and community pressure rather than on the basis of the facts and the law.

Kyle Rittenhouse was a 17-year-old armed youth who volunteered to protect business properties at the height of the August 2020 arson, riots, and looting in Kenosha. He was pursued and attacked by three members from a larger group who chased the armed youth, presumably either to disarm, injure, or kill him—or perhaps all three.

Rittenhouse variously was assaulted, kicked, and had a firearm pointed at him. In reaction, he fatally shot two of his pursuing attackers and wounded a third. Kenosha prosecutors reviewed videos of the altercations. They saw clearly that Rittenhouse was running away from his assailants. He was variously rushed by one assailant, kicked by another, and struck with a skateboard by still another. Again, a final pursuer pointed a gun at him at close range.

No matter. The Kenosha district attorney’s office charged Rittenhouse with several felonies including two first-degree homicide charges. All four whom Rittenhouse fired at—whether he missed, wounded, or fatally shot—had lengthy arrest records. Three were convicted felons; the fourth had a long arrest record.

Given the lengthy and quite horrific rap sheet of Rittenhouse’s first attacker Joseph Rosenbaum (including multiple counts of pedophiliac rape), it is difficult to understand why the latter was not in jail (he had been released earlier that day from a mental facility to which he had been committed after a failed suicide attempt). The common denominator to the various prior convictions of his other three assailants was that they should have led to consequences far worse, given that many of their arrest charges were dropped, or bail was sometimes waived, or plea bargaining turned serious charges into merely bothersome ones. The release of violent offenders on little or no bail seems now thematic in Wisconsin.

Shortly after the August 2020 shootings, the media, Joe Biden, and most of the left-wing commentariat had claimed Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist,” even though there was no evidence of such a libel, then or now. Remember, the Kenosha shootings took place just nine weeks before the November presidential elections, at a time when the Left was framing the incumbent Trump as a “white supremacist” and Joe Biden a “healer.”

The Racist Construct

The shootings were immediately declared to be “racial.” Yet both the shooter Rittenhouse and all of his attackers who were wounded or killed were white (a fourth assailant, an African-American who kicked Rittenhouse while he was on the ground escaped without injury).

What followed in the media was the most egregious example of concocted fictions since the Russian collusion hoax. Rittenhouse was falsely accused of crossing “state lines” (plural), while unlawfully armed with an “illegal automatic weapon.”

In truth, he did not buy the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic rifle, much less bring it into nearby Kenosha, Wisconsin from nearby Antioch, Illinois. It was legal for Rittenhouse to possess and use the firearm. The gun itself was not unlawful. He did not purchase it but had been given it by a friend. And Kenosha was his alternate home in that it was where his father and other relatives lived. Rittenhouse, then, was constructed as the proverbial white supremacist of the sort warned about by the likes of Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley.

At various times during the trial, the prosecuting attorneys called Rittenhouse a coward. They claimed he should have faced the pursuing mob of at least a dozen and willingly taking a beating from them face-to-face, in at least one case at gunpoint. The jury inter alia was told that the ongoing arson and other violent acts were not serious crimes, and that the three who attacked Rittenhouse were near-heroic victims.

Protestors outside the courthouse tried to intimidate the defense and jurors. A journalist sought to follow the jury bus, ostensibly to divulge their identities or to...

A Simpsons episode titled “Goo Goo Gai Pan” featured the Simpson family traveling to Beijing, where they walk past a plaque in Tiananmen Square, the site of the 1989 massacre, that read: “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

We have seen various countries carry out censorship functions for various governments, including social media countries. Now the Simpsons have been “disappeared” in an episode that acknowledged the Tiananmen Square massacre. China blocks any mention of the massacre so Disney willingly became an extension of its massive censorship bureaucracy.

I recently discussed the decision of the W.H.O. to skip the letter “xi” in naming its new COVID-19 variant, which it dubbed the “omicron” variant. While the organization insisted that it was only avoiding “causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups,” it was an effort to avoid embarrassment to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Xi has been accused of covering up the outbreak in Wuhan and also ordering the cover-up of evidence related to the emergence of the virus (including the possible release from a government lab). W.H.O. took the action after global criticism for its fawning treatment of China in the investigation of the virus.

The decision by Disney made a mockery of the words of its founder, Walt Disney: “Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.”

The missing episode in the 16th season was noticed by people in China. The season jumps from episode 11 to 13. Episode 12? It was a 2005 episode where Homer takes his family to China, where they visit Tiananmen Square and come across a placard that reads: