Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

The Scottsdale Unified School District has elected a new interim president after allegations against President Jann-Michael Greenburg that he had distributed a “dossier” on some parents, including photos and personal finances.

The SUSD board voted 4-1 at a Monday night meeting to elect Patty Beckman as interim president as parents gathered outside to call for Greenburg’s resignation.

The reality is that Critical Race Theory is being effectively smoked out. There was a time not so long ago when people actually tried to defend the use of CRT, like Marc Lamont Hill during his interview with Christopher Rufo.

But now the playbook has changed. CRT is simply too toxic even to try to defend. This is why the National Education Association scrubbed Business Item #39 — which supported the use of CRT in K–12 schools across America — from its website in July. This is why the Biden administration removed the link to University of Georgia professor Bettina Love’s Abolitionist Teaching Network from the Department of Education’s website, claiming that the connection to the radical group (which aims to “disrupt Whiteness” in schools) was a mistake.

Snip.

[Defending CRT] would be to defend the “Color Line” exercise, a teacher training activity developed by Glenn Singleton’s Pacific Educational Group, which aims to help white educators identify their so-called “white privilege” so they can understand how this privilege is perpetuating white supremacy culture in K–12 schools as well as the rest of America. According to University of Alabama history professor David Beito, this exercise is a Maoist-style scheme that “publicly humiliate[s] dissenters by having them wear signs around their necks expressing shame for their ‘incorrect thoughts.'”

It would be to support forcing third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities and rank themselves according to their power and privilege. It would be to teach educators that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old and that White children “remain strongly biased in favor of Whiteness” by age five. It would be to argue that the United States was founded on a Eurocentric, White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, homophobic, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe. It would require teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix” and accept that White heterosexual Protestant males are inherently oppressive and therefore must atone for their “covert White supremacy.”

It would be to defend turning MLK’s “Dream” on its head, replacing judging a person by the “content of character” with judging a person by the color of his skin. It would be to defend replacing individualism with identity-based tribalism, with teaching children that race is the most important determinant of success, that meritocracy and American exceptionalism are evil, and that systemic racism is so deeply ingrained in our institutions that you are no longer the captain of your own ship.

In other words, it would be to defend the indefensible.

(Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

Throughout election night, as it became clear Republican Glenn Youngkin would win the Virginia governor’s race, numerous left-leaning media commentators insisted that critical race theory isn’t being taught in Virginia public schools.

Various media personalities—some professing to be on the news side, others on the opinion side—repeated the assertion both before and after the election results came in.

But a simple Google search would have shown these pundits that public documents from the Virginia Department of Education repeatedly mention the phrase “critical race theory,” as well as produced news stories about teacher training by consulting firms associated with critical race theory.

Christopher Rufo, a contributor to City Journal and Fox News, is among those who have reported on the documents, as well as on Virginia counties implementing critical race theory into their curricula.

In 2015, then-Governor McAuliffe's Department of Education instructed Virginia public schools to "embrace critical race theory" in order to "re-engineer attitudes and belief systems." They explicitly endorse CRT—he can't wiggle out of this one with word games. pic.twitter.com/aLV4LGYFZJ

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 30, 2021

Right now, on its website, the Virginia Department of Education recommends "Critical Race Theory in Education" as a "best practice" and derives its definitions of "racism," "white supremacy," and "education equity" explicitly from "critical race theory." pic.twitter.com/QVSJVpju2A

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 30, 2021

McAuliffe is playing a linguistic shell game to obfuscate about critical race theory. But the reality is that Virginia Department of Education promotes all of the *concepts* of critical race theory: "systemic racism," "white supremacy," "white privilege," "white fragility," etc.

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 30, 2021

I've included the full documentation on critical race theory in Virginia public schools here.https://t.co/53HenbG65y

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 30, 2021

How about firing anyone who won’t sign on to the racist, anti-American ideology of Critical Race Theory? Shockingly, that is now happening, all across corporate America. The current message is: believe in CRT, or more likely pretend to believe, or you are fired.

The Upper Midwest Law Center, on whose board I serve, is representing several individuals who have been fired or demoted because they disagreed with Critical Race Theory. One of those plaintiffs is Chuck Vavra. Vavra was an engineer at Honeywell, which imposed mandatory Critical Race Theory-based training on its employees. The “curriculum” called America irredeemably racist and asserted that all whites are the same, and insisted that whites admit their inherent racism and status as evil oppressors, while blacks were characterized as victims, good people but intrinsically unable to lead successful lives due to white racism.

Vavra objected to this bizarre Marxist world-view. The result? Honeywell fired him.

It is notable that the “training” insisted upon by Honeywell was not a matter of compliance with federal civil rights statutes or other laws, nor did it have anything to do with Vavra’s job duties as an engineer. It was simply an effort to impose fealty to an extreme left-wing, anti-American agenda as a condition of employment at the company.

In the safe & suburban Central Texas city of Round Rock, a group of parents, staff, and students are raising red flags over the potentially dangerous environment at their local schools—and so far, district officials have only disregarded them.

Round Rock Independent School District is situated in the northern suburbs of Austin, in a community long considered safe from the craziness of the state’s notoriously liberal capital city. Yet, based on a series of tips, Texas Scorecard has interviewed a handful of individuals experiencing a free-for-all locker room rule in the district’s schools; many of these individuals even know of school plans to place boys in girls’ hotel rooms during school trips.

To protect the minors and their families from harassment or punishment, this report will refer to these students, parents, and responsible staff by pseudonyms.

Two female high school students—referred to as Heather and Lauren—told Texas Scorecard about their first experiences in the troubling series of events.

“I became aware of it about a month ago when I was getting dressed for school [in the locker room] out of my sweaty gym clothes, and I had just taken my shirt off,” said Heather, “when I noticed someone who looked a lot like a dude standing there using the sink and stuff. And I got really scared because I didn’t know that they were a biological male … so I quickly put my shirt back on then I immediately left with all my stuff.”

Lauren relayed a similar story. “I remember I was going in [to the locker room] and I was getting changed when, out in the open, I saw an individual walk in who I know is a biological male,” Lauren said. “It just kind of really caught me by surprise; it caught me off guard. So, I just quickly got dressed and just got out really quickly.”

Snip.

Soon after, several parents got involved; for the sake of this story, we’ll refer to them as Crystal and Julie. They first sent an open records request to the district, asking for their bathroom/private facilities policy (with no response as of yet). They then sent their questions up the district food chain, first to a teacher (who replied they did not have the power to fix the situation), then to a high school principal, the school board, and finally the superintendent and his leadership team.

“At Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the school board’s policy on ‘gender expression’ provides a similar environment as presently experienced at RRISD schools, a ninth-grade girl was allegedly raped in a school bathroom by a so-called gender-fluid male student wearing a skirt,” wrote Julie to the school board.

“Please take the time to craft, with parent input … a district-wide policy and action plan to address this dilemma.”

Only two of the seven school board members—the same two who were the only ones fighting for parental rights and transparency in the district’s other recent tumultuous events—responded.

“Yesterday Trustee [Mary] Bone and I both inquired to the superintendent, in writing, about this,” wrote RRISD Trustee Danielle Weston. “I seek to protect our students’ safety and do not want what happened in Loudon County to happen here.”

Meanwhile, the parents and Lauren were able to meet with one of the district’s high school principals, who actually confirmed they will allow anyone inside any private room, including boys inside the girls’ dressing rooms.

“That is what I’ve been told from [the legal department], that every student is permitted to use a restroom if they choose to,” the principal said.

“So this policy comes from legal?” asked Julie.

“Mhm,” the principal replied.

Later in the conversation, Julie asked who in the district is creating the policy.

“So does legal have a policy in place?” she asked.

“No there’s no policy in place,” the principal replied. “The policy is this: Every one student at a time, every situation one at a time. And if the student chooses to use the restroom [of their choice], they’re going to be allowed to use that restroom.”

The principal then suggested if they wanted to feel safer, the biological female students could make their own adjustments. He said they could go to a different locker room, change in a bathroom stall, go home, or even change inside a pop-up tent in the bathroom.

You will be made to care, and you will be made to conform. How many fingers, Winston?