Wealthy White Liberals Are Reduced to Meeting In Shameful Secret Just to Complain About the Cult of #Woke That Has Taken Hold of Their Pricey Private Schools

Honestly, could not happen to more deserving people.

If children have to be sacrificed to the Woke Demon-Gods, then it's just and right that it be your children before anyone else's.

The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.

But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join.

In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.

By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year--a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert's daughter-in-law, on its board--is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school's new plan to become an "anti-racist institution" -- unveiled this July, in a 20-page document -- is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

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"They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin," one mother says....

"The school can ask you to leave for any reason," said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. "Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer."

One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, tells me: "I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels." Another joked: "We need to feed our families. Oh, and pay $50,000 a year to have our children get indoctrinated."

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Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of "Latinx," or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them. Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond. The parents know this, and so woke is now the lingua franca of the nation's best prep schools. As one mother in Los Angeles puts it: "This is what all the colleges are doing, so we have to do it. The thinking is: if Harvard does it, it must be good."

"I am in a cult. Well, that's not exactly right. It's that the cult is all around me and I am trying to save kids from becoming members." He sounds like a Scientology defector, but he is a math teacher at one of the most elite high schools in New York City.

This teacher is talking with me because he is alarmed by the toll this ideology is taking on his students. "I started seeing what was happening to the kids. And that's what I couldn't take. They are being educated in resentment and fear. It's extremely dangerous."

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The science program at Fieldston would make any parent swoon. The electives for 11th- and 12th-graders, according to the school’s website, include immunology, astronomy, neuroscience, and pharmacology.

But physics looks different these days. "We don't call them Newton's laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. "We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to 'decenter whiteness," and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics."

I hope that NeverTrump -- mostly a movement of upper-middle-class liberals who don't want to pay Democrat-level taxes but who otherwise support the Democrat Party's endless culture warring -- finds their children particularly targeted by this Woke Cult.

posted by Ace at 05:49 PM

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