The Week in Woke

from @GuntherEagleman on X

Ro Khanna @RoKhanna

It is absurd that Palo Alto School district just voted to remove honors biology for all students & already removed honors English. They call it de-laning. I call it an assault on excellence. I took many honors classes at Council Rock High in PA.

Mark Hemingway
@Heminator

May 13
It's pretty amazing how omnipresent critical race theory was for a while -- hucksters such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D'Angelo, and Nikole Hannah-Jones et al. were everywhere -- and how absent they are now.

A pretty big cultural victory.

Eh, maybe. I still see the hateful DEI charity-hire Jemelle Hill on TV, pushing anti-white racism.

technology sista (aspiring) @typeclonghouse

"DEI until they come for my son's AP classes" Democrat

A Democrat running for office in a very MAGA Virginia district needs you to know what she gets up to at night.

Specifically: She's a swinger, baby!

Rorrer, a Democratic candidate for Virginia's House of Delegates in the 47th district, revealed Saturday on social media that she is married and ethically nonmonogamous, meaning she and her husband consensually date other couples together.

"In politics, people love to dig up the unexpected and spin it into a spectacle," the 47-year-old wrote on social media. "I don't do shame, and I sure won't give anyone else the opportunity to tell my story."

Rorrer told HuffPost on Tuesday that while no one was threatening to out her, she believes word of her lifestyle would have gotten out of her inner circle in Stuart, Virginia, her hometown with a population of just over 1,000.

A professor was arrested by Yale police for a "racist" statement she never made.

I never thought I'd end up in handcuffs and a jail cell for something I didn't say.

But last May, police in New Haven, Conn., arrested me -- because a parking attendant falsely claimed I had used a racial slur against him nearly a year earlier.

I denied it. I asked the cops to check the parking lot's surveillance video.

They didn't -- and the state charged me first with disorderly conduct, then with three counts of breach of peace in the second degree.

It took almost a year, tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and endless stress before the nightmare ended on March 27, when the prosecutor finally dropped all charges.

Why? "Insufficient evidence," "inconsistencies," "credibility issues," video that "clearly contradicted" the accuser's claims -- and a possibility that I wasn't even the right person.

The judge dismissed the case.

If this can happen to me -- a First Amendment advocate with resources, legal counsel and a public reputation to defend -- it can happen to anyone.

In 2011, while still a student at Yale University, I founded the Buckley Institute, named for conservative hero William F. Buckley, Jr.

Our mission is to promote intellectual diversity and freedom of speech at Yale.

For the past decade, we've hosted an annual Disinvitation Dinner featuring speakers who have been disinvited from and disrupted on college campuses.

And now here I was, facing not merely an attempt at cancellation, but actual criminal charges that could mean prison if I was convicted.

It did not exactly feel like a coincidence.

The interest in my case seemed to have more to do with what the Buckley Institute represents than anything I ever did, or was accused of doing.

...

They made the malicious assumption that those who defend free speech do so to say offensive things.

The case was a farce from the start: There were no threats, no violence -- just a made-up accusation, rubber-stamped by a system that didn't bother to check basic facts before putting someone's life through a meat grinder.

When the state finally obtained the video footage I had asked the police to view before arresting me -- footage that had been accessible all along -- it showed me, on multiple dates, calmly parking, getting out of my car and walking away.

No confrontation, not even any interaction, with the accuser.

No slurs.

No drama.

Yet for nearly a year, I lived under a cloud of suspicion.

My experience should terrify anyone who values free speech and due process.

...

This wasn't about justice.

It was about ideology run amok.

When the woke campus mindset infects the criminal-justice system, fairness takes a back seat to political influence and pressure.

The parking attendant's attorney suggested as much when he objected to the prosecutor's decision to drop the case by bemoaning "the caste system in this country" in court.

The real systemic problem?

It's not bias.

It's cowardice.

It's a criminal-justice system that rushes to judgment, punishes the innocent and works on a sluggish timeline to correct its own mistakes, regardless of the cost to the accused.

If this is what free speech in America now looks like, we're all in more trouble than we realize.

It doesn't matter if you commit the offenses the left imagines you committed, because if they even imagined you did it, you crossed the line. The very fact that they can imagine you doing something means that there's some vibe you're giving off that much be punished and purged until you denounce your vibes.

A district judge in California of all places has ruled that schools must provide parents an opt-out for gender indoctrination.

Fox 5 San Diego reported:

Carlos and Jenny Encinas have two boys who attended La Costa Heights Elementary school in the Encinitas Union School District in the Southern District of California. In May 2024, their fifth-grader's teacher read his class the book, My Shadow is Pink, which urges children to question their own gender identity. Following the reading, their son was forced to watch a read-aloud video of the book with his kindergartener "buddy" as part of the school's mentoring program. He was then required to participate in an activity where he drew the kindergartener's shadow, using the color that "represents" him.

Featuring a boy who sees his shadow as pink instead of blue, My Shadow is Pink promotes the idea that children can change their own gender, encouraging kids to find the color of their shadow described as "your inner-most you." The story displays the boy learning to cope with being true to his inner self, starting when he decides to wear a dress on his first day of school. His dad, originally full of "anxiety and stress" about the issue, changes his mind and puts on a dress too. He encourages his son to wear a dress to school, and if anyone doesn't like it, then "they are the fool."

The Encinas' fifth-grade son, a strong Christian, was very uncomfortable with being used as a mouthpiece for views contrary to his beliefs. Carlos approached the school with two requests: notification when sensitive topics would be read in school and an allowance for his children to opt-out of participation. Unfortunately, both requests were denied.

The judge issued an injunction ordering the school to provide parental notification and opt-outs for concerned children. But this is only a temporary injunction; no idea if the shithole state of California will respect it.

See the article for the whole story.

Our genius media:

What a weird thing to say. The Washington Post knows that its audience is entirely atheist/non-Christian, so they felt they had to explain what "hallelujah" might mean.

And their explanation isn't really accurate. Yes, "hallelujah" is Latin but in the same way that "taco" is English. The word exists in the language, yes, but it's just imported from another language with hardly a change.

James Carville offers a list of seven words that must be banned in the Democrat Party.

He started off the list with the phrases "communities of color" and "people of color." He said that in Democrats' zeal to prove how not racist they are, these phrases actually are a bit racist because they imply that all minorities are identical and not unique. But if Democrats stop using these phrases, will they then have to concede that not all minorities think alike? A tall order indeed. Next on the list was the phrase "generational change." Carville asked, "Why do you want to limit the appeal of your message to younger people? ..." Plenty of Americans of all ages want some drastic change. Next on the verboten list was the word "structural." Carville stated the obvious: "We're not going to attack the structural issues in the world right now." I would add two things: one, it sounds pretty elitist, and two, what are structural issues anyway?

The next one should definitely be on the chopping block: the word "equity." Again, an elitist-sounding word. What Joe Sixpack kind of guy rambles on about equity? Carville again laid a truth on Democrats, saying, "People basically don't know what it means, and if they do know what it means, it looks like you tried to force an outcome."

Other words Democrats need to stop saying: "community" and "oligarchy." See the link for that.

A transgender -- a man pretending to be a woman -- complains that 23 and Me reported, accurately, that he has a Y-chromosome, as men have. He wants to know if there's a special 23andMe which will lie to him and tell him he has XX chromosomes.

I call the below video, "Our Strength."

posted by Ace at 06:23 PM

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