PalaZinnian Liberation
How to Destroy Public Education and Still Look Like the Good Guy
The budget conversation looms, ballots are due for school boards and the bond, and I’ve got an interesting little follow up to the “NW Knife Guy” aka Raul story.
But local activist groups and the public school teachers who love them were on extra-bullshit-mode last week, so that’s what you get.
I once claimed to Andy Chandler you can tell how angry I am by how much I write. Good luck with this one.
There is a lot of context to this beast. I’ve footnoted and hyperlinked what I can. Feel free to push back on any of it and I will bury you in additional sources. Try me. Angry Max is also Research Max.
Our cast of important characters today will include Howard Zinn, Macklemore, Adolf Hitler, Angela Davis, and more! Spoilers: I dislike all of them. (obviously with varying degrees of intensity)
I mentioned that “Teaching Palestine” was back in the news in:
It’s been an ongoing saga since October 7th, 2023 for some reason. This week saw a resurgence of the issue as lefty education resource Rethinking Schools prepared for the launch of their new book Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices. They held three events/trainings/sales pitches for our local public school teachers:
For the Beaverton Education Association (BEA) at the BEA union hall.
A Zoom book launch party featuring celebrity guest Macklemore!
A teach-in for all Portland educators on Saturday at an event cosponsored by Oregon Educators for Palestine (OEP), the Center for the Study & Preservation of Palestine Library (SWANA Rose Culture + Community Center), and the Portland Association of Teachers' Social Justice & Community Outreach Committee.1
There was even a free lunch at the two in-person events, just don't ask questions about who paid for them. That’s none of our business.
The argument from these activists is that “Palestine is one of the great silences in the official curriculum.” That’s why teachers need to go off-book and educate students with or without the blessing of their school administration, boards of education, or parent groups. After all, this is (possibly) the most pressing issue of our time, or at least interconnected with all other crises and oppressions.
That’s nonsense.
They aren’t teaching your kids about the Israel-Hamas war. They are teaching your kids why Israel should not exist, along with a host of other conspiracy theories. This curriculum, about a supposed genocide, is eliminationist to its core. The irony.
This fun little poster was hanging inside the BEA Union Hall during the presentation. The Jews have absolutely no ancestral ties to the Levant. That’s why the war is wrong. Not because war itself is wrong. Not because the civilian death toll is too high. Not any of the reasons I am happy to debate with you because they at least come from a place of shared humanity and compassion.
No. It’s because Jews don’t belong there and never did. Fuck sharing land and “Two States.” They need to go back to Poland.
Vasily Grossman described antisemitism as a “mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and state systems. Tell me what you accuse Jews of, I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.”
Nothing new under the sun2, after all.
Local Context
I will begin by giving you articles from more emotionally regulated writers than myself… and then I will attack the issue with my particular brand of “trenchant invective and deep research.”
Here’s the first story: Fresh Off a Strike, Portland Association of Teachers Turns Its Attention to Israel - WW, December 14, 2023. This was two months into the war and PAT was already positive we were looking at a genocide. Of course, PAT knew it was a genocide back in 2020… but let’s not get distracted by facts! We’re here to discuss the anti-factual crowd.
The issue popped off in June of the next year, when we first heard about “Teaching and Organizing for Palestine.”
Portland Teachers’ Union Publishes Handbook on “Teaching and Organizing for Palestine” in the Classroom - WW, June 3rd, 2024
Murmurs: Teachers’ Union Doubles Down on Middle East - WW, June 5th, 2024
School Board Members Weigh In on Teacher Union’s Palestine Advocacy - WW, June 23rd, 2024
Two Portland City Council Candidates Criticize Teachers’ Union Handouts on Palestine - WW, June 27, 2024
So PAT started promoting a new off-the-books curriculum3. When this came to light, they created a Know-Your-Rights training and a tip-line for teachers who were getting in trouble for things like distributing t-shirts calling for the destruction of an entire nation.
I maintain that this shit is vile, antisemitic, and anti-American. It’s agitprop created decades ago by horrible people and, because the Left is composed of just as many losers as the Right, we are still dealing with it today.
If you want a calm argument for the “just criticizing Israel” crowd, we can head up to Seattle. The Cholent4 has a great article on the battle to bring Palestine into the classroom:
Getting our kids’ math and reading scores up to grade level should be the first priority of Washington’s schools. How is it possible that we’re falling so far behind when we’re the home of some of the most brilliant companies in the world? And don’t tell me it’s about funding.
Moreover, if you feel an absolute need to teach about Israel/Palestine, would it be so hard to bring in balanced materials? You could study news coverage from Al Jazeera through Jerusalem Post and call it “media literacy.” Have students debate the sides, then switch and debate the other side. You could study primary source stories, maps, the global fallout from World War I, art, do virtual museum and library tours — there are so many options. We do not have to rely solely on the Zinn Project for this. Thoughtful discussions and activities will produce engaged citizens, not just robots who get extra history credit for walking out of school to chant slogans derived from anti-Jewish sources they know nothing about.
I like Emily and her publication, and I think it’s important to point out that not all criticism of Israel’s actions is automatically antisemitic. It is very possible to create a curriculum that both introduces students to criticism of the war and remains factual and pro-critical thinking. You do not need to sink to eliminationist rhetoric or conspiracy to criticize a foreign nation or a war.
These groups have not succeeded at creating that hypothetical curriculum, likely because they were never interested in the pursuit. This “Pro-Palesinian” movement that has infested education in the United States knew they were looking at a genocide before the first bomb fell. While they were cheering for the massacre of October 7th, they were already writing (or had written in advance) their talking points. They have never been interested in facts or reason.
Here is some additional coverage on this curriculum by K-12 Extremism Tracker:
The Curriculum
Clearly I don’t like the people who are promoting this stuff. It’s ahistorical propaganda and it’s driving Jewish parents to pull their kids out of public schools. I also don’t think these groups are going about things in a transparent way. Many parents and other teachers are not on board and a lot of this is being sold behind closed doors. That’s not a reassuring look for public schools.
Let’s take a crack at digging into the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ of this issue. I’ve already named Olivia Katbi as leading the charge on the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)’s anti-Israel platform and I’ve pointed out that the PAT Vice-President is Alisha Chavez, a DSA member. In fact, PAT is full of DSA members and those members are big fans of Rethinking Schools. The trouble is that no one I’ve named actually wrote the curriculum. They promoted the activism, and protected the teachers doing it, but who is actually shaping what our students are supposed to be learning?
Rethinking Schools
Here’s a promotional image for the book launch of Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices. The “solidarity price” is only $30. We’ve got all the major contributors listed:
Anti-racism educator Jesse Hagopian, Philly High School teacher Adam Sanchez, Bridge Academy Principal Samia Shoman, Rethinking Schools Curriculum Editor and retired Portland High School Teacher Bill Bigelow, and Grant High School Teacher Suzanna Kassouf.
Most of these educators got started with Rethinking Schools over Climate Justice or Black Lives Matter curriculum. If you were familiar with Rethinking Schools before today, that’s probably your context for them as well.
Grant High Teacher Suzanna Kassouf is a primary driver inside Portland Public Schools. You can check our her totally rational thoughts “just criticizing Israel” here:
To be fair to her, I do remember vilifying “their liberation,” if by that she means the murder, rape, torture, and capture of innocent civilians. Yeah. I still vilify that shit. Fuck you Suzanna.
Lots of tears for the Palestinians from a woman who cannot condemn terrorism or check her sources. When I mentioned to local teachers it was Kassouf who was driving a lot of this they were not surprised.
They also had a special guest: Macklemore!
You can watch the whole event here:
K12 Extremism Tracker has broken things out into clips so you don’t have to watch the entire agonizing thing in one go. It’s a rough time, especially if you have any knowledge of the conflict. Imagine hiring someone to educate you on World War II but they only used TikTok as a source. That’s the level of expertise we’re dealing with and it is the source an increasing number of teachers are turning to.
Not widely respected history texts - those are corporate and probably controlled by the poisonous influence of “Israel.” Instead, these teachers turn to Rethinking Schools and Al-Jazeera5. After all, “mainstream” curriculum and news sources like CNN have “no place in the classroom.” It’s all Zionist lies.
What about the book blurbs? Who recommends this thing? Surely respected education experts and scholars, right?
Well…
First up we have Mona and Rashid Khalidi - former terrorists, present terrorism supporters, and academic frauds. Both of these assholes literally worked for the PLO.6 I cannot imagine curriculum on the post 9/11 period of American history being promoted by a former Al-Qaeda member, or that being seen as a good thing. Diversity of opinion I guess?
And just to be an extra big dick - according to MacArthur Genius Ta-Nehisi Coates, in this whole debacle, I am meant to be the “white guy,” and this motherfucker is the black/brown person?
The Marxist critical theory of oppressor/oppressed starts to break down a bit when you’ve got a wealthy, celebrated professor arguing for bloodshed, me over here calling him an asshole, and somehow I’m the “genocidal maniac” while public school teachers are cozying up to Khalidi so they can push his book to your kids. Seems extremely stupid but I don’t have a PhD so maybe I’m just missing something.
Okay, back to the blurbs! Who’s next?
Stefanie Fox - JVP Executive Director. Moron. The less said the better.
Robin D. G. Kelley - Scholar of black radicalism and long time BDS/JVP stooge. Probably the least shitty person on this list? The bar for decency is very low.
Susan Abulhawa - the “most widely read Palestinian author” according to her website. If that’s true, Palestinian culture is truly fucked. Let’s pull some quotes!
“Calling Israel a Nazi state doesn’t quite capture the depths of their malevolence.”
“These [motherfuckers] brought Nazi Germany to Palestine. That’s all Israel is—an ironic transplant of Europe’s Nazi supremacist ideology.”
“This is your daily reminder that Zionism is the contemporary face of Nazism and white supremacy. The fairytales of Israel’s benevolence, democracy, etc are promulgated by an intensely funded global propaganda machine.”
And if you’re thinking “Well, Max, the Gaza death toll has brought a lot of heated feelings up for people,” then you don’t know me at all, because all of those quotes are from 2022 or earlier! I don’t need to choose from the things these shitheads have said in the middle of a war. This is what they’ve been saying on a random Thursday for their entire professional lives.
This is the crowd cheering for the new off-book public school curriculum. Now that’s still guilt by association. We need to look at what’s in the curriculum. Surely, it’s just that a bunch of terrorists and their fans are excited to see Palestine acknowledged in the classroom period, right? It couldn’t be that the curriculum itself is rotted by their ahistorical and antisemitic ideas?
…oh reader.
Truth™ in Practice
This is from Abdulhawa’s blurb:
For decades, a manipulative Zionist narrative with no historic or forensic basis has been pushed into schools and imposed on popular imagination, while indigenous Palestinian voices were excluded or muted. But the truth, like water, has a way of seeping through the most fortified lies.
Truth™. That word is very important to this crowd and Rethinking Schools uses it a lot. “Teach Truth,” as opposed to what the schools are currently teaching. You know, what you and I grew up learning. Jewish lies have filled our heads for generations. The public school system has been an instrument of our indoctrination. This is the correction.
So what is the Truth™ your kids will finally have access to?
Bill Bigelow (remember him from earlier?) explains in his “Seeds of Violence” teaching activity for the Zinn Education Project:
As Rashid Khalidi summarizes in his essential book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, “the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” Seemingly to frighten teachers and students from grappling with the origins of today’s crisis, politicians, as well as corporate media and textbooks, have a thousand ways to warn us how “complex” the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is. And it is. But Khalidi distills this complexity in the simplicity of that single sentence. In a participatory way, the “Seeds of Violence” mixer/mystery seeks to do the same thing for students — applying that framework to the conflict’s earliest days.
First, a reminder that Khalidi is far from trustworthy. His book is nonsense written by a former terrorist who has a creative grasp on reality.
Second… (ahem) that is some blood and soil business, right? The Motherland, raped by foreign barbarians!? How ever can they be resisted?7
The idea that Jews have no ancestral ties to that region is a very old antisemitic conspiracy theory that really popped off in the 1970s8, the same decade some of our cast of characters were becoming big names in academia as well as terrorism. Coincidence?
This exercise of Bigelow’s is a classroom role-play, very similar to a murder mystery party or the other People’s Tribunal9 exercises that Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project are fond of. You’ll notice a lot of “People’s” stuff from these groups, as opposed to corporate/mainstream/etc. keeping us from Truth™ and brainwashing our kids.
If you recognize some of this rhetoric from the MAGA Right, you’re paying attention. Gold star!
I’m a big fan of roleplaying as a social activity and a learning tool, but are we really being asked to trust Bill Bigelow’s writing of the “Zionist” characters? What does this look like in practice?
Well, if he can just make shit up and not get laughed out of the conversation, I’m going to take a swing at it myself. I’ll trust you to not unsubscribe or change your opinion of me as Portland’s greatest mind.10 Here’s my imagining of the setup for this exercise:
TEACHER:
Okay! Aiden and Aaeden, you two will be playing the settler-colonialist, white-supremacist, Zionists - Theodor Herzl and Arthur Ruppin.
Ayden, you will be playing Lord Arthur Balfour of the British Empire.
Aden, Aydon, and A’ Den, you can play three Palestinian peasants I literally made up!
Everyone ready? Begin colonizing!You take a group of high school students, cast a few of them as the predefined “bad guys” and ask them to role-play out a historical scenario. I’m sure they take a lot away from this.
Unfortunately no one gets to play Haj Amin al-Husseini, but I guess it would be inappropriate to have students role-play him fellating Adolf Hitler as they planned to globalize the intifada The Jewish Question.
Let’s do another role-play:
AL-HUSSEINI:Adolf, these fucking Jews! A lot of them are moving back to the Levant and buying land. It’s nasty. They’re everywhere, like vermin. It’s giving ISRAEL and we do NOT want that place making a comeback.
HITLER:Oh mein Gott, I knooow! Hussy, listen. I have a... solution. We’re working it right now. Meanwhile, we’ll push south, meet up with you and the rest of the Arabs, wipe the Jew dogs AND the British Empire protecting them off the face of the Earth? I’ll take Europe, Japan has got the East, and you guys can have like a new Arab Empire? What will this be? The 14th?
AL-HUSSEINI:Fuck me, I have no clue. It’s kind of our thing and we’ve had a lot of them.
Okay, I like the plan. Kill the Jews, return all lands to Islam. Something about Japan... I wasn’t listening to that part. Dead Jews. Slaves. Based.
HITLER (NODDING):Based indeed. One last thing - you gotta stop saying that “moving back to the Levant” shit. How about… ‘they’re invading Palestine just like they invaded Europe?’ Those rats scurry everywhere if they aren’t exterminated, ja?
AL-HUSSEINI:Okay, but if they aren’t from HERE, and they aren’t from THERE... Where ARE they from?
HITLER:They’re from hell! Who cares?! It’s just Jews. Don’t get distracted Hussy! If any of them survive we’ll convince their kids that ‘the diaspora’ is actually GOOD for them.
AL-HUSSEINI (GLANCING EXPECTANTLY):Right... it makes so much sense when YOU say it.
I love you Adolf.
HITLER (LEANING IN CLOSE - DEEP EYE CONTACT):Mein little Mufti...
See Bill? I can do pop-history too. And yes, the Nazis absolutely understood the Jews were native to the land while al-Husseini argued against this11 but even great couples fight and Hitler and his little Hussy were a great couple. They both hated Jews12 and squabbling over exactly what hole we scurried out of wasn’t top of mind.
It’s also worth noting that I don’t really care about the indigenous argument… basically ever. Israel is a legal nation. She exists and that is the only justification she needs for continuing to do so.
Japanese people are not indigenous to their islands but they’ve been there since before Polynesians first arrived in Hawaii, who are considered indigenous. Jews existed in the Levant over 3000 years ago and have been there continuously, if in fluctuating numbers, forming the basis of our claim to indigeneity. And I still don’t really care. I don’t care to rank native Hawaiians against Japanese people. They’ve both inhabited their lands for hundreds of years. I think if you have a nation with borders and someone wants to change that, they need to go to war with you and win. I also think your allies should help you prevent that.
Israel was formed legally, in the traditional ancestral home of the people who founded her. That last part is nice, but the first part is international law. If your argument is predicated on inventing history to undermine this, fuck off. We all know what you’re really after and we’ve heard this song and dance before.
So the curriculum is ahistorical and derived from 19th and 20th century antisemitic conspiracy theory. There are many more examples and you can browse through it and count them yourself here, here, and here.
This rot isn’t new, however. It’s the natural consequence of decades of work to erode our faith in public education, carried out by groups of public educators. Wild, right? Who could ever have guessed that selling alternative history to support activist priors would cause trust in institutions to break down?
Howard Zinn
Rethinking Education is tied to the Zinn Education Project, created to carry on the “good work” of Activist-Historian Howard Zinn.
Howard Zinn was a dishonest actor and for decades we didn’t care. It didn’t seem to matter because he spoke to captive audiences of leftists in academia. In order to be radicalized, you had to seek his stuff out.
Zinn pursued a Better World™ and Truth™ while apologizing for violent communist dictatorships. He abused the asymmetrical knowledge American Leftists have of oppression and government abuse.
We know the kinds of things the US Government gets up to, because we live here and have eyes and ears, but we do not fully understand the abuses of Communist regimes. We have not lived under them and the grass is always greener, etc.
Howard Zinn and his friends did travel to the Soviet Union13. They know about the better world outside of capitalism/imperialism/etc. They are here to tell you Communism is pretty cool, man. What your square teachers are feeding you is government cheese. It’s Reaganomics, the Christian Right and Zionist propaganda.
This may sound like the 1970s, but the American Left never got over this shit. Maybe we had a nice run of Liberalism in the 90s and early 2000s, but the next generation of college students came up under former terrorist professors who never forgave the US for the end of the Cold War, the survival of capitalism, or the continued existence of Israel.
All this time, Rethinking Schools was growing - encouraging more young educators to go “off book” and get the Truth™ to their students. This culminated in 2007/2008 with the creation of the Zinn Education Project to “bring Zinn’s work to a new generation of students.”14
They bridged Climate Justice to Antiracism to Decolonization to From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.15 They branded it as Teaching Truth and critical thinking in a world at war with history.
In a nutshell: Republicans want to prevent schools from teaching you history, which they have been lying about the whole time anyway, so please buy our book, which will teach you about the lies your teachers have been teaching you before the Republicans stop them (the teachers) from teaching them (the lies) to you.
It never made sense. You have nothing to lose but your chains. A better world is possible. Buy the book!
Poetic Truth and the Resistance
In 2012, History News Network (HNN) awarded David Barton's The Jefferson Lies “The Least Credible History Book in Print.” It beat the number two contender by only nine votes (650 vs 641). The silver medalist was our boy Howard Zinn.
However, the most intense discussion -- on HNN's boards, at least -- centered on the runner-up, Zinn's A People's History, with some commenters on one end condemning the book as "cheap propaganda" and "the historians equivalent of medical malpractice"; others took a more moderate line, criticizing the book as partly "caricature" and an "exercise in tortured reasoning," but praising the book for "[reminding] us of some facts about our history that make for discomfort." "[Zinn] may be criticized for giving movements from below a heroic aura," one commenter wrote, "but this is not the same as a factual misrepresentation."
There’s a defense of Zinn that often comes in the form of sure he didn’t get things exactly right, but isn’t challenging “the received wisdom” a good all on its own?
Obviously the only antidote to bad speech is more speech, and ahistorical nonsense is best countered by historical sense. But what happens when the gatekeepers (teachers/curriculum writers) and watchdogs (journalists) don’t care so much about the accuracy of things they like?
Michael Hobbes is the co-host of You’re Wrong About - a podcast that “reconsider[s] an event, person or phenomenon that’s been miscast in the public imagination.” That premise is great, if you can stick the landing. Hobbes doesn’t manage to. An infamous example is the Matthew Shepard debacle.
When I was younger, Matthew Shepard was beaten to death in Wyoming because he was gay. Only, that’s almost certainly not true. The reality is much more complex. That reality matters to those of us trying to actually produce a “better world,” because we need that world to be based in reality. So why did I bring up Michael Hobbes and his podcast about correcting errors in the public imagination?
Because of his feelings on truth around Matthew Shepard and other stories:
In the Matthew Shepard episode, Michael goes into a truly eye-opening tangent. He outright says "well, let's say Shepard's death wasn't actually a hate crime. So what? There are lots of gay hate crimes every year. If a journalist used Shepard's as a hook to bring attention to the gay hate crimes, does it matter if the original hook was inaccurate?" He literally talks about stories that are too good to fact check, and how he can kinda see the temptation to not dig too deep if a juicy story helps your social crusade. Like, does it matter if what you're writing is the exact "truth" as long as you're serving the Truth!
Challenging Received Wisdom and serving the Truth™.
See also: Alternative Ways of Knowing and bell fucking hooks…16
Getting facts correct comes second to getting things right, morally. Here are a few of my “favorites” gems from this new, better received wisdom on the Left. If you know the words, sing along:
Modern policing evolved from slave patrols and therefore must be abolished.
Free markets will never result in lower rents because that’s not how capitalism works.
The phrase “rule of thumb” comes from folk law concerning the appropriate method of beating your wife.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a dedicated Communist and friend of the Soviet Union.
Huey Newton was framed for the murder of 17-year-old Kathleen Smith.
Retail theft is a boogie man made up by corporations to excuse shutting down stores where workers are trying to unionize.
The moon landing was faked with help from Stanley Kubrick.17
9/11 was at least allowed to happen by the United States, even if they didn’t direct it. Or maybe it was the Jews.18
Speaking of them - Ashkenazi Jews are actually Turks who converted in the 9th century and have no ancestral ties to the Levant. They aren’t real Jews.
The Holodomor was a Western, Fascist fabrication.
The Cambodian Genocide was a Western, Fascist fabrication.
The Uyghur Repression was invented, or at least, exaggerated by the CIA.
Tibet had it coming.
The United States Government under Joe Biden helped fund and carry out an ongoing genocide in Gaza and the Democratic Party did nothing to stop him.
I have, personally, had Leftists repeat each of those claims to me. Several times in a few cases. So yeah, I definitely want Marxists teaching kids. They have such moral and rational politics.
This Can Only Hurt Public Schools
So we have dishonest actors, activist-historians with questionable ethics (and sense), literal terrorist (and terrorism sympathetic) college professors promoting public school curriculum that is transparently false, ideologically slanted, propaganda for foreign terror organizations (some of which previously employed the above-mentioned professors).
This curriculum is pushed by teacher’s unions who are increasingly captured by the DSA, an organization that has become so antisemitic that Rep. Shri Thanedar renounced his membership. The unions are unresponsive to criticism involving the facts above.
Are we still shocked by this uniquely stupid anti-factual period in American history? Are we surprised as our most trusted universities battle the federal government in a free speech crisis?
Are you ready to admit this is one of the reasons Trump won?
These universities are stocked to the rafters with former terrorists and we ignored it because they existed only on the margins of society in their ivory tower. It was all silly theory… until it left campus and entered local government and the public schools because we had a deadened reflex for calling this crap out.
Now we have to figure out a way to push back on it without taking the Trump approach. Unfortunately that’s going to require a lot of arguments about Truth™. It’s going to take a lot of what Kmele Foster popularized in 2020 as “Be Brave. Call Bullshit.”
It’s also going to require some of you to acknowledge that figures on like Chris Rufo had (at least a bit) of a point.19 The American Right was pointing out something legitimately wrong with education in this country. I don’t think they had any of the solutions, but they were pointing to the actual problem.
We ignored it, to our peril, and now we get the Trump Years and the stupid, malicious overcorrection.
We need to say true things as often as possible. In order to prove they are true, we have to back those things up with evidence. It will make people mad, but you have to do it because the alternative is to let the cruelest, dumbest people you’ve ever met have a slap-fight over public schools until they are defunded.
A Parting Shot
Let me give you a truth about a progressive hero that most of the above mentioned characters probably look up to:
Angela Davis. The perfect distillation of my point. Here’s the famous quote you may be familiar with, and may even love:
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” - Angela Davis
The problem is that many of the things Davis couldn’t accept were things a lot of us would like to keep around. Like liberal democracy, and an accurate accounting of history.
Davis is in the National Women’s Hall of Fame and she’s considered a feminist icon. She also holds the Lenin Peace Prize. Yeah, that Lenin. The man who killed… it’s honestly hard to say exactly but tens of millions? At least? A good portion of those being women.
Feminist icon.
Imagine accepting the Hitler Peace Prize. I guess I could see Kanye doing it.
Davis is also the Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So she’s one of the professors these fools above learned from.
And so what? She sucks and her ideas are often moronic. That doesn’t mean everything she’s ever written or thought was wrong, but when academia is flooded with people like Davis, the eventual results are a little obvious. I also included her for one other reason.
I wanted to share this story, from Alan Dershowitz’s Chutzpah:
“Davis, who was one of the leaders of the American Communist party, was charged with murder in connection with a 1970 shoot-out at the Marin County courthouse. She claimed that as a black, a woman, and a Communist, she could not receive a fair trial in any American Court. She was acquitted, so maybe she was right! After her acquittal, she announced that she would be devoting the remainder of her life to defending political prisoners like herself. A short time later, I read that she was going to Moscow to receive some human rights prize from the Soviet Union. I called her office and gave them a list of Jewish prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union — Jews who had been imprisoned because they wanted to emigrate to Israel or to learn about their heritage. I asked if she would be willing to speak up on behalf of these political prisoners. Several days later, I received a call back from Ms. Davis’s secretary informing me that Davis had looked into the people on my list and none of them were political prisoners. ‘They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism.’ Davis would urge that they be kept in prison where they belonged.”
- Alan Dershowitz20
And there it is, again. They’ve been saying it. Loudly. For decades.
It didn’t matter because they were marginal lefty figures. You had to actually read their books and go to their classes to get radicalized by them. Now we have social media, and you can radicalize yourself from the comfort of your bed.
If you want to do that, have at it. This is a free country and we have free speech, but public school teachers do not. We do not fund these schools to provide kids with subsidized access to violent, ahistorical propaganda written or promoted by terrorists.
We elect school boards to oversee curriculum and serve as gate keepers in our name. We do not empower individual teachers to take it upon themselves to re-educate students in a politically slanted Truth™ that has little connection to consensus reality. We certainly don’t empower them to hide it from us. This is a democracy and we are entitled to know what the teachers in public schools are presenting as fact.
The Truth™ being offered up by this crowd is wrapped in their stunted, binary world view. Oppressor/Oppressed, Black/White, Indigenous/Colonizer, Socialism/Fascism - all things fall within one of two groups.
We know this isn’t true. This is not reality, and sane, reasonable people are not going to allow their kids to be taught this way. They are going to pull their kids from these schools and only students whose parents lack the financial ability to choose will be forced to endure this garbage.
That doesn’t sound very progressive at all. It actually sounds like a great way to end up with school choice.
They removed the PAT committee from social media later but I take screenshots.
An ahistorical, antifactual, antisemitic, pro-terrorism curriculum.
The state-run media of Qatar.
Involved in or directed the Munich Olympics Massacre (1972), Sabena Flight 571 Hijacking (1972), Lod Airport Massacre (1972), Ma’alot Massacre (1974), Kiryat Shmona Massacre (1974), Coastal Road Massacre (1978), Hijacking of the Achille Lauro (1985), among others. Just fighting for rights and freedom, y’all.
By any means necessary BABY! There is only one solution, after all…
See Arthur Koestler’s brutally debunked The Thirteenth Tribe (1976).
If you actually believe this, we need to have a talk. My credentials are that I’m literate - which is more than I can say for a good portion of Oregon graduates!
Although sometimes this argument was more along the lines of: their home in the region has not been continuous. The musical chairs of territorial disputes.
"Germany also knows that the claim that Jewry plays the role of an economic pioneer in Palestine is a lie. Only the Arabs work there, not the Jews." https://www.hoover.org/research/mufti-and-holocaust
Invited by the Soviet Union to receive the very sort of “wisdom” they are critical of in liberal democracies.
Arab
I do not care for bell hooks. I have not enjoyed her books. I would not like her in a postmodern box. I would not like her with a genderqueer fox. I do not care for bell hooks. She inspired too many crooks.
Another Jew.
I most recently heard this in a Trader Joe’s. Thankfully not the Jews part.
At least initially. I think he lost his mind to total audience capture.
Max~ What is the "interesting little follow up to the 'NW Knife Guy' aka Raul story"? Is it in this article?
Every article is a jewel. Still have no idea how the cognitive dissonance doesn't iron itself out organically here in Portland.
Hope everyone voted. Take the trash out.