"Anti-racism" is the ultimate Catch-22

Oct 23, 2020
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John,

Harvesting hypocrisy: When I went to bed on Election Night 2018, Republicans were ahead in a handful Orange County districts by close but healthy margins. When all the votes were totaled weeks later, however, Democrats succeeded in flipping all four seats. Ballot harvesting likely made the difference. The county registrar said activists were dropping ballots off by the hundreds. Now the GOP is fighting back by installing ballot dropboxes, and Democrats are up in arms, suing to stop the move. But Republicans aren’t backing down, with party leaders writing ([link removed]) :

We believe that temporarily holding [mail vote] ballots in a locked box at a church or local Party headquarters is more secure than a Party volunteer or paid operative holding harvested ballots collected from voters at a senior center in the back seat of his or her car—though both are legal.

This week, the Wall Street Journal editorial page pointed out ([link removed]) Democrats’ harvesting hypocrisy:

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2022 re-election campaign blasted out a message declaring “the GOP is terrified of losing—so they’re willing to lie, cheat, and threaten our democracy all for the sake of gaining power.” When Democrats harvest ballots, they are increasing voter access. When Republicans do it, it’s cheating. Glad we cleared that up.

And how Democrats’ moves mirror those in third-world countries – in more ways than one:

Democrats control every statewide office, a supermajority in the state Legislature, and 45 of 53 House seats. But they’re afraid they may pay a political price this year for bad governance that has resulted in double-digit unemployment, catastrophic wildfires, power outages, rising homelessness, water shortages and other #thirdworldproblems. So like leaders in one-party governments, Democrats are using the law to stymie their political opponents.

CPC work is making a difference: New data ([link removed]) presented by Mike Antonucci shows that teachers unions’ political contributions this election cycle are way down, approaching all-time lows (see chart below). This data suggests that efforts by organizations like CPC to educate employees about their workplace rights are having an impact. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its Janus decision that requiring government employees to pay dues to the unions that represent their workplaces is unconstitutional.

CPC is the only organization in California fighting the government union behemoth. By informing government union members about their right to stop paying all union dues and fees, more teachers are opting out, reducing union income and political spending.

Please share our personalizable Janus information ([link removed]) with government employees, employers, and in your government workplaces.

Contributions to Congressional Candidates from the NEA Fund for Children and Public Education


The political war on Californians: On the latest episode ([link removed]) of National Review’s Radio Free California, CPC President Will Swaim and board member David Bahnsen highlight how California’s political class continues its war on Californians, but nowhere is the fighting so lopsided as San Francisco. Gavin Newsom battles a virus only he can see. And they answer this question: When Kamala Harris tells a lie and there’s no honest media to check it, does it become true?

The battle for California is the battle for America: Too many American conservatives and libertarians have given up on California. As CPC contributor Edward Ring explains in a 5,000-word tour de force ([link removed]) this week, this fatalism is a mistake:

It is understandable that conservatives in the rest of the United States would be happy to write off California. But California is not writing off the rest of the United States, and therein lies grave danger to American prosperity and freedom….

What happens in California matters to the rest of the United States because California’s internal market is huge, its political and financial influence is powerful, and it rallies political allies throughout the U.S. If what California does to transform its own culture and economy isn’t stopped, the rest of the U.S. will fall into line. The result will be a comprehensive reinvention of society in all areas, political, economic, and cultural.…

What is at stake in California is not just California. It is the future of America. It is the future of the world.

If you’re serious about school funding, look at teachers pensions: Ed also provides much needed perspective in a response ([link removed]) this week to a Bakersfield Californian op-ed ([link removed]) that repeats the myth that public school funding is falling. Ed explains that the problem isn’t with school funding – which is actually rising – but with how school funding is diverted to teacher pensions:

If [the author] – or anyone else who thinks public education is being defunded in California – is serious about getting more money to the school districts, they can call for pension reform that gives teachers the same deal as the taxpayers who support them: Social Security. That would save billions per year, billions that could go right back into those “defunded” schools.

More mandatory reading on the origin of California forest fires: Rounding out his trifecta for the week, Ed provides ([link removed]) historical context for California’s wildfires and explains why forest management is smart on so many levels:

For the last 20 million years or so, climate change has been the norm. To put this century’s warming into some sort of context, Giant Sequoias once grew on the shores of Mono Lake. For at least the past few centuries, forest ecosystems have been marching into higher latitudes because of gradual warming. In the Sierra Foothills, oaks have invaded pine habitat, and pine have in turn invaded the higher elevation stands of fir. Today, it is mismanagement, not climate change, that is the primary threat to California’s forests. This can be corrected.…

The logic of these steps seems impeccable. Thin the forests. Restore them to ecological health. Adopt time-tested modern logging practices and revive the timber industry. Build biomass power plants on the perimeter of the forests. Reissue grazing permits for additional cost-effective brush thinning. Prevent ridiculous, costly, horrific, tragic wildfires. Help the economy.

Open letter to Gov. Newsom: Don’t Make it Easy to Leave the State We Love: The California exodus continues. Two of the most recent high-profile Californians to quit the state are Kiss frontman Gene Simmons – moving from LA to Washington state – and Graham Stephen, a YouTube superstar (think, the millennial generation’s Dave Ramsey) – moving from LA to Las Vegas. Both cited California’s tax burden as the main reason for their moves.

An anonymous Laguna Beach businessman copied us on his open letter ([link removed]) begging Gov. Newsom not to push him out too. For obvious reasons, he wants to remain anonymous. (If and when he does actually leave, we’ll try to get him on the record.) He writes:

I’m part of a small group of people – less than 1 percent of all Californians – who pay half of all the state’s income taxes. I am not proud of that. And I’m outraged that you’re even thinking about raising taxes on people like me again. But you are – and that has me and others like me thinking about leaving the state.

More data demonstrates the low risk of reopening schools: California schools remain closed, hurting minorities most of all. This week, a pair of California scholars wrote an op-ed ([link removed]) in the Wall Street Journal providing yet more evidence that schools can safely reopen:

A group of researchers, spearheaded by Brown University Professor Emily Oster, have created and made available the most comprehensive database ([link removed]) on schools and Covid case rates for students and staff since the pandemic started. Her data—covering almost 200,000 kids across 47 states from the last two weeks of September—showed a Covid-19 case rate of 0.13% among students and 0.24% among staff. That’s a shockingly and wonderfully low number. By comparison, the current overall U.S. case rate is 2.6%, an order of magnitude higher.…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report ([link removed]) that of all Covid-19 deaths up to Oct. 10, only 74 were of children under age 15. During the 2019-20 flu season, the CDC estimates ([link removed]) , 434 children under 18 died of the flu. Yet we don’t shut down schools over the flu.

Police wear bodycams, why not teachers? In his latest piece ([link removed]) , CPC contributor Larry Sand explains how recording teachers – as Zoom is currently doing – could expose their social justice activism and teaching quality: “Like cops, public school teachers are entrusted by the government to perform a service. So how about edu-cams which would disclose the content and quality of their lessons, as well as help keep their students in line?”

San Diego Unified invokes racism to do away with racism: In a classic episode of the Orange County-set show, Arrested Development, the character Maeby attends a super-progressive school that has done away with traditional letter grades. She receives a crocodile in spelling.

Now, this satire is playing out ([link removed]) in San Diego, where the school district of 106,000 students is getting rid of grades in the name of “anti-racism.” Minorities received more “F” grades than white students, and in the eyes of such progressives, the reason for any racial disparity is racism. This move follows California’s recent announcement that public universities will stop considering SAT scores for admissions.

Students will no longer be graded based on a yearly average, how late they turn in assignments, or even on test or assignment scores. In other words, grades will become essentially meaningless. "This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district," San Diego Unified School District Vice President Richard Barrera explained ([link removed]) to a local NBC affiliate. "If we're actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years."

Where to begin. First, grades are the great equalizer. They are an opportunity for those from disadvantaged backgrounds to level the playing field with their wealthier peers. Grades and test scores are objective metrics of work ethic. Objective measures overcome not perpetuate prejudice. Tens of millions of Americans have used hard work and good grades to overcome disadvantaged backgrounds and succeed.

In addition, as Robby Soave points out ([link removed]) in Reason, “Ending these kinds of grades doesn't actually eliminate the underlying inequities that produced the disparate Fs. It may actually cover those inequities up.”

Anti-racism, the process of seeking out supposed structural racism, is the latest fad in leftist circles. But to invoke it, you must rely on the most stereotypical racist tropes – in this case, that minorities can’t succeed in a merit-based education system. The notion that grades themselves are racist is itself racist. Imagine being a hardworking minority kid and being told that grades are racist?

As leftist journalist Matt Taibbi puts it ([link removed]) , anti-racism is a “quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.”

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Jordan Bruneau
Communications Director
[email protected] (mailto:[email protected])


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