Amazing warning from the Left

I have never been a Naomi Wolf fan, but after hearing her speak on what is happening to our American (and Western) freedoms, I know we share a deep love of liberty and the desire to fight to save it. Wolf has been branded a enemy of the establishment left but is still speaking out in traditional right or neutral media  formats.  Watch her interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox Nation for a clear-eyed view of history in the making. Trigger warning - it is disturbing to hear how far we have come down this road to serfdom. 

From  The Defender

March 5, 2021

Naomi Wolf: We’ve Reached ‘Step Ten’ of the 10 Steps to Fascism

In her 2008 book, “End of America,” Naomi Wolf outlined the 10 steps those in power use to close down democracies. Sadly, she writes today, as governments use the pandemic to justify the suppression of civil rights, America is now in the throes of “Step Ten.”

Naomi Wolf: 10 steps to fascism

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

By Naomi Wolf

In 2008, I wrote a book, “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.” In it I warned, based on my study of closing democracies in 20th century history, that America needed to beware of an all-too-possible slide into totalitarianism.

I warned that would-be tyrants, whether they are on the left or the right, always use a map to close down democracies, and that they always take the same ten steps.

Whether they “Invoke an External and Internal Threat” or “Develop a Paramilitary Force” or “Restrict the Press” or the final step, “Subvert the Rule of Law, these steps are always recognizable — and they always work to crush democracies and establish tyrannies. At the time that I wrote the book, the “global threat” of terrorism was the specter that powers invoked in order to attack our freedoms.

The book was widely read and discussed, both at the time of its publication and over the last 12 years. Periodically over the last decade, people would ask me when and if we had reached “Step Ten.”

We — my brave publisher, Chelsea Green, and I — are releasing videos of me reading the first and last chapters (see videos below) of “The End of America” now, in 2021, for free. And I am calling the sequel to this book, which I am now writing, “Step Ten” — because as of March of last year, we have indeed, I am so sad to say, arrived at and begun to inhabit “Step Ten” of the 10 steps to fascism.

Though in 2008, I did not explicitly foresee that a medical pandemic would be the vehicle for moving the entire globe into “Step Ten,” I have at various points warned of the dangers of medical crises as vehicles that tyranny can exploit to justify suppressions of civil rights.

Today, a much-hyped medical crisis has taken on the role of being used as a pretext to strip us all of core freedoms, that fears of terrorism did not, despite 20 years of effort, ultimately achieve.

In 2015, I was widely mocked in mainstream news outlets for warning about the hysteria that accompanied Ebola reporting, and I cautioned then that infectious diseases could be used as a justification for ushering in the suppression of liberties, always under the guise of emergency measures.

In 2020, I showed in my book, “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love,” how infectious disease epidemics, such as cholera and typhus, had been exploited in the 19th century by the British state in order to crush freedoms and invade people’s privacy. I wrote about how the first anti-vaccination movements arose among British parents in the Victorian period.

That book was initially cancelled, and its message of warning continues to be assailed. But that book, too, was prescient: In early March of 2020, of course, a global pandemic was announced — COVID-19.

In the immediate wake of the announcement and narrativization of that pandemic, most of the elements of a locked-in, 360-degree totalitarianism have been put into place in most of the countries of the West, including in what had been robust democracies. It all happened very quickly and comprehensively.

In the U.S. we now have:

1. Emergency measures in many states, which suspend due process of law. This is the hallmark of a police state. COVID-19 is invoked as the reason for the introduction of emergency law — but there is no endpoint for lifting these emergency laws.
2. The closures of schools, which break the social contract with the next generation.
3. Bills being passed for “vaccine passports,” which bypass the Fourth Amendmentto the Constitution by allowing the government and Big Tech companies to intrude on medical privacy, and to create a comprehensive digital surveillance state. (Indeed, the fact that tech stocks rose by 27% each quarter of the pandemic shows one driver of this war against the human: Every minute human beings spend in a classroom, at the pub or restaurant or in a church or synagogue, is time that tech companies lose money by being unable to harvest that data. COVID-19 policies driven by “COVID-19 Response” — actually, by Big Tech companies — ensure that humans are not allowed to connect except via digital platforms. The reason is profit as well as social control).
4. Forced closures of businesses. By intervening directly in the economy and allowing certain businesses to flourish (Amazon, Walmart, Target) at the expense of small businesses, Main Street shops, restaurants and sole proprietor businesses in general, the State has merged government and corporations in a way that is characteristic of Italian fascism and modern Chinese communism.
5. Restrictions on assembly. Some states such as California are fining people for seeing their friends in their homes, and making it unlawful for kids to have playdates with their friends. Massachusetts restricted gatherings of more than 10 people at a time, forcing synagogues and churches to stay closed, in spite of a Supreme Court ruling against states forcing churches to close. Parks and playgrounds and beaches have been closed. In countries such as Britain, people are fined for leaving their homes for more than an hour’s exercise a day.
6. Forced face coverings. In Massachusetts, people are fined if they are not wearing masks outdoors — even children as young as 5 are forced to do so by law. Again, this mandate has not been undergirded by peer-reviewed studies showing medical necessity. And there is no endpoint proffered for these extraordinary violations of personal freedom.
7. Suppression of free speech. Big Tech companies are censoring critics of COVID-19 policy and vaccine policy, as well as censoring views that are on the right hand of the political spectrum. Incitement, a word that has a long history in the 20th century for closing down free speech, has been weaponized by the left to shut down First Amendment freedoms of expression. In other forms of censorship and management of speech and public debate, tycoons such as Bill Gates have been funding major news outlets, with millions of dollars directed to “COVID-19 education.” As a result, dissenting voices are marginalized and shamed, or even threatened with legal action or job losses.
8. Science being hijacked in the interests of “biofascism.” By heavily funding scientific commentators such as Dr. Fauci in the United States, Imperial College and SAGE in the U.K. and Dr. Christian Drosten in Germany, a dominant set of policies and pronouncements about COVID-19 that benefit a small group of bad actors — notably tech and pharmaceutical interests, acting in concert with governments — have built an army of secured, credentialled supporters. But when other scientists or institutions seek debate or transparency, they are threatened with job loss or are reputationally attacked, as in the case of Dr. Simon Goddeke of the Netherlands, who was told to keep quiet by his university when he challenge the flawed COVID-19 PCR test protocols.
9. Data being hijacked to serve the interests of this biofascism. This manipulation of truth, which I foreshadowed in “The End of America,” is typical of the Soviet censors. COVID-19 platforms such as the COVID Tracking Project and Johns Hopkins University, funded by technocrats such as Michael Bloomberg, serve unverifiable COVID-19 data that directly affect the stock markets. Again, while this un-American merger of corporate interests and public policy is reminiscent of Italian fascism, the twist provided by digital data presentation and its relationship to the stock market is very much of the 21st century.
10. Attacks on religious minorities. The orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn and Christian churches in California have been singled out for punishment if they do not follow COVID-19 rules — a targeting of religion that is characteristic of communist policies on the left, especially in China.
11. Policies that weaken bonds between human beings and weaken the family being introduced and policed. This is the most serious development of all.

The new biofascism, very much driven by Big Tech leaders, is a war against human beings and the qualities that make us human.

Masks break human beings’ ability to bond face to face and enjoy human contact, smiles and jokes. Masks turn down the effectiveness of human “technology,” essentially, by making it hard for us to “read” each other and to pick up social cues.

Forbidding assembly keeps us from forming human alliances against these monstrous interests. Forbidding human assembly also prevents new cultures, new heroes and new business models from arising. We are all stuck with the Rolodex and the ideas we had in March of 2019.

Forcing kids to distance at school and wear masks ensures a generation of Americans who don’t know how to form human alliances, and who don’t trust their own human instincts. Those are counterrevolutionary training techniques.

Driving all learning onto (already prepared) distance-learning platforms ensures that kids do not know how to behave in human space, space not mediated by technology.

Many COVID-19 policies seem designed to ensure that humans will have no “analog” space or “analog” culture left — no way to feel comfortable simply gathering in a room, touching one another as friends or allies, or joining together.

Lastly, driving all human interaction onto Zoom (which is a window for the Communist China Party, as China owns the platform) is not only a way to harvest all of our tech, business secrets and IP, it is a way to ensure that intimacy and connection in the future will be done online and that human face-to-face contact will be killed off.

Why is this? Why develop policies that punish, encumber and restrict human contact in analog (un-surveilled, unmediated) spaces?

Because human contact is the great revolutionary force when it comes to human freedom and resistance to this form of comprehensive biofascism — the biofascism represented by the New Normal — the medico-fascist “Step Ten.”

Now let me recap from the year 2008, and read you my intro to “The End of America”, as well as the warning at the close of that book. Its message has never, sadly, been more timely. This time, the threats to freedom that were then justified by terrorism, have re-clothed themselves in the trappings of a medical pandemic.

But this time we do not just face a war on freedom. This time we face a war on human beings, and on all that makes us human.

Watch Naomi Wolf read the introduction to “The End of America” and two other videos on the Defender website or YouTube. 

Climate Crisis is a lack of clear thinking

Notable & Quotable: No Climate Crisis

‘A poll in 2019 revealed that 68% of Americans would not pay $10 more per month on their electricity bill to combat climate change.’

Wall Street Journal, Sept. 26, 2021

From the Sept. 23 edition of Christian Whiton’s Super Macro newsletter:

The fake science pushed on the public by the government and media has worked somewhat. A Pew poll last year indicated 62% of adults think climate change is affecting their local community. Gallup, exhibiting the trademark arrogance and refusal to countenance disagreement that mark the climate debate, said that 64% of adults “acknowledge the scientific consensus” that human activities cause climate change. On the other hand, a poll in 2019 revealed that 68% of Americans would not pay $10 more per month on their electricity bill to combat climate change. The same poll showed that if you lower that amount to $1, then 57% of the public would pony up. We see that the American public as usual knows better than the elites. The climate is changing as it always has and carbon emissions are something we should probably curb gradually through nuclear power, natural gas, and renewables, but there is no “crisis.” Certainly raising the cost of energy, which would stunt human progress generally, is not the right answer.

I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

 Famous words from Ronald Reagan.  "Help" from the government can, and often is, destructive.  Government entitlements create perverse incentives that change human behavior to the detriment of individuals, families and society.  All the while, those who invented the war on inequality, poverty, whatever, feel righteous and pure, rarely understanding their involvement in the expansion of the problems they sought to solve.  Willful blindness keeps the ideologies from ever admitting their culpability in the destruction of the lives of others.  

The trouble is that the connection between government aid and antisocial behavior, failed families and poverty are not well understood or talked about or taught to the next generation of policy-makers.  Nothing will change until the public understands how human nature is being manipulated and lives ruined - with both good and bad intentions.  If it is your life going down the toilet, it doesn't matter if the one helping you meant you no harm.  

Wall Street Journal, Opinion

The Destructive Legacy of the Great Society

Government subsidies for antisocial behavior stalled decades worth of black progress.

By Jason L. Riley,  Sept. 21, 2021

Excerpts: 

Liberals view a larger welfare state as an unalloyed good, but what’s the track record? Entitlement programs were dramatically expanded in the 1960s in the service of a war on poverty, yet poverty fell at a slower rate after the Great Society initiatives were implemented, and overall dependency on the government for food, shelter and other basic necessities increased. According to Howard Husock, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a coming book on housing policy, “The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It,” the median time a family spends in New York City public housing today is 19 years. And 10% of public housing residents in the city have been there for more than 40 years. Housing intended to help families through a rough patch has become a multigenerational trap for some.

Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of black families living in poverty declined by 40 points as blacks increased their years of education and migrated from poorer rural areas to more prosperous urban environs in the South and North. No welfare program has ever come close to replicating that rate of black advancement, which predates affirmative action programs that often receive credit for creating the black middle class. Moreover, what we experienced in the wake of the Great Society interventions was slower progress or outright retrogression. Black labor-force participation rates fell, black unemployment rates rose, and the black nuclear family disintegrated. In 1960 fewer than 25% of black children were being raised by a single mother; within four decades, it was more than half.

The welfare state is often discussed in relation to its effect on racial and ethnic minorities, yet crime, single parenting and drug abuse also increased among poor whites in the aftermath of the Great Society. When the government indulges and subsidizes counterproductive behavior, we tend to get more of it. Aside from how all this indiscriminate government benevolence has affected individuals, there’s also the matter of its long-term effect on America’s standard of living. By undermining the development of human capital and allowing—even encouraging—larger and larger swaths of the less-productive population to live off their more-productive brethren, we risk exacerbating income inequality and nurturing class resentments.

Hard-left ideologues who want to turn the U.S. into Western Europe, and politicians eager to hand out goodies in exchange for votes, don’t much care about these trade-offs. But they’re relevant for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between social progress and government “help.”

Shrinking Income Inequality

 I don't know if the data in this commentary is still true as entitlements and taxes are changing.  Perhaps the inequality gap is bigger or smaller than this article suggests, but the premise remains - it is not the amount of "income" that defines one's wealth but how much remains after taxes are paid and benefits are received - what do people have left to spend?   

Wall Street Journal, Opinion

Incredible Shrinking Income Inequality

Its rise is an illusion created by the Census Bureau’s failure to account for taxes and welfare.

By Phil Gramm and John Early

March 23, 2021

"While the disparity in earned income has become more pronounced in the past 50 years, the actual inflation-adjusted income received by the bottom quintile, counting the value of all transfer payments received net of taxes paid, has risen by 300%. The top quintile has seen its after-tax income rise by only 213%. As government transfer payments to low-income households exploded, their labor-force participation collapsed and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

In 2017, federal, state and local governments redistributed $2.8 trillion, or 22% of the nation’s earned household income. More than two-thirds of those transfer payments went to households in the bottom two income quintiles. Remarkably the Census Bureau chooses to count only $900 billion of that $2.8 trillion as income for the recipients. Excluded from the measurement of household income is some $1.9 trillion of government transfers. These include the earned-income tax credit, whose beneficiaries get a check from the Treasury; food stamps, which let beneficiaries buy food with government issued debit cards; and numerous other programs in which government pays for the benefits directly.

Give me Liberty

 

After perusing some of my favorite quotes from a wise, long-dead white man, I am certain that we are on a path set for us not by our current political leaders, but by our collective, fallible human nature.  Otherwise, how could Alexis de Tocqueville know almost 200 years ago how American liberty would be struggling in 2021?  We seem to be heading toward this perilous fate at an ever more rapid pace.  Will Americans wake up to the continuing loss of their individual liberty in time to revive it?  Or will we see some form of authoritarian bureaucracy (soft or hard tyranny) controlling our lives?    

Use the link below to read "Democracy in America" Volumes 1 and 2 in PDF format from Penn State.  

Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville  (1835)

On Human Nature or Why Education in the Tenets of Liberty is Essential

“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.” 
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Volume 2

On Individual "Rights" 

“It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”    ― Alexis de Tocqueville

On Equality

“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.” 
― Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy vs Socialism

“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”     ― Alexis de Tocqueville

It's All OK - Until They Come For My Rights

“It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.” 
― Alexis de Tocqueville

Maintaining Political Power

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” 
― Alexis de Tocqueville

Combat Critical Race Theory indoctrination in Schools

August 16, 2921

For Parents and All Citizens of Lake Oswego - Support education and support local students, but do not support corrupt educational practices no matter where they occur.  

My kids graduated from Lake Oswego schools a couple of decades ago, but even then I saw the rot creep into the curriculum - the dumbing down of math and English, and an anti-American sentiment that had crept into history and Social Studies.  I worked to keep my kids out of the classes I deemed to be academic sink holes and lessons I thought ran counter to our family values.  

Luckily I had a background as a teacher and knew what to look for and how the system worked.  I also did a little bit of substituting in LO and nearby districts to see what was happening with evolving education practices.  Luckily there were still older teachers around who did not bend to passing fads and taught a straight academic curriculum. I sought out these teachers, avoided the woke, used PCC and other sources for alternative learning, formed learning groups for grammar and vocabulary taught by friends with experience in the subjects, and taught a couple of art classes in my garage.  When needed I filled in gaps in my kids’ education by home schooling in science, essay and creative writing, math and reading.  I was on various school and district advisory committees and learned the law regarding student rights to an appropriate education.  It was a lot of work.  But I fear the effort would be many times harder today, because instead of just filling in curriculum gaps, I would have to unteach the social indoctrination that has infiltrated the schools.  The older teachers are gone - replaced by those who have a different idea of what public education is meant to achieve.  

Oregon education is a bad joke in the national news.  The complete surrender to wokeness has left Oregon’s public school students without a defense against bad policies and unaccountable teachers and administrators.  As colleges are abandoning standardized tests, grades and demonstrable  academic skills will become more important for admissions.  Oregon students will be entering the fray with a black eye, not through any fault of their own, but because the so-called adults in the room believe that leveling the playing field means lowering the ladder of expectations and success. According to Forbes, Oregon ranks 43rd in quality of public education among the states.  

A few weeks ago I visited the Lake Oswego School District website to see what is being done  regarding Critical Race Theory indoctrination. I had hoped, but did not really expect, that Lake Oswego had somehow escaped the insanity of wokeness sweeping the country and that the site would be filled with information on academic topics touting rigorous standards for all students.  Instead I found the depressingly common references to Diversity Equity and Inclusion (aka  Critical Race Theory),  including a page devoted to books and resources on the subject. All the popular, radical tomes are there, but none of the moderating voices of Black academics and intellectuals who do not agree with the  narrative of America being systemically racist. 

Until 2019 I had no personal experience with DEI instruction.  Then the Metro Master Gardeners’ annual training session introduced a half-day course on White Privilege. It was an eye-opening view into how degrading and racist this ideology is.  I cannot fathom how any organization can justify this kind of racist, hate-filled teaching.  This is not white “fragility” talking, I just don’t have the white guilt that others seem to project.  Numerous studies have proven the damage that teaching White Privilege can have on students and the population at large. 

Then I started reading.  I found that many wise, intelligent black, white and other voices have the same thoughts I do and still believe in the morality and fairness of a color blind society.  Unfortunately, their voices are not being heard and are nowhere to be seen on the LO School District resources website 

I have prepared a list of resources to counter what the mainstream education establishment offers.  I present the list here and invite readers to send me their suggestions for additions to the list or tell about their experiences with CRT or other woke assaults being perpetrated on our kids. 

I encourage parents and district taxpayers to let the school board know what they think about what is happening in our schools and support parents who choose alternative learning for their children when they encounter a curriculum they do not agree with or find inadequate.  I did it 20 years ago, but the task is much harder today.  Government schools don’t have control over the children in their care, parents do.  

The Problem

MSN News

Oregon promoting teacher course on 'dismantling racism in mathematics'

Jake Dima 2/12/2021

The Oregon Department of Education is promoting and encouraging its educators to register for a course that likens modern math instruction to the "toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture..

"White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions," the course description stated. "Coupled with the beliefs that underlie these actions, they perpetuate educational harm on Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, denying them full access to the world of mathematics."

The course continued in a section on "white supremacy culture" in math classrooms, saying, "This reinforces the idea that there is only one right way to do math. The history of mathematics, its colonization, and what is deemed as 'acceptable' knowledge is rich and complex, therefore, the way that mathematics is taught in the United States needs to be interrogated because it currently centers Western, Eurocentric ways of processing and knowing information. When students are required to learn in this way, they either have to unlearn their learned native traditions to meet teacher expectations, or they are deprived of learning math in their ancestral history. For teachers, teaching the way they learned also reinforces the right to comfort for teachers because to conform is easier than to challenge themselves to teach math differently."

The program insisted that educators "identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views." It added that it is "unequivocally false" to assume math is an "objective" discipline.

"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," it said. "Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."

The course instead encouraged teachers to "come up with at least two answers that might solve this problem." The course is also riddled with guidance to reject "individualism" in favor of "collectivism."

From 2021 Regular Legislative Session, 

Oregon Senate Bill 744:

(d) The determination of whether the requirements for a high school diploma in this state are equitable and inclusive.

(2) Notwithstanding any rules adopted by the State Board of Education, a student may not be required to show proficiency in Essential Learning Skills as a condition of receiving a high school diploma during the 2021-2022 or 2022-2023 school year.

(b) Notwithstanding paragraph (a) of this subsection, the State Board of Education may not require a student who has successfully completed the credit requirements prescribed by paragraph (a) of this subsection or by rule of the board to demonstrate proficiency in any skill or academic content area.

The Solution

 

From The Heritage Foundtion Report:  

Rescuing Math and Science from Critical Race Theory’s Racial Discrimination

Critical race theory is overt racial discrimination. Theorists claim that America is systemically racist, despite the Civil Rights Act and state and federal agencies designed to stop and prosecute racist acts. And despite the enormous and obvious progress on race that this country has made.

Educators have used CRT to redesign history, civics, and English instructional content to focus on the critical obsession with oppression and power. Now, school officials are also changing classroom content in the hard sciences and math away from facts and skills and focusing on racial activism. (In math!) Parents, teachers, and policymakers should oppose any form of racial discrimination in schools, and reject these insidious efforts to inject prejudice and racial bias into technical subjects that should be used to help children—of all backgrounds—to develop skills and abilities that will help them to be successful in school and in life.

    Jonathan Butcher is the Will Skillman Fellow in Education in the Center for Education Policy, of the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

RESOURCES 

American History

Book 

The 1776 Report 

The 1776 Report is the official report of The President's Advisory 1776 Commission. Submitted to the President and released as a public document on January 18, 2021, the report explains the core principles of the American founding and how they have shaped American history, considers the leading challenges to these principles at home and abroad, and calls on all Americans to “restore our national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country and by raising new generations of citizens who not only know the self-evident truths of our founding, but act worthy of them.” This edition features the original text with the addition of notes and commentary by Chair Larry P. Arnn, Vice Chair Carol Swain, and Executive Director Matthew Spalding.

The 1776 Curriculum

American History and Civics Lessons for K-12 Classrooms

https://k12.hillsdale.edu/Curriculum/The-Hillsdale-1776-Curriculum/

The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum is a complete collection of lesson plans for teaching American history, civics, and government to K-12 students. Students who study using this curriculum learn about American history from the colonies through the Civil War at four different times during their K-12 years, each time increasing in depth. The curriculum also includes American history since the Civil War and American government and civics for both middle and high school students.

1776 Unites

https://1776unites.com/our-work/curriculum/

Contact:  educate@1776unites.com

The 1776 Unites curriculum offers authentic, inspiring stories from American history that show what is best in our national character and what our freedom makes possible even in the most difficult circumstances. 1776 Unites maintains a special focus on stories that celebrate black excellence, reject victimhood culture, and showcase African-Americans who have prospered by embracing America’s founding ideals.

Created by a team of independent scholars, counselors, and role models, the 1776 Unites curriculum equips students to seize the opportunities afforded them today. These lessons are grounded in the Woodson Center Principles and help educators bring their K-12 students encouragement, enrichment, and the genuine empowerment that comes with personal agency.

As 1776 Unites founder Robert L. Woodson put it, America’s founding generation built the new nation “upon a set of virtues and values that would create a truly free society, the freest the world had ever seen. They even knew at the time it was falling short of truly delivering on that promise for all, but they knew what they were working toward.”

1776 Unites Library

Suggested books to read and to purchase.

https://1776unites.com/library/

Race 

Video

Uncle Tom 

In a collection of intimate interviews with some of America’s most provocative Black Conservative thinkers, Uncle Tom takes a different look at being Black in America. Featuring media personalities, ministers, civil rights activist, veterans, and a self-employed plumber, the film explores their personal journeys of navigating the world as one of America’s most misunderstood political and cultural groups: The American Black Conservative. In this eye-opening film from Director Justin Malone and Executive Producer Larry Elder, Uncle Tom examines self-empowerment, individualism and rejecting the victim narrative. Uncle Tom shows us a different perspective of American History from this often ignored and ridiculed group. Features intimate, candid interviews with some of the leading African American voices in the conservative community. 

 

Video 

Created Equal, Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

Although Clarence Thomas remains a controversial figure, few know him beyond his contentious U.S. Supreme Court confirmation battle. But behind the headlines, Thomas life is a classic American tale: born poor in the segregated South, only to become one of the most influential justices in the highest court of the land. Created Equal tells Thomas life story truly and fully, without cover-ups or distortions.

Documentary  

Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, A Personal Exploration 

By Jason Riley

Traces Thomas Sowell's journey from humble beginnings to the Hoover Institution, becoming one of our era's most controversial economists, political philosophers, and prolific authors.

Documentary 

The Great American Race Game 

https://greatamericanracegame.com

It is said that “All Whites Are Racist”. There is still plenty of racial bigotry in America, as there is elsewhere in the world. It is a terrible thing, and should be exposed, fought and condemned. Racists should be attacked and shamed. But is it helpful, or fair, to accuse people of being racist who are not, to find racism where there is none, and to use the accusation of ‘racist’ indiscriminately as a lazy political insult?

Book

Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory Is Burning Down the House 

By Carol M. Swain and Christopher Schorr  

In schools and workplaces across the United States, Americans are being indoctrinated with a divisive, anti-American ideology: Critical Race Theory (CRT). Based in cultural Marxism, CRT bullies and demonizes whites while infantilizing and denying agency to blacks, creating a deep racial rift. As Abraham Lincoln famously observed, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." CRT aims to divide the American nation against itself and burn down the house.

In Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory Is Burning Down the House, Carol Swain and Christopher Schorr expose the true nature of Critical Race Theory, and they offer concrete solutions for taking back the country's stolen institutions. They describe CRT in theory and practice, accounting for its origins and weaponization within American schools and workplaces; explain how this ideology threatens traditional American values and legal doctrines, including civil rights; and equip everyday Americans with strategies to help them resist and defeat CRT's pernicious influence.

Book

Discrimination and Disparities 

By Thomas Sowell

“In this provocative book, Thomas Sowell turns the tables on those who automatically link disparate outcomes to discrimination. He begins by focusing instead on the myriad of factors that need to come together for success. Before we can explain why people fall behind in life, we must first understand what life demands for success…. Native intelligence by itself does not guarantee success. Hard work is important, but nature can be capricious. Who knew that being first born is a persistent factor for success in life? The book is chock full of such pertinent observations, none of which reflect discrimination by anyone. The book is a wonderful short introduction to the thought of one of our most important social thinkers.”―Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., Senior Fellow, CATO Institute

Book

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era  

By Shelby Steele

 “With his characteristic honesty, clarity and hard-won wisdom, Shelby Steele exposes the social hypocrisies and racial lies that transformed the once promising post-civil rights era into a period of cultural decadence and mediocrity. We owe Citizen Steele our thanks. On questions of race in America—white guilt, black opportunism—he is our twenty-first century Socrates: the powerful, lucid and elegant voice of a refreshingly independent thinker who desires only to see us liberated from sophistry and self-destructive illusions.” -- Charles Johnson, author of MIDDLE PASSAGE, National Book Award winner 

Book

Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers 

By Robert L. Woodson Sr.

In the rush to redefine the place of black Americans in contemporary society, many radical activists and academics have mounted a campaign to destroy traditional American history and replace it with a politicized version that few would recognize. According to the new radical orthodoxy, the United States was founded as a racist nation—and everything that has happened throughout our history must be viewed through the lens of the systemic oppression of black people.

Rejecting this false narrative, a collection of the most prominent and respected black scholars and thinkers has come together to correct the record and tell the true story of black Americans in all its complexity, diversity of experience, and poignancy. 

Book

Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe 

By Dr. Voddie M. Baucham Jr.

“I believe we are being duped by an ideology bent on our demise.   This ideology has used our guilt and shame over America’s past, our love for our brethren, and our good and godly desire for reconciliation and justice as a means through which to introduce destructive heresies.”

“I want this book to be a clarion call. I want to unmask the ideology of Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality in hopes that those who have imbibed in it can have the blinders moved from their eyes, and those who have bowed in the face of it can stand up, take courage, and ‘contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.’”

See also YouTube videos of lectures by Dr. Voddie Baucham:

“Biblical Justice vs Social Justice”

“Cultural Marxism”

Article

What Does Teaching ‘White Privilege’ Actually Accomplish? Not What You Might Think (Or Hope)

By Zaid Jilani

https://quillette.com/2019/05/23/what-does-teaching-white-privilege-actually-accomplish-not-what-you-might-think-or-hope/

When activists and academics invoke the phrase “white privilege,” they typically are speaking of advantages that whites, on average, have over members of other ethnic minority groups in our society. But there is a danger that, by talking about this inequality as an all-consuming phenomenon, we will end up creating a flattened and unfair image that portrays all whites in all situations and all contexts as benefiting from unearned advantages. Indeed, it’s possible that we will cause people to confuse a structural inequality that exists on the level of group average with the circumstances of every individual within a particular racial group.

Article

The Fallacy Of White Privilege — And How It’s Corroding Society

By Rav Arora

https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/the-fallacy-of-white-privilege-and-how-its-corroding-society/

None of the statistics in this piece discount racial prejudice, unequal opportunities or the privilege of not experiencing racism. They simply point to the glaring fallacies of the all-consuming white-privilege narrative which has degraded our national discourse into identity politics and racial tribalism. White people are now one-dimensionally seen as an undifferentiated mass of privilege and wealth whereas minorities are seen as powerless victims oppressed by a society ingrained with white supremacy and racial bigotry.

Article 

Language and Thought

By Walter E. Williams

https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/09/23/language-and-thought-n2576593

Seventeenth-century poet and intellect John Milton predicted, "When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation." Gore Vidal, his 20th-century intellectual successor, elaborated saying: "As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate." Sloppy language permits people to get away with speaking and doing all manner of destructive nonsense without being challenged.

Article

The Devil and Karl Marx

By Walter E. Williams

https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/09/16/the-devil-and-karl-marx-n2576177

The world's intellectual elite readily focus on Adolf Hitler's murderous atrocities but ignore those of the world's socialists. Keep in mind that one does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one must believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

Website 

Critical Race Theory

https://www.heritage.org/crt

Critical race theory (CRT) makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims. It is a philosophy that is infecting everything from politics and education to the workplace and the military. 

Many Heritage Foundation Reports on CRT on this website.

 

View the Critical Race Theory Legislation Tracker to see what's happening in your state.

 

CRT: Knowing It When You See It and Fighting It When You Can

Rescuing Math and Science from Critical Race Theory’s Racial Discrimination

Climate Change

Book

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts 

Us All 

By Michael Shellenberger

“We must protect the planet, but how? Some strands of the environmental movement have locked themselves into a narrative of sin and doom that is counterproductive, anti-human, and not terribly scientific. Shellenberger advocates a more constructive environmentalism that faces our wicked problems and shows what we have to do to solve them.” -- Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now

Book

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters

By Steven E. Koonin

“Essential reading and a timely breath of fresh air for climate policy. The science of climate is neither settled nor sufficient to dictate policy. Rather than an existential crisis, we face a wicked problem that requires a pragmatic balancing of costs and benefits.”

—William W. Hogan,professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School