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The Trump Inauguration by Edgar B. Anderson

THE TRUMP INAUGURATION

By Edgar B. Anderson

LAIKS Latvian Newspaper, February 18-March 10, 2017, Volume LXVIII, Numbers 7-9 

My week in Washington, D.C., covering the Inauguration for Laiks started with a jolt. Tuesday evening before Inauguration Friday a friend and I were walking from my hotel headed to dinner.  As we arrived at Pennsylvania Avenue, right in the middle of the street in front of the Trump International Hotel, a man set himself on fire.  Paramedics arrived and carted him off to the hospital. This was a hint of things to come.

My friend and I continued across Pennsylvania Avenue for a visit to the Trump Hotel. The Old Post Office-turned-hotel has quickly become one of the major tourist stops of Washington since its opening in September. Next we walked through the historic Willard Hotel where in another era one might have encountered members of Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet. Finally, we enjoyed dinner at the popular Old Ebbitt Grill, a Washington landmark, around the corner from the White House.

On Wednesday after attending a lively off-the-record meeting with a group of political activists, I picked up my Inauguration press credential in the basement of the Russell Senate Office Building and then waited in line to attempt to watch some of the confirmation hearing for President-elect Trump’s nominee to head the EPA. While crossing the Capitol grounds to visit the office of my Congressman, I came upon an exuberant group of students from Johns Creek High School in Georgia who were touring the sights of Washington before attending the Inauguration. I could not help but stop to meet them and take their picture.

Thursday began with lunch with a journalist friend at one of the leading D.C. think tanks. Afterward I walked down to the Mall where I observed a security line several blocks long to enter the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial, site of the evening’s Pre-Inaugural Concert.  The powerful final moments of the concert, available for viewing on YouTube, show the U.S. Marine Corps Band and Chorus performing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” spectacular fireworks, and the Donald Trump family walking up the steps of the Memorial and standing at attention beneath overhead lights in front of the statute of Lincoln.

Later that evening as I was returning to my hotel I was horrified to encounter hundreds of masked protestors and their sympathizers. They were yelling, spitting, screaming foul words, and generally assaulting peaceful citizens who were attending various Inauguration-related events. Police were deployed everywhere. During the night rioters broke store windows and set a car on fire. It is sobering to realize that security concerns about the Inauguration had become less about possible radical Islamic terrorism than about the more immediate danger posed by angry and violent Americans who refuse to accept the results of the November election.

Inauguration Day started cold, dark, and threatening rain.  During the preceding days many streets in the city center had been blocked off -- by cement barriers, parked trucks, fencing, and obstacles of every kind. Nonetheless on Friday morning huge crowds moved toward the Capitol from all directions, subways were packed, and everybody appeared in a buoyant mood. There were multiple checkpoints around the Capitol, with a specific entrance assigned depending on the category of one’s admission ticket to the ceremonies. For security reasons, umbrellas were not allowed, and many people brought along ponchos to cover themselves in case of a downpour. Uniformed military were stationed throughout the viewing areas to give direction and keep watch. A number of Inaugural guests had their photos taken with the military personnel.

As the United States Marine Corps Band was playing and the Inaugural program was about to begin, I spoke with a few random spectators. What’s going through your mind today as you are here at the Inauguration?  Megan Rosell, Oklahoma City OK: “I can’t believe I’m here and this close. I’m so excited.” Beside that you got a good seat. “It’s gonna to be a great day, a great start to a great four years.” What are your hopes for Trump? “That he does what says he was gonna to do. That’s my hope.” What’s most important to you? “Jobs, economy, I’m from Oklahoma, so it matters.”

Dr. William Elizondo, a self-described Mexican-American, from San Antonio TX, was wearing souvenir pins from Poland and Slovakia and attended with his part-Polish wife. What goes through your mind here today? “Well, I think this is a great occasion, a great occasion for America, for the United States, and I think that we need to bring solidarity to a lot of our leaders, and I think that this is the first beginning of a great day.” What are your particular hopes for Donald Trump? “I am hoping not only that he can bring the people together and we’re gonna to be working toward that end, and we’re hoping that he can bring in jobs and bring in industry and bring in the kind of leadership capabilities which I think that he has, that he exemplifies. I think that it can be done.”

Baba Ji is President of Sikh Temple in Chicago and Chaplain with the Department of Police in Rockford IL and has been in the United States for 24 years. How do feel today? “I feel better. Before I was supporter of Hillary Clinton, but now I appreciate the honorable President Trump because he said whatever he will do to make the most strong the United States because country is first for me, the party is second for me. And another thing strongly strictly he said he will fight against the terrorism that we need today. Nobody have dared to give any statement against the radicals, but he gave strongly that I appreciate.”

Haitao Cao, an accountant in Ft. Collins CO, is from the eastern part of China and has been a resident of the United States for 13 years.  What are your feelings here today? “Just it’s a good experience once in my lifetime and to get to know more about the U.S. government and democracy.” What are your thoughts about Donald Trump? “I definitely support him to be the President of the United States, and I think to make the country great again. I really support his policy like colorblind, gender-neutral, so provide equal opportunity but not equal result so encourage people to work hard to pursue their dream and live a good life pursue their dream and make the country great again.”

The program began with official welcomes and three invocations, followed by the Missouri State University Choir, the Vice Presidential Oath of Office, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Next was the Presidential Oath of Office followed by Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address, which echoed many of the themes of his populist, anti-Establishment campaign:

“For too long a small group in the nation’s capital has reaped the reward of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished – but the people did not share in the wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left and the factories closed. … That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.”

The complete address is available for viewing on YouTube. Three benedictions, including from Rev. Franklin Graham and Rabbi Marvin Hier, were followed by a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” performed by 16-year old Jackie Evancho. Rain threatened throughout the proceedings, but only a few drops fell at the start of President Trump’s speech, a sign of God’s blessing, according to Rev. Graham.

After the conclusion of the program I resumed my interviews. What are your thoughts today at this Trump Inauguration? Yulia P. of New Jersey, originally from Ukraine: “I am here, so I think it’s a historical and exciting moment.” What do you expect of Donald Trump? “I expect a lot. I think he’s gonna make difference.” And what about for Ukraine?  “I think he’s gonna be good for Ukraine – and for Latvia.” And why do you say that? “Because I think he has more common sense, I guess. He’s honest. I don’t think there’s lot of politics behind his motivation. He’s motivated by making good for people.”

Becky D. of Columbia SC is a teacher and formerly an instructor in the juvenile prison. She currently volunteers as an arbitrator in the federal court dealing with first-time non-violent offenders. “This program is really good. It keeps kids who make a one-time mistake out of the prison system.” What are your thoughts today? “I predicted he was gonna to win. I think there’s hope, I think there’s a lot of people that have hope now because they got tired of politicians promising and promising and promising, and nothing ever changed, and I think that’s the difference. Now he better come through or he’s gonna be short-lived in that White House. But I think there’s hope. People don’t like how he talks, but he says things a lot of people are thinking but are too afraid to say, and so there’s some hope. … We lived in Arkansas for a few years. There’s nothing in me that could vote for Hillary Clinton, nothing. And, you know, if you can’t run a state, you can’t run a country.” What issues most interest you? “Military, support the military, support law enforcement, reduction in taxes, and bringing business back to the United States are very important. … We’re gonna to go to Arlington. When we come to D.C., we always go over to Arlington and visit some of the military that we know, and so that’s why military and patriotism are important.”

Sandi Steinbeck came to the United States in 1973 from Thailand and has been an American citizen for 30 years. What brought you to this country? “Future, a new life, a new future, a new way of living.” What have you been doing for these last forty years? “Oh, awesome. I have freedom, pursue happiness. I can be myself, the happiness, open-minded.” What kind of work have you done? “I used to be investor, and also I am a professional casino worker, professional black jack dealer.” Really?  ”Yes!” So where do you live? “I live in Las Vegas.” Why did you choose Donald Trump? “Why, you know, you have to look at a man and the result, what he produce, what did he done, what he produce. He have done so much of the tycoon, and in New York City some ice skate couldn’t finish it, he finish it … he helped to complete it … and also the high-rise. I also met him from the first weekend when he came to Las Vegas. … I have a chance to shake hand with him. I have a picture. … First time in the campaign he speak more to his head, and after a year go by his heart go with the people, and he’s really got the masses the movement the people cry out want freedom want happiness so he changed his feeling changed.” Tell me about when you shook hands with Donald Trump. “He had a thick, thick palm right here. He can have good energy. He got a big hand. Compared to my hand, he has big hand and good energy, good energy. And he is very down to earth. He hug, he touch, hug and touch me. He touched everyone that come close. So anyway you give a businessman who is successful you get things done. … Oh, my God, last chance, otherwise our country will be no turn back with Hillary, crooked Hillary, never turn back.”

Early Saturday morning I emerged from my hotel to the sight of the massive crowds of the Women’s March. The demonstrators were mostly female, but there were also many men. They carried signs displaying often vulgar denunciations of Trump (the “F-word” was ubiquitous) along with claims that fascism is descending upon America and women’s rights, especially the right to abortion, are about to be revoked. The Rally that took place before the actual March lasted for nearly five hours and can be seen in its entirety on YouTube. The program featured remarks from a long list of activists who promoted a wide array of causes, with frequent attacks on what they view as racist and white supremacist America. Madonna mused about blowing up the White House, veteran feminist Gloria Steinem charged that Donald Trump is mentally unstable, and University of California professor and longtime Communist Angela Davis issued a call for broad-based resistance to the Administration.

On Saturday afternoon I was invited to attend a reception at the new Hungarian Embassy, a beautiful old building at 1500 Rhode Island Avenue, corner of Massachusetts Avenue, and only a few blocks from the Latvian Embassy. The Hungarians billed their event “Salute to Freedom to Celebrate the Inauguration of the 45^th President of the United States Donald Trump.” The afternoon consisted of an elegant buffet, chamber music, and several short speeches. In the final moments I had the opportunity to talk privately with representatives of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.

Dr. Réka Szemerkényi, Ambassador from Hungary. I think you know there’s a lot of anxiety in the Baltic community about some of the things that Donald Trump has said, but what is your message to the Baltic States about what’s ahead with the new Administration? “Well, I very much believe that the fundamentally important message that we have as part of our discussions in the past half-year, with the transition team afterwards after the elections, is the need for Europe to focus on building up our security, to contribute to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is very important.  We have committed to it anyways, but I think we have to take it very, very seriously. And I think as long as we live up to that there is very clear message from our side that we find it very important that we will see is that the Trump Administration will also be very strong partners, and we will be able to continue to strengthen that transatlantic cooperation. I very much see the Trump Administration as an administration of power stability security. So those are the values that we share, and there have been a number of occasions just this week to meet with the members of the incoming administration. On Tuesday evening offered to the diplomatic corps a talk by the Vice President-elect at the time where Donald Trump also came and gave a speech. The message was continuously underlining their respect for the countries and for our partnership, their willingness to cooperate, their openness to listen to us, to get our ideas incorporated into their thinking. So I think we have a good basis as long as we also continue to believe in our need to focus on security which unfortunately in Europe we have been missing for quite a number of decades. We have tended to think like all the international crises are going to avoid us and hit the United States and they will have to deal with it. I think we are now under a very serious pressure from many directions, and so the commitment for security has to be expressed from our side and then I’m sure that in terms also of decisions, not just verbal messages, and I think on this basis we will be able to strengthen the transatlantic cooperation.”

Piotr Wikczek, Ambassador from Poland. What is your understanding of Trump Administration policy toward the Baltic States and what message would you have for the Latvian people? “Well, the message I would have for President Trump is to imitate President of Poland who paid his first visit after inauguration to Tallinn, Estonia, which was, of course, a very visible signal for all countries that we care about security of Baltic countries and Eastern Europe in general and of Europe because our security is security of Europe which we Poles very well remember from 1920 when the Red Army invaded Poland planning to go to Western Europe and introduce Communism there, but they were stopped in Warsaw. So I know that we all can be concerned, but I am sure that both Trump and his advisers, including General Mattis and General Flynn, are very well aware of the role of NATO. I’m sure that no NATO countries will be attacked by anyone, and reservations which Trump has about NATO are about sharing the burden, about sharing costs, and most of our countries, I mean the Baltics and Poland, pay at least 2% of their GDP for the military, is for NATO, so it is my understanding that for Donald Trump, and if I were him I would do the same, it’s negotiable. What he mentioned yesterday about the United States subsidizing other countries’ armies or troops, that’s the facts. The United States has done it for your own security, but I would be also concerned, and I understand that Donald Trump wants to negotiate with NATO about finances, about business, but the whole issue of American presence in the Baltic Republics and Poland is a matter of business as well as a matter of contracts. It’s a matter of business cooperation. So I do not think there is any reason of doing anything against NATO to please Russia. With Russia he also wants to negotiate so that’s actually no reason to worry about.”

Ambassador Wikczek added: “What is very important and I really appreciate the attitude of the Baltic counties not to be called as ‘post-Soviet Republics’ or ‘former Soviet Republics.’ … or part of the ‘post-Soviet bloc.’ The Baltic Republics were occupied by the Soviet Union for a number of years, but before the occupation they were independent countries and recognized all the time by many countries like the United States. So the difference between the Baltic Republics and other former Soviet Republics that they are not ‘post-Soviet.’ And that’s the case of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania and the case of Poland. We were occupied in a different way by the Soviet Union. But we were pre-War independent countries, which because of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact were occupied by Russians by Germans but were independent before the War. So we are not a part of the post-Soviet world in this sense. And I believe that the prosperity of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania nowadays one of the reasons for that is that like we in Poland and you in the Baltics we have this sense of being independent, having capitalism, until late ‘30s so still many years after the Bolshevik Revolution. So we are not ‘post-Soviet.’”

Zdeněk Beranek, Charge d’Affairs, Head of Mission, Czech Republic. What is your expectation about how this Administration will deal with its NATO obligations? “It’s too early to judge, but … I think Mr. Trump himself and his national security team were quite open about the importance of NATO and the importance of the allies in the U.S. foreign policy. So I think there is no reason to worry now at this moment.” Have you had some dealings with the incoming Administration? “I think every single diplomatic mission in this town has.” Can you characterize those dealings? “I would prefer not to do that right now.”

Peter Kmec, Ambassador from Slovakia. What is your expectation of the U.S. commitment and relationship with the eastern NATO countries? “We still hope that NATO will remain the cornerstone of transatlantic security, and the nominations for Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and other nominations prove that the commitment of the new Administration will remain to the transatlantic solidarity and security. We’ll have to wait for details of the new Administration program, but we are very confident that we’ll keep relations unchanged and the security relationship will be enhanced also taking into account the new security challenges in the eastern flank of NATO.”

At the conclusion of my trip to Washington I talked with a taxi driver named Bitew. As I sat down in his cab at midnight he immediately turned around and wanted to discuss politics, and so I asked him, What is your opinion of Trump? “Trump, he’s a hard worker. He’s a rich man. He make great America again, I wish. He’s a good hard worker person.” You’re from where? “Ethiopia.” How long have you been in United States? “Eight years. This is the first inauguration in America.” Why did you come to America? “I came to Diversity lottery.” What kind of work have you been doing? “Before I work dump truck, but I have kids now, and I take care of kids.” So now you drive a cab. Let’s get back to politics. What are you thinking about politics?  “It’s good, America politics. You know Africa the opposition party is killed, and jailed. America is free politics.” Why do you like Trump? “He’s a hard worker. He speak fluently, clear. ‘I do this, I do this. I do this,’ he said. I like him. He tell us everything clearly.” What do you say about his family? “He’s a family man. He’s a good responsibility. He’s good.” Do most Ethiopians like Trump or do they like Hillary? “Trump 100%” Why? “He’s hard worker, I tell you.” You like Washington? “Yes, I like Washington.” Why? “It’s free country. Everybody live here is good America. Work free. Teaching. Everything. I like America.” I appreciate that. “You’re welcome.”

Edgar B. Anderson is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School. He has worked as a reporter at all the Democratic and Republican National Conventions since 1988. He represented Laiks at the 2008, 2012, and 2016 conventions. He lives in Los Angeles.

On Two Different Planets by Edgar B. Anderson

ON TWO DIFFERENT PLANETS

The 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions

By Edgar B. Anderson

LAIKS Latvian Newspaper, September 3-October 14, 2016, Volume LXVII, Numbers 33-37

This summer I had the pleasure of working as a reporter at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions – at both conventions for the eighth time since 1988 and this year for the third time since 2008 representing LAIKS.

Each Monday through Thursday in Cleveland and Philadelphia, I took the railroad into downtown from the suburban homes of my generous Latvian hosts.  Security was tight in both cities. Police, some on horseback, had been brought in from far distances to help out. The train stations and even the train cars were patrolled with dogs.

On the night before the GOP convention the street in front of the central station in Cleveland was blocked by enormous trucks, which made me think of the photos of Riga during the Barricades. To be sure, this was hardly Latvia in the winter of 1991. Despite all the security measures, the GOP conventioneers, guests, visitors, and local volunteer greeters were in a buoyant mood.

The Democrats in Philadelphia, in contrast, still exhibited hard feelings between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters. In the downtown streets as well as outside and inside of the Wells Fargo Center, site of the Democratic proceedings, Bernie fans held noisy protests for the duration of the convention.

Several square blocks around Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena as well as the nearby Convention Center were cordoned off for the week, with admission permitted only by pre-arranged credentials – for press, staff, delegates, and guests.  Philadelphia streets were not quite so restricted, except for the area south of downtown around the Wells Fargo Center. This year, for the first time, Secret Service clearance was required for delegates and press to access secured areas at both conventions.

My task as reporter was to learn what the politicians and delegates believed – about their favored candidates, about the suddenly controversial matter of the American commitment to NATO, about the hot button issue of immigration, and about anything else that excited them. I particularly wanted to observe the fundamental differences between the parties.

The Republicans I talked with were very worried about the future of the country. Their major concerns were radical Islamic terrorism, our porous borders, the sluggish economy, a 20 trillion dollar national debt, threats to Constitutional rights, including the Second Amendment, and the growing breakdown of law and order and attacks on the police. So-called social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, seem to have receded somewhat as major flashpoints.  The proverbial “Big Tent” was in evidence as Trump delegate Peter Thiel, the gay founder of PayPal, spoke from the podium shortly before Ivanka Trump introduced her father, and received a standing ovation.

The Democrats were concerned about completely different issues.  They talked about income inequality, racism, white privilege, police brutality, a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, campaign finance reform, college costs, climate change, and fracking. The Democratic convention was also a manifestation of identity politics with daily caucuses of African-American, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, and LGBT delegates to whom politicians would go calling and make promises relating to the particular group’s interests.  Display tables filled the hallways of the Philadelphia Convention Center staffed by activists for various causes, including Save the Children, abortion rights, Mark Zuckerberg’s open borders group, environmental protection, domestic violence, gun control, and Palestine.

My press credential allowed me to walk throughout the arena, including the convention floor, each day and evening in both Cleveland and Philadelphia and talk with many prominent political figures as well as regular delegates. I had the pleasure of meeting one of two Latvian diplomats from the Embassy in Washington D.C., who participated in briefings organized for foreign dignitaries. I also had fun spending time on Radio Row, the temporary location of scores of radio and Internet outlets.  Familiar faces were everywhere:  Dan Rather and Ted Koppel, Dennis Prager and Larry Elder, Carl Bernstein and Karl Rove, Jesse Jackson and Jesse Watters, Milo Yiannopoulos and Diamond and Silk, Jerry Springer and Medea Benjamin, and Ann Coulter and Roger L. Simon. GOP Convention guest Dutch Parliament party leader Geert Wilders drew attention from press and well-wishers.

Donald Trump’s statement that all NATO members must honor their financial obligations raised concern in some quarters about his commitment to the alliance and triggered controversy at both conventions. In Cleveland the Republicans backed up Trump.  Former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown told me, “[NATO] needs to adjust and adapt to the new threat [of terrorism]. They’re still fighting the traditional wars of men in uniforms representing a state or a country. Those [NATO] countries have to pay their fair share. We can’t continue to pay the freight. … What, we have three countries paying the full freight this last go-round? So they need to adjust and adapt to the new threat, and that means modernizing NATO. It doesn’t mean eliminating it at all, never was the intention. I know that for a fact. And I agree with that. I think they should pay their fair share, and I also believe that they should be able to modernize to fight that terrorism threat. … NATO plays a key role, but they need to play a different role. Look what’s happening in France, look what’s happening in Germany. We have to adjust and adapt.”

Former New York Senator Al D’Amato:  “He [Trump] expects and rightfully so our partners in NATO do what they’re supposed to do and to be quite candid with you, they haven’t. They haven’t put up their fair share. They haven’t committed enough of their resources. We’re not there just to guarantee your protection. You got to help yourself, and so I think he’s absolutely right in saying by the way we want them to do more. … I believe that we have mishandled our relationship with the Russians for quite a while going back to Bush and continuing now. Our natural allies in my belief can and should be the Russians in the battle against the extremist fundamentalists. …  And, by the way, you don’t ask someone to help you while you’re poking them in the eye publically for things that you shouldn’t be. You want to talk about human rights? Talk about it behind the scenes. Don’t poke Putin in the eye with one finger and then ask him to help you with Iran on the other hand. Doesn’t make sense. And that goes back to Bush and that carries through with this President.”

New York Congressman Peter King: “{About Trump] the best assurance that I can give is that he picked Mike Pence. Mike Pence is a foreign affairs expert. He’s on the foreign affairs committee, he believes in strong American foreign policy, he’s not going to be at all intimidated by Putin, and he has a very realistic hard-nosed approach to American foreign policy, and so I would say that the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia would be well protected by a Trump Administration, particularly with Mike Pence in the room.”

Donald Trump confidant and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions: “Well, yes, we are going to honor the NATO commitment. And we’ve already stepped up this year our contribution to Europe’s defense, which should have been only done when Europe matched it. But we didn’t. We gave another 3.4 billion dollars. So we’re moving troops into the Baltics. I love the Latvians and the Baltic nations. They got such a good spirit. And they’re doing better than the rest of Europe in helping fund their own defense. So I think this is an important thing. And I don’t know if there’s any possibility of our having a breakthrough with Russia. We’ve tried before and it didn’t work. But I think it’s illogical and against good common sense that we have as much hostility as we do with the Russians. And somehow they need to calm down a little bit, and we need to have a lot more positive relationship that would benefit both Europe and Russia. It makes no sense from my perspective. Of course, I’m not on the border like the Baltics and Poland and other countries. I’m not there. But hopefully somehow it would be great if we had a breakthrough. It may not. There can be no erosion of our support for our Baltic allies in Latvia to try to get a deal with Russia. That’s not negotiable.”

Some Democrats condemned Donald Trump. California Congresswoman Maxine Waters: “I think when Donald Trump made that statement you saw our leaders come quickly to say that we’re committed to our allies and that they are to understand that that commitment cannot be broken by a Donald Trump. He doesn’t know what he is talking about.” New York Senator Chuck Schumer: “Well, I don’t know if he’s such a friend of NATO. I think all Latvians should tell the Latvian-Americans to be wary of Trump.” Retiring California Senator Barbara Boxer: “The NATO alliance is very sacred. If you believe that we should stand by our friends and allies in Europe and abide by our NATO commitment, you need to vote for Hillary Clinton and not Donald Trump because he’s going to walk away.” One of the two Senate candidates on the November ballot in California and Boxer’s possible successor, State Attorney General Kamala Harris, had this to say about the NATO commitment, “I believe that it remains and should be strong and that we cannot neglect the promise that we’ve made to our neighbors and friends around the globe, and we will stand with them and at the very least work together as a global community and work with a priority around engagement.”

Dennis Kucinich, former Ohio Congressman took a radically different position from his fellow Democrats (as well as the Republicans) which he was eager to expound upon at length: “The United States’ position should be that it deals with the Baltic countries directly and not through NATO. I don’t want NATO making decisions for the United States of America, period. NATO has an interest in increasing its budget, in making itself relevant. We’ve got to be careful that NATO is not used to restart the Cold War and to therefore put the people of the Baltics in jeopardy. You know, the people in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are not pawns in some kind of geopolitical game. They have a right to live in peace and security, and no one should come on their doorstep and start to rattle sabers from any side. This isn’t a tug of war. Let the Baltics be the Baltics without the interference of any other nation.”

Kucinich continued, “Let the U.S. be involved directly with the Baltics without another organization whose actions can be used to inflame a situation in order to justify its continued existence. To my way of thinking NATO is a scam. And so they milk the countries of the Baltics for more money. It’s like a protection racket. And then they get that money and they want to stir stuff up and pretend they’re protecting the Baltics from Russia. … In the Congress of the United States I have been a very strong supporter of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, their independence, their security, their ability to chart their own course as a nation. And those three countries have had some brilliant leaders who have created economic models which are important for the whole world. But you cannot create a solid economic model which delivers health care and education and economic security if you have to keep paying more and more money for your military. And the fact of the matter is the United States’ relationship with Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia can and should be the guarantee. I see NATO as being an anachronism. Their mission has gone beyond the North Atlantic, and it’s time for re-evaluation of its relevancy.”

On another major issue, immigration, the parties could not have been farther apart. The Republicans support border security and legal immigration. The Democrats back “a path to citizenship” for the 10-15 million people in the US illegally, and, judging from what their speakers had to say, the Democrats make little or no distinction between legal and illegal immigration.  

A portion of the first evening of the Democratic Convention was set aside to salute people living in the United States illegally. A “dreamer” (a child brought into the country in violation of U.S. laws) addressed the delegates from the podium.  A young girl born in the United States to illegal immigrants also spoke, followed by her undocumented mother. Their messages may have been mostly in Spanish, but the final few words were unmistakably in English: “Hillary Clinton for President!” The Democrats gave them a rousing ovation.

In contrast the Republicans highlighted the immigration issue with speeches by three parents, Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and Jamiel Shaw, whose children were killed by illegal aliens. African-American Shaw spoke about his 17-year old son, Jamiel Jr., who was shot and killed in front of the family home by an illegal alien gang member whom Los Angeles authorities had just released from jail. The major news networks blanked out these appearances, but Donald Trump cited their cases in his acceptance speech. In addition, Trump mentioned Kate Steinle, the young woman who was shot and killed by a five times-deported illegal alien who had been let loose onto the streets by the sanctuary city of San Francisco.

Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio spoke for many of the GOP delegates when he said, “I’m the sheriff, I’m the chief law enforcement for Maricopa County, which is larger than 19 states, but my mother and father came here from Italy legally. So you just have to obey the law. If you don’t like the laws, change them.” Why is it important to uphold the law? “It’s very simple. You have to have some control of your country. You have to know who’s coming in, for many reasons. For example, Mexico isn’t just for illegal immigration. That’s where all the drugs are coming from that nobody talks about. We don’t care about the drugs coming into our country from Mexico? My whole life for 55 years has been really fighting the drug problem in Turkey, the Middle East, Mexico City.  I could go on and on. But nobody talks about drugs. Trump now talks that the wall is for the drugs too, not for illegal immigration. I’m very concerned about Europe that they took away the borders. …  I said years ago, it’s going to come back on them and it is coming back on them. That’s a good example why you need borders, and to be a sovereign country you need someone surrounding that country with personnel to see who’s coming in. The other thing is why are they complaining? Unfortunately in this country you need fences and walls in your own house, you need burglar alarms, you need canine dogs, you need all this security in our own homes, and you worry about the country? That doesn’t make sense.”

Former California Democratic Governor Gray Davis took a quite different approach to the immigration issue as he explained his views: “I think the President is on the right track. First of all, we need border security. I think this year there was a net migration zero, nobody coming in from Mexico. I do think we need a path to citizenship. And I am hopeful that with a President Clinton and hopefully a Democratic Senate and a Paul Ryan that I think wants to get one or two achievements under his belt we can actually get something done on immigration. But we need to understand we are all God’s children. If people obey the rules, they come into this country, they pay taxes, they learn the language, they have to pay a fine, they take a decade, but they should have the hope that they can eventually become a citizen.” But what does this say to the people, such as the Latvian immigrants after World War II, who waited their turn in line, sometimes many years, and those, and I know some, who are waiting in the Philippines patiently and yet they see people who jumped to the head of the line offered a path to citizenship? “I wish there were no inequities in life. I was elected, re-elected, and recalled so when I spoke to the graduating class at Columbia Law School I said to the students, ‘I want you to remember three observations. School is fair, life is not. Just learn to deal with it.’ … In a perfect world no one would ever get in front of anyone in line.”

Another chasm between the parties was on the matter of race. At the Republican Convention Trump supporter African-American Sheriff of Milwaukee County David A. Clarke, Jr., began his speech, “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to make something very clear: Blue Lives Matter!” The delegates responded with a roar of approval. He continued with a fervent defense of law enforcement and the importance of “Making America Safe Again.” Clarke has been a strong critic of the Black Lives Matter movement in the aftermath of the numerous recent murders of police officers around the country.

The Democrats were supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement. In a video shown to delegates Hillary Clinton charged that America suffers from “systemic racism.” The convention then proceeded to honor “The Mothers of the Movement” and brought onto the stage several women whose children had lost their lives, in most cases, at the hands of law enforcement. The mother of Trayvon Martin spoke. Among the other women the Democrats recognized was Lezley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, the 19-year old who was shot by a Ferguson, Missouri, policeman after, according to the findings of the Obama Justice Department, assaulting the officer in his patrol car. The delegates gave these women a standing ovation, along with shouts of “Black Lives Matter."

In response to my questions the next evening, Kweisi Mfume, former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, although not himself involved with the Black Lives Matter movement, had the following to say: “I just think that Black Lives Matter, they just haven’t always mattered which is why in fact there’s been such an emphasis by groups of people across the country to underscore that. It does not diminish in any way Blue Lives or Nurses’ Lives or First Responders’ Lives. It’s just that in this instance the issue came about because of the number of unfortunate tragedies that were happening to black men, many of them, in my opinion, innocent. … I think what has created a harsh edge on all this unfortunately has been the very, very unfortunate murders of police officers here recently and the very unfortunate kind of dialogue that’s back and forth, whether it’s yelling or shouting down protestors or protestors yelling and shouting down a speaker. The bottom line is that the concept came out of a real and honest means of expression.” He lamented the fact that numerous efforts to deal with the high inner city black-on-black crime rate as well as the crisis of so many fatherless homes in the African-American community simply don’t receive the media attention that he said they deserve.

THE REPUBLICAN DELEGATES.  I interviewed numerous regular Republican delegates in Cleveland, and here follows a representative sampling of what they had to say.

Felix Vega, delegate from Los Angeles who works in the real estate development business, explained his support of Trump, “When you analyze his motives, Donald Trump has all the money in the world. He’s got a beautiful family. He’s got a beautiful wife. He’s got a lot of power. He’s got everything he already needs, and when you think about it, why would a man want to risk and endanger himself and his family and take on a responsibility like this unless he had pure motives? … I really believe that Donald Trump loves America. I really believe that his motives are good, his motives are pure, and I believe that he will put America first.” Vega’s issues are “safety, the deficit, bringing jobs back to the country.” On immigration – “I’m Latino – and it’s a big issue in the Latino community, and he [Trump] is facing these problems head-on. He’s not a procrastinator. He’s going to have some solutions to the problems that are facing America. I believe he thinks out of the box. People are fed up with Washington. … We have an existing problem. People who want to come to the United States are welcome. But we need for them to come legally. It’s not a good life for your family to come illegally. I know many immigrants that are here illegally. Many of them are friends that I’ve known for many years. … Donald Trump will deal with them fairly, and he will come up solutions so that this problem won’t continue to be a cancer.” About NATO, “America needs to do the right thing for America [and] doing what’s right for America is going to make America stronger, and it’s going to help other countries, and I tell you, if you’re an ally of Donald Trump, he’s going to be loyal to you. It’s not going to be like it is now. “

Self-described fifty-year “conservative activist” Morton Blackwell of Virginia said he has hired many interns from the Baltic States in his Leadership Institute over the years and that he travelled to the Baltics in 1991 to meet with anti-Communist activists. “I strongly think that the United States should defend Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. I think it needs to be done.  I suspect that Putin has designs on reabsorbing those Baltic republics, which would be an awful tragedy.” About Trump on this subject, “I don’t know if he has spoken specifically about what responsibility or obligations the United States has in the Baltic Republics. He does not seem to be the kind of person who would allow himself or the country to be pushed around.” On immigration, “I believe that we have to have borders or we don’t have a county, and we have to enforce those borders in order for that country to remain sovereign. So it would seem to me that more than any other current era politicians Trump would deliver on promises to secure the border.”

Maria Teresa Mayer, of Portland Oregon, originally from the Philippines, said that she was drawn to support Ted Cruz because of “his Christian upbringing, and he quoted a couple of Scriptures, and I felt that he spoke to me at that time, especially when he said, ‘This is our time.’ … I felt some quickening in my heart. … It has something to do with Christian values in my perspective, and it was time to rise up as a Christian and be counted.” Now she backs Donald Trump.  “I am against illegal immigration, and I believe in the rules. And it’s first come, first serve. … You don’t’ let anyone just cut you in line. If it’s your turn, then it has to be your turn. So if it’s the Latvian people’s turn to come, I think they should take that, and America should welcome them here. …. If you are here illegally you have to go back to the end of the line and start back there.” About NATO, “I feel that if the United States made a commitment they have to come through with that because that’s also integrity and that’s what our country is known about, a country of integrity, and we do what we say we will do.”

Maria Zack, of Atlanta, who owns an IT company and a government affairs company, chaired a SuperPac for Ted Cruz but was assigned by the party as a Marco Rubio alternate delegate. She now supports Trump: “Well, certainly knowing what’s happening in the world and what’s happening in the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party has left and gone so far out of the ordinary out of the extreme that America will not be safe under their direction, under their leadership, they’ve already proven with Benghazi, and we are not growing jobs under the Democrat agenda, so as friends of mine they have all said ‘Look, I’m not political, but we can’t continue with our country going downward,’ and so there is this movement that we want to restore the American culture that we love and cherish, our religious liberties, they want to be able to have jobs.  I believe Donald Trump will win and defeat [Clinton] handily.”

“Minister of the love of Jesus Christ” Nathan Paikai, Hawaii delegation chair, knows Latvia from his time living in Europe spreading the Gospel. He explained why he supported Donald Trump from the very beginning: “First of all, Hillary’s going to take the country down. Her character does not match the character of a President.” About Trump, “He’s a Godly father, he’s a businessman, he loves America first and foremost, he loves the police department, he loves the military, he will not let anybody die in another country that we went to serve. … He’s a man of his word. And he’s a father, a grandfather, and he wants the best for the people of America. And that’s why I’m asking all of America and the world to get behind him. Why did we give Barack Hussein Obama a chance, and he did nothing but cause chaos and more wars and racial divide? Mr. Trump has not done any of that.” When I mentioned how touching it was to see all the Trump children lined up watching as their father went over the top in the delegate count, Paikai responded only by moving his fingers down his cheeks to show the tears that he had shed.

Judy Schwalbach, a self-employed kitchen designer, from Escanaba, Michigan, “I ran as delegate for John Kasich, and now I am in full support of Donald Trump.” She praised Trump as a negotiator. “Do we really want somebody that’s going to sing Kumbaja or somebody who’s going to go in there and cut a really good deal for the U.S. A.?” On NATO, “The United States leads, and we remember our friends, and we never turn our back on people no matter what. Throughout history we have always been the supporters of the world, and the world is healthier when the United States is leading.” Schwalbach is a naturalized American citizen adopted from Canada. “I believe we are a country of laws and that we need to follow those laws. If I go through a stop sign I get a ticket. You mean to tell me that you can come over the border and you’re not going to get a ticket – you’re not going to get sent back? I think that’s very disrespectful of our country. And I think you need to pledge allegiance to this country when you come here, and you mean it, and you need to speak the English language, at least to a certain degree. And I don’t want people to lose their ethnicity either. Because French-Canadian I am, and my grandmother was French Canadian, and she taught me how to speak. My memere was important to me.”

Legendary 91-year old Phyllis Schlafly, a Missouri delegate: “Well, I’m thrilled with what’s happening. I endorsed Trump early. I felt he’s the best one to kick the kingmakers away and stop them from giving us a series of losers and have the gumption and the energy to be elected. And so I’ve been for Trump all along.” About her longtime vocal support of the Baltic States, “Yes, I was a big supporter of protecting our allies and having our friends being able to rely on us. That’s why I’ve always supported not just a strong national defense but military superiority. We have to be the biggest and the best so our friends will rely on us and our enemies will be afraid of us.”

Shirley Husar of Los Angeles has worked in real estate and technology: “I was given one of the most amazing honors as I was to cast the votes of all of California’s 172 delegates for Donald Trump.” Why Trump, especially in the African-American community? “It is so important that people identify that this man understands not only the vision of what America is about, he brought Pence in tonight and we see the balance and everybody likes Mike. He [Trump] is a man who understands that he is becoming the world leader. They need to see a man who understands the vision, the purpose, the fortitude that it takes to make America great again.” What issues really motivate you?  “Urban communities. Many urban communities right now are blighted by leadership that has been governing for the last 40 years. … The people in the urban communities are hurting. They can’t find jobs. We have a miscommunication between the police and the people on the streets. So if we can bring that unity together and make everyone safe in America, that will make a better America.” What do you say about the Democratic Party that honors illegal immigrants while this party honors the victims of illegal immigrant crime? “I know Mr. Shaw [whose son was killed by an illegal alien]. I grew up in that neighborhood. Jamiel Shaw, Sr. went out to the urban communities. He talked to [Los Angeles Democratic politicians] Karen Bass, Maxine Waters, Ridley-Thomas, and he asked for some kind of support. And instead they backed up illegal immigration. They backed up bills that did not really support their own community, which was very shocking and appalling. Look, 40 years of oppression from the communities under a regime of the Democratic Party that doesn’t want to really support inner city growth of small businesses but instead expand government programs. … Under the President Trump, you’re going to see someone who understands that people are valued no matter what ethnic background, no matter what race, if you do it legally and you understand that this country is governed by laws.”

Emily Gruenhagen of Glencoe, Minnesota, supported Ted Cruz: “I believe Cruz has the most depth of understanding, I believe he has the most experience, I believe he is the most articulate, I believe he is the most principled, I believe he is the most trusted, and I share his values the most.” And now?  “Well, I don’t want Hillary Clinton for President. I believe that the Clinton Administration has been terribly corrupt, and I don’t trust her at all.  I don’t believe she has America’s best interests in mind, and I do believe that Donald Trump does.” What issues particularly concern you? “Religious liberty is one that really pushes my buttons, also Second Amendment rights and our Constitution in general, anything that infringes on our Constitutional rights. … The problem is we don’t realize how socialism is creeping upon us. And, of course, I’ve heard it said that the difference between socialism and communism is a bayonet. … But socialism is creeping on our nation. And, you know, this election is so crucial. I don’t know that we can ever quite bring it back unless we win. And that’s one of the reasons that Hillary must not win because we might be beyond the point of return. And once America’s has gone to socialism where will be people go? There will no place for people to flee anymore. We are like the last hope.”

Carl Paladino of Buffalo, attorney and real estate developer, chair of the New York State Trump campaign, and GOP candidate for Governor in 2010: What drew you to Trump?  “He’s been a personal friend for a few years, and I like him. I like his style. I like his substance of issues. And we’re much the same type of person. We’re the type that goes out and does the right thing. We make promises, we keep them. Honest, credible, character. It’s our nature. And I was right on board the first day he announced.” What does the public not really know about Donald Trump that you know as a close friend?  “Well, I asked him a few years ago why he wanted to run for President.  And he said, ‘Carl, I’ve had all the success you could have in private life. I’ve raised a great family. I’m very proud of everything that I’ve done. I know that I can do things that other people can only think of. And I believe that America is entitled to something better.’ And he says, ‘I can do it.’ And I said, ‘I know you can do it,’ and we’ve been friends since that day. I think what you’ve heard from Melania last night and what you’re hearing from his children he’s a guy that when he makes a promise he’s very determined. He’ll find a solution to the problem, and he will perform on his promises. And when you get a person of that kind of character, not just laying high platitudes out there and making promises you can’t keep, you’ve got to turn to the logical choice, and I think that’s where the American people will turn as we get into November.”

Paladino continued, “The Washington elitists have taken us so far off track that they’ve given us right now no option but to just get them out of there.  The American people finally woke up and said, ‘The media has been telling us how to think, how to react to things, and we’re done with that. We can’t buy that song anymore. It doesn’t ring in our ears anymore. We want constructive change.’ That’s why you see the people committed to Trump are committed, with a vengeance committed, because they’ve identified that connection, and they know that the nonsense can’t continue. The progressive movement was born to die. It’s had great success. They gave us political correctness. They told us you can’t say ‘Merry Christmas,’ and we accepted it blindly as a society, but something happened when Donald Trump came on the scene. The people engaged, and as they engaged they went and they spread the word that this man is no nonsense. You may not like his style. You may not like how he looks. You may not like his hair. Who cares? Because he’s the guy that can do the job. And he’ll do it for the people. He’s a leader of men. He’s a born leader of men.”

THE DEMOCRATIC DELEGATES.  In Philadelphia I was also able to interview many regular Democratic delegates, a good number of whom were still standing by their support of Bernie Sanders. Here is a representative sampling of their comments.

Nazda Alam of Weston, Massachusetts, works for the State of Massachusetts as a clinical social worker and is an adjunct college teacher and was a Clinton delegate. “I was a Hillary supporter in 2008 so it’s not new and this year is important. I am a Muslim delegate, and I am also the Chair of the Massachusetts Muslim Voter Registration Project, and I am the Co-chair of the National Muslim Voter Registration Project. This we’ve been doing since 2008, but this year is so important because of Donald Trump’s rhetoric against Muslim immigrants and other minority communities. And that is so Un-American, undemocratic, and it is dangerous. So at this time … I organize the Muslims to vote for Hillary, and then Democratic leaders we decide to stop Donald Trump and unite all the minorities. “ Aside from the Muslim issue what makes you a Democrat for Hillary? “We made history by electing the first African-American President in this country. We wanted to make history by electing the first female President of the United States.” But what issues? “Women’s rights, equal pay, health care, education, everything for the middle class and lower income class. How equal pay? “Right now women earn 73 cents for the dollar the men earn, and Hillary has the policy for equal pay for equal job.  She has a detailed plan, but the bottom line the people want to see that happen. And this year Hillary Clinton also came more like left than middle because of Bernie Sanders, and I personally feel that this is the best time for the Democrats to come together on the progressive issues.” Alam suggested that the Ferguson, Missouri, policeman should have been more restrained and didn’t need to kill Michael Brown. She defended Brown as “a symbol. It’s happening everywhere. You see in the last days how many innocent black people have been killed. … All Lives Matter, it is the universal truth. But we are focusing Black Lives Matter means stop discrimination – it’s not only killing – but Black Lives Matter means living situation, jobs, education.”

Kim Saylor, from Indianapolis, Indiana, was a Bernie Sanders delegate. “I’ve been a single mom since I was 19. I’ve never gotten a dime of child support. I’ve had what most people would call a rough life. I am definitely the 99%. And Bernie’s values and his core beliefs and the way he inspired people just inspired me to support him, and he spoke to me with what he was about and what he was about never changed.  Her key issues: “$15 per hour, the stop the TPP issues, things that are going to ruin the environment and ruin my children’s future as far as I am concerned Bernie is willing to fight for.” About the illegal immigrants, “I believe that there’s a reason that they’re here illegally, and I think that we should set up programs to help them become legal immigrants instead of throwing them back to the problems that they have.” On the race issue, “I think it’s come to the point in our country the reason that [Michael Brown’s] mother can be honored is because the fact that racism still exists in 2016. She’s become a spokesperson. The Black Lives Matter group they need change because it is white privilege in America. All day long it’s white privilege against black lives. It’s white privilege against lesbians and bisexuals and gays. If you don’t fit into the norm of what America is supposed to be, then you have to fight for your rights in America, and the Black Lives Matter people are just fighting for their rights, and that was the case that they used.”

Audrey Blondin of Litchfield, Connecticut, explained her decision to run as a delegate for Bernie Sanders: “First and foremost his passion about leveling the playing field as far as income equality is concerned. I live in Connecticut. There’s terrible disparity between the wealthier southern part of the state in Fairfield County as opposed to where I practice law in Torrington. It’s a lot of poverty. That really resonates with me.  Student load debt – I have three children who have more than $1/2 million in student loan debt.” How do we deal with income inequality? By what means?  “I think creating more better paying and more middle class jobs, which I think both Hillary and Bernie are focused on. I think, for example, that transportation bill that’s been languishing around. Like when we came down here on 95 – I went to law school here in Philadelphia, at Temple – I said to my husband – and they were building 95 40 years ago – I said to my husband as we drove down 95 they haven’t done one thing to upgrade or repair this 95 in 40 years. And that’s just right here. The airports, the bridges. There’s so much that needs to be done.” They’re government-funded projects. “Government is to provide for the people. I’m not, obviously being a Democrat, I’m not a fan of less government. I’m a fan of more government. I’m a fan of universal health insurance. That’s another thing that Bernie is very supportive of – single payer. It’s what Hillary started to do back in the day. President Obama has made some good steps, and it needs to continue. Huge issues. Government, in my opinion, is there for the good of the people. It’s not there to go away.” Back to your point about college costs. Nothing has gone up more than college costs. Could that be partly the fault of the colleges? “Well, I’ll give you an example. My oldest son is a physician. … When he started Yukon Medical School in 2004 the tuition was $10,000. When he graduated the tuition was $40,000. Now I don’t know what it is.” Well, maybe the university should answer for that. I believe that in California where I come from there are now more administrators in the University of California than teachers, and yet the University is begging for more money. “Well, this is why Bernie has proposed state colleges tuition free. There can be some restructuring. Money can be used differently and in other ways in order to serve the people.”

Nancy Wanderer, Falmouth, Maine, was a Hillary Clinton delegate. Why Hillary over Trump? “The first reason that most people give is that we can’t possibly have Trump as President, and that is a good reason.” And the reason they say that? “Well, they say that because he is totally unsuited to be President. And I don’t think that he even intended to be President. I think he just wanted to get publicity and have a good time and get more publicity for himself and then something weird happened and he actually got voted for. I don’t think he even wants to be President. You know, he’s already talking about other people doing the job for him.” Wanderer continued, “Hillary, on the other hand, has been preparing for something like this – it didn’t have to be this – something to make a major contribution her whole life, and I know that because I went to college with her. I’ve known her for 51 years so I saw what she did in college. … She tutored minority children in the inner city of Boston. She did a lot of campaign work on the campus to make Wellesley College a better place with more liberal social rules and also academic rules she updated that. I worked with her on a lot of these things. She became our college government president, the senate president. And she gave a fantastic commencement speech that I think most people have heard of. … She followed Senator Edward Brooke, who was our official commencement speaker who said – this is during the Vietnam War, it was 1969 – he said everything is fine, and these young people who are protesting and demonstrating are just selfish, and they don’t even know how good they’ve got it. They should just home and get a job and cut it out. And, of course, we were all very upset to hear him say this, but what could we do?  And Hillary got up – she was our student choice as a commencement speaker and took him on and said – she had a speech prepared and she did eventually give that speech – but she started with a direct rebuttal to what he said and how young people of the time – this was, you know, when we were in our 20s back in 1969 – you know, that what we were doing was going to be making a difference  and that we did have something to contribute and that the world wasn’t so good right now.”

In regard to Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments as a diplomat, “I think the major thing that she did was to re-establish some respect for our country in the world. I think George Bush – you know – people didn’t trust him, they didn’t think he was even smart enough to be President. And I think she went and she listened to people, and she did the best she could to get peace between different groups. And I know people say that she was too hawkish in some instances, but I think she did her homework, and I trust her that what she decided to do was the right thing to do.” On immigration, “One of the best things about Hillary is that she’s looking for a way to help immigrants come and become Americans. That’s been her goal all along.” About the death of Kate Steinle and similar cases of illegal alien crime, Wanderer said, “I don’t think we have enough people to keep good track of what some of the immigrants are doing. It’s terrible when someone slips through the cracks like that, but it’s the exception, it’s not the rule – and the thousands and millions of immigrants who come and help build this country, and to cite one to two or ten or 100 or even 1000 is still a small fraction of the good people who come as immigrants, and we do have to allow them to come and welcome them.”

Robert Shearer, Humboldt County in Northern California: “I support Senator Sanders because he has brought forth all the issues that I have fought for my entire life. I’ve been an activist since I was 13 fighting for social and environmental justice and what Sanders has done is expose the intersectionality of countless economic, social, and environmental justice issues that are now united under the umbrella of the political revolution, and we’re going to carry that in the future by infiltrating the Democratic Party and taking over all of the positions from local level to the top, and we’re going to continue to fight in the streets, and we’re going to use an inside outside strategy to push the party to the left and reclaim American democracy for the American people and for the climate.” Specific issues: “I want health care for all. I think that every American, every human being, deserves the right to quality health care. And this convention right here is sponsored by major Republican donors and anti-Obamacare lobbyists paid for the Democratic Convention and now – I’m speculating – but that’s how come we couldn’t get health care for all into the Democratic platform. I think Americans are pretty sure now when there’s money going into big politics that it is corrupting it, which I think this is one of those instances. … Now another issue I stand behind is climate change. This is a climate crisis, this is not just climate change. When any candidate is taking millions from the fossil fuel industry we cannot count on them to rein those industries in and to tax carbon and to ban fracking and the science is clear. We need to keep the oil in the ground or we’re going to push the climate over the limit. 99% of scientists agree with that. I think even the Hillary delegates will agree we need to keep the oil in the ground.”

Don Bye, delegate from Duluth, Miinnesota, supported Hillary Clinton: “She has the best chance to lead us. I support whoever is as far left as close to socialism as we have, as close to a labor party in Europe, who I think can win, and I think that she can win. … I vote as far left as can be elected.” What do you mean by ‘left’? “More socialized, more Democratic, more the common man. We are our brother’s keeper. Single payer, socialized medicine absolutely. I’d like to see some incentive, the remnants of capitalism, some incentive, but not corporate American that we have too much of, not money in politics.” He cited as models “the Northern European countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland. Denmark – it might be my Norwegian heritage. … We grew up with the Christian background. We help our neighbors, we help each other, we help those who cannot take care of themselves.” On money in politics, “I’d outlaw that. I would limit the money that could be spent in campaigns – take as much time as want to campaign but not money, not the advertising. … I would limit campaign donations. … I would have public financing of campaigns.”

Clinton delegate Lou Weaver of Houston, Texas, works as Transgender Programs Coordinator for Equality Texas, a lobbying group. What is your number one issue that you think Hillary Clinton can move forward on? “The Equality Act – We need employment, we need housing and accommodations for everybody, for all residents of the United States, to be able to feel safe, to know that they can go to work and provide for their families, to know that they can keep a roof over their heads. Those are important priorities for us, for everybody.” Are you talking about a non-discrimination law?  “Yes, a non-discrimination act for everybody.  It’s got to protect all people who live in the United States.” What other issues are you concerned about? “Health care – making sure everybody in the United States has access to adequate health care. Health care and prescriptions cause a lot of people to become homeless if they cannot take care of those bills when they need adequate medical care. Then that becomes a problem. … We have to make sure that our people have access to care.” Well, Medicare, they say, is on its way to bankruptcy as it is now. Social Security is headed to bankruptcy also. Tremendous costs ahead for the baby boomer generation that’s retiring. Everybody wants what you want. But where do we get the money? How do we do this? “I’m not an economic person. I am a person who likes to talk to people. But I think we need to figure out where we’re spending our money, where we’re putting it, who we give tax breaks to, whether it’s companies, whether we’re outsourcing companies to other countries and not providing employment for our people here in the United States. I think we need to take a whole look at what our system has become and who we are holding accountable. And I’m not talking politicians. I’m talking businesses, I’m talking people. We need to start taking care of our own. And that’s our priority.”

Lil Ortendahl of Osakis, Minnesota, enthusiastically supported Hillary Clinton: “Because I trust her, because she’s a woman. She’s assertive like I have been. I’m 81 years old, and I’ve served my community well, raised a large family, been in business, and I’ve been 48 years in the trenches holding all the jobs I possibly could for the Democratic Party because I believe the Democratic Party works for everyone, tries to bring everybody up, not just a few who get wealthy at the top and kind of forget the rest of society. Some of them have experienced everyday things like we have, but many of them have not. They come from wealthy backgrounds or they inherit the business or a farm in the family, and so it’s a lot easier to make mistakes and work hard if you know that you got a half million or a million dollars standing behind what you’re doing,” What do you think her greatest achievements have been as a politician and a diplomat? “Well, I think she listens, and I think she tries to find a solution whether it’s an individual problem or a family problem or a business problem or for a whole group of people.”

THE PEOPLE AND THE MEDIA.  The sharp differences between the two political parties are the greatest they have been in a very long time. Indeed, Republicans and Democrats today often seem to be living on different planets. This situation is aggravated by a change as well in the news media, which Americans in the past have expected would inform them fairly and objectively about politics.

On the final night of the Democratic Convention I spoke with Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune and The McLaughlin Group, who observed, “We can see demographically that the parties have moved farther apart because their constituents have moved farther apart, and some of us in the media, not all, but some of us in the media are more polarized. When I came into journalism we all tried to be objective, balanced, and all that. Nowadays we’re more like the European press traditionally. You have your left publications and websites and your right publications and websites. And so people can now insulate themselves from any view that disagrees with theirs. So if you happen to be slightly liberal you can just hear lots of liberal to leftwing all the time, same on the right. So we kind of cultivate this polarization now, and we have less and less dialogue between right and left, and that results in some exaggerated hero worship on both sides.”

I hope that this report provides some useful insights into the hearts and minds of those civic-minded citizens who chose to participate in our political process in these troubled and dangerous times.

Edgar B. Anderson is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School. He lives in Los Angeles.

University of Pennsylvania Professor Alan Charles Kors: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses

 

What's Happened to California?

CATCHING UP TO MEXICO by Alex Alexiev

National Review, August 24, 2009

 

Catching Up to Mexico

Illegal immigration is depleting California’s human capital and ravaging its economy

ALEX ALEXIEV

 

California’s financial unraveling has prompted a long-overdue debate about taxes, regulation, and government spending, but the state’s media and government continue to ignore what could be an even greater problem: the irreparable damage to California’s human capital that nearly 30 years of unrestrained illegal immigration has achieved.

 

This is not an immigration problem, or even an illegal-immigration problem, per se. A strong case could be made that, in terms of educational achievement, industriousness, and entrepreneurial acumen, Asian immigrants to California have proven superior to white natives of the state. Therefore, if California were to experience a wave of mass immigration from Asia, its long-term economic prospects would be improved. Today’s Hispanic immigrants would probably have the same effect if they came from the top 10 to 20 percent of their society — according to those same measures of human capital — rather than from its bottom rungs. But the influx has instead been composed mainly of the poorly educated, the unskilled, and the illiterate. Such immigrants will likely soon dominate the state’s overall population and politics.

 

In 2005, the California K–12 school system was 48.5 percent Hispanic, compared with 30.9 percent white. By now it is above 50 percent Hispanic. Two-thirds of kindergarten students were Hispanic, most of them unable to speak English.

 

For a closer glimpse of what’s in store for California, look at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in California and the second largest in the country. Of its roughly 700,000 students, almost three-quarters are Hispanic, 8.9 percent are white, and 11.2 percent are black. More than half of the Latino students (about 300,000) are “English learners” and, depending on whether you believe the district or independent scholars, anywhere between a third and a half drop out of high school, following significant attrition in middle school. A recent study by UC Santa Barbara’s California Dropout Research Project estimates that high-school dropouts in 2007 alone will cost the state $24.2 billion in future economic losses.

 

Even those who graduate aren’t necessarily headed to success. According to one study, 69 percent of Latino high-school graduates “do not meet collegerequirements or satisfy prerequisites for most jobs that pay a living wage.” It is difficult to see how the majority-Hispanic labor force of the future can provide the skills that the sophisticated Los Angeles economy demands. Already studies show that as many as 700,000 Los Angeles Latinos and some 65 percent of the city’s illegal immigrants work in L.A.’s huge underground economy.

 

The unhappy picture in Los Angeles is replicated to one degree or another across much of California and is taking a huge toll on the state’s economic competitiveness and long-term prospects. California’s educational system, once easily the best in the country, is today mired in mediocrity — near the bottom among the 50 states as judged by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in math, science, reading, and writing. And for the first time in its history, California is experiencing an increase in adult illiteracy. In 2003, it had the highest adult illiteracy in the United States, 23 percent — nearly 50 percent higher than a decade earlier. In some counties (Imperial at 41 percent, Los Angeles at 33 percent) illiteracy approaches sub-Saharan levels.

 

Perhaps even more important than the collapse of educational achievement among the lower strata is a deterioration of the higher education that was for decades the basis of California’s preeminence in science and technology. California currently ranks 40th among the 50 states in college-attendance rates, and it already faces a significant shortage of college graduates. Studies have shown that the economy will need 40 percent of its workers to be college-educated by 2020, compared with today’s 32 percent. Given the aging white population (average age, 42), many of these new graduates will have to come from the burgeoning Latino immigrant population (average age, 26). By one estimate, this would require tripling of the number of college-educated immigrants, an impossibility if current trends hold. The state’s inability to improve the educational attainment of its residents will result in a “substantial decline in per capita income” and “place California last among the 50 states” by 2020, according to a study by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.

 

The mediocre education system, along with the unfriendly business climate and confiscatory tax regime, is driving educated, middle-class Californians out of the state. Between 2000 and 2005, more people with college degrees left California than came in, according to research by the Hewlett Foundation. Since then this trend has accelerated, and the state lost 2.2 million members of its young, educated, tax- paying middle class between 2004 and 2007. IRS data show that of recent migrants from the Golden State to places like Texas and Oklahoma, who average 29 years of age, 58 percent have received at least some college education and 53 percent own their homes.

 

In short, we are witnessing a highly advanced and prosperous state, long endowed with superior human capital, turning into the exact opposite in just one generation. What can be done to stop this race to the bottom? The answer is simple: California and Washington need to enforce existing immigration law. Unfortunately, it is difficult to convince the public that this is necessary, so deeply entrenched are myths about illegal immigration.

 

One myth is that because America is a country of immigrants and has successfully absorbed waves of immigration in the past, it can absorb this wave. But the argument neglects two key differences between past waves and the current influx. First, the immigrant population is more than double today what it was following the most massive previous immigration wave (that of the late 19th century). Second, and much more important, as scholars from the Manhattan Institute have shown, earlier immigrants were much more likely to bring with them useful skills. Some Hispanic immigrants certainly do integrate, but most do not. Research has shown that even after 20 years in the country, most illegal aliens (the overwhelming majority of whom are Hispanic) and their children remain poor, unskilled, and culturally isolated — they constitute a new permanent underclass.

 

Perhaps the most disingenuous myth about illegal immigrants is that they do not impose any cost on society. The reality is that even those who work — and half do not, according to the Pew Hispanic Center — cannot subsist on the wages they receive and depend on public assistance to a large degree. Research on Los Angeles immigrants by Harvard University scholar George J. Borjas shows that 40.1 percent of immigrant families with non-citizen heads of household receive welfare, compared with 12.7 percent of households with native-born heads. Illegal immigrants also increase public expenditures on health care, education, and prisons. In California today, illegal immigrants’ cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be $13 billion — half the state’s budget deficit.

 

The state should stop providing welfare and other social services to illegal aliens — as existing statutes demand — and severely punish employers who break the law by hiring illegal immigrants. This would immediately remove powerful economic incentives for illegal immigration, and millions of illegal aliens would return to their countries. Instead, with President Obama in the White House and the Democrats controlling Congress, an amnesty for the country’s 13 million illegal immigrants may be soon to come.

 

Milton Friedman once said that unrestrained immigration and the welfare state do not mix. Must we wait until California catches up with Mexico to realize how right he was?

 

Mr. Alexiev is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

          

 

Obama! Perhaps It's Time to Raise the Voting Age to 25

THE VOICE OF OBAMAMERICA

DIVERSITY UBER ALLES

Heather Mac Donald
Less Academics, More Narcissism
The University of California is cutting back on many things, but not useless diversity programs.
14 July 2011

California’s budget crisis has reduced the University of California to near-penury, claim its spokesmen. “Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,” the university system’s vice president for budget and capital resources warned earlier this month, in advance of this week’s meeting of the university’s regents. Well, not exactly to the bone. Even as UC campuses jettison entire degree programs and lose faculty to competing universities, one fiefdom has remained virtually sacrosanct: the diversity machine.

Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.

It’s not surprising that the new vice chancellor’s mission is rather opaque, given its superfluity. According to outgoing UCSD chancellor Marye Anne Fox, the new VC for EDI “will be responsible for building on existing diversity plans to develop and implement a campus-wide strategy on equity, diversity and inclusion.” UCSD has been churning out such diversity strategies for years. The “campus-wide strategy on equity, diversity and inclusion” that the new hire will supposedly produce differs from its predecessors only in being self-referential: it will define the very scope of the VC’s duties and the number of underlings he will command. “The strategic plan,” says Fox, “will inform the final organizational structure for the office of the VC EDI, will propose metrics to gauge progress, and will identify potential additional areas of responsibility.”

What a boon for a taxpayer-funded bureaucrat, to be able to define his own portfolio and determine how many staff lines he will control! UC Berkeley’s own vice chancellor for equity and inclusion shows how voracious a diversity apparatchik’s appetite for power can be. Gibor Basri has 17 people working for him in his immediate office, including a “chief of staff,” two “project/policy analysts,” and a “director of special projects.” The funding propping up Basri’s vast office could support many an English or history professor. According to state databases, Basri’s base pay in 2009 was $194,000, which does not include a variety of possible add-ons, including summer salary and administrative stipends. By comparison, the official salary for assistant professors at UC starts at around $53,000. Add to Basri’s salary those of his minions, and you’re looking at more than $1 million a year.

UC San Diego is adding diversity fat even as it snuffs out substantive academic programs. In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master’s program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature. At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. The cultivation of “a student’s understanding of her or his identity,” as the diversity requirement proposal put it, would focus on “African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or other groups” through the “framework” of “race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age.” Training computer scientists to compete with the growing technical prowess of China and India, apparently, can wait. More pressing is guaranteeing that students graduate from UCSD having fully explored their “identity.” Why study Cervantes, Voltaire, or Goethe when you can contemplate yourself? “Diversity,” it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism.

UC San Diego just lost a trio of prestigious cancer researchers to Rice University. Rice had offered them 40 percent pay raises over their total compensation packages, which at UCSD ranged from $187,000 to $330,000 a year. They take with them many times that amount in government grants. Scrapping the new Vice Chancellorship for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion could have saved at least one, if not two, of those biologists’ positions, depending on how greedily the new VC for EDI defines his realm. UCSD is not disclosing how much the VC for EDI will pull in or how large his staff will be: “We expect that [budget/staffing] will be part of the negotiation with the successful candidate at the end of our search process,” says Senior Director of Marketing and Communications Judy Piercey. Since the new UCSD vice chancellor will be responsible for equity, inclusion, and diversity—unlike the Berkeley vice chancellor, who is responsible only for equity and inclusion—the salary at UCSD will presumably reflect that infinitely greater mandate.

UCSD is by no means the only campus bullish on the diversity business, despite budgetary shortfalls hitting the UC system everywhere else. In 2010, Berkeley announced the UC Berkeley Initiative for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, funded in part by a $16 million gift from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. The “new” initiative duplicates existing “equity” projects, not least the Berkeley Diversity Research Initiative, established by Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau in 2006. This latest initiative boasts five new faculty chairs in “diversity-related research”—one of which will be “focused on equity rights affecting the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community,” according to the press release, and “will be one of the first endowed chairs on this subject in the United States.” (Sorry, Berkeley, Yale got there first.)

The main purpose of the UC Berkeley Initiative for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion seems to be to buy for the academic identity racket the respectability that no amount of campus mau-mauing has yet been able to achieve. “Area studies such as ethnic studies, queer studies and gender studies tend to be marginalized and viewed as less essential to the university than such fields as engineering, law or biology,” glumly noted the press release. (The use of the term “area studies” to refer to the solipsist’s curriculum is a novel appropriation of a phrase originally referring to geopolitical specialization.) According to a campus administrator on the Berkeley Diversity Research Initiative’s executive committee, the new initiative will change the character of Berkeley’s area studies by “asserting [sic] them squarely into the main life and importance of the campus.”

Conferring academic legitimacy on narcissism studies is apparently a superhuman task deserving of superhuman remuneration. The salary and expense account of the likely new director of the UC Berkeley Initiative for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, John Powell—who is currently the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University’s law school—will likely dwarf anything seen so far among diversocrats, according to inside sources.

UCLA’s diversity infrastructure has likewise been spared the budgetary ax. In the pre-recession 2005–06 academic year, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor for faculty diversity reported up the bureaucratic ladder to a vice chancellor for academic personnel, herself reporting to an executive vice chancellor and provost, who in turn reported to the university chancellor. Today, that associate vice chancellor for faculty diversity has been transformed into a vice provost position, while the vice chancellor for academic personnel above her has been eliminated. The new vice provost for faculty diversity will not be lonely; she can pal around with UCLA’s associate director for diversity research and analysis, its associate vice provost for student diversity, its associate dean for academic diversity, its director of diversity outreach, and its director of staff affirmative action.

The one observable activity performed by these lavishly funded diversity bureaucrats is to pressure academic departments to hire more women and minorities. (Even that activity is superfluous, given the abundant pressure for race and gender quotas already exerted by campus groups, every accrediting agency, and external political bodies.) Should a department fail to satisfy—as it inevitably will in every field with low minority participation—only one explanation is possible: a departmental or campus “climate” hostile to diversity, which then requires more intercessions from the diversity bureaucracy. The fact that every other college and university in the country is scouring the horizon for the identical elusive cache of qualified female and minority hires is not allowed into the discourse. Even less acceptable is any recognition of the academic achievement gap between black and Hispanic students, on the one hand, and white and Asian students, on the other, which affects the pool of qualified faculty candidates in fields with remotely traditional scholarly prerequisites. Student admissions offices are under the same pressure, which in California results in the constant generation of new schemes for “holistic” admissions procedures designed to evade the ban on racial and gender preferences that California voters enacted in 1996.

UC San Diego’s lunge toward an even more costly diversity apparatus was inspired in part by one of those periodic outbreaks of tasteless adolescent humor that every diversity bureaucrat lives for (and whose significance is trivial compared with the overwhelmingly supportive environment that today’s universities provide all of their students). But it was hardly out of character on a campus presided over by a chancellor fond of “social justice” rhetoric. And UC’s other campuses are equally committed to bureaucratic diversity aggrandizement, even without a pretext for accelerating those efforts.

This week, in light of a possible cut of $650 million in state financing, the University of California’s regents will likely raise tuition rates to $12,192. Though tuition at UC will remain a bargain compared with what you would pay at private colleges, the regents won’t be meeting their responsibility to California’s taxpayers if they pass over in silence the useless diversity infrastructure that sucks money away from the university’s real function: teaching students about the world outside their own limited selves. California’s budget crisis could have had a silver lining if it had resulted in the dismantling of that infrastructure—but the power of the diversity complex makes such an outcome unthinkable.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Union Mobocracy and Gangster Government

Union Mobocracy Drowns Out Democracy in Wisconsin

Editorial, Washington Examiner, March 12, 2011

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/2011/03/union-mobocracy-drowns-out-democracy-wisconsin

Democracy could be found in Wisconsin this past week, but not among the screaming protesters running wild throughout the Wisconsin capitol. While Wisconsin's elected representatives -- minus 14 Democratic state senators who fled the state -- were working hard on the job the people sent them to do, thousands of screaming protesters provided America with a preview of the union mobocracy coming soon to a legislature, city council or school board near you. State, county and city governments across the country might well find themselves facing the same confrontational tactics that caused havoc in Wisconsin.

The reason is that public employee unions have used collective bargaining to extract generous salaries, pensions and other benefits from taxpayers who can no longer afford to pay for them. The unfunded liabilities for public employee pensions and health care benefits are estimated at $3 trillion, according to Orin S. Kramer, chairman of New Jersey's State Investment Council. Voters are rebelling against public employee union demands that these inordinately lavish benefits be preserved by raising taxes, again, on the productive people in the economy, most of whom have far less lucrative benefits, if any at all. In Wisconsin, the projected deficit was $3.6 billion just for the next two years. That's why last November voters there elected Gov. Scott Walker and new Republican majorities in the state legislature. When Walker unveiled his proposed budget cuts and reforms last month, the public employee unions initially demanded higher taxes on "the rich" instead.

When Walker refused to raise taxes, government labor leaders agreed to pay a little more toward their benefits, but they also shifted the debate to the governor's proposed reforms in the collective bargaining process that enabled the unions to expect overly generous benefits. Union leaders -- who receive an estimated $100 million annually in compulsory membership dues that are paid with tax dollars -- were especially aghast that Walker proposed making union membership and dues an elective rather than a required paycheck deduction. That's when the protests moved away from fervent political speech and toward the kinds of systematic confrontation and violence reminiscent of the Students for a Democratic Society-inspired campus demonstrations of the 1960s.

Things reached a fever pitch as the Wisconsin legislature approved Walker's collective bargaining reforms. Republican legislators were often surrounded and threatened by cursing demonstrators; protesters repeatedly disrupted the legislative process; and chanting, screaming, horn-blowing crowds took over the rotunda and other parts of the capitol. Outside agitators were shipped into the state by President Obama's Organizing for America, the SEIU and other national unions, and the organization formerly known as ACORN. As events reached a crescendo, demonstrators broke past security police, breaking windows and forcing doors open in mob actions clearly intended to bring Wisconsin government to a stop and to nullify the results of last November's elections. Worst of all, many credible death threats were received by Republican legislators and are now being investigated by Wisconsin law enforcement authorities. Union mobocracy is what we get with gangster government, whether it's practiced in Washington, D.C., a state capital, or the county where you live.

THE REALITY OF RECONQUISTA

CA Hispanic Majority (+ Bilingualism!) = Federal Taxation = Secession?

Posted by Peter Brimelow, VDare.com Blog, November 16, 2010.

Amid the reports that California’s public schools now have a Hispanic majority was this gem:

[Hispanic] influence will only grow as Latino parents - now in the majority - realize many of the schools their children attend are underfunded, said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley.

“It turns upside down how we think about California students,” he said.

“A lot depends on the extent to which Latino parents come together and organize,” Fuller added. “These are parents who historically have not had much political power. But as they are coming together and feeling their oats, they may organize around education.”

Latino kids now majority in state’s public schools, by Will Kane, San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 2010.

In fact, of course, the California public school system is not remotely “underfunded“: it is a huge socialist sinkhole that has been captured by a rent-seeking parasite—the California Teachers Association, the teachers union. (I don’t like to mix controversies, but this was the argument of my book, The Worm In The Apple, and immigration is just making things worse).

What this educrat Fuller is actually saying is that Hispanics = more taxation (some of which he wants to be spent on him). But California has already hit the fiscal wall. The next step: a federal bail-out. In effect, Americans in prudent heartland states will be forced to subsidize immigrants in improvident alien-dominated states.

Sounds like this = secession to me.

Professor Fuller has another bright idea:

Fuller, the UC Berkeley professor, suggested state educators look at language education in an entirely new way.

“If the majority of the population is becoming bilingual,” he said, referring to the growing Latino population learning English, “why shouldn’t the white minority also become bilingual?”

Maybe because they’re Americans? And they object to Reconquista?

Advise Professor Fuller here.

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URL to article: http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/11/16/ca-hispanic-majority-federal-taxation-secession/

BIG SURPRISE!

THE SHAKEDOWN OF AMERICA

YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS

Teaching Immigrant Children to Hate America

'Stinko de Mayo," Editorial, The Washington Times, May 7, 2010

On May 5, five students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif., were sent home for wearing clothing featuring the American flag. Their offense: trespassing on Mexican heritage during Cinco de Mayo. Administrators called the flag-wearing "incendiary" and likely to cause violence. The school district overrode the decision, and the boys were allowed to return to school. In response yesterday, about 200 students staged a walkout carrying Mexican flags. The question is: Who taught these kids to hate America so much?

There should be nothing disrespectful about the U.S. flag to Americans of Mexican descent or to any other immigrant group. Teaching children that their heritage is at odds with their citizenship promotes disunity and divisiveness. While the high school's administrators may have been responding to a real public-safety threat, that threat was the product of their failure to instill a sense of national pride in their students.

Identity politics has become such a staple of public life and education in recent decades that incidents like this illustrate the poisonous effects it has on the nation. In the past, immigrant groups would attempt to outdo each other in demonstrating their patriotic attachment to the country that gave them safety, opportunity and freedom. Today, immigrant activist groups think patriotism is at best an inconvenience, at worst a sellout. They have replaced the melting pot with hardening battle lines in a struggle for power.

Read the full editorial: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/07/stinko-de-mayo/

WOE TO YOU IF YOU ARE OF THE WRONG RACE

Are Some Races More Equal Than Others?

By Abigail Thernstrom and Tim Fay, The American, March 12, 2010

How will the Obama administration respond to a formal complaint in the wake of serious black-on-Asian violence at South Philadelphia High School?

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has just announced a new push to enforce civil rights laws to combat discrimination in our schools. In the last decade, he said, his department’s Office for Civil Rights “has not been as vigilant as it should have been . . . But that is about to change.” His remarks were made March 8 in a speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge commemorating the 45th anniversary of the civil rights march on Selma, Alabama, that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is also eager to break with the allegedly lax civil rights policies of the Bush administration. Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has appointed a new education section chief, Anurima Bhargava, who comes to the department directly from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where she had been director of education practice since 2006. "I am excited she will be joining us as we continue our efforts to restore and transform the civil rights division," Perez declared.

Duncan wants to eliminate racial disparities in education in general, including in student discipline in particular. Undoubtedly, Perez does as well. But what will they do in response to a formal complaint filed by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) in the wake of serious black-on-Asian violence at South Philadelphia High School (SPHS)? AALDEF has charged that the district acted with "deliberate indifference" to the harassment of Asian students and with "intentional disregard" of their welfare.

Interethnic tension is generally ignored in the media, as is the level of violence and disorder in an appalling number of urban schools.

Will the Obama administration act aggressively to ensure Asian rights to a public education free of intimidation and actual violence—surely a basic civil right? Or will such action be taken only when blacks are the victims rather than the perpetrators? If the administration acts in the interest of the Asians, black students will be singled out as racially hostile troublemakers—a conclusion that neither the Department of Education nor the DOJ will welcome, if Duncan’s announcement means what it says. ...

Evidently, it is beyond imagination that disparities in school discipline reflect disparities in the conduct that merits discipline. Why is it that Asian-American students are only half as likely as whites to be suspended or expelled from school? Does this reveal the powerful anti-white biases of our largely white teaching force today? And does it reveal anti-black hostility on the part of black administrators and teachers when they discipline disproportionately high numbers of black students?

As far as we can tell at present, the Obama’s administration’s perspective is that of the LDF. That is, the big problem with school discipline is not the failure to impose it. Rather, it is the racial disparities that appear when data on disciplined students are collected. It is very hard to make schools like SPHS safe for all those who attend it—especially when those in charge seem unprepared to stop problems before they start by insisting on a culture of civility, which the best schools do. But the difficulty of creating a school in which students feel safe and are actually learning is certainly made much harder if administrators must worry about getting the numbers right—making sure blacks are not overrepresented and Asians underrepresented when disciplined students are counted for federal reporting purposes. Obama administration officials may have their hearts in the right place—worrying about the number of blacks who are floundering in school—but their heads are badly askew. 

Abigail Thernstrom is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Her most recent book is Voting Rights—and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections. Tim Fay is the special assistant to the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Read the full article: http://www.american.com/archive/2010/march/are-some-races-more-equal-than-others/

THE INMATES ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM

How the Campuses Helped Ruin California's Economy

By John Ellis, MindingTheCampus.com, March 11, 2010

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year's. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of "the struggle," and of "oppression," and---of course---of racism. "We are all students of color now" said Berkeley's Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented "structural racism." (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations "the best of our tradition of effective civil action." Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the old "shut it down" cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve. ...

The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California's two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.

Only one idea for solving the funding crisis was floated on March 4. It was to repeal the state's requirement that taxes can only be raised by a two thirds vote, so that taxes can be raised yet again and more money made available to the campuses. In other words, let's make the funding crisis even worse, by driving out of California even more wealth and wealth creating capacity, and raising the unemployment level even more. "California is not a tax-heavy state," said Assemblyman Joe Coto, whose office is right next door to San Jose State University, which enrolls 31,000 students. And that raises the question: how much longer will the California citizenry want to support a system of higher education that keeps its legislature stuck on stupid? It's not a question for this state alone.

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John Ellis is President of the California Association of Scholars, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/how_the_megacampuses_helped_ru.html

By John Ellis, MindingTheCampus.com, March 11, 2010

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year's. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of "the struggle," and of "oppression," and---of course---of racism. "We are all students of color now" said Berkeley's Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented "structural racism." (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations "the best of our tradition of effective civil action." Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the old "shut it down" cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve. ...

The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California's two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.

Only one idea for solving the funding crisis was floated on March 4. It was to repeal the state's requirement that taxes can only be raised by a two thirds vote, so that taxes can be raised yet again and more money made available to the campuses. In other words, let's make the funding crisis even worse, by driving out of California even more wealth and wealth creating capacity, and raising the unemployment level even more. "California is not a tax-heavy state," said Assemblyman Joe Coto, whose office is right next door to San Jose State University, which enrolls 31,000 students. And that raises the question: how much longer will the California citizenry want to support a system of higher education that keeps its legislature stuck on stupid? It's not a question for this state alone.

---------------------------------------------------------

John Ellis is President of the California Association of Scholars, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/how_the_megacampuses_helped_ru.html

By John Ellis, MindingTheCampus.com, March 11, 2010

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year's. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of "the struggle," and of "oppression," and---of course---of racism. "We are all students of color now" said Berkeley's Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented "structural racism." (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations "the best of our tradition of effective civil action." Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the old "shut it down" cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve. ...

The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California's two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.

Only one idea for solving the funding crisis was floated on March 4. It was to repeal the state's requirement that taxes can only be raised by a two thirds vote, so that taxes can be raised yet again and more money made available to the campuses. In other words, let's make the funding crisis even worse, by driving out of California even more wealth and wealth creating capacity, and raising the unemployment level even more. "California is not a tax-heavy state," said Assemblyman Joe Coto, whose office is right next door to San Jose State University, which enrolls 31,000 students. And that raises the question: how much longer will the California citizenry want to support a system of higher education that keeps its legislature stuck on stupid? It's not a question for this state alone.

---------------------------------------------------------

John Ellis is President of the California Association of Scholars, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/how_the_megacampuses_helped_ru.html

No Child Left Unbrainwashed

NO CHILD LEFT UNBRAINWASHED

By Edgar B. Anderson

FrontPageMagazine.com

July 1, 2004

 

The Left teaches new immigrant children that America is the Great Satan.

As countless numbers of immigrants continue to pour into the United States, the Left has been trying to destroy any patriotic thoughts these new Americans might develop toward their adopted country.  One can see an example of this phenomenon by perusing the textbooks used in the nation’s English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) programs.  High Point, Success in Language-Literature-Content, Level B, is an ESL literature anthology textbook published by Hampton-Brown and intended for middle and high school students whose English vocabulary and reading ability is at the sixth grade level.  The book has been purchased with taxpayer funds and adopted in school districts across the country.  

 

High Point opens with a chapter on the theme “Messages That Matter,” which contains a subsection entitled  “Talking Walls” excerpting from a book of the same name.  The editors introduce children recently arrived from El Salvador, Thailand, Nigeria, Armenia, and Bangladesh to a great historical figure.  No, it is not an American hero such as Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, or Abraham Lincoln.  First up is a tribute to Mexican muralist and dedicated Communist Diego Rivera.  The lesson includes the indispensable reference to “the glorious and painful history of [Mexico]” and the assurance that Rivera’s wall paintings reflected his belief “that working people represented the real Mexico.”

  

Next -- as if to compensate for the hosannas to Rivera -- is a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.  After a brief description of the black granite monument, High Point offers its rendition of history:  “In 1954, Vietnam gained independence from France.  Two separate governments formed and fought a civil war that kept the country divided.  In the late 1950s the United States began supporting South Vietnam in its fight against North Vietnam.  In 1975, North Vietnam won the war.”  A review of casualties follows.  The textbook editors tell the teacher to stress, “The war in Vietnam began as a civil war between two parts of the same country – North Vietnam and South Vietnam.”   

 

Notice the absence of any explanation why the United States participated in the Vietnam conflict.  The children learn only that America involved itself in a war that resulted in great suffering.  The fact that the North tried to take over the South is not mentioned.  The word “Communist” is nowhere to be found.  The millions of deaths that ensued after the North was victorious are overlooked.  And there is no such thing as a Boat Person. 

 

High Point editors go for the gold as they draw from a sequel, Talking Walls, The Stories Continue, to present a glowing profile of a second historical figure.  If you guessed Benjamin Franklin or Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson or Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Sally Ride, or Christa McAuliffe, you would be on the wrong track.  No, the honor belongs to “one of the greatest poets in the world” and a spokesman for “human rights,” the 1970 Communist Party candidate for President of Chile and winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, Pablo Neruda.

  

Instructional materials accompanying the “Messages That Matter” chapter include a lesson about the graffiti-covered barracks at the U.S. facility at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay where from 1910 to 1940 “thousands of Chinese immigrants were held against their will….  Many were lonely because they missed their families in China.  They were angry because they were being treated unfairly.”  In other words, America abuses its newcomers. 

 

As an aside, it should be noted that the most famous wall of our era, the Berlin Wall, covered in the source book Talking Walls, is not featured in High Point.  But this oversight is arguably a blessing since the Talking Walls author served up the following to her unknowing young readers:   

 

“The Berlin Wall, constructed in 1961 [By whom?], became a physical part of an invisible barrier that had divided Eastern and Western Europe since 1945. [Were the hundreds of miles of barbed wire fences, minefields, watchtowers, armed guards, and attack dogs invisible?]  At that time Winston Churchill, the leader of Great Britain, called this invisible barrier the ‘Iron Curtain’ because he believed the Soviet Union wanted to divide countries and take them over. [Only his opinion, of course.]  Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union at that time, thought this invisible wall would protect his country from further invasion.” [And not to prevent trapped Eastern Europeans from fleeing the Communist prison?  One can only gasp at the author’s distortion of the truth.] 

 

A second noteworthy chapter in High Point is entitled “An Enduring Legacy,” based on the idea that certain historical events continue years later to impact our lives.  This section deals with World War II and focuses on the Holocaust and specifically the story of Anne Frank, which is presented in the form of a biographical narrative along with an excerpt from her diary.   

 

High Point editors immediately recommend to immigrant children three books as supplementary reading.  The first book concerns a group of prisoners who use spoons to make a menorah.  The second book is about a young girl who saves the life of her friend hunted by invading soldiers.  The last book recounts the tragedy of a grandfather’s death in an internment camp. 

  

The first two books are about the Nazis and their victims, European Jews.  And presented in the same category with Nazi barbarians are WWII-era Americans!  That's right, the third book is about Japanese-Americans interned in the United States during the Second World War.

  

To drive home the message of moral equivalence, half-way through the detailed presentation on Anne Frank, the Holocaust, Hitler, and Nazism, High Point editors suggest to children that they write a report on the atomic bomb and answer several questions:  “When was the first atomic bomb developed?  Who invented it?  Where was the atomic bomb dropped during the war?  What were its effects?”  The teacher is asked to encourage advanced students “to add a human dimension to the report.  Tell them that many of the scientists who worked on nuclear weapons had strong personal feelings about whether the work they were doing was the right thing to do.”  There is no assignment to examine how many lives would have been lost if America had not dropped the bomb or to study, for instance, the Bataan Death March and the fate of U.S. servicemen captured by the Japanese. 

  

As the unit concludes, students are directed to research the “important legacies” of “key figures from World War II” -- Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Einstein, Hirohito, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and French resistance member Josephine Baker.  This is a laudable exercise.  However, Stalin is oddly missing from this list, as he is from the entire chapter.  Perhaps the editors wished to avoid an inquiry into the legacy of Uncle Joe because they did not want to take the risk that, God forbid, students might learn of the tens of millions who perished in the Gulag, a subject naturally excluded from the curriculum.

 

Although High Point is aimed at children from other lands who know nothing about the history and values of the United States, this textbook is only one of many similar volumes that are inflicted on native- and foreign-born students alike.  Such textbooks represent the calculated efforts of leftists and multiculturalists who brazenly use the schools to foist their political views on our children.  

 

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=12400

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Edgar B. Anderson is a graduate of Stanford Law School and works as a freelance journalist.  His website can be found at EdgarBAnderson.com.  

 

The Attack on America Starts in the Schools

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_snd-tucson-equity-plan.html

 

Heather Mac Donald, CITY JOURNAL, November 10, 2009

There’s a Quota for That

Tucson schools determine to fix minority discipline rates.

 

As part of its plan to comply with a federal desegregation order now decades old, Tucson’s school district adopted racial quotas in school discipline this summer. Schools that suspend or expel Hispanic and black students at higher rates than white students will now get a visit from a district “Equity Team” and will be expected to remedy those disparities by reducing their minority discipline rates. The Tucson equity plan shows that when Hispanics replace blacks as the dominant ethnic minority, as in Tucson and throughout the Southwest, the regime of double standards for behavior remains unchanged.

Tucson’s school district is 54 percent Hispanic, 30 percent white, and 7 percent black. It boasts an active “Mexican American Studies Department” that sponsors classes in high schools and middle schools to provide “social equity for Hispanic students.” Despite these attentions, the Hispanic high school suspension rate—10.5 percent of all Hispanic students in 2007–08—is 40 percent higher than the rate for white students (7.4 percent), though it’s dwarfed by the black suspension rate (16.3). Tucson’s new plan, first reported by the Arizona Republic, instructs schools to move away from “discipline” and toward “restorative justice.” (In the adult context, restorative justice typically features face-to-face encounters between criminals and their victims in lieu of jail or prison time.)

Tucson’s administrators explain their disciplinary quota pressure on the ground that students removed from class lose valuable learning time, exacerbating the already great ethnic academic achievement gap. Such thinking ignores the students who are not disrupting class or threatening teachers and who also lose valuable learning time when unruly or violent students remain in the classroom. Surely those students have a greater claim to “equity” in school resources than gang members do.

The administrators want local principals to examine disparate suspension rates “in detail for root causes.” I can save them some time: the root cause of disparate rates of suspension is disparate rates of bad behavior. As for the root cause of that bad behavior, the biggest one is single parenting. If the Tucson school board wants to publicize the essential role of fathers in raising law-abiding children, it might start solving the problem of disciplinary imbalance. But until then, it should let schools resolve their discipline problems in a color-blind fashion, without worrying about a visit from an “Equity Team.”

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Research for her article was supported by the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation

Brainwashing in Grade School

By Edgar B. Anderson

FrontPageMagazine.com
October 23, 2002

---

Your 12-year-olds are being taught to hate America.

The Left's stranglehold on education in the United States is not limited to our colleges and universities. Anti-American and multicultural propagandists are constantly at work attacking the minds of even our youngest children. Just take a look at a middle school textbook called Bridges to Literature (California Edition), a collection of literary selections, published by McDougal Littell, a Houghton Mifflin Company, which is aimed at students in grades 6-8 and specifically those reading at only a grade 4-5 level.

As an example of historical fiction the editors offer a story about the landing of the English in Massachusetts. The piece is entitled "The Invaders" and is told from the viewpoint of an Indian who observes the menacing arrival on shore of a "heavily armed" group of men. The Indian fears, "They would come out and hunt us down like animals. They would hunt us down and kill us all." "What images does the word 'invader' bring to your mind?" the students are asked. There is a brief sidebar that identifies the Indian as a composite of two actual people and the settlers as the Pilgrims. On the off chance that your child is slow and doesn't quite grasp the intended message of the main story, the sidebar pounds home the point with the headline "The True Invaders." Needless to say, there is no mention of the first Thanksgiving.

A section called "Courage Counts" contains stories about four heroes: an escaped slave named Tice Davids, Puerto Rican baseball player Roberto Clemente, farm workers union organizer Cesar Chavez, and Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller. Chavez is graced with a lengthy profile and canonized as "one of the truly heroic figures of the twentieth century," "a giant in the civil rights movement of the United States," and "A saint. A hero. The Mexican-American Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." Contrast the treatment of Chavez with a story elsewhere in the book about Abraham Lincoln, the only traditional American icon to be featured, which is limited to reporting on his childhood relationship with his stepmother and says next to nothing about his accomplishments.

The salute to Wilma Mankiller, who became the first woman chief of the Cherokee nation in 1985, exposes American cruelty on "the Trail of Tears." The Cherokee once lived in the southeastern part of the United States. "How they loved that land!" But in 1838, "President Van Buren sent in the army. Soldiers dragged Cherokees from their log cabins. Soldiers loaded Cherokees onto wagons. Soldiers shot Cherokees who tried to get away…. In the next two years, about 17,000 Cherokees were sent west. Four thousand died on the way." In the end, "They had nothing left but the spirit within them."

When Mankiller ran for election as deputy chief in 1983, she was shocked to learn that many people in the tribe considered her gender a disqualification. "How could anyone say only men make good leaders? Had the Cherokees picked up this idea from white people? Wilma thought so." After all, "When white settlers came to America, they brought new ideas with them. Some of their ideas were good. Some were not. One idea was that men were more important than women."

Poetry selections in Bridges to Literature include a 27-line verse entitled "Graffiti" and subheaded "A Little Graffiti Can Say a Lot about the Person Who Wrote It." The editors pose to students three questions labeled "Connect to Your Life": "Where have you seen graffiti? Did you think about the writer? How do you think the writer felt when he or she wrote it?" There is no discussion of the wrongfulness of graffiti vandalism.

"Terrible Things: An Allegory of the Holocaust" describes Nazi-like creatures who prowl the forest kidnapping one species at a time. The other animals in the woods selfishly rationalize what is happening so long as they are not themselves targeted. All of the animals are eventually taken away, however, except for the rabbits who are finally grabbed too. But as Big Rabbit insists before their fate is sealed, "We are the White Rabbits. It couldn't happen to us."

The oft-quoted statement of German Pastor Martin Niemoller follows the forest allegory: "The Nazis came first for the Communists. But I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Jews, but I wasn't a Jew, so I didn't speak up…." In a long excerpt from Anne Frank: Child of the Holocaust, the Communists are again cited as among the persecuted. The textbook honors the double standard by which the crimes of Nazis are included as an integral part of the school curriculum whereas the crimes of Communists are completely ignored. Better yet, Reds are portrayed as victims to young school children who perhaps have never before heard, or at least understood, the word "Communist." You may rest assured that there is no mention, much less a story, of any of the millions who died in the Gulag.

Bridges to Literature offers its unique perspective on the American military. The focus is not on the causes for which our servicemen and women have sacrificed in war but rather on weaponry and bombing. "Weapons of War" deals with the Colonists' use of flintlock muskets and breech-loading rifles and their invention of the first submarine, known as the Turtle. "The Turtle never sank any ships. But it showed that man could attack from underwater. A new military weapon was born!" George Washington is granted his one sentence reference in the book.

"Shot Down Behind Enemy Lines" is introduced as follows: "Vietnam was a very dangerous place for U.S. soldiers. The jungle held many hidden dangers. Enemy soldiers seemed to attack from out of nowhere. U.S. soldiers depended on planes and missiles. Special planes sprayed chemicals that destroyed the thick jungle growth." Navigator and weapons systems operator Captain Roger Locher is ultimately rescued after he parachutes from his burning plane following an encounter with some MiG-21s (No word where those came from!) but not before he barely escapes being captured by "a search party of Vietnamese soldiers." Notice that the author does not say "North Vietnamese."

Good use is made of repulsive imagery in describing Locher's experience in the jungle: "Mosquitoes and other insects tormented him endlessly. His skin was covered with red welts and stinging bites. Too, leeches crawled up inside his clothing. Time and again he would pull up his pants to find his legs covered with the ugly things. Their slimy black bodies were bloated with his blood. With disgust, he tore them from his flesh and crushed them." A brief, context-free sidebar about U.S. Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady, whose plane went down over Bosnia, reveals that he survived by eating ants. There is nothing to be found in either piece indicating why these men were fighting in a foreign land. If there is no reason, how can there be any justification? A student might well wonder.

The most dramatic offering in Bridges to Literature is a lengthy excerpt from Laurence Yep's semi-fictional Hiroshima, which appears in the textbook immediately preceding the Holocaust story about Anne Frank mentioned earlier. Many pages are dedicated to detailing the suffering and death of 195,000 Japanese, thanks to the Americans. "People are still dying today," the author informs. Yep acknowledges that war began as a result of a Japanese aerial attack: "Caught by surprise, many ships and planes were wrecked at the naval base, Pearl Harbor." But nothing is said about anyone being killed.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the crews of the Enola Gay and its escort planes and two Japanese teenage sisters, Riko and Sachi. The Americans are shown preparing for their operation. Finally, "The bombardier presses a button to release the bomb." As for the girls: "Sachi mercifully passes out." "Riko and her classmates are destroyed." Later, "The bodies of schoolchildren are piled up on a hallway bench. The mother looks through the bodies for her daughter. She hears a groan. Someone is alive. It is Sachi. However, Sachi has terrible burns on her face. She cannot even smile. It is as if she has no face."

The editors assert that "the military" dropped the bomb — as opposed to the U.S. Government apparently — so that our children know exactly whom to blame. The Hiroshima excerpt is followed by "Think It Through": "This piece shows the tragedy caused by the dropping of the atom bomb. Do you think ending the war made up for this tragedy?" Since the students have virtually no knowledge of the War in the Pacific, the question answers itself.

The lesson concludes with "Floating Lanterns XII," a poem that tells of paper lanterns painted with the names of bomb victims and annually sent down the rivers of Hiroshima in memory of the time when "these same rivers were filled with the corpses of those fathers, mothers, and sisters." The editors neglect to raise the matter of Japanese brutality against Americans, or even against Filipinos or Chinese. Teaching school children about the Bataan Death March, for example, would undoubtedly fail to contribute to the development of the appropriate student consciousness.

Sorry to say, Bridges to Literature is not an isolated case. American Literature is published by Globe Fearon, a division of Simon & Schuster, and is considered suitable for middle and high school ESL (English as a Second Language) students reading at a grade 3-4 level. This textbook routinely identifies non-white characters by their race or ethnicity, sometimes noting admiringly their pride in their heritage. Whites, on the other hand, are said or implied to be "white" generally only when they are depicted harming non-whites.

About 20 of the approximately 60 stories, sidebars, and poems in the book concern the lives of black Americans and present those lives in the most desperate terms. An adaptation of the autobiography of Frederick Douglass tells of his experience as a slave: "[He] was beaten even when he was very sick." In her story Harriet Tubman is beaten also. "Escape: A Slave Narrative" describes a man's "frightening and dangerous flight from a slave state to a free state," where a Pennsylvania Quaker family offers him sanctuary. He says, "I had never before received such treatment at the hands of any white man."

"Dust Tracks on a Road" tells of a girl who attends a blacks-only school in the early 1900s, and it is followed by a brief history of school segregation. There is a story about Rosa Parks and her refusal to sit in the back of the bus, accompanied by a sidebar on the Ku Klux Klan. In a Langston Hughes poem, "A mother compares life to climbing stairs." Another poem laments the situation of a black family enduring life "in a poor, dirty city [with] ugliness all around them…."

"Little Things Are Big" is about a black Puerto Rican teenager who refrains from assisting a woman on the subway struggling with her bag and her small children because he expects, "This white lady might be prejudiced against African-Americans." He later regrets that he did not help her. Black Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente appears in this book as well coping with discrimination in major league baseball: "Some people treated him badly because of where he came from and because of the color of his skin."

In the midst of all this unrelenting misery and injustice, "Ballad of Birmingham" presents an account of a black mother who fears for her young daughter's safety if she participates in a civil rights march. She sends her instead to church where the child is killed in a bombing.

A number of stories chronicle the suffering of the Indians. One is about the Cheyene tribes who are chased by white settlers from the area of Minnesota to the Dakotas. Another describes the plight of the Sioux: "Conditions on the reservations were terrible. People often did not have enough to eat. Many got sick and died…. In 1890, U.S. soldiers attacked the Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Over 250 Sioux were killed."

"At Last I Kill a Buffalo" tells of "the Sioux's preparations for the hunt and an understanding of its importance…." Accompanying this story is "The End of the Buffalo," which charges, "Many white hunters killed more buffalo than they could even use. Soon, there were fewer and fewer buffalo. Millions of buffalo were killed by whites. Only a few hundred survived." The result was that, "By the 1880s the Plains Indians had nothing to eat."

In "Chief Seattle's Oration," the wise leader "tells how his people and the white settlers are different. He asks only that respect be given to his people and to the spirits of his people's ancestors." Students are asked to consider, "Do you think most white settlers understood the Native Americans' feeling about nature and the land? Explain." Can we quickly guess the answer?

Finally, there are two stories about Japanese-Americans. In each story the central character is a young girl. By a remarkable coincidence, in both cases the girl is a prisoner at Manzanar, the World War II internment camp in Southern California. The young readers are urged to ponder, "Why are there barbed wire fences, guards, and locked gates for women and children?" After "Prisoner of My Country," the students are instructed: "Write a letter to the President of the United States telling him how you feel about being in Manzanar." "A Taste of Snow" is followed by the suggestion: "Write a diary entry as the girl narrator explaining what Christmas was like in Manzanar."

Bridges to Literature and American Literature present the worst that can possibly be dredged up about the United States. The apparent goal is to teach students to be ashamed of their country, especially its military. Children are encouraged not to see themselves as Americans possessing a common humanity but rather to view the world though the prism of race and ethnicity and to regard white people as the oppressor. Since a huge percentage of today's students are the children of third world immigrants who have found freedom and opportunity in the U.S., this propaganda is particularly contemptible.

The education establishment apparatchiks who are responsible for these and similar textbooks evidently believe that nobody is watching what they are doing. Presumably they think that they are totally free to promote their hate-America and hate-the-white-man agenda. So far it seems that they are largely correct in their assumptions. It is long past time that the American people wake up and put a stop to the brainwashing of our children.

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=21555

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Edgar B. Anderson is a graduate of Stanford Law School and works as a freelance journalist.

By Edgar B. Anderson

FrontPageMagazine.com
October 23, 2002

---

Your 12-year-olds are being taught to hate America.

The Left's stranglehold on education in the United States is not limited to our colleges and universities. Anti-American and multicultural propagandists are constantly at work attacking the minds of even our youngest children. Just take a look at a middle school textbook called Bridges to Literature (California Edition), a collection of literary selections, published by McDougal Littell, a Houghton Mifflin Company, which is aimed at students in grades 6-8 and specifically those reading at only a grade 4-5 level.

As an example of historical fiction the editors offer a story about the landing of the English in Massachusetts. The piece is entitled "The Invaders" and is told from the viewpoint of an Indian who observes the menacing arrival on shore of a "heavily armed" group of men. The Indian fears, "They would come out and hunt us down like animals. They would hunt us down and kill us all." "What images does the word 'invader' bring to your mind?" the students are asked. There is a brief sidebar that identifies the Indian as a composite of two actual people and the settlers as the Pilgrims. On the off chance that your child is slow and doesn't quite grasp the intended message of the main story, the sidebar pounds home the point with the headline "The True Invaders." Needless to say, there is no mention of the first Thanksgiving.

A section called "Courage Counts" contains stories about four heroes: an escaped slave named Tice Davids, Puerto Rican baseball player Roberto Clemente, farm workers union organizer Cesar Chavez, and Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller. Chavez is graced with a lengthy profile and canonized as "one of the truly heroic figures of the twentieth century," "a giant in the civil rights movement of the United States," and "A saint. A hero. The Mexican-American Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." Contrast the treatment of Chavez with a story elsewhere in the book about Abraham Lincoln, the only traditional American icon to be featured, which is limited to reporting on his childhood relationship with his stepmother and says next to nothing about his accomplishments.

The salute to Wilma Mankiller, who became the first woman chief of the Cherokee nation in 1985, exposes American cruelty on "the Trail of Tears." The Cherokee once lived in the southeastern part of the United States. "How they loved that land!" But in 1838, "President Van Buren sent in the army. Soldiers dragged Cherokees from their log cabins. Soldiers loaded Cherokees onto wagons. Soldiers shot Cherokees who tried to get away…. In the next two years, about 17,000 Cherokees were sent west. Four thousand died on the way." In the end, "They had nothing left but the spirit within them."

When Mankiller ran for election as deputy chief in 1983, she was shocked to learn that many people in the tribe considered her gender a disqualification. "How could anyone say only men make good leaders? Had the Cherokees picked up this idea from white people? Wilma thought so." After all, "When white settlers came to America, they brought new ideas with them. Some of their ideas were good. Some were not. One idea was that men were more important than women."

Poetry selections in Bridges to Literature include a 27-line verse entitled "Graffiti" and subheaded "A Little Graffiti Can Say a Lot about the Person Who Wrote It." The editors pose to students three questions labeled "Connect to Your Life": "Where have you seen graffiti? Did you think about the writer? How do you think the writer felt when he or she wrote it?" There is no discussion of the wrongfulness of graffiti vandalism.

"Terrible Things: An Allegory of the Holocaust" describes Nazi-like creatures who prowl the forest kidnapping one species at a time. The other animals in the woods selfishly rationalize what is happening so long as they are not themselves targeted. All of the animals are eventually taken away, however, except for the rabbits who are finally grabbed too. But as Big Rabbit insists before their fate is sealed, "We are the White Rabbits. It couldn't happen to us."

The oft-quoted statement of German Pastor Martin Niemoller follows the forest allegory: "The Nazis came first for the Communists. But I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Jews, but I wasn't a Jew, so I didn't speak up…." In a long excerpt from Anne Frank: Child of the Holocaust, the Communists are again cited as among the persecuted. The textbook honors the double standard by which the crimes of Nazis are included as an integral part of the school curriculum whereas the crimes of Communists are completely ignored. Better yet, Reds are portrayed as victims to young school children who perhaps have never before heard, or at least understood, the word "Communist." You may rest assured that there is no mention, much less a story, of any of the millions who died in the Gulag.

Bridges to Literature offers its unique perspective on the American military. The focus is not on the causes for which our servicemen and women have sacrificed in war but rather on weaponry and bombing. "Weapons of War" deals with the Colonists' use of flintlock muskets and breech-loading rifles and their invention of the first submarine, known as the Turtle. "The Turtle never sank any ships. But it showed that man could attack from underwater. A new military weapon was born!" George Washington is granted his one sentence reference in the book.

"Shot Down Behind Enemy Lines" is introduced as follows: "Vietnam was a very dangerous place for U.S. soldiers. The jungle held many hidden dangers. Enemy soldiers seemed to attack from out of nowhere. U.S. soldiers depended on planes and missiles. Special planes sprayed chemicals that destroyed the thick jungle growth." Navigator and weapons systems operator Captain Roger Locher is ultimately rescued after he parachutes from his burning plane following an encounter with some MiG-21s (No word where those came from!) but not before he barely escapes being captured by "a search party of Vietnamese soldiers." Notice that the author does not say "North Vietnamese."

Good use is made of repulsive imagery in describing Locher's experience in the jungle: "Mosquitoes and other insects tormented him endlessly. His skin was covered with red welts and stinging bites. Too, leeches crawled up inside his clothing. Time and again he would pull up his pants to find his legs covered with the ugly things. Their slimy black bodies were bloated with his blood. With disgust, he tore them from his flesh and crushed them." A brief, context-free sidebar about U.S. Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady, whose plane went down over Bosnia, reveals that he survived by eating ants. There is nothing to be found in either piece indicating why these men were fighting in a foreign land. If there is no reason, how can there be any justification? A student might well wonder.

The most dramatic offering in Bridges to Literature is a lengthy excerpt from Laurence Yep's semi-fictional Hiroshima, which appears in the textbook immediately preceding the Holocaust story about Anne Frank mentioned earlier. Many pages are dedicated to detailing the suffering and death of 195,000 Japanese, thanks to the Americans. "People are still dying today," the author informs. Yep acknowledges that war began as a result of a Japanese aerial attack: "Caught by surprise, many ships and planes were wrecked at the naval base, Pearl Harbor." But nothing is said about anyone being killed.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the crews of the Enola Gay and its escort planes and two Japanese teenage sisters, Riko and Sachi. The Americans are shown preparing for their operation. Finally, "The bombardier presses a button to release the bomb." As for the girls: "Sachi mercifully passes out." "Riko and her classmates are destroyed." Later, "The bodies of schoolchildren are piled up on a hallway bench. The mother looks through the bodies for her daughter. She hears a groan. Someone is alive. It is Sachi. However, Sachi has terrible burns on her face. She cannot even smile. It is as if she has no face."

The editors assert that "the military" dropped the bomb — as opposed to the U.S. Government apparently — so that our children know exactly whom to blame. The Hiroshima excerpt is followed by "Think It Through": "This piece shows the tragedy caused by the dropping of the atom bomb. Do you think ending the war made up for this tragedy?" Since the students have virtually no knowledge of the War in the Pacific, the question answers itself.

The lesson concludes with "Floating Lanterns XII," a poem that tells of paper lanterns painted with the names of bomb victims and annually sent down the rivers of Hiroshima in memory of the time when "these same rivers were filled with the corpses of those fathers, mothers, and sisters." The editors neglect to raise the matter of Japanese brutality against Americans, or even against Filipinos or Chinese. Teaching school children about the Bataan Death March, for example, would undoubtedly fail to contribute to the development of the appropriate student consciousness.

Sorry to say, Bridges to Literature is not an isolated case. American Literature is published by Globe Fearon, a division of Simon & Schuster, and is considered suitable for middle and high school ESL (English as a Second Language) students reading at a grade 3-4 level. This textbook routinely identifies non-white characters by their race or ethnicity, sometimes noting admiringly their pride in their heritage. Whites, on the other hand, are said or implied to be "white" generally only when they are depicted harming non-whites.

About 20 of the approximately 60 stories, sidebars, and poems in the book concern the lives of black Americans and present those lives in the most desperate terms. An adaptation of the autobiography of Frederick Douglass tells of his experience as a slave: "[He] was beaten even when he was very sick." In her story Harriet Tubman is beaten also. "Escape: A Slave Narrative" describes a man's "frightening and dangerous flight from a slave state to a free state," where a Pennsylvania Quaker family offers him sanctuary. He says, "I had never before received such treatment at the hands of any white man."

"Dust Tracks on a Road" tells of a girl who attends a blacks-only school in the early 1900s, and it is followed by a brief history of school segregation. There is a story about Rosa Parks and her refusal to sit in the back of the bus, accompanied by a sidebar on the Ku Klux Klan. In a Langston Hughes poem, "A mother compares life to climbing stairs." Another poem laments the situation of a black family enduring life "in a poor, dirty city [with] ugliness all around them…."

"Little Things Are Big" is about a black Puerto Rican teenager who refrains from assisting a woman on the subway struggling with her bag and her small children because he expects, "This white lady might be prejudiced against African-Americans." He later regrets that he did not help her. Black Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente appears in this book as well coping with discrimination in major league baseball: "Some people treated him badly because of where he came from and because of the color of his skin."

In the midst of all this unrelenting misery and injustice, "Ballad of Birmingham" presents an account of a black mother who fears for her young daughter's safety if she participates in a civil rights march. She sends her instead to church where the child is killed in a bombing.

A number of stories chronicle the suffering of the Indians. One is about the Cheyene tribes who are chased by white settlers from the area of Minnesota to the Dakotas. Another describes the plight of the Sioux: "Conditions on the reservations were terrible. People often did not have enough to eat. Many got sick and died…. In 1890, U.S. soldiers attacked the Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Over 250 Sioux were killed."

"At Last I Kill a Buffalo" tells of "the Sioux's preparations for the hunt and an understanding of its importance…." Accompanying this story is "The End of the Buffalo," which charges, "Many white hunters killed more buffalo than they could even use. Soon, there were fewer and fewer buffalo. Millions of buffalo were killed by whites. Only a few hundred survived." The result was that, "By the 1880s the Plains Indians had nothing to eat."

In "Chief Seattle's Oration," the wise leader "tells how his people and the white settlers are different. He asks only that respect be given to his people and to the spirits of his people's ancestors." Students are asked to consider, "Do you think most white settlers understood the Native Americans' feeling about nature and the land? Explain." Can we quickly guess the answer?

Finally, there are two stories about Japanese-Americans. In each story the central character is a young girl. By a remarkable coincidence, in both cases the girl is a prisoner at Manzanar, the World War II internment camp in Southern California. The young readers are urged to ponder, "Why are there barbed wire fences, guards, and locked gates for women and children?" After "Prisoner of My Country," the students are instructed: "Write a letter to the President of the United States telling him how you feel about being in Manzanar." "A Taste of Snow" is followed by the suggestion: "Write a diary entry as the girl narrator explaining what Christmas was like in Manzanar."

Bridges to Literature and American Literature present the worst that can possibly be dredged up about the United States. The apparent goal is to teach students to be ashamed of their country, especially its military. Children are encouraged not to see themselves as Americans possessing a common humanity but rather to view the world though the prism of race and ethnicity and to regard white people as the oppressor. Since a huge percentage of today's students are the children of third world immigrants who have found freedom and opportunity in the U.S., this propaganda is particularly contemptible.

The education establishment apparatchiks who are responsible for these and similar textbooks evidently believe that nobody is watching what they are doing. Presumably they think that they are totally free to promote their hate-America and hate-the-white-man agenda. So far it seems that they are largely correct in their assumptions. It is long past time that the American people wake up and put a stop to the brainwashing of our children.

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=21555

---

Edgar B. Anderson is a graduate of Stanford Law School and works as a freelance journalist.

Progressive Education

A Memorial Day Travesty
By Edgar B. Anderson
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 22, 2003

You might think that all schools in the United States would use the occasion of Memorial Day to educate their students about the stories of the men and women who gave their lives in defense of our country.  However, you would be mistaken.  Look, for example, at what occurred not long ago in a public middle school in Southern California. 

The Friday before Memorial Day has arrived, and the administration has said nothing to its students about the significance of the upcoming holiday.  Visualize if you can what actually transpires.

It is a typical classroom scene in today’s California.  Most of the students are immigrants.  Their English skills are poor, and their knowledge of history is minimal.  They have been passed on to the seventh grade notwithstanding the fact that their academic performance is at only a third or fourth grade level.  Even after living several years in the United States, many of them continue to identify with their native countries.  They are America’s future.

Although Memorial Day is immediately upon us, the lesson for the students on this sunny Friday is not about the heroism and sacrifice of the nation’s servicemen and women.  Indeed there is nothing on the agenda about Valley Forge or Gettysburg, The War to End All Wars, Pearl Harbor or Iwo Jima, Omaha Beach or Anzio, Korea or Vietnam or the Persian Gulf. 

There is no explanation that for many Americans this is a weekend to lay flowers on the graves of loved ones who sacrificed their lives to protect our nation.  There is also no mention that many people attend church or synagogue to pray for those who never returned home from serving their country.  Neither is there any word about others who simply stay at home and mourn in solitude for those they have lost. 

There is nothing in what the students are learning to suggest that they ought to be grateful for the opportunity to grow up in America or that they should appreciate the enormous price that was paid to preserve our freedom.

Quite to the contrary.  Because of the political agenda of the left-wing ideologues who control this and so many other of the nation’s public schools, these kids are presented with a very different message – a message meant to convince them that the United States is a cruel, inhuman, and unjust place.

During the students’ lesson, the teacher from the next room drops by to borrow some supplies.  She expresses pleasant surprise when she discovers what the youngsters are studying.  “Oh, we are reading the same story!” she exclaims enthusiastically.

So what is this lesson that occupies both our class and the neighboring class?  It is a chapter in one of the school’s literature textbooks that deals with Manzanar, the internment camp in the Owens Valley of California where the US Government sent Japanese-Americans during World War II.

On the Friday before Memorial Day these 12-year old mostly immigrant children are given the following assignment:

“Write an essay describing what it would be like to be imprisoned by the Americans in Manzanar at Christmastime."

University of the Absurd

University Of The Absurd

MindingTheCampus.com, March 21, 2008

By Edgar B. Anderson

Recently I sat down with a young woman who shared with me the experience of her first year at Thurgood Marshall College, one of the six colleges of the University of California at San Diego. She explained to me that regardless of her major field of study and in order to graduate she was required to take certain "general education" courses, the centerpiece of which is a three-quarter, 16-unit creation called "Dimensions of Culture." What she had to tell me is a warning to both parents and students.

The Dimensions of Culture program (DOC) is an introductory three-quarter social science sequence that is required of all first year students at Thurgood Marshall College, UCSD. Successful completion of the DOC sequence satisfies the University of California writing requirement. The course is a study in the social construction of individual identity and it surveys a range of social differences and stratifications that shape the nature of human attachment to self, work, community, and a sense of nation. Central to the course objective is the question of how scholars move from knowledge to action. - UCSD Course Description

Edgar B. Anderson: So let's talk about Dimensions of Culture. That's vague. What's that mean?
Student: I don't know. Each quarter, the first quarter is called Diversity, the second quarter is called Justice, and the third quarter is called Imagination. So Diversity is we studied everything about minorities - like women, homosexuals, and then Asians, blacks, Latinos.
Q. So what's left out - white males?
A. Yeah, pretty much if you're a white male you're bad, that's kind of the joke among all the students.
Q. Women are not even a minority, they're a majority.
A. But it's more about the workforce.
Q. Power.
A. Yeah, that's kind of how they presented it. We didn't really focus on women that much. It was mainly how Asians have been oppressed in history and how Latinos continue to be oppressed and how blacks continue to be oppressed, all of that.

Q. Is there any mention of how successful Asians are in the culture?
A. They say that it's a stereotype because whites have labeled Asians as smart in order to put down black people.
Q. And how about Latin Americans now?
A. That we also put them down...
Q. So this is your Diversity class.
A. Yeah, that was Diversity.
Q. Justice.
A. I liked that quarter best because all it was about were Supreme Court cases like affirmative action and Brown v. Board... My teaching assistant, who you have in discussions twice a week, was crazy. I remember one day she was talking about how there should be affirmative action in terms of who becomes a Fortune 500 CEO and that they should require that a certain percent of all CEOs in Fortune 500 companies be women. I said I disagree, "Who's to say that a woman is going to be a better CEO than a man? Let's be honest, you know, a lot of women don't become CEOs because most women choose to not work as much 'cause you have no life if you're a CEO to raise a family or anything." But she said, "How can you be a woman and think that? That's totally wrong. That's what's wrong with women in our society because we need affirmative action to get ahead." She was unbelievable.
When we talked about investment bankers and people who worked in finance... she said, "Well, I hate investment bankers anyway, I hate them, I hate their whole attitude." And she went on and on how they're terrible people...
Q. So Imagination. What is that?
A. I really don't know. I had no idea what was going on in that class. And even the TA said she had no idea what it was about...
Q. But did you have reading lists?
A. Yeah, I have the book. You'd spend a week on Vonnegut or similar writing, or the next week it'd be about graffiti, and another week it'd be immigration, and another week it'd be Vietnam. It wasn't tied together at all, so we never ended up with anything.
But I remember for graffiti the professor said how pretty much we don't understand that it's an art form, and it's just a misunderstanding why people don't like graffiti and why police try to cover it up. She said that people are just trying to express themselves, and she never went into how it was vandalism or anything like that.
When we talked about the entertainment industry and the show The L-Word, she said that having straight actresses portray lesbians was the same as white people painting themselves black. And so I don't think that anyone agreed with her on that -
Q. In these classes were there a lot of student challenges?
A. No, the only student challenges were when she was talking about The L-Word, and that was the only time when people like really disagreed with her, and she was just so adamant about it.
Q. So through Diversity, Justice, and Imagination you found generally students simply took notes?
A. Um-huh. Well, [the school] is majority Asian, and half of the class, especially in Diversity, was like, "Poor Asians, we're mean to them." So, you know, they had no reason to complain.

****
Q. Did they talk about blacks and their problems? Is it all blamed on whites?
A. It was all just, you know, people are racist toward them...
Q. Did they talk about the fact that blacks have a 70% out-of-wedlock birthrate-
A. No. Okay, very few black people go to UC Diego, and so they're trying to get more African-Americans to come, and we read this article saying, "Let's be honest here, UC San Diego has no sports, it's pretty much all science, and there are just a lot of blacks that go to school to do sports or are not into biology." And, oh my gosh, that was terrible, and they're like, "I can't believe this was written. You can't say that blacks only do sports."
Q. Wait a minute, where did that statement come from, that most blacks-
A. In our reader someone had written the article saying that it's not that they're not getting in, but it's that they don't want to come here.
Q. And the reaction was from whom-
A. The lecturer and the TA-
Q. Found it outrageous to say that.
A. Yeah, because the reason that they're not coming here is because our public schools and high schools aren't providing any opportunities for them so that they don't apply to college.
Q. Is there ever any mention that some groups of students for whatever reasons are studying harder?
A. No... But I just felt like it must have been really awkward to be black in this class especially when they were talking about why do no blacks go to UCSD. And they'd almost [ask] "Why do you go here, and why do no other blacks go here?" It was really awkward.
And talking about hip-hop and rap, [they'd say] it's weird how white people listen to it. The one black guy I knew in my class said, "I don't think it's a big deal if white people listen to black rap. I don't understand why we're getting so upset about it... I don't care, I don't feel offended." But the white TA insisted, "A lot of black people feel offended, and [white people] think they know what it's like to be black even though they don't, and they like pretend to be black, and it's really offensive..."
Q. This is part of the classroom discussion?
A. Yeah, and then we like listened to rap music and analyzed if it was good or not.

****
A. Everyone hated the class, and they know it, and even at the end of the year they gave out these pins that said, "I survived DOC." And the lecturers [asked] "Aren't you so glad it's done?"
And all my white friends were just so disgusted because all it'd be is, "Let's go learn how we're bad again," that's all it was...
And I think I am just so sick of analyzing race relations, and I really feel like our country would be a less racist place if people didn't continue to focus on it...
Q. How did Asian students you know feel about this class?
A. I don't really know... I mean, they all thought it was dumb, but I don't know if they disagreed with what they were saying...

And my Mexican friends, I remember when we were studying for the final, and one of the sections is on immigration, they joked, "Can we just write, 'We emigrated here from Mexico.'? We'll probably get an A if we only write that." They were all joking that they should just write, "I crossed the border with my family," and, you know, it was a joke, "Oh, wow! You immigrated here! A+."
I was just so fed up with it. And when they talked about immigration they never differentiated between illegal and legal immigration... I made a comment that it was unfair that people can sneak in from the south, and yet if you're coming from Russia or Norway you have to wait years to legally immigrate, and the response was that our foreign policy hasn't affected those countries so we're not forcing them to come over here...
Q. What about the idea that this is stolen land?
A. Well, she [the lecturer] said people don't understand that the Mexicans used to have California and so we shouldn't stop them from immigrating here... She was pretty much advocating for a completely open border and just gave no idea of the problems that would cause at all.

****
A. I guess what annoyed me most about this class is that they said that it was, you know, everyone can have their opinion, you're really entrusted in like learning, but if you said anything against what they thought, they were mean. And I remember on my paper I wrote about the Supreme Court case that dealt with Seattle [racial quotas] in which I said that it's unconstitutional, which is what the Supreme Court decided, I literally spent an hour arguing with my TA before I turned it in because she said, "I think you're wrong."
Q. And you wrote that it was unconstitutional to do what?
A. The Seattle case was about having quotas for different races going to high school. They presented it as only white people were upset about it and never talked about how minorities were just as upset ... but so yeah, I spent an hour, and she finally was like, "Okay, we'll agree to disagree. I don't agree with what you're saying, I think it is constitutional." So I turned in the paper, I get an A, and she writes on my paper, "Just so you know, I still think you're wrong." It was supposed to be a persuasive essay or argumentative, and I wanted to say, "Aren't you supposed to be grading on how I'm arguing, not on my opinions?" It was ridiculous. I didn't learn to write at all in that class. You had to write pretty much what they wanted, or you had to go and fight for an hour. And I'm sure she just knew that she couldn't give me a B-, or else I'd have gone and complained. So I was just disgusted by it and that she was just so rude.
Q. And what are the qualifications of these teachers? Are these professors or are these-
A. No, these are teaching assistants, but they teach the discussions, as the professor does the lectures, and then they have teaching assistants do the discussions, and the teaching assistants grade.
Q. Was there any student opportunity to feedback, respond in the lectures, or you just listened and took notes?
A. You could raise your hand, but very few people ever did. It was a huge lecture hall.
Q. Oh, I see, a big auditorium.
A. Yeah, so I mean I never personally talked to any of my professors.

****

[A normal yearly course load at the University of California consists of 36 to 48 units. The required Dimensions of Culture program consumed 16 units, about 40% of the student's freshman year course work. You can read more about Dimensions of Culture here.]

MindingTheCampus.com, March 21, 2008

By Edgar B. Anderson

Recently I sat down with a young woman who shared with me the experience of her first year at Thurgood Marshall College, one of the six colleges of the University of California at San Diego. She explained to me that regardless of her major field of study and in order to graduate she was required to take certain "general education" courses, the centerpiece of which is a three-quarter, 16-unit creation called "Dimensions of Culture." What she had to tell me is a warning to both parents and students.

The Dimensions of Culture program (DOC) is an introductory three-quarter social science sequence that is required of all first year students at Thurgood Marshall College, UCSD. Successful completion of the DOC sequence satisfies the University of California writing requirement. The course is a study in the social construction of individual identity and it surveys a range of social differences and stratifications that shape the nature of human attachment to self, work, community, and a sense of nation. Central to the course objective is the question of how scholars move from knowledge to action. - UCSD Course Description

Edgar B. Anderson: So let's talk about Dimensions of Culture. That's vague. What's that mean?
Student: I don't know. Each quarter, the first quarter is called Diversity, the second quarter is called Justice, and the third quarter is called Imagination. So Diversity is we studied everything about minorities - like women, homosexuals, and then Asians, blacks, Latinos.
Q. So what's left out - white males?
A. Yeah, pretty much if you're a white male you're bad, that's kind of the joke among all the students.
Q. Women are not even a minority, they're a majority.
A. But it's more about the workforce.
Q. Power.
A. Yeah, that's kind of how they presented it. We didn't really focus on women that much. It was mainly how Asians have been oppressed in history and how Latinos continue to be oppressed and how blacks continue to be oppressed, all of that.

Q. Is there any mention of how successful Asians are in the culture?
A. They say that it's a stereotype because whites have labeled Asians as smart in order to put down black people.
Q. And how about Latin Americans now?
A. That we also put them down...
Q. So this is your Diversity class.
A. Yeah, that was Diversity.
Q. Justice.
A. I liked that quarter best because all it was about were Supreme Court cases like affirmative action and Brown v. Board... My teaching assistant, who you have in discussions twice a week, was crazy. I remember one day she was talking about how there should be affirmative action in terms of who becomes a Fortune 500 CEO and that they should require that a certain percent of all CEOs in Fortune 500 companies be women. I said I disagree, "Who's to say that a woman is going to be a better CEO than a man? Let's be honest, you know, a lot of women don't become CEOs because most women choose to not work as much 'cause you have no life if you're a CEO to raise a family or anything." But she said, "How can you be a woman and think that? That's totally wrong. That's what's wrong with women in our society because we need affirmative action to get ahead." She was unbelievable.
When we talked about investment bankers and people who worked in finance... she said, "Well, I hate investment bankers anyway, I hate them, I hate their whole attitude." And she went on and on how they're terrible people...
Q. So Imagination. What is that?
A. I really don't know. I had no idea what was going on in that class. And even the TA said she had no idea what it was about...
Q. But did you have reading lists?
A. Yeah, I have the book. You'd spend a week on Vonnegut or similar writing, or the next week it'd be about graffiti, and another week it'd be immigration, and another week it'd be Vietnam. It wasn't tied together at all, so we never ended up with anything.
But I remember for graffiti the professor said how pretty much we don't understand that it's an art form, and it's just a misunderstanding why people don't like graffiti and why police try to cover it up. She said that people are just trying to express themselves, and she never went into how it was vandalism or anything like that.
When we talked about the entertainment industry and the show The L-Word, she said that having straight actresses portray lesbians was the same as white people painting themselves black. And so I don't think that anyone agreed with her on that -
Q. In these classes were there a lot of student challenges?
A. No, the only student challenges were when she was talking about The L-Word, and that was the only time when people like really disagreed with her, and she was just so adamant about it.
Q. So through Diversity, Justice, and Imagination you found generally students simply took notes?
A. Um-huh. Well, [the school] is majority Asian, and half of the class, especially in Diversity, was like, "Poor Asians, we're mean to them." So, you know, they had no reason to complain.

****
Q. Did they talk about blacks and their problems? Is it all blamed on whites?
A. It was all just, you know, people are racist toward them...
Q. Did they talk about the fact that blacks have a 70% out-of-wedlock birthrate-
A. No. Okay, very few black people go to UC Diego, and so they're trying to get more African-Americans to come, and we read this article saying, "Let's be honest here, UC San Diego has no sports, it's pretty much all science, and there are just a lot of blacks that go to school to do sports or are not into biology." And, oh my gosh, that was terrible, and they're like, "I can't believe this was written. You can't say that blacks only do sports."
Q. Wait a minute, where did that statement come from, that most blacks-
A. In our reader someone had written the article saying that it's not that they're not getting in, but it's that they don't want to come here.
Q. And the reaction was from whom-
A. The lecturer and the TA-
Q. Found it outrageous to say that.
A. Yeah, because the reason that they're not coming here is because our public schools and high schools aren't providing any opportunities for them so that they don't apply to college.
Q. Is there ever any mention that some groups of students for whatever reasons are studying harder?
A. No... But I just felt like it must have been really awkward to be black in this class especially when they were talking about why do no blacks go to UCSD. And they'd almost [ask] "Why do you go here, and why do no other blacks go here?" It was really awkward.
And talking about hip-hop and rap, [they'd say] it's weird how white people listen to it. The one black guy I knew in my class said, "I don't think it's a big deal if white people listen to black rap. I don't understand why we're getting so upset about it... I don't care, I don't feel offended." But the white TA insisted, "A lot of black people feel offended, and [white people] think they know what it's like to be black even though they don't, and they like pretend to be black, and it's really offensive..."
Q. This is part of the classroom discussion?
A. Yeah, and then we like listened to rap music and analyzed if it was good or not.

****
A. Everyone hated the class, and they know it, and even at the end of the year they gave out these pins that said, "I survived DOC." And the lecturers [asked] "Aren't you so glad it's done?"
And all my white friends were just so disgusted because all it'd be is, "Let's go learn how we're bad again," that's all it was...
And I think I am just so sick of analyzing race relations, and I really feel like our country would be a less racist place if people didn't continue to focus on it...
Q. How did Asian students you know feel about this class?
A. I don't really know... I mean, they all thought it was dumb, but I don't know if they disagreed with what they were saying...

And my Mexican friends, I remember when we were studying for the final, and one of the sections is on immigration, they joked, "Can we just write, 'We emigrated here from Mexico.'? We'll probably get an A if we only write that." They were all joking that they should just write, "I crossed the border with my family," and, you know, it was a joke, "Oh, wow! You immigrated here! A+."
I was just so fed up with it. And when they talked about immigration they never differentiated between illegal and legal immigration... I made a comment that it was unfair that people can sneak in from the south, and yet if you're coming from Russia or Norway you have to wait years to legally immigrate, and the response was that our foreign policy hasn't affected those countries so we're not forcing them to come over here...
Q. What about the idea that this is stolen land?
A. Well, she [the lecturer] said people don't understand that the Mexicans used to have California and so we shouldn't stop them from immigrating here... She was pretty much advocating for a completely open border and just gave no idea of the problems that would cause at all.

****
A. I guess what annoyed me most about this class is that they said that it was, you know, everyone can have their opinion, you're really entrusted in like learning, but if you said anything against what they thought, they were mean. And I remember on my paper I wrote about the Supreme Court case that dealt with Seattle [racial quotas] in which I said that it's unconstitutional, which is what the Supreme Court decided, I literally spent an hour arguing with my TA before I turned it in because she said, "I think you're wrong."
Q. And you wrote that it was unconstitutional to do what?
A. The Seattle case was about having quotas for different races going to high school. They presented it as only white people were upset about it and never talked about how minorities were just as upset ... but so yeah, I spent an hour, and she finally was like, "Okay, we'll agree to disagree. I don't agree with what you're saying, I think it is constitutional." So I turned in the paper, I get an A, and she writes on my paper, "Just so you know, I still think you're wrong." It was supposed to be a persuasive essay or argumentative, and I wanted to say, "Aren't you supposed to be grading on how I'm arguing, not on my opinions?" It was ridiculous. I didn't learn to write at all in that class. You had to write pretty much what they wanted, or you had to go and fight for an hour. And I'm sure she just knew that she couldn't give me a B-, or else I'd have gone and complained. So I was just disgusted by it and that she was just so rude.
Q. And what are the qualifications of these teachers? Are these professors or are these-
A. No, these are teaching assistants, but they teach the discussions, as the professor does the lectures, and then they have teaching assistants do the discussions, and the teaching assistants grade.
Q. Was there any student opportunity to feedback, respond in the lectures, or you just listened and took notes?
A. You could raise your hand, but very few people ever did. It was a huge lecture hall.
Q. Oh, I see, a big auditorium.
A. Yeah, so I mean I never personally talked to any of my professors.

****

[A normal yearly course load at the University of California consists of 36 to 48 units. The required Dimensions of Culture program consumed 16 units, about 40% of the student's freshman year course work. You can read more about Dimensions of Culture here.]

MindingTheCampus.com, March 21, 2008

By Edgar B. Anderson

Recently I sat down with a young woman who shared with me the experience of her first year at Thurgood Marshall College, one of the six colleges of the University of California at San Diego. She explained to me that regardless of her major field of study and in order to graduate she was required to take certain "general education" courses, the centerpiece of which is a three-quarter, 16-unit creation called "Dimensions of Culture." What she had to tell me is a warning to both parents and students.

The Dimensions of Culture program (DOC) is an introductory three-quarter social science sequence that is required of all first year students at Thurgood Marshall College, UCSD. Successful completion of the DOC sequence satisfies the University of California writing requirement. The course is a study in the social construction of individual identity and it surveys a range of social differences and stratifications that shape the nature of human attachment to self, work, community, and a sense of nation. Central to the course objective is the question of how scholars move from knowledge to action. - UCSD Course Description

Edgar B. Anderson: So let's talk about Dimensions of Culture. That's vague. What's that mean?
Student: I don't know. Each quarter, the first quarter is called Diversity, the second quarter is called Justice, and the third quarter is called Imagination. So Diversity is we studied everything about minorities - like women, homosexuals, and then Asians, blacks, Latinos.
Q. So what's left out - white males?
A. Yeah, pretty much if you're a white male you're bad, that's kind of the joke among all the students.
Q. Women are not even a minority, they're a majority.
A. But it's more about the workforce.
Q. Power.
A. Yeah, that's kind of how they presented it. We didn't really focus on women that much. It was mainly how Asians have been oppressed in history and how Latinos continue to be oppressed and how blacks continue to be oppressed, all of that.

Q. Is there any mention of how successful Asians are in the culture?
A. They say that it's a stereotype because whites have labeled Asians as smart in order to put down black people.
Q. And how about Latin Americans now?
A. That we also put them down...
Q. So this is your Diversity class.
A. Yeah, that was Diversity.
Q. Justice.
A. I liked that quarter best because all it was about were Supreme Court cases like affirmative action and Brown v. Board... My teaching assistant, who you have in discussions twice a week, was crazy. I remember one day she was talking about how there should be affirmative action in terms of who becomes a Fortune 500 CEO and that they should require that a certain percent of all CEOs in Fortune 500 companies be women. I said I disagree, "Who's to say that a woman is going to be a better CEO than a man? Let's be honest, you know, a lot of women don't become CEOs because most women choose to not work as much 'cause you have no life if you're a CEO to raise a family or anything." But she said, "How can you be a woman and think that? That's totally wrong. That's what's wrong with women in our society because we need affirmative action to get ahead." She was unbelievable.
When we talked about investment bankers and people who worked in finance... she said, "Well, I hate investment bankers anyway, I hate them, I hate their whole attitude." And she went on and on how they're terrible people...
Q. So Imagination. What is that?
A. I really don't know. I had no idea what was going on in that class. And even the TA said she had no idea what it was about...
Q. But did you have reading lists?
A. Yeah, I have the book. You'd spend a week on Vonnegut or similar writing, or the next week it'd be about graffiti, and another week it'd be immigration, and another week it'd be Vietnam. It wasn't tied together at all, so we never ended up with anything.
But I remember for graffiti the professor said how pretty much we don't understand that it's an art form, and it's just a misunderstanding why people don't like graffiti and why police try to cover it up. She said that people are just trying to express themselves, and she never went into how it was vandalism or anything like that.
When we talked about the entertainment industry and the show The L-Word, she said that having straight actresses portray lesbians was the same as white people painting themselves black. And so I don't think that anyone agreed with her on that -
Q. In these classes were there a lot of student challenges?
A. No, the only student challenges were when she was talking about The L-Word, and that was the only time when people like really disagreed with her, and she was just so adamant about it.
Q. So through Diversity, Justice, and Imagination you found generally students simply took notes?
A. Um-huh. Well, [the school] is majority Asian, and half of the class, especially in Diversity, was like, "Poor Asians, we're mean to them." So, you know, they had no reason to complain.

****
Q. Did they talk about blacks and their problems? Is it all blamed on whites?
A. It was all just, you know, people are racist toward them...
Q. Did they talk about the fact that blacks have a 70% out-of-wedlock birthrate-
A. No. Okay, very few black people go to UC Diego, and so they're trying to get more African-Americans to come, and we read this article saying, "Let's be honest here, UC San Diego has no sports, it's pretty much all science, and there are just a lot of blacks that go to school to do sports or are not into biology." And, oh my gosh, that was terrible, and they're like, "I can't believe this was written. You can't say that blacks only do sports."
Q. Wait a minute, where did that statement come from, that most blacks-
A. In our reader someone had written the article saying that it's not that they're not getting in, but it's that they don't want to come here.
Q. And the reaction was from whom-
A. The lecturer and the TA-
Q. Found it outrageous to say that.
A. Yeah, because the reason that they're not coming here is because our public schools and high schools aren't providing any opportunities for them so that they don't apply to college.
Q. Is there ever any mention that some groups of students for whatever reasons are studying harder?
A. No... But I just felt like it must have been really awkward to be black in this class especially when they were talking about why do no blacks go to UCSD. And they'd almost [ask] "Why do you go here, and why do no other blacks go here?" It was really awkward.
And talking about hip-hop and rap, [they'd say] it's weird how white people listen to it. The one black guy I knew in my class said, "I don't think it's a big deal if white people listen to black rap. I don't understand why we're getting so upset about it... I don't care, I don't feel offended." But the white TA insisted, "A lot of black people feel offended, and [white people] think they know what it's like to be black even though they don't, and they like pretend to be black, and it's really offensive..."
Q. This is part of the classroom discussion?
A. Yeah, and then we like listened to rap music and analyzed if it was good or not.

****
A. Everyone hated the class, and they know it, and even at the end of the year they gave out these pins that said, "I survived DOC." And the lecturers [asked] "Aren't you so glad it's done?"
And all my white friends were just so disgusted because all it'd be is, "Let's go learn how we're bad again," that's all it was...
And I think I am just so sick of analyzing race relations, and I really feel like our country would be a less racist place if people didn't continue to focus on it...
Q. How did Asian students you know feel about this class?
A. I don't really know... I mean, they all thought it was dumb, but I don't know if they disagreed with what they were saying...

And my Mexican friends, I remember when we were studying for the final, and one of the sections is on immigration, they joked, "Can we just write, 'We emigrated here from Mexico.'? We'll probably get an A if we only write that." They were all joking that they should just write, "I crossed the border with my family," and, you know, it was a joke, "Oh, wow! You immigrated here! A+."
I was just so fed up with it. And when they talked about immigration they never differentiated between illegal and legal immigration... I made a comment that it was unfair that people can sneak in from the south, and yet if you're coming from Russia or Norway you have to wait years to legally immigrate, and the response was that our foreign policy hasn't affected those countries so we're not forcing them to come over here...
Q. What about the idea that this is stolen land?
A. Well, she [the lecturer] said people don't understand that the Mexicans used to have California and so we shouldn't stop them from immigrating here... She was pretty much advocating for a completely open border and just gave no idea of the problems that would cause at all.

****
A. I guess what annoyed me most about this class is that they said that it was, you know, everyone can have their opinion, you're really entrusted in like learning, but if you said anything against what they thought, they were mean. And I remember on my paper I wrote about the Supreme Court case that dealt with Seattle [racial quotas] in which I said that it's unconstitutional, which is what the Supreme Court decided, I literally spent an hour arguing with my TA before I turned it in because she said, "I think you're wrong."
Q. And you wrote that it was unconstitutional to do what?
A. The Seattle case was about having quotas for different races going to high school. They presented it as only white people were upset about it and never talked about how minorities were just as upset ... but so yeah, I spent an hour, and she finally was like, "Okay, we'll agree to disagree. I don't agree with what you're saying, I think it is constitutional." So I turned in the paper, I get an A, and she writes on my paper, "Just so you know, I still think you're wrong." It was supposed to be a persuasive essay or argumentative, and I wanted to say, "Aren't you supposed to be grading on how I'm arguing, not on my opinions?" It was ridiculous. I didn't learn to write at all in that class. You had to write pretty much what they wanted, or you had to go and fight for an hour. And I'm sure she just knew that she couldn't give me a B-, or else I'd have gone and complained. So I was just disgusted by it and that she was just so rude.
Q. And what are the qualifications of these teachers? Are these professors or are these-
A. No, these are teaching assistants, but they teach the discussions, as the professor does the lectures, and then they have teaching assistants do the discussions, and the teaching assistants grade.
Q. Was there any student opportunity to feedback, respond in the lectures, or you just listened and took notes?
A. You could raise your hand, but very few people ever did. It was a huge lecture hall.
Q. Oh, I see, a big auditorium.
A. Yeah, so I mean I never personally talked to any of my professors.

****

[A normal yearly course load at the University of California consists of 36 to 48 units. The required Dimensions of Culture program consumed 16 units, about 40% of the student's freshman year course work. You can read more about Dimensions of Culture here.]

A Teacher's Challenge

San Jose Mercury-News, May 4, 2007, Letters to the Editor

Students, parents must be educable

I teach at a school that is the lowest-performing in its district. Currently, I do not have enough textbooks for a classroom set. At the beginning of the year, however, I had enough for almost two sets. Textbooks have been found thrown out the window, with covers and pages ripped out, with gum stuck in the pages and worse. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is not a mystery what types of students do these things. They are the same students who refuse to be silent in class and yell at the teacher when asked to behave themselves. They are the students that make a 20-minute lesson plan impossible to teach in a 60-minute class.

As long as we are debating linking teacher performance to compensation, why not do something similar for students and families?

Gabriel Ross
Oakland

University of Indoctrination at Boulder

Before you pay $40,000 per year for your child’s college education, take the time to read David Horowitz's report on the professors who are propagandizing students at a major American university. Horowitz is leading the fight for academic reform across the nation, and his efforts deserve your strong support .

Senseless in Seattle

If you still need more evidence that America's public schools require radical reform, you have come to the right place.

Proposition 82 Rejected!

California voters said NO to the Education Bureaucracy that wants to get its hooks into the state's four-year olds.  The people who are failing in their management of K-12 will not be permitted to set up a universal pre-school regime.  They will not be allowed to force privately-owned day care facilities out of business.  Their visions of tax and spend and control are for the moment blown out of the water.  Thankfully, the voters defeated Proposition 82 by a resounding 3 to 2 margin on June 6, 2006.

Two Plus Two Equals Four Is Discriminatory

A judge in Oakland has tossed out the California State high school exit exam.  The name of the test, of course, is misleading since students are required to show academic proficiency at only an eighth grade level.  In addition, they may take the exam as many times as they wish.  Oh, and a passing score is 55%.  (Sounds as if I'm joking, doesn't it?)  But no matter, the test is unfair, and, therefore, students who fail are nevertheless to be granted a diploma.  "It takes the pressure off," said one relieved young scholar who repeatedly flunked the test.  At the same time, students who actually pay attention, do their school work, and pass the exam are to be insulted by being handed a diploma that is correctly regarded as worthless.   Rest assured: The dumbing down of America is proceeding apace.

Update May 22, 2006: The State Supreme Court has reversed -- and for the moment the test is reinstated.  A high school diploma will once again simply mean that a student has at least stumbled to the eighth-grade finish line.