Don’t Mistake Rioters for Protesters

In Minneapolis Friday a police officer was arrested for the murder of a black man he was detaining and restraining in a manner that led to death. It was captured on video, so the whole country has seen it.

Protests break out calling for justice for George Floyd. The perpetrator is in custody. The other officers, who didn’t step in to prevent the officer’s actions, are also charged as accessories. All were immediately fired, not suspended, no waiting to see.

Terrence Floyd, brother of George Floyd, calls for peace.
"That's not going to bring my brother back at all," he says of riots.
Image from here.

The arrest wasn’t instantaneous. In such a high-profile case (because of the media), the prosecutors need to be careful not to charge more than they can prove. It doesn’t appear to be premeditated, for example, so if they charged first-degree murder and couldn’t prove it, the officer would be found not guilty. And, because of double jeopardy protection, he couldn’t be charged again for the same incident. So the charges are what they can prove for certain. If evidence later appears to prove a higher level crime, the charges can be raised.

There were things to take into account. I suggest this op-ed, which explains those legal details. 

But do you know anyone or have you heard anyone say that the brutality was justified and the police officer should be let off? In regular media? On social media? Anywhere?

This is one of those times that civil society is in agreement. A serious crime was committed, and there must be justice.

found on Ben Shapiro's Facebook page today

So what is being protested?

If justice is underway, what is the message of the protest?

I think it’s something like, “Until America can guarantee that this will never happen to another black person, America is evil.”

But that’s an impossible ask.

America was founded on the principle that all people are created equal—no one is entitled to more consideration under the law than another. Society isn’t stratified by birth, as it has historically been in most countries on earth throughout history.

Unfortunately, slavery of blacks was instituted on this continent by the Mother Country, and it needed to be rooted out. The Constitution was written with that expectation. It took too long, and it took a bloody Civil War to accomplish. But that’s what America sacrificed to make it happen.

Even then, people who had been taught their whole lives that people of a certain bloodline were inferior didn’t automatically unlearn that false teaching. It took another century for people to get fed up and actually grant equal rights.

We’re still divided. But let’s define things a little more carefully.

The Republican Party was created to fight slavery. All slaveholders were Democrats. Even in the northern non-slave states before the Civil War, the pro-slavery people were only Democrats. Coincidentally, it is Democrats who run the cities with most of the racial issues. This is true in Minneapolis—local on up to the governor.

The Republican Party pushed for the Civil Rights laws in the 60s. It was Democrats, mainly from former slave states, that resisted letting go of the Jim Crow laws they had perpetuated.

Then, somehow, the lie got told that it was the Republicans all along who had been racist. The lie became that what conservatives wanted to conserve were the old, pre-Civil Rights, ways. That conservatives wanted to conserve the Democrat way of thinking and living. That was never even close to reality.

So, here we are, decades later, and the lie is bigger. Now, at a time when most Americans don’t even understand the mindset of a racist, and have never felt that way in their lives, have never treated different races with disdain—those people are being told they’re guilty of systemic racism.

What are the protests saying, then? That we should stop being white, or Hispanic, or Asian, because blacks need to be knelt down to? If that isn’t it, what is the message of the protest?

Houston Chronicle May 31, 2020

I’ve seen a number of people reference other protests—implying that this is just an escalation, because we didn’t listen before. Such a message covers the full front page of yesterday’s Houston Chronicle Sports section. Colin Kaepernick protested by refusing to stand for the National Anthem, and that offended us. “If only we had heard his message!” people say.

We did hear him. It wasn’t his method of protest that offended us. It was the lie of his message—that America is an evil, systemically racist country—this from a millionaire black man playing a ball game for a living, and not playing it spectacularly well enough to merit his hiring amid the bad media he brought on.

Black Live Matter protested. And when people of goodwill answered, “Yes, your lives do matter to us. All lives matter,” those people got shouted down with, “No! You’re not hearing us. Black lives matter!”

What is that supposed to mean? That our lives don’t matter because we don’t have the right skin color?

Their protests were related to the Ferguson incident, which wasn’t a case of racist police brutality; it was a case of a black thug attacking a police officer who defended himself; even black eyewitnesses testified of that. Still the protesters shouted the lie that the perpetrator had held his hands up and called don’t shoot and was just gunned down. When it was proven that didn’t happen, the protesters insisted, “It’s still symbolic of the systemic problem.” Then where is your real evidence?

I assert that there isn’t a systemic racist problem going on in America, particularly toward blacks. Black radio host Larry Elder has the stats. Such as today, when he pointed out that police are 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black man than the other way around. That studies that set out to prove racist police brutality found instead that, surprisingly, blacks are less likely to be harmed, because every officer is hyper-aware of the media ramifications of an error.

Elder recites the evidence often. So does black commentator Candace Owens. When they provide data, they’re called traitors. Sometimes they’re even called white supremacists, which is more than a little ironic. They get called these things because their experience and the data they provide does not coincide with the going narrative that there’s systemic racism in America. But those calling them those names don’t provide data; they only cite isolated incidents—which we all agree, when they actually happen, are injustices, and we all agree that justice should be done.

So, where is the evidence of this systemic, widespread problem that is making them so angry?

I’m not saying they don’t really feel what they’re feeling. I believe they do.

Steve Locke, who tells his story
of being detained because black
image from here

I read a story over the weekend, from an incident several years ago, that tells what they’re feeling better than most. It’s the experience of a black man, a college teacher in Massachusetts, who was heading to get a burrito for lunch before going to teach a class. Police pulled him over and questioned him, and then detained him. He fit the description, they said, of a black man, his approximate size, wearing a knit cap and a puffy coat, who had just robbed a nearby business. His jacket (a designer brand, and not a parka) didn’t look very puffy. He was wearing a lanyard showing his ID at the university. Everything he said checked out. He remained calm and respectful. Nevertheless, the police kept him, didn’t believe him, and were considering taking him to be identified by the victim. Fortunately, a detective arrived, saw that his story checked out. The new officer on the scene ran through the details and let him go.

This teacher had felt endangered. He believed it was because he was black. Literally, it was, because the actual perpetrator had been black. That is an unfortunate reality for blacks; they have a particular attribute that looks like the people who are doing an outsized proportion of the criminal activity. That’s a problem caused by those criminals, not generally by the police. But you can see how an officer—even a black officer—could come to be suspicious of people who, in their experience, so often turn out to be the bad guys.

I have sympathy for that teacher. It’s an upsetting thing to happen to a decent person. What could he have done to prevent it? Nothing. He even knew to handle the situation in a way that prevented escalation.

What could the police have done? Detected truth more accurately. Seriously. The detective who arrived later on the scene could tell almost instantly that this wasn’t the bad guy; this was a college professor, and his story rang true. Why didn’t the first officers see that? I don’t know. Maybe they need better training. Maybe they need more experience—combining more seasoned officers with newer ones until they learn? Maybe there’s something else.

But what I see is not racism, but police officers checking out someone who partly matched a not very detailed description of a criminal, a man who had the bad luck of being at the wrong place at that moment. That’s a very different thing from, “He’s black, so we’ve got it in for him. Let’s get him.”

No one’s arguing that racism never happens. Unfortunately, it does. The vast majority of Americans are not only not racist; they’re disgusted by actual racism.

We hear the peaceful protests. The message is, “We’re upset because of racism.” Yes. We understand.

It is similar to people who are afraid of the coronavirus. This fear is intensified for someone whose experience is that it has killed or severely affected someone close to them. So they insist on things that do not help fight coronavirus: economic collapse, wearing of facemasks alone outdoors, contact tracing at a point when prevalence is so widespread that such practices guarantee practically permanent loss of freedom. Yes, we understand you’re scared. The best solution is not to end society as we know it until every case of the virus in the world is gone; the best solution is for you to get a better understanding of the situation so you get over the fear. Then we can all cautiously get on with our lives with that new awareness.

We stopped being racist so long ago that most of us Americans have lived our entire lives without a racist heart. What more can we do? The best solution is not for all races to bow down to blacks in abject humiliation and repentance; that would be a lie coming from people who did not do anything wrong.

Protesters are saying this should never have happened. The people they’re protesting to? They agree. The message has been heard. The wheels of justice are underway. If you value civilization, it’s time to go home and watch the process play out.

Ah, but there’s the issue. People who do not value civilization are using this moment for their own nefarious purposes.

Protests are acceptable—even when their message is wrong, a lie, or misguided. Wrongness in a protest message has more to do with emotion overriding reason than it has to do with moral wrongness. So we value their right to express their views in peaceful protest.

Riots are not protests. Riots are evil acts of violence. They are literally anti-civilization; they are savage. They destroy property. They harm people—usually innocent people, sometimes even the demographic of people the protests were stated to support. And sometimes they take lives.

Rioters are criminals. Sometimes they get away with their crimes by overwhelming the law enforcement resources. That is intentional.

Some riots grow naturally out of crowd emotion. Mob mentality. Those are always bad.

The riots we’re seeing now are even worse; they are unnatural. They are instigated. They are planned. They are funded.

We don’t know all the details yet. And who knows whether the stories we’re seeing will turn out to be true.

Antifa is involved. US Attorney General Barr has identified them as the organizers of looting and mob violence across the country. And President Trump is right to label them a domestic terrorist organization. 

There’s a collection of photos from various cities, where people have noticed pallets of bricks showing up, mysteriously overnight, where there is no construction going on. They have cones placed around them. They’re staged strategically to be available—for throwing by rioting thugs. One instruction included a suburban neighborhood, miles from downtown, with the intention of making the previously safe feel unsafe.

Bricks pre-staged for rioting, image found here

Minneapolis, where the incident took place, and possibly Houston, where George Floyd was from, were not surprising locations. But these things are happening in cities all over the country. What is the message when thugs deface the Lincoln Memorial, where MLK gave his historic speech in the fight for Civil Rights? There is no connection between the damage caused by the evil rioters and the anti-racist message of peaceful protesters.

Anarchist rebels tend to make a common mistake—that once they set things in motion, people will rise up and join them.

What we need to have happen is the arrest and prosecution of each and every perpetrator of the crimes involved in rioting—violence, property damage, theft, assault, murder. Cleanse our free society of those who are actively working to oppress destroy our way of life so that they can get us vulnerable enough to easily oppress.

I believe the numbers of actual believers in the anarchist Antifa worldview are small. People of goodwill do not join such savages.

A community near Minneapolis held a food drive
to help victims of the riots. Image from here.

One good sign is that people showing up in the mornings—to clean up the damage. Pick up debris. Wash off graffiti. Repair what they can. That is what good people do: the exact opposite of the evildoers.

Here are eight examples of good things that have happened. 

Here’s a story of people in Minneapolis bringing groceries to the aid of victims of the riots.

Here is George Floyd’s brother calling for peace. 

What we need is overwhelming civilization to wash away the savagery. Let’s pray we can do it.

Too Much Savagery

Too much savagery in our world! The most shocking recent example was the coordinated bombings of Christians celebrating Easter in Sri Lanka Sunday. The death toll is approaching 300 by today, with hundreds more injured.  

Aftermath of bombing in Sri Lanka church on Easter Sunday
image found here

This was carried out by National Thowheeth Jama'ath (NTJ), an Islamist jihadi group in Sri Lanka. No surprise. Much of the most violent savagery in the world today fits in that demographic. They go by such names as Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and supporting organizations such as Hamas, CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Those of us who have Muslim friends realize that this is not a standard Muslim way of thinking, but an extremist corruption, valuing power, hate, and death, having nothing to do with civilizing religious principles. They are vicious, as other power-mongering political movements before them. (Looking at you, communism, socialism, authoritarian dictatorships, mob rule.) It is a Muslim problem, however, to separate and distinguish the savage from the civilized.

When tragic attacks like this happen—and isn’t it shocking that we can even say “attacks like this,” because we experience them somewhat routinely?—we turn our attention there, instead of to the smaller savage events. They cause terror, as intended. 

It may be that attending to the smaller events will do something toward preventing the larger ones, or at least making us aware enough to predict and avoid them.

Back in 2013 I listed what we see in a society that is sinking into savagery. This list is something of smaller events, but still feel devastating to individuals who are affected:

The Social Sphere of the Spherical Model

·         Families break up or fail to form. Children are unwanted, avoided, and even abandoned by one or both parents. Promiscuity is commonplace and accepted as normal, even honored as a preferred lifestyle.

•         People fail to worship God, ranging from indifference, simply not attending religious services, to not choosing a religion, to declaring antipathy and disdain toward religious people.

•         People fail to live in peace with one another. Nations fight other nations or threaten war. Factions separate from other factions and refuse to tolerate differences in belief. Tribes separate from other tribes and put loyalty to ethnic connection above loyalty to God or righteous behaviors.

•         Poverty increases and becomes more difficult to rise above; society is more permanently stratified. Corrupt business practices abound, with neither workers nor hirers keeping their part of agreements. Producing wealth and preserving it both become increasingly difficult. Takers willingly confiscate from producers, discouraging production—which decreases innovation and invention, curtailing technological progress. People seek to get what they can for themselves and leave helping the poor to others.

•         Art, literature, and music deteriorate, with lack of form along with dissonance and ugliness being praised in place of truth, beauty, form, and function.

•         Pressure against civilizing principles grows stronger. Religion is removed from public discourse. Parental rights are diminished. Controlling entities take over choices about raising and educating children. Choices about food, health care, media, work, use of income, and other basic freedoms are also usurped by controlling entities.

•         Trust fails. Children are encouraged to distrust parents and report on them. And neighbors are encouraged to distrust and report on their neighbors. People will have reason to distrust law enforcement, which will be inadequate for their protection. And people will be deprived of means to protect themselves.

•         Laws become arbitrary, favoring cronies, ignoring basic justice and fairness. Eventually this includes arbitrary violations of life, liberty, and property based on the interests of the controlling entities.

I don’t have a scale on which to quantify these. But several are measurably worse than when I wrote them. Here are more than a few examples from recent news:

·         “Medical students in Africa outraged over U.S.based org enticing them to become abortionists,” Life Site News, by Doug Mainwaring, April 13, 2019. 

·         “Colorado Sex Ed Bill Would Force Kids to Learn LGBT Ideology, Ban Talk of Abstinence” and would specifically prohibit religious, moral, and ethical perspectives on sex from being discussed in the classroom, The Daily Signal, by Stephanie Curry, April 17, 2019.

·         “Teenage Girl Births And Kills Infant, Dumps Body With Help Of Father,” The Daily Wire, by Frank Camp, April 13, 2019. 

·         “Court orders Christian to pay $55,000 to trans politician for calling him ‘biological male,’” Life Site News, by Lianne Laurence, March 28, 2019. 

·         “The totalitarian state snubs concerned families, imposes seXXX ed agenda,” Orange County Register, by Rebecca Friedrichs, April 7, 2019. 

·         “Second Child Sex Offender Unmasked at Drag Queen Story Time, Houston Activists Say,” PJ Media, by Tyler O’Neil, April 5, 2019. 

·         “Abortion is destroying Spain’s future, new study finds,” Life Site News, by Martin M. Barillas, April 2, 2019. 

·         “‘Doctor’ Advises Threatening Suicide To Get Transgender Treatments For Kids,” The Federalist, by Jeremiah Keenan, April 1, 2019. 

·         “Childbirth and marriage are “just a pain” in Korea: South Korea's birth rate drops below 1.0,” Mercatornet, by Shannon Roberts, March 29, 2019. 

·         “Belgium Euthanizes Over 1,000 Patients EveryYear Without Their Consent,” LifeNews.com, by Alex Schadenberg, March 14, 2019. 

·         “Deadly Silence: The Unreported Persecution of Christians,” video program So What You’re Saying Is, Damian Thompson is interviewed by Peter Whittle, April 21, 2019. 

·         “‘We can’t prove sex with children does them harm’ says deranged liberal scumbag,” The Israel Wire blog, by April 2, 2019. 

·         “Bangladeshi student burned to death by fellow students for reporting sexual harassment by head teacher,” Fox News, by Hollie McKay, April 18, 2019. 

Not all news is bad, however. Just to instill hope, here are a couple of stories of people standing up against the savagery, at least somewhat successfully:

·         “Major Sex-Ed Bill Stopped In Washington State Thanks to the Efforts of Concerned Parents,” Activist Mommy blog, April 15, 2019. 

·         “At School, a Test of Wills over Privacy,” Family Research Council, Tony Perkins’ Washington Update, April 16, 2019. 

I don’t know all that will happen in the near a not too distant future. What I do know is that, in the end, good wins out over evil. Evil is making a mad and desperate attempt to ruin the future, but that won’t happen. God is in control. Standing up against savagery will be worth it.

Ennui and Evil

We had another school shooting, this past Friday. Too close to home. It was at Santa Fe High School, about 30 miles south of Houston, toward Galveston. It’s a little over an hour from our home, near where we go to pick strawberries in the spring. I didn’t know anyone there, but almost right away a friend asked for prayers from Facebook friends for her relative who was a teacher at the school.

News report following the Santa Fe shooting
screen shot from here

Santa Fe High School has been in the national news before. You might recall, back in 2000, the Supreme Court ruled in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, on the question, “Whether petitioner's policy permitting student-led, student-initiated prayer at football games violates the Establishment Clause." SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that it did.

There were larger questions in the case as it came up. The majority religion in the area was Baptist. The Does (the unnamed plaintiffs) were Catholic and Mormon. The Mormon family did not object to prayers at graduation and football games. What happened was that a particular teacher, in class, handed out flyers to students encouraging them to attend a revival meeting—clearly inappropriate. But that same teacher also harangued the Mormon student in front of other students, insisting that Mormons belong to a cult. That should never happen in a school, or anyplace else that we expect civilized behavior.

If I had been the mother of such a child, you can be certain the Mama Bear teeth and claws would have come out in protection of my beloved cub. That family joined in a class action suit with the prayer-objectors, although it was the establishing—or favoring—of one religion over all others that was at issue.

The families filed anonymously with good reason: the school district attempted to “out” them through various means, which were harshly condemned by the judge. In other words, what we would normally see as simply pro-religious behavior was, indeed, anti-any-other-religion behavior. And at a public school, no student should be required to submit to that sort of atmosphere.

It's harder to see how someone could be harmed—or forced to participate in a particular established religion—at a football game prayer. The issue there was that a particular chosen chaplain always gave the prayer. Respecting other religions by taking turns, or having various students apply to pray would have solved that issue. But by the time it got to the Supreme Court, it became an opportunity for an overreaching court to actually limit religious freedom.

The ruling ended up giving permission for a student-led prayer at a solemn, once-in-a-lifetime event such as a graduation, but not giving permission for student-led prayer at football games. The original ruling allowed for “non-sectarian and non-proselytizing” prayers and discussions at the school. The school district went ahead with graduation prayers following students’ voting for that. But then the district appealed based on the “non-sectarian and non-proselytizing” phrase, and lost even more.

In the dissent, Justice Rehnquist pointed out that the majority opinion "bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life.” For one thing, the policy change being ruled on, going against the original ruling, had never been put into action, so no one could have been materially harmed by it. SCOTUS legislated from the bench to prevent a possible future violation of the Establishment Clause. And second, Justice Rehnquist asserted that the speech in question would be private, chosen and delivered by the speaker, rather than public, school-sponsored speech.

overhead view of  Santa Fe High School
image from here

I’m bringing this up because of the irony of preventing a community that wants to have prayer—that has even had students vote in favor of having prayer—from having the free exercise of religion, which is the essence of the First Amendment. And now, that same community that was prevented from exercising religion is faced with the evil of a school shooting.

Is there a direct correlation? I don’t know. The prayer in school question goes back much further—before I was in school. When I was in first grade, I had a teacher who decided to disobey what she deemed a wrong decision and have us bow our heads for our own private prayer every day anyway. No one complained.

One thing we do following a school shooting is offer prayers for the victims and their families and friends. That is good and right to do. Anti-gun people complain that that is doing nothing. But what we really needed was prayer in schools all along—or, I should say, the atmosphere in which prayer is natural, normal, and encouraged. Because when you have an atmosphere that honors God, you’re a lot less likely to have an atmosphere that cultivates mass murderers.

Back when I was in high school, people brought rifles, in a rack in their pickup trucks, or in their cars, so they could go deer hunting after school. The guns themselves, or their prevalence, did not increase our danger—because no one intended to use them for mass murder. People carried knives to school too. We didn’t need metal detectors, or armed teachers, or policies that didn’t tolerate even a paper gun or a pop-tart bitten into the shape of a gun. We didn’t have mass murders, because we didn’t have mass murderers among us.

So the question is, why are there mass murderers among us now?

The answer is going to be cultural. When you have savagery and you want civilization, you need to have a preponderance of people living the rules of civilization. And that hasn’t been happening for a while.

We’ve been looking at various possible causes, which, if any single one was the actual cause, we could address it. If only it were that easy.

There’s the fatherless home issue. But Friday’s shooting was someone from a two-parent family. No record, like the Parkland shooter, where there were multiple calls for police to come to the home. The parents seem duly shocked.

There’s mental illness, and medications used to treat it. We may not know enough yet, but that doesn’t appear to be part of this scenario. It may be a factor in some others, but not all.

People have talked about the bullied child, the loner, the unaccepted one. If that were the causal factor, some people think we could address that with better inclusion skills.

There’s video game addiction. But it doesn’t seem to be just any game for any person. There’s a problem with single shooter games, where the “win” or the “score” comes from killing multiple innocent people—in the game. So they look like humans, and the reaction to doing that may lead to desensitization. But only for some people who can’t, or won’t, separate fantasy from reality.

Along those lines, Dennis Prager talked today about ennui. That’s beyond boredom, to world weariness. The world weary youth attempts to address this undesirable feeling with excitement, for some sort of adrenaline rush. In a mind without purpose or meaning—without civilization—that might mean acting out violence for the adrenaline hit more than because of any hatred or other rationalization.

One of the best explanations I’ve seen was written by David French this past weekend. He was referring to an explanation by sociologist Malcolm Gladwell from 2015, who in turn referred to research by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Granovetter’s theory is that we should not be looking at these shootings as isolated incidents. We are essentially looking at a slow-motion riot. Someone starts it—and that seems to be the Columbine shooters. And others who would not start an action on their own become willing to do it along with other bad actors.

French explains the theory this way:

In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

The theory goes that the Columbine shooters laid out a script, and others have followed it.

Researcher Ralph Larkin examined the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine; eight of the twelve perpetrators made explicit reference to the Columbine shooters. Looking outside the US, he examined eleven school shootings between 1999 and 2007; six of the eleven were copycat versions of Columbine. In addition, he looked at eleven cases of thwarted shootings during the same period; all followed the Columbine script.

Friday’s shooter wore a long trench coat, like the Columbine shooters. This is ostensibly to hide a longer weapon. But the 17-year-old perpetrator wore it daily, like a signature—in Texas where the weather was 90 degrees and humid. There were explosives placed, as in Columbine. I don’t know whether he was addicted to video game killing; he may have been. But there does seem to be evidence that he admired and emulated the legend of Columbine. If only someone had noticed that way ahead of time.

As Gladwell says, “Let’s not kid ourselves that if we passed the strictest gun control in the world that we would end this particular kind of behavior.”

That’s grimly pessimistic.

Riots always end—after lots of destruction. But they do end. Typical riot control involves strong security forces controlling, dispersing, and arresting rioters. Sometimes riots can be prevented by the presence of strong security forces and the announcement that heavy penalties, possibly even death, could result for rioters.

In this “mass shooting” riot, they’re already dispersed. We can try to control, with various safety measures around schools aimed at thwarting mass shooters and/or bringing them down quickly. Sometimes they don’t care about the threat of heavy penalties or death. They may count on death. The last two have been taken alive, but that is rare. And no school shooter ever gets away with it and goes on with life. Not one.

David French ends his essay with this: “There are young men in the grip of a terrible contagion, and there is no cure coming.”

He may be right that there is no cure in sight. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cure that we can eventually find. We must.

I don’t know what the specific actions we must take will be. But, step one, if you’re a parent and want your kids safe: pull them out of school and homeschool. There are plenty of good reasons for that; safety is only one. Providing your child with civilization is even more important.

Another step might involve profiling, recognizing the kids who are showing signs of acting out this particular Columbine-inspired fantasy. We need a way to intervene without trampling the rights of innocent people. That’s a big challenge.

And, somehow, we need a more civilized total society. We have to say this is rock bottom; we can’t endure with this evil among us. Then we follow the rules of civilization so thoroughly that we move up out of savagery until those savage acts again become unthinkable.

It comes down to this: There is evil among us. We mostly have control only over ourselves. So we protect ourselves and our families—and outward from there as best we can. And we live lives so full of goodness andpurpose that there is no room among us for world weary ennui or any other excuse for riotous evil.

So we pray. And may God bless us as we do what we can.

Communism’s 100-Year War on Civilization

One hundred years ago this week (November 7, 1917) Communists took power in Russia. This is not a day to celebrate, but it’s a day we ought to be aware of.

I grew up during the Cold War, when people understood communism was an existential threat. But an entire generation has grown up now without ever having to do bomb shelter drills.

Some years ago I was teaching the Spherical Model way of identifying ideologies for some homeschooling high schoolers. I’m not sure how much sunk in, but I remember one young man thanking me, because he’d never understood what communism, and fascism, and socialism and all those -isms meant. These things aren’t common knowledge, as they used to be.

So we’ll use today’s post as a reminder. Here’s an official definition of communism, from my very old (1980) dictionary, which includes a bit of historical perspective:

Notice that socialism is a synonym. Sometimes people separate the two by saying socialism is a stage, working toward a total communist state; they are both based on Marxist ideas.

I’m noting this, because young people seem enamored with socialism as described by Bernie Sanders, who fails to understand basic economics and refuses to admit Socialism’s nasty history.

National Review provided on Facebook a short video of Communist history, with these words:

100 years ago today [November 7], the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, establishing the world’s first communist state, and unleashing the deadliest political system in human history. During the past century, communism has resulted in unparalleled oppression, terror, and genocide. From the Soviet Union to Mao’s China, to Castro’s Cuba, to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, millions were killed by the state, in the name of total control and the elimination of “class enemies.” And millions continue to be oppressed by Communist regimes worldwide. Vladimir Lenin and his successors all declared war on civilization. And the world is still living with its consequences.

screen shot from National Review photo essay

Yes, communism means war on civilization. The opposite of civilization is savagery, and that’s what they’ve wrought.

The Daily Signal did a video interview with Daniel Hannan, member of the European Parliament, who gave us this reminder:

Communism, in terms of crude numbers, must be reckoned the most lethal ideology ever devised by human intelligence. The Atlantic slave trade killed maybe 10 million people. The Nazis killed maybe 17 million. Communists killed 100 million people. Some of them were shot into pits. Some of them were arrested at night, and worked to death in Gulags. Some of them were starved as deliberate policy to enforce collectivization. You don’t get more murderous than that. So, why is it acceptable to wear a Che Guevara T-shirt now? Why isn’t that in the same moral category as wearing an Adolf Hitler T-shirt or an Osama bin Laden T-shirt?

Victor Davis Hansen wrote a piece reminding us of the good contributions of Russia during WWII—which shows that there can be good, courageous people even under a bad regime. But in that piece he mentions this data: 

Prior to the German invasion, Stalin was responsible for some 20 million Russian deaths through forced farm collectivization, planned famine, show trials and purges, and the murders of his own Red Army troops. More than 10,000 soldiers were likely executed at Stalingrad by their own officers.

These words, from Ezra Taft Benson[i] in 1962, sound pre-contemporary to our ears today, yet what he says is still pertinent:

The Communists bring to the nations they infiltrate a message and a philosophy that affect human life in its entirety. Communism seeks to provide what in too many instances a lukewarm Christianity has not provided—a total interpretation of life. Communists are willing to be revolutionary, to take a stand for this and against that. They challenge what they do not believe in: customs, practices, ideas, and traditions. They believe heatedly in their philosophy.

But our civilization and our people here in America are seemingly afraid to be revolutionary. We are too "broad-minded" to challenge what we do not believe in. We are afraid of being thought intolerant, uncouth, or ungentlemanly. We have become lukewarm in our beliefs. And for that we perhaps merit the bitter condemnation stated in the Book of Revelation 3:16: "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth."

This is a sad commentary on a civilization which has given to mankind the greatest achievements and progress ever known. But it is ever a sadder commentary on those of us who call ourselves Christians, who thus betray the ideals given to us by the Son of God Himself. I ask, are we going to permit the atheistic communist masters, fellow travelers, and dupes to deceive us any longer?

There is a deception going on in our country this very moment which is just as dangerous to the United States as the false pretensions of Fidel Castro were to Cuba. It is amazing to me that some of our citizens seem to take special delight in ridiculing the warnings of government investigators and the cry of alarm which comes from Iron Curtain refugees when they see how the United States is being led carefully down the trail of disaster.

He's right. Here, in this nation so blessed with freedom—which has shared the ideals of freedom with much of the world—must not give up that heritage for lack of speaking up. Let’s be clear about this: Communism is a sure way to tyranny, poverty, and savagery. We must consistently head the opposite direction, toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

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[i] Ezra Taft Benson was at one-time Chairman of the Department of Agriculture, and later the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This quote is from The Red Carpet, Bookcraft, 1962, pp. 53-54.

Worse than We Imagined, Part II

Sometimes it’s prudent to fact-check the fact checkers.

This Snopes headline came to my attention:

Reading, Writing, and RuPaul

Reports of revised curriculum standards for Washington state led to false rumors claiming that schools there will be teaching "transgenderism" to Kindergarteners.

That relates to what I wrote in my last post, “Worse than We Imagined.” So I began to read, wondering if I had missed something and would need to write a retraction.

But Snopes is…not fully accurate.

They claim that the Daily Caller article on Washington State Board of Education changes to standards to include teaching transgenderism to kindergarteners is “mostly false.”

Image from here

The original Daily Caller article actually begins with this: 

By fall 2017 Washington state public schools will begin teaching gender expression to kindergarteners under newly-approved health education learning standards that designate sexual health a “core idea” of public K-12 education.

Here is what Snopes says is actually true:

Washington State has released updated curriculum guidelines in 2016 that include directives regarding gender and gender expression.

So, Snopes agrees with the Daily Caller so far.

What they don’t seem to like is the conclusion drawn by the Daily Caller opinion piece, that teaching “gender expression” to kindergarteners can easily be construed to mean teaching “transgenderism” to kindergarteners. Snopes says the guidelines don’t actually use the word “transgender” except in the glossary section.

But why would they include transgenderism in the glossary (on page 53 of the .pdf file) of their standards if they did not assume it would come up? The word itself may or may not be used in kindergarten. The state standards writers seem less concerned about the teaching of the word transgenderism than they are about the teaching of the various ways gender can be expressed— which, of course, to them, must include transgenderism, else why change the standards?

The Daily Caller article included the link to the .pdf file (which I also linked in Monday's post and above), and Snopes shows page 29, which is at issue—below.

Snopes uses this to show how overblown the Daily Caller claims are. But I look at the chart and see that the Daily Caller point of view is totally justified.

One point the Snopes piece makes is that the standards are not curriculum; curriculum and lesson plans decisions are made at the local school board level. But, to fact-check Snopes, that’s not entirely accurate.

It has been a long time since I worked as a curriculum writer. I worked in California, writing hi-low textbooks; that is, high interest level (middle school to high school) but low reading level (around second grade). I didn’t write for kindergarten, or even for elementary school. But I think some practices translate across grades.

I wrote mostly government and civics related books and workbooks. But one big project was a biology text (which I did not complete at that job). A publisher looks at who is most likely to buy. The biggest markets then, and probably still, were California and Texas. As a writer I referred to the California and Texas standards; they were different in significant ways. For a biology text, human reproduction had to be handled very differently for the two markets. A publisher might decide to aim for a California market or a Texas market, or might do separate versions, with different chapters for materials for which the standards were disparate.

It was unlikely that a publisher would do a special version of a text just to fit Washington State standards, or Utah standards, or Mississippi standards. The other states would look at what was available and choose from among the variety of available materials—which had been aimed mainly at the California or Texas markets. On the topic of transgenderism, Washington State would probably choose materials aimed at the California market.

Smaller niche marketers, often coming from interest groups, might provide supplemental materials on certain subject matters, and try to sell those to individual states or school districts. (We’ll talk about one of these below.)

In Texas the SBOE does not write curriculum; it reads it and deems it acceptable or not. Then local school districts can adopt what they choose. Local school board members, who are unpaid for their school board work and probably make a living elsewhere, are unlikely to read every text. They might have committees set up to do that. The committees might include community members and parents—or, more likely, they include only teachers and administrators. (I have known parents who volunteered for this work in Texas, because Texans are proactive that way.)

Parents who disapprove typically get involved after they see the chosen materials and then must work to get something inappropriate removed from their schools by going through a long and challenging process.

So, when the Daily Caller says that the standards changes, which clearly include talking about “gender expression” to kindergarteners, might be a way of teaching the LGBTQ agenda on transgenderism, that isn’t alarmism. It isn’t making things up. That is likely to happen across the state—unless parents become aware and speak loudly their disapproval.

The Daily Caller article was originally written in June 2016, shortly after the standards changes were announced and approved. The hope is to get enough attention so that parents can prevent implementation of things they do not want their children to be taught, so those materials will not be forced on them by fall 2017, which is now upon us.

By the way, who might be one of the special interest groups offering materials they hope the schools will teach? Planned Parenthood might be one. In my last post I mentioned obscene materials they were trying to force on teens.

Two days ago I came across a story about Planned Parenthood’s new guidelines for talking to

Image from here

preschoolers about sex. These include, "Boy, girl, man, and woman are words that describe gender identity, and some people with the gender identities “boy” or “man” have vulvas, and some with the gender identity “girl” or “woman” have penises/testicles. Your genitals don’t make you a boy or a girl.”

This differs from their previous guidelines (which also include vocabulary not normally used by preschoolers): "I’m a woman—a girl who is all grown up—so I have a vulva instead of a penis. And you’re a boy, so you have a penis instead of a vulva."

Body parts don’t tell you anything anymore, they say. Because of new science? Of course not. Because they’re pushing an agenda. And they’re aiming it at our children. We can also assume they’re using taxpayer dollars to produce the indoctrination.

Will this new Planned Parenthood preschool material make its way into elementary schools in Washington State? I have no idea. But they meet the new state standards.

So, until the Washington State standards are changed back to something closer to sane reality, assume the standards changes likely means that confusing, biology-denying lies, along with immoral values, are going to be foisted upon your children—unless you stand up and refuse to let that happen to your children.

Worse than We Imagined

I have a good imagination. But imagining the ugly, savage, creepy, disgusting—I don’t spend a lot of time doing that.

So I didn’t imagine that things would get so bad so soon.

Washington SBOE seal
image found here

Let me share the easier bad news first. This is from schools in Washington State, where we lived when my kids started school. The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) has put out a new set of Health and Physical Education Standards. They begin their 126-page document with this reassurance:

The 2016 Health and Physical Education K-12 Learning Standards were developed collaboratively with teachers, administrators, subject matter experts, state and national association, and stakeholders in health and physical education. Teams of Washington state health and physical education teachers started working on drafts in September 2014 with the aim to develop the most comprehensive, relevant, medically-accurate, and inclusive set of health and physical education learning standards for our state.

That is to reassure you parents, who were NOT consulted and were excluded from the process, don’t worry; experts are in charge.

Here’s what the experts are planning for Washington children:

·         Beginning in Kindergarten, students will be taught about the many ways to express gender.  Gender expression education will include information about the manifestations of traits that are typically associated with one gender. Crossdressing is one form of gender expression.

·         Third graders will be introduced to the concept of gender identity.  These children will be taught that they can choose their own gender.

·         Fourth graders will be expected to “define sexual orientation,” which refers to whether a person identifies as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual; they’ll also be taught about HIV prevention.  Children in fourth grade will be told that they can choose their sexual orientation.

·         Fourth and fifth graders will learn about the relativity of gender roles and why such roles are social constructs that are not inherent to who we are as male or female human beings.

·         Seventh graders will be expected to “distinguish between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.”

·         High school students will critically “evaluate how culture, media, society, and other people influence our perceptions of gender roles, sexuality, relationships, and sexual orientation.”

In case you, as a parent, are confused about terms, they provide a glossary. [The definitions below were reported by The Daily Caller, but the link to the glossary was no longer available.]

Gender: “A social construct based on emotional, behavioral, and cultural characteristics attached to a person’s assigned biological sex.”

Gender expression: “The way someone outwardly expresses their gender.”

Gender identity: “Someone’s inner sense of their gender.”

So, kindergarteners will be told they don’t know what “boys” and “girls” are, that it’s up in the air, and they ought to go ahead and try out being something they are not, or invent something that is neither boy nor girl and be that.

And fourth graders, who are still in the stage where the opposite sex has cooties, are being told that they might be homosexual if they do not feel attracted to the opposite sex.

Parents are, of course, outraged. Back when we had children in Washington schools, I met personally with the health teacher to go over the curriculum and verify that it met my standards, and that she shared my values. I could have opted out if I had not felt comfortable.

Parents worry that is no longer the case; the LGBTQ agenda is being incorporated fully into the entire health education curriculum. So it’s not a matter of sending a child to the library during the teaching of a particular lesson. It will be multiple days, in multiple ways, over multiple years from K-12.

School board member John Torre claimed parents will be able to opt out, “including the sexual orientation and gender identity lessons.” But Torre also told the Washington Times, the proposed curriculum changes (put out in March, approved in May) have nothing to do with the previous week’s vote to allow boys who identity as girls to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice. That’s just an unrelated coincidence.

Andrea Lafferty, president of Traditional Values Coalition, one of several opponent groups, said, “They are not being forthright with the information. They are not telling people the truth.  They are bullying parents. They are intimidating and they are threatening.”

Meanwhile Torre admits that he cannot provide either the science behind the curriculum changes, or examples of lessons; those things have not been written yet.

I might remind you that schools originally took on the role of informing children about sex for the purported purpose of preventing out-of-wedlock births. And I’ll repeat one of the Spherical Model maxims:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

There’s another, related piece of news that goes beyond what I could imagine. It’s about Planned Parenthood, that bastion of savagery that exists because of taxpayer dollars. I am going to have to quote from an article, because I could not make this up, and I fail to be able to put it in my own words:

Pro-life advocacy group Live Action released a second investigative video on July 15 showing what Planned Parenthood “counselors” teach minors in the name of “sex-ed”: sexual bondage and sadomasochism, and steering them to sex stores to “get educated.” In the latest video, a Colorado counselor told the Live Action investigator (posing as a minor) that “sexual exploration is normal”—and went so far as to suggest defecating and urinating on men as an option. Really. Only conservative media found the film worth reporting….

According to the counselor, “sexual exploration” is “normal” and “can be really fun.” For ideas to imitate, she referenced 50 Shades of Grey as well as porn. She even offered some creative techniques of her own: “There are so many different fetishes out there,” she stressed. “Like, some guys like for women to urinate on them” or “pooping.”…

During a “Hannity” interview on July 15, [Live Action President Lila] Rose, elaborated on Planned Parenthood: “Their interest is not protecting these girls. Their interest is abortion and in pushing a sexual ideology—a sexology—that's very destructive and dangerous on our teenagers.”

Obamacare provided this particular Planned Parenthood with additional funding for educating teens. That means in schools. Rose encouraged parents to contact their principles and school superintendents to find out what their school’s relationship was with Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood Houston
image from here

That is a good first step wherever you are in the country. We think our schools are somewhat safe from such indoctrination here in Texas, because we are vigilant. And yet the huge Houston Planned Parenthood office is guilty of selling baby parts (another abomination I couldn’t have imagined until proof was placed before us), but they were temporarily successful in getting the reporters prosecuted, rather than the actual perpetrators. The reporters were eventually exonerated, but no real justice has been done yet.

I’ll say one more time, homeschooling is a lifestyle choice worth looking into. If there is any way you can do it, your family will benefit—both educationally and socially. If you are in an area where schools are already imposing this savage, anti-family doctrine, you must find a way out now.