Archive | May, 2025

California Charter School Movement Update

25 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/25/2025

Charter schools continue grabbing larger percentages of California students and have surpassed 700,000 in total enrollment. Their existing in California for more than 30-years means it is probable that some charter school students have parents who went to charters. None of this is because charter schools are superior to public schools or that many California public schools are bad. It is the right wing ideology of “school choice” and massive spending by billionaires driving charter growth. Sadly, it means we are undermining democracy and increasing segregation.

California enrollment data documents the continuing charter school growth. This first chart is of the percentage of charter school students in the state over the past decade.

As the chart shows, charter school students now make up 12.5% of publicly financed students in California.

This next chart is of charter school growth in the 12 largest California counties. It provides insight into where the growth is occurring.

The four counties with more than 16% charter school students are Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento and San Joaquin. LA and San Diego are the two largest counties in the state but Sacramento is number six in size and San Joaquin is 11th. The third largest county in California is Orange and it only has a 6% charter enrollment. County population is not a good indicator for where charter schools will spread.

The growth in San Joaquin seems to have two important causes. The largest city, Stockton, is close to charter promoting organizations in Oakland and Sacramento. More importantly, Don Shalvey has always lived on his small ranch near Stockton. During his long education-centered career, he worked with billionaires including Reed Hastings, Bill Gates and Helen Schwab, to privatize public education. In 1993, Don’s San Carlos Learning Center became the first charter school in California and second in America. After retiring from his job at the Gates Foundation, he went to work for a small non-profit, San Joaquin A+, and turned it into a large well financed charter school promoting organization.

Massive Continuous Funding

Soon after legal means were provided for “school choice” by chartering, two organizations were developed to accelerate and sustain California charter schools; NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF) and California Charter Schools Association (CCSA).

The history tab at the NSVF website states:

“NewSchools Venture Fund was created in 1998 by social entrepreneur Kim Smith and venture capitalists John Doerr and Brook Byers.” (Byers and Doerr are colleagues from the Kleiner Perkins venture fund.)

“We were among the first and largest investors in public charter schools and the first to identify and support multisite charter management organizations, which launch and operate integrated networks of public charter schools.”

Philanthropy Magazine notes that Reed Hastings helped “launch the NewSchools Venture Fund.”

Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation are the largest individual donors to NSVF with $226,881,394 of grants documented in Organized to Disrupt. However, this is only a fraction of the total billionaire largess. Besides receiving help from Reed Hastings over the last 20 years, billionaires John Doerr, Laurene Powell Jobs and John Sackler also served on the board.

CCSA is a charter school industry membership and support organization. In 2017, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education (NPE), Carol Burris, published Charter and Consequences. In this yearlong study of the charter school industry, she noted:

“CCSA does not disclose its funders on its website nor on its 990 form, but given its Board of Directors, who makes the list of big donors is not difficult to guess.

“The 2017 Board of Directors include New York’s DFER founder, Joe Williams, a director of the Walton Education Coalition; Gregory McGinty, the Executive Director of Policy for the Broad Foundation; Neerav Kingsland, the CEO of the Hastings Fund; and Christopher Nelson, the Managing Director of the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund. Prior Board members include Reed Hastings of Netflix and Carrie Walton Penner, heir to the Walmart fortune.

“The real power, however, sits in CCSA’s related organization, CCSA Advocates, a not-for-profit 501(c)(4) whose mission is to increase the political clout of charter schools on local school boards, on county boards, and in Sacramento.”

Beyond creating and financing organizations like NSVF and CCSA, a quick peek at any of the non-profit foundations these billionaires own reveals page after page of donations to individual charter schools and charter organizations.

Let’s not forget the $440 million federal dollars ticketed for charter school growth. Last year California’s share was $93 million and this year Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, has raised that bribe to $500 million. California’s share will likely top $100 million.   

Buying Politicians

This morning the San Diego Union ran Kristen Taketa’s article about insider concerns over a small California charter school network, Elite Academic Academy. Former teacher Eric Shirley who taught home-school students there said he left after 5 years because he found several things fishy about the administration. That included Elite’s CEO, Meghan Freeman, living in a Montana resort town being paid more than $380,000 while founder Brent Woodward was still profiting from the academy.

Taketa shared,

“But Shirley’s biggest concern was that Elite was paying millions of dollars a year to an obscure third-party corporation — one created by Woodard. This corporation not only employs family members of Elite administrators in high-level jobs but also has paid him six-figure sums each year as a consultant.”

Shirley is one of three former Elite teachers who believe their charter network is the latest example of an operator of charter schools exploiting lax charter laws to misuse taxpayer funds.

In 2019, a San Diego Grand Jury indicted A3 charter school leaders for fraud and theft. The A3 Charter School conspirators fraudulently collected $400 million from the state of California, misappropriated more than $200 million and according to the Voice of San Diego’s Will Huntsberry outright stole $80 million. However, no effective measures have been taken since to remediate California’s laws.

Taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, billionaires have poured huge sums of money into California’s state and local elections. Most of this money hides in independent expenditure groups like EDVOICE FOR THE KIDS PAC; CALIFORNIA CHARTER SCHOOLS ASSOCIATION ADVOCATES INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURE COMMITTEE; CA CHARTER SCHOOL ASSOC INDEP EXP COMMITTEE; EDVOICE INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURE COMMITTEE; KIDS FIRST, SUPPORTING KELLY GONEZ, NICK MELVOIN, AND MARIA BRENES FOR LAUSD SCHOOL BOARD 2022 and KIDS FIRST, SUPPORTING TANYA ORTIZ FRANKLIN FOR LAUSD SCHOOL BOARD 2020.

Most of this Money went to LA School Board Elections

In 2019, James Walton of Arkansas made contributions to 29 California legislative candidates plus Reed Hastings provided contributions to 69 local and state political candidates. These are examples of billionaires buying influence.

A New Effort

California Assembly Bill 84 sponsored by Robert Garcia [D] and Al Muratsuchi [D] was voted out of the Assembly Committee on Education by a party line vote and forwarded to the Appropriations Committee on Friday (5/23/2025). The Assembly Appropriations Committee analysis summarizes:

“This bill establishes new requirements for charter schools and nonclassroom based (NCB) charter schools regarding auditing and accounting standards, and the funding determination process. This bill adds requirements to the contracting process, limits authorization of NCB charter schools by small school districts, makes changes to the authorizer oversight process, and clarifies that charter schools are subject to specified teacher credential and salary expense requirements.”

Since the criminality of the A3 charter organization, bills to solve the lack of charter school oversight in California have been proposed regularly. This time around, The Assembly Committee on Education Analysis lists almost 200 charter schools dutifully opposing the new bill.

The billionaire backers of “school choice” dislike lawmakers working to safeguard taxpayer supplied education dollars. Will the plutocrats win again or will Californians finally be protected from criminal education enterprises?

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Nichiren and the Opening of the Eyes

18 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/18/2025

My just published book, Nichiren and the Opening of the Eyes, is probably a bit of a surprise for public education advocates. For the past 15-years, I have been one of the loudest voices fighting against the demise of taxpayer funded free universal public schooling. However, long before I became an education advocate, I embraced Nichiren’s philosophy.

Strangely enough, I have been working on this book the entire time that I have been an outspoken advocate for public education.

The first paragraph of the book’s introduction shares:

“In February 1969, I was walking down Broadway in San Diego, California when a Japanese woman approached me. She spoke almost no English, but I understood her to say, “World Tribune; Buddhist discussion meeting; you go.” That was my first encounter with Nichiren and his declaration that chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo opened the path to Buddhahood, personal happiness, and world harmony.“

In 1969, I was not the only one who had never heard of Nichiren Buddhism. Scholar Daniel Montgomery reported that in the 1930s, a Japanese monk chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo while his new friend Gandhi beat a chanting drum. Montgomery also stated that many self-help and new-age religious movements teach ideas that originated with Nichiren, but they often do not know the source.

My book is a biography of this 13th century Japanese monk whose tale rivals that of any historical figure. He came close to a violent end at least four times while spreading his message of Buddhist reform and human salvation. Living in a samurai-dominated society, this oracle once had an astronomical event save him from the executioner’s sword.

This is the most comprehensive biography of Nichiren ever produced in English.

I traced the life of a boy from his humble fishing village to his establishing what has become a world religion, now known as Nichiren Buddhism. Such a large percentage of the Japanese population started following Nichiren that rival Buddhist sects and governing authorities went to extraordinary lengths to thwart him.

In 13th century Japan, Nichiren joined Esai, Hōnen, Shinran and Dōgen as founders of new sectarian movements. Esai and Dogen established, respectively, Rinzan Zen and Sōtō Zen. Hōnen founded the Pure Land Sect and Shinran, the True Pure Land Sect. These schools founded by the five Buddhist monks, known as the “Kamakura reformers,” survived throughout the past 800 years.

Today, it is only Nichiren’s teachings that have moved past just surviving to stunning worldwide growth.

His philosophy was suppressed after he died, but along with all other Buddhist schools allowed to propagate with the advent of Meiji Imperialism in 1868.

Nichiren was a forward-thinking man with surprisingly modern views. It is remarkable to discover that many of this Dark Ages’ Japanese monk’s most important disciples were female, in a time when women were treated like property. He accepted the equality of the sexes as common sense and accorded women a respect equal to that given his male followers.

Nichiren was a prolific writer and his disciples went to considerable lengths to preserve his messages. Today, over four hundred of his letters and treatise are extant, including 146 in his own hand.  These were the backbone documentation for this project.

After 15-years, the book has finally arrived.

A Personal Journey

A press release referred to me as a veteran student of the Soka Gakkai indicating my background in Buddhist study. They asked, “How did a guy who grew up on a ranch in Idaho become a Buddhist?”

I was a 19 year-old sailor just returned to San Diego from a 9-month Southeast Asia tour on a Destroyer. We mostly worked in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of Viet Nam. When walking past a small long-gone downtown park, Horton Plaza, I encountered the Japanese woman mentioned above. I was a little interested and too young to go to the bars, so I went with her. We arrived at a small former church where I met a guy who told me that by chanting Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo he was able to get a driver’s license in spite of five drunken driving charges. At the time, I was thinking this does not sound like a good thing.

The timing was right for me. Most of my buddies from the ship were over 21 and out in the bars doing the kind of sailor things we used to do together in the Philippines, so I would go to that little church and hangout. I was pretty sure it was a cult but was inexpensive and friendly. Every night the members would chant for about an hour to be successful. I thought chanting was fun and would join in. It turns out that anyone who chants Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo for any reason will start experiencing its power.

That is how I became a Buddhist. I was having great luck finding parking spots and getting green lights. More importantly, I was struck by the sincerity of the local members.

Since that time, I have had many much more profound and eye opening personal experiences but those early parking spots near the main entrance at the 32nd street naval station were important for my Buddhist journey.

Motivating the Writing

In 2010, I was reading an article by our international president, Daisaku Ikeda, in the SGI-USA publication, World Tribune. Ikeda, who I viewed as my teacher, encouraged all youth division members to write about Nichiren Buddhism. I decided since I was only 60 that I qualified as a youth and would work on a paper about Nichiren’s amazing treatise, “The Opening of the Eyes.”

I was teaching 150-170 high school students in math and physics so my paper made slow progress, but after a year, I started expanding the context. The more I worked on the piece, the more I looked at Nichiren’s overall life. Finally it occurred to me that I had never seen a complete biography of him. That is when I decided to write this book.

Now that it is done and in print, I am pleasantly surprised by how much I like it. Whether Buddhist or non-Buddhist, readers of this book will learn a lot and enjoy the read.

To find the book, go to Amazon and type: Ultican

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Promoting Vouchers to Destroy Public Education

15 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/15/2025

It is clear that the motive for financing voucher adoption has never been about improved education or democratic principles. Pro-voucher billionaires are using their stolen opulence to end taxpayer funded education for all. Vouchers are their most effective tool in this venture.

The latest mania is a wild scheme to give parents bank accounts from which to pay for their children’s education. These so called education savings accounts (ESA) are not really vouchers. They just directly transfer public money to private citizens while shunning accountability measures.

What could possibly go wrong?

ESAs used to be systems like the Coverdell ESA or the 529 tax advantaged plans where a parent put money in an account for their child’s higher education. Today, ESAs are states giving money directly to individuals and telling them to use it to educate their children almost any way they see fit. Wealthy people, who send their children to private schools, now get a nice chunk of change from the state.

Writing in the billionaire funded education propaganda channel, The 74, Jeb Bush is ecstatic about the new ESA voucher program just arm twisted into existence by the Texas governor. Bush declares:

“After decades of debating private school choice, Texas has delivered a monumental victory for its students and families. With the passage of a $1 billion education savings account (ESA) program, Texas joins a growing list of states giving parents real power to customize their children’s education. But this is more than just a win for Texas families — it is a moment of national significance that can reshape how ESA programs work across the country.”

All of the hyperlinks, in Bush’s declaration, are to former articles from The 74 pushing school privatization.

Abbott Lying to Texans about Vouchers

Why is it that when given a chance to vote on vouchers, people always vote against these “monumental” victories? Before billionaires destroyed their political careers, even Republican politicians from rural Texas opposed vouchers. They could see that the only winners would be wealthy people in cities like Dallas. Where rural people live, there were no privates schools to take vouchers. The ESA scheme transfers wealth from rural areas to urban areas by underfunding public education to pay for vouchers.

The Economic Policy Institute reported in 2023, “An analysis of voucher programs in seven states found an unmistakable trend of decreased funding for public schools as a result of voucher expansion.”

Texas Can Expect a Fraud Fest

The right-wing Texas Policy Research champions ESAs and informs:

“Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) represent a more flexible alternative to vouchers. Instead of directing public funds solely toward private school tuition, ESAs allow parents to use the money for a variety of educational expenses. ESAs function like a debit account that parents can use to pay for tuition as well as other approved education-related costs, such as tutoring, online courses, special education services, and homeschooling resources.”

There are two big problems with this approach. Instead of the school, private or public, managing their child’s education now parents who normally have no training or expertise in education must do it. Secondly, handing out money to thousands of parents for their children’s education is a giant management problem. Fraud and abuse are guaranteed.

In February, two Phoenix men 21 and 20 years-old were convicted of voucher fraud. They pleaded guilty to money laundering, agreed to pay $196,526.33 in restitution and were given supervised probation. 

Two Colorado residents, Bowers and Hewitt, were recently indicted for submitting fraudulent applications for 43 “ghost” children.

Just over a year ago, three employees of the Arizona Department of Education and two others were indicted for fraud, conspiracy, computer tampering, illegally conducting an enterprise, money laundering and forgery related to the ESA Program.

The defendants approved ESA applications for minor students, both real and fictitious, and admitted them into the program by using false, forged or fraudulent documentation such as fake birth certificates, and falsified special education evaluations. The defendants approved and funded these fictitious student’ ESA accounts and expenses for reimbursement which went to their own benefit.

Save Our Schools Arizona summarized an ABC15 receipts study documenting extravagant ESA spending by parents:

  • $3,400 for one purchase at a golf store
  • $10,000 for one purchase at a sewing machine company 
  • $19,000 for more than 100 passes to Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort
  • $100,000 for extravagant appliances that freeze dry food which cost $3,000 each
  • $350,000 for “Ninja Warrior” training centers, trampoline parks & climbing gyms
  • $400,000 for trendy, indoor hydroponic tower gardens that cost $1,000 each
  • $1.2 million for martial arts instruction

Save Our Schools Arizona also reported on ESA Director John Ward’s explanation:

“Even a $4000 piano for a single family? Director John Ward explained, ‘These are absolutely allowable. Now, if it was a luxury piano, some type of grand piano, baby grand, we may not approve that as a luxury item.’ So, ‘luxury’ pianos aren’t approved, but what about ‘luxury’ driving lessons in BMWs and Teslas? According to Ward, ‘while you may think this may not be a good use of that family’s ESA funding, at the end of the day, they get a fixed amount of money, and if that’s how they’re going to choose to use it, that’s their prerogative.”’

Most people hope that responsible public servants would not create this kind of unaccountable taxpayer funded system but that is the nature of the ESA voucher scheme. Arizona’s ESA program, which now serves over 70,000 students across the state, is staffed by 32 employees. 

Failed Policy

Josh Cowen writing about vouchers in his book, The Privateers states, “The purpose was and is to do away with schools existing as a core function of democracy and stand up instead a privately held, sectarian, and theocratic version of publicly funded education.” The results with vouchers the past 20-years have been abysmal. From an education policy standpoint, no one would recommend continuing with them.

In February 2017, Kevin Carey’s article in the New York Times was a rude awakening for voucher hawking billionaires. He reported on three voucher studies.

The first was a 2015 voucher study in Indiana that showed significant drops in math results.

This was followed by results from a Louisiana study showing voucher students having huge comparative losses in both English and Math. Carey wrote, “Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, calls the negative effects in Louisiana ‘as large as any I’ve seen in the literature’ — not just compared with other voucher studies, but in the history of American education research.”

Finally the conservative think tank, Thomas B. Fordham Institute that is a proponent of school choice, did a Walton Family Foundation financed study of a large voucher program in Ohio. They reported, “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”

Reviewing these and other results prompted Professor Cowen to remark, “… the evidence against vouchers is actually overwhelming.”

Conclusion

The only reason vouchers schemes are gaining ground is because billionaires like the Walton Family, Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch are spending lavishly to make it happen. They target Republican politicians, who oppose vouchers, by funding primary challengers. They have created and funded the state policy network (SPN).  Influence Watch reports, “The SPN has close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) with the two organizations sharing many members, and the SPN supporting policies formulated by ALEC and its members.” SPN is a network of 167 conservative and libertarian think tanks throughout the United States and Canada which coordinate efforts to support billionaire policy goals, raise funds, and amplify the influence of its members.

One billionaire policy goal is to end free universal public education.

SPN is an anti-democratic movement created to subvert the will of people. There has never been a voucher program to win an election. Vouchers only occur where Republican politicians can ram them through state legislatures and then fight tooth and nail to keep them off ballots.

The billionaire created voucher movement is harming American students and undermining democracy.

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DEI is NOT a Marxist Plot – It’s a Map to Justice

7 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/7/2025

Donald Trump kicked off his anti-DEI campaign during his first term by signing Executive Order 13950 which prohibited federal agencies and contractors from conducting DEI-related training. Now, he is back to complete his racist plan with new executive orders. Christopher Rufo and Robby Starbuck appear to be the phony intellectual heft behind his benighted agenda.

Many right-wingers are out to end Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, wrote on X, “DEI is just another word for racism.” Musk’s central complaint is DEI unfairly harms White people. Billionaire hedge-fund manager, Bill Ackman, wrote, “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people.”  However, there is a long history of non-Whites in America not getting into schools or being hired when they clearly had the better credentials. Apparently this does not a concern to these White billionaires.

Rufo claims about DEI, “It’s the old Marxist idea of treating people unequally in order to equalize their outcomes.” Sadly, on the MAGA right, the politics of “red bating” has been rescued from Joe McCarthy’s ash heap. Calling someone a “commie” is a weak argument against DEI.

McKinsey & Company is not known to be an ultra-leftist organization still they provide a useful definition of DEI:

“Diversity is defined as having a presence and representation of people who are different. This includes but is not limited to race, gender, disability, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, age, languages, and nationalities.

“Equity, which is often confused with equality, is defined as the act of implementing processes that are just and fair across the various groups of people.

“Inclusion is the state in which all groups feel included because they are recognized and receiving beneficial access to programs, systems and power and are not discouraged due to their personal characteristics. As these three definitions are combined, one can see evidence that DEI is needed.”

In the corporate world McKinsey & Company is not alone. Taylor Tedford of the Washington Post reported, “In his annual letter to shareholders this year [2023], JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon emphasized that DEI ‘initiatives make us a more inclusive company and lead to more innovation, smarter decisions and better financial results for us and for the economy overall.’”

Boston Consulting Group is another entity not known for its leftist tendencies. It says DEI initiatives can boost profits, reduce employee attrition and increase employee motivation. This comes from their research based on data provided by more than 27,000 employees in 16 countries.

The fact is non-White males and women are not competing on a level playing field when it comes to hiring, admittance to training programs or gaining promotions. DEI programs work to rectify this. Now, the President is claiming it to be a “WOKE” agenda of liberals working against White people. That is simply a lie.

Rufo and Starbuck

Christopher Rufo was born August 26, 1984 and grew up in Sacramento, California. His path to fame and power in rightwing politics opened while he was a research fellow at the Christian think-tank, Discovery Institute. This small Seattle institute is most famous for promoting “intelligent design” in high school science classes and opposing Darwinian Theory.

In her book School Moms, Laura Pappano shared about Rufo:

“In ‘White Fragility’ Comes to Washington,’ Rufo claimed that diversity trainings at several federal agencies were part of ‘the creation of a new, radical political consciousness.’ He also miss-defined this new consciousness as CRT, writing, ‘Critical race theory—the academic discourse centered on the concepts of ‘whiteness,’ ‘white fragility’ and ‘white privilege’—is spreading rapidly through the federal government.’ The erroneous definition of CRT caught on. Rufo tweeted about it. Then, on August 17, 2020, Rufo was a guest on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, where he described critical race theory as spreading ‘like wildfire’ across American institutions.”’ (Page 77)

A few weeks later, Rufo, back on Carlson’s show, claimed, “Conservatives need to wake up that this is an existential threat to the United States” and looking into the camera stated:

“The president and the White House, it is within their authority and power to immediately issue and executive order abolishing critical race theory. I call on the president to immediately issue this executive order.” (Page 78)

Amazingly, President Trump complied two days later.

Robby Starbuck is part of the Millennial Generation (also known as Generation Y) born 2/27/1989. He claims his mother and grandparents fled Cuba during the 1960s to escape the Castro regime. Starbuck began his career in Hollywood where he started a production company and worked on commercials, films and music videos for artists like Akon and Smashing Pumpkins.

Starbuck has become a leader for right-wing hostility to DEI programs, climate science and LGBTQ rights.

He claims corporate policies to slow down the effects of human-caused climate change do “nothing positive for society.” Starbuck says the climate has “always changed” and human beings have “very little control” over it. In their article about his activism, CNN states:

“This is false. It is the overwhelming consensus of scientists that human-generated fossil fuel pollution – what comes from burning coal, gas and oil – is the primary cause of global warming.”

He was an out spoken Republican in 2015. After not finding much support for his political ideology in California, He and his wife Landon moved to Tennessee. CNN reports, “Landon Starbuck has been a leading advocate in Tennessee for right-wing causes like banning both transgender-affirming medical care for minors and drag shows with children present.”

Starbuck hits on all of the right-wing agenda including during the pandemic when he campaigned against Covid-19 masks and vaccine mandates.

He asserted to CNN that corporate DEI programs are “evil” and a “Trojan horse for pushing leftism.”

Rufo and Starbuck are the brain trust behind President Trump’s anti-DEI posture.

A Map to Justice

In his Book Dangerous Learning, Derek Black laid out the almost two centuries of efforts to undermine black education.

The landmark case of Mendez v. Westminster in 1947 challenged the segregation of Mexican-American students in California schools. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 brought vast areas populated by Mexicans (present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming) into US control. Soon White populations turned intensely anti-Mexican and until the California case, Mexican children were segregated away from White students.

After the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Chinese immigrants who worked on the western end of the endeavor were looking for new opportunities. White westerners terrorized them away from their communities.

American Indian children were taken from their homes and put into reeducation camps aimed at destroying their Indian culture.

These acts were not because White people are so terrible. It was the fruit of ignorance. Never before had so many disparate cultures interacted. By dint of numbers and wealth, White people dominated. Physiologists tell us about three phenomena that promote racism; “categories, which organize people into distinct groups; factions, which trigger ingroup loyalty and intergroup competition; and segregation, which hardens racist perceptions, preferences and beliefs.”  These are all naturally occurring and the only solution to them is education.

A note of warning to the left is Harvard Professor Danielle Allen’s observation:

“Across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense — certain mandatory diversity training initiatives come to mind — but the values of lowercase-i inclusion and lowercase-d diversity remain foundational to healthy democracy.”

Yes, it is true that liberals can be just as boneheaded as right-wing ideologues. That said, being opposed to climate science is really stupid and opposition to all DEI initiatives is the same as supporting White nationalism.

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