Category Archives: Marxism

The Sorry State of the ACLU of Virginia

Posted on August 9, 2023 by | 45 comments

by Hans Bader

The communist activist Angela Davis advocated abolishing prisons in the U.S., while supporting the incarceration of political prisoners in totalitarian communist regimes overseas. The ACLU of Virginia has touted Angela Davis’s stances in the past, such as in an April 4, 2022 tweet  quoting Davis.

Now, the ACLU of Virginia has returned to promoting these extreme positions, in addition to new ones. In an August 7 post, the ACLU approvingly featured an image with the message “Abolish Prisons,” “Abolish White Supremacy,” and “No One Is Illegal On Stolen Land,” accompanied by a tweet agreeing with this sign, and saying “That’s right, NO ONE.”

We do not all live on stolen land, contrary to the claim made by some left-wingers. A great deal of land was voluntarily sold to settlers by Native Americans. Law professor Stuart Banner’s book How the Indians Lost Their Land explains this. Some land changed hands through “consensual transactions,” and other land through “violent conquest.”

Banner is a mainstream, well-respected academic at UCLA Law School who may have been surprised by what he discovered about the large scope of voluntary transfers of land from Native Americans to whites. But the large number of land sales by Native Americans makes sense because North America was a much emptier place after European diseases wiped out most of the Native American population, leaving many Native Americans with plenty of land even if they ceded some of it to white settlers.

The ACLU’s apparent call to “abolish prisons” is also misguided, because peer-reviewed academic studies show prisons prevent many violent crimes and property crimes. One such study is “The Incapacitation Effect of Incarceration: Evidence from Several Italian Collective Pardons,” which found that reducing incarceration increased the crime rate. This article was published in the American Economic Review, which is a peer-reviewed journal. Continue reading →

45 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Courts and law, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Individual liberties, Marxism

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School Boards, Model Policies and Parental Rights in the Raising of Children

Posted on June 11, 2023 by | 16 comments

by James C. Sherlock

The Virginia Beach School Board will vote tomorrow.

The announced subject will be transgender rights in schools.

It is couched by The Virginian-Pilot as the school board defending transgender students against “unnecessarily cruel policies.“  As opposed, one supposes, to necessarily cruel policies.

The local paper refers, of course, to the Youngkin administration’s “Model Policies” on the subject. Which, like their predecessors from the Northam administration, are not mandatory, so need not be debated at all.

The School Board debate is at its core constitutional.

You will note that the Youngkin Model Policies linked its constitutional interpretations to court decisions. The Northam version did not. Northam’s just asserted what the constitution meant. Must have been an oversight.

My take:

  • Families are responsible for shaping the values, beliefs, and personalities of children;
  • Government is required to protect children from abuse and neglect. But government schools are not allowed to substitute their judgements on values and beliefs for those of the families;
  • They are most certainly not permitted to define parental moral or political disagreements with school personnel as emotional abuse at home. Or as harassment of government schools or teachers;
  • And government schools, absent evidence of abuse or neglect, must never be allowed to substitute their own moral judgments for those of parents.

But that’s just me. Not a lawyer. Continue reading →

16 Comments

Posted in Children and families, Civil Rights, Culture wars, Education (K-12), Freedom, Governance, Individual liberties, Marxism, Parental Rights, Politics, Social services

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Which of These Persons at UVa Oversees the Educational Development of the Rest?

Posted on May 20, 2023 by | 11 comments

by James C. Sherlock

In order to illustrate the truly insulting nature of the DEI program at the University of Virginia, I offer the following quiz.

See if you can pick out the person pictured who:

directs a range of educational programming focused on educational development for staff, faculty and students.

Nana Last, Professor of Architecture

Ira C. Harris, Professor, McIntyre School of Commerce

Sankaran Venkataraman, Professor, Darden School of Business

Sandhya Dwarkadas, Professor and Chair Department of Computer Science

Tisha Hayes, Professor of Education

Trinh Thuan, Professor Emeritus, Department of Astronomy

Kelsey Johnson Professor of Astronomy

Haibo Dong Professor Aerospace Engineering

Sly Mata, Director of Diversity Education, Division for DEI

Nicole Thorne Jenkins, Dean, McIntyre School of Commerce

Devin K. Harris, Professor of Engineering

Mool C. Gupta, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Tomonari Furukawa, Professor of Engineering

Allan Tsung M.D., Professor and Chair Department of Surgery, Medical School

Sallie Keller, Professor of Data Science

Harsha Chelliah, Professor School of Engineering

 

 

 

 

 


Bottom line.  Good guess.

There is every evidence that Mr. Mata is a fine man. His biography is inspiring.

But the people pictured above who are not Mr. Mata excelled and earned their plaudits and appointments before there was a UVa Division for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).  Even before James Ryan was President. Continue reading →

11 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Culture wars, DEI, Education (higher ed), First Amendment, Freedom, Marxism, Race and race relations

Read It and Weep – DEI at UVa

Posted on May 18, 2023 by | 124 comments

Navy helicopter overflies UVa Disharoon Park as team stands at attention for national anthem. Photos By Sanjay Suchak, sanjay@virginia.edu

by James C. Sherlock

Kerry Daugherty’s column this morning was heart-wrenching for anyone who cares at all about kids’ educations.  The Norfolk School Board voted 6-1…

to begin teaching gender ideology, masturbation, sexual identity, homosexuality, abortion and lesbianism in middle and high schools.

To kids who cannot read or perform mathematics at grade level.

Now we get a look at what awaits any kid who escapes Norfolk public schools with sufficient skills and diversity credits to get accepted into the University of Virginia (UVa).

They will be welcomed by a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy so large, powerful and widely distributed that a DEI factotum will:

  • review and grade their application in the recruitment process;
  • exercise authority over the curriculum and faculty;
  • monitor their progress; and
  • interview each candidate for graduate school and meet with each annually to assess political views.

If I just told you how this works as above, you would think I was making it up.

So I will quote from UVa’s website. Continue reading →

124 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Freedom, Government workers and pensions, Individual liberties, Marxism, Taxes

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Glen Allen Va’s “Do No Harm” Doing a Great Deal of Good

Posted on May 12, 2023 by | 26 comments

by James C. Sherlock

Do you assume that Virginia’s medical schools are strict meritocracies, taking only the most well prepared and accomplished applicants?

And that their efforts are then focused entirely on creating the most skilled physicians possible?

If so, you are mistaken.

The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), written by the American Medical Association (AMA), a proudly progressive organization, measures everything they know to measure.

The AMA knows MCAT is by far the best predictor of success in medical school and brags about it. The MCAT itself was redesigned in 2015 to include sections that required test-takers to have an understanding of the social and behavioral sciences.

The current MCAT sections breakdown is as follows:

  • Section 1 – Biological and Biochemical Foundations of Living Systems (BBLS);
  • Section 2 – Chemical and Physical Foundations of Biological Systems (CPBS);
  • Section 3 – Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior (PSBB);
  • Section 4 – Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills (CARS).

Remember that women and minorities who take the MCAT are not so “disadvantaged” that they do not feel ready to apply to medical school.

The AMA hoped the change would produce more women and “underrepresented” (as opposed to Asian-American) minorities with high MCAT scores.

Fair enough.

Yet the rest of the woke medical leadership refuses to accept the results of AMA’s MCAT because that test still does not yield the “correct” candidates. Continue reading →

26 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Demographics, Education (higher ed), Health Care, Individual liberties, Marxism, Not-for-profits, Politics, Race and race relations

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The Ideology of Transgenderism Critiqued at JMU

Posted on April 28, 2023 by | 52 comments

by John S. Buckley

James Madison University recently showed how it ought to be for a conservative student group to sponsor a speaker on a controversial topic and be received with respect for principles of free speech and open inquiry. Bravo to JMU students, the JMU college administration, and the Harrisonburg community for setting such a good example.

On Wednesday evening, April 26, the JMU Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter sponsored a notable right-wing speaker, Liz Wheeler, on the “ideology of transgenderism.” She’s a prominent speaker among conservative student groups on college campuses and she doesn’t pull punches, that’s for sure.

Although the word on campus was that the transgender community at JMU and in Harrisonburg was vociferously urging a boycott of the event and a small, colorfully outfitted, and sign-holding group showed up outside the hall where the talk was to be held, the whole event — inside, outside, and in-between was entirely civil. Everyone involved deserves credit for how it played out. The room was packed and late arrivers, I’m told, were turned away. Judging from the questions put to Ms. Wheeler after the talk, the audience was not all conservatives.

As if anticipating disruption, or at least aiming to head it off at the pass, the program began with remarks from an officer of campus security. I imagine he wouldn’t have said what he did without a green light from the college powers-that-be. He said disruptive behavior would absolutely not be tolerated; he cited some provision or another of the campus code of behavior; and he assured the audience that a second violation on anyone’s part would definitely result in removal and a citation.

His comments either did the job or weren’t needed in the first place. I sensed it was the latter.
Continue reading →

52 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed), LGBQT, Marxism, Uncategorized

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Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” and the Suppression of Debate

Posted on April 8, 2023 by | 71 comments

Herbert Marcuse. Courtesy Britannica

by James C. Sherlock

There have been countless articles here on the tyranny of the left on Virginia college campuses. And nationwide.

I need not summarize them here.

But I think it useful on a weekend to consider the origins of that movement to better understand it.

It did not spring up randomly, and it continues to flow from its source, Herbert Marcuse and his book Repressive Tolerance (1965)*.

Marcuse abandoned the working class as a source of subversion of capitalism in 1964’s The One-Dimensional Man.  He

put his faith in an alliance between radical intellectuals and those groups not yet integrated into one-dimensional society, the socially marginalized, the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other ethnicities and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable.

You may recognize that target coalition.

Herbert Marcuse has been the campus left’s philosopher since the 60’s radicals were suckled on his writings and remained in academia. Their students have come now to dominate the heights of the culture, including academia, Hollywood, the media, and teachers’ unions.

What I call the “stupid right,” more useful to the left than to conservatism, seeks to use some of Marcuse’s tactics in an equally destructive way. But they remain a fringe.

They seek a different coalition, most of which utterly rejects them.

Because they are destructive of society. Continue reading →

71 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education - Early Childhood, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), General Assembly, Government workers and pensions, Individual liberties, Marxism, Politics

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Anti-Capitalism Packaged as Antiracism Teaches Failure in Virginia Schools

Posted on January 10, 2023 by | 87 comments

Karl Marx

by James C. Sherlock

I have spent the last 15 years or so studying and reporting on the decline of scholarship and the rise of censorship at the University of Virginia and other state institutions of “higher learning.”

The enforced closing of minds has been targeted to resurrect an economic system that failed everywhere in the 20th century and cannot work in the 21st.

The decline has been led by UVa’s School of Education and Human Development not only at the University but also, more harmfully, in the policies and pedagogy developed for teaching in the public schools. That school, blind to redundancy, recently appointed an Associate Dean for DEI.

UVa’s School of Education, unfortunately close to Richmond, has dominated the councils of the Virginia Department of Education even under Republican administrations. But it most tragically ran free under Ralph Northam and his two worst appointees, Secretary of Education Atif Qarni and Superintendent of Public Instruction James Lane.

Tragically, their tenures overlapped with complete domination by Democrats of the General Assembly and the COVID shutdowns.

The public schools, many operated under school boards in political agreement with the progressive left, will be trying to recover from those multiple simultaneous catastrophes for decades. Many will not recover if they remain as currently configured.

Some schools won’t last long as parents seek choices elsewhere. If true choices are offered that the poor can afford, entire divisions will collapse. Which is why, because too many school divisions are run for the benefit of the adults in the system, they will oppose choices.

Regardless, the steep decline in production of new teachers and the fleeing from chaos of experienced teachers, including those who have not yet been attacked in their classrooms, continues.

That is a classic death spiral. Continue reading →

87 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Marxism

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The Commissars of Charlottesville

Posted on November 8, 2022 by | 37 comments

Leon Trotsky, People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, 1918

by James C. Sherlock

Leon Trotsky, who headed the Red Army from 1917-22, did not trust it.

On 6 April 1918, he wrote in Isvestia:

The military commissar is the direct political agent of Soviet power within the army. His post is of the highest importance. Commissars are appointed from the ranks of exemplary revolutionaries, capable of remaining the embodiments of revolutionary duty at the most critical moments and under the most difficult circumstances…. The military commissar ensures that the army does not become isolated from the Soviet system as a whole and that individual military institutions do not become breeding grounds for conspiracy.

With commissars at every level of the army, they had their own reporting chain independent of the operational chain of command. And punishments both quick and much to be feared.

Progressives, themselves unwilling to entrust the revolution to those who may subvert it, are fond of similar structures.

Witness the broad and deep Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) system at the University of Virginia. Continue reading →

37 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Freedom, Government Oversight, Individual liberties, Labor & workforce, Marxism

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George Orwell Call Home

Posted on April 28, 2022 by | 56 comments

Nina Jankowitz

by James C. Sherlock

This blog, while proudly based in individual research, often offers controversial ideas.

Uniform agreement is not expected. Debate is encouraged. We learn from one another and even occasionally change a few minds on both sides.

Yesterday the Biden administration announced the establishment of a federal “Disinformation Governance Board” in the Department of Homeland Security to “combat online disinformation in the 2022 midterms.”

Seriously. It was disclosed yesterday afternoon by Secretary Mayorkas in his testimony on Capitol Hill.

You will not be shocked to learn that neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times has yet covered the story. I just checked. Yet it represents a bigger threat to our nation than Russia and China. And it lives within the Department of Homeland Security. Continue reading →

56 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Elections, Federal, Freedom, Governance, Government Oversight, Individual liberties, Marxism

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Return to Autocracy in Virginia

Posted on August 13, 2021 by | 9 comments

Why is this man smiling?

by James C. Sherlock.
Updated Aug 13, 12:15 PM

It was so easy to predict that I can claim no special prescience. I wrote a week ago:

“The Governor’s 15-month emergency powers expired June 30, and, God, does he miss them…. (H)ow long (will the) governor put up with the lack of emergency powers?”

If you guessed a week, you win.

Today’s headline: Virginia Gov. Orders Mask Mandate for State’s K-12 Schools

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam on Thursday announced a public health emergency order to require masks in all indoor settings for the state’s K-12 schools.

The Governor has a legal basis for the order, § 32.1-13 of the Code of Virginia. The State Health Commissioner, acting for the Board of Health when it is not in session (§ 32.1-20 of the Code of Virginia),

may make separate orders and regulations to meet any emergency, not provided for by general regulations, for the purpose of suppressing nuisances dangerous to the public health and communicable, contagious and infectious diseases and other dangers to the public life and health.

If you are wondering, the Board of Health meets four times a year for a couple of days each meeting. And there is no mention of a role for the General Assembly.

This is not the same law that Northam used for 15 months. New ball game. Continue reading →

9 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Courts and law, Culture wars, Education (K-12), Freedom, General Assembly, Governance, Health Care, Individual liberties, Marxism, Politics, Public safety & health

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Kendi Blames Capitalism, Prescribes Discrimination

Posted on August 8, 2021 by | 47 comments

By Steve Haner

The book was one the local librarian chose to display on the new acquisitions shelf, my curiosity was high, and by all accounts some  leaders in Virginia’s educational establishment are taken with and listening to the author. So I read Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist.”

I will largely let the author, who graduated from Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, speak for himself below. It was possible the critics were exaggerating. His own words below indicate otherwise.

I recommend the book to anybody really interested in this ongoing debate. Is this being directly taught to K-12 school children?  I doubt it, but maybe. Is it being taught to the next generation of teachers and is it at the heart of much of current in-service teacher training? Apparently. Continue reading →

47 Comments

Posted in Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Marxism, Politics, Race and race relations

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Virginia Needs a Constitutional Amendment to Elect the Board of Education

Posted on May 8, 2021 by | 26 comments

by James C. Sherlock

The Virginia Board of Education (VBOE) is by far the most powerful and consequential public board in Virginia. It is the only one whose Powers and Duties are defined in the Virginia Constitution.

It was a mistake not to make the members of the Board with such vast and unconstrained powers constitutional officers who stand for election.

We are now seeing what the Board, once appointed and confirmed, can do. It has transformed Virginia’s educational system into a Marxist indoctrination system.  Board members know what they are doing is not only radically transformational, but intensely political and fiercely opposed.

Their work is not only dogmatic, but sloppy. Their use of the English language has been demonstrated here to be severely challenged. Not exactly a trait most look for in a Board of Education.

And they do not care. There is no constitutional reason they should.

The current Board has demonstrated like no other before it that it needs to face the electorate. Virginia will need a constitutional amendment to make the VBOE, who are together more constitutionally powerful than any elected official but the governor, constitutional officials elected by the people.

It is time. Continue reading →

26 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (K-12), Elections, General Assembly, Marxism, Politics, Regulation

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VPM and the ACLU Descend into Madness

Posted on April 30, 2021 by | 11 comments

Taylor Marie Maloney

by James A. Bacon

Only one Richmond news outlet, Virginia Public Media, has written about the controversy engendered by the hateful online language of Taylor Maloney, president of the Virginia Commonwealth University student government. No surprise, the angle of the VPM report was not how Taylor tweeted, “i hate white people so much its not even funny” and advocated the killing of police, but the “harassment” that Taylor, a Black non-binary transgender activist, has received from irate right-wing bloggers.

Maloney’s propensity for violent and racist rhetoric was outed, so to speak, by Andy Ngo, a conservative journalist writing in an online publication, The Post Millennial.

Maloney, who goes by the pronouns them/they, has adopted various personas on Twitter, including “fuck off honkeys” and “cancel cultural worker.” When a follower of the black nationalist Nation of Islam group rammed his car into Capitol Police, killing one of the officers on April 2, Maloney celebrated his death. “[L]ove this we need more of this,” “they” tweeted. Continue reading →

11 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Marxism, Media

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Virginia Democrats Govern in the Service of Dogma and Power

Posted on April 4, 2021 by | 24 comments

by James C. Sherlock

Karl Marx

Socialism and communism are so 19th and 20th centuries.  

Under socialism, individuals would still own property. But industrial production, which was the chief means of generating wealth, was to be communally owned and managed by a democratically elected government.

Socialists sought change and reform, but sought to make those changes through democratic processes within the existing social and political structure, not to overthrow that structure.  Socialism was to be based on the consent of the governed. Communism sought the elimination of personal property and the violent overthrow of existing social and political structures.

So what has changed for today’s progressives who have taken over the Democratic party, especially in Virginia? 

A lot. Continue reading →

24 Comments

Posted in Courts and law, Culture wars, Education (K-12), Elections, Electoral process, Environment, Freedom, General Assembly, Governance, Individual liberties, Marxism, Politics, Race and race relations, Uncategorized