WASHINGTON — The Education Department has ordered Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to remake the Middle East studies program run jointly by the two schools after concluding that it was offering students a biased curriculum that, among other complaints, did not present enough “positive” imagery of Judaism and Christianity in the region.
In a rare instance of federal intervention in college course content, the department asserted that the universities’ Middle East program violated the standards of a federal program that awards funding to international studies and foreign language programs. The inquiry was part of a far-reaching investigation into the program by the department, which under Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has become increasingly aggressive in going after perceived anti-Israel bias in higher education.
That focus appears to reflect the views of an agency leadership that includes a civil rights chief, Kenneth L. Marcus, who has made a career of pro-Israel advocacy and has waged a yearslong campaign to delegitimize and defund Middle East studies programs that he has criticized as rife with anti-Israel bias.
In this case, the department homed in on what officials saw as a program that focused on the region’s Muslim population at the expense of its religious minorities. In the North Carolina program’s outreach to elementary and secondary school students, the department said, there was “a considerable emphasis placed on the understanding the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East.”
Too few of the Duke-U.N.C. programs focused on “the historic discrimination faced by, and current circumstances of, religious minorities in the Middle East, including Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Yazidis, Kurds, Druze and others,” the department said.
With its actions, the department entered the debate over Israel and Palestinians that has roiled campuses around the country.
The department’s action “should be a wake-up call,” said Miriam Elman, an associate professor at Syracuse University and the executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which opposes the boycott-Israel movement that has animated campus activism across the country. She added, “What they’re saying is, ‘If you want to be biased and show an unbalanced view of the Middle East, you can do that, but you’re not going to get federal and taxpayer money.’”
Palestinian rights groups accused the Education Department of intimidation and infringing on academic freedom.
A curious thing happened in the second half of the Obama era: The commander-in-chief began viewing the military less as an entity designed to destroy enemies but a tool with which to achieve progressive goals. Warriors were turned into social-justice warriors. Men and women with risible-to-nonexistent military records were made heads of the services. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus (who had logged all of two years’ service as a junior officer) named ships after Cesar Chavez and Harvey Milk.
James Hasson, a former Army captain who served in Afghanistan, stresses in “Stand Down: How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging the Military” that he isn’t making a partisan, political case against President Barack Obama’s efforts to reshape the military.
He asks important, nonpartisan questions, such as what is the military really for? And is it career military people or civilian bureaucrats who are better equipped to understand how to optimize its potential?
Hasson takes a sobering look at such matters as drastically lowering standards in order to pass more women through Army Ranger school, ignoring data showing that all-male Marine units outperformed mixed-sex ones and that female recruits are more likely to suffer serious injuries.
Hasson reports on a program in which male soldiers were ordered to train in fake breasts and distended bellies so they could experience what life was like for pregnant soldiers. Ordering a recruit to do more than 10 pushups as punishment for minor misdeeds was declared unduly harsh.
The Obama policy to overturn centuries of precedent and treat troops in accordance with whatever gender identity they declared, writes Hasson, is widely deemed within the military to be unlike the issue of homosexuality. For one thing, transgender individuals were already serving. Yet because the military ranks combat readiness ahead of soothing the psyches of its members, those individuals were required to meet standards according to their immutable biological sex.
If you are born male, you may call yourself female if you like, but you will still be held to the physical-fitness standards of other biological males. (The Obama policy decreed that troops could change their gender marker without undergoing sex-reassignment surgery or making any other physical changes.)
In 2016 Peterson released a series of YouTube videos criticizing political correctness and the Canadian government’s Bill C-16. The act added gender identity as a prohibited ground of discrimination,[11] which Peterson characterised as an introduction of compelled speech into law. He subsequently received significant media coverage, attracting both support and criticism.[4][9][10] Peterson is associated with the “Intellectual Dark Web
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Jordan Peterson
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Peterson in 2018
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| Born |
Jordan Bernt Peterson
June 12, 1962 |
| Residence | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
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| Spouse(s) |
Tammy Roberts ( m. 1989)
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| Children | 2 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology |
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| Thesis | Potential psychological markers for the predisposition to alcoholism (1991) |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert O. Pihl |
| Notable students | Colin G. DeYoung |
| Influences | Carl Jung |
| Influenced | Gregg Hurwitz |
| Website | jordanbpeterson .com |
| Signature | |
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It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.
It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.
During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman’s issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.
Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.
Will no one speak up for Karen Pence other than her husband?
In scarcely a week, the vice president’s wife has become a public face of hate. CNN’s John King suggests that what Mrs. Pence has done is so grievous maybe taxpayers shouldn’t fund her Secret Service security protection. The American Civil Liberties Union says she’s sending “a terrible message to students.”
The Guardian sees in Mrs. Pence a reminder of “the vice-president’s dangerous bigotry.” During a Saturday night performance in Las Vegas, Lady Gaga told her fans that what Mrs. Pence has done confirms she and her husband are “the worst representation of what it means to be Christian.” A former Washington Post editor and senior writer for Politico tweets: “How can this happen in America?”
So what is this terrible thing Mrs. Pence has done? She plans to teach art part-time at Immanuel Christian School in Northern Virginia. This is a small private K-8 academy where Mrs. Pence has taught before. It adheres to a biblically rooted view of human sexuality.
Thanks to the crack reporters at the Washington Post, what this means is no mystery. The Post reports the following provision in the school’s employment contract: “I understand that the term ‘marriage’ has only one meaning; the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive covenant union as delineated in Scripture.”
Hmmm. Though presented as dangerous stuff, we’ve heard this before. For example, this is how Senate candidate Barack Obama put it in a 2004 radio interview: “I’m a Christian, and so although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”
So why are so many eager to cast the first stone against Mrs. Pence and not Mr. Obama? Because everyone knew when Mr. Obama spoke he didn’t really mean it; his position was taken out of political calculation. Mrs. Pence’s sin is that she really believes what she says.
This is a rather humorous video of the differences between the Democrat and Republican parties (actually, it is not so funny as it highlights the stark differences between the two parties!) Be sure you vote as the future of this country depends of us, the voters ! Please share with your friends Nancy
Even before President Trump’s election, hatred had begun to emerge on the American left—counterintuitively, as an assertion of guilelessness and moral superiority. At the Women’s March in Washington the weekend after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the pop star Madonna said, “I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House.” Here hatred was a vanity, a braggadocio meant to signal her innocence of the sort of evil that, in her mind, the White House represented. (She later said the comment was “taken wildly out of context.”)
For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle. “America was never that great,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said. For radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of identity, a display of racial pride.
For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left—Rep. Maxine Waters comes to mind—are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself.
How did the American left—conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world—become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. That acceptance changed America forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy.
The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. Thus the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. This is how the left put itself in charge of America’s moral legitimacy. The left, not the right—not conservatism—would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.
This bestowed enormous political and cultural power on the American left, and led to the greatest array of government-sponsored social programs in history—at an expense, by some estimates, of more than $22 trillion. But for the left to wield this power, there had to be a great menace to fight against—a tenacious menace that kept America uncertain of its legitimacy, afraid for its good name.
WASHINGTON – Democrats may not like President Donald Trump, but do they want the alternative?
“That is probably what we hear most from Democrats,” said Kevin Mack, lead strategist for the “Need to Impeach” President Donald Trump campaign. ” ‘Well, if we get rid of Trump, then we end up with (Mike) Pence.’ “
As Trump’s presidency became more endangered this week with the conviction or guilty plea of two of his former aides, a new book about the vice president will stoke concerns about Pence.
In “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence,” on sale Tuesday, authors Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner cast Pence’s background – congressman, Indiana governor, Trump VP – in a harsh light, arguing that “the most successful Christian supremacist in American history” is already functioning as a “kind of replacement president” and is preparing to “fashion a nation more pleasing to his god and corporate sponsors.”
A flattering preview of the book by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni – that ran under the headline “Mike Pence, Holy Terror” – already has religious leaders and other Pence supporters accusing Bruni and the book’s authors of religious bigotry. Saying he’d “never heard such hatred poured out against such a good man,” evangelist Franklin Graham urged supporters to pray that God will put a “hedge of protection” around Pence and his family.
More: Here’s why powerful women don’t use the ‘Mike Pence rule.’ Spoiler alert: They can’t.