CRITICAL ETHNIC STUDIES USING BACK DOOR INTO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “CRITICAL ETHNIC STUDIES USING BACK DOOR INTO PUBLIC SCHOOLS”

 

        Critical Ethnic Studies couldn’t get in the front door of California’s public schools, so now adherents of the historical perspective that’s considered by many to be both anti-white American and anti-Semitic are trying to enter through the rear.

 

Grappling with the prospect of developing new ethnic studies programs for middle and high schools, districts in many parts of California are hiring co-authors and backers of a rejected first version of the state’s new Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum as well-paid consultants.

 

        Such courses are not yet required to receive high school diplomas in this state, but soon will be if legislators pass a proposed law known as AB 101. That bill lets local school districts design their own ethnic studies programs and not use the state’s new, better-vetted curriculum.

 

        With few consultants available to help, several early adopters of ethnic studies appear to be influenced by Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) adherents, whose focus is largely on past persecution of minority groups which together today make up a majority of California’s populace.

 

        The strong CES focus on the roles of slavery and white supremacy in American history and the part colonialism played in world history was largely rejected in the state’s model curriculum. But many districts appear about to spend millions of dollars on their own curricula that would once again bring those factors to the fore, advancing themes rejected at the state level because they were factually incorrect and likely to spur ethnic discord.

 

        Some districts are using authors of the faulty first draft of the state curriculum to create their own programs. These would stay in force under AB 101 if it passes.

 

        The school board in Hayward’s unified district in the East Bay suburbs of San Francisco, for one example, last month voted to spend $40 million on a program designed by the for-profit Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute (LESMC), a consulting firm aiming to sell versions of the state’s rejected first draft, which featured overtly false anti-white, anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist elements. That group’s website lists several contributors to the dumped draft as member consultants.

 

        The resoundingly rejected curriculum taught that virtually all whites historically backed racism and slavery, despite realities like these: About half the “Freedom Riders” during the civil rights movement of the 1960s were white and one-fourth were Jews. Northern whites and Jews established and funded schools to further education for freed slaves and their children during post-Civil War Reconstruction, when public education was denied them in the former Confederacy. Many more historical facts also contradict CES claims, which falsely hold that virtually all white immigrants to America quickly gave up their old identities in favor of new “white privilege.”

 

        San Diego’s district appears set to approve a $77 million plan to emphasize ethnic studies in all subjects taught from kindergarten to 12th grade. As conceived, its program would be largely written by an LESMC member who also helped write the dumped state draft.

 

        And the Jefferson Elementary School Board in Daly City approved a $40,000 consulting contract with another LESMC member.

 

        Plus, LESMC members consult for the state Board of Education and with Stanford University’s influential Instructional Leadership Corps.

 

This adds up to a picture of something like a taxpayer subsidized guerilla war waged on many fronts by CES advocates whose anti-white, anti-Semitic ideas could not win state approval even under a liberal Black state schools superintendent.

 

        It’s now up to local citizens to let their school boards know they won’t put up with this subversion of the new emphasis on ethnic studies.

 

        “The Jewish community alone does not have the bandwidth to oppose LESMC in each of the hundreds of school districts (in California),” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of the AMCHA Initiative, which tracks anti-Semitism in education.

 

        That makes the new reality one of needed local activism: if parents and other citizens don’t act, Critical Ethnic Studies could soon become standard fare for many California schoolkids, unnecessarily breeding even more divisions than now plague this state and nation.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WHAT UNLIMITED PARTY MONEY LAUNDERING CAN DO

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE:  FRIDAY, JULY 27, 2018, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WHAT UNLIMITED PARTY MONEY LAUNDERING CAN DO”

          For most Californians, the year-2000 Proposition 34 was little more than a meaningless formality. But not to politicians or political party officials.

          The 18-year-old initiative sets inflation-adjusted limits on what individuals and organizations can donate to candidates, ranging today from $4,400 for state legislative races to $29,200 for those running for governor. But there are no limits on giving to state and local political parties or how they can spend that money.

          This gets little notice from most Californians, even those who examine the fine print on election-time mailers to see who is behind them.

          But it surely means a lot to politicians and their parties. The power these rules give parties to launder money earmarked for particular candidates was behind the bitter and very close race last winter between Eric Bauman and Kimberly Ellis over who would be the next chairperson of the California Democratic Party.

          But perhaps the most dramatic and clear-cut example of political parties’ power to launder cash and pass it along to intended recipients involved a locally well-known power couple during the spring primary campaign in San Diego County.

          The couple: Democratic state Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher and her husband Nathan Fletcher, a former Republican whip in the Assembly and a two-time loser in runs for mayor of San Diego.

          Fletcher, who converted from Republican to Democrat in 2012 and 2013, with an intermediate stop as an independent, was one of five primary election candidates this spring for a seat on his county’s Board of Supervisors, getting large-scale financial support from the local Democratic Party and some from the county’s labor unions.

          But nothing matches what he’s gotten from his wife. By the end of the primary season, Gonzalez Fletcher had transferred $355,000 of her Assembly campaign funds to the county’s Democratic party, far outstripping other San Diego politicians like state Senate President Toni Atkins ($16,000) and Democratic Assemblyman Todd Gloria ($9,000).

          The reason was obvious. While Gonzalez Fletcher was giving the party enormous sums, the organization was passing much more to her husband – a total of $680,000, of which he got $188,000 in just one week. So there’s little doubt that Gonzalez Fletcher’s campaign funds were staying in the family.

          The most obvious example of this happening came one day in May, when she gave $50,000 to the party and the very same day the organization spent the identical amount on behalf of her husband’s campaign.

          There was nothing the least bit illegal about any of this. But it’s doubtful California has ever seen a more obvious example of a local party laundering money on behalf of a candidate and his chief donor. Of course, the party could not, did not, use the money to do anything but market its candidate to registered Democrats.

          But that meant Fletcher himself did not have to send mailers or fund phone banking aimed at Democratic voters. Instead, he could concentrate on outreach to voters with no party preference or even to Republicans.

          One thing wrong with all this is that voters have no direct way to track where the money actually comes from. Sure, they know Gonzalez Fletcher and her husband are close allies. But they don’t know just whose money that was previously given to the Gonzalez Fletcher campaign account went to Fletcher. So no one can really be sure who he’s beholden to if and when he takes a seat on the county board. Which makes it difficult to track his motives in votes on development and other key issues.

          That’s the trouble with the entire current state campaign funding system. And it seems legislators want to keep the current opaque system in place indefinitely. About a year ago, they killed a bill making gifts to political parties subject to the same limits imposed on donations to candidates.

          Today’s disgraceful and easily exploited system is a major legacy of former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, recalled in 2003 partly because of his own questionable fund-raising practices. If it remains in place, it will be because of ignorance or indifference by California voters, who could employ a ballot initiative to change the system anytime they like.

         

                  

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

VIOLENT CRIME-IMMIGRATION LINK IS A SHIBBOLETH

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2010, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“VIOLENT CRIME-IMMIGRATION LINK IS A SHIBBOLETH”

As Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer last spring signed her state’s landmark bill cracking down on illegal immigration, she listed crime as her biggest reason.

Her signature, she said, aimed to solve a “crisis (of) border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigrantion.”

If she’d gone to the one Arizona city that confronts Mexico most directly – Nogales, where the border separates the town into American and Mexican components – she’d have discovered the connection she claimed simply does not exist.

In 2000, Nogales, AZ experienced 23 rapes, robberies and murders. Last year, after 10 years of population growth mostly through illegal immigration, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults dropped by one-third. There have been no murders for more than two years.

So much for the immigration-created crime wave.

Yes, there is crime aplenty in Mexico, especially drug-related crime in cities like Tijuana and Juarez on the south side of the border. But illegal immigrants have not brought that with them. Many, in fact, come to America to escape it.

Yes, there is the occasional violent crime along the border. A Cochise County rancher was killed in March, possibly by a drug smuggler, although no one knows that for sure. A sheriff’s deputy in Pinal County was shot and wounded in April, allegedly by illegal immigrant drug runners. But every law-enforcement agency along the Arizona sector of the border says drug cartels normally don’t target U.S. residents.

“This is a media-created event,” Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Pima County (Tucson) told the Arizona Republic newspaper. “I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure.”

That is one reason federal apprehensions of illegal immigrants are lower this year than they’ve been since the 1990s.

It’s not merely politicians in Arizona who have tried to exploit a non-existent link between violent crime and illegal immigration (no one denies that crossing the border surreptitiously is a crime, but it’s not a violent one).

That alleged link became a major theme of the California Republican primary election battle between Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman last spring. But there is no link, according to the latest research on the subject.

That research comes from University of Colorado sociology Prof. Tim Wadsworth, whose research on crime and immigration completely debunks the notion that more immigration necessarily equals more crime. Wadsworth, of course, would be the last to deny that some immigrants, illegal or not, are criminals and even violent criminals.
But here’s what he reported in the April issue of the academic journal Social Science Weekly (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123341598/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0):
“Cities that experienced greater growth in immigrant or new-immigrant populations between 1990 and 2000 (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fresno and San Diego were among those with the greatest rise in migrant populations) tended to demonstrate sharper decreases in homicide and robbery. The suggestion that high levels of immigration may have been partially responsible for the drop in crime during the 1990s seems plausible.”
Wadsworth worked only with statistics from the 1990s, a decade for which the numbers are complete. But the same cities that saw the most foreign immigration in that decade also were the leaders in the next 10 years, and in most of them, violent crime continued its downtrend.
Wadsworth didn’t stop with just the big cities, though. He looked at 459 communities with populations of at least 50,000. He said distinguishing the effects of legal and illegal immigration is difficult, as the last two U.S. Census reports did not track those numbers. But he noted that immigrant citizens and non-citizens often congregate in the same areas for reasons of culture and language. He tracked robberies and homicides because they are harder to hide than other crimes.
Rather than causing crime waves, Wadsworth says, the numbers suggest that “immigration may be partially responsible for the decrease in violent crime.” His statistical analysis shows that growth in the new immigrant population led, on average among the 459 cities, to a 9.3 percent decline in the murder rate and a 22.2 percent decrease in robberies.
Wadsworth does not, however, expect his pioneering research to change political rhetoric. “The association between immigration and crime has been a center point of anti-immigrant discourse since the 1880s,” he said. “Although there has been scant empirical research to support such claims, they have persisted with little debate.”
Now there is some research. But politicians who exploit the supposed – and, it turns out – nonexistent link between increased crime and illegal immigration mostly likely won’t change their tune. It’s been too useful.
Which means it will now be up to voters to see through the false rhetoric and act accordingly.
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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net