K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Rise of Woke Classrooms.

Education Week’s “Classroom Q&A” blog tells teachers that “As Dr. Ibram X. Kendi would say, there is no ‘not racist.’ There is only racist and anti-racist. Your silence favors the status quo and the violently oppressive harm it does to black and brown folk everywhere.” Antiracism, in the current formulation, does not mean equal treatment of others; it is an all-encompassing ideology that demands constant questioning of one’s own actions and motives and the actions and motives of others, with total vigilance about one’s own purportedly implicit racial biases.

English teachers may look for guidance to an “antiracist” expert like Lorena German, who chairs the Committee on Anti-Racism for the National Council on the Teaching of English (NCTE). At the height of the recent urban unrest, while police cars and buildings were set ablaze by anarchists and looters, German tweeted: “Educators: what are you burning? Your White-centered curriculum? The Amy Cooper next door? Your anti-Black behavior policies? The school’s racist policies? Your racist ass principal? The funding for the police in schools vs counselors? WHAT ARE YOU BURNING???!!?!?!?!?”

German’s call to commit arson may have been metaphorical. But antiracist schools will teach very different material from the schools of yesteryear. “Transforming Our Public Schools: A Guide to Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education,” created by the NYC Culturally Responsive Education Working Group, explains to teachers that “the whole Western canon is rife with horrible stories and atrocities of who we are as people of color.”

Related: What anti-racism really means and how to talk about it.

More:

IMPRESSIVE: A Man Drove Solo Across America in 25 Hours 55 Minutes in a Rental Mustang.

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Products.

Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

JAMES LILEKS: What we’ll lose if we lose movie theaters.

ADVERSARY TECHNOLOGY: The Internet of Things Has a Consent Problem: IoT companies should tell users what information their devices are gathering and how they’re using it.

REACTIONARY GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA REFUSES TO DEFUND THE POLICE: “‘We are being drawn into a false choice idea,’ Stacey Abrams says when asked about movement to defund the police. ‘We need reformation of how police officers do their jobs,’ and ‘ a transformation of how we view the world of law enforcement,’ she adds.”

THE WHITE-GUILT CULT:

Anti-racism is the most critical element of a broader new Woke Orthodoxy whose other elements include environmental apocalypticism, feminism, and a severing of sexual identity from genetic indicators. Settling on a term for the new religion will take some time. Wesley Yang’s suggestion (seconded by Ross Douthat) of “the Successor Ideology” is clunky, anodyne, and a bit euphemistic given the righteous, roiling fervor and unnerving credulousness that define the cult. As Dmitri Solzhenitsyn writes in National Review Online, a YouTube prankster named “Smooth Sanchez” who walks the streets of New York demanding that white people kneel before him and declare their privilege receives surprising compliance, even as he signals his charlatanry by referring to George Floyd as “George Foreman.”

Ben Shapiro notes astutely that the new woke religion rushes in to fill a “God-shaped hole” in secular hearts. Devotees immerse themselves in the sacred texts of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi (né Ibram Henry Rogers of Queens), books designed to make white wokesters writhe with a kind of ecstatic anguish. Indoctrination in early childhood is taken up as a parental duty (Kendi’s new board book for toddlers, Antiracist Baby, is a hot seller), parishioners engage in ritualistic incantation of sacred phrases (“Hands up, don’t shoot,” “I can’t breathe”), and there are mass displays of penitential self-abasement. All over the country, guilty white crowds have gathered to reenact the circumstances of George Floyd’s horrifying death. Scores, even hundreds, of parishioners in the new faith prostrate themselves on the ground, hands behind their back, repeating “Mama” and “I can’t breathe.” Sometimes police officers joined these displays, kneeling or prostrating themselves for the sanctified period of time: eight minutes, 46 seconds. Floyd’s death is a kind of new Crucifixion, his final words the new “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Since we’re currently living in the version of the Matrix that was programmed by Tom Wolfe before his death in 2018, it’s worth quoting from in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)

ALIENS: Does intelligent life exist on other planets? Technosignatures may hold new clues.

JOHN NOLTE: All Remains Sane and Calm Out Here in Rural America.

My appreciation for Rural America has only grown as the lunacy of blacklists, rioting, looting, woke fascism, and a full-blown CHAZ has spread like a malignant cancer throughout dozens of Democrat-run cities.

You know what?

There really are Two Americas.

To which I can only say, “Thank God.”

For how long, though? The Rise of Woke Classrooms.

INSERT HINDENBURG JOKES HERE: Space tourists might rise above Earth with hydrogen balloons.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: This week in media anti-Semitism.

YOUR UNION SHORT ON FUNDS? TRY FORGERY! Hey, it allegedly works for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in three states, California, Oregon and Washington, according to the Capital Research Center. Amazingly (or maybe not), a California judge even upheld the practice of forging signatures so that non-union members have dues automatically deducted from their paychecks. The Freedom Foundation has filed five lawsuits against the practice.

GET YOUR REST: Poor sleep may increase risk for heart disease, atherosclerosis, study finds.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Men and Women Differ in Their Perceptions of Sex Robots and Platonic Love Robots. “The results of the current study show that females have less positive views of robots, and especially of sex robots, compared to men.” And yet about half of women use a vibrator, which is just a primitive sex robot.

Related: Eugene Volokh on vibrators and double standards.

UPDATE: I almost forgot — nobody tell notorious robophobe Matthew Yglesias. “He seems to have a particular fear of fembots, the analysis of which I will leave to the professionals.”

BILL DE BLASIO DECLARES MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Nation recovers, NYC won’t.

YES, AND I REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE HORRIFIED AT THE CONFORMISM OF THE 1950S: Conformity is the new god in leftist-run America.

WOODROW WILSON’S NAME REMOVED FROM TWO NJ SCHOOL BUILDINGS: “Monmouth University will remove the name of Woodrow Wilson from the building he once used as his ‘summer White House,’ and Camden will change the name of its Wilson high school after 90 years.”

While this article at Trenton’s WKXW FM radio station correctly mentions that “the 34th governor of New Jersey [and] 26th president of the United States — who oversaw the re-segregation federal offices, and who once screened a film portraying Ku Klux Klan members as heroes in the White House,” his Democratic Party affiliation is “unexpectedly” missing.

Via Seth Mandel of the Washington Examiner, who tweets, “Princeton, you’re on the clock.”

UNEXPECTEDLY: United Nations comes out in support of Antifa.

KATHY SHAIDLE: Remembering Brian Linehan (For Some Reason).

JEFF DUNETZ: Missing My Dad On Father’s Day.

DEFUND THE POLICE?

● One Dead, 11 Wounded In Minneapolis Mass Shooting.

● NYC Violent Spree: 22 people shot in 2-day span, NYPD reports.

● 60 shot, nine fatally, so far this weekend in Chicago.

UPDATE: Seattle’s Breakaway CHOP Now Also a Sexual Assault Crime Scene.

ARE DEMS’ DIRTY TRICKS ACTIONABLE? By now everyone knows that the left coordinated a phony registration scam to suppress the turnout at POTUS’ Tulsa rally. It makes me wonder if the campaign has a cognizable cause of action — and maybe even grounds for a TRO — based on the tort of “intentional interference with prospective economic advantage.” The elements vary from state to state, but courts generally hold that the elements of the civil wrong are:

“(1) an economic relationship between the plaintiff and some third party, with the probability of future economic benefit to the plaintiff; (2) the defendant’s knowledge of the relationship; (3) intentional acts on the part of the defendant designed to disrupt the relationship; (4) actual disruption of the relationship; and (5) economic harm to the plaintiff proximately caused by the acts of the defendant.”

Sounds to me like the campaign has a reasonable case. I find it ironic that the bunch who complain about “suppression” are bragging about doing just that.

Projection. It’s always projection.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I think such legal actions might also be a response to organized efforts to get people fired; often there are folks with substantial assets involved. Meanwhile, a friend from Facebook writes: “Fraudulent ticket reservations? I think we just learned exactly what will happen with mail in voting. We should thank AOC for demonstrating this.”

BLUE-COLLAR BATTLE: Review of The Hardhat Riot by David Paul Kuhn.

Friday morning in lower Manhattan, when hard-hatted construction workers demonstrated—emphatically, energetically, violently—that the anti–Vietnam War left didn’t own New York City’s street-protest franchise.

Beginning shortly before noon on May 8, 1970—the 25th anniversary of V-E Day and four days after national guardsmen shot dead four students at Kent State University in Ohio—several hundred helmeted building tradesmen left work sites across downtown, laid into a large anti-war protest near Federal Hall, and undertook a two-hour rumpus that eventually rolled over the steps of City Hall, leaving 70 injured, six arrested, and the city itself in startled confusion.

What quickly became known as—what else?—New York’s “Hardhat Riot” was a noteworthy event in the nation’s protracted Vietnam War drama. Hitherto the role of the working class had been to contribute its sons to the war effort—while leaving the politics, and the moral preening, to its betters.

No longer, as journalist David Paul Kuhn details in this very fluid account of the event, its context, and its aftermath. Kuhn presents it as an inflection point in America’s journey from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, and to some degree it might have been. Certainly, the hardhats had laid down a cultural marker of some significance. Looking back, though, we can see that it was as much a civic spasm as an actual riot—just one more insult to an obsolescent and teetering post-WWII social order.

Read the whole thing.

Flashback: Happy ‘Hard Hat Riot’ Day! Remembering the coolest 1970s protest you’ve never heard of.