IT’S COME TO THIS: Twitter Debates Whether Anne Frank Had ‘White Privilege.’

Flashbacks: I’m A Middle School Teacher And See How Critical Race Curriculum Is Creating Racial Hostility In School.

Missing from our curriculum during the 2020/ 21 school year was the diversity, perspective, truth, and rigor that previously were taught. Previously vetted books were removed from our classroom and sent to recycling.  Gone was the diverse collection of American and World Literature: House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin Go Tell It On The Mountain, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, essays by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., poetry by Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, Anne Frank, Night, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, Macbeth, Walt Whitman, The Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible , Holocaust studies, world genocide, world art, universal themes, universal characters and any book or short story from the literary cannon.

What saddened me most was that I would not be teaching the Holocaust any longer. The Holocaust unit included one of the following: either Anne Frank, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, and depending on reading level, Elie Weisel’s Night When I asked the school reading coach where all the Holocaust books were, she said “we do not teach the Holocaust because kids can’t relate to the story.” What? Kids can’t relate to genocide, hate, discrimination, and prejudice? Yes children can relate to these universal themes, we all can. Children would never learn about the evils of hatred during the Second World War?  Why? What was it about the truth and perspective that seemed to escape us during the 2020/21 school year?  Exactly why was all this great literature removed from our curriculum?

Earlier: My road to cancellation — Stanford professor and CEO Joel Peterson’s take.

Soon, a Black Lives Matter advocate asked, of all things, whether I would stand for the American flag. To provide context for my decision, I shared a story. As a toddler, I’d seen my mother take a call from the Department of Defense announcing that her fighter-pilot brother had been killed. Honoring her grief, I’d chosen to stand for the flag under which my only uncle had offered the ultimate sacrifice. The student’s response was presented as an irrefutable argument; my choice was “racist.”

Furthermore, in this woke new world, my professional experience was no longer relevant because of the race and gender I’d been assigned at birth. Despite having created tens of thousands of jobs, promoted women and minorities, and coached scores of entrepreneurs, I was deemed an “oppressor” in the catechism of “wokeism.” Furthermore, the penance for being raised in a “systemically racist” society — founded on millennia of Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian antecedents, no less — was submission, and, if resisted, cancellation.

The reason behind such tyranny came into focus for me when Condolezza Rice, former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, told me she’d shared with her students that the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (9/11’s architect) had felt like “having Erwin Rommel under lock and key.” The blank looks on the faces of her very bright students revealed that they had never heard of WWII’s famous Desert Fox.

Until then, I’d traced the enmity to activists like Jackson and Hannah-Jones. Now, I could see that it also stemmed from students having swapped an education for indoctrination. Those enlisted as social justice warriors had avoided the lessons of history, missed out on refining skills that might have allowed them to judge assertions and denied themselves the insights required to make wise trade-offs.

As the Washington Post reported in 2018, “Holocaust study: Two-thirds of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is.” Which allows the Corbynization of the Democratic Party to continue apace.

SRI LANKA: Protesters burn down Sri Lanka PM’s private house.

Related: Amid crisis, Sri Lanka president flees on naval ship, hints video: Report.

CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: David Brooks Doesn’t Know Why Australian-Style Gun Control is Controversial.

New York Times columnist David Brooks is, in theory, supposed to be the conservative counterweight to Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart when the two join PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff every Friday to recap the week’s news, but in reality Brooks mostly ends up repeating liberal talking points. A case in point was Friday’s episode where he wondered why Australian-style gun control is so controversial.

Brooks’s remarks came at the end of the segment’s gun control portion after Woodruff asked, “You agree the likelihood of there being any more federal action on guns is very unlikely?”

After noting his agreement, Brooks lamented, “I have never understood why an Australian-style gun buyback is an affront to anybody. It’s an open choice. You can sell your gun or not. But if we’re going to reduce 400 million guns, it would take something like that, not even just banning future purchases. I mean, we have got 400 million here.”

Maybe because it was not “an open choice,” but mandatory and Brooks will probably escape the ire of the fact checkers.

But men with extremely fine trouser creases all assured Brooks that Australia was the way to go.

GOIN’ MOBILE: Never-before-seen images of iconic band The Who on the 50th anniversary of their launch party for their famous fifth album Who’s Next.

RICK MCGINNIS AT STEYN ONLINE: This Butcher’s Yard: Michael Caine and Zulu.

Zulu is the sort of film that it’s become imprudent, even inadvisable, to write about. Nearly six decades since it was released, its subject matter – a battle between white colonial troops and an African army – would certainly never be attempted by a filmmaker today, and certainly not in the same manner as it was in 1964, which it’s worth remembering is as far away from us today as the Civil War was from the first stirrings of the Roaring Twenties.

(These temporal comparisons are facile, to be sure, though we’ve certainly seen as radical a social transformation in the last six decades as the stunning technological changes that happened between the presidencies of Lincoln and Coolidge.)

When it was released, Zulu was billed as a spectacle, an epic action picture that delivered the sort of widescreen thrills that television was two generations from capably providing. Even then, it was made at probably the last plausible moment for this sort of unironic celebration of valour by British redcoats on a foreign field; Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, released just four years later, would cast a far more acerbic eye on another celebrated instance of Victorian military bravery, reflecting the cultural sea change that had happened on either side of the ’60s.

Zulu retells the story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, which was fought from January 22-23, 1879, between a tiny British garrison of just over a hundred men and a Zulu army that outnumbered them nearly forty to one. It might not have been memorialized in film nearly a century later if it had not happened just hours after the worst British battlefield defeat until the next century’s world wars, at the hands of a native army wielding mostly spears and shields against professional soldiers with rifles, cannon and rockets.

The film was directed by Cy Endfield, an American escaping the blacklist in Britain, based on a script co-written by Endfield and John Prebble, and inspired by an article Prebble had written for Lilliput magazine. It was produced by Endfield and actor Stanley Baker, who plays Lt. John Chard of the Royal Engineers, commander of the defense of the supply depot at Rorke’s Drift, a former trading post turned mission station near the bank of the Buffalo River in Natal Province.

The film was meant to be a star vehicle for Baker, but he would be forced to share screen time – and ultimately stand in the shadow – of his co-star, a young cockney actor from London’s named Michael Caine.

Read the whole thing — and then go and rent or stream the whole thing — it’s a brilliant film. Just as Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest are unintentional documentaries of San Francisco and New York in the late 1950s, Zulu is an unintentional documentary of a worldview which would soon largely be lost on the movie screen.

HMMMM: Security alert for Jewish community in San Antonio, Texas lifted. The Jewish Federation of San Antonio said the FBI explained there was no longer a “known imminent threat,” but recommends staying vigilant.

JIM TREACHER: Sounds Like Japan Needs Some Gun Laws.

Shinzo Abe was 67.

I really don’t want to hear that this sort of thing only happens in America. Japan has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, and none of those laws stopped this lunatic from making his own gun and shooting a politician with it. Laws mean nothing to the evil and the insane.

The NRA didn’t do this, unless there’s a Nipponese Rifle Association.

And once again, our media is a disgrace. Here’s how NPR decided to remember Shinzo Abe:

The man who was just assassinated was divisive and arch-conservative, huh?

And here’s their second attempt, after they deleted that one:

2022’s version of the Journolist must have been hopping late last night and this morning: CBS Smears Abe as ‘Polarizing,’ ‘Right-Wing Nationalist’ With ‘Controversial’ Views.

UPDATE: Don Surber spots the AP smearing Abe as well:

As Surber writes, “AP claims to be a news agency…Fact-check: LOL.”

(Updated and bumped.)

THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: Here is the exact type of person who was most likely to leave San Francisco in the pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic stripped San Francisco of a decade’s worth of population gain in a single year — mostly by hollowing out its population-rich downtown and neighborhoods close by.

Now, thanks to detailed data from the U.S. Census Bureau, it’s possible to identify the greatest losses by demographics, too. Last week, the census released data population trends by age, sex, race and ethnicity. And it turns out that young adults, particularly white people in their late twenties, drove S.F.’s historic decline.

THE GREAT RELEARNING: Leftist women discover traditional marriage.

(Classical reference in headline.)

本当なら大きい。: AP’s crack fact-check team lets us know Shinzo Abe did not recently tweet ‘I have information that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton.’

Shades of Snopes “fact-checking” the Babylon Bee: The Babylon Bee Satirizes the Absurdities of American Politics. Snopes Doesn’t Seem to Get the Joke.

JOHN O’SULLIVAN: Post-Boris, a Battle with Biden and the Blob.

As it was, all these forces wanted the pandemic restrictions to be tougher and longer. For a long time Boris and his ministers were more or less ventriloquist’s dummies speaking lines written by scientific and medical officialdom in London. Boris struggled to break free and eventually ended the lockdown. But he took a lot of heat for doing so sooner than the Whitehall committee of SAGE, plus “Independent Sage,” the media, Labour, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all wanted.

Britain today and tomorrow will be paying a heavy price for their miscalculations, risk-averse science, and economic ignorance. Boris is paying it today.

In other respects he had real achievements to his credit. He got Brexit done. He sent the extreme left Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, packing in the 2019 election. He put together a broad-based national coalition of all social classes to win his 2019 landslide victory. He was personally popular–a well-known public figure who had edited the Spectatormagazine, written a column in the Daily Telegraph, and appeared for years on a popular radio comedy program about current affairs: “Have I Got News for You.“ And he still has lots of supporters throughout the country who are indignant at his defenestration.

Why then is he Out with a capital O? The answer is his policies. More and more voters, especially those who voted Tory in 2019 for the first time ever, thought he had let them down over policy. And, sadly, they’re correct. His policies were almost more socialist than Labour, hiking spending and raising taxes. He was a passionate advocate of a “Net-Zero” carbon emissions that threatened to reduce living standards, increase taxes and electricity prices, and make the energy crisis a permanent one.

Why did he embrace these policies? I believe it was for the same reason that he initially bowed down to the consensus of doctors and scientists: he believed he had no alternative. It’s vital to say that clearly now because almost exactly the same thing is likely to happen on a very different playing field, the Tory leadership election, unless we wake up.

Read the whole thing.

NOT THE BEE: I’m starting to think there may be a really easy way to avoid getting monkeypox.

THE COLONIES’ NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: British Parliament Forms July 4th Commission To Investigate Colonial Insurrection.

THE ECONOMIST HAS AN “UNEXPECTEDLY” MOMENT: Covid learning loss has been a global disaster.

When covid-19 first began to spread around the world, pausing normal lessons was a forgivable precaution. No one knew how transmissible the virus was in classrooms; how sick youngsters would become; or how likely they would be to infect their grandparents. But disruptions to education lasted long after encouraging answers to these questions emerged.

New data suggest that the damage has been worse than almost anyone expected [emphasis mine — Ed]. Locking kids out of school has prevented many of them from learning how to read properly. Before the pandemic 57% of ten-year-olds in low and middle-income countries could not read a simple story, says the World Bank. That figure may have risen to 70%, it now estimates. The share of ten-year-olds who cannot read in Latin America, probably the worst-affected region, could rocket from around 50% to 80% (see chart 1).

Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less. McKinsey, a consultancy, estimates that by 2040 education lost to school closures could cause global gdp to be 0.9% lower than it would otherwise have been—an annual loss of $1.6trn. The World Bank thinks the disruption could cost children $21trn in earnings over their lifetimes—a sum equivalent to 17% of global gdp today. That is much more than the $10trn it had estimated in 2020, and also an increase on the $17trn it was predicting last year.

Who on earth could have foreseen this? Flashback: Politico: How Ron DeSantis won the pandemic.

Related:

● Why we must demand that leaders who got COVID wrong admit it and apologize.

—Karol Markowicz, the New York Post, March 6th.

● Speech Therapy Shows the Difficult Tradeoffs of Wearing Masks.

—Atlantic headline, March 2nd.

As Ace of Spades wrote, at the start of a lengthy post on that last headline, “The masking mandates that the corrupt US and state and local governments forced on children, under pressure from the corrupt teachers unions have imposed developmental disorders on children that they may never recover from. The early years of development are critical ones. You don’t get those back. These are critical years of development in which children’s brains are wired to rewire themselves like crazy. Their brains will reconfigure themselves during these years like in no other point in their lives, ever. There is no ‘Do Over’ switch on a child’s formative years.”

ANYTHING YOU PUT ON THAT TELEPROMPTER, RON BRANDON WILL READ! Watch: Biden Reads Teleprompter Instructions During Remarks on Abortion Executive Orders.

DON’T GET COCKY: Democrats Getting No Sense of Urgency From Biden or His Aides to Turn Things Around Before Midterms.

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE PAUL KERSEY AGAIN: Why is New York Persecuting a Man for Defending Himself?

GREAT MOMENTS IN KINSLEY GAFFES: Canned climate official was right, consumers suffer the most.

Remember David Ismay?

He was [Massachusetts’] $130,000 a year climate change czar — a mini-John Kerry — who was forced to resign after he was inadvertently caught telling the truth.

He revealed how the Green anti-fossil-fuel movement wants to punish you to save the planet.

Ismay, speaking to a virtual meeting of the Vermont Climate Council last year on gas and oil emissions, said, “Sixty percent of our emissions that need to be reduced come from you — the person across the street, the senior on fixed income.”

If that was not damaging enough, he added, “There is no bad guy left, at least in Massachusetts, to point the finger at, turn the screws on and, you know, break their will so we have to break your will. I can’t even say that publicly.”

Unfortunately for Ismay a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and Navy Seal, his comments were recorded by the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, a conservative group opposed to Gov. Charlie Baker’s Transportation and Climate Change Initiative and offshore wind farms.

Ismay resigned after Baker took issue with his remarks.

Yet, in retrospect, Ismay was telling the truth when he talked about who would carry the burden for Joe Biden’s half-baked, premature and ill-conceived war on fossil fuel.

In his equivocating letter of resignation, he said, “Although my comments were interpreted by some as placing the burden of climate change on hardworking families and vulnerable populations, my intent was the opposite.”

The truth is that it is the hardworking families of the country who are paying for Biden’s ill-planned war on fossil fuel. They are paying for it every time they gas up or go to the grocery store.

Ismay should have stuck to his guns. He was right before he was wrong.

Earlier:

● Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

● Let them pump gas: Elitist environmentalists have contempt for working class.

SRI LANKA’S PRIME MINISTER RESIGNS AFTER PROTESTERS SWARM PRESIDENT’S PALACE: PM Ranil Wickremesinghe resigns amid hostile protests.

Earlier:

● Sri Lanka Begging Russia and India for Fuel: A Nation Wrecked by Green Agricultural Policies.

● Here’s What Life Looks Like in a Country That’s Run Out of Fuel.

● Could It Happen Here? 200 Dead, as Sri Lanka Literally Runs Out of Gas.

● In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong.

● Sri Lanka facing imminent threat of starvation, senior politician warns.

● Looming food shortages is the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Downfall Edition.

RIP, PAULIE WALNUTS: Tony Sirico, ‘The Sopranos’ actor, dead at 79.

QUESTION ASKED:

DEVELOPING: Elon Musk notifies Twitter he is terminating deal.

Billionaire Elon Musk wants to end his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, according to a letter sent by a lawyer on his behalf to the company’s chief legal officer Friday.

But Twitter’s board chairman Bret Taylor said the company is still committed to closing the deal at the agreed-upon price and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the agreement.

“We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery,” Taylor wrote.

Twitter shares were down about 6% after hours on Friday.

In the letter, disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Skadden Arps attorney Mike Ringler charged that “Twitter has not complied with its contractual obligations.”

As Clay Travis tweets, “Musk says he’s not buying Twitter for $44 billion because of all the bots & fake accounts. Twitter says it’s suing him to compel purchase. I’d bet on a lower purchase price being negotiated before all is done here.”

(Updated and bumped.)

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH DAVID FRUM IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Shinzo Abe Made the World Better.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF JEREMY CORBYN’S PARTY CONTINUES APACE:

Related: Coldplay Dedicated Song to Notorious Anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, Analysis Finds.