Midterm elections are upon us, and polling suggests a gloomy election season for sanity and probity. The intellectually shallow and morally untethered are out in droves eager to abolish capitalism, prisons, borders, police, a strong military, the U.S. Senate, and the Supreme Court while concomitantly promoting, among other evils, Communism, de facto infanticide, unlimited costly privileges for illegal aliens, and DEI and pro-“trans” indoctrination.
Kamala Harris recently reared her inauthentic head at an NAACP forum in Detroit on midterm elections at which she revealed she has learned nothing from or since her disastrous presidential run. With her horsey grin and signature cackle, she trotted out a southern tinged “blaccent” to impart yet another Deep Thought:
I do believe that when you feel powerless, you are powerless. And when we feel powerful, we are powerful.
She also said in her grating nasal voice,
We are witnessing the most callous, corrupt, and incompetent presidential administration we have ever experienced in the history of America.
She actually said that after being an integral part of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight led by an auto-pen—an administration that callously abused the rights of Americans, weakened America militarily, grievously harmed children, wrecked the economy, and incentivized border law-breaking.
Then Harris really got into her rhetorical groove. See if you can make heads or tails out of this:
When we think about a moment like this and we know that folks are struggling, it is also, I think, important for us to remember how in the midst of the weight of these burdens, how we can help to deconstruct what is actually at play that is creating the environment in which we are trying to exist and helping people to see that in a way that we also allow people to know things. We can’t just allow things to happen to us. We understand what’s going on. You’re not going to pull this over our eyes. And we’re going to exercise our power understanding the connection between somebody like a person who’s out there supporting Donald Trump’s policies like he’s um holy versus those people who are willing like Debbie Dingle who I know is here and is an extraordinary leader … who is a force, a force in the United States Congress speaking truth about the policies of an administration that create pain in the community and the need to fight against it.
Maybe it’s the influence of celebritydom or maybe it’s the degradation of education at all levels including our once-esteemed Ivy League that accounts for the dumbing down of America to such a degree that any American would conclude Harris was or is fit to lead the most powerful country in the world.
The degradation of government schools and its deleterious effects on American students made the news in a surprising way this past week when historian manqué Nikole Hannah-Jones penned a lengthy faux-confession/defense of the decision by her and her public school advocate husband Faraji to send their daughter to lousy NYC public schools:
Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage.
Their 16-year-old daughter has been intermittently angry with her parents about being a pawn in their parents’ doctrinaire collectivist experiment, which should serve as a warning to all Americans about the dangers posed by cozy collectivism.
But it won’t, at least not if Hannah-Jones gets her way. In her interminable 8,300-word piece titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?,” in The New York Times Magazine, she does her darndest to ennoble her gigantic blunder by dangling the “racism” red herring everywhere.
Hannah-Jones wants Americans to believe that her decision to place her daughter in a poor-performing school when she and her husband have the means to make better choices is the equivalent of those brave black families who fought racist laws in the 1950s. Nikole-Jones argued,
Black parents put their children forth as plaintiffs in lawsuits argued by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund that ultimately ended legal segregation in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. When the federal government refused to enforce the new law of the land, Black parents sent their children to wade through white mobs to enter white-only schools, pushing their doors open for the rest of us.
The plaintiffs and community participants in the court cases that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education acted bravely in opposing grossly unjust laws to ensure their children and others had easy access to public education.
Hannah-Jones sacrificed her child’s education on Hannah-Jones’ ideological altar. The dismal quality of education available at the schools to which she sent her daughter was not caused by unjust racist laws.
In torturous detail, Hannah-Jones shares her daughter’s story from kindergarten through sophomore year of high school. She tells anecdotes about school staff that didn’t properly monitor lunchrooms full of misbehaving kids, teachers who didn’t assign homework or didn’t grade assignments, and administrators who didn’t respond to parents. She reports that the predominantly white and Asian high school her daughter attended was rife with “casual” racism. All of this, according to Hannah-Jones, is the result of systemic racism that the powerful—and presumably white—people just won’t change:
[M]y daughter’s sacrifice could not transform a system that those who hold the most power refuse to change.
To be clear, it was Hannah-Jones and her husband who sacrificed their daughter’s education. Their daughter did not voluntarily sacrifice anything. Her parents made her into a sacrifice.
Hannah-Jones talks a lot about the impoverished families whose children attend New York City’s failing schools with lazy staff, incompetent teachers, and unresponsive administrators. Was it systemic racism that caused staff, teachers, and administrators to behave irresponsibly?
Curiously, not once does Hannah-Jones address the sexual promiscuity, broken families, and missing fathers that result in children being raised without guidance and discipline. Instead of critically examining cultural forces that lead to antisocial behavior, Nikole Hannah Jones attributes all school problems to systemic racism.
Hannah-Jones is a tricksy little rhetorician. She managed to kinda, sorta admit that maybe, just maybe, her decision to sacrifice her child for a doctrinaire ideology harmed her daughter, while at the same time offering a full-throated, wordy defense of her noble act that pointed the finger of blame for every public school ill at racism. Oh, and most important, Hannah-Jones placed herself smack dab in the center of our cultural klieg lights—again.