Tag: identity politics

Former Columnist Exposes Scientific American’s Sudden Descent Into Left-Wing Ideology

Minnesota Sun Staff
Michael Shermer

Scientific American, a top science magazine that has been around since 1845, has become increasingly captured by the political left to the detriment of its scientific goals, a whistleblower told City Journal in a story published Sunday.

While the magazine previously pushed for authors to debate accepted perspectives, it has recently moved toward far-left ideology on issues, such as race, gender and climate, Scientific American author Michael Shermer, who wrote for the outlet from 2001-2019, told City Journal. Shermer, who wrote a column called “Skeptic” for the publication says he faced pushback for writing pieces on progress in reducing discrimination as well as for criticizing the ideology of “intersectionality,” commonly referred to as “identity politics.”

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Commentary: 10 Reasons Why Affirmative Action Died

Minnesota Sun Staff

The end of affirmative action was inevitable. The only surprise was that such intentions gone terribly wrong lasted so long.

First, supporters of racial preferences always pushed back the goal posts for the program’s success. Was institutionalized reverse bias to last 20 years, 60 years, or ad infinitum? Parity became defined as an absolute equality of result. If “equity” was not obtained, then only institutionalized “racism” explained disparities. And only reverse racism was deemed the cure.

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Teachers’ Union’s ‘Schools in Transition’ Guide Instructs How to Bolster Gender Ideology in Classrooms

Susan Berry, PhD

A lesser known document created in 2015 by the National Education Association (NEA), a group of LGBTQ activists, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) laid the “groundwork” for the gender ideology movement in schools years before the recent increase in the numbers of transgender young people, reports the Freedom Foundation.

NEA, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, provides a “toolkit” website page that features “NEA LGBTQ+ Resources,” the purpose of which appears to be to offer “support to transgender and non-binary students,” to indoctrinate all students with “LGBTQ+ history in their classrooms,” and to engage students in a political agenda that includes stopping “LGBTQ+ bias and intolerance in our public schools.”

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South Carolina Mom Asks School Board ‘Why Are Adult Teachers Allowed to Sponsor a Group Regarding Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity with Minors?’

Susan Berry, PhD

A South Carolina parent challenged the school board of Richland School District Two in Columbia where Blythewood High School (BHS) hosted the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) “No Place for Hate” program that invites children to “explore identity,” and “apply this understanding to recognize the relationship between identity, bias and power.”

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Identity Politics Absurdities and the Ridiculousness of Reparations

Admin

The last time racial reparations made the major news was on the eve of September 11, 2001 attacks. The loss of 3,000 Americans, which for a time fueled a new national unity, quickly dispelled the absurdities of the reparation movement, and turned our attention toward more existential issues. Now the idea is back in vogue again. Here are 10 reasons why the nation’s—and especially California’s—discussions of reparatory payouts are dangerous in a multiracial state, and why reparations are not viable either in an insolvent state or a bankrupt nation at large.

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Commentary: An American Awakening

Minnesota Sun Staff

The seemingly novel developments of the last several years have not taken me by surprise. When I completed American Awakening in May 2020, the national election was still five months into the future, and the stringent measures ostensibly instituted to hold the Wuhan Flu at bay had just been implemented. I thought then that a Democratic Party victory in November 2020 would promise the American electorate a return to normal politics, but in fact would operate on the basis of what, in American Awakening, I called the politics of innocence and transgression; and that if Joe Biden became the Democratic Party nominee, in order to demonstrate that he was the-right-kind-of-white-man, he would champion this sort of politics. 

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Civil Rights Commissioner Warns Schools Touting Segregated Programs and Graduation Ceremonies They Are in Violation of Civil Rights Act

Susan Berry, PhD

U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow has warned two schools that have announced programs or graduation exercises that intend to segregate students by race or other identifying feature they are in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

In recent letters to both California Polytechnic State University and Oakton Community College in Illinois, Kirsanow, writing as a single member of the commission, reminds the schools’ officials that they are “subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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Commentary: America Is Not Divided, It’s Being Hijacked

Minnesota Sun Staff

It seems lately like everywhere, on both the Right and the Left, we are hearing a chorus of voices tell us America is hopelessly divided and on the brink of a second civil war.

The level of rancor and incivility characterizing much of our contemporary political dialogue appears to confirm as much on a daily basis. It appears Left and Right have arrived at irreconcilable worldviews, disagreeing on first principles, core convictions, specific policy choices and ultimate ends. Increasingly, they seem unable to see eye to eye even when it comes to pure matters of fact.

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Commentary: Adopting a ‘Woke Culture’ Hurts Diversity and Inclusion

Minnesota Sun Staff

I have been watching with great personal and professional interest over the past few years as employers, predominantly the larger publicly traded companies, but sometimes the smaller companies as well, have been forcing their employees to make political choices instead of general work condition choices when weighing career decisions. Likewise, they are forcing their customers to make the same sort of political calculus when deciding whether or not to purchase their company’s goods or services.

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Commentary: Tribalism Turns Toxic in the Social Media Age

Minnesota Sun Staff

Man is by nature a tribal creature. For many thousands of years, human existence was defined by family connections, with ties of blood and marriage providing the social network that ensured cooperation and support necessary to sustaining life. Loyalty to one’s kinship group — the tribe or clan — was vital to this system of cooperation, and from the deeply rooted tribal nature of human life emerges the sense of national identity that inspires what we call patriotism.

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Commentary: The Privilege of Identity Politics

Minnesota Sun Staff

Last month, Melinda Gates announced that “we need to apply a gender lens to solving this [coronavirus] crisis.” She linked to a March 12 story in the New York Times reporting that with women making up to 70 percent of healthcare workers worldwide, women are at “disproportionate risk.” COVID-19 may very well end up “exacerbating gender, social and economic fault lines,” Gates claimed.

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Commentary: Crack-ups at the Crossroads of Intersectionality

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Victor Davis Hanson   Progressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole – each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures:…

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Commentary: Democrats’ Collapse Could Happen Quickly

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Karin McQuillan   There are signs of Democrats’ coming electoral collapse, some anecdotal, some by the numbers. Most Democrats are staying loyal to their party, no matter how far how left their party shifts. But President Trump doesn’t need most Democrats; he only needs a few to get turned off by…

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234 House Democrats, Two Republicans Co-Sponsor Bill Forcing Schools to Let Male Athletes Compete on Girls’ Sports Teams

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Peter Hasson   Every House Democrat but one has co-sponsored a bill requiring schools to allow male athletes who identify as transgender girls to compete on female sports teams. Democrats’ Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make “sexual orientation and gender identity” protected characteristics…

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Commentary: The Phrase that Launched a Thousand Grievous, Leftist Failures

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Jeffery Tucker   In 1969, the salad days of New Left activism, a writer named Carol Hanisch penned an essay that the editor called “The Personal Is Political.” She was seeking to explain the ethos of the women’s therapy sessions she was running. The point was not to improve psychological…

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Commentary: The Democratic Socialist Platform Echoes the Madness of the Khmer Rouge

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Barry Brownstein   In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over, they quickly emptied the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. This was to be year Zero; a rebirth of Cambodia as an engineered egalitarian, classless rural society with “the corruption and parasitism of city life” eliminated. Several million had…

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Democrats Targeting a Very Specific Demographic for 2020

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Grace Carr   Newly-announced presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris will visit South Carolina Friday in an attempt to appeal to black women voters, who have historically been a solid voter base for Democrats. The California Democrat will visit with her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters during the trip to…

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Commentary: What the Hoax Papers Tell Us About the Decline of Academic Standards

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by Phillip W. Magness   By now, most followers of the higher education press have heard of the “grievance studies” or Sokal Squared hoax. In this incident, a team of three researchers successfully published several hoax papers on intentionally absurd subjects in ostensibly serious scholarly journals. Their purpose was to…

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Commentary: Progressive Politics Are Not Really Progressive

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by Victor Davis Hanson   Some progressives lamented the apparent defeat of radical progressive African-American candidates such as gubernatorial nominees Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Florida’s Andrew Gillum by blaming allegedly treasonous white women. Apparently white women did not vote sufficiently en bloc in accordance with approved notions of identity…

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Dr. Carol M. Swain Commentary: The Rejection of Absolute Truth Strips Leftists of the Moral Authority to Criticize Elizabeth Warren’s Ethnic Fraud

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by Dr. Carol M. Swain   The Left has created quite a conundrum for itself. As a consequence, it has no moral language to justify its condemnation of Senator Elizabeth Warren for her decades-long decision to self-identify as a Native American. The Leftists we see on television depicted in the…

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