X-Rated Adult Books Packaged for Children
There are a plethora of books being presented in schools as part of a social/emotional learning curriculum, sometimes referred to as SEL. These books offer characters of diverse backgrounds and worldviews and are meant to help students understand and even identify with their stories.
Initially, this curriculum may have been introduced as a means of helping students understand and learn about other cultures, socioeconomic circumstances, or religious beliefs to prevent bullying. But however well-intentioned, it has been hijacked by activist teachers.
The issue now, more than ever, is that these books increasingly contain content that is explicit, pornographic, obscene, profane, and full of horror that leads to a character’s suicide. Parents are now finding out about these books from other parents across the country and are investigating with the vain hope that it’s not in their own child’s school.
Last week, a Virginia mom from Fairfax County confronted the school board after discovering these books were available in her high schooler’s library. Two of these books contain material that was pedophilic and graphic. She said: “This is not about being anti-gay, anti-trans, or whatever. I would have been there and said every single word I said if this had been the depiction of a heterosexual couple with heterosexual acts — pornography is pornography, and I don’t care what the gender is. And by the way, it’s even worse that the pornography involves children. That takes it to a whole other level of evil.”
She recited some of the passages at the meeting. Ironically, though, the oblivious school board cut off her mic, saying there were children present. If it’s something you’d be horrified to have read aloud at a public meeting, you should be equally horrified to know it’s available at your high schooler’s library — which is exactly this mother’s point.
In Texas, there were two different incidents where moms went to the school board about books their middle school-aged children were being asked to read. The first mother, Kara Bell, found a sexually explicit passage in a book called Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez. It describes acts that no high schooler, let alone middle schooler, should be exposed to. This mother was irate as she confronted the board.
In the second instance, Texas mom Sherry Clemens had to confront her child’s school board after attempts to go to the teacher, principal, and district were proven ineffective. She had very grave concerns about the books her gifted middle school child was asked to read. The first red flag was when her child brought home a reading list, and seven of the books needed a permission slip.
The next red flag was when her daughter mentioned that she herself was concerned, which was the impetus for Ms. Clemens to start investigating. After researching and reading these books, the mother found there was explicit sexual content, sexual violence, obscenity, books with LGBTQ+ material, and instances of suicide. Understandably, she brought her concerns to the teacher (who has yet to meet with her), the principal, the district, and finally, since no actions were being taken, the school board.
There are other instances that only make the local news, but more parents across the country are actively searching for these books that are clearly inappropriate for their children. Which should be a good thing, right? Unfortunately, at a Virginia gubernatorial debate this week, the Democrat candidate staunchly disagreed. Terry McAuliffe feels that parents should not be allowed to interfere in what schools are teaching their children. He thinks it is demeaning toward the teachers and that parents should just let them be. This despite the two candidates discussing the incident of the Virginia mother regarding pedophilic books. Monstrous.
If a politician has the audacity to try to take away your rights as parents in your child’s education, that should be a huge wake-up call. There is great and terrible power in books with bad ideas. The more these inappropriate books are exposed and taken out of the hands of these vulnerable kids, the better. But to McAuliffe’s point, parental interference is the only stopgap to cultural depravity and teachers with an agenda.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/83114-x-rated-adult-books-packaged-for-children-2021-10-01
**********************************************New ruling hinders the search for truth in sexual assault cases
On July 28, U.S. District Judge William G. Young ruled against mandatory cross-examination by colleges investigating sexual assault cases on grounds that it is capricious. Pursuant to that ruling, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, Suzanne B. Goldberg, declared on Aug. 24 that the Office for Civil Rights will no longer enforce mandatory cross-examination rules in postsecondary sexual assault cases.
Is that position fair to either accuser or accused?
One reasonable question is, did the judge have a political disposition or philosophy?
We know that judges can be political: Many of us describe the Supreme Court as having six “conservative” and three “progressive” justices. Other scholars make the same claim of bias.
Roy Cohn once said, “Don’t tell me what the law says; tell me who the judge is.” Jeffrey Toobin, legal analyst for CNN and author of the book “The Nine,” similarly observed about the Supreme Court, “What matters is not the quality of the arguments but the identity of the justices.” What governs decisions is judicial philosophy — ideology. Similarly, Richard A. Posner, the great conservative judge and law professor, wrote that constitutional cases “can be decided only on a basis of political judgment.”
Does Judge Young have a “judicial philosophy”? Most if not all judges do. Surely Young does not come to the bench with a blank mind. How does his philosophy relate to this case?
A second question is, can judgment of innocence or guilt be fairly determined without cross-examination? Its purpose is to test the credibility of statements made during direct examination. Cross-examination probes the reliability of witnesses and uncovers additional information about the case at hand. Won’t some truth be lost if we don’t have such an examination?
Goldberg’s declarative letter contains this key section:
“...[A] federal district court in Massachusetts ... found one part of [the law regarding the live-hearing requirement for the Title IX grievance process at postsecondary institutions only] to be arbitrary and capricious, vacated that part of the provision, and remanded it to the Department for further consideration.
In a subsequent order issued on Aug. 10, 2021, the court clarified that its decision applied nationwide. The court vacated the part of 34 C.F.R ... that prohibits a decision-maker from relying on statements that are not subject to cross-examination during the hearing: ‘If a party or witness does not submit to cross-examination at the live hearing, the decision-maker must not rely on any statement of that party or witness in reaching a determination regarding responsibility….’”
In other words, mandatory cross-examination is out — immediately.
She concluded: “Thank you for your efforts to ensure equal educational opportunities for all of our nation’s students.” Can you “ensure equal educational opportunities” without cross-examination that seeks the truth on both sides?
Surely this case will be appealed. But of course, politics looms everywhere.
A final observation: I worked for or with Chief Justice Warren Burger for over nine years. We became close friends, and he trusted me implicitly. Sometimes we’d sit for two hours just talking. He shared intimate views on judicial matters that I never betrayed, though after his death I wrote a book on him. I knew he had predispositions on certain issues — that is, he had a judicial philosophy.
Judge Young surely has a judicial philosophy — but an appellate court might have a different one. I hope so because that might enable a greater search for truth.
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I can't blame young American men for turning their backs on our Universities of Wokery that make them so unwelcome but society will pay a high price for driving yet another wedge between the sexes
Fewer and fewer men want to go to college. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal they are now trailing female college students at record levels. At the close of the 2021-2022 academic year women made up 59.5% of college students, which is an all time high, and men made up 40.5%. All told, U.S colleges and universities have 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
The main question coming out of this study is - why is college and its intended experience being sold effectively to American women as necessary to advance in their lives but not to American men?
There are all the obvious reasons men are opting out of college in a post-covid world. What was once seen as an almost necessary next step in order to launch into adulthood is now getting a second look. The rising cost of college is leaving young adults entering their twenties with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt for degrees with little guarantee of a job afterward.
And who wants to attend college when they miss out on the social elements of the experience – fraternities, sororities and in-person learning – but are forced to do remote learning from their room, yet still end up paying the same tuition as during regular pre-covid times.
I have nothing against the Ivy League. I went to Columbia University and for the most part, aside from the fact that I was one of what felt like four Republicans on the entire campus, I enjoyed my time there and got much - both educationally and socially - out of what is considered one of the most premier institutions in America.
But today, attending an Ivy League school tends to inspire a very different reaction than it once did. Like everything in the culture war, Ivy League degrees are now seen as being synonymous with having a level of contempt for many Americans, and inspire in other people visceral disdain for the elites who believe it is their right to run our country.
Today's college experience has already exported much of this culture war outside the Ivy League – into less exalted colleges and also into the companies and government departments that now employ them.
I used to give speeches at colleges regularly. But after an incident with some particularly angry students who felt the very presence of a conservative woman on their campus offensive, I thought the entire experience however was ultimately not worth the insufferability of trying to reason with what seemed like spoiled, radical overgrown children, not young adults about to take on society.
Comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock have spoken out about the absurdity and impossibility of trying to perform comedy in front of college audiences just waiting to be triggered.
While going to college was once a rite of passage for education and socialization and a foundation of a better career, now, it seems more like a place of hysteria, irrationality, and speech codes, a place filled with landmines both in and out of the classroom.
The conservative cliche is that this is just an example of leftist professors indoctrinating naive young people. But in reality, the opposite seems to be true - it is the students who are the aggressors, deplatforming and driving from campus even tenured academics who utter the wrong thought.
Try voicing any dissenting opinion as an academic on issues like Israel, President Trump, even trans women in sports and you're more likely to find yourself kicked out of the academy or as a viral figure on the internet or both.
A recent video that went viral taken in my home state at Arizona State University showed two white male students are sitting in a multicultural center studying when they were accosted by two women for being white men in the room and having a 'blue lives matter' (the slogan used to show support for law enforcement) on his computer.
One young man in the video looks simultaneously confused and then petrified, the fear registering on his face of what will happen when that video uploads onto Youtube and turns him into the national figure of hate and ridicule.
So no wonder men increasingly feel colleges don't want them. There is nothing worse that someone can be these days than a 'white man of privilege'.
I am going to present the same question I raised in an earlier column: Who likes living like this? Who wants to live and, in the case of college, learn on campus that is repressive, humorless, angry space. And where to hold a diversity of opinion, to make a mistakes or just adopt a contrarian position to the loud wokesters could quite literally ruin your life and career when they've barely begun?
We live entirely in two fractured Americas. Anyone who thinks differently hasn't left New York or Los Angeles in the last four years. The broad national divide should be no shock to anyone paying remote attention. People in the middle of the country do not trust those of us in the media, the vast majority of politicians and swamp-creatures running Washington D.C., our financial institutions, or any of our institutions which claim to churn out our elite class.
They feel judged, looked down upon and disrespected by the people running our country and so many of those people who attended elite institutions and seem to only have learned a new vocabulary for hating our country.
It seems natural that many young men who are coming up into adulthood wouldn't feel the need to attend college when the people running them don't respect who they are or where they came from - and when women go looking for a mate, they don't want to marry down.
But it's worse than that. As a 2019 study for the Journal of Marriage and Family found, this creates a serious problem for family formation.
The authors summarized their findings by writing: 'Our study uncovers the demographic reality of large deficits in the supply of men who are suited or well matched for today's unmarried women. If nothing else, our empirical results indicate that the US marriage market is currently in disequilibria. The supply of unmarried men is out of demographic balance with the demand for marriageable men among America's currently unmarried women.'
Put simply, there are too many eligible, educated women chasing too few men with the same qualifications. An ever widening gender gap in our colleges is only going to make that even worse.
If there is anything a generation of Millennials have learned from the upheaval of American families following years of high divorce rates is that we understand how disruptive it is to have a country where family formation proves difficult, where the costs of having children and paying off student debt discourage childrearing, and where socioeconomic divides discourage strong unions.
It is yet another way people stay tribal and divided, spending more and more of their lives as individuals instead of families and neighborhoods.
So what happens from here? The institutions become even more narrow in their focus, the divide between men and women increases - and America's cultural divide grows larger. There will be social consequences as there always are when giant paradigm cultural shifts happen. The result in this case is a nation made weaker by the very institutions that are supposed to help produce the best and brightest.
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Australia: Innocent male student targeted over rape claim
Bettina Arndt
Kristin Hosking is used to a tough life. She and her husband Phil run a sheep farm near Tamworth in Northeast NSW
They have coped with drought. “We had to hand-feed our stock and watch them die. But we pulled together and got on with it. That’s just nature, you can understand that,” said Kristin.
Next came the bushfires. “What was left of our feed was lost in the fires, along with fencing and hundreds of acres.” That too, the family just dealt with, with their sons spending months fighting not just on their farm but on their neighbours’ as well.”
But what came next just blew them away. “How do you prepare your kids for absolute evil?” asks Kristin.
“How do you explain to your son that even through you have lived your life in a respectful, decent way and have done nothing wrong, all it takes a malicious lie from one girl and you can be thrown out of university and your life impacted forever?”
On the first of March this year, Kristin’s son suffered an “emergency eviction” from the University of New England. He was advised by university administrators that he’d been accused of a rape that supposedly had happened five months earlier, in a dorm room on campus. He was given two hours to pack his bags and leave the university grounds.
Kristin and Phil brought James home to the farm and she took leave from her job because she was frightened of leaving him on his own. “I’ll never forget the absolute bewilderment and hopelessness in his eyes when we arrived to pick him up. My beautiful, caring young man was shattered.”
James had been accused by a young woman living in the same dorm who was known to suffer mental health issues. As a male nursing student, he’d became a support person for her after she told him about her history of self-harming, her tales of being raped by an uncle in Sri Lanka, and her suicidal thoughts. She was part of a group of four friends who interacted most days over a six-month period in 2020.
The bungling, self-serving handling of this complaint by the university was appalling – but sadly typical of the biased, negligent treatment of accused young men by the kangaroo courts currently operating across Australian universities.
Just think about this. Here’s a young woman accusing a fellow student of rape - in October last year. The university refers the matter to police but James is not even told. They leave him living in the dorm near his accuser totally innocent of the fact that she’d accused him of a criminal offence – and all this time he is exposed to the possibility of further accusations.
Then suddenly, five months later, the university decides to expel him - by which time his accuser has moved on to study elsewhere. Despite this, he is suddenly deemed a risk to others on campus. It later emerges that the university received a complaint from parents of a friend of the accuser, asking why an alleged rapist was living in the dorm.
Once this all happened, the university asks police to get a move on with the investigation. James produces detailed evidence of his activities on the night in question – the alleged rape took place in her room after the friends all attended a games night. He has social media messages showing the girl’s friendly involvement with him over the subsequent few weeks. But eventually she withdraws contact – which he believes may have been due to her taking offence when he pressed her to address her mental health issues.
Finally, after months of anguish and thousands in legal fees, the police announce they are dropping the case and the university informs James that the girl has withdrawn her complaint.
James is now back at college but the very public handling of his expulsion from the university has left him feeling very uncomfortable and shamed, with the accusation always hanging over him. He’s lost a year of his nursing studies and is now struggling to complete his degree because his disrupted schedule has meant he misses out on the government study payments.
Kristin has decided to speak out because she believes the public needs to tune into the injustice being perpetrated by our universities. I’ve made a video with Fiona, as she describes the shattering impact of this event on her family. James was happy to go public but we believe it’s too much of a risk for the young man to deal with the unfair stigma that accused men face.
The shaming of this young man by the University of New England is par for the course. Our universities have in place sexual misconduct regulations which pay lip service to fair treatment for accused students but in practice, accused young men are routinely left out to dry.
In the last few years, I’ve been following a string of such cases, having gathered a group of very generous lawyers willing to offer pro bono help for students dealing with these kangaroo courts.
The wildly unfair, inconsistent treatment of accused students is so distressing to witness. Here was James left for months not even being told he had been accused, while other students are expelled or thrown out of colleges within days of an accusation being made. One young international student found himself given two hours to get out of the college which had been his only home since he’d arrived in Australia – dumped alone and desperate in ghastly accommodation far away from his few new friends.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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