Ideas that were discussed a year ago at AltRight (and which have also been developed at places like Zero Hedge and by independent libertarians like Peter Schiff) are now being put forth by über-Establishmentarian Bill Gross. 

Tyler Durden: 

A few weeks ago we pointed out what may be the most troubling (and Marxist) observation in America's labor arena, namely that the labor's share of national income has dropped to the lowest in history as a record number of Americans now focus on wealth creation through assets (i.e. owners of capital) instead of labor. In his just released latest letter (below) Bill Gross piggybacks on this observation in what is one of the most scathing notes blasting the traditional of higher education, and in essence claiming that college, as means of perpetuating a broken employment status quo whcih redirect labor to a now-expiring Wall Street labor model, is now worthless: "The past several decades have witnessed an erosion of our manufacturing base in exchange for a reliance on wealth creation via financial assets. Now, as that road approaches a dead-end cul-de-sac via interest rates that can go no lower, we are left untrained, underinvested and overindebted relative to our global competitors. The precipitating cause of our structural employment break is both internal neglect and external competition. Blame us. Blame them. There’s plenty of blame to go around." And why college graduates have only a 6 digit loan to look forward to: "American citizens and its universities have experienced an ivy-laden ivory tower for the past half century. Students, however, can no longer assume that a four year degree will be the golden ticket to a good job in a global economy that cares little for their social networking skills and more about what their labor is worth on the global marketplace." And some very bad news for the communists in the White House and the chimpanzees in the San Francisco Fed who continue to believe that unemployment is anything but structural: "The “golden” days are over, and it’s time our school and jobs “daze” comes to an end to be replaced by programs that do more than mimic failed establishment policies favoring Wall as opposed to Main Street."

Via Gawker. 

According to the video's description, the woman was being loud and using profanity on the train. When the conductor told her to quiet down, she flew off the handle and started telling her, repeatedly, about how "educated" she is and how the conductor doesn't know "what schools I went to."

While watching the video of efforts by left-wing thugs to disrupt Richard Spencer’s recent talk on affirmative action at Providence College, I was reminded of a conversation I had sometime in the late 1980s with a former member of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society who had been involved with the movement to oppose the Vietnam War since its inception circa 1962. He recalled how in the early days of the antiwar movement, protest organizers were thrilled if they could get fifty people to show up for a rally. To publicly oppose the war at the time was physically dangerous, and such rallies were always at risk of being physically attacked by vigilantes shouting epithets like “communist” at the protestors. If organizers of the rallies could get police protection at all, they were happy to have it. Not only were public demonstrations in danger of such assaults, but so were quiet and peaceful meetings of those who opposed the war held in church basements or on university campuses. Of course, we all know that the anti-Vietnam War movement morphed into a mass movement just a few years later.

So it is indeed ironic that half a century later it is those who challenge the established dogmas purveyed by the Left who similarly experience the disruption of their efforts to peacefully speak and organize, who become the targets of epithets like “racist,” “sexist,” or “classist,” and who are threatened with physical violence. Incidents of this type are exceedingly common. It is now widely known that conservative speakers on university campuses, even entirely mainstream neocon-friendly “movement conservative” types, are routinely shouted down and threatened by leftists. As most readers are probably aware, right-wing organizations outside the mainstream, such as American Renaissance, have endured even worse attacks. At times, simply attending an anti-illegal immigration rally can be all that it takes for one to become the victim of a physical assault.

A number of observations could be made concerning the demeanor and behavior of the disrupters of Richard’s presentation at Providence. One is the obvious fact that they are so certain of their own moral superiority and the nobility of their crusade that they feel ordinary rules of civilized discourse or common courtesy no longer apply to them. Another is that far from their image of themselves as enlightened, free-thinking rebels, they come across more like brainwashed zombies similar to members of the LaRouche cult or the Moonies I used to encounter selling flowers on the streets of Washington, D.C. years ago. Their level of intellectual prowess seems to amount to little more than thinking that merely throwing labels at people and ideas they find disagreeable counts as a valid refutation of the opposing viewpoints.

Judging from the hysteria of their reaction, one would think that Richard was advocating genocide rather than arguing for the fairly standard right-of –center position that affirmative action is a bad idea, a position that even some minority scholars and analysts hold. It is also rather difficult to see how Richard was arguing for “white supremacy” given that the data he was presenting actually showed Asians to be the top performers with regards to SAT scores. As Richard pointed out in his talk, it was he who was the moderate and the protestors who were the extremist nutjobs.

For the diversitarians, affirmative action is not merely a policy preference, but a sacred article of faith, like the Holy Trinity or the Immaculate Conception. Affirmative action is a political tool the liberal establishment utilizes to maintain the loyalty of one of its core allies and constituent groups, the black elite and the middle class professional sectors of the black population. Affirmative action is an entitlement used as a reward for political loyalty from these sectors. It is doubtful that AA is of much benefit to genuinely impoverished or disadvantaged blacks, many of whom do not even finish high school, much less attend college or obtain professional-level occupations. And as Richard pointed out, if the goal of AA was to help the poor and disadvantaged in the first place, AA would be class-based rather than race-based.

Indeed, “black conservatives” like Thomas Sowell and Elizabeth Wright have documented a myriad of ways in which policies implemented by the welfare state and civil rights bureaucracy that has meta-morphed in recent decades have severely undermined the organic economic, cultural, and family life of urban black communities, and contributed exponentially to the social pathologies often found in those communities. Likewise, the black libertarian economist Walter Williams has produced rather extensive evidence indicating the contribution of efforts at intrusive economic micromanagement to high unemployment rates among urban blacks.

Additionally, there is some evidence that black children who are educated in culturally specific Afro-centric schools perform much better than black children who receive conventional public schooling. The reasons as to why this is so are inconclusive but what is interesting is that the efforts of either conservative and libertarian black scholars like Sowell, Wright, or Williams, or of Afro-centrists with a nationalist or separatist outlook, are routinely attacked or dismissed by white liberals and the captains of the civil rights industry alike. Indeed, such people are often reviled by the Left. The obvious reason for this is the fanatical egalitarian-universalist ideology that has come to dominate the Left, an ideology that just happens to coincide with the political and economic self-interest of those who push it. It is an ideology that seeks a society where all resources are controlled and managed by the state and administered according to a spoils system the ostensible purpose of which is the imposition of bureaucratically-managed “equality.” The ultimate outcome of totalitarian humanism taken to its logical conclusion would be a totalitarian state organized as a kind of caste system whereby individual rights are assigned on the basis of group identity and group rights are assigned on the basis of the position of the group in the pantheon of the oppressed or on the victimological family tree.

Given these considerations, it might be apt to compare our present day lefto-fascist, stormtroopers-on-granola with the Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards were, of course, bands of youthful vigilantes who scurried about China during the 1960s smashing up cultural artifacts deemed “old” (e.g. conservative, traditional) and engaging in vigilante violence against persons deemed “reactionary” (mostly dissident intellectuals and those labeled “bourgeois” or originating from politically incorrect cultural or class backgrounds.) We see a similar though milder version of this today in the West today with attacks on expressions of traditional culture (like Christmas celebrations), historical artifacts considered to be reactionary (like Confederate Civil War monuments or streets named after Confederate generals), and vigilante actions against people given labels like “racist,” “fascist,” “sexist,” or “classist.”

I suspect that these “antifa” types, these Red Guards-on-tofu, would be every bit as murderous and destructive if the authorities would sanction it, as Chairman Mao did during the Cultural Revolution. We’ve seen hints at this already with the nonchalant attitude of the authorities towards threats of murder and arson against innocent people made by the Antifa in response to American Renaissance’s planned gathering in 2010. Plenty of other incidents have occurred where destructive or violent behavior by those claiming to act in the name of noble causes like “anti-racism” and “anti-fascism” have been overlooked or dealt with leniently by authorities convinced of the purity of their motives or restrained by political pressure.

The great irony presented by the Antifa is that despite all of their posturing as radicals and revolutionaries, they’re essentially doing the establishment’s bidding. The attitudes they subscribe to are not fundamentally different from those of the liberal elite overlords of the wider society. The Red Guards-on-tofu are simply a smellier, more ill-mannered, undisciplined, more in-a-hurry version of the liberal establishment itself. Wouldn’t it be an even greater irony if indeed the growing counterculture of the alternative right were to grow into a large influential movement as the leftist counterculture and antiwar movements did in the 1960s, with the Antifa and their ilk assuming the role of the “hardhats”?

Rarely do I find an issuance from The Heritage Foundation to have added to humanity's storehouse of wisdom . . .  But things might change since Jason Richwine came on board last year. Richwine can skillfully crunch numbers and, most important, isn't intimidated by racial taboos. 

Here's a selection from his latest report, "The Myth of Racial Disparities in Public School Funding":

In 2009, white public school eighth-graders outscored their black classmates by one standard deviation (equivalent to roughly two and a half years of learning) on the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test.[1] Racial differences in achievement like this one are pervasive in the U.S. education system, and the gaps have persisted for decades.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test battery given to 15-year-olds in all 34 OECD[2] countries, puts the gaps in stark terms. If white American students were counted as a separate group, their PISA reading score would rank them third in the world. Hispanic and black Americans, however, would score 31st and 33rd, respectively.[3]

Blaming “Unequal Funding.” A common hypothesis is that Hispanic and black students perform worse in school because less money is spent on them. In 1995, Columbia University’s Linda Darling-Hammond claimed, “The resources devoted to the education of poor children and children of color in the U.S. continue to be significantly less than those devoted to other American children…and it is these inequalities that create and sustain the ‘bell curve’ of differential achievement.”[4]

Part of the NAACP’s official statement on education policy reads: “Quality public education for African American and Latino students is persistently threatened as a direct result of inequitable school funding.”[5]

Responding in 2001 to criticism that blacks and Hispanics perform poorly on the SAT, College Board President Gaston Caperton declared, “Tests are not the problem…. The problem we have is an unfair education system in America—an unequal education system.”[6]

Even conservative author John McWhorter, while downplaying structural and institutional explanations for the racial achievement gap, still asserts that the alleged funding disadvantage for black students “is a real one.”[7]

These commentators are mistaken on two levels. First, increasing school spending has rarely led to better outcomes.[8] Second, and more fundamentally, based on data from the U.S. Department of Education itself, the assumed funding disparities between racial and ethnic groups do not exist.

{snip}

Table 1 displays three columns of results. The first shows the raw per-pupil spending figures for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The second column shows per-pupil spending on white students. The third column adjusts this percentage with the CWI to reflect differences in the cost of living. All three data points for each group are then broken down by census region.

Nationwide, raw per-pupil spending is similar across racial and ethnic groups. The small differences that do exist favor non-white students. After breaking down the data by region, the non-white funding advantage becomes more pronounced. In the Northeast, for example, blacks receive over $2,000 more than whites in per-pupil funding per year. The region with the smallest differences is the South, where spending on black and Hispanic students is only slightly higher than on whites.

Adjusted for cost of living, the differences narrow. Asian and Hispanic students receive slightly less money than whites overall, while blacks receive slightly more. Regional differences persist after the adjustment, especially in the Northeast.

Let's take stock of where we are. The notion that standardized tests are "culturally biased" has been thoroughly demolished. The Verbal SAT is now laden with so much "Diversity," in terms of names and reading comprehension selections, that no one who has taken the test in the past 20 years can hear this critique without smirking. Moreover, Blacks actually do more poorly in the Mathematics portion, which involves abstract reasoning, than the Verbal, which, we were told, confused them with its many references to croquet and yachting. The fixation that Black schools are "under funded" has, hopefully, now been dealt a deathblow by Richwine. Sadly, the meme that Blacks don't perform well out of a fear of "acting White" might have legs, since this psychological notion is impossible to disprove. Whatever the case, Richwine is helping policy analysts take a step closer to racial reality.     

In my prior article I made reference to the “…religious nature of the Secular Humanism…” that fuels the emotional fervor of the disparate social elements that one might broadly classify as the Left. This is actually a misuse of the term and I should begin this article by correcting myself and acknowledging that I am referring instead to the pastiche of incongruent ideological, moral, cultural, and political elements that should more rightly be defined as Egalitarianism. I posit—and I am not the first to do so— that Egalitarianism is indeed the regnant religion of this era. It is important to grasp that it is, indeed, a religion in order to best understand it and its followers; to comprehend the danger inherent in it; to possibly identify any weaknesses that may be exploited; and to predict its progression through the organic and finite life of such belief systems. I shall begin by establishing the case that Egalitarianism is, indeed, the state religion for the West.

What is Egalitarianism? There is no use in trying to define it as some cogent and definable set of beliefs. It is rather a tumor in the mind of the collective body of Western man, diffuse at the extremities and interconnected with an infinite number of outlying elements—some of which, ironically enough, are actually shared with various elements of Rightist thought. However, the center of the tumor is thick with notions of the overarching equality of men, the outright rejection of even the possibility of natural differences between human populations, convictions of the inherent evil of Whites and especially of white men, sentiments of the moral superiority of colored races and of women, support for the uses of state power to correct inequality wherever it may be found—as its presence can only be the result of the abuses of appropriately colored or sexually oriented groups by the aforementioned white, heterosexual men, conviction in the unquestionable good of “freedom” and “democracy," the importance of tolerance and cultural relativism, and lastly, the firm belief in Progress and the perfectibility of the temporal world. The logical incongruities obvious to even the casual reader between most of these notions—e.g. the idea that all races can at once be completely equal, while at the same time, Whites can be more evil than the others—do not hinder the true believer in the least. Indeed, the faith in these principles, regardless of their inability to coexist in a coherent philosophy, is one of the first indicators of the religious nature of this system of beliefs.

To a significant extent these beliefs—most particularly the notions of the unquestionable equality of man and of the original sin (of the White man in this case)—are ironically inherited from the Christian religion that is to no small degree despised by the modern, secular Egalitarian. It could in fairness be said that modern, secular Egalitarianism is in fact the transmogrification of Christianity into a religion that is now true to its theoretical principles to an extreme degree but that is now paradoxically devoid of its deity in the supernatural sense, the male God-figure having been killed off. What has replaced Him within the context of the religion in question is not entirely clear to me. But certainly one can identify Christ-figures such as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and elements of religious taboo.

Regarding the former, note that the dear reverend is the only man for whom a National Holiday exists in the United States. And this at a time when Easter (the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ) and Christmas (His birth) are themselves becoming completely devoid of acceptable, public religious meaning. With regard to Easter—ostensibly the most important Christian Holiday period—this process is essentially complete. With regard to Christmas, the process has reached such a level of maturity that in many cities of the United States, references to the Tannenbaum as a “Christmas tree” are considered gauche. Anyone who still doubts whether Christianity has been replaced as the State religion of the West need only ask himself one question: Is it more socially acceptable in today’s polite society to be a Satan worshipper or a racist? Marilyn Manson does an entertaining job of pretending to be the former. It would be interesting to see how many albums he would be allowed to sell if he pretended to be the latter.

It’s now a familiar phenomenon. Self-styled “conservatives” are so eager to find a Black person who champions their cause that they’ll latch on to anyone—anyone—who can pass the paper-bag test and who has recently uttered something mildly resembling a “traditional” or “free market” principle. Each month, Beltway operatives think they’ve discovered The One who will convince his racial brethren to "leave the plantation" and start voting Republican. The facts about each dark-skinned sage be damned.

The latest cause célèbre conservatives have rallied around is Kelley Williams-Bolar.

According to legend, Williams-Bolar of Akron, Ohio, was just trying to give her two daughters a better education in the Copley-Fairlawn school district, as she feared subjecting them to the utter hopelessness of her home district of Akron. Her effort was thwarted due to her being “economically disadvantaged.” She thus stands a martyr for “school choice.”

A little scratching of the surface, however, reveals quite a different and sordid story.

Williams-Bolar is a single mother who, along with her daughters, lives in a subsidized home courtesy of the Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority at the 900 block of Hartford Avenue, and while many of the nearby gummit schoos are certainly abysmal for reasons regular readers of this website can readily surmise, she has stated she wanted them to attend Copley-Fairlawn schools because she was concerned for their safety, and not for academic reasons.  The safety issue did not involve any events that occurred at the schools within their district; rather, after her residence was burglarized, she did not want her daughters to be home alone after school, while she was working for Akron Public Schools as a substitute assistant for special-needs children.

Twenty five years ago, as the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union was beginning to face internal crisis, G. Edward Griffin interviewed a Soviet defector and ex-KGB agent named Yuri Bezmenov. Bezmenov explained, in simple terms, the process by which the Soviet Union and the KGB attempted to subvert and topple governments. They called this process “ideological subversion.” Even though the Cold War is over, it is important to understand this process because the KGB was by no means the only organization to engage in it. We encounter one technique of ideological subversion in particular, demoralization, every day in schools and in the media, and the only way to effectively defend against this technique is to be aware of it and to identify and expose those who are actively engaged in promoting it.

According to Bezmenov, ideological subversion was so important to the KGB that most of their resources were allocated to it. “Only about 15 percent of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such,” he explained. “The other 85 percent is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or ‘active measures.’” Ideological subversion is a long-term process that involves four stages: 1) Demoralization, 2) Destabilization, 3) Crisis, and 4) “Normalization.” In this article, I will focus on the first step of the process, demoralization.

The purpose of demoralization, According to Bezmenov, is to “change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.” Effectively, demoralization would render a large part of the population vulnerable to Marxist-Leninist ideology and confused as to its real intent. In any conflict, it is just as important to get as many of your opponents to sit on the sidelines as it is to neutralize them on the battlefield. Proper demoralization would ensure that a large percentage of the population would sit on the sidelines of any eventual revolution, or even actively work against their own interests in support of that revolution.

The benefit of demoralization is that the targeted population will not know it is being demoralized, and once demoralization sets in, a certain percentage of that population will actively pursue the goals of the enemy without even being aware of it. This is achieved by using what appear to be perfectly valid means, i.e. promoting the questioning of authority or of long-held assumptions, but which are aimed only in one direction: at the opposing ideology of the agents engaged in the process of ideological subversion. Once demoralized, exposure to true information does not matter anymore because a person who is demoralized is not able to assess true information. According to Bezmenov, “Even if I shower him with authentic information, with authentic truth, with documents and pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it.”

With enough sympathizers in schools and in the media, the minimum time it would take to demoralize a population is 15 to 20 years, because that is the minimum number of years which it requires to educate one generation of students. In relation to the Soviet campaign in the United States, Bezmenov explained, “Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism… Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to lack of moral standards.”

Recent revelations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation demonstrate that educators in the United States were actively involved throughout the 1960s and ‘70s in organizations with ties to communist front groups. Historian Howard Zinn, author of the influential book A People’s History of the United States, was one whose participation in and advocacy for Marxist groups was well documented by the FBI. His FBI file was recently released after his death, showing that, although he denied participation, several reliable informants in the Communist Party USA identified Zinn as a member who attended party meetings as many as five times a week. There are photographs of Zinn teaching a class on “Basic Marxism” at party headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951.

In light of this information, and what we know about the process of ideological subversion, it should be obvious that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was nothing more than a tool to promote demoralization among American students. A People’s History is often lauded as simply an effort to “turn traditional history books on their head,” and to add another voice to the historical narrative. Neither of those goals are necessarily bad, and it is true that Zinn was actively engaged in questioning the fundamental assumptions about the history of the United States, but to what end? Given the history of Zinn’s involvement with the CPUSA, his “leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography” can be seen for what it truly was.

Legitimate criticism, questioning, and dissent must never be confused as being part of an active demoralization campaign. It is the source of those efforts, and their ultimate aim, that indicates whether or not those efforts are being used to further the process of ideological subversion. Demoralization has only progressed as far as it has because most Americans have either been unwilling or unable to counteract it. To resist, we must spread awareness of how demoralization works. Then, we must develop the habit of investigating, questioning, and determining the motives behind all sources of information. Finally, we must work on strengthening the arguments in favor of our own beliefs. A truly informed and independently-minded public is our best defense against this insidious tactic.

As if further evidence were needed that college education is a pyramid scheme; we hear today from the Associated Press:

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.

Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

The findings are in a new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," by sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. An accompanying report argues against federal mandates holding schools accountable, a prospect long feared in American higher education.

....

Overall, the picture doesn't brighten much over four years. After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared to 45 percent after two.

Students who studied alone, read and wrote more, attended more selective schools and majored in traditional arts and sciences majors posted greater learning gains.

Imagine that: when working hard and studying traditional subjects, people actually tend to learn stuff! Just like those old dead white males said would happen! Who knew that bachelor's degrees in feminist queer art studies didn't equip their holders with a capacity for rational thought? I wonder what other hoary tenets of that antiquated bugbear, Western Civilization, might also be true?

One of my great joys in life is watching the next clueless meme pop up and spread like wildfire.  The latest is that education reform is going to solve this country’s problems.  Newsweek hopes that “imposing standardized test-based accountability for schools and teachers and fostering competition among schools” will be the one area where Republicans will work with the Obama administration.  The villains in this narrative are the teachers’ unions.  Tom Friedman tells us that “countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class.”  More interesting is a recent Atlantic piece which points out America can’t use “the diversity excuse” to explain away our country’s failures.

These days, the theory Hanushek hears most often is what we might call the diversity excuse. When he runs into his neighbors at Palo Alto coffee shops, they lament the condition of public schools overall, but are quick to exempt the schools their own kids attend. “In the litany of excuses, one explanation is always, ‘We’re a very heterogeneous society—all these immigrants are dragging us down. But our kids are doing fine,’” Hanushek says. This latest study was designed, in part, to test the diversity excuse.

Actually, the diversity excuse mostly applies to blacks, who are twelve percent of the population and the worst performers on standardized tests, and who have been speaking English (or something that resembles it) for three hundred years. Never mind that though...

So Hanushek and his co-authors sliced the data more thinly still. They couldn’t control for income, since students don’t report their parents’ salaries when they take these tests; but they could use reliable proxies. How would our states do if we looked just at the white kids performing at high levels—kids who are not, generally speaking, subject to language barriers or racial discrimination? Or if we looked just at kids with at least one college-educated parent?

As it turned out, even these relatively privileged students do not compete favorably with average students in other well-off countries. On a percentage basis, New York state has fewer high performers among white kids than Poland has among kids overall. In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden.

Parents in Palo Alto will always insist that their kids are the exception, of course. And researchers cannot compare small cities and towns around the globe—not yet, anyway. But Hanushek thinks the study significantly undercuts the diversity excuse. “People will find it quite shocking,” he says, “that even our most-advantaged students are not all that competitive.”

The closest thing America has to a bright spot is Massachusetts.

Is it because Massachusetts is so white? Or so immigrant-free? Or so rich? Not quite. Massachusetts is indeed slightly whiter and slightly better-off than the U.S. average. But in the late 1990s, it nonetheless lagged behind similar states—such as Connecticut and Maine—in nationwide tests of fourth- and eighth-graders. It was only after a decade of educational reforms that Massachusetts began to rank first in the nation.

What did Massachusetts do? Well, nothing that many countries (and industries) didn’t do a long time ago. For example, Massachusetts made it harder to become a teacher, requiring newcomers to pass a basic literacy test before entering the classroom. (In the first year, more than a third of the new teachers failed the test.) The state also required students to pass a test before graduating from high school—a notion so heretical that it led to protests in which students burned state superintendent David Driscoll in effigy.

Standards for teachers!  Why didn’t anybody think of this before?  Actually, many people have, it’s just that objective tests for educators have been criticized for being racist. From the first edition of The Affirmative Action Hoax, pages 155-156.

...in the early 1980s, the three main American newsmagazines devoted cover stories to the scandalous performance of American teachers and prospective students on qualifying tests, thus recognizing that it was a vital national concern.  However, their stories hid from their readers that the cause was affirmative action university admissions and graduation.

Newsweek did not mention race at all.

Time’s article quoted ungrammatical, barely intelligible sentences written by American teachers and documented their terrible performance on qualifying tests.  It offered several explanations, one of which came close to the true one: “In Oregon, a kindergarten teacher who had been given As and Bs at Portland State University was recently found to be functionally illiterate.”  At one point, it carelessly included a parenthesis that disclosed how that could happen.  Pinellas County Florida, “required teacher candidates to read at an advanced tenth-grade level and solve math problems at an eighth-grade level.  Though all had their BA in hand, about one-third of applicants (25 percent of whites, 79 percent of blacks) flunked Pinellas’ test.”

U.S. News and World Report printed a selection of questions from the National Teacher Examination to show how risby easy they were.  It constantly blamed the problem on inadequate funding, and its cover showed a white teacher wearing a dunce cap.  But in two sentences in the last column on the last page, it mentioned, “In Florida, 84 percent of all those who took the exam last October passed.  However, only 37 percent of black students in education passed, which has raised concerns about worsening an already serious decline in the number of black teachers.”  Of course, it is exactly this concern that has prevented the use of legitimate qualifying tests.

Steve Sailer has pointed out before that quotas would be preferable to the kind of affirmative action we have in America because you could at least get the most qualified of each race.  But if liberals ever get their education reform and find that any test used will reveal the need to fire 80% of black teachers, the exam will be thrown out and even the white incompetents, of whom there are more than there are unqualified blacks in absolute terms, will get a pass.

Unlike most liberal shibboleths, perhaps the teachers matter idea has some truth to it (not as much truth as human biodiversity of course, but you have to start somewhere).  On the LSAT, used for law school admissions, and the GRE, taken by prospective graduate students, those who majored in education are consistently among the worst performers.  It’s not surprising that a profession dominated by unions attracts the least ambitious and capable people.

Whether liberals ever beat the teachers’ unions remains to be seen.  The opening shot in the war going on was this year’s mayoral race in Washington, D.C., where the main issue was school chancellor Michelle Rhee.  The Swipples were excited about school reform and thought they knew what was best for blacks, who themselves more sensibly understood that having the public education system as a jobs program was in their best interests.  If we’ve learned anything over the past forty years, it’s that our highly intelligent elite can usually get its way against the more numerous but passive and dimmer masses.  It’s just that on the issues of school prayer, immigration, affirmative action, etc. the Left had their secret weapon of moral certainty, due to the fact that the enemy was the wrong kind of white people.  We’ll see how quickly they lose their zeal when it’s their favorite victims who are standing in the way of their goals.  

After the disastrous economic mismanagement of a succession of Labour governments, which managed to give away 60% of the nation’s gold reserves, double public debt, build a huge out-of-control budget deficit (despite constantly raising taxes), and shrink GDP by a whopping 5% during its last full year, the incoming coalition government was faced with difficult choices.  Amazingly, they made the right one, and set out to implement drastic cuts in public spending in order to reduce the deficit. Unfortunately, however, they were either unable, or unwilling, to eliminate the deficit with just cuts, and decided they also had to increase VAT and raise taxes. With citizens under ever increasing economic pressure, particularly during the past two years, during which they had to put up with bankster perfidy, government waste, fiscal rapacity, job losses, and inflation (the true extent of which remains hidden), the coalition’s decision to cut subsidies and allow universities to treble their fees was not going to be met with smiles—particularly after 13 years of a Labour government that fomented a culture of entitlement through their egalitarian efforts to extend university education to half the population.

Leftist agitators mobilised their pawns—the university students—who yesterday converged in London to protest the increase in university fees. The protest turned violent and 5,000 protesters mobbed the Conservative Party’s headquarters in Millibank, London, where property was smashed and angry graffiti sprayed on marble walls. The UCU and NUS (unions, for educators and students respectively) were there, demanding the cuts to be stopped. The Socialist Worker, a fringe Marxist organ, also made their presence felt; their placards read ‘F**K FEES FREE EDUCATION NOW’.

Stupidly, or disingenuously, the agitators blame the Conservatives, even though the Liberal Democrats, who are left of Labour, are also part of the two-party coalition government. Stupidly, or disingenuously too, they (conveniently) forget that it was Labour who created the conditions that forced the cuts in the first place: the United Kingdom is estimated to have become the most indebted country in the world during the Labour years.

Does this mean that the Conservatives are free from blame? By no means! Over successive governments they encouraged immigration, which increasingly put the education system and public services under pressure. They also engaged in deficit spending, so the public debt was bigger each time they were voted out than each time they were voted in. They aligned themselves with the United States government’s Zionist Middle East policy, which eventually led to a wave of terrorist plots and attacks. They supported the spurious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost many thousands of millions of pounds. They ring-fenced the ever-growing international aid and ‘development’ budget, which wastes thousands of millions more every year. And so on.