Sex Ed: Are public schools using the cult-technique of shunning?

By Rubashov

A blog called “Chaos and Control” ran a story about what happens to children whose parents opt-out of the Murphy administration’s sex-ed curriculum mandates. The blog carried several photos of the room in which a child is banished while his or her classmates receive instruction on the finer points of masturbation or the joys of hormone blockers. Here is an example:

You can see all the photos and read the full story by subscribing to Chaos and Control.
https://chaosandcontrol.substack.com/p/kids-shoved-in-closet-literally

According to the blog, “the image above is allegedly the Martin J Ryerson Middle School (Ringwood NJ) closet (off the main office) where they keep the 6-8 grade opt-out kids.” The blog suggests that “some schools want to purposely make it uncomfortable or down right dangerous for kids to opt-out.”

The blog notes: “This is their view, 5 days a week, for a 45 min period, since school started in September. Parents have been told that an adult checks on the secluded kids to make sure they are OK, but someone at that school needs to explain how this is appropriate or even humane to do to a child.”

“This room wouldn’t even be appropriate for a detention, let alone a kid who’s only crime is to be opted-out of the NJ state Sex Ed classes. Apparently we need a child bill of rights to make sure the administrators of the schools use good judgment when handling our children.”

By nightfall yesterday, the Superintendent of the Ringwood Schools had issued a letter raising more questions. In his letter, which was ostensibly designed to reassure parents, the Superintendent spent many words on the former use of the room in an attempt to describe its size. As everyone who has ever dealt with a realtor knows, floor space is best described in square feet. What are the dimensions and square footage of the room in the picture above?

Is it larger than a standard sized prison cell housing one inmate? The American Correctional Association standards require a minimum of 70 square feet for a single inmate cell. How many children are housed in the room pictured above at one time?

The Superintendent took a number of curious “steps” to address the publication of the story. These included calling the Ringwood police department and filing a report. Why? Was it to report possible criminal activity by the school or was it an attempt to intimidate a journalist exercising her rights under the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights?

The Superintendent notes: “Action will be taken to secure the network rack behind a wall or partition. While the wall or partition is being installed around the (computer) network rack, students will not be in the room.” Does this mean the room’s current configuration is a safety hazard? Does it create the possibility for child injury and open the district to legal issues? His statement seems to suggest so.

What concerns us most about this situation is the psychological effect such physical isolation will have on the children of dissenters. The threat of shunning is a practice often used by cults to achieve conformity. Cults use this technique of isolating dissenters as a punishment for expressing non-conformist ideas. In our opinion, such methods should not be turned on public school children.

Instead, schoolteachers and administrators should publicly support the decision of the parents and the children of those parents. They should explain how dissent is an American tradition and forms the basis of the laws that protect conscientious objection to a variety of government prerogatives – including war.

Who knows, such knowledge might lead some future generation to stand up to our nation’s endless infatuation with armed conflict. Its fixation with violence. One can only hope.

Is the League of Women Voters involved in a Democrat Party scam?

By Rubashov

If you are a candidate running in the General Election this November, you may have already received a request to attend a debate hosted by the League of Women Voters (LWV). Your first question might be: "Are they on the level?" Wikipedia describes the League of Women Voters (LWV) as follows:

“The League of Women Voters (LWV) is a nonprofit organization in the United States that was formed to help women take a larger role in public affairs after they won the right to vote… Originally, only women could join the league; but in 1973 the charter was modified to include men. LWV operates at the local, state, and national level, with over 1,000 local and 50 state leagues, and one territory league in the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

Although officially non-partisan since its founding in 1920, the LWV has adopted left-of-center policy positions on many issues so that it has come to mirror the Democrat Party. Wikipedia makes this clear:

“The League of Women Voter's primary purpose is to encourage voting by registering voters, providing voter information, and advocating for voting rights. In addition, the LWV supports a variety of progressive public policy positions, including campaign finance reform, universal health care, abortion rights, climate change action and environmental regulation, and gun control.”

Wikipedia notes that the LWV supports the Kyoto Protocol and opposes the Keystone Pipeline project. Wikipedia highlights other policy positions adopted by the LWV:

“The League lobbied for the establishment of the United Nations, and later became one of the first groups to receive status as a nongovernmental organization with the U.N.”

“The League supports the abolition of the death penalty. Furthermore, the League of Women Voters supports abortion rights and strongly opposed the passage of the Partial-Birth Abortion Act.”

“LWV supports universal health care and endorses both Medicaid expansion and the Affordable Care Act. It also supports a general income tax increase to finance national health care reform for the inclusion of reproductive health care, including abortion, in any health benefits package.”

“The League actively opposed welfare reform legislation proposed in the 104th Congress. It also opposes school vouchers. In 1999, LWV challenged a Florida law that allowed students to use school vouchers to attend other schools.”

“In May 2019, the League joined 400 other national, state, and local groups, in urging Congress to ensure passage of legislation that offers a path to citizenship to Dreamers and beneficiaries of temporary protected status and deferred enforced departure.”

“The League advocates gun control policies including regulating firearms and supporting licensing procedures for gun ownership by private citizens to include a waiting period for background checks, personal identity verification, gun safety education and annual license renewal.”

Nevertheless, the LWV presents itself as a non-partisan group – particularly when it comes to moderating debates between candidates of both major parties. But is it genuinely non-partisan? The LWV hasn’t been permitted to moderate a presidential debate for decades. Now, a situation in Passaic County calls into question the LWV’s suitability to moderate debates at any level.

Ringwood is a borough in Passaic County. Originally a Lenape settlement, it’s been officially a borough since the First World War and now has a population of just over 12,000 people. The borough is tucked into a beautiful landscape – the Sierra Club’s Jeff Tittel grew up in Ringwood.

Recently, two of the three Republican candidates for Ringwood Borough Council received a certified letter from the local Democrats asking them to participate at a debate hosted by the League of Women Voters. This raised a flag, because the Democrat operative running the campaign for the local Democrats appears on the LWV website as a Member of its Board of Directors.

Dr. Jennifer M. Howard is the President of the League of Women Voters of New Jersey. She’s a longtime activist from Princeton. Vice President Deborah McComber, of Morristown, “represented the League as co-organizer of the NJ Women’s March in Morristown 2018, adult advisor to March for Our Lives Morristown 2018, and webmaster for the NJ Women’s March 2019.”

LWV Secretary Lauren McCaskill “serves on the Long Branch Board of Education and is a graduate of Emerge New Jersey, a premier national training program geared towards increasing the number of Democratic women leaders in public office.” The League of Women Voter’s website notes that “Lauren has also worked on various political campaigns ranging from national to municipal races.”

And then we come to Jason DeAlessi. The LWV website describes Jason as “an entrepreneur who works in startups across the media, entertainment, real estate, and hospitality industries. His primary focus is currently with Fuerza Strategy Group, where he serves as Managing Director of the boutique digital and creative consulting firm on its projects with clients across the United States in the political and social justice arenas.” Jason “previously served as President of his local Board of Education.”

The LWV website does not explain that Jason DeAlessi is a Democrat Party operative active in Passaic County who previously worked on the state Democrat’s “flip the 40th” program (that’s 40th as in the legislative district). Jason has worked on a great many Democrat campaigns but what concerns us is his involvement with the Democrat candidates in the campaign the LWV wants to moderate a debate for. How is this not a conflict?

How involved is this member of the Board of Directors of the LWV? Well, while his group (LWV) is preparing the questions they’ll ask the candidates, he’s busy doing the opposition research on the Republican candidates. That’s a bit too partisan.

Has the LWV devolved into a networking/ client recruitment scheme for “social justice” entrepreneurs and Democrat Party start-ups? It appears so. And if so, it is simply one more establishment organization that has allowed itself to rot out from the inside through self-dealing, greed, and private corruption. It’s a long list.

“The entire business model of the Democratic Party is to avoid dealing with its own populists’ concerns, so they’ve never seen the Sanders wing of the party as anything but a threat to what they do for a living, which is basically take corporate money and then sell themselves as socially progressive. That’s what they do for a living. That’s their business.”

Matt Taibbi
Journalist and author of Hate, Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another.

Ringwood: Is national politics destroying neighborhood and civility?

By Rubashov

A few weeks ago, The Economist posed the question: “What gets lost when national politics eats everything?”

In an article, about how national politics is dividing a small town in Maine, the magazine cited a 2016 book by philosopher Nancy Rosenblum called Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America. Rosenblum is the Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University and co-editor of the Annual Review of Political Science. She studies modern political thought and constitutional law. Professor Rosenblum has been the Chair of both the government department at Harvard and the political science department at Brown University, and a member of the leadership of several professional organizations in political science and political philosophy.

In her book, Professor Rosenblum warned of imposing abstract and totalist political ideologies over the daily interactions of a community and the people who live there. Rosenblum writes: “For reciprocity among neighbors as ‘decent folk’ turns on the real possibility of disregarding precisely the social inequalities, racial and sectarian differences, and conflicting ideological commitments that citizens bring to public life.”

The Economist notes: “Passions about such matters can simplify and coarsen relations among neighbors. They collapse the generous spaces made – not always, but often enough – for eccentricities, personal lapses and political opinions, for the tolerance and empathy that sustain pluralism.”

Looking around New Jersey, you can find no better example of what happens when one group decides to erase those “generous spaces” than the town of Ringwood, in Passaic County. Yes, Ringwood, a semi-rural enclave once called Stonetown. By the 1960’s it had been transformed from farms to residential developments and summer homes. Back then there was a sort of hippie commune, called Camp Midvale.

The Sierra Club’s Jeff Tittel grew up there and provided this background: “The original founders of the camp were a European hiking group, the Nature Friends. They were pioneer conservationists. They were an open people and their camp was an interracial camp.” Ah, the sweet air of tolerance!

In 1991, the site of Camp Midvale became the Weis Ecology Center and today is the New Weiss Center for Education, Arts, and Recreation. The Highlands Nature Friends, Inc. is the non-profit membership organization that owns and operates The New Weis Center. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

But today, neighborhood groups like the Highlands Nature Friends must share the public square with groups like the Ringwood Anti-Racism Collaborative – an organization not unlike the gangs of puritan witch hunters that once roamed the countryside, looking for people to burn. Pity the person whose social media pages get noticed by this group, because you will never pass muster, never be pure enough.

From what it has posted on its own social media page, this group appears to support “Antiracism and Equity”, while opposing “Equality and Whiteness”. The group advises its neighbors in Ringwood to “treat racism like COVID-19” and to do the following:

1. Assume you have it.
2. Listen to experts about it.
3. Don’t spread it.
4. Be willing to change your life to end it.

In humanspeak, this translates to:

1. You are guilty of the original sin of skin color!
2. Shut up and listen!
3. Don’t talk back!
4. Be willing to do what we tell you to do and (most importantly) pay the price we tell you to pay!

Yep, it is little more than modern day fascism. With an economic sting in its tail that is more scam than justice.

What effect will this have on the neighborliness one hopes to find in a small town? How will it end?

Well, Professor Rosenblum has this warning for us. Citing how some Americans stood by and watched as their Japanese-American neighbors were packed off to internment camps during the World War Two, she writes: “The family next door was seen through the lens of racial and political categories, and through the miasma of mistrust thrown up by war. Pluralism gave way to totalism.”

Author and civil rights pioneer Lillian Smith offers this perspective (given when she accepted the Charles S. Johnson Award for her work):

“It is his millions of relationships that will give man his humanity… It is not our ideological rights that are important but the quality of our relationships with each other, with all men, with knowledge and art and God that count. The civil rights movement has done a magnificent job but it is now faced with the ancient choice between good and evil, between love for all men and lust for a group’s power.”

“Every group on earth that has put ideology before human relations has failed; always disaster and bitterness and bloodshed have come. This movement, too, may fail. If it does, it will be because it aroused in men more hate than love, more concern for their own group than for all people, more lust for power than compassion for human need.”

“We must avoid the trap of totalism which lures a man into thinking there is only one way, one answer, one option, and that others must be forced into this One Way, and forced into it Now.”

Unfortunately, the "anti-White" ideology of the Ringwood Anti-Racism Collaborative has been wholly embraced by the local Democrat committee in Ringwood and by its candidates. One candidate for town council, Jessie Kitzman, is a young and very radicalized Public Defender who has completely lost touch with common sense. For example, Kitzman calls for the abolition of confinement for criminals – at a time when violent crime is surging across the United States.

Except that she doesn’t believe that…

Kitzman does crazy...

What is happening in Ringwood is an example of what not to do if you value your town, your neighbors, and civility. We will be following the goings-on in Ringwood over the next months and reporting back.

Stay tuned…

“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.”
 
Robert Heinlein, author