UNITED AGAINST RACISM IN EDUCATION

JULIE STRAUSS-LEVIN URGES TEACHING CHILDREN AMERICAN HISTORY EARLY

By Kathy Gugulis

The Potomac Women’s Republican Club warmly welcomed Julie Strauss Levin as its special guest speaker at its June 30th luncheon. 

Among her many other accomplishments, Julie Strauss Levin, a lawyer experienced in the non-profit and for profit arenas, was appointed by President Trump to the 1776 Commission, as well as the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. She is a proud mom and daughter, and the wife of conservative author, TV and radio host Mark Levin.

The room full of nearly 100 guests had a lively discussion with Mrs. Strauss Levin about how to raise conservative children in today’s world, voter integrity, and the tragic developments earlier this year in Israel which has led to a reprehensible rise in anti-Semitic attacks both in the U.S. and around the world, as well as anti-Semitic statements from some Democrat members of Congress.

Strauss-Levin encouraged parents and grandparents to start teaching American history, talking about the Declaration of Independence and Constitution at home as soon as kids can begin to comprehend these concepts.

“Your kids should not be learning about the Declaration of Independence at school. They should learn about it at home.  Kids need to understand that the Constitution is the roadmap for limited government, to make sure that that We, the People, are in charge and that our inalienable rights are protected,” she said. 

Asked if there is any hope left for public schools, especially regarding the teaching of history, Strauss-Levin said, “Kids are never too young to talk about that on the soccer field or day care.  Discussing American history and who we are as Americans should be done as soon as kids can comprehend.  I know that I talked to my kids when they were 3,4, and five years old. Go to the primary documents, show them the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. We live here right near the city, take them around.”    

Another guest asked what we in Montgomery County could do to counter Leftist, Marxist ideologies.  Strauss-Levin urged people to prepare and become informed so they could push back during every day conversations. She suggested that an organization called The Policy Circle prepares issue papers on different subjects and makes them available for community leaders who establish conversation circles to find local solutions.  

How can we get more Republicans to win in Moco?  “Do what you are doing every single day, talking to people about your values—freedom, liberty. It all goes back back to conversation.  Having people in the comfort of your home where you can talk about issues, I really think you can change minds.”

“Marxism is here in our country,” she said.   “It is frightening.  The Left is on the march.  Nancy Pelosi says jump, they ask how high.”

“I am asked, why can’t we [conservatives] do that?  We are wired to believe in individualism.  We are not government centric.  We believe in liberty. It is easy for the Left to follow in lock step, follow the line.” 

“You see Marxism everywhere.  You can’t even let your kids watch TV today without seeing Disney propaganda or Sesame Street.” 

“Why do they push CRT?  Why do they embrace climate change?  This is a way for the Left to tell us what to think, what to do, where we can go,” she said. 

“They’ve stolen our language and then they censor us.”  An audience member noted that “Critical race theory—cute words—sounds like a good idea.  But it is an evil ideology.  CRT says the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are White supremacist documents created to give power and influence to white people, and that is why we have to trash these documents.  It is just awful.”

“This is why we have to get to our kids first,” Strauss-Levin said. “The first time they should learn about Declaration of Independence shouldn’t be at school, it should be at home, so when they get to school, they know how to think critically.”

Strauss-Levin encouraged the audience to get to legislators first with your own message and not let the Leftists take the lead.

The 1776 Commission, to which Strauss-Levin was appointed by President Trump, did a study and submitted the report to the president, symbolically on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  

“The media attacked us as racists.  We were vilified,” she said. Not surprisingly, Biden signed an executive order abolishing the 1776 Commission on January 21, 2021, right after Inauguration Day.

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Kathy Gugulis is Treasurer of the Potomac Women's Republican Club, a member of the Montgomery County Charter Review Commission and resident of Legislative District 39.

Sponsored by the Rural Republican Women's Club ~

By Dan Cuda

I recently made a  Zoom presentation to Governor Hogan’s Maryland redistricting commission.  The following builds on my thoughts from that night and what I’ve so far settled on how a fair redistricting might work.  I’m focused on Maryland but these tentative first principles seem applicable to any state.  

Redistricting must support citizens not politicians.  Its first principle must be: the voters will select their representatives, not the other way around.  The past partisan process in Maryland  demonstrates how politicians chose their preferred groups and diluted others: crazy, stretched out shapes,  with fingers reaching out to find the desired pockets of voters.  Instead, non-partisan redistricting produces and sustains compact communities of voters, enabling neighborhood politics  and local relationships to flourish.  District shapes must not divide communities,  nor must it try to submerge or dilute the diversity of our voters. Instead, non-partisanship can create communities of interests. 

The question of voter diversity is at the heart of drawing the shapes of our districts.  Multi-member versus single member Maryland legislative districts stands out from among the other issues.  The greatest diversity will appear with the largest number of districts.  This principle connects a single representative with the smallest numbers of voters.   On this basis, undivided communities with their networks of family, friends,  youth sports and schools all come together to form the basis of its majority  vote.   Earning this majority is difficult for politicians, and they work hard within redistricting to make their political work easier.  Shaping the vote ahead of time is the hallmark of  partisan districting.  Instead, politicians must be required to work harder to bridge differences in their districts by devising and enabling compromise among their associated communities.  Partisan redistricting short circuits this desirable process.   

Multimember districts can be a compact shape that conforms to many of these ideals.  But they subtly dilute and offset the politics of one community by unnecessarily combining it with others. Multimember districts are undesirable because when purer choices are available. Single member legislative district preferable for this reason.  

How to draw the districts?   I propose centering at least some districts at points of the highest residential density. These shapes then need to expand on  lines of equal population density – necessarily irregular - until they have included the appropriate number of voters.  I believe density captures something of community.  Think of the social reality that density captures in city centers, suburbia, or even rural setting.  We recognize the social differences and similarities captured by each of these settings.  Shapes centered on this basis seem likely have the least risk of dividing community.

Dividing, uniting, or creating communities of political interest is the great opportunity or danger of the redistricting process.  It can be accomplished by independent commissions as easily as state legislatures.  Instead, a transparent process that announces its principles can help restore voter trust in democratic institutions.  The partisan alternative will continue its alarming erosion.  The process should  enable a voter majority in the smallest possible, most feasibly compact district, to coalesce around a single representative.  Redistricting on this basis enables a truer democratic process by allowing differences and interests to evolve in a district -  street by street,  block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.  The complexities of redistricting  likely overwhelm this attempt at non-partisan first principles,  but in the end they must be articulated to help citizens recognize that redistricting is done in their interest and not careerist politicians.  

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Dan Cuda is a Member of the Republican Central Committee, the main Republican orientation director, and a boardmember of the LD-15 PAC.

The Maryland Voter Integrity Group

We're looking to make sure the next election can be counted on as a contest we can have utmost confidence in. The Maryland Voter Integrity Group has found serious anomalies in the previous election, including 35% Democrat Vote Spikes in 4 Counties. We also found strong evidence that a Computer Algorithm ran for the entire 2020 Election. Learn more & sign our Petition for a Full Forensic Audit in Maryland at www.mdvoter.org .

By William Richbourg

“Never have I witnessed a greater, swifter, collapse of competence that what I have seen with the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan. Events at the airport – desperation, death – indicate the extreme chaos that ensues when the commander in chief doesn’t actually understand the value of service.”  ……. Elliot Ackerman, NY Times

However, if we look at the “awe-inspiring” armory that was left behind we have to suspect something more was going on than simple incompetence. In fact, I suspect that this is a clear case of politicized and malevolent incompetence! 

Consider for a moment the scope of this particular part of the disaster.  Left to the Taliban according to the following inventory published in the London Times:

• 22,174 armored Humvees
• 42 pickup trucks and SUVs
• 64,363 machine guns
• 162,043 radios
• 16,035 night-vision goggles
• 358,530 assault rifles (real ones not the ones Joe Biden warns about in the US)
• 126,295 pistols
• 176 artillery pieces
• 100 helicopters (including 33 Black Hawks)
• 4 C-130 transport planes
• 60 other fixed wing aircraft

Why did we do that? No one has offered an explanation. What’s worse is that, not only did we leave behind this horrifying arsenal, but the Administration lied about their intent to save all Americans. They left many of them behind as well and that is unforgivable.

The only explanation is that Biden refused to follow President Trump’s plan because it was President Trump’s plan! He came up with his own timetable so that he could claim credit for ending “America’s longest war” in a way that would clearly deny President Trump any credit and it blew up in his face.

Worse, it is likely not over. Counting on the kinder, gentler Taliban is a dangerous and foolhardy strategy and one that is likely to cause the American people additional and on-going heartache.

What else did we leave behind? Our credibility, our honor! Americans must wake up and end this Administration before it can do further irreversible damage to our country.

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William Richbourg is a Member of the Montgomery County Republican Central Committee.

Honoring our first responders, we gathered last month at Bethesda District 2 to show our support for the hard working MCPD. These events, coordinated by Sandy Tuttle and Patsy Dillingham bring members of the Women's Clubs and other Republicans together to make it clear we appreciate the hard work and diligence provided by our public safety providers. The police are quite thankful, so often they get criticism and disdain - but not from us.

To join us at an upcoming event contact Sandy Tuttle at [email protected] or Patsy Dillingham at [email protected].

Testimony to the Board of Education September 9, 2021

Today, Maryland parents are concerned about the insertion of racism into school curricula under the guise of anti-racism in Crude Racist Thinking (Critical Race Theory or CRT) and the indoctrination of children into thinking and behaving along the precepts of Marxism. We ask you to demonstrate bold and courageous leadership that brought you to this position, to protect Maryland’s children from divisive and misshapen ideologies, and weld our children—“whites, Korean Americans, Latinos, Blacks, and Bengalis—into a united, tolerant, patriotic America. You must make clear to the teachers and administrators in the State that embracing a traditional American education focused on reading, writing, math, history, and civics is the only acceptable preparation for American children to graduate to a life of innovation, contribution and self-realization in our society. 

However, with certain materials now showing up in classrooms and in the US Department of Education order to provide CRT grants directly to School Districts, the purveyors of Newthink and racism will persist and their defeat requires eternal vigilance on the part of every citizen and of our State government. Their twisted and subversive thinking has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, and school curricula. .  Many thinking parents in Montgomery County have protested that the School Administration and the Board of Education have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by allowing our schools to be captured by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal, racist mob.

This obsession has motivated the MCPS, an education system facing declining national rankings, to spend half the county annual budget in a worthless so-called anti-racist system audit. An investigative report by Judicial Watch (JW) concluded that “the racist, revolutionary claptrap in these documents should be nowhere near a school classroom.” Example: a social justice class where students were taught that the phrase Make America Great Again was an example of covert white supremacy ranked just below lynching, hate crimes, the N-word and racial slurs 

Probably the sickest aspect of CRT and its likes is that it deceitfully claims to combat racism but is in fact deeply racist.   Its only coin of identity is race: certain races are typed by association into inherent nasty behavior or weak performance;  attempts to break out of one’s racial category are fruitless; efforts by Blacks for example to excel in school and move ahead are “whitey; exams and grading are to be abolished because they put down weaker students; e g in California, English and math are no longer taught, to be replaced, e g in Washington, by diversity, equity and inclusion on the basis of racist categories, not performance,  qualifications, or even potential.  This is rank divisionism, inequity, victimism and exclusionism, (DIVE)  the divide-and-conquer that malevolent rulers have used to weaken their societies.  They are using the schools to turn the American motto—e pluribus unum—upside down: not one but many, and infusing personal relations with suspicion, blame, and hostility.

We cannot tolerate a school that not only judges our children by the color of their skin but encourages and instructs them to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.  By adopting CRT our schools are advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work, traits which brought the members of the Board of Education to their positions of leadership today..

We object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and in our schools. Systemic racism is the government and society of apartheid and the exterminating of Jews. It is segregated schools and separate lunch counters, which we have not had since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, half a century ago. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of American history, a motivated denial of the American virtue of progress, and a racist insult of American minorities.

An honest, academic, traditional American education is the most important gift we can give our children. We strongly request a stop by schools’ purchase of materials or conducting of any classes, workshops, etc. that embrace Crude Racist Theory, 1619 Project, and BLM Marxist messages. In addition, it must be clear that an activist teacher bringing supplemental materials into the classroom that undermine our founding ideals and basic values of progress, improvement and innovation will not be tolerated. We must stop the segregation and indoctrination of our children in Maryland and in our great Country.  Don’t teach racism!

Respectfully,

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William Zartman is the Jacob Blaustein Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Conflict Resolution and International Organization; former director, African Studies Program, SAIS-The Johns Hopkins University