Texas Senate's Abdication, Abbott's Mendacity, enables UT-RGV's unprecedented expansion of Bilingual "Education"....

"Therefore by their fruits you will know them."
Matthew 7:20

With their accreditation hanging by a thread, the University of Texas' Rio Grande Valley campus demonstrates some...odd priorities:

The bilingual course I visited is a pilot for an initiative known around campus as B3 — “bilingual, bicultural, biliterate” — that aims to transform the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) into the United States’ first comprehensively bilingual public university. The project’s goals, proponents say, are far-reaching: to not only produce the bilingual professionals in high demand along the Texas-Mexico border, but also to begin to redress a historical legacy of what queer Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, a Valley native, calls “linguistic terrorism” against border Spanish speakers denied the legitimacy of their native tongue. As the initiative moves from rhetoric to reality, though, UTRGV finds itself grappling with questions of identity: What does it mean to be a bilingual and bicultural university?

“It’s about being much more aware of the language that is being spoken, and making sure that the space is safe for my students,” Saldívar told me after class in his office, which is decorated with an oversized pennant from Stanford, his alma mater. Saldívar, who in the fall of 2016 taught the first of what is expected to be dozens of bilingual or Spanish courses, has plenty of common ground with his students. Now in his late 30s, he grew up in the rural South Texas community of Edcouch-Elsa; his parents were punished in school for speaking Spanish and encouraged him to speak only English at home. Language could play a role in helping students feel a sense of comfort and belonging at the university, Saldívar said, but he wanted to impress on me that what the students were talking about was as noteworthy as how they chose to say it. “I think the American ethos is you pull yourself up by your bootstraps in order to be successful,” he said. “And that’s great. But I want my students to recognize the challenges and the disparities. And when faced with those challenges, ask: ‘What do we do?’ Because I want them to be able to handle that.”

For the class I visited at UTRGV’s Edinburg campus, students had read an article by Juan Carrillo called “I Always Knew I Was Gifted: Latino Males and the Mestiz@ Theory of Intelligences.” It led with an epigraph from Anzaldúa: “Theorists-of-color are in the process of trying to formulate ‘marginal’ theories that are partially outside and partially inside the Western frame of reference (if that’s possible), theories that overlap many ‘worlds.’”

The critical theory made for challenging reading for first-year students in what has often been taught as a remedial course.

[Author's Note: Emphasis added.]

Read the whole thing here, though we caution that slogging through this predictable litany of academic identity politics doesn't add much.

But why is this happening in Texas in the first place?!?

That's because the University of Texas system has a well documented history of doing whatever it wants and daring their Board of Regents, and the elected officials to whom they report, to stop them.

We know how that's worked out in recent years.

Prior to his first round of Regent appointments, Governor FoxNews stated:

"I will give them marching orders about what I want them to achieve, and I expect them to achieve it without micromanaging."

One would think an allegedly conservative Governor would give 'marching orders' to Regent appointees that would put a stop to hard left gobbledygook, but Abbott's first round of regents did nothing of the sort and his second round are well documented defenders of the status quo.

And the Texas Senate just rubber stamped that second round so, absent a new set of "marching orders" from the Governor (which, now that the Regents are confirmed, they are under no obligation to follow) or direct intervention from the Chancellor, you can't even begin to address this nonsense for another two years.

We put in a request for comment from the Chancellor and the Abbott appointees on the Board of Regents but had not heard back by the time of publication; if they reply, we will include it in a separate post.

As we told Senator Birdwell at the confirmation hearing: if that second round of regents were confirmed, political correctness on campus would get a lot worse.

The Senate chose to disregard our warning, they confirmed the regents, and look what's already happening.

And the Texas Senate, along with Governor FoxNews, OWNS this nonsense.

Bottom Line: Buckle up, because it's going to get a lot worse over the next two years.

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Governor Greg Abbott: (512) 463-2000
Chancellor Bill McRaven: (512) 499-4201
UT System Board of Regents: (512) 499-4402

Demolishing the "Safe Sex" Propoganda

Responding to a question from a teenage reader, Matt Walsh tears into the reigning sexual dogma:

Our culture tells a lot of lies about sex. Your teacher is one of the liars.

There’s plenty of ignorance on the subject. Plenty of confusion. But it’s the lies I hate. The lies that come from people who know better. The people who have made mistakes and now encourage others to make them, too.

You could ask any married person who slept with other people before meeting their spouse (I wouldn’t recommend actually asking this, I’m just trying to illustrate a point here): are you happy about it? Are you glad that you gave yourself to someone other than the person you now love eternally? If you could go back to those times, would you stop yourself?

....

It’s a tragedy, really. It’s a shame. You deal with it and you move on, but “casual sex” has taken its chunk and you’ll never get it back.

Yet few will speak against the predators and perverts in media, Hollywood, and Academia who promote this “casual sex” deception. There should be armies of people opposing it, but instead there is only a small, fringe group of cultural insurgents; the ones we point and laugh at and accuse of having a “boring” and “outdated” view of sexuality.

This is another lie. Casual sex proponents are the ones who have turned sex into something trivial, banal, utilitarian, pointless, joyless, one-dimensional, lifeless, lonely, and disappointing. How could the ones who hold it as sacred also be the ones who make it “boring”? No, it’s mainstream culture that’s made sex boring. It’s mainstream culture that is, in fact, afraid of sex. That’s why we spend so much energy shielding ourselves from every natural aspect of it, other than the physical sensation itself.

And the ones who believe it to be so much more than that are the ones who make it “boring”? THEY are the ones who are afraid of it? They embrace all of it, every part of it, and they are the ones who “hate sex”?

Ridiculous. Casual sex is a lie. It’s a lie that rests on lies and breeds lies and turns people into liars.

....

Casual sex has liberated us, yet casual sex produces so many regrets. The landscape is rife with people who have felt the sting of our “hook-up culture.” But where are the people who regret abstinence and monogamy? Sure, some people, while married, think they regret having not “played the field.” Then they play it. And then they learn what regret really feels like.

Even the term “casual sex” is insane. It’s an oxymoron. Denim is casual. Restaurants can be casual. Casual: without serious intention, careless or offhand, informal. A high-five is casual. Sex can only be viewed in this same vein once we have dehumanized ourselves enough to see human sexuality as something no more significant than a pair of jean shorts.

 AMEN; read the whole thing here.

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New readers can read our 2012 manifesto on this topic here.

New Study Documents what we already knew about the University of Texas -- Austin

The permanent bureaucracy of the University of Texas at Austin is one of the great unseen villains of Texas.  Living in the neighborhood of the campus, Cahnman's Musings often observes their crap up close.  That's why we were delighted to read this new study from the National Association of Scholars.

The study, which examines the fall 2010 semester, investigates the lower-level U.S. History course content at UT-Austin and Texas A&M.  The study documents the degree to which Marxist claptrap has infiltrated UT's (and A&M's) curriculum.  While the study's objectives are national in scope, my interests in it are parochial.

While the study documents this phenomenon 9 ways to Sunday, the central conclusion is devastating:

In fall 2010, 78 percent of University of Texas faculty members who taught the freshman and sophomore history courses were high assigners of RCG [race, class, gender] readings.

In other words, 78% of lower level history faculty at UT-Austin are pushing the reflexive, self-immolating, white liberal guilt that just helped re-elect Obama; this isn't surprising.

This study has perfect timing.  Every two years, UT cries poverty to the legislature.  Even though those claims are absurd, people still listen.  Not anymore; the permanent U.T. bureaucracy is a cancer maleducating the next generation of Texans.  This study documents that reality, any Republican legislator who collaborates with the permanent UT bureaucracy deserves a big, fat primary challenge.

Update: I should check my e-mail more frequently, while I was writing this post, BizPAC review found this gem from a UT Journalism professor.

Cultural Marxism and the Origins of 'Modern' Sexual Morality

This fantastic video outlines how an obscure group of 1930's Marxist intellectuals bequeathed to America our allegedly modern notions of sexual morality:



Highlights:

• Gramsci: Western Culture had to be destroyed before Marxist revolution could take place.
• They needed a cultural revolution against Western Civ.

•  Early 1920's: Bolsheviks introduce radical sex ed into Hungarian schools.
• Deliberately designed to undermine family unity.

•  Horkheimer -- Making culture, not economics, the focus of Marxist efforts.
• Crossing Marx with Freud
• Everyone was 'repressed'
• Sexual 'alienation.'

• Sexual 'liberation' and gender politics.
• Masculinity and femininity were 'socially constructed.'

• 1960's: Marcuse injects cultural Marxism into the new Left.

• Critical Theory -- Criticize everything without presenting an alternative.
• Designed to undermine Western Confidence.

•  Anyone who supports traditional American culture is psychologically unfit.

• Eros and Civilization:
• Condemned all restrictions on Sex.
• Polymorphous perversity and Narciscissm
• Liberating 'non-Procreative Eros.'
• The 'intellectual foundation' for having lots of sex with lots of people.

Why Marriage Matters

Since Obama's homosexual 'marriage' interview last week, there have been far too many people on our side who view the issue as a distraction from the economy.  They fail to understand that there are deeper forces at play.  Homosexual 'marriage' has nothing to do with homosexuality; it's a Trojan Horse for the left's final assault on the Church.

It troubles me the how many members of the Tea Party fail to appreciate the assault on the Church embedded in the Homosexual 'marriage' debate.  You already have people advocating to force Churches to perform homosexual 'weddings' in the United Kingdom.  Why, in the U.S., anybody would want to hand a weapon like homosexual 'marriage' to a government that is already forcing Churches to subsidize abortion baffles me.  Once homosexual 'marriage' is the law of the land, does anyone doubt that government censorship of the pulpit will shortly follow?!?

Giving the government this sort of a weapon to use against Churches is insane, just insane.

POTUS 2012: Data vs. Critical Theory

There's an aspect of Mitt Romney's background about which I'd forgotten; if I'd have remembered it earlier, I'd have opposed his nomination far less strenuously.  A massive opportunity exists for Mitt Romney if he can use the same skill set with Barack Obama that he used with new hires twenty years ago.

Mitt Romney's background, prior to becoming Governor of Massachusetts, was turning around failing companies and organizations.  When Mitt Romney ran for President in 2008, I read Hugh Hewitt's A Mormon in the White House.  Hewitt's second chapter, titled "Bain Washed" not "Brain Washed" details Romney's business career.  As Romney told Hewitt, his approach to solving tough problems was to:

"let people sit at the table and let them bring in different viewpoints and arguments and then support them with reviewable data that could be confirmed." (58-59)

 In contrast with Mitt Romney's data based background, Barack Obama is steeped in something called critical theory.  While critical theory is often presented as something high-falutin', at its core it's nihilstic bullcrap.  Critical theory is the tactic the left has used on numerous topics these past five years: like George W. Bush and Iraq, Health Care and the Tea Party, and the Debt Ceiling.

The short version of critical theory is that its practitioners relentlessly criticize their opponents without presenting an alternative.  Critical theory is against everything and for nothing.  The purpose of critical theory is to demoralize your opposition while disguising your intentions.  This video, from PJTV, outlines the history of critical theory:

Mitt Romney's background with data makes him uniquely suited to confront critical theory.  The weakness of critical theory comes when you demand your opponent present their alternative, backed up with data.  Romney told Hewitt his approach was:

"the approach of gathering people who represent different viewpoints and then insisting they argue but with data and analysis allows people to reach consensus and points out where self-interest is driving a particular argument rather than mutual interest." (58) Emphasis Mine

 Hewitt summarizes Romney's approach by saying that "[T]he 'Bain way' presumes a common interest in success. (58)"  It's also a unique tool to highlight Barack Obama's refusal to argue in good faith AND the media's corrupt complicity.  Consider the following examples:

• Does a corrupt trillion dollar 'stimulus' that was written years earlier, and has failed to meet its own standards, represent national or parochial interests?!?
• Does shredding 1000 years of bankruptcy law to give the Auto Companies to the Unions while lying about their performance represent national or parochial interests?!?
• Does Obama's corrupt Health Care Law represent national or parochial interests?!?
• Does special interest banking legislation that fails to address the underlying causes of the housing crisis represent national or parochial interests?!?
• Does abandoning national interests in Iraq while simultaneously launching a treasonous war in Libya without Congressional authorization and helping the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the region represent national or parochial interests?!?
• Does creations a national clusterf**k in Afghanistan while classlessly taking credit for the actions of the Navy Seals in the bin Laden raid represent national or parochial interests?!?
• Does ignoring a growing alliance between Gog and Persia Russia and Iran, while forcing Israel to indefensible borders, represent national or parochial interests?!? :)

(Author's note: And I didn't even mention the border)

If Mitt Romney can force Barack Obama, and his buddies in the media, to argue with data instead of critical theory, Romney will win BIG.  The basic math is so obvious a fourth grader can understand it if it's presented with data.  Barack Obama cannot discuss his plans with data because, if he did, he's be lucky to win 30%.  Many Americans instinctively understand how terrible Barack Obama has been; if Mitt Romney can educate them about the facts while demanding that Obama and the Media argue with data, the contrast will speak for itself.