The 97% Consensus -- GLOBAL WARMING HOAX

The 97% HOAX! Where did the 97% figure come from that is so frequently and confidently bandied about as "conclusive" evidence that scientists agree on man-made global warming (aka "climate change)"? Here it is! "The 97% study was a "graduate thesis" (a master's level project) by the "famous" (irony) Margaret Zimmerman, MS (Master of Science) published by the Univ. of Illinois in 2008. Zimmerman sent out a "two-question" survey to 10,257 earth scientists, of whom only 3,146 responded. 96% of respondents were from North America, overwhelmingly from the U.S. and 9% from California. 

THEN Zimmerman selected 77 (Yes, 77, seventy-seven, not a typo, 77) out of the 3,146 respondents and declared them "experts." 75 of these 77 "experts" believed in catastrophic human-caused global warming requiring massive government intervention. THAT, my friends, is where the 97% figure comes from! And have you ever heard ANYONE explain the origin of the figure? Mark Steyn published his book containing this information in 2015! "A Disgrace to the Profession." Can you imagine what the corrupt press would do with a similarly constructed "survey" that showed 97% skepticism on catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming (now altered to "climate change")?!!

WHY MEADOW DIED: THE PEOPLE AND POLICIES THAT CREATED THE PARKLAND SHOOTER AND ENDANGER AMERICA'S STUDENTS

MASS MURDER: COMING TO A SCHOOL NEAR YOU

Why Meadow Died doesn’t focus primarily on the murderer of seventeen people at Broward County’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School on Valentine’s Day, 2018, though the book does contain chapters describing the troubled life of Nikolas Cruz (often designated  by his prison number, 18-1958, to avoid giving the killer further notoriety).  Instead, most of this compelling work exposes the “restorative justice” discipline model brought to Broward County schools by Superintendent Robert Runcie, someone without a background in education who was a Chicago-based IT employee of Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.  It was Runcie’s lenient, racially-focused model that virtually created the mass murderer at MSD High School.  Even worse, that same discipline approach is creating toxic environments in schools across the country thanks to leftist pressure groups and Obama’s Education Secretary -- thus, the book’s subtitle:  The People and Policies that Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students.

Why Meadow Died was written by Andrew Pollack, the father of Meadow, in conjunction with the Manhattan Institute’s senior fellow in education policy, Max Eden.  Meadow was one of seventeen students and adults murdered at MSD High School, a tragedy that happened not because of the availability of guns, but because an ideologically-driven bureaucratic system demanded fake statistics about arrests, suspensions, and student behavior to prove the efficacy of Runcie’s disciplinary approach.  This bogus data was required if teachers and administrators were to survive or advance within this corrupt system.  

After the Parkland shooting, media attention focused overwhelmingly, as it always does, on “gun control.”  The sham “town hall” produced by CNN after the massacre gave an heroic platform to Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel whose department response to the shooting provided a textbook example of malpractice.  The show’s host and questioners ignored the fact that Israel had cooperated enthusiastically in a school program that all but ignored criminal behavior by students, including actions that would have made it impossible for Cruz to purchase a firearm.  Meanwhile, in the wake of the shooting Superintendent Runcie received accolades for a policy that, according to Pollock and Eden, was at much to blame for the massacre as Cruz himself.   

Runcie’s leftist-inspired program claimed that traditional school discipline is both punitive and discriminatory since minority students are suspended and punished at rates higher than white students.  This and other disparities provided for reformers clear evidence that teachers were racially biased and that the traditional system of discipline was destructive for minority groups.  To make matters worse, kids who often misbehaved, even those issuing threats and engaging in fights, were regularly labeled “special-needs” and thus put in another potentially “victimized” grouping.  The obvious explanation that fatherless homes and hostile environments largely account for statistical disparities was dismissed as racist [as these explanations also are, I might add, by urban District Attorneys funded by George Soros].  “Social justice,” reformers insist, demands that suspensions and punishments for blacks, whites, Hispanics, and special-needs kids be equally distributed.   Furthermore, since punitive punishment and law enforcement involvement is viewed as feeding the “school-to-prison pipeline,” Runcie’s program set out to drastically lower such punishments, especially arrests. 

To achieve these goals it was necessary to ignore bad behavior, to make reporting even egregious misbehavior bureaucratically burdensome, and to provide the “least restrictive” punishment for disciplinary violations.  The disastrous result of this approach was predictable -- increased bullying by kids who had little to fear for misbehavior, even for actions that extended to death threats and assaults.  The consequence for teachers who didn’t produce the desired statistics was also predictable: “Give a warning.  Issue a consequence.  Be labeled a racist.”  So while the numbers for suspensions and arrests dropped dramatically, making Runcie and his program a nationwide model, the numbers didn’t reflect reality.  Meanwhile, many students in Broward County were placed in normal classrooms alongside felons.  And at MSD students were interacting on campus with someone who should have been a felon or at the very least placed in a special education setting and denied access to guns.

The information provided in a chapter devoted exclusively to 18-1958 is chilling -- Cruz’s family background, his bloody fantasies, his cruelty to animals, a vicious assault that he initiated on campus, and his incessant threats to kill himself and others, threats that were consistently minimized both by school officials and Parkland police.  The fact that he was eventually placed back in a regular school setting and even allowed to enroll in Junior ROTC caps off a host of decisions that illustrate the incompetence and ideological rigidity of those implementing school policy. 

This mismanagement is further highlighted in a chapter that provides an incomplete list of forty-two ways Meadow’s death and, in many cases, the entire Parkland shooting, could have been avoided.  The list implicates, among others, Runcie’s discipline policy, the pathetic Broward County police response, the incompetent and predatory MSD security monitor, School Resource Officer Scot Peterson (who remained in a safe space holding the only gun on campus while students were being murdered), failure to secure all entrances to the campus, and failure of the district to install an alarm system that wouldn’t send students on a deadly fire drill during a shooting. 

The final chapters of Why Meadow Died relate the attempt by Pollack, Eden, and others to change the composition of Broward County’s school board and to oust the always politically conscious and often vindictive Runcie from his position.  Highlighted in this section is a courageous teen journalist named Kenny Preston who confronted Runcie and the Board with critical facts they invariably deflected, misrepresented, or denied.  In an act of unbelievable spite against this young man with mild cognitive issues, Kenny was denied graduation for what seem trivial reasons.  In the authors’ view, “At the end of the school year, Kenny was the only person in the entire Broward County school district to face any consequences for what happened on February 14.”  Likewise, the mendacity, intimidation, and cowardice displayed during the school board election was a true reflection of the powers that be in Broward County and of the 2-to-1 Democrat constituency that not only featured a blow-hard judge, Elijah Williams, who referred to the Parkland massacre as a “so-called tragedy” but also returned to power (over a man who lost his daughter in the massacre) a school board lackey who had the audacity to call 2018 “an amazing school year.”

  

The reason the authors believe another school massacre like Parkland’s is inevitable is that Runcie’s “social justice” discipline model has been implemented in hundreds of districts throughout the country, something Max Eden illustrates with numerous horror tales in chapter nine -- tales typically related by teachers so intimidated by administrators that they speak anonymously.  This lemming-like institutional behavior isn’t simply a consequence of the ideological conformity that characterizes education professionals.  It also stems from a “Dear Colleague” letter sent by Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan (Runcie’s old boss) that in effect threatens to investigate and bring civil rights suits against schools that fail to pursue discipline policies like those in Broward County and to produce similar statistical results.  Though the Trump Administration revoked Duncan’s directive, school districts throughout the country still cling to the ineffective and dangerous approach that teaches kids most at risk that there will be no significant consequences even for criminal behavior -- a lesson many will rue once they are out of school.  Of course the victims most to be pitied for these policies are students and teachers who are bullied, assaulted, and occasionally murdered by the fruit of Arne Duncan and Robert Runcie’s politically-correct reform tree -- victims like Meadow and her family.    

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

DEBUNKING HOWARD ZINN: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America, by Mary Grabar, Regnery History, August 20, 2019 (352 pages, $29.99, Hardcover)

HOWARD ZINN’S AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

If folks wonder why youngsters today are less patriotic and more inclined toward socialism, they need look no further than the most popular “history” textbook in the United States, Howard Zinn’s  A People’s History of the United States -- a one-sided work written from the perspective of a Communist activist that contains a plethora of distortions and outright lies.  In 2012, the director of the American Textbook Council noted that Zinn’s text had sold two million copies and was the “best-selling survey of American history.”  By 2018, it was estimated that the book had sold more than 2.6 million copies.  

Mary Grabar’s new book, Debunking Howard Zinn, does us the service of exposing  the mendacious,  non-scholarly character of this work that was praised to the hilt by Zinn’s former Cambridge neighbor,  Matt Damon.  In Good Will Hunting the film’s protagonist exclaims, “It will knock your socks off!”  making an even greater rock star of Zinn and solidifying for impressionable teens the bona fides of a propaganda tome composed in a scant year.  Even a sympathetic leftist historian, Michael Kammen, called the book “simpleminded” and a “scissors-and-paste-pot job.”  The well-known liberal scholar Arthur Schlesinger was even more critical, labeling Zinn “a polemicist, not a historian.”  Grabar herself notes that after his graduate school book on Fiorello La Guardia, Zinn produced not a single piece of historical scholarship until decades later he slapped together his People’s History -- a work that relies overwhelmingly on secondary sources and for which “there is no evidence that Zinn ever actually made extensive notes,” as he claimed, in preparation for its writing.

Grabar provides scores of examples of Zinn’s modus operandi that ignores, distorts, or simply lies about evidence to construct a Manichean portrait of good versus evil as those categories are conceived by a Marxist activist.  Zinn’s caricature of Columbus sets the stage for his presentation of American history as a series of Holocausts.  In one case Zinn quotes Columbus’ diary entries out of context to portray the explorer as a rapacious gold-seeker who wouldn’t be averse to enslaving the island’s primitive inhabitants.  To accomplish this goal Zinn ignores Columbus’ positive comments about “freedom” for the “Arawak” tribe and splices together separate entries that make the explorer appear a nascent slave trader on first viewing the island’s inhabitants.  In fact, the damning comments about the natives being “good servants” were made days later and concerned the perspective of a warring tribe intent on subjugating their more docile neighbors.  The other side of Zinn’s narrative involves the beatification and Marxification of the Americas’ native population -- a portrait at odds with any objective history of the New World which was filled with wars at least as ubiquitous and violent (including the cannibalism that Zinn omits) as those in “capitalist” Europe!   

To top off the lies about Columbus, Grabar shows that a good deal of Zinn’s “scholarship” is plagiarized from a 1976 work by fellow anti-Vietnam War activist, Hans Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth.  Grabar shows how page after page in Zinn’s history was lifted almost verbatim from Koning’s book.  Indeed, “The first five-and-a-half pages of A People’s History of the United States are little more than slightly altered passages from Columbus: His Enterprise.”  The secondary kicker is that Koning wasn’t even an historian, much less a Columbus scholar.  In fact, Koning’s “slim volume does not cite any sources.”  Grabar also reveals additional instances of Zinn’s plagiarism -- one of which was discovered by a leftist Professor who didn’t publicize the truth lest it harm their common ideological objectives.  So much for professional standards that were applied even to a well-known historian like  PBS’s favorite scholar, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who “resigned from her post on the Pulitzer Prize review board and took a ‘leave’ from PBS NewsHour” when parts of her work were found to be plagiarized.

Chapter two of Grabar’s book reviews the life of Zinn as a dedicated Communist activist whose Marxist beliefs and activities spoke louder than any card he may or may not have carried.  Chapter three shows how Native Americans are used as props for Zinn’s ongoing Marxist cartoon, with Europeans and Americans forming the necessary oppressive class.  As for his account of the Iroquois Indians, it was again largely plagiarized from another patently biased historian, Gary Nash.  One critic said the descriptions of this well-known American tribe resembled “California countercultural rebels, defenders of women’s rights, and communist egalitarians. . . .”   In Zinn’s telling, any butchery and slavery on the side of oppressed groups (even the Aztecs) is ignored, distorted, or excused.  Thus, Zinn’s “history” conforms perfectly to Professor Fred Siegel’s observation about the “New Historians” for whom “American history became a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else.”  

Concerning the second act of that tragedy, Zinn somehow manages to blame capitalism for American slavery, though the institution has been around for all of recorded history and still exists in some very non-capitalist African states.  He also ignores the fact that only in America, where slavery was said to be the cruelest, were slaves, despite the evils of the institution, able to grow their population through natural increase, something not possible in regions where slaves died or were killed so frequently that only a constant influx of new victims maintained their numbers.

Grabar clearly demonstrates that Zinn takes the orthodox Communist line when discussing any topic: The Founding Fathers were more interested in their investments than the welfare of oppressed groups.  Lincoln was more a capitalist tool than a President committed to ending slavery -- or a friend to his adviser and later Republican political official, Frederick Douglass.  Even World War II was fought to maintain the capitalist system, as was, of course, the Vietnam War, where, according to Zinn, the My Lai massacre was “typical.”  Also in the 60s, radical and violent groups like the Black Panthers are given greater attention and more credit for (always inadequate) civil rights progress than traditional groups like the NAACP -- even though the latter organization clearly accomplished more than the former and was supported by blacks (despite Zinn’s insinuations) far more than their violent counterparts.                    

Earlier in the book and also in closing Grabar makes a telling point about the duplicity of modern historians by comparing their vigorous denunciation of David Irving’s Holocaust-minimizing work with the plenary indulgences given to Zinn’s unbalanced, unreliable, often-plagiarized volume.  Why, she asks, should Zinn’s false American Holocaust history not be judged by the same standards that make Irving’s account of Hitler’s crimes totally unacceptable.  The obvious answer is that most historians, even those who think Zinn’s book is more propaganda than history, are still sympathetic to the ideology that permeates Zinn’s distorted view of the U.S. -- a sympathy illustrated by their spirited defense of the book whenever official attempts arise to remove it from state-related classrooms. Grabar provides sufficient evidence to make the case that Zinn’s history is every bit as contemptible as Irving’s and should be viewed with equal revulsion.  That Zinn in 2004 signed a statement supporting an investigation into a possible 9/11 Bush Administration conspiracy says all one really needs to know about Zinn’s animus toward America.  That professional historians, clueless high school teachers, and even Google searches (no surprise) present  Zinn’s history as reliable is a big reason many young Americans no longer feel pride in a nation that’s been presented to them through the jaundiced eyes of a Communist who cares not a whit for professional historical standards -- or the truth. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle