#ideological indoctrination

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Brad Polumbo

Published: Jun 25, 2024

Republicans are very concerned about left-wing indoctrination in the public school system, and often for good reasons. Yet, it seems that some Republican leaders feel differently about ideological indoctrination in the classroom when they’re the ones doing it. 

In Louisiana, a recent law mandates the display of the Ten Commandments across all public educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities. The bill, championed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry, was signed into law at a private Catholic school. During the ceremony, Governor Landry declared, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”

This makes Louisiana the only state in the nation with such a mandate. Other red states haven’t ventured into this territory in recent years, perhaps because they know it’s blatantly unconstitutional. Nonetheless, Governor Landry appears undeterred, openly stating that “can’t wait to be sued.”

He may not have to wait very long.

A coalition of groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), has already announced its intention to file suit, condemning the mandate as “unconstitutional religious coercion of students, who are legally required to attend school and are thus a captive audience for school-spons.ored religious messages.” The ACLU also added that the mandate “send[s] a chilling message to students and families who do not follow the state’s preferred version of the Ten Commandments that they do not belong, and are not welcome, in our public schools.”

This is not uncharted territory. The ACLU cited the 1980 Supreme Court case Stone v. Graham, where the court explicitly ruled that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits the establishment of a formal state religion, prevents public schools from displaying the Ten Commandments. 

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” the Supreme Court ruled in that case. “However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

Governor Landry is surely aware of this precedent and simply does not care that this legislation will almost certainly be blocked in the courts. Nonetheless, it represents an opportunity for him to signal his cultural war bona fides—a move that, in any other context, Republicans might rightly describe as empty “virtue signaling.”

Regrettably, this isn’t just an isolated incident among Republicans in one conservative state. Louisiana’s initiative has garnered support from many of the most prominent figures in the modern GOP. One such figure is Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who praised the legislation in an interview with Real America’s Voice. “This is something we need all throughout our nation,” she said. “I’m so proud of Governor Landry…. We need morals back in our nation, back in our schools, and if there’s anything we’re going to present in front of our children, it should be the word of God.”

This stance appears to be a mainstream view within the Republican Party, as the party’s leader, Donald Trump, also threw his support behind Louisiana’s efforts in a post on Truth Social: 

The Republicans’ embrace of this religious mandate in public schools is deeply hypocritical, contravening many principles they have previously claimed to stand for, and incredibly short-sighted. 

Firstly, they are proving to be fair-weather fans of the First Amendment. These same types regularly champion free speech when it comes to opposing government censorship or progressive attempts to crack down on “hate speech” (which now includes uttering basic biological truths), and they are absolutely right to do so. However, you cannot selectively support the First Amendment, endorsing free speech and freedom of religion clauses while actively violating the Establishment Clause. After all, if Republicans can disregard the parts they don’t like when it’s inconvenient, then progressives can too!

Secondly, Republicans are compromising their stated beliefs about the importance of parents’ rights and opposing “indoctrination” in schools. Now, they suddenly advocate for the government’s role in teaching children morality, instead of leaving this responsibility to parents or families.

Which is it? Consistent supporters of parents’ rights believe that it should be up to parents to teach their kids about morality, whether it concerns pronouns or prayer. 

There’s also the issue of misplaced priorities. Louisiana ranks 40th out of all 50 states in education. Meanwhile, 40 percent of 3rd graders cannot read at grade level, according to The Advocate. Yet, the governor prioritizes mandating posters of the Ten Commandments—and allocating tax dollars to defending it in court—that many students probably can’t even read.

Even many conservative Christians can see the issue here. As radio host Erick Erickson put it:

When the 3rd grade reading level is only 49 percent, I don’t see why the state wants to spend money on lawyers for a probably unconstitutional law making the Ten Commandments mandatory just to virtue signal a side in a culture war. Actually use conservative reforms to fix the schools instead of putting up posters half the 3rd grade cannot even read.

Perhaps the most common Republican rejoinder is that displaying the Ten Commandments is an educational initiative focused on historical context rather than a promotion of religion. But while there’s no disputing its historical significance, it’s not being presented as part of a broader course on religion that features a variety of religious and secular perspectives, which would be fine. Instead, beliefs from a particular religious tradition, the Judeo-Christian one, are being elevated and mandated to the deliberate exclusion of others. This selective approach is hardly subtle: Governor Landry purposefully signed the bill at a Catholic school and even referenced Moses! 

There’s no denying that the Ten Commandments are inherently religious, as they proscribe not only murder and adultery but also idolatry, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and working on the Sabbath. So, conservatives making this “history, not religion” argument are straining credulity. 

What’s more, further empowering government schools to promote a specific ideology to students will not end well for conservatives. It’s not exactly breaking news that the public education system is overwhelmingly staffed and run by people with increasingly left-leaning political and cultural views. Conservatives should be fighting to restore viewpoint neutrality in the public square—not further undermining it and thereby making it easier for woke ideologues to propagandize to everyone’s kids. 

It’s sad, but ultimately not surprising, to see so many Republicans proving to be inconsistent allies to true liberal values. At least those few genuine, principled defenders of the First Amendment now know who our allies are—and who they are not. 

--

About the Author

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

==

Moral consistency requires opposing both.

... Secularism means that no particular ideology is being forwarded and getting special treatment. Go have your belief. Believe what you want. Privately. You don’t get special treatment because you believe this with tons of conviction. Secularism means that your belief in your faith covers none of the distance to proving that it’s true. Conviction is not evidence of much of anything. Except conviction. -- James Lindsay

--

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”

Leviticus 25:44-46

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

Who's going to tell him?

[amygdalae]

My archeology prof has gone on multiple tangents about how stupid gender reveal parties are ("they aren't gender reveal parties, they're sex reveal parties, and that's stupid) and spent a good chunk of a lecture going into how gender is a cultural/social construct and gender does not equal sex and neither gender nor sex are anywhere near as binary as western norms have us believe. And also she's beautiful. Just bragging

[gynandromorph]

maybe it's just the context that i have? i'm sure i've posted this before

even then???!?!?? there are people who still go to church after God kills their mother!!! there are people who still go to church after the pastor drops dead during the sermon because God decided it was HEART ATTACK TIME!!!!!! THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO START GOING TO CHURCH AGAIN AFTER GOD GIVES THEM STAGE 4 CANCER

SO I CAN'T EVEN SAY "NO ONE WOULD DO THAT" CLEARLY A LOT OF PEOPLE WOULD DO THAT

[quantumshade]

me: jews who are antizionists are pushed out of jewish spaces this genius: uhm well you’re not part of jewish spaces? checkmate.

also “since Judaism and Zionism are so intertwined (see: ancient holidays, prayers, wedding traditions, sayings, genealogy, archeology, etc)” me when i fucking fell for it

[cultoftheswag]

I've made my lamb vocally faithless/atheist and as a result they present themselves as seperate from the divine and as "one of the people" instead , but because devotion is something that can be harnessed and used as a power source , this creates the problem how they would even use an idol as a representation of themselves/their image in the first place. I think I could spin this around and have idolatry of the red crown be synonymous with the lamb , because they present the crown as the means of divinity used for the good of the common folk ,and the lamb is just the mortal guy burdened with being the bridge between divine and mortal (but obviously they are the only one allowed to wear the crown and by extension the one to decide how the court runs, don't ask to wear the crown ♥️♥️♥️).

[exvangelicalrage]

You Will Be Free Indeed

5/22/23

There's thing thing christians sometimes do, called "testimonies." Most of my memories of testimonies involve dudes with tattoos getting up in front of the congregation and saying something like, "I spent the last ten years in prison, and while I was there, I found jesus!" And then all the people say, "praise be" or "amen" or some such nonsense. Then the dude expounds on his story about how he did all these terrible things, but when he was born again, he felt the chains of sin fall away from him and he became "free indeed." 

(Side note, "Free indeed" is evangelical rhetoric/gaslighting designed to counter the realization that religion actually binds you.)

These testimonies weren't always from dudes with tattoos. Technically, everybody had a testimony. The formula was this: 

All the bad stuff you did —> your encounter with jesus and/or being born again — > how it changed you — > freedom

For example, "I used to be selfish but then I became born again and gave all of my self to christ and now I am free!" 

Or, "I used to be bound by the shackles of lust! Then jesus cleansed me of my sins and I was born again. I no longer feel constrained by my sinful desires. It's like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders!" 

Literally anything that counts as a "sin" works. Even if you were young, like I was, and hadn't experienced much in the way of deliberate sinfulness, you could simply swap out a specific sin with "sinful nature" or "sinful desires." 

"I was born sinful but then learned about jesus, accepted him into my heart, and now I know I don't have to give in to sin and am free in christ."

BAM: Testimony!

The proclamation of freedom at the end of a testimony has stuck with me.

There were tons of ways people described it, always very visceral and visual. Shackles breaking. A weight lifted from their shoulders. As if everything had been in darkness and now they could see the light. As if they had been limited or bound or contained in some way, but now they were released. Imprisoned, trapped, captive. And then freed.

I had this vision in my head of atheists walking around with a ball and chain hooked to each leg. With metaphorical backpacks that weighed hundreds of pounds making it impossible to keep their spines up straight. With black, slimy tendrils of sin licking around their bodies, pulling them into a quicksand of sin.

I could hardly imagine how non-christians slept at night. How did they not see the black cloud that followed them everywhere they went? Did they not imagine life could be better? 

Honestly, this intense visual is one of the reasons I stayed christian as long as I did. I didn't want to become like that. I didn't want life to be heavy. I didn't want to bear the weight of my sins—not when jesus had offered to do it for me. 

But eventually, the weight of my doubt grew heavier than the weight of my sins. After all, I'd spent my entire life trying to be as perfect as possible. Not to mention, jesus had supposedly cleansed me. 

So why did everything feel so heavy?

When I finally had the courage to Exit christianity, officially and for real, something crazy happened. You'll never believe it. 

I felt free.

It was like a metaphorical weight had been lifted. Like I'd been walking around with a ball and chain hooked to each leg—but now they were gone! Like I shed that metaphorical backpack that made it impossible for me to keep my spine straight. Like the black, slimy tendrils of christianity licking around my body and dragging me into the quicksand of religion had been utterly, irrevocably banished. 

The black cloud—gone! Only a blue sky above. 

Never had I ever imagined that life, existence, self could feel so light.

christians imagine that that sense of freedom comes from jesus. That the lightness comes from having your sins "forgiven." From choosing to live your life for god and walk on that dusty road to heaven, instead of the glittery road to hell.

But the truth is, that sense of freedom and lightness comes only in making the choice.  And which choice doesn't really matter. It's just that you made the right one for you.

It's about looking your own darkness in the face and saying, "No. I reject you."

Sometimes that darkness takes the form of the "sins" we've committed or the harm we've caused. Sometimes it's our guilt. Sometimes it might be mental illness. Or the trauma of past experiences. 

And sometimes, it's christianity.

[heresronnie21]

Nico di Angelo would not wear an Italian flag patch on his jacket

[faithfromanewperspective]

i know a lot of places in the world are used to this. but can we please talk about how so many christian-adjacent organisations are being so obviously (if you know how to look for it) funded by right-wing political donors that it's actually changing our theology. and in australia we don't have any large local organisations standing up against this and this is terrifying

[tangledinourstrings]

minorities: *exist*

roblox players:

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: Apr 24, 2024

Top physicians, including former Harvard dean, say required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor."

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum "promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation."

UCLA "has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate," said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. "As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking."

One required reading lists "anti-capitalist politics" as a principle of "disability justice" and attacks the evils of "ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism." Others decry "racial capitalism," attack "growth-centered economic theories," and call for "moving beyond capitalism for our health."

The essay by Mercedes "describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms" and offers guidance on "resisting entrenched fat oppression," according to the course syllabus. Mercedes claims that "ob*sity" is a slur "used to exact violence on fat people"—particularly "Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people"—and offers a "fat ode to care" that students are instructed to analyze, taking note of which sections "most resonate with you."

"This is a profoundly misguided view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups," Flier told the Free Beacon. "Promotion of these ignorant ideas to medical students without counterbalancing input from medical experts in the area is nothing less than pedagogical malpractice."

Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician at Yale University, who has spent decades providing medical care to underserved communities, including in the South Side of Chicago, called the curriculum "nonsensical."

The relationship between health and social forces "should indeed be taught at medical school," Christakis wrote in an email, "but to have a mandatory course like this—so tendentious, sloganeering, incurious, and nonsensical—strikes me as embarrassing to UCLA."

UCLA did not respond to requests for comment.

Snapshots of the course have been leaking for months and left the school doing damage control as members of UCLA’s own faculty have spoken out against the curriculum. The most recent embarrassment came when a guest lecturer, Lisa Gray-Garcia, led students in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" after instructing them to kneel on the floor and pray to "Mama Earth." Lessons on "decolonization" and climate activism, as well as a classroom exercise that separated students by race, have also stirred controversy.

"There are areas where medicine and public health intersect with politics, and these require discussion and debate of conflicting viewpoints," Flier said. "That is distinct from education designed to ideologically indoctrinate physician-activists."

The mandatory class is part of a nationwide push by medical schools to integrate DEI content into their curricula—for residents as well as students— both by adding required courses and by changing the way traditional subjects are taught.

Stanford Medical School sprinkles lessons on "microaggressions," "structural racism," and "privilege" throughout its curriculum. Residents at Yale Medical School must complete an "Advocacy and Equity" sequence focused on "becoming physician advocates for health justice," while those in the infectious disease program must complete additional lessons on "Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism."

Columbia Medical School promotes an "Anti-bias and Inclusive" curriculum by encouraging educators to use "precise, accurate language." Instead of "women," guidelines for the curriculum state, faculty should refer to "people with uteruses."

The changes have been driven partly by the Association of American Medical Colleges—one of two groups that oversees the accrediting body for all U.S. medical schools—which in 2022 released a set of DEI "competencies" to guide curricula. Schools should teach students how to identify "systems of power, privilege, and oppression," the competencies state, and how to incorporate "knowledge of intersectionality" into clinical decision-making. Students should also be able to describe "public policy that promotes social justice" and demonstrate "moral courage" when faced with "microaggression."

The course at UCLA, which predates those accreditation standards, offers a preview of how DEI mandates could reshape medical education. It is littered with the lingo of progressive activism—"intersectionality" is a core value of the class, according to slides from the first session—and states outright that it is training doctors to become activists.

Students will "build critical consciousness" and move toward a "liberatory practice of medicine" by "focusing on praxis," according to the slides.

A section called "Our Hxstories" adds that "[h]ealth and medical practice are deeply impacted by racism and other intersectional structures of power, hierarchy, and oppression—all of which require humility, space and patience to understand, deconstruct, and eventually rectify."

That jargon reflects a worldview with clinical implications. In a unit on "abolitionist" health, which explores "alternatives to carceral systems in LA," students are assigned a paper that argues police should be removed from emergency rooms, where 55 percent of doctors say they’ve been assaulted—mostly by patients—and threats of violence are common, according to a 2022 survey from American College of Emergency Physicians. Other units discuss the "sickness of policing" and link "Queer liberation to liberation from the carceral state."

Flier said the syllabus was so bad it called for an investigation—and that anyone who signed off on it was unfit to make curricular decisions.

"Assuming the school’s dean," Steven Dubinett, a pulmonologist, "does not himself support this course as presented, it is his responsibility to review the course and the curriculum committee that approved it," Flier said. "If that body judged the course as appropriate, he should change its leadership and membership."

Dubinett did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the leaders of the course is Shamsher Samra, a professor of emergency medicine who in December signed an open letter endorsing "Palestinians’ right to return" and linking "health equity" to divestment from Israel.

"To authentically engage in antiracism health scholarship and practice is to explicitly name injustices tied to white supremacy and maintain an unapologetic commitment to antiracism praxis that transcends US borders," the letter reads. "As such, we, the undersigned,* unequivocally support a free Palestine and Palestinians’ right to return."

Samra, who in 2021 published a paper on "infrastructural violence and the health of border abolition," did not respond to a request for comment.

To the extent the course addresses actual medical debates, it frames contested treatments as settled science, omitting evidence that cuts against its activist narrative. A unit on "Queerness/Gender," for example, assigns readings on "gender self-determination" and "DIY transition," but does not include any of the research from Europe—such as the newly released Cass Report—that has led England and other countries to restrict hormone therapies for children.

"UCLA School of Medicine has decided to shield its students from the ongoing scientific debates playing out in Europe and even in the U.S.," said Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who researches gender medicine. "This is fundamentally unserious, and a stain on the school’s reputation."

The omission of inconvenient facts extends to a unit on Los Angeles's King/Drew hospital—nicknamed "Killer King" for its high rates of medical error—which the course promotes as an example of "community health."

Founded in 1972 as a response to the Watts riots, the hospital was majority black, had a documented policy of racial preferences, and was hit with several civil rights complaints by non-black doctors alleging discrimination in hiring and promotion.

It closed in 2007 after a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Los Angeles Times found numerous cases in which patients had been killed or injured by clinical mistakes, such as overdosing a child with sedatives and giving cancer drugs to a meningitis patient. Efforts to reform the hospital stalled, according to the Times, because its board of supervisors feared coming across as racially insensitive.

The assigned readings on King/Drew do not include any of this history. Lecture slides instead praise the hospital for "suturing racial divides," but suggest that it may not have gone far enough. A focus on "producing highly talented and skilled physicians," one slide reads, "forced" King/Drew to hire doctors who were, "in some cases, not Black."

The curriculum is a "compilation of ideologic and anecdotal assertions that represent a warped view of medicine," said Stanley Goldfarb, the founder of the medical advocacy group Do No Harm and the father of Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb. "American medical education needs to purge itself of this nonsense and treat every patient as an individual."

The slides suggest that "lived experiences," "historical memory," and "other knowledges" can constitute medical expertise.

Biomedical knowledge, after all, is "just one way of knowing, understanding, and experiencing health in the world."

==

The moral of the story is, if you see a UCLA medical school certificate on your doctor's wall, leave.

If you don't see this as the same thing as faith-healing, I don't know what to tell you.

[superdiscochino]

Helping 12-year-old study for her history test the other night, they're doing European explorers, I'm reading names off flashcards, "Hernan Cortes" "Amerigo Vespucci" "Vasco de Gama," and every time she starts with "he discovered..." I make giant air quotes and exaggeratedly say "DISCOVERED" and every time she's like I KNOW I KNOW I GET IT!!!

[mummer]

re lrb a huge portion of the zionist propaganda i have personally seen posted like on facebook and insta and stuff is concentrated very specifically on denying the concept of the innocent palestinian civilian. mostly just trying to manufacturing consent for the death of children. videos will be like “look at these palestinian 6 year olds saying how much they hate jews the entire population has been sadly brainwashed irreparably nothing to be done.” or that Fucking golda meir quote thats like “maybe we’ll forgive The Arabs for killing our sons but it’ll be harder to forgive them for ~forcing us to kill their sons~”. or stuff about how they’re Forced to bomb hospitals and schools human shields etc. most entrenched zionists really are not hemming and hawwing about history most of the time… They dont care that they’re killing innocent people whatsoever like it doesnt convince them because they just dont care. They consider it utterly acceptable in their moral calculus. i dont even think most of the time it’s that they dont see palestinians as people, they might, they see them as people deserving of death

[lizard-fashion]

i’m more or less a cis woman but i get gender euphoria from young children thinking i might be a man (short hair, low voice, etc). like older people definitely look at me and see “female” without a doubt but 3-6 year olds haven’t yet developed their understandings of gender so i’m literally helping them figure it out. i’m telling them that girls can have short hair and low voices!!! it’s so exciting to me.

[beautifulscreaminglady]

white police and military bootlicker: par for course

non-white police and military bootlicker: Something Terrible Happened Here, Who's Paying You, or alternatively Blink If You Need Help

[dontlookforme00]

i feel like you should know that thanks to you i am now starting to develop a chonny jash obsession (i am here to thank you this music is very good and im liking it a lot)

I keep getting asks from my mutual about chonny jash I am SO fucking pleased with myself. YES. YES, STAR, JOIN US. YOU'RE WELCOME, NOW come scream about the music with me, I need to balance my lack of irl friends who know him (NONE of them)

The music is fucking great. Have this video essay, please

[to-thelakes]

regulus arcturus black is my roman empire

(jkr completely glossing over his importance is another reason i hate dislike her 🫶)