Episode 205: “Confronting the K-12 Racialist Star Chamber” with Sahar Tartak
Release Date: 11/10/2022
The Bill Walton Show
The war in Ukraine drags on at a terrible cost for all involved with no seeming end in sight. Some estimate that there have been almost 400,000 total Russian and Ukraine casualties so far, although both sides claim their losses are much lower. Ukraine is on the ropes and running out of manpower with its most of its elite forces destroyed. Missiles for its air defenses are depleted. Both sides are dragooning teenagers and old men for their armies. Russia’s military command is in disarray. But no one knows what is really going on. A key problem understanding the war in Ukraine is...
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“Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism “Americans have long sensed a new kind tyranny creeping into our lives. This disquiet has hovered in the background for a long time, though most of us couldn’t put our finger on it. Trends to control speech and behavior are isolating us from one another, and they have begun to intensify rapidly and spread throughout society’s...
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When Walmart went public in 1970 and soon thereafter listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its SEC disclosure prospectus was 20 pages long. Today, a prospectus requires massive numbers of mostly obscure disclosures imposing very real liabilities for the issuing company - but which no one reads, except for lawyers who charge $2,000 an hour to read it and to write it - and which can run upwards to 300 pages or more. Under President Joe Biden’s whole of government effort to weaponize federal agencies, this regulatory creep has become an outright onslaught of new regulations. Except...
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is proceeding with plans to build a new headquarters which would be twice the size of the The Pentagon, the world’s largest office building. The new FBI headquarters is to be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres. The Kremlin in Moscow —a walled fortress containing the administrative offices of the Russian central government, the official presidential residence, massive auditoriums, an arsenal, a museum, four palaces, three cathedrals and several churches—is just over 66...
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What are the evolutionary differences between men and women, and how do they survive and thrive through differing competitive strategies? In this episode, Dr. Joyce Benenson talks with Bill about her book, Warriors and Worriers, which draws her extensive lifelong research on children’s interactions. The result is fascinating array of studies and stories that explore the ways boys and men deter their enemies, while girls and women find assistants to aid them in coping with vulnerable children and elders. Dr. Benenson, a retired professor of psychology at Emmanuel College and an associate...
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Is the Federal Reserve a godlike Zeus able to control our money and the economy, preserve financial stability and keep a lid on inflation? Or is it like the Wizard of Oz? A little man behind the curtain pulling levers to create smoke and noise to terrify and control people, but in the end only one market participant among many worldwide. If you’re a bond trader in New York, trying to predict minute day to day changes in interest rates, it’s more like Zeus. For the rest of us, I believe, it’s like Oz. Trying to figure out the Fed is a complicated business and I'm...
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It looks like the bill is finally coming due after decades of reckless monetary policy and out of control federal spending. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation. Interest rates have risen dramatically. Mortgage rates have more than doubled. And commercial banks are now sitting on more than $600 billion of unrealized bond losses. Of course, and as expected, with the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, the Regulators have pulled out their default playbook declaring yet another institution systematically risky, taking another step toward the federalization of...
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This week, Americans for Limited Government published a provocative and insightful piece about the banking system asking, "Has the United States banking system become too big to save?” In the past three years, to finance massive federal spending, the Treasury has issued almost $8 trillion new treasury bonds with almost $4 trillion bought by US banks during the tail-end of the Fed’s era of zero interest rates. US Treasury Bonds? Sounds like a safe investment for a bank, but here’s the problem. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation...
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Under President Joe Biden and his Administration the whole of government has been weaponized to promote a so-called Diversity Equity and Inclusion agenda that, in fact, will bring about just the opposite of what these words mean. Case in point is an assertive, left-wing, anti-family Department of Labor with its power to regulate and attempt to social engineer virtually every aspect of the American workplace. Congress has granted it a stunning amount of power to administer more than 180 federal laws and thousands of regulations affecting more than 10 million employers and 150...
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Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily as the government has claimed. The emails emerged last month in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private...
info_outlineRecently The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by my guest on this episode, Yale freshman Sahar Tartak.
Titled “My High School’s ‘Antiracist’ Agitprop”, she described how illiberal her supposedly liberal high school had become, and the ways she and other students were “berated, bullied and insulted” for voicing dissent towards the school’s race essentialist policies and programs.
The story goes like this.
In 2021 Great Neck North High School directed the student government to give $375 of student funds to a “racial equity” group to speak to the student body about “systemic racism.”
Sahar, then a Senior at Great Neck, was the student government’s treasurer, and felt they didn’t know enough about the organization and its mission to disburse the funds.
So she refused to sign the check.
What happened next was that the full weight of the education cartel’s racialist star chamber fell upon a smart and courageous 17 year old.
The teachers who advise the student government berated, bullied and insulted her at their next meeting. They began by announcing that her social studies teacher would be present. Together, the three adults told her that the principal himself found my stance “appalling.” She had made them and the school “look bad,” they told her. One teacher said the situation gave her “hives.” Another said “If you’re not on board with systemic racism, I have trouble with that, girlfriend.”
The adults in the room were teachers who had the power to grade and affect her prospects of getting into college.
After that, there were a series of tense meetings between Sahar and the administration and her parents, resulting in stalemate.
Sahar, whose mother escaped revolutionary Iran, and grandfather escaped the Nazis, wouldn’t back down.
“The experience prompted me and a few like-minded others to look into our school’s curriculums. What we found was an arsenal of lopsidedly race-obsessed lesson plans.”
One was the American Psychological Association’s “Apology to People of Color” for its role in “Promoting, Perpetuating, and Failing to Challenge Racism.” Another asserted that America is a place where racism is “no better today than it was 200 years ago.”
So what does she do? She presents her findings in an audacious speech to the school board and receives a standing ovation - from other students parents, not the school board.