The brainwashing of California kids

IF YOU asked me about the Jewish contribution to California, I’d think of Louis B Mayer, Kirk Douglas, Levi Strauss, and Neil Diamond’s

Hot August Night album. But no one asked me when it came to compiling the Jewish American lesson plan in California’s new Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC). So the keywords that teachers must emphasise are “antisemitism, conditional whiteness, identity, intersectionality, racial formation, racialization, Jews of color, Mizrachi, Sephardi, Ashkenazi”.

When I wrote about this last month, California’s Jewish groups were preparing their appeals and bickering with each other. Last Thursday, California’s Department of Education unanimously passed a slightly modified version of the ESMC.

It is now doctrine in America’s largest school system that the United States runs not on donuts, but on “white supremacy”, and that Jews, when not the target of white supremacy, like to pass themselves off as white. Which is to say, Jews are seen as the sinister and shape-shifting enemies of “racial justice”.

Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), a small Californian group, are claiming victory because the ESMC has added a class on Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews to the existing session on the conditionally white

Ashkenazi race traitors. Both of these lessons appear in the compulsory Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies module. If this is a triumph, then I’m a Tongan.

The Sikh American lesson plan includes the history of Sikh immigration to California and explains what a turban is. The Jewish American lesson plan teaches that, “Light-skinned Jews may experience the benefits of conditional whiteness on the basis of their appearance, for example, safer encounters with law enforcement.”

The JIMENA lesson plan describes how Mizrahi and Sephardi immigrants to California have experienced “prejudice and discrimination” as “intersectional refugees, immigrants, and racialized Jewish Americans”, including at the hands of the Ashkenazi majority. It shows no such attention to detail when it comes to the murders and mass expulsions that caused their immigration: “Many Arab countries include Christian communities and some have also had Jewish communities… Since the 1940s, one million Jewish refugees from the Middle East, who are also known as Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, fled antisemitic persecution to countries around the world.”

The ESMC, otherwise so fluent about racism and persecution, can’t bring itself to say what happened to those Jewish communities. No mention of where they fled from or why. No mention of Israel, either.

The problem with the ESMC isn’t in the details: it’s in the fundamentals. Ethnic Studies is part of the cult of Critical Race Theory, which has broken out from an obscure corner of the academy and is now overrunning the institutions of America. So it makes little difference that the final draft of the ESMC says “an oppressive economy” where the first draft said “capitalism”, or that it substitutes readings from Edward Said where it previously praised BDS.

Donald Trump might not know his Adorno from his Horkheimer but he banned the teaching of CRT on federal property. The Biden-Harris administration, in its glib wisdom, has lifted the ban. CRT is going to spread across America like so much melted cheese.

The little Californians of the future will learn little of use — unless, that is, they aspire to join the authors of the ESMC and become professional racial agitators. In which case, of course, the ESMC will be invaluable.

It’s a how-to guide for “anti-racists”. It slices and dices populations by colour and class. It identifies the race and class enemies that are beyond the pale of “white supremacy”. And that, incredibly, is where it places the Jews. When the earlier versions of the ESMC were released, the big Jewish organizations like the ADL tried to moderate the decree when they should have denounced

it. Now they’re denouncing it, but too late.

The ESMC asks each child to draw an individual “Iceberg of Identity”, identifying the personal intersectionalities that are visible and those that are below the waterline. This is nothing if not appropriate: the changes to the ESMC are improvements in the way of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Fortunately, one of the ESMC’s authors has created a lesson plan for building unity in the classroom. Unfortunately, it’s through invoking the ancient Mayan gods: “Seeking the roots of the truth, seeking the truth of the roots, elders and us youth, critical thinking through,” the little Californians will chant. “Texkatlopoka, Tezkatlipoka, smoking mirror, selfreflection Tezkatlipoka.”

The Mayans, the ancestors of modern Mexicans, honoured Tezkatlipoka through human sacrifice. Presumably the Department of Education’s pagan revival is intended to make Mexican Americans feel at home, though they’ve been Catholic for centuries. When a government teaches the worship of Moloch on the taxpayers’ dime, you

can guess who’s next for the chop.

Dominic Green is deputy editor of The Spectator’s US edition