The purpose of this essay is to showcase a debate I had with a person in my hometown that I believe is dishonest in her intentions for involving herself in the Newberg school board decision to ban political symbols from the school system (such as BLM, Antifa and Pride flags). By reading this essay you will better understand my position that the school board vote to remove these symbols from our school system was the correct one, because you’ll see the true nature of the type of person who believes these symbols should be in the schools.
As most of the residents of my hometown of Newberg, Oregon are aware, on August 16th, Erin McCarthy, who owns a local recording studio, erected a large trans-racial pride flag on her farm in view of the school. Although during our debate she lied about doing it for this reason, it is clear in her Facebook post (which is publicly available information) she did it to send a message to the school board, which means her actions were politically motivated.
The local newspaper, the Newberg Graphic, published an article about the erection of the flag on her farm the very next day on August 17th, 2021, titled, Newberg couple erects Pride display.
The Newberg Graphic article story was then picked up by several other newspapers, including major news outlets. This made Erin very happy as she gloated about how much attention she was getting from the news on her Facebook wall.
A few days later, as detailed in the article The Newberg Graphic article, Volunteers Erect BLM Sign Next to Pride Billboard ( August 26 202), a large BLM flag was erected next to it. The article features photos and videos of the event, demonstrating that this flag erection was coordinated with reporters onscreen.
The McCarthy’s have also created a Gofundme page to raise money for the stated purpose of improving McCarthy’s private property. While they claim it is to install security cameras and repair a broken fence, it doesn’t change the fact these additions have the effect of improving their property and therefore they are personally financially benefited by it. This isn’t a charity.
These are all important facts to know, because they will soon become very relevant as you read the debate I had with Erin McCarthy about her behavior.
Who Am I and Why Does It Matter?
It doesn’t really matter who I am, because my arguments rely on evidence and logic. However many people want to know who is speaking to them. So, here is some information about me so you can better understand the context of this essay.
I was born in Newberg, and I attended the local school system. My family has lived in the area for about a century. I enlisted in the Army when I was seventeen years old, and I served for five years, including a tour during OIF. After I was honorably discharged from the military I traveled around the US, living in many different cities. I eventually became an entrepreneur in video streaming entertainment.
Obviously, just like anyone else I have my own way I think is best to live in life, but I also believe in liberty,
- I think people should be legally allowed to choose their own path in life, so long as they’re not doing anything that is morally evil.
- My politics are centrist-leaning conservative.
- I do not believe in the concept of human races (i.e. that there are specific behavioral traits dependent on ethnicity, as well as attributes such as intelligence or morality that are tied to ethnicity biologically) , because there is no scientific evidence for them.
- I believe in the Common Humanity approach to addressing diversity — that is, the development of shared group identity based on commonly held values and attributes, as opposed to the Common Enemy approach, which is an obsessive fixation on differences to create tribalism along these differences.
- I am a registered Democrat but I am disgusted with the direction of the party the past few years and I refuse to vote for their candidates anymore. Yet, I still believe America is the greatest country in the world,; in fact, I believe America is the greatest country in all of human history.
When you look at our country in its proper context, America has been a pioneer in liberty.
We are one of the few countries in 5,000 years of human history to end slavery, bestow equal rights of citizenship to people of any gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity. We are a country with no caste system, a country where anyone can start a business, people can choose their jobs, decide who they want to marry, can move between cities and regions without restrictions, and the list goes on and on.
Sure, America didn’t get to this point overnight. It took about 200 years — but that’s faster than not at all. At present, there are many countries that haven’t achieved this level of progress in the many hundreds of years they have existed. Even if you look into antiquity, almost no country did even half of the things that America has done. Rome never did all of these things and it was around for a thousand years!
So, I believe America is the greatest country in all of human history because it offers the most people the most liberty while ensuring a high quality of living standard, and I will fiercely defend this belief to those who say otherwise. I have sufficient knowledge of history to articulate these defenses, and I did in fact raise my hand and volunteer to serve my country as a soldier. “This We’ll Defend”.
As a result of my travels, I have a rather significant amount of experience interacting with people from many walks of life, and of different ideologies. This includes Critical race theory, which I am familiar with to the degree I have authored a lengthy, well cited essay on its actual origins and intentions, which you can read at one of my other blogs via this link. You can read my full essay discussing the origins of Critical Race Theory and why it is actually a dangerous, anti-American ideology, with citations to the original publications that developed its core ideas, many of which are actually available for read from the Department of Education and other universities (all of which I cited and linked to).
Recently, because I am alarmed at how this stuff has infected my small home town, I have been posting into the Newberg-Dundee Facebook Group protesting the teaching of Critical Race Theory (which also goes under the names ‘anti-racism training’, ‘inclusion training’ and ‘diversity training’) in the school system.
I do wholly support the Newberg school board members who voted to remove this stuff from our classrooms and campuses. Contrary to what other media outlets claim, the school board has full legal authority to restrict the display of these objects, per Supreme Court case decision Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. Due to the nature of public schools, they are not a public forum and their purpose is to teach children how to become productive members of our republic. It’s contrary to the mission of the public schools for the schools to be used to teach children any other values, especially values that claim America is inherently ‘systemically racist’ and evil.
A school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, even though the government could not . … (Judicial action to protect students’ rights is justified) only when the decision to censor a school-sponsored publication, theatrical production or other vehicle of student expression has no valid educational purpose
Supreme court ruling, Hazelwood V Kuhlmeier
Furthermore, the Government Speech Doctrine means governments have special ability to restrict speech using public funds to ensure that speech is consist with American shared values. This is well established law.
The Debate with Erin McCarthy
On September 17th I began having exchanges in the group with Erin McCarthy herself, and through these exchanges I provided McCarthy ample time and opportunity to explain her positions and defend them. What follows is a copy of the public messages between us in the group.
During these exchanges you will see that Erin is fully aware that the Trans-Racial Pride Flag on her property is a racially exclusive symbol. You will also see that she is extremely bigoted against heterosexual “white” males (cis white males) and several times used my gender as a reason for her to dismiss my points when she was unable to refute them using logic and evidence. This even involved catching her contradict herself a few times, too. She even attempted to obfuscate her financial benefit from the Gofundme page by claiming she didn’t create it.
By reading these messages you will see what she and other Newberg social activists who want these divisive symbols believe.
The original thread url: https://www.facebook.com/groups/348215152453862/posts/896275204314518/
As a note. the link I shared is this article, and this was the section I highlighted.
As a note, the link I shared is to is a press release from the Newberg school district, located here.
If you had read my essay about Critical Race Theory, you’ll recognize the employment of language in the press release pertaining to a claim of “systemic racism” conforms to the arguments used by CRT activists. It’s been the assertion from the very first 1970 publication by Bidol that the schools are ‘systemically racist’ because they teach shared American values and that ‘anti-racist racist activists’ need to stop teaching shared American values because they are “racist”. This is what the activists are doing to the educational materials in town as they indoctrinate kids into CRT under the disguised label of ‘diversity’ and ‘anti-racism training’. They use these latter terms to disguise CRT, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, to go undetected by parents who aren’t familiar with what CRT actually is.
The link I shared is to the Wikipedia article for motivated reasoning, which is a form of fallacious reasoning that uses emotionally biased reasoning to produce justifications or make decisions that are most desired rather than those that accurately reflect the evidence. These social activists frequently use motivated reasoning in their debates, because the CRT ideology relies heavily on motivated reasoning. This dependency is the main reason why CRT is often referred to as a cult.
I just want to pause here for a moment so you can absorb the gravity of what Erin McCarthy has said.
Thus ends the debate I had with Erin McCarthy.
Final Thoughts For Residents of Newberg
The residents of Newberg need to ask themselves some very important questions,
- Is Newberg a place where you wish your sons to be taught that their opinions do not matter based on their ethnicity and gender?
- Is Newberg a place where you want kids to be taught the absolute most important things about themselves is their skin color, gender and sexual orientation? And that they must rally under exclusionary political symbols that represent these things?
- Is Newberg going to become a place where someone can just shout wolf and be believed, even when they provide no evidence for their claims? Is this going to become a city where individual feelings matter more than facts, and a person can justify any action just because they feel it is true, even if its objectively not true, and everyone else just has to step aside and let them do whatever they want?
- Are we going to teach children of our town to be ‘anti-racist racists’ who believe everyone who is “white” is inherently racist and they must become a cult-like zealot like Erin who calls herself an ‘ally’ of what is essentially a black separatist movement (BLM) that uses violence to intimidate others for political gain?
- Do you want your children to become a person like Erin, who is completely unable to articulate her thoughts using logic, and who instead demands she is to be believed just because she claims to be moral? And when she is asked to provide evidence for her claims, decides to just call that person an asshole? And who initially tries to obscure her involvement and benefit from a Gofundme page until she gets called on it?
I think the majority of residents in Newberg don’t agree with Erin McCarthy and these other social activists who have moved to our town in a desire to escape the consequences of the bad ideas those towns allowed to infect their own school systems. Now they have brought these bad ideas like Critical Race Theory from Portland and other failed communities into Newberg, which has never had the problems those other places have. These activists are now trying to infuse our community with the same bad ideas that led to all the social problems they are running from. Are we going to allow that to happen?
I believe these activists are wolves in sheep’s clothing. They think they can use terms like ‘love’ while preaching hatred, that they can claim others are ‘bigots’ for questioning their motivations when their claims are contradicted by their actions, and that all criticism of their behavior and ideology can be dismissed by projecting their own negative personality qualities onto others.
This is my opinion,
- You should not ally yourself with racists who excuse their racism and discrimination by reinventing terms to have new definitions so they can excuse their own bigoty.
- You should not ally yourself with people who wish to teach children America is ‘systemically racist’ and evil. It’s objectively not; 100% of every politician who voted to pass the laws to end slavery, and nearly 99% of those who also voted for every major piece of civil rights legislation, was a heterosexual European descended male, who was elected into office by a voting body that was overwhelmingly the same. If America really was the kind of country they think it is, why did the majority of American heterosexual European descended males support the civil rights changes that enabled the same rights and protections they enjoyed to apply to everyone who is a citizen of this country? These facts contradict the narrative that our country is systematically racist, which is why it is blatantly incorrect in its conclusions.
- You should not ally yourself with people who erect racially divisive flags in view of schools and who believe it’s okay because it’s only prejudicial against ‘cis white males’ (a term that was invented by third wave feminists and that is frequently used in a derogatory way to imply that European descended males are morally inferior because they have ‘privilege’, which in their framework is an abstract concept based on the incorrect perception that our socio-political environment in America is a zero-sum game where one ethnic, gender or other special population group cannot thrive unless another fails) .
I believe the school board vote to remove these symbols from our school was a good vote. I think it doesn’t go far enough. I think we should also ban these symbols from our public buildings, such as the library and town hall, because they are racist, politically divisible symbols and our public institutions shouldn’t be displaying them. And we definitely need to get the CRT crap out of our schools. Otherwise, I fear Newberg will cease to be a nice place to live and it’ll start turning into Portland or one of these other places that has nightly riots and violent mobs running around smashing up private residences and businesses while the rioters are decked out in trans-racial pride flags and BLM flags.
It’s easy to think that America will always be a great country, and cities like Newberg will always be great places to live. But great places take maintenance to remain great. They take work. They take people willing to defend them when others wish to turn them toward darker paths.
I support the school board members who voted to remove these divisive ideologies from our campuses, who don’t want our public money to spread ideologies that teach children to tribalize along ethnic, gender and sexual orientation lines. I believe we need to go back to the Common Humanity approach that taught children these are not the most important things to judge a person by, nor to judge themselves by, either. But it won’t happen if people are too afraid to speak out against the true racists and bigots in our town, who want to spread their cult into our schools.
Speak up. Speak out. Let your voice be known. Don’t let your tax dollars be used to spread hatred of America and what our shared values are. The children of our town do not need to decorate their classrooms and bodies with divisive political symbols, branding them from an early age into movements they don’t fully understand. What they need is an education that teaches them how to use logic, science and evidence, so they can make these decisions once they are an adult. The future of our republic depends on children learning to do this. It’ll collapse, like all failed republics before it, if it succumbs to the madness of crowds who use motivated reasoning to guide their politics.
UPDATE:
Erin McCarthy posted this to her Facebook wall today,
Erin says not to judge the town by the actions of a few, and yet also claims Newberg is a cesspool of racism. Quite a contradiction.
Her messages were reshared by Ryan Clarke on Twitter, who seems to be the Newberg Graphic reporter providing all the negative coverage of Newberg and who is, in my opinion, providing an exceptionally one-sided narrative of the events taking place in our town by only providing comments from the social activists, such as Tai Harden-Moore, who owns the Critical Race Theory consulting firm that the mayor and city council hired last April, and whom Ryan Clarke has quoted in every article he’s written about this topic without disclosing that political and financial connection while claiming she is just a ‘concerned parent’ .
In reality, Tai Harden-Moore is deeply involved in the social activism in town, since her consulting firm is employed by the city. And how does she plan to help? Well, she’s told us.
I talk more about Tai Harden-Moore and her racist ideologies and viewpoints in the next article. Please click here to read it.
