Jacob the Brave
Good morning all,
Last night’s screening for Killing America was a success. Despite rain and a terrible parking situation in crowded downtown Palo Alto, the screening sold out.
After the screening, a young woman came up to me and told me that she used to be one of those activists marching on the frontlines of the protests. She was an ally down with the cause and believed she was making change. “I thought it was all about education, about uplifting people. Then I realized it was propaganda. But I had no idea until I saw your film how DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) was leading to such hate.”
She now wants to host a screening in her own East Bay community.
The real highlight of the evening was panelist Jacob Yuryev, a 17 year old senior at Carlmont High School who will be attending Stanford University in the fall. He plays a key role in the documentary as one of the two student trustees on the Sequoia Union High School District which serves as the film’s main battleground.
During the panel discussion, he was asked to describe what it was like to be a student living under what can be called “the DEI culture” at his high school. What he described was a culture of ideological conformity. While there are teachers committed to teaching their subjects in the true sense, there are many activists teachers who expect students to parrot their way of thinking instead of practicing critical thinking. Jacob even admitted that he, at times, has repeated the teacher’s beliefs in his answers or essays in order to score the top grade.
He then mentioned the example of a “well known student” who was a grade ahead of him. That student had achieved fame on campus for challenging teachers with well reasoned arguments and for refusing to conform to what he did not believe in. Jacob then revealed that there had been a dispute over a grade the student had received for an essay. The dispute eventually reached administrative level. In the end, the teacher chose to resolve the dispute by lowering the student’s grade another notch and was allowed to do so.
I’ve never heard of that happening before. These disputes usually end with the teacher defending the original grade or some sort of compromise that moves the grade up a notch. But to punish the student by lowering the grade?
In fact, the teacher that we had to blur out in Killing America — because he was afraid of losing his job for speaking out — said that he was not allowed to fail students and had to inflate grades in order decrease the disparities between the races. So for this teacher to lower that student’s grade meant only one thing: the student was being punished for challenging the teacher’s ideology. That’s unheard of.
Then again, I’m hearing things I never heard of before. But think about this for one second. The only reason why that student achieved fame was because he was one of the very few that voiced his own opinions. In my day, voicing your opinion was demanded of you, it was the rule, not the exception. My honors English teacher, Mr. Sinclair, would give me a look of disdain if I did not have a well thought out opinion or argument ready.
(By the way, I have to apologize that this was not recorded. We were invited to be on a Bay Area TV station and we decided to make the best use of my time up here by throwing together this impromptu screening rather quickly. But I know we will have Jacob on another panel and will be sure to have him speak on this again.)
After fielding questions on antisemitism, Jacob then made another revealing statement. When he was applying to be the student trustee on the Sequoia Union High School District board, he knew that his merit — which he has more than plenty of — would not be enough. He knew he would have to show ideological conformity to the DEI culture that his interviewers expected of him. Jacob said, “I knew what answers they wanted and I spoon-fed it to them.”
When you see Jacob in the documentary, you see a brave young man fighting for what he believes in. He argues with the board against removing the honors classes. He tells the board how students are afraid to speak up for what they believe in because they depend on recommendations from teachers among other things. He also explains that well-off families supplement the lack of honors classes with private tutoring classes and asks out loud who is being hurt the most here.
I had wondered how such a contrarian and non-conformist like Jacob was allowed onto the board. Well, he clearly had to wear the mask of conformity in order to grease his way. During slavery and segregation, blacks had to wear the mask of conformity as well — a subject covered extensively by my father’s writings. And now that Jacob had to wear such a mask reveals how deeply race (DEI) has rotten our institutions once again.
I was given the last word on this panel. I decided to speak of how the school culture was one of merit during my time. I was born profoundly deaf and my hearing aids only gave me about 15% of what “normal” people hear. Lip reading helped immensely but if a teacher or student turned their backs on me, I missed that information.
The solution was for the district to provide me with an itinerant teacher who took notes for me and made sure I did not miss anything. Adding another salaried person to the staff and for just one student was a huge cost to the district. My parents were required to meet with the superintendent twice a year to argue for the continuation of the service. One day, when I was in seventh grade, they came home with stern faces. They told me that the superintendent was not happy with my grades and that he had learned that I was goofing off.
Then they told me that the superintendent was demanding that I get my GPA above 3.5 or he was going to pull the teacher. My deafness — a true disability compared to what most kids claim today — did not matter. It would not be allowed to be used as an excuse. I had to straighten up or else. And I did.
I would not be where I am today, living the wonderful life I have now, if I had used my deafness as an excuse.
Today, I would have been pressured to use my deafness as an excuse.
That is why it was inspiring to hear Jacob speak last night. He’s only 17 but was mature enough to navigate today’s toxic racial politics in order to get through the door where he revealed his true self: a fierce defender of meritocracy and America’s principles.
From that young women who realized the errors of her activism to Jacob, there is much hope among the young for America’s future. It is these young people that our society needs to be focused on developing instead giving hours of our days to those false prophets who dominate our headlines and media with extreme positions that only serve to fuel their never-ending appetite for more clicks.
All my best,
Eli
Thank you for the white pill. Jacob the Brave is becoming a man of steel. Hope the rest of his generation awakens before it's too late.
Thank you for this, it gives me hope.