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It’s mid-September, so your kids will be back in school or college on both sides of the Atlantic—but what will they actually be learning there?

Quite possibly, little more than Junior Maoism 101. Nonsense like Critical Race Theory (an obscurantist euphemism for antiwhite race hatred) and Queer Theory (an obscurantist euphemism for actual obscurantism) has been absorbed across all academic subjects.

Literally no area of the curriculum has by now been left uncolonized by senseless leftist dogma—not even, as I never tire of observing (see here and here), math. It is easy to see how humanities subjects like literature or history could be subverted politically, but math ought to be impossible to corrupt in this way. Numbers are just numbers, wholly neutral. Yet today’s activist educators think otherwise.

Calculated to Offend
Let’s begin by considering the issue of race. How on earth can you have “racist numbers”? Very easily: Just call them that.

In November 2021, U.S. pseudo-feminist organization The Women’s March carelessly performed an ideologically unacceptable calculation resulting in the production of just such an obscene digit. Emailing supporters, The March reported the average amount donated to them recently had been $14.92—1492 being the year Christopher Columbus discovered/systematically raped America (it depends on which way you vote now).

Fearing outraged members of America’s numerically disturbed community might write in to complain, The March hurriedly tweeted thus:

We apologize deeply for the e-mail that was sent today. $14.92 was our average donation amount this week. It was an oversight on our part not to make the connection to a year of conquest, colonization and genocide for Indigenous people, especially [just] before Thanksgiving.

Once, people in receipt of unhinged letters of complaint about the existence of certain “significant” random numbers, like 1492 or 666, would simply have laughed, then thrown them in the bin. Now, so successfully have their minds been captured by Marxism, they actually find this prospect plausible. (The only genuinely racist number in existence today, by the way, is 1619…)

Those Who Can’t Count, Teach
The real problem is that leftist pod people like these have now seized whole swathes of the West’s public education systems. Prime amongst such zombies’ number is Rochelle Gutierrez, a California-born Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, who has helped write official guidelines for the training of future school math teachers. A biologist, Gutierrez has no specific higher qualification in math at all, yet has still managed to invent an entire new field of hitherto-unimaginable human knowledge: “Mathematx” (pronounced “math-e-mat-esh,” as if cruelly impersonating the disabled).

As far as can be understood by inferior white men’s minds like my own, this is a new form of so-called “ethnomathematics,” designed to appeal to the souls of Latinx or Chicanx persons, as Communists condescendingly refer to Mexicans these days.

In an algebraic equation, “x” may refer to an unknown or indeterminate quantity, and the “x” in mathematx apparently “signifies a variable to represent any gender form,” as Latinx can be mxn or womxn too, you know, and Gutierrez’s “choice to use [such terms] reflects my respect for how people choose to name themselves.” But most Hispanics hate being called Hispanx, so she doesn’t actually respect what they choose to call themselves at all, does she?

Yet Gutierrez goes even further than this, preferring not to speak of Latinos (men) and Latinas (women), but Latin@s, as this “decenters the patriarchal nature of the Spanish language,” as the @ sign seems to visually combine the “a” and “o” gender suffixes in one gender-bending typographical whole, thereby showing “a sign of solidarity with individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning and queer.” What @n @bsolute @rsehole.

Triggered by Trigonometry
Gutierrez explains her feelings about the @ sign in her 2013 pseudo-academic paper “Why (Urban) Mathematics Teachers Need Political Knowledge,” published on a toilet wall somewhere south of Tijuana in 2013 (i.e., online at the US Department of Ed-u-kay-shun, disturbingly enough). Gutierrez is perhaps best known for her 2017 opinion that “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness,” but in her 2013 essay was already claiming that “similar to whiteness, mathematics holds unearned privilege in society”—unlike, say, Gutierrez herself.

How is math’s privilege “unearned”? Well, it is “a form of microaggression” that keeps non-capable non-white kids held down in their place (even though many white children are hopeless with numbers too…) by operating as “an objective arbiter of truth” and “a proxy for intelligence” because it is “based on a Western concept of rationality” that “operates with a kind of formatting power on our lives.”

Translated, this means it requires unambiguously right answers, rather than allowing stupid lazy non-white ghetto kids to bring “their truth” to the table, as they say. Ask an indoctrinated Hispanic or queer kid to voice their opinion on a poem, play, or novel, and, no matter what drivel they reply with, it can be spuriously justified as their arguable subjective opinion, even if said opinion is “Romeo and Juliet were secretly trans, that’s why they really both killed themselves,” or “‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is racist because it’s not ‘Ode on a Venezuelan Vase.’” But ask them what 2 + 2 is and, much like a preprogrammed calculator, they will have no option but to answer “4.”

This is a form of racist, classist, colonialist oppression that must be resisted: There are actually some extreme leftists out there who now dispute that 2 + 2 does necessarily equal 4, and Gutierrez has urged teachers to develop “empathy” for students who might answer otherwise due to them possessing “different mathematical assumptions” (i.e., being unable to add up properly). Math, she preaches, should be reconfigured into a “moral” issue, not a “rational” one.

This kind of thinking is how we end up with insanities like the 2021 revelation that a pedagogical workbook, A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, was advising American teachers that insisting sums have correct solutions to them is a kind of mathematical hate crime. One especially egregious quote from this text was that “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’” Objectivity, of course, is an inherently white Western idea, supposedly, and so must be dismantled immediately—and that’s an objective fact.

Calculated Chaos
Ethnomathematicians believe that white men have historically colonized non-white subaltern natives’ very minds along with their physical homelands, tricking them into thinking that, for example, “4” is the only way to perform the calculation 2 + 2.

To understand this claim, consider how the effects of such mental colonization were eerily anticipated in chapter IX (or “9” for those successfully number-conquered by Islam—the 1,2,3, etc., numerals we use today are actually Arabic in origin, yet the potential “racism” of this fact is curiously never mentioned by the likes of Gutierrez…) of Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim. Here, the titular young culturally Indian, ethnically Irish street-orphan lad manages to resist the native hypnotist Lurgan Sahib’s attempts to mesmerize him into hallucinating a smashed jug is magically reassembling itself, piece by jagged piece, like so:

So far Kim had been thinking in Hindi, but a tremor came on him, and with an effort like that of a swimmer before sharks…his mind leaped up from a darkness that was swallowing it and took refuge in—the multiplication-table in English!… The jar had been smashed—yes, smashed—not the native word, he would not think of that—but smashed—into fifty pieces, and twice three was six, and thrice three was nine, and four times three was twelve. He clung desperately to the repetition. The shadow-outline of the jar cleared like a mist after rubbing eyes. There were the broken shards; there was the spilt water drying in the sun, and through the cracks of the veranda showed, all ribbed, the white house-wall below—and thrice twelve was thirty-six!

Thanks to the three times-table Kim does not see the jug falsely reassemble itself, which is the first time the hypnotist’s hallucinatory magic has not worked upon one of his dupes; the far greater rational powers of white Western math have saved our hero from the snares of perceptual delusion. Yet, according to those of Rochelle Gutierrez’s mindset, he would have done better to simply lie back and accept the native jugglery. Were Kim not already half-Irish, he could almost have been labeled a numerical race-traitor.

Crossed Wires
Readers may recall series 4 of The Wire, in which an inner-city schoolteacher wins the hearts and minds of his criminal black math class by teaching them nothing but probability, as mastery of this specific subject would facilitate their ability to beat mathematically clueless adult gamblers in games of dice to win cash and drugs. Strangely enough, this is what the entire scam of ethnomathematics seems set ultimately to end in: trying to appeal to kids of non-white ethnicity by reframing the curriculum around their alleged innate criminality.

There was once a widespread joke document, “The L.A. Math Test,” circulating online, which purported to be a California Education Department worksheet designed by hyperpoliticized individuals like Rochelle Gutierrez to get urban black and Hispanic youths into math by asking them immoral yet criminally practical questions like the following:

Rufus is pimping for three girls. If the price is $65 for each trick, how many tricks will each girl have to turn so Rufus can pay for his $800-per-day crack habit?

Thelma can cook dinner for her 16 children for $7.50 per night. She gets $234 a month welfare for each child. If her $325 per month rent goes up 15%, how many more children should she have to keep up with her expenses?

Raoul is in prison for 6 years for murder. He got $10,000 for the hit. If his common-law wife is spending $100 per month, how much money will be left when he gets out of prison and how many years will he get for killing the bitch that spent his money?

You can tell what’s coming next: a number of stupid lefty teachers across America and Canada saw the Test, thought it was real, and taught it to their classes under the genuine assumption they were doing good, resulting in their immediate suspension.

That’s how brainless some of your kids’ educators these days actually are. The contemporary West must be the only society in history whose literacy and numeracy rates actually increase in line with soaring child truancy rates, not fall. There’s probably some real math out there somewhere that proves it.

Next week: How math can now be gay and transgender as well as racist!