Taqiyya at Clayton graduation? | VinFast misses megasite deadlines | 50 year anniversary of anti-democratic Wake Schools merger
No. 178 — May 24-May 30, 2026
At the 2026 Clayton High School graduation, a disgruntled foreigner spent months convincing and deceiving her school administration to let her speak in order to have the opportunity to slip in an unapproved political statement opposing ICE and “spreading awareness” about “people in [her] country...that are unable to graduate.” (With America apparently not being her country as a self-described “Muslim Arab.”)
The State of North Carolina has filed to seize a behind-schedule mega-manufacturing site in Chatham County which had significant taxpayer investment, including using eminent domain to seize and tear down homes, businesses, and even a historic church.
It’s the 50th anniversary of the anti-democratic merger of the Wake County and Raleigh school systems along DEI lines. But what has this really accomplished?
Ungrateful “Muslim Arab” student highjacks Clayton graduation with leftist remarks
Clayton teen claims high school diploma withheld after graduation speech touched on ICE, genocide - WRAL
A graduate of Clayton High School claims her diploma was withheld after she went off the approved script for her speech to make politically-tinged statements about “families being torn apart by ICE” and “millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan.”
In a video explaining the situation, the self-described “Muslim Arab girl” Leen Hijaz described Clayton as a “very, very racist,” describing how she had to fight for months and deceive the school administration in order to have the chance to “[speak] up for all the people in my country...that are unable to graduate. (She didn’t appear to mention which of those four foreign countries she belongs to instead of the country she lives in and was educated in.)
“The only reason why I wanted to go on that stage was because I wanted to say something and I really think that somebody had to say something because nobody else is going to speak up,” Hijaz said. “I said what I was going to say at the end of my speech, if I submitted it to the school, they would have disapproved it immediately because of how racist they are.”
Hijaz also claimed her remarks were not “political,” despite explicit referencing opposition to immigration enforcement, and a general alignment with leftist ideology.
Before I leave the stage, I have one last thing to say. Every single person here has a voice; we have the privilege to use it when millions around the world are struggling and suffering to be heard. Whether it’s the millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan and so many other countries around the world, or the families being torn apart by ICE. These are not just an issue there; they are happening there, they’re happening right here as I speak. My point is, we’re not given a voice to stay silent.
— Leen Hijaz, Clayton High School graduation 2026 (as transcribed by WRAL)
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
State attempts to seize delayed VinFast manufacturing site
NC sues VinFast to take over Chatham County site after company resists sale - N&O
North Carolina sues VinFast to take back control of Chatham County land - Axios
The State of North Carolina has filed to seize a factory site under construction in southeastern Chatham County and recover $80 million in taxpayer investment after the Vietnamese electric vehicle company failed to meet performance metrics.
The agreement signed by the startup granted the state the ability to buy back the property if VinFast failed to meet benchmarks such as vertical construction by January 2024 (which has yet to happen), local manufacturing underway by July 1, and 1,750 jobs at the site by the end of the year.
Although initially reported to be on track in 2022 to meet the milestones over the next five years to receive “one of the largest economic incentive packages in state history,” the company was already announcing delays in 2023. In 2024, VinFast announced a four-year pause with production not to begin until 2028, far past the agreed to timeframe.
To add insult to injury, not only has the state invested millions in transportation infrastructure as well as water and sewer infrastructure in nearby Sanford, the NC Department of Transportation also used eminent domain to seize and tear down the history Merry Oaks Baptist Church as well as 27 homes and 5 businesses for site.
Although North Carolina law does restrict the use of eminent domain to seize property for economic development, the church property was technically seized for a road expansion necessitated by the expected traffic generated by the factory, thus bypassing the legal protection.
50 years of DEI: reflecting on Wake County’s anti-democratic school district merger
In 1973, the citizens of Wake County voted 3-1 to reject the DEI measure of merging the Wake County and Raleigh school districts, which was intended to promote “racial integration.” (The legislature did it anyway.)
Now, as the Wake County Public School System celebrates the 50th anniversary of the merger, the new generations of transplants and immigrants who now make up the majority of the county’s residence might vote by a similar margin in favor of such an agenda.
However, five decades of “equity” focused policies such as busing, racially gerrymandered base attendance districts, and magnet schools have entirely failed to eliminate the racial achievement or behavioral gap, suggesting that the philosophical foundation of this political ideology driving these policies is without merit.
The History
Wake and Raleigh schools merged 50 years ago. How the region still feels the impact - N&O
Is Wake losing the school choice battle? How the district competes for students - N&O
Wake Schools plans celebrations for 50th anniversary of school system merger - WRAL
How did this merger take place? The narrative propagated by the mainstream institutions goes something like this:
In the wake of the Supreme Court discovering that access to white people was a human right, with desegregation and the prioritization of civil rights over property rights, the evil racist white families engaged in “white flight” out of the neighborhoods, cities, and school districts they had built for no reason at all other than the fact that they were white and evil.
Raleigh was apparently no exception to the phenomenon across the country, with the outlying suburbs under the Wake County Board of Education trending white and experiencing increased demand, while the schools under the jurisdiction of the Raleigh City Board of Education trended in the opposite direction on both counts.
Given the lack of any solution for improving the quality of the predominantly black schools or the performance of black students, the legislature decided on giving the residents of Wake County the opportunity to Do The Right Thing by merging the better whiter district with the worse blacker district via a non-binding referendum in 1973.
However, when the citizens overwhelmingly rejected this opportunity, the legislature made the desired decision on behalf of the people with a bill passed by the Democratic supermajorities which controlled both chambers, and signed by the Republican Governor James Holshouser.
The consolidated school district then began pursuing an explicit strategy of racial balancing, ensuring that there wasn’t too many or too few black students at any public school in Wake County, including via strategies such as busing and magnet schools.
Although the current board is overt about their “equity” policies, the district has come to rely less on direct measures of race, including in 2010 when a brief Republican majority on the county school board made national news for a plan to shift to a “neighborhood school” model.
While the left-wing social engineers are very much back in charge, the current wave of anti-DEI and school choice sentiment on the right has resulted in a withdrawal of federal support for the continuation of the “civil rights” activist agenda, and the erosion of district-level monopolization of public education with the expansion of school choice.
However, it still doesn’t take much more than a cursory look at the current “base attendance areas” to see that the current maps drawn by the school board are far more “gerrymandered” than the oft-criticized political maps, with non-contiguous districts and many students having to pass multiple schools to get to the institution chosen by the administration.
Fifty Years of Integration: the Results
The mass migration of newcomers from all corners of the state, the country, and the globe in the past fifty years has radically changed the demographic makeup of Wake County. According to the 1980 census, the county had a population of 301,327, of which 76.8% were white and 21.8% were black.
The number of residents has approximately quadrupled in the ensuing years, with the 2020 census showing a population which is 65.5% white, 20.3% black, 11.9% Hispanic, and 10.2% Asian.
The standardized testing data shows that the project of bringing “equity” to the academic performance between racial cohorts has been an abject failure, with a metric like “Grade Level Proficiency” showing that the Wake County student demographic groups follow a pattern observed in countless contexts, where Asians (87.7%) tend to outperform whites (80.2%) who tend to outperform Hispanics (41.9%) who tend to outperform blacks (41.1%).
This pattern is so strong that knowing the demographics of a particular school’s student body can give you a fairly good guess at the overall testing results of the school, with above average schools having the most white and Asian students, while below average schools have the most blacks and Hispanics.
In fact, the top performing elementary school (White Oak) by the GLP measure is 69.4% Asian and 22.1% white, while the five worst performing schools are 0% Asian and are each less than 25% white.
Literacy, crime, and magnet schools
Earlier this year, a video went viral on social media in which a student at a STEM magnet school in Philadelphia highlighted the inability of many of his classmates to pronounce or comprehend a sentence reading “she wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.”
One may be forgiven if one thinks that the purpose of a magnet schools is to attract the best and brightest students from across a school district to receive specialized instruction commensurate with their potential.
That is, indeed, the “attraction” which is intended to draw the desired students to magnet schools, but the purpose of the magnet schools is actually to balance those students out by getting them in the same building as some of the worst and lowest-potential students in the district as a means to achieve “equity” or “desegregation,” as chronicled on the website of the Magnet Schools of America.
This explains not only why an institution offering specialized education would have a large number of students who can’t read, but also why a school like Southeast Raleigh Magnet High School stands out for incidents of stabbing or shooting, while the even more loftily named Southern School of Energy and Sustainability in the Durham school district had a brawl/riot last year involving “at least 12 people.”