More than 100 years ago, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that popular catchwords can stunt critical thinking for 50 years or more. In his latest book, Social Justice Fallacies, revered economist and scholar Thomas Sowell confirms Holmes’ observation by examining the buzzwords that self-described “social justice” proponents commonly use today. He shows that, despite many years — and in some cases even centuries or more — of evidence revealing these words to be nonsense, our media and cultural elites continue touting them in utter defiance of facts.
Social Justice’s False Premise
Consider, for example, the very term “social justice.” It is predicated on the assumption that institutional discrimination is the primary reason for differences among groups of people, whether among races, economic classes, or even between the sexes. It assumes that were it not for such discrimination, all races, groups, and classes would be equally represented in all human endeavors. In other words, human beings are equal not only in their nature and capacities but in theirability todevelop those capacities.
As Sowell documents, however, this assumption is rarely tested empirically. In fact, both the historical record and everyday experience regularly contradict it. For example, not only have homogenous societies had unequal representation among groups of people in various endeavors, but even twin siblings who are raised under the same roof and by the same set of parents show vast differences in aptitude, performance, and cognitive ability. This is because factors beyond both our knowledge and our control — including factors that begin long before birth — heavily influence the development of human capabilities, including intelligence.
Culture and Competence
Some cultural traditions, for example, go back centuries or even millennia and thus continue to orient the developmental capacities of the people living in these cultures today. For instance, Sowell notes that the Germans have been brewing beer for thousands of years, far longer than most other cultures. It is, therefore, no surprise that they tend to be superior at making beer nowadays. Likewise, for reasons that need not concern us here, Jewish people have historically been significantly involved in matters of finance, where they continue to excel to this day.
It is simply folly, however, to believe that government decree could circumvent these longstanding cultural traditions without major catastrophe. Moreover, these “reciprocal inequalities,” as Sowell calls them, rarely amount to one group dominating all fields of human achievement. “Even highly successful groups,” he writes, “have seldom been highly successful in all endeavors. Asian Americans and Jewish Americans are seldom found among the leading athletic stars or German Americans among charismatic politicians.”
Cultural Inequalities Aren’t Fair
Of course, Sowell quickly adds that this does not mean that life is fair for all groups of people, much less to all individuals, or that there is nothing that can be done about injustices in the world. It does mean, however, that we ought to be humble about the limits of both our knowledge and our power to improve things rather than make them worse. As he points out, “We might agree that ‘equal chances for all’ would be desirable. But that in no way guarantees that we have either the knowledge or the power required to make that goal attainable, without ruinous sacrifices of other desirable goals, ranging from freedom to survival.”
Sowell spends several chapters documenting the negative consequences that have followed from decades of government policymakers ignoring the limits of their knowledge. He describes the unintended consequences of minimum wage policies, tax legislation, rent control laws, and policies related to race and sex as well as to welfare, housing, and education.
Affirmative Action and Welfare Backfire
Take, for instance, the issue of affirmative action in education. Sowell exposes the harm these policies have done first and foremost to the recipients themselves. Minority students who gain acceptance to elite schools for which they are not academically prepared often struggle to keep up with the rigorous pace and demanding workload. As a result, they end up either failing or dropping out.
On the other hand, Sowell highlights the positive results that followed from the abolition of affirmative-action policies in California (as decided by voters). “The number of black and Hispanic students graduating from the University of California system as a whole rose by more than a thousand students over a four-year span,” he observes. “There was also an increase of 63 percent in the number graduating in four years with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher.”
A similar trend followed the growth of the welfare state in the 1960s when both crime rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates exploded in minority communities. The two decades prior to the ’60s, however, saw declining crimes. Out-of-wedlock birth rates were lower among minority groups than among the majority white population. Nevertheless, laments Sowell, “intellectual elites, politicians, activists and ‘leaders’ — who took credit for the black progress that supposedly all began in the early 1960s — took no responsibility for the painful retrogressions that demonstrably did begin in the 1960s.”
Beware Man’s Ignorance
All this history and much more is packed into this short but critical book, whose single most important insight may be how little we know about the lives of others. We must, therefore, be careful when making policy decisions that have the potential to affect many people — and possibly even whole societies.
As Sowell warns, “Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. They have already done that enough times — and in enough different ways — for us to reconsider, before joining their latest stampedes, led by self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence.”
David Weinberger is a freelance writer and book reviewer on topics related to philosophy, culture, history and economics. Follow him on Twitter @DWeinberger03. Email him at davidweinberger916@gmail.com.
Barack Obama is often hailed as one of the greatest orators in modern politics. While he had undeniable gifts in that department, as someone who attended a number of his speeches in person, I never quite understood all the praise. Setting aside his career-making “red states, blue states” speech at the 2004 Democratic convention — a plea for political moderation he spent his time in office repudiating — the only memorable things Obama said were either campaign pablum such as “hope and change,” or remarks that were unintentionally revealing.
In the latter category, my personal favorite remark was this comment about congressional Republicans from 2013: “We’re going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what’s going to be best for the country,” he said.
“Permission structure” is a phrase that’s been used by marketing executives for many years, and was apparently in common usage at the Obama White House. The idea is“based on an understanding that radically changing a deeply held belief and/or entrenched behavior will often challenge a person’s self-identity and perhaps even leave them feeling humiliated about being wrong. … Permission Structures serve as scaffolding for someone to embrace change that they might otherwise reject.”
While there’s more overlap between politics and marketing than anyone would like to admit, the naked use of jargon that comes from the world of consumer manipulation betrays a remarkably egotistical approach to politics. There was no need to address honorable disagreement to Obama’s policies, which were politically extreme and consistently opposed by voters. The White House just needed to create, with the help of a slavish media, narratives that could help people admit they were wrong and come around to his way of thinking.
Ironically enough, I thought of the “Permission structure” remark reading David Samuels’ interview in Tablet with Obama biographer David Garrow, which is shaping up to be perhaps the most discussed piece of journalism of the year. That’s because the entire article is a really effective “Permission structure” for a lot of Obama voters and moderates to finally admit he’s an entirely overrated, largely failed president who was far more radical than he ever let on. He’s also obsessed with celebrity and not very loyal to the people who helped him along the way.
In other words, he’s pretty much the guy his critics on the right said he was all along.
MLK vs. Obama
To be clear, that’s my gloss on it, and while I don’t think it’s an unfair summation, I wouldn’t want to claim to speak on behalf of Samuels or Garrow. But I think it’s undeniable the article does real damage to Obama’s reputation because the many criticisms in the piece are rooted in factual revelations about Obama’s past and the considered opinion of Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr. (In addition to decades of work as a civil rights historian, Garrow is a major historian of abortion.) Garrow was considered an important enough scholar that Obama sat for eight hours of interviews with him while he was still president. And it’s clear his opinion of Obama is somewhere between dismissive and contemptuous.
Worse, Garrow’s opinion is all the more devastating to Obama because, throughout the sprawling 16,000-word interview, Garrow keeps reverting back to his extensive knowledge of MLK and making explicit comparisons between the two men to reinforce his unflattering judgments about Obama. At first blush, being compared to MLK would be an impossible standard for almost anyone to be held up to. However, as a historian Garrow is notable for deftly exposing MLK’s considerable character flaws — the degree of MLK’s womanizing and alcoholism are decidedly worse than the public wants to know — while still burnishing his historic accomplishments. It’s clear throughout the interview that Garrow is not so reverential toward MLK he can’t think objectively about him, yet he still considers him a great man.
And in fairness, Obama invited this comparison upon himself. He rode into the White House encouraging supporters to frame his election as the fulfillment of MLK’s legacy, and further invited comparisons by appropriating MLK’s rhetoric.
Speaking of memorable Obama rhetoric, I’d be willing to bet that millions of Americans are under the impression “the arc of history is long and bends toward justice” is an Obama quote rather than an MLK quote (and it appears MLK borrowed it from a 19th-century Unitarian minister). Nonetheless, Obama has used the phrase “arc of history” more than a dozen times since his first presidential campaign.
The “arc of history” soon transmogrified into another oft-used Obama phrase, which was invoked by Obama and his staff many times throughout their triumphal bullying of political opponents for being on “the wrong side of history.” Obama’s abuse of the “right” and “wrong” side of history was so absurd that even The Atlantic took a break from acting as a court stenographer to run an article fretting this language “suggest[s] a tortured, idealistic, and ultimately untenable vision of what history is and how it works.”
It’s just as well people attribute that quote to Obama, because while this progressive and Hegelian understanding of history is perfectly in sync with American liberalism, it’s not exactly compatible with common sense — history is full of injustice that comes out of nowhere and sets righteous causes back quite a ways. King himself eventually recognized this and rejected the sentiment in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
“Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills,” King wrote. “Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.”
At the same time Obama expressed arrogant certitude about his own role in history, he rejected the aspects of King’s idealism that were actually productive. In 2020, Obama gave an interview to Atlantic editor and Obama superfan Jeffrey Goldberg where he said, “America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold.”
So, America is the most powerful nation because of accidents of history — not because of our historically unprecedented founding commitment to human rights and limited government. It’s telling how the arguments about being on the right side of history are casually discarded here, even though they might make sense to use retroactively. As Garrow observes, “What I could never understand was Obama’s contempt for the idea of American exceptionalism. … Why would the president of the United States feel the need to disabuse his countrymen of the idea that they are special?”
Regardless, that’s hardly the most revealing part of that quote. MLK offered Americans “a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Well, I don’t exactly know what Obama’s offering in response to King’s vision of the future is, but it sounds pretty pessimistic to say you’re not sure America can survive as a “multicultural democracy” — especially coming from a guy so famous for having his likeness emblazoned next to the word “HOPE” that the poster has its own Wikipedia entry.
Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect America ever to stamp out racism (or any other sin for that matter), but King’s call to a virtue-based vision of equality was nonetheless deeply taken to heart by most Americans. Otherwise, the fact it took just 40 years for America to go from assassinating civil rights leaders and turning firehoses on peaceful black protesters to electing a black president is just another “historical accident.”
Maybe we still have a long way to go, but the progress made on civil rights in this country is still worth celebrating — and there’s no good evidence we should abandon the belief that progress was made because, in King’s words, “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” That it’s hard to tell whether America’s first black president believes that racial progress in America is because of, not in spite of, American ideals, well, that isn’t exactly reassuring for ordinary Americans looking to validate the trust they placed in him.
Of course, lots of other black leaders harbored doubts about King’s hopes for the future. Which brings us to the other startling aspect of the interview between Samuels and Garrow, where we move from the abstract realm of character judgments to disturbing historical facts. In Obama’s ballyhooed first memoir, Dreams of My Father, Samuels summarizes his description of the breakup between Obama and Sheila Miyoshi Jager, one of his serious girlfriends before he married Michelle Obama: “In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism.”
But Garrow, who started writing his Obama biography well into Obama’s second term as president, tracked down Jager — now a professor at Oberlin with a formidable academic reputation — and asked her about her relationship with Obama. (That the credulous journalistic establishment was totally incurious about digging into Obama’s inconsistent and self-serving life story is a thread running throughout the interview.) According to her, what really happened was this:
In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
While it’s hard to land firmly on one side of a he said/she said account of a romantic break-up, Jager has an outstanding reputation; she’s a professor at Oberlin college. She hasn’t been outspoken about Obama on much of anything, much less publicly critical of him. She doesn’t seem bitter about a relationship that ended decades ago, where Obama asked her to marry him twice and she rejected him.
If Jager is to be believed — and I think she is, as the rest of the Samuels-Garrow interview is full of criticism of episodes where Obama has obviously fictionalized aspects of his memoirs and life story — then this just really puts an exclamation point on the narrative established by this landmark interview. Americans thought they were electing a guy who had tacitly, if not explicitly, said he would fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, a man who, in Garrow’s considered words, “did not buy into identity politics.” Instead, they got a guy invested in defending Louis Farrakhan’s vision of race in America.
Being a president in the mold of King would entail evaluating leadership failures as a matter of the content of your character and judgment. Following Farrakhan would entail blaming… well, it seems hard to believe Obama would embrace antisemitic conspiracies, but certainly there’s ample evidence that Obama and his defenders do dodge accountability by blaming a more socially acceptable villain of shadowy cabals of racists and Republicans. (On the other hand, if Obama is hoping for favorable assessments of his famously antagonistic relationship with Israel, he’s not helped by Jager’s anecdote or the fact that he had his kids baptized at a church run by a guy who even Ta-Nehisi Coates admits spews “crude conspiratorial antisemitism.”)
‘He Loses Interest’
For those of you who may think this is a little too harsh and/or a Manichean take on Obama’s nuanced worldview, I have good news. The interview is also a springboard to debate Obama’s sexuality. And large portions of the interview are also consumed with discussions of whether Obama is a “celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or … a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society.”
Garrow and Samuels’ conclusion on that last dilemma seems to be that the shallow narcissism of the former neuters a lot of the impulses related to the latter. Garrow concedes Obama, who frequently touted his credentials as a law professor, would be a terrible Supreme Court justice because Obama himself admits he’s “fundamentally lazy.” Elsewhere Garrow sums up much of his political career by saying, “Some things are meaningful to him, but then he loses interest.”
Samuels, however, doesn’t have Garrow’s scholarly restraint in describing Obama’s post-presidency. “I remember thinking, imagine telling Harry Truman, ‘Hey, why don’t you sell that old house and buy three or four huge mansions in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii and Washington, D.C., and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in sweetheart deals with big corporations while you’re vacationing on rich people’s yachts?’” Samuels tells Garrow. “He’d probably sock you in the jaw.” (For what it’s worth, the yacht vacations with Bruce Springsteen, Oprah, and Tom Hanks appear pretty nauseating.)
In order to keep the Secret Service at bay, let me say for the record that neither the ghost of Harry Truman nor anyone else should sock Obama in the jaw. But it’s been seven years since the guy was in the White House, and the judgment of history is starting to come in. I think we at least have permission to say he was a bad president.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
The government-funded pundits at National Propaganda Radio (NPR) seem to have a toxic fixation with race.
On Tuesday, the outlet blamed the success of American country music on racial prejudice. In a podcast episode titled“How racism became a marketing tool for country music,” NPR brought on a historian to outline the myriad ways country music is a vehicle for white supremacy. The host, Britany Luse, introduces the episode by previewing questions to Amanda Martinez, a country music historian at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Luse wants to know “how country music became this symbol of racism” and why country music stars remain popular despite artists who currently lead the charts “peddling racist rhetoric today.”
“Is racism really what it takes make country music number one?” Luse asks. “I wanted to know how country music became this symbol of racism.”
The episode went to air over recent allegations of racism against country music stars currently at the top of the charts. Jason Aldean’s recent number-one hit, “Try That In A Small Town,” drew controversy over the suggestion that inner-city riots such as the record-devastating outbursts that erupted in 2020 wouldn’t be tolerated outside major metropolitan areas. Aldean didn’t try to hide the message, as if he even needed to.
“That sh-t may fly in the city. Good luck trying that in a small town.”
“Unfortunately, I think that these three very successful songs at the top of the charts only encourages the country music business to continue what it’s always done,” Martinez said, “which is making a product for a white conservative base.”
Aldean, Martinez added, is “calling for a suppression of those calls for greater freedoms” embedded in the 2020 riots.
According to NPR, the song is racist because of its condemnation of deadly uprisings brought about by Black Lives Matter under the righteous banner of social justice.
The podcast host also brought up Morgan Wallen, because he used the N-word one time, and Luke Combs, because the song that has him in the number three spot is apparently adapted from a black queer woman. While social justice warriors might otherwise be flattered by Combs’ tribute to 1988 Grammy winner Tracy Chapman, the cancellers have to see victimization in everything, so they manufacture a narrative about race so they can continue to label everything “white supremacist.” NPR has now decoded country music as a primary pillar of systemic racism, courtesy of the taxpayer.
“I think we’re continuing to see conservatives kind of hold up country music as supposedly morally superior to an alternative, youth-oriented black popular music,” said Martinez.
But let’s examine the obscenity that’s come to define rap music.
“Fukumean,” currently the number one rap song in the country by Gunna, is an anthem about the rapper’s own superiority and unapologetic determination to stay at the top of the social hierarchy.
F-cking this b-tchh like a perv, smack from the back, grab her perm. Ice the burr, sh-tin’ on all you lil’ turds.
In 2020, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” which stands for “Wet A– P-ssy,” topped the Billboard charts for at least four weeks. The lyrics are so obscene that they are not suitable for publication. Readers can read them here.
But more specifically, let’s examine some rap lyrics about Jews. In 1989, a militant rap group called Public Enemy released “Welcome to the Terrordome.” The lyrics read, “Crucifixion ain’t no fiction: so-called chosen, frozen/Apology made to whoever pleases. Still, they got me like Jesus,” followed by “Backstabbed, grabbed a flag from the back of the lab, told the ‘rab, get off the rag.”
In 2017, Jay-Z’s “Story of O.J.” played on Jewish stereotypes of financial dominance.
You wanna know what’s more important than throwin’ away money at a strip club? Credit. You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This how they did it.
Rap music has also mocked Arabs and Asians. Ice Cube released “Black Korea” in 1991, deriding “funky little stores” run by Asian-Americans.
Every time I wanna go get a f-ckin’ brew I gotta go down to the store with the two Oriental one penny countin’ motherf-ckers that make a n-gga mad enough to cause a little ruckus … Pay respect to the fist or we’ll burn your store, right down to a crisp.
Now let’s look at some of the commentary from NPR celebrating the genre. In June 2020, NPR published a list of 50 songs deemed significant to black history that they claim “lift music itself” and represent the “spirit of resistance” against racial injustices. To NPR, rap music represents a revolutionary response in support of a righteous cause, and country music represents the worst elements of American racism.
NPR’s Pattern Of Divisive Coverage
The racial lens through which NPR produces coverage has driven the government outlet to produce some bizarre takes on race. In the summer of 2020, NPR flat-out invented a racist crime altogether.
“Rightwing extremists are turning cars into weapons, with reports of 50 vehicle-ramming incidents since protests erupted nationwide in late May,” NPR tweeted. The story featured an image of a Buick sedan surrounded by demonstrators. Local coverage of the incident revealed it was the protestors, not the driver, who will face charges after the altercation. It was the driver who was assaulted by armed rioters.
Just two weeks prior, the outlet published commentary that called on followers to begin “decolonizing your bookshelf.” NPR claimed it was “Republican leaders” the following year who were trying to “ban books.”
In essence, "decolonizing your bookshelf" is about actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long, says @itsjuanlove. https://t.co/pbSBx8Z4So
Guests on NPR in 2020 also declared the George Floyd riots “‘Acts of Rebellion’ Instead Of Riots” and authored books on the “Defense of Looting.” In the “All Things Considered” podcast that same year, host Sacha Pfeiffer characterized then-President Donald Trump’s initiative to promote patriotic education as an exercise in “cultural division.” Federalist Editor Joy Pullmann reported the comment came after Trump said this:
We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world
In 2019, an NPR affiliate also decried struggling to pronounce foreign names as “racist.”
If someone wanted to incite a race war, they would pull from the NPR playbook, inserting an element of racial animus into every story. The pattern of coverage from the taxpayer-funded outlet reveals an agenda on race that’s far more corrosive to national discourse than if Aldean had even tossed the N-word into his number-one hit.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
An everlasting truism of the political left is that when they hold an indefensible position, they pretend everything is more complicated than it actually is, and, therefore, it’s your fault for failing to understand the complexities of the world. So shut up and just let them do what they need to do!
You think crime is addressed with more policing and criminal prosecutions? How naive! It’s not so simple! This is an issue that requires time and new solutions!
There is no truer example of that reality than the way they talk about “racism.” The Supreme Court just ruled that it’s unconstitutional for institutions in higher education to discriminate against an applicant based on his race. What has been congenially known as “affirmative action” is, by definition, racial unfairness.
Knowing full well that defending the kind of discrimination America erased 50 years ago is untenable, the left has once again attempted to take a very simple concept and distort it beyond recognition so that, hopefully, everyone will be too confused to even argue about it.
Washington Post contributor Theodore Johnson wrote Tuesday that the Court’s decision didn’t eliminate yet another form of toxic discrimination but exacerbated existing racial tensions by reinforcing the idea of a supposed “model minority” — ethnic minorities who assimilate to the broader (white) population. The Court’s “portrayal of Asian Americans as model assimilators is neither a compliment, nor is it proof that structural racism is an artifact of the past,” Johnson wrote. “It serves only to exploit one minority group, to condemn others and to argue against accounting for a people’s history.”
Wow, the ruling did all that? Here I am thinking it’s a good thing that schools can no longer deny access to an applicant because he’s not a specific race. Little did we all know that, actually, the ruling perpetuated a myth for the purpose of pitting Asians against blacks in some type of Cold War.
Thanks for the lesson, Theodore!
It’s garbage. Racism means one thing — the belief that a person’s value is contingent upon his skin color. What it doesn’t mean is, “Anything that I think denies me advantages because now I’m expected to follow the same guidelines as everyone else and, by the way, model minorities are a construct of white supremacy, and the very idea advances my argument.”
Overcomplicating and distorting the very basic, straightforward concept of racism is how we all ended up paraplegics from contorting ourselves trying to understand “equity,” “unconscious bias,” and every other convoluted new term cooked up by the left.
It’s now racist to even expect that it’s enough to say racism is bad. Now you have to dwell on it, consume it, and ultimately accept that the only way to truly absolve yourself of racism is to do whatever people like Johnson say.
But no matter what they say, the word for that isn’t “racism.” It’s submission.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down race-conscious student admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in a sharp setback to affirmative action policies often used to increase the number of Black, Hispanic and other underrepresented minority groups on campuses.
The justices ruled in favor of a group called Students for Fair Admissions, founded by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum, in its appeal of lower court rulings upholding programs used at the two prestigious schools to foster a diverse student population.
The decision, powered by the court’s conservative justices with the liberal justices in dissent, was 6-3 against the University of North Carolina and 6-2 against Harvard. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not participate in the Harvard case.
In major rulings last year also spearheaded by the conservatives justices, the court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion nationwide and widened gun rights in a pair of landmark rulings.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority said, “Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause,” referring to the U.S. Constitution’s promise of equal protection under the law.
Roberts said that students “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
“At the same time,” Roberts said, “as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
Many institutions of higher education, corporations and military leaders have long backed affirmative action on campuses not simply to remedy racial inequity and exclusion in American life but to ensure a talent pool that can bring a range of perspectives to the workplace and U.S. armed forces ranks. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a dissent that the decision “subverts” the constitutional guarantee of equal protection and further entrenches racial inequality in education. “Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” she wrote in a dissent joined by Jackson and Liberal Justice Elena Kagan.
Sotomayor added, The “court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
Blum’s group in lawsuits filed in 2014 accused UNC of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants and Harvard of bias against Asian American applicants. Students for Fair Admissions alleged that the adoption by UNC, a public university, of an admissions policy that is not race neutral violates the guarantee to equal protection of the law under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The group contended Harvard, a private university violated Title VI of a landmark federal law called the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination based on race, color or national origin under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. According to Harvard, around 40% of U.S. colleges and universities consider race in some fashion.
Affirmative action had withstood Supreme Court scrutiny for decades, most recently in a 2016 ruling involving a white student, backed by Blum, who sued the University of Texas after being rejected for admission.
The Supreme Court has shifted rightward since 2016 and now includes three justices who dissented in the University of Texas case and three new appointees by former Republican President Donald Trump.
Harvard and UNC have said they use race as only one factor in a host of individualized evaluations for admission without quotas – permissible under previous Supreme Court precedents – and that curbing its consideration would cause a significant drop in enrollment of students from under-represented groups. Critics, who have tried to topple these policies for decades, argue these policies are themselves discriminatory.
AMERICAN HISTORY
The United States is a nation that long has struggled with issues of race, dating back to its history of slavery of Black people that ended only after a Civil War, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and in recent years racial justice protests that followed police killings of Black people.
Reaction to the ruling was swift.
“The Supreme Court ruling has put a giant roadblock in our country’s march toward racial justice,” said Democratic U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a statement.
“Affirmative action is systemic discrimination,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton wrote on Twitter. “I’m thankful the Supreme Court held this discrimination violates the constitution. Admissions should be decided on merit – not by color of skin.”
Many U.S. conservatives and Republican elected officials have argued that giving advantages to one race is unconstitutional regardless of the motivation or circumstances. Some have advanced the argument that remedial preferences are no longer needed because America has moved beyond racist policies of the past such as segregation and is becoming increasingly diverse.
The dispute presented the Supreme Court’s conservative majority an opportunity to overturn its prior rulings allowing race-conscious admissions policies. Lower courts rejected the group’s claims, prompting appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court asking the justices to overturn a key precedent holding that colleges could consider race as one factor in the admissions process because of the compelling interest of creating a diverse student body.
Less than one month after Texas Tech University was busted for using race-based ideology as a litmus test for hiring candidates in the school’s biology department, the four-year university suspended head men’s basketball coach Mark Adams for quoting the Bible to a student-athlete.
TTU Director of Athletics Kirby Hocutt suspended Adams on Sunday after learning that the coach encouraged one of his basketball players “to be more receptive to coaching and referenced Bible verses about workers, teachers, parents, and slaves serving their masters.”
The comment, according to the university, was “inappropriate, unacceptable, and racially insensitive” and deserved a formal written reprimand from Hocutt, suspension, and an investigation into Adams’ previous “interactions with his players and staff.”
TTU claimed that when confronted with offense over the comments, Adams “immediately addressed this with the team and apologized.” Adams, however, said that was not the case.
“One of my coaches said it bothered the player,” Adams told Stadium. “I explained to them. I didn’t apologize.”
The controversial exchange, Adams said, was supposed to be “a private conversation about coaching and when you have a job, and being coachable.”
“I said that in the Bible that Jesus talks about how we all have bosses, and we all are servants,” Adams added. “I was quoting the Bible about that.”
TTU first hired Adams as head coach in April of 2021 to replace Chris Beard. In Adams’ first year leading the team, he secured the most wins, 27, of any first-year head coach in TTU basketball history. He also led the Red Raiders to the Big 12 finals and the Sweet 16.
Adams’ impressive debut record, however, quickly dwindled earlier this year. One week before the 2023 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, TTU’s men’s team is only 5-13 in the Big 12 and 16-15 overall.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.
They are now.
Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution — including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies, and major retail brands — has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning.
From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.
Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations, and accrediting associations that support their efforts.
“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms). Yet however defined, it’s clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.
“It’s an industry in every sense of the word,” says Peter Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale. “My suspicion is that many of the offices don’t do what they say. But they’re hiring people, giving them titles and pretty good money. I don’t think they do nothing.”
It’s difficult to know how large the DEI Industrial Complex has become. The Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t assessed its size. Two decades ago, MIT professor Thomas Kochan estimated that diversity was already an $8 billion-a-year industry. Yet along with the addition of equity, inclusion, and like terms, the industry has surely grown an order of magnitude larger. Six years ago, McKinsey and Company estimated that American companies were spending $8 billion a year on diversity training alone. DEI hiring and training have only accelerated in the years since.
“In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace,” writes Marti Gurri, a former CIA analyst who studies media and politics, “nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.”
Yet in our time, no Roman Emperor has demanded a complete cultural transformation. No law was passed mandating DEI enactment. No federal court ruling has required its implementation. There was no clarion call on the order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” warning. No genuine public crisis matched the scale of the response.
The sources of this transformation are both deep and fairly recent. On one level, they can be traced back to the egalitarian movements that have long shaped American history — from the nation’s founding, through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the battles for women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and same-sex marriage. In other ways, the rapid transformation can seem no more explicable than an eccentric fashion trend, like men of the late 18th century wearing periwigs. However, a few pivot points of recent history bent its arc in DEI’s direction.
The push for affirmative action is the most obvious influence, a program first conceived during the Reconstruction era but then abandoned for nearly a century. Although triumphs for social justice, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights acts of the late 1950s and 1960s didn’t stop discrimination; the country would need to take more affirmative steps toward assisting minority groups and achieving more equitable outcomes, proponents argued. A controversial policy from the start (with the Supreme Court expected to curb its use in college admissions this term), affirmative action was further complicated by immigration reforms that allowed for more non-European immigrants, setting off a seismic demographic shift that continues to reverberate.
The diversity movement of the early 1990s was in part an attempt to capitalize on the new multicultural reality. Stressing individual and institutional benefits rather than moral failings, early corporate diversity training programs hewed to traditional values of equality and meritocracy. Creating a diverse workplace, R. Roosevelt Thomas wrote in the Harvard Business Review, in 1990, “should always be a question of pure competence and character unmuddied by birth.”
But in other ways, the recent explosion of DEI initiatives reflects shortcomings of earlier efforts, as suggested by the headline of a 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Diversity Fails.” Even as high-achieving first- and second-generation immigrants have thrived in certain industries, particularly STEM fields, people of color remain scarce in senior institutional positions. There is also the deeper issue of what many in the post-George Floyd era have taken to calling systemic or structural racism, citing major disparities for black Americans in education, health care, homeownership, arrests, incarceration, and household wealth.
More recently, a spate of widely publicized police killings of unarmed African Americans has galvanized a growing belief, especially among progressives and especially since Donald Trump’s election, that America is an irredeemably racist nation. In 2020, in the wake of the Floyd murder and in advance of a fraught election, a moral panic set in. Having increased their ranks, social justice entrepreneurs and bureaucrats were poised to implement an ideological agenda and compound their institutional power.
Although no hard numbers exist on the exact size of the industry, the “DEIfication” of America is clear. From Rochester, New York, to San Diego, California, cash-strapped municipalities have found the funds to staff DEI offices. Startups and small companies that once relied on their own employees to promote an inclusive culture now feel compelled to hire diversity consultants and sensitivity trainers to set them straight.
At Ohio State University, for example, the average DEI staff salary is $78,000, according to public information gathered by economist Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute — about $103,000 with fringe benefits. Not to be outdone by its Big Ten conference rival, the University of Michigan pays its diversity officers $94,000 on average — about $124,000 with benefits. Until he retired from the position last summer, Michigan’s chief diversity officer, Robert Sellers, was paid over $431,000 a year. His wife, Tabbye Chavous, now has the job, at the vice provost rank and a salary of $380,000.
For smaller organizations that cannot afford a full-time equity officer, there are other options for shoring up social justice bona fides — namely, working with any of the hundreds of DEI consulting agencies that have risen like mushrooms after a night’s rain, most of them led by “BIPOC” millennials. With some firms, the social justice goals are unmistakable. The Racial Equity Institute is “committed to the work of anti-racist transformation” and challenging “patterns of power” on behalf of big-name clients like the Harvard Business School, Ben & Jerry’s, and the American Civil Liberties Union. With others, the appeal has less to do with social change than exploring marketing opportunities and creating a “with-it” company culture, where progressive politics complement the office foosball tables and kombucha on tap.
“Diversity wins!” declares the management consultancy McKinsey & Company. Certainly diversity officers have been winning, although opposition is building in Florida and elsewhere, where the wider woke agenda that includes DEI has advanced. Even minimally trained practitioners are in high demand, and signs of their influence abound.
Major tech companies like Google publicly chart the “Black+ and Latinx+” people they’ve hired and assure the public that Artificial Intelligence will prioritize the DEI political agenda. ChapGPT, an AI model that can generate remarkably cogent writing, has been designed with a liberal bias, summarily rejecting requests that don’t conform to the algorithm’s notions of “positivity, equality and inclusivity.”
In education, college students are required to take DEI-prescribed courses. Community college employees in California are evaluated on their DEI competencies. Loyalty oaths to the DEI dogma are demanded of professors. Applicants to tenure-track positions, including those in math and physics, are rejected out of hand if their mandatory DEI statements are found wanting. Increasingly, DEI administrators are involved in hiring, promotion, and course content decisions.
“Academic departments are always thinking, ‘We need to run this by Diversity,’” says Glenn Ricketts, public affairs officer for the National Association of Scholars.
The industry’s reach can also be seen in the many Orwellian examples of exclusion in the name of inclusion, of reprisals in the name of tolerance. Invariably, they feature an agitated clutch of activists browbeating administrators and executives into apologizing for an alleged trespass against an ostensibly vulnerable constituency. When that has been deemed insufficient or when senior executives have sensed a threat to their own legitimacy, they’ve offered up scapegoats on false or flimsy pretexts. That might be a decades-long New York Times reporter, a head curator at a major art museum, an adjunct art history professor, a second-year law student, or a janitor at a pricey New England college. (The list is long.)
Often enough, the inquisitions have turned into public relations debacles for major institutions. But despite the intense criticism and public chagrin, the movement marches on.
The expansion “happened gradually at first, and people didn’t recognize the tremendous growth,” Perry says. “But after George Floyd, it really accelerated. It became supercharged. And nobody wanted to criticize it because they would been seen as racists.”
Not playing along with the DEI protocols can end an academic career. For example, when Gordon Klein, a UCLA accounting lecturer, dismissed a request to grade black students more leniently in 2020, the school’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office intervened to have him put on leave and banned from campus. A counter-protest soon reversed that. However, when Klein also declined to write a DEI statement explaining how his work helped “underrepresented and underserved populations,” he was denied a standard merit raise, despite excellent teaching evaluations. (He is suing for defamation and other alleged harms.)
Scores of professors and students have also been subject to capricious, secretive, and career-destroying investigations by Title IX officers, who work hand-in-glove with DEI administrators, focusing on gender discrimination and sexual harassment. As writer and former Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis recounts in “Unwanted Advances,” individuals can be brought up on charges without any semblance of due process, as she was, simply for “wrongthink” — that is, for having expressed thoughts that someone found objectionable.
With activist administrators assuming the role of grand inquisitors, “the traditional ideal of the university — as a refuge for complexity, a setting for free exchange of ideas — is getting buried under an avalanche of platitudes and fear,” she writes. And it would appear that students and professors would have it no other way. By and large, they want more bureaucratic intervention and regulations, not less.
As more institutions create DEI offices and hire ever more managers to run them, the enterprise inevitably becomes self-justifying. According to Parkinson’s Law, bureaucracy needs to create more work, however unnecessary or unproductive, to keep growing. Growth itself becomes the overriding imperative. The DEI movement needs the pretext of inequities, real or contrived, to maintain and expand its bureaucratic presence. As Malcolm Kyeyume, a Swedish commentator and self-described Marxist, writes: “Managerialism requires intermediation and intermediation requires a justifying ideology.”
Ten years ago, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg found that the ratio of administrators to students had doubled since 1975. With the expansion of DEI, there are more administrators than ever, most of whom have no academic background. On average, according to a Heritage Foundation study, major universities across the country currently employ 45 “diversicrats,” as Perry calls them. With few exceptions, they outnumber the faculty in history departments, often two or three to one.
At Michigan, Perry wasn’t able to find anyone with the words “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” in his job title until 2004; and for the next decade, such positions generally remained centralized at the provost level, working for the university as a whole. But in 2016, Michigan president Mark Schlissel announced that the university would invest $85 million in DEI programs. Soon after, equity offices began to “metastasize like a cancer,” Perry says, across every college, department, and division, from the college of pharmacy to the school’s botanical garden and arboretum, where a full-time DEI manager is now “institutionalizing co-liberatory futures.” All the while, black enrollment at Michigan has dropped by nearly 50 percent since 1996.
Despite the titles and the handsome salaries, most DEI administrative positions are support staff jobs, not teaching or research positions. In contrast with the provisions of Title IX, DEI is not mandated by law; it is entirely optional. DEI officers nevertheless exert enormous influence, in part because so few people oppose them. The thinking seems to be that if you’re against the expanding and intrusive diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, you must be for the opposite — discrimination, inequality, and exclusion.
“By telling themselves that they’re making the world a better place, they get to throw their weight around,” says Ricketts. “They have a lot of money, a lot of leverage, and a lot of people who just don’t want to butt heads with them — people who just want to go along to get along. People who are thinking, ‘If we embrace DEI, nobody can accuse us of being racist or whatever.’ They’re trying to cover their backsides.”
Some organizations, it seems, are merely trying to keep up with cultural trends.
Consider Tucson, Arizona, where diversity is not a buzzy talking point but an everyday reality. With a population that is 44 percent Hispanic, 43 percent white, and only 4.6 percent black, the city has had no major racial incidents in decades. Yet like hundreds of others communities, Tucson suddenly decided in direct response to the Floyd murder 1,600 miles away that it needed an office of equity.
To many observers, it seemed that the city was just “getting jiggy with it,” pretending to solve a problem that didn’t exist. After a two-year search, it hired Laurice Walker, the youngest chief equity officer in the country, at age 28, with a salary of $145,000 — nearly three and a half times what Tucson’s mayor, Regina Romero, earns.
Not that the mayor is complaining. “I think this position is about putting an equity lens into all that we do,” Romero said in May, by which she means — well, nobody is quite sure what “equity” means, particularly with respect to federal legislation clearly prohibiting positive and negative discrimination alike.
But trying to get out in front of the DEI train can also result in getting run over by it.
When the city council of Asheville, North Carolina, hired Kimberlee Archie as its first equity and inclusion manager, its members probably didn’t anticipate being accused of having a “white supremacy culture.” After all, city manager Debra Campbell is black, as are three of the seven women making up the city council. The council had cut police funding and unanimously approved a reparations resolution.
Archie nevertheless complained that her colleagues still weren’t doing enough to advance racial equity. “What I describe it as is kind of like the bobblehead effect,” she said in 2020. “We’d be in meetings … and people’s heads are nodding as if they are in agreement. However, their actions didn’t back that up.”
The drama in western North Carolina illustrates a dilemma that organizations face going forward. They can pursue an aggressive political agenda in which white supremacy is considered the country’s defining ethos (per The New York Times’ “1619 Project“) and present discrimination as the only remedy to past discrimination (see Ibram X. Kendi). Or they take the path of least resistance, paying rhetorical tribute to DEI enforcers as the “bobbleheads” that Archie disparages but doing little more than that. After all, they still have universities, businesses, and sanitation departments to run, alumni and investors to satisfy, students to teach, research to pursue, roads to be paved, sewage to be treated, costs to be minimized, and profits to be maximized.
Perhaps, too, senior administrators and executives are beginning to realize that, despite the moral panic of 2020, the most culturally diverse country in the world might not be irredeemably racist, even if it’s no longer acceptable to say so. The United States twice elected an African American man named Barack Hussein Obama as president. His first attorney general was a black man, who would be replaced by a black woman. His vice president would pick a woman of mixed race as his running mate. The mayors of 12 of the 20 largest U.S. cities are black, including the four largest cities.
Likewise, many of the people whom Americans most admire — artists, athletes, musicians, scientists, writers — are black. Lately, most winners of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants are people of color. Gay marriage is legal, and enjoys wide public support, even among conservatives. The disabled, neurodivergent, and gender-divergent are applauded for their courage and resilience. And nonwhite groups, particularly Asians, Latinos, and African immigrants, have been remarkably upwardly mobile (often without official favoritism).
Clearly, troubling disparities persist for African Americans. What’s much less clear is that racism, systemic or not, remains the principal cause of these disparities or that a caste of equity commissars will reverse them. And now, it would seem that narrowing these disparities runs counter to their self-interest.
“I don’t want to deny that there’s genuine goodwill on the part of some of these programs,” says Prof. Schuck, stressing that he hasn’t examined their inner workings. “But some of these conflicts are not capable of being solved by these gestures. They have to justify their own jobs, their own budgets, however. And that creates the potential for a lot of mischief. They end up trafficking in controversy and righteousness, which produces the deformities we’ve been seeing in policies and conduct.”
Still, to hear DEI officers, it’s they who are beleaguered and overwhelmed. Yes, they have important-sounding jobs and rather vague responsibilities. They are accountable to nobody, really. Rather than fighting “the man,” they now are the man, or at least the gender-neutral term for man in this context. But this also means that they are starting to catch flak, particularly as the evidence mounts that the institutions they advise and admonish aren’t actually becoming more fair, open, and welcoming. They’re not even becoming more ethnically diverse.
Like other DEI advocates, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education has declined to answer questions for this article. Its officers are too busy traveling to conferences to do so, a spokeswoman said.
But at a recent association meeting, Anneliese Singh of Tulane University invoked Rosa Parks’ refusal to take a back seat to discrimination. Although Parks was a housekeeper and diversicrats have comfortable university sinecures, their struggles are analogously distressing, Singh suggested. The latter, too, are on the “front lines” in a harrowing war. However, she said, her colleagues needed to remember what mattered most: Looking out for themselves.
“It is not self-indulgence,” she said, now quoting the feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lord. “It is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare.”
For the moment, it’s a war Singh and her DEI colleagues are clearly winning.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
It’s been a good year for classical Christian education. New school starts are up threefold, a book on classical education became No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and on Jan. 26, Fox Nation will release season two of a popular series on classical Christian education, “The Miseducation of America.” Of course, with growth comes attention. What is unusual this time is that someone with ties to our movement — one of our own — draws focus to a growing divide.
On Jan. 12, in the online journal Current, Jessica Hooten Wilson asked, “Is White Supremacy a Bug or a Feature of Classical Christian Education?” It should come as no surprise that, within her mainstream academic ecosphere as a scholar at Pepperdine University, she gets pressure. “I experience regular pushback from those who perceive [classical Christian education] as white, Western-only, and male-dominated.” She proceeds to cast aspersions on a few people and organizations — including, indirectly, mine. Her accusations become a pretext for her thesis: “If the classical Christian school movement is to survive — let alone flourish — we must oppose all forms of racism and misogyny and stand with the beauty, goodness, and truth that we hold up for our students.” I’ll take her up on that charge.
Hooten Wilson is a staccato note at the end of a new tune within our circles. Her article praises those groups she believes are taking the right steps. So far, I’ve heard no one publicly state the thesis so clearly as she does: “We should peruse the authors of the works and, if applicable, the editors or introductory writers to ensure an assortment of voices … as well as an equality of both sexes. If we look at the table of contents of a textbook or a reading list for a semester and find not a single woman or person of color in that list, then that curriculum is misrepresenting the classical Christian tradition.”
Choosing the Classical Canon
For the better part of three millennia, philosophical, theological, and literary authors labored to create the classical canon, representing countless cultural influences. Over much of this same time period, learned scholars have made lists of those that deserve “canon” status. It is unclear if there are minorities or women in Cassiodorus’ list of authors (400 A.D.), or Leonardo Bruni or Battista Guarino’s lists (humanists from the 1400s) — they don’t use those categories. Mortimer Adler and his team of about 40 renowned scholars chose the most widely recognized list of books in our time based upon their contribution to “the great conversation.” Adler’s merit-based criteria required a work to have changed the course of history and to have developed the collective Western mind. What Adler’s team did not do is look to race or sex as criteria.
The Western classical tradition has long included people of every race and sex in a particular way: The tradition deals with a body of texts that address the universal truths about the human condition, rising above our culture’s current quest to silo everyone into an intersection of identity.
Whatever your identity may be, the long journey toward Aeneus’ destiny amplifies the tension between duty and desire. The hilarity of twins unknown to each other, living in the same city, begets “A Comedy of Errors,” no matter your race or sex. Would Hooten Wilson tell the young women and minorities in our schools that they cannot fully converse with these texts because their voices are not represented in them? Shall our schools sacrifice universal human dignity on the altar of token inclusion? Hooten Wilson limits her criteria to women and minorities. Some, like Kimberle Crenshaw, will not be satisfied with this attempt to diversify our reading lists — there will always be one more disaffected group.
Duped into Old-Fashioned Racism and Sexism
By Hooten Wilson’s standard, we must scrape and scrape until we find a “fair” representation of “diverse” contributors. “I am especially excited about the number of women that we added to the Middle Ages list. … Classical schools should look through their reading lists to make sure women and persons of color are not excluded from their curriculum.” Classical Christian education should not be duped by the spirit of our age into old-fashioned racism or sexism. This spirit was cultivated not by our tradition, as Hooten Wilson claims, but rather by the Frankfurt School.
During the 1930s, a group of cultural Marxist scholars set up shop at Columbia University. The Frankfurt School set out on a mission to end the influence of Christianity in our culture. Their thickly veiled product called critical theory deliberately divides us by whispering one small lie, presented in two axioms: For a person to relate to anything, or gain from anything — in this case an intellectual tradition — it must have elements that “look like them” and match their “identity.” And, a second axiom follows: Thus, if something does not contain “diverse and inclusive” elements, it is racist or misogynist. These fruits of critical theory travel down a circuitous path from the Frankfurt School, to Hooten Wilson’s proposal, to a few classical educators who take incremental steps toward critical theory — all of this under the trendy label of “inclusiveness.”
True Liberation Through Classical Christian Education
Classical education was created to, and has, liberated the minds of countless people groups in history, and it is capable of doing the same in America today — and beyond. It has been at the forefront of the march for freedom and education; for individual rights apart from race or class or sex. If we let the very toxin that infects progressive education get into our classrooms, we’re doomed. This toxin was created and propagated by those who hate our tradition. Should we voluntarily drink it?
My daughter recently graduated from New Saint Andrews College. This is one of the institutions that those in Hooten Wilson’s camp label “misogynist.” The college seeks to uphold and respect traditional Christian femininity, which displeases feminists who seem to hate femininity. Misogyny? When my daughter brought her friends to our home over Thanksgiving, I remember listening to the conversation and thinking, “Where do these women come from? They’re strong, bright, extremely well-read, fluent in ancient languages, and honoring of Christian truth — including their God-given womanhood.” None were weak women. All seemed faithful, happy, and confident. I don’t think any of them would want Hooten Wilson’s prescription for their reading list.
Is Racism a Bug or a Feature in Classical Christian Education?
The Frankfurt School’s purpose was to deconstruct. To do so, they inserted a “bug” in our educational system: critical theory, and all of its descendent forms. Some in our movement now offer a batch of code that has this bug embedded deeply within it — in the form of reading lists. By Hooten Wilson’s reckoning, these groups are heading in the right direction. The rest of us are not. Will our institutions continue to follow her lead by adopting coded terms like “Kingdom Diversity”? Or will we recognize the code as a virus and say, “No thank you. The classical Christian tradition is above all that nonsense — and the nonsense of white nationalists, by the way. May a plague be on all your racist houses.”
If classical Christian education is to survive, it has to reject the foolishness of our age and embrace Christ’s way alone. Christ’s church favors neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.
The humanities are great because they unite. They are universal. Women and non-Europeans are now, in our present time, contributing to classical Christian education in spades. I work so that all children can rise up and join the great conversation without barriers.
“Identity,” however, won’t fit here. Check it at the door. We are Christ’s. We are classical. Those who want to be loved by the spirit of our age will become intoxicated by it, and slowly die of its poison.
David Goodwin is the editor of The Classical Difference magazine, the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, and the co-author of The New York Times no. 1 best seller “Battle for the American Mind.” You can find him at Substack.
During opening statements of the Senate confirmation hearings for Biden Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, which began on Monday, Democrats (one in particular) went into spin mode by testing out a talking point that went a little something like this: Republicans are saying you were nominated because of yourrace.
It was Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, who said it most plainly:
“My Republican colleagues and public figures have attempted to undermine your qualifications through their pejorative use of the term ‘affirmative action,’ and they have implied you were solely nominated due to your race. … Let me be clear: Your nomination is not about filling a quota.”
"They have implied you were solely nominated due to your race…Your nomination is not about filling a quota… It is about time that we have a highly qualified, highly accomplished Black woman serving on the Supreme Court," Sen. Hirono says of Judge Jackson in opening remarks. pic.twitter.com/5CsFDDheXY
Al Sharpton employed a similar deflection on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”“I salute President Biden in this case. He made a commitment, and I don’t think it was based on some tokenism. I think it was based on him saying that the court ought to reflect the country, and a black woman has never been on the court, and you couldn’t get one more qualified,” Sharpton said, before implying that it was racist for GOP lawmakers to inquire about the nominee’s law school admission test score.
The SCOTUS hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson begin today, I underlined the importance of this nomination and this time in history on #MorningJoe. pic.twitter.com/smhrK23KmP
It’s an odd basket of claims: that it’s Republicans who made Jackson’s nomination all about race, that anything was “implied,” that describing the race-based selection as “affirmative action” is out of bounds, and that this has nothing to do with tokenism. They’re strange claims because most Americans are old enough to remember just two months ago when President Joe Biden himself stated clearly and plainly that his pick would be “the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court,” after making a similar promise on the campaign trail. It was the Democrat president, not Republican cynics, who announced that race and sex were deciding factors in the selection. “Y” chromosomes and fair skin were disqualifying attributes before any merits could be considered.
Other Democrats couldn’t help themselves, playing into the identity politics game and marveling at the “historic” nature of nominating a black woman to the high court — and all the while undermining Hirono’s claim that it’s Republicans who have centralized race in Jackson’s nomination.
“The appointment of a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court — let’s be very blunt — should have happened years ago. This day is a giant leap into the present for our country and for the court,” gushed Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
“The Senate is poised right now to break another barrier. We are on the precipice of shattering another ceiling,” said New Jersey Democrat Sen. Cory Booker, who is known for breaking Senate rules during the confirmation hearings for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh with his cringe “Spartacus” moment. “I just feel this sense of overwhelming joy as I see you sitting there.”
Despite Hirono’s attempted deflection to her GOP colleagues and empty media assurances that tokenism is nonexistent here, it was Democrats who fixated on Jackson’s race and sex.
Now when Republicans inquire about her academic achievements and judicial record, it’s branded as veiled racism and sexism. Jackson proponents treat it like unjust scrutiny, as if a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing is supposed to be for grandstanding about “historic” moments and not for judicial vetting.
Try as they might to turn Jackson criticism on Republicans, this one is on Biden. He’s the one who announced in other terms that Jackson is an affirmative action pick, just as he did with his vice president (and we’ve seen how that’s turned out). He’s the one who invited intensified scrutiny of Jackson’s merits and ideology. He reduced Jackson’s qualifications to the color of her skin and the pairing of her chromosomes.
Nobody “implied” that Jackson was nominated because of her race. The president announced it proudly.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Whether Mitch McConnell’s boneheaded distinction between African Americans and “Americans” was a misstatement or something more sinister, the fact remains: America will not benefit from federalizing its elections.
The narrative that continues to be stoked by the radical left is that states all over the country are actively denying blacks the right to vote and only the federal government can stop it. At the center of this controversy is the “oppressive” requirement that all voters be required to produce a valid ID, which will disparately affect black voters because everyone knows blacks are more likely than whites to not have an ID.
Joe Biden’s risible claims about voting rights are true to what Malcolm X described as the “trickery” of the white liberal: “The history of the white liberal has been nothing, but a series of trickery designed to make Negroes think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems.” The trickery for today’s white liberal is to manufacture racism by creating the narrative that voter ID is racist and will disproportionately harm blacks. Or that limiting the amount of early voting and other measures that increase ballot vulnerability is inherently racist because blacks won’t vote unless the federal government prods them to the polls because blacks are so dependent on the federal government.
Not only is this narrative unsupported by facts, this lie covers the truth that Democrats don’t want any election laws passed that might catch or stop from voting illegally people Democrats believe will vote Democrat—including voters who don’t want to prove they haven’t voted twice in the same election.
Every black person I know has an ID. Can any supporters of the Freedom To Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act produce black people who tried to vote but were turned away because they did not have a valid photo ID? That’s the rap on Georgia and other states’ laws requiring all prospective voters to prove who they claim to be as a protection against claims of voter fraud.
The big deal with these state legislatures tightening security measures is allegedly not that the measures are unnecessary, but that they are discriminatory, racist, and targeted to keep blacks from voting. Democrats must believe that blacks aren’t smart or interested enough to get a photo ID, the central security measure being added to state voting protocols.
For the past year, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi have been “Jim Crowing” that the Georgia law and others like it are racist since black people are more likely than their white counterparts to not have an ID and therefore be denied their vote (for Democrats—because, according to Joe Biden, you ain’t black if you don’t vote Democrat). Really?
What is it about being black that makes one less likely to have identification? Seems like a racist sentiment. Assuming that there is a black adult without identification, we are supposed to presume that black voters without IDs would be so intimidated by a requirement to present an ID that they would rather not vote than stop by the local license branch and get an ID for the cost of a Big Mac and a Coke? Most states like Indiana will waive the minimal fee if necessary.
But if Democrats are right, and requiring identification is indeed racist, why are they only making noise about required ID voting? Shouldn’t they complain about driving, which would be racist because an ID is required to drive? What about opening a bank account, credit application, or ordering a cell phone, cable and ordinary utilities?
All these would have racist implications daily rather than just on Election Day. Yet there’s not a peep about blacks not being able to get a cell phone or cable TV, because that doesn’t get the Democrat his votes.
This all leads to the Democrat solution: kill the Senate filibuster. Of course, we are reminded that the filibuster was the procedural tool used by Democrats and Republicans to oppose civil rights legislation. But the use of the tactic that may have been used against what is now viewed as popular legislation does not make the tactic itself racist in its application.
The filibuster has evolved from its initial incarnation to a procedure that provides the minority party or position the opportunity to be heard. Since both parties have often been in the minority, both parties have benefited and suffered from its deployment.
I know it might be painful for them, but perhaps Democrats should open up their playbook and remember what they did to intimidate and suppress black voters in the first half of the 20th century.
It is unnerving that the Democrat Party draws comparisons to its champions of segregation Bull Connor and George Wallace suggesting that voter ID is a discriminatory tool, the same as the poll tax or the literacy test, that actually prevented blacks from voting in a notoriously humiliating manner. Such comparisons are a disgrace to the honored memory of all who fought and won victories in securing the right to vote.
In the continued invocation of Jim Crow, the euphemism for the abhorrent laws that legally sanctioned segregation, discrimination, and brutality, Biden and his race-baiting big government aim to racialize the filibuster so that all who support its continued use are brandished racist forevermore. I hope blacks in this nation are wearing thin to the leftist patronization that denigrates the proud history of black and white patriots who fought, bled, and died for freedom, independence, and our opportunity to vote.
Curtis Hill is the former attorney general of Indiana.
Davis Joint Unified School District in Davis, California, pushed leftwing distortions of gender and critical race theory through its Office of School Climate, which taught staff that “gender is a scam” and advertises the White Privilege Conference on March 9-12, 2022. The office is “responsible for supporting district staff and recommending and piloting ways to address structural oppression and to enhance school climate, equity, diversity, and inclusion,” according to their website.
The district, which includes approximately 8,500 TK-12 students throughout 16 different schools, also recently voted to adopt an Ethnic Studies requirement, which a press release notes will “explore issues of identity, analyze systems of power” and “examine social movements.”
Distortions Of Gender
The district’s site features a number of different resources that pushed radical leftwing distortions of gender. One presentation called “Supporting LGBTQ+ Students and Staff” was given to staff members at Harper Junior High School in May 2021 by two of the school’s teachers, both of whom use “they/them” pronouns. One also uses the abbreviation “Mx.” in lieu of Mr., Ms., or Mrs.
One slide bore a pride flag with transgender colors and black and brown stripes, both of which “sought to further represent the queer and trans identities of black and brown people.” Another one linked to a video titled “Gender is a Scam,” which compels audiences to “decolonize their language,” while a linked article called “15 Things LGBTQ people of colour want you to know” tells you “Why you might be guilty of white fragility.”
The slideshow instructed staff to use the pronouns they/them until someone says his pronouns and told them that “Posters/flags that support LGBTQ+ people are just the beginning” before going on to ask, “does your curriculum center primarily white/cis/straight voices?” The same slide warns against using medical and scientifically accurate terminology in regard to gender.
Meanwhile on the office’s LGBTQIA+ Supports page, a link to the activist group Human Rights Campaign promoted “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Picture and Middle School Books,” some of which are even aimed at children in pre-k. A link to the USC Rossier School of Education’s site “Students and Gender Identity Guide for Schools” also features a “Gender Identity Glossary for Schools” with woke vocabulary terms like “deadnaming,” “gender expansive,” “polygender,” “third-gender,” and “two spirit.”
Critical Race Theory and the White Privilege Conference
The office also promotes a trove of critical race theory resources intended for students, families, staff, teachers, and administrators under the subheading “Anti-Bias and Racial Justice.” The site opens by promoting free webinars from Embrace Race, a left-wing organization aimed at young children. Their webinars bear titles like “Addressing Racial Injustice with Young Children” and “RaceTalk among White Families Post-Floyd. Now What?”
The White Privilege Conference, a project of The Privilege Institute, is also promoted to staff members. The annual conference, not to be confused with the institute’s similarly named White Privilege Symposium, intends to provide “an opportunity for participants to discuss how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life while giving strategies for addressing issues of privilege and oppression and advancing social and economic justice.”
Last year’s conference hosted Robin DiAngelo, who discussed the subject of her latest book “nice racism,” which condemned all white people, including the far-left white people who comprise her audience, as definitionally racist.
The conference featured myriad workshops each day, which boasted titles like “Critical Race Theory/Critical Race Feminism: Creating a Plan of Action during the Biden-Harris era,” “A Good Womyn is Hard to Find,” and “The Making & Remaking of Whiteness.” The institute also hosts the Youth Action Project, with one-day institutes geared towards middle schoolers and high school students.
The district’s office also advertises the 1619 Project curriculum alongside a site called Learning for Justice, which they note “offers excellent, teacher-developed classroom curriculum.”
‘Dismantle White Supremacy’
Included under the heading “For Teachers, Staff, and Administrators” are K-12 frameworks for anti-bias and social justice education from Learning for Justice, a project of the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center whose mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and “strengthen intersectional movements” by pushing critical race theory into schools.
One such video from The New York Times titled “A Conversation with White People on Race” features white people expressing guilt over their alleged privilege, with one person remarking “We’re all implicated in a racist system, and I play my part in it as a white person.”
The office adds that they have a library of books and videos for staff, including one titled “Cracking the Codes and Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.”
Meanwhile, students and families are also directed to a number of critical race theory-inspired resources, including one link to a site titled “100 Race-Conscious Things You Can Say To Your Child To Advance Racial Justice,” which includes quotes of things parents have told their children when discussing race. Particularly striking is number 53, which makes the claim that “if you are White and you commit a crime … police might say ‘that was wrong, don’t do that again,’ and that’s all…but if you are Black and commit the same crime, they might arrest you and you might go to prison.” One quote under the subtitle “police violence” discusses black victims of police brutality, writing“The man who killed them didn’t like brown skin. He had white skin like us.”
The list isn’t exclusively focused on race, however, also promoting left-wing distortions of sex with quotes like“You know, some people are born with penises but feel like girls on the inside and some people are born with vaginas but feel like boys on the inside. We can’t always tell if someone is a boy or a girl just by looking at them and that’s okay.”
“Guidelines for Strong White Allies” is also included on the district’s list. Among the guidelines were requests for “resources,” “money,” and even “your body on the line.” Author Paul Kivel also told “white allies” to “understand and learn from the history of whiteness and racism” and to “assume racism is everywhere, every day.”
An anti-racist book list for children promoted by the district explains how parents can ease children into CRT by first starting “very gently” with entirely unobjectionable books that “just show kids that racial diversity exists.” The goal, however, is to eventually employ books that discuss “racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.”
The district’s previous superintendent John Bowes signaled his belief in the leftist claim that America is fundamentally racist when, after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, he sent out a message explaining that he was reminded of the need to “rid our country of the systemic bias and institutional racism that exists in all parts of our society.” He went on to explain that “public education, including DJUSD schools, are part of the solution.”
Davis Joint Unified School District’s promotion of both critical race theory and leftist distortions of sex are part of a broader leftwing push in K-12 institutions throughout the country. In California alone, other districts have lied about teaching CRT, hosted LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, paid extremist organizations to “disrupt whiteness,” and promoted material that tells students to use witchcraft against those who say “all lives matter.”
The politicized nature of California’s government schools, along with general concerns regarding quality of education, may lead some to support a recently launched bipartisan campaign to pass a school choice initiative in the golden state.
Neither Superintendent Matt Best nor Climate Coordinator Kate Snow responded to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
The woke-o-meter in public schools is about to ramp up. Parents who think they don’t have time to homeschool may soon realize that, compared to the effort involved in monitoring and countering the nonsense from leftist classrooms, homeschooling is the relaxing alternative. Not all teachers buy into the leftist narrative of race-obsessed anti-Americanism. But leftist K-12 administrators want to ensure that, eventually, all teachers will present only approved ideas and counter any wrongthink children are taught at home. Many of these educrats are now embracing a technological fix.
Trade publication Education Week recently reported that about 500 school districts around the country are rating teacher applicants according to their “cultural competency,” another code for “wokeness.” Many of these districts are contracting with a teacher-hiring company called Nimble, which uses artificial intelligence to examine applications and interview answers to determine which candidates harbor the correct political and cultural attitudes.
A central concern of Nimble and its leftist clients is mindsets about race. The goal is to hire only teachers who are “anti-racist” activists, who will reject equal treatment of all students in favor of discrimination against some (whites) for the supposed benefit of others (racial minorities). Note that under this rubric, Asian students, who as a group work hard and consequently excel, don’t qualify as an oppressed racial minority.
“Now that we’ve become a little more aware of the concept of anti-racism and maybe a little more woke as a culture, I do think that districts have started to emphasize these questions a little bit more,” Nimble CEO Lauren Dachille told EdWeek. “They might be more common, they might be more explicit.”
Anti-racism as a motivating societal force was popularized by Ibram X. Kendi, who along with other savvy race grifters is profiting handsomely from the concept. Getting points for honesty if not integrity, Kendi teaches that discrimination against white people is a positive good, and indeed necessary to establish the “equity” of equal outcomes for all regardless of intelligence or effort. This is what is meant by anti-racism: “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.”
Note the racism inherent in anti-racism. “Anti-racists” assume that black and brown children are “less than” white or Asian kids—they can’t excel in academics, they can’t follow basic rules of personal conduct. It’s necessary to change all standards to accommodate these presumed “inferior” beings. Such a theory ensures minority kids will never overcome personal obstacles because they’re told they don’t have to. This is the system that, with Nimble’s help, many schools are trying to establish and perpetuate.
EdWeek identified a Boston elementary school principal who “will tell candidates the school’s priorities around anti-racism and ask them to respond.” To make crystal clear the political attitudes expected from successful candidates, “she will ask them what they’ve done personally or professionally to be more anti-racist.” Presumably, getting arrested at a Black Lives Matter riot would be, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, a resume enhancement.
Applicants in Indianapolis may be asked “how [they would] ensure that student outcomes are not predictable by race, ethnicity, culture, gender, or sexual orientation.” Of course, there’s only one way to ensure such an outcome: manipulate it to guarantee that all students end up at the same low level. Any students who threaten the leveling by working too hard or achieving too much will have to be brought to heel—at least, if they’re the “wrong” race.
Indianapolis teaching applicants may also be asked, “Why do you think that low-income students predictably perform lower on standardized tests than their more-affluent peers?” One would be pretty safe to assume a preferred answer would be “because of systemic racism,” not “because those students, largely due to decades of misguided government policies, are more likely to come from fatherless families and grow up in a dysfunctional environment.”
Throughout the article, district officials emphasize the importance of hiring teachers who are amenable to the schools’ “priorities” and “values.” But how is it appropriate for a public institution, funded by taxpayers who hold a wide range of political opinions, to institutionalize one set of those opinions? Even worse, how is it appropriate for the institution to guarantee the propagation of those opinions by limiting hires to candidates who agree with them?
These questions illustrate the bubble mentality of the left. Leftists are so certain of the objective correctness of all their views that they cannot conceive of any person of goodwill taking a different position. In the leftist mind, anyone not willing to engage in discrimination against whites or Asians in the name of “equity” is the moral equivalent of a Klansman. And who would object to screening out Klansmen from the teacher corps?
Parents who hope the public schools are still salvageable might want to reconsider. The skyrocketing wokeness of administrators who control teacher hiring will ensure that all classrooms are increasingly devoted to indoctrination rather than education.
How exhausting it is for parents to constantly monitor what their children are being fed in every class and then try to repair the intellectual and moral damage at home. Viewed in this light, does choosing another schooling arrangement really seem so hard?
Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.
This is the least racist period in the history of our country. If black Americans want to address disparity, we must start with the black nuclear family.
In some respects, I feel as if we are living through a time like Charles Dickens, “The Tale of Two Cities,” of which he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”
We are bombarded with messages claiming America is overflowing with systemic racism and white supremacists. Even the National Council on Family Relations now labels the traditional two-parent family an extension of white privilege.
If you listen exclusively to the news media, the entertainment industry, and the academic-industrial complex, you will be surprised to learn this truth: This is the least racist period in the history of our country.
Having lived in the Jim Crow south, my parents and grandparents would have loved to have grown up in the America I grew up in. A large percentage of the country has been operating in a post-racial America for many years. Across our nation, people have been interacting with each other with respect, dignity, and compassion regardless of race. They have been judging people by the content of their character.
We can pass laws that allow me to enter the front door and reserve a room in any hotel in this country, but we can’t pass laws to force people to open their hearts and their homes to people who don’t look like them. But that is precisely what Americans have done for decades. So how do we explain the differences in the realities on the ground and what we hear in the media?
My family is a classic example of the “best of times – worst of times” and of the disparity between reality and rhetoric. My children, who are now adults, grew up in a two-parent family. They had their challenges, but they also had stability, unconditional love, and clear boundaries.
Unfortunately, there is a stark contrast with their cousins on my side of the family. Of my four siblings, my children are the only ones who grew up with both a mother and father in the home. As a result, the lives of my siblings’ children have been interwoven with trauma and tragedy.
How do we explain these differences? Was it systemic racism built into American society? Or was it something else? We have two tales from the same family with the same skin color, yet the disparities are quite broad.
On the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, I was five years old. At that time, nearly 80 percent of black children were born into two-parent families. Sadly, in my lifetime, we have seen the black community transform from 80 percent two-parent families to 80 percent fatherless homes without one national initiative to reverse the trend.
If the American black family was a spotted owl or a gray wolf, it would be on the endangered species list. Instead, what has happened to the American black family is nothing short of a cultural genocide.
This is not the dream King had in mind, and it has been a nightmare for children born during this period. The black community has been used as a political pawn for 50 years.
Therefore, I have taken on this crusade to begin a transformation back to cultural roots in the black community and reverse a trend that has devastated generations of families, including helpless children born into situations not of their own making.
I know from personal experience that this country is not systemically racist. My parents and grandparents lived through systemic racism. I did not.
Unfortunately, my siblings made different decisions in their lives. All four of them used drugs and three were incarcerated. Far worse, their children were left to be raised without fathers in their lives. Theirs are the stories of many families ravaged by the lack of father involvement, personal responsibility, faith, and most importantly, hope.
I mourn deeply for what has happened to their lives. My children live in wide disparity from their own cousins, and it is not because of the color of their skin.
To be clear, we do have racist people in our country that do bad things to people, but the country is not systemically racist. To put it another way: If you look for racism in this country, you’ll find it. If you look for opportunities, you will find them 100 times over.
How do we resolve this “Tale of Two Cities,” the 80 percent fatherless homes and the chronically low graduations rates for black high school students? Ironically, the power to change ultimately lies in the hands of black Americans. I would like to direct the following comments to black Americans throughout the country.
For far too long, we have watched our black communities destroyed from within. As a community, we are worse off now than we were before the Civil Rights Era.
We have it within our power to move forward and begin a transition of healing and growth that is long overdue. And we do not need government help or funds to accomplish this transformation.
We are missing out on opportunities in this country to which we are fully entitled as American citizens, opportunities that seem to be clearly visible to nearly everyone except native-born black Americans. Many of us are blinded by tears of anger, mistrust, and misunderstanding that lead to decisions that are not in our own best interests.
Today, black American citizens who have legally immigrated from the Caribbean Islands and African countries like Nigeria earn significantly higher incomes than native-born black Americans. They achieve higher levels of education. They are living the American dream civil rights leaders desired for us.
Many of these new citizens came to the country with intact families, which helped with their achievement and integration. Another reason for their success is they have not been indoctrinated by years of anti-white, anti-American, and anti-capitalist hatred.
Now more than ever, it is imperative that we reconcile with the past sins of our nation, re-establish two-parent families, and rebuild our culture and join other Americans around the “Table of Prosperity” as fellow citizens of this great country. How do we get started?
I believe it starts with tapping into the strengths of our cultural roots, which are linked to our Christian faith. Forgiveness is the cornerstone of Christianity. Just as God extends forgiveness to us in Christ, we are called to forgive others.
As we forgive the country for the sins of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and many other forms of bigotry that followed, the heavy burden of bitterness, anger, and resentment will be lifted from our shoulders. Our eyes will be opened so we can clearly see the path forward allowing us to focus on what is best for our future and the future of our children.
To forgive is an act of strength, not weakness, and we must begin the healing and strengthening process in our communities. This is our Prodigal Moment. It is time to come home.
Now, to all Americans: Our shared history transcends political parties, race, religion, and class. It is a shared humanity that binds us together like the intertwined roots and branches of trees in a dense forest.
Organized groups are igniting forest fires to divide and destroy our unique American culture. It’s imperative that we not only extinguish their efforts, but foster a new movement that nurtures, unites, and strengthens us as Americans, regardless of race, for generations to come.
Kendall Qualls is the president of TakeCharge, which strives to unite Americans regardless of background and to inspire black and other minority communities to take charge of their own lives and not to rely on government and politicians for prosperity. He has been married for 35 years and has five children.
President Joe Biden’s support in the black community is one of the most inexplicable phenomena of modern politics. Despite several racial gaffes during the 2020 primaries — like talking about his work with Dixiecrat segregationists on racial busing as evidence of “civility” in Washington or telling a crowd in Iowa that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” — it was black support in the South Carolina primary that saved his campaign after a series of botched debates and poor showings in the first three primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
While it could be argued that the only other viable Democrat candidate after the first three contests, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, never gelled with black voters (or anyone outside of his white progressive base, for that matter), black support propelled Biden to the nomination. Many pundits felt black turnout for Biden — particularly in Georgia — helped Biden take the presidency.
What fueled the loyalty? Was it the fact Biden is seen as being close to former President Barack Obama, having served as his vice president? Was it the connections he’s made with black leaders during nearly a half-century in Washington politics? Was it the time he went on the New York City-based radio program “The Breakfast Club”and told listeners that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black?”
Or is it the fact he keeps lying to black America about what he’s done for racial justice?
Case in point: On Monday, Biden addressed the 2021 State and National Teachers of the Year event at the White House. These are the kinds of national TV speeches that should easily pass without incident. As far as the White House and Biden supporters are concerned, the best news that can come out of these affairs is if no news comes out of them. We’re talking about it, however, so guess how that went?
According to a White House transcript, the president began getting himself in trouble when he told the long-winded tale of how he first got elected to the Senate in Delaware even though the seat was considered “to be a lead-pipe cinch” for the Republicans.
If you’re familiar with Biden’s backstory, that part’s actually kind of true. We have an improbable Democratic upset during a 1972 Republican landslide to thank, in part, for the fact we now have a president who, if his handlers weren’t there to direct him to Air Force One, would spend the afternoon wandering around Joint Base Andrews looking for the Braniff International check-in counter.
The rest of the rambling story would probably be marked on Wikipedia as [citation needed]. It involves attending an off-year state party convention and having a bunch of Democrat bigwigs bust into his room while he was “in a towel with shaving cream on my face,” saying he should run for the seat that was supposed to be a GOP lock.
After leaving the convention, Biden said, he went and saw an old professor at the University of Delaware, a Dr. Ingersoll, who paraphrased Plato to him: “The penalty good people pay for not being involved in politics is being governed by people worse than themselves.”
There are so many jokes one could make about that statement, particularly when we look at who’s governing us from the White House. The important part, however, was the lie Biden was about to tell:
“And he looked at me, and he said, ‘Joe, you should run.’ I said, ‘But I — I feel strongly about all of these issues, but I…’ I had gotten involved in the civil rights movement and the wa- — but I —
“He said, ‘Joe, you should do it,’” Biden continued. “He had enough confidence in me that he gave me confidence in myself. With a kid with no money, coming from a middle-class family, who grew up in grade school stuttering, literally — for me, I’m confident I would have never done it were it not for Dr. Ingersoll.”
Maybe if Dr. Ingersoll knew Biden was lying about being involved in the civil rights movement, this could have worked out differently.
Joe Biden was never involved in the civil rights movement in any meaningful sense. He’s admitted as much in his own words, when he wasn’t trying to exaggerate his own importance. He was “concerned,” he said, but was not an “activist.”
By that standard, football fans who watch every Sunday from their couch or a stool at the local bar are more “involved” in the NFL than Biden was in the civil rights movement. (They’re not just “concerned.” They’re screaming.)
And we know this would get a “pants on fire” fact-check rating because he’s been caught lying about his involvement in the civil rights movement before and had to walk it back.
And then he started spouting the same lies again:
In 1987, Joe Biden claimed he marched in the civil rights movement. A few months later, Biden disavowed the claim. Decades later, during the Obama era, and more recently on the campaign trail, he started making the same claims again. https://t.co/NAlMJ6ZTq7pic.twitter.com/tpmE6VXmG6
The first spurious claims came during his abortive 1988 presidential run, which eventually died after he was caught plagiarizing a speech. However, claims he made about his involvement in marching and protesting for civil rights also came under scrutiny.
As The Intercept pointed out, his rhetoric changed considerably over the course of 1987.
In February: “When I was 17 years old, like many of you, I participated in sit-ins to desegregate the restaurants and movie houses of Wilmington, Delaware.”
In April: “I came out of the civil rights movement … I was one of those guys that sat in and marched and all that stuff.”
In September: “During the 1960s, I was in fact very concerned about the civil rights movement,” Biden said. “I was not an activist. I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Delaware. I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. I was involved, but I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma, I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans in my own city.”
What’s more, this pattern continued during the Obama years. As The Intercept reported, Biden would frequently spend his time as vice president citing his attempts to desegregate Delaware movie theaters despite inconsistencies in his stories and almost no evidence he was seriously involved. And this isn’t even counting his biggest race-related whopper — technically not related to the American civil rights movement but still worth noting.
In February of 2020, Biden claimed apartheid-era South African police arrested him as he was trying to visit Nelson Mandela, saying “I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”
Soweto is a township in Johannesburg, hundreds of miles away from Robben Island, the prison off of Cape Town where Mandela was being held. Biden would later try to explain this away by saying he was “stopped” and could not “move where I wanted to go,” not that he was actually arrested. As for being hundreds of miles away from Mandela, he didn’t explain that part — nor was he asked to.
In short, Biden has lied and continues to lie about what he’s done for civil rights and racial justice. He gets called on it occasionally — but is rarely taken to task in any serious manner for inflating his civil rights resumé. And yet, in 2020, a man who blatantly and repeatedly lied to the black community about his commitment to their cause got their overwhelming support.
Sure, Bernie Sanders was and is no great shakes. At least he never claimed he got arrested in Toronto trying to bail Martin Luther King Jr. out of a Birmingham, Alabama jail.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.@CillianZealFacebook
And listen for the “Tsk, tsk, you don’t really understand what we’re about, dear.” That’s how it will be in Minnesota and probably elsewhere if a leftist teachers union can spread its ideas on how to respond to its promotion of critical race theory.
Before reading the following, you might want to take a deep breath and exhale or whatever it is you do to reduce stress. You might have to do that after reading it, too.
Education Minnesota is trying to counter growing community pushback against CRT around the state, so it has published a guide on how teachers should respond, a copy of which was obtained by Powerline and publicized by Minnesota’s Alpha News. First of all, the union tells teachers not to call what they’re teaching critical race theory. They know parents are catching on. And the guide presents buckets of mush designed to obscure the issue and talk down to critics.
It’s a classic snow job using the special language of “educanto,” a term coined by the late Paul Greenberg, public school critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning Arkansas newspaper editor. Education Minnesota tells teachers that when asked why they teach kids that all white people are racist, they should give the following response:
“First off, I’m thrilled you’re taking such a deep interest in how and what our kids are taught, a conversation that I feel is long overdue.
“What I know most Americans believe is that we expect our students — whatever their color or background — to be able to learn hard truths and handle honest history and civics.”
May I pat your head?
“I believe in children’s potential to meet new challenges and have an honest reckoning, and when we try to edit and distort our history, we are doing them, and our future, a disservice. My loyalty is to children and who and what they can become.”
That’s how teachers should respond to your question about their “evil white people” push. And, of course, as the left always says: It’s for the children.
Education Minnesota does more than purr in its teacher voice. In its guide for its union members, it provides does some hard-knuckle political messaging against CRT critics by presenting “Key Concepts for Responding.”
Here are excerpts:
“Seize the moral high ground and engage on our terms. With attention on education, let’s talk about the teaching and curricula we support and communicate how it benefits all students.”
“Ascribe motivations to the opposition. Instead of reflexively repeating the opposition’s claims to dispel them (e.g. ‘we are not teaching grade schoolers about XYZ’) talk about why they’re attacking standards, equity and classroom educators.”
“Bring the conversation back to what we want. Don’t stay on defense.”
“Avoid the academic term ‘critical race theory. This phrase, unfamiliar to most audiences, has been redefined by the political right as an all-purpose racial dog whistle. Talk instead about the more honest and more complete education our students deserve.”
“[I]t is so disappointing to see that a few billionaires, and the promoters and talking heads they pay for, have launched a national campaign to mislead Americans about the lessons educators teach about history, culture, gender and politics.”
“Once again, they’re trying to distract and divide us so we don’t demand the richest 1 percent and the largest corporations pay what they owe for what our communities need, like affordable health care for all.”
Leftist educators try to hide what they’re teaching, but word is getting out. The Center for the American Experiment has been monitoring CRT in Minnesota and produced a video noting instances of it. It found that in Burnsville, fourth-graders were reading a book that said police officers were “mean to black people but nice to white people” and deliberately shot black men.
The video cited officials in the Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins as saying school operations were built on “white supremacy” values of logic, linear thinking, perfectionism, objectivity and “requiring black students to turn in assignments on time.” Letter grades are gone since they are part of “a dominant white culture.”
White Bear Lake sixth-graders were divided into groups based on race, sex, religion and place of birth and told to address issues of oppression and privilege.
Edina kindergarteners through second-graders did an exercise on how to identify themselves by their skin color. Kindergarten through second grade!
St. Louis Park scrapped the gifted and talented program, opening it to everyone and focusing on “anti-racist talent development.”
Minnesota teachers are taking anti-racism training, which, in effect, advocates new forms of racial discrimination, according to the video.
It’s not known if Minnesota schoolchildren are learning, like first- and second-graders in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, that “whiteness is a bad deal” and that if you are white, you essentially are a devil oppressing people of color, as reported Wednesday in a RealClear Policy piece that included shocking curriculum photos.
Education Minnesota defines CRT as “an academic framework that is more than 40 years old and is centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not just a product of individual bias or prejudice, and embedded in our policies legal structure.”
Indeed, CRT came from legal theorists during the 1970s and ’80s. The problem is it left the campus, and no matter how groups like Education Minnesota try to hide it, it is gumming up primary and secondary education.
Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist scholar and social commentator whose gravitas stems from also having been a farmer, points out a problem with woke nonsense being dreamed up on the college campus. College professors, Hansen has said, were once like court jesters of old. They could say all kinds of crazy things and no one was offended, not even the king, because everyone knew professors, like jesters, had no real power. Now, according to Hansen, crazy ideas have escaped the campus and are setting public policy.
Classic Marxism may have hit some resistance since its call for dividing people by income and class could be hindered by the relative affluence of most of the U.S. population, at least by world standards. But for sure, today’s Marxists are focused on dividing by race and gender to class. And critical race theory fits right in.
There’s a lot to process here: lying teachers, overt racism, emotional oppression upon very young children. You might want to take that deep breath.
Mike Landry, PhD, is a retired business professor. He has been a journalist, broadcaster and church pastor. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on current events and business history.
Violence sprung from the streets of New York City’s Chinatown on Monday, leaving an Asian woman sprawled on the ground after a black man punched her in the face for no apparent reason. Surveillance video posted by Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, whose district includes Chinatown, showed the 55-year-old woman walking past the Kong Sihk Tong café at around 6:15 p.m. A black man in an orange hoodie and denim jacket then punched her square in the face with a hard left. The woman collapsed on the pavement. The attacker then raved at the victim.
“What’d you hit me for?” the attacker said, according to the New York Daily News. “Why’d you hit me?”
This was just sent to me from my constituent. This just happened in my district in Chinatown. He has been arrested and our precinct is investigating. pic.twitter.com/sxNfCbrlza
Several people went to check on the victim, who remained motionless on the ground. She was later taken to a hospital, reportedly in stable condition.
Police were called and arrested the man at the scene.
The Daily News quoted a source who said the attacker was “homeless, and he has a long criminal record.” The attacker was taken to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Charges are pending.
“Can’t believe I actually witnessed an attack on an Asian lady right in front of me at the heart of NYC Chinatown,” Jin Zhen wrote on Instagram, according to the New York Post.
“When I saw the lady rolled over to the ground and went unconscious I quickly hung up on my food order and start recording the situation for evidence.”
Donald Ng, who works in the area, said that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio“needs to do something about this mental health issue.”
“Some customers were calling for help. They said a guy punched a woman. She was sitting there on the sidewalk like she was tired, like she was out,” Chiu Cheng, the restaurant manager, said, according to the Daily News.
“He was crazy. I know it’s serious. I feel sad about it. With all that’s happening, I feel scared. I work at the restaurant late. I’m afraid about walking to the subway at night,” Cheng said.
The issue of bail reform entered the incident after former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik noted that a consequence of bail reform has been putting people such as the attacker on the street.
The NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force is looking into the assault, according to WCBS-TV.
Hate crimes against Asians in New York City are up 353 percent over last year.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
One of the biggest stories in this election is how President Trump, whom leftists and their media allies have constantly called a “racist,” made great inroads with minorities. The left is clearly shocked. Rather than humbly spending some time on self-reflection, however, they are doubling down on identity politics by blaming minority Trump voters.
Since Election Day, leftists have been attacking minority Trump voters from two angles. First, they claim minorities who voted for Trump are “white” voters who shouldn’t be classified as minorities. This nonsense is nothing new. Prior to the election, Joe Biden famously said black voters who vote for Trump “ain’t black.”
Immediately after the election, this nonsense came up again courtesy of none other than Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the now-debunked 1619 Project. When it became clear that Trump would win Florida thanks to enthusiastic support from Latino voters, Hannah-Jones tweeted: “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains [sic] why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate.”
National Public Radio’s Gene Demby quickly endorsed Hannah-Jones’ assertions. In an NPR post-election segment, titled “Who is the White Vote?” Demby said:
It’s important that, you know, we think about the ways that there are many, many white Latinos. And because whiteness so thoroughly informs voting behavior, we should probably be asking better questions about Latino voters, like whether they identify as white or not. That might be more illuminating than simply whether someone refers to themselves as Latino in some ways.
No, Democrats Don’t Own Brown People
Here is the thought process behind these kinds of comments Only white people vote for Republicans. Since skin color trumps ethnicity, of course, light-skinned minorities would vote for a Republican candidate because of their “whiteness.” They shouldn’t be counted as minority voters at all.
This thought process is deeply flawed. Dividing the Latino community by skin color is possibly the most racist thing to do. Latino voters are unique, both as individuals and based on their diverse Latin American countries of origin, but it’s wrong to use colorism to explain Latino voters’ behaviors. Regardless of skin color, many Latino immigrants have suffered or watched their families suffer under socialist policies in their home countries. Many came to America to escape socialism, so naturally, they will not vote for Democrats, whose party enthusiastically embraces it.
Further, claiming skin color drives a voter’s behavior is an insult to minority voters’ intelligence. During Trump’s first term and prior to the pandemic lockdowns, both black and Hispanic unemployment rates were at historic lows. The black and Hispanic household median annual income increase (adjusted for inflation) more than doubled during Trump’s term compared to the Obama years. Minority voters, like any other voters, will naturally support the candidate whose policies have benefited them.
By the same token, minority voters will reject candidates whose policies might bring them harm. Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, explained to a puzzled NPR journalist why Biden lost Latino support in Texas. “For example, a lot of the Border Patrol law enforcement are heavily Latino in the Rio Grande Valley,” Garcia said. “So when you are talking about defunding the police, and you don’t stand up to those types of rhetoric, then it leaves an opening for Republicans to come in and take advantage of that.”
When will leftist pundits such as Hannah-Jones and Demby ever realize it is the radical policies and ideas they support that have driven away minority voters?
The Left Believes Minorities Have No Agency
Apparently, blaming minority Trump voters’ “whiteness” doesn’t go far enough for some on the left. Charles M. Blow, a New York Times columnist, complained that some minority Trump voters have Stockholm syndrome, a psychological response that occurs when abuse victims bond with their abusers.
In his most recent article, Blow listed statistic after statistic showing that “a larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016,” including Trump doubling black women’s support from 4 percent in 2016 to 8 percent in 2020, and increasing black men’s vote from 13 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2020. “It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists,” Blow said, calling all Trump voters either racists or accomplices of racism.
There’s more. According to Blow, the number that really put him on his heels was “the percentage of L.G.B.T. people voting for Trump doubled from 2016, moving from 14 percent to 28 percent. In Georgia, the number was 33 percent.”
Although none of the statistics Blow presented even remotely support the title of his piece, “Exit Poll Points to the Power of White Patriarchy,” he found a way to blame white patriarchy and demean minority Trump voters in the end. According to Blow, Trump’s widening support across racial and gender groups “points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. … Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.”
In the eyes of leftists such as Blow, nonwhite voters and non-straight voters who supported Trump are nobody but coattail riders who have neither personal agency nor the ability to make it on our own in the world. I had never read anything more racist, more divisive, and more insulting than this, and I am not the only one. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist and a fellow at the Hoover Institute, tweeted: “This is the dumbest, most divisive drivel I’ve read in a long time. We should be talking about what unites us now. Not doubling down on ID-Politics. Shame on you!”
Minorites Had Good Reason to Vote for Trump
It is obvious that leftist pundits are dumbfounded by Trump’s widening support among minority voters in 2020. Since the 2016 election, rather than trying to understand half of the country who voted for Trump the first time, these talking heads turned toward nurturing their hatred of Trump and getting him out of office as their full-time jobs.
They thought that after repeating “Orange Man Bad” day after day for four years, the electorate would just follow their lead. They have no clue why someone they despised so much could have attracted even more minority votes this time around. Since they are unable to come up with any reasonable explanation, let me shed some light on the matter.
Minorities like me voted for Trump because we like his policies: lower taxes, fewer government regulations, and strong national security. American people, especially minorities, have seen real economic benefits during Trump’s first term. He stands up to socialism and promises, “America will never be a socialist country,” and his unconventional foreign policy approach has brought a historical breakthrough of peace in the Middle East.
We want a safe environment to raise our families. We don’t want to see our cities burned, our shops looted, and our statues toppled. We want good-paying jobs so we can enjoy the lifestyle we desire through our own hard work. We want all families, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to be able to choose the best school that matches their children’s educational needs. We want to continue to express ourselves without being censored or canceled.
We certainly don’t believe race and sex are the roots of nor the answer to every social ill. We are tired of identity politics, critical race theory, and cancel culture, all of which have sucked the fun out of life and shut down the exchange of ideas. We know our country has room for improvement, but it is not a racist nation. We take pride in being Americans and in all the progresses our nation has made, and we are tired of the left condemning our country’s founding and the American ideal.
As long as leftists continue to weaponize identity politics and dress us down as if we are mindless cattle, their candidates will continue to lose our support.
Helen Raleigh, CFA, is an American entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. She’s a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her writings appear in other national media, including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Helen’s new book, “Backlash: How Communist China’s Aggression Has Backfired,” is available for pre-order with a release date of October 20, 2020. Follow her on Twitter: @HRaleighspeaks.
The American left’s tone-deafness and blatant ignorance caught up with it Thursday night at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. Rounding out the fourth and final night of the event with a tribute to the late civil rights hero and 17-term U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who died in July, the Democratic Party unknowingly took itself to task on matters of criminal justice reform and civil disobedience.
The topics again have become mainstays in the American political discourse following the officer-involved deaths of unarmed black Americans George Floyd and Breonna Taylor earlier this year. And the social-justice left has been quick to assert itself again as arbiters and champions of racial justice.
A quote from Lewis himself embedded within the DNC tribute to his life, however, reveals modern Democrats and progressives have no idea what it means to move the dial on such issues.
John Lewis was a dear friend. He was the best of who we are and what we can become. And he held onto the promise of this country until his final breath. We miss you, John. #DemConventionpic.twitter.com/fRAr5Mijst
“The means by which we struggle must be consistent with the end we seek,” Lewis could be heard saying amid a slew of his most famous quotations and the praises of fellow Democratic politicians.
According to The New Republic, it was a statement made in 1994, during a PBS debate between Lewis and controversial fellow civil rights activist Al Sharpton on the topic of violence and retributive hate within the civil rights movement.
Lewis, like civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was a firm supporter of peaceful civil disobedience and attempts to strive, with love, toward unity on the issue of racial injustice in the United States. The debate had been spurred on by growing support within the movement for figures such as anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan and fellow members of the Nation of Islam. But Lewis, the longtime Georgia congressman, did not hold this opinion for a brief moment at the time of the Nation of Islam’s relevancy. He lived it, skipping the historic Million Man March in 1995 due to Farrakhan’s presence, according to excerpts from his memoir.
“I did not march because I could not overlook the presence and central role of Louis Farrakhan, and so I refused to participate,” Lewis wrote. “I believe in freedom of speech but I also believe that we have an obligation to condemn speech that is racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic or hateful.”
“The means by which we struggle must be consistent with the end we seek, and that includes the words we use to pursue those ends,” he added.
WARNING: The following tweets contain graphic language and images that some viewers will find offensive.
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Rioters just tried breaking into the Gucci Store in DC but couldn’t break in before the cops showed up. pic.twitter.com/lDedf0bWOd
Antifa extremists throw smoke bombs and explosive fireworks in the street during the 50th night of violent Portland protests against the state. Video by @FromKalen: pic.twitter.com/xD0qNg1F6S
Unfortunately, the modern American left does not seem to hold Lewis’ personal philosophy in the same esteem that it does his Democratic voting record. Or perhaps the left simply does not understand Lewis’ words at all.
Either way, apathy or ignorance, the consequences have been great in recent months, as Democratic politicians made excuses for — or outright granted a stamp of approval to — violent Black Lives Matter demonstrations nationwide.
By the second week of June, race riots had resulted in more than $25 million worth of physical damage in Floyd’s home state of Minnesota alone, MarketWatch reported. According to WITI-TV, an unofficial tally done at the time also indicated that at least 17 people, the majority of them black, had died in the opening weeks of the unrest.
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Since the start of the demonstrations, businesses have been razed. People have, literally, been beaten and bloodied to near death in the streets by angry mobs. If only the Democrats would make an effort to understand and live by the words they espouse, the words of the late, great figures of days gone by — perhaps they wouldn’t be doomed to radicalism.
Officially selected Tuesday as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris has already entered the crucible as progressives and conservatives fight for control over the narrative surrounding the candidate.
Coming as an unexpected hurdle alongside controversy surrounding Harris’ radical left primary platform, cutthroat prosecutorial record and sexual relationship with political superior Willie Brown, however, were the details of her lineage. Unbeknownst to many, Harris is the descendant of prominent Jamaican slave owners, according to her father.
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The news had first broken on Jan. 13, 2019, when Jamaica Global published a lengthy ancestry article written in September 2018 by Harris’ father, the prominent economist and Stanford University professor Donald Harris. Born in British Jamaica himself before coming to the United States in 1963, the professor had contributed his 3,000-word article to the site, which highlights the “Jamaican diaspora” and its descendants worldwide, in an effort to reflect “on the ‘Jamaicanness’ of his daughter Kamala.”
According to the professor’s own account, he, his paternal grandmother and, by extension, his daughter were all descended from Jamaican plantation owner and Brown’s Town founder Hamilton Brown. “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town),” Harris wrote.
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“The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1936 two years before I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).”
According to Snopes, no explicit evidence of the genealogical connection has ever been provided by the professor.
A Jamaican records archive unearthed in July 2019 by the Washington Free Beacon, however, did reveal that in 1817, Hamilton Brown owned a substantial number of slaves, some of whom were African while others were Creole. This was all it took for some prominent conservative commentators and political operatives to revive the story, citing it as a major irony given the fact that it would make Harris a compulsory donor to, rather than a recipient of, the American left’s long-supported slavery reparations plan.
“Did you know: According to Kamala Harris’ father, her family descends from 19th-century slave owners in Jamaica,” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk wrote on Twitter.
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“Does she still support reparations or is she going to claim that she can’t be held responsible for the sins of her ancestors now?”
Another figure quick to highlight Harris’ lineage was right-wing author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who first mentioned the issue in an appearance on Fox News, claiming the candidate should not be considered African-American at all as a result of the development.
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“Kamala Harris’s mom is Asian Indian. Her dad Donald Harris is by his own account descended from one of the largest slave planters in Jamaica,” D’Souza also wrote on Twitter. “In what sense then can she claim the African American experience of being descended from slaves and subject to segregation and Jim Crow?”
“If the Democrats want persons descended from slaves to receive reparations from those descended from slaveowners, how much should Kamala Harris have to pay?”he later added.
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Harris is far from the only American political figure to face scandal regarding slave-holding ancestry. Several prominent statesmen have been canceled or seen their character assassinated as a result of such genealogical ties.
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Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell faced similar controversy last July, when NBC News unearthed evidence of his slave-holding ancestry from the 1850 and 1860 U.S. Censuses. This proximity to slavery was, in the same breath, used to corner McConnell over his opposition to race-based financial reparations.
At the time of this report, left-wing politicians, commentators and establishment media figures were mum on the topic of Harris’ ancestry.
The Western Journal reached out to both the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
The headline of the news release from the Pew Research Center was a master class in trying to make the headline fit the prevailing narrative: “Recent protest attendees are more racially and ethnically diverse, younger than Americans overall.”
“Large-scale protests and rallies for racial equality have captured public attention and amplified calls for policy reforms in recent weeks,” the Wednesday article began.
“Some 6% of U.S. adults say they have attended a protest or rally that focused on issues related to race or racial equality in the last month, and those who have are more likely to be nonwhite and younger than Americans overall, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. They are also more likely to live in an urban area and to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.”
Let’s say you stopped reading there. What would be your takeaways on the reading comprehension tests? a) Lots of people attended these protests. b) Those people skewed nonwhite. c) They tended to be urban and Democratic in nature.
You’d only get a high-D, however — 67 percent right.
As for what you got correct: a) Yes, 6 percent is a high number. c) The crowds were urban and tended to vote for Democrats.
As for b) — well, let’s talk about that.
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The Pew Research Center’s survey of protest-goers is heavily dependent on what you’re willing to consider “more likely to be nonwhite and younger than Americans overall.”
Younger? Yes, definitely. “About four-in-ten (41%) of those who say they recently attended a protest focused on race are younger than 30; among all U.S. adults, 19% are in this age group,” Pew said.
“In turn, those ages 50 and older are underrepresented among the protesters, while those ages 30 to 49 represent a similar share of those who have attended a protest as they do of the adult population overall.”
The problem comes out when you look at how many people who attended protests that were supposed to be about black people achieving racial justice were actually black.
“Black Americans account for 17% of those who say they attended a protest focused on race or racial equality in the last month, compared with their 11% share of all adults in the survey,” the news release said.
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“Hispanic Americans account for 22% of recent protest attendees, versus 15% of all adults. The difference is less pronounced but still statistically significant when it comes to the share of protesters who are Asian (8% vs. 5% of the adults surveyed). While 64% of U.S. adults are white, just 46% of those who said they attended a protest focused on race in the last month are white.”
The results came from a web survey managed by Ipsos of 9,654 respondents between June 4 and June 10. The margin of error was 1.6 percentage points. So, the difference between the share of adult black respondents and the percentage of black individuals in attendance at the protests in which the Black Lives Matter movement played a large part and which were perceived to be about black Americans standing up for their rights was just 6 percentage points.
The vast majority of people who were protesting for racial equality, in other words, weren’t black.
This wasn’t at all like the skew of Democrats-to-Republicans.
“When it comes to political party affiliation, about eight-in-ten (79%) of those who say they participated in a protest or rally focused on race or racial equality in the last month identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while just 17% say they are Republican or Republican-leaning,” the news release said.
Meanwhile, 51 percent of all adult respondents in the survey said they were Democrats or leaned Democrat, compared to the 44 percent who were Republican or leaned Republican.” And yet, both Democrats and Republicans expressed outrage at the death of George Floyd.
I suppose part of the difference could be explained by the fact that the average Republican probably isn’t going to show up to a protest with a “Trump Supporters 4 Justice” sign, but the reality is that this is about something significantly different than requesting justice for Floyd.
This is nothing short of Democrats and the media using black pain as a prop for themselves.
While many black Americans may be frustrated with their treatment by law enforcement, that’s largely not who was protesting. The demonstrators, according to this survey, were within 5 percentage points of being majority white. But that’s not what the narrative was — and that’s likely not what the narrative will remain.
Facts and narrative, however, are two very separate things, no matter how hard the Pew Research Center wants to make them fit.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal for four years.
It wouldn’t be a holiday in 2018 if liberals weren’t offended by something. This time, liberals were outraged over “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” which is apparently now being deemed racist.
On Wednesday, ABC aired the classic animated Peanuts special “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” which sparked the outrage. The animated special includes a heartwarming scene in which Linus leads a prayer as the head of the table. Franklin, the only black character in the special, was seated in a comfortable chair on one side of the table by himself while other characters sat on the opposite side.
Since Franklin was sitting on one side of the table by himself, some Twitter users were quick to call racism.
“How come Franklin, Charlie Brown’s only black friend, sits alone on the other side of the table? And in a lawn chair,”one user tweeted.
Another user claimed he would stop watching the annual special until they edit in more characters on Franklin’s side of the table.
One Twitter user even compared the Peanuts special to the horror movie “Get Out.”
However, misinformed Twitter users failed to realize that the character’s creator, Charles M. Schulz, added Franklin to the cast as a show against racism. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, a teacher asked Schulz to include a black character to help influence attitudes on race.
As a result of Schulz’s correspondence with the teacher, Franklin was introduced in the summer of 1968, which was a bold stand against racism at the time. Considering the history of Franklin, it’s doubtful that there were any racist intentions in the Thanksgiving special. If anything, the seating was made to point out racial division instead of trying to exacerbate it.
It seems this was just another case of liberals being outraged for the sake of it.
Malachi Bailey is a writer from the Midwest with a background in history, education and philosophy. He has led multiple conservative groups and is dedicated to the principles of free speech, privacy and peace.
Members of the Black Panther Party marched through the city of Atlanta, strapped with assault rifles and brandishing Stacey Abrams campaign signs. In a video posted on the group’s Facebook page on Saturday, members of the Black Panther Party are seen marching through the West End neighborhood of Atlanta in support of Stacey Abrams gubernatorial campaign. As they marched, the Black Panthers carried assault rifles and continually shouted slogans such as “black power” and “power to the people.”
Abrams, a former Democratic state representative, is running in a tight election against Republican Brian Kemp, Georgia’s current Secretary of State. The Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows Kemp up by 1.1 percentage points, well within the margin of error.
The video shows the panthers marching for nearly 30 minutes through the city of Atlanta until they enter a local radio station.
When reached for comment by The Daily Caller News Foundation, the Abrams campaign forwarded a statement from spokeswoman Abigail Collazo. Her statement did not specifically address the Panthers’ march, but instead attacked Kemp.
“Brian Kemp is the only candidate in this race who has posed for pictures with supporters wearing racist, hate-filled t-shirts and refused to denounce them, while Abrams continues to condemn any racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise discriminatory words and actions,”Collazo said.
“Unlike Kemp, Abrams is a leader committed to running an inclusive campaign focused on bringing all Georgians together to find bold solutions on critical issues like health care, education, and the economy,”she continued.
At one point during the march, someone driving a vehicle stopped momentarily to speak to the Panthers.
One of the members can be heard saying afterward: “You need to march in your neighborhood. When we was (sic) in West Virginia, 99 percent crackers, stone cold crackers.”
Kemp’s campaign called on Abrams to immediately denounce the Black Panthers.
“It’s no surprise that militant Black Panthers are armed and patrolling the streets of Georgia for Stacey Abrams. The Black Panthers are a radical hate group with a racist and anti-semitic agenda. They are dangerous and encourage violence against our men and women in uniform,” Kemp spokesman Ryan Mahoney said in a statement to TheDCNF.
“Stacey Abrams should immediately denounce the Black Panthers and their hateful record of racism,” he continued. “She should stand against and condemn their attempts to intimidate hardworking Georgia voters just days before the election.”
The close race has brought star power from both sides of the aisle. Vice President Mike Pence campaigned for Kemp on Thursday — the same day Oprah Winfrey knocked on doors on behalf of Abrams.
The Panthers did not respond to a request for comment by TheDCNF.
Founded by Tucker Carlson, a 25-year veteran of print and broadcast media, and Neil Patel, former chief policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, The Daily Caller News Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit providing original investigative reporting from a team of professional reporters that operates for the public benefit.
I originally read this story on ClasDaily.com, with Doug Giles. I trust this man and his organization. I truly hope this does not turnout to be speculation.
Jerry Broussard of WhatDidYouSay.org
You shouldn’t trust Rubio.
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio has carried on at least two extramarital affairs since he entered politics. GotNews.com can confirm through lobbyist sources in DC and Tallahassee that at least one DC-based lobbyist has had an extra marital affair with the first term U.S. Senator. Still another Florida-based lobbyist has been IDed as carrying on an affair.
The first woman was Amber Stoner, a 36-year-old woman who worked for Rubio when he was head of the Florida Republican Party.
Stoner, who later became a lobbyist, traveled with Rubio at least seventeen times, including several resort towns on the GOP credit card. Rubio still hasn’t released all of his credit card records from his time heading the party.
A pattern has emerged where Rubio often has affairs with women who work for him or who could benefit from his access or policies. As Rubio’s election prospects diminish — he only won Minnesota — the willingness of ex-supporters to throw him under the bus has also increased.
Sources from both the Jeb Bush campaign for president and the Charlie Crist for U.S. Senate campaign confirm that they investigated the Amber Stoner-Rubio relationship. A journalist who investigated the affair found Stoner threatening a libel suit.
An email read to GotNews.com shows Rubio increasingly desperate calls for attention from Stoner after Rubio gave her the cold shoulder. GOP officials opposing Rubio from Florida read the email as that of a spurned lover.
Rubio and David Rivera, a disgraced former congressman and Rubio mentor, would attend topless bars with other married members of the Florida legislature, says a high placed GOP party official.
Rivera and Rubio would often party together with lobbyists at an apartment on Munroe Street where cigars, drinks, and single women were on offer. Several prominent lobbying firms retain attractive women to entice politicians into supporting their bills.
Rubio’s closeness with lobbyists may have also been because he was one of them, according to BuzzFeed. That fondness has continued to DC.
The second woman is Dana Hudson, a blonde lobbyist based in the Beltway.
According to two lobbyists in DC in the national security space Hudson has been bragging about having had sex with the senator to other lobbyists.
Hudson lobbies on Homeland Security issues and is personal friends with the very same corrupt David Rivera who once partied with Rubio.
Interestingly, despite an ongoing investigation by the FBI, Rivera still manages to find tickets to the GOP debates. Based upon her Twitter feed Hudson and Rivera seem to enjoy each other’s company a lot.
Rubio’s wife reportedly knows about Marco Rubio’s extra marital affairs and doesn’t mind them — so long as she and her children are provided for.
One high placed GOP establishment source from Florida who actually backs Rubio over Trump and Cruz expressed shock that Rubio was still carrying on with women while he was running for president. “It smacks of Jon Edwards,” he texted.
More to come…
GotNews.com is currently investigating claims that Rubio has been carrying on with the female staffer of another GOP senator who has endorsed Rubio in the presidential campaign.
GotNews.com is offering a $10,000 bounty for more women and sources to come forward. If you’d like to donate to that fund, donate here.
We are also putting together a crowd fund to compensate women and encourage them to come forward.
We reached out to both Dana Hudson and Amber Stoner and will update this post when we here more.
GotNews.com was the first publication to expose the evidence of an affair between Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Renee Ellmers. The story led to McCarthy stepping down for consideration for Speaker of the House.
For decades blacks and whites have stood side-by-side – marched arm in arm, fighting for equality and desegregation. Though the odds at times were stacked against him, they persevered. However, some paid the ultimate price for the movement, including its champion, Dr. Martin Luther King.
They endured many abuses, all to give blacks the equality they deserved – so we could share a lunch counter, a water fountain, schools and universities. All spaces would be equal and open to any race.
Well, that was then and this is now. 50 years removed from the movement anddemands for segregation have returned.
You may ask: “Who’s to blame for such an affront? Is it the neo-Nazis or the Klan or maybe the Republicans?”Sadly it is none of these. What some would call bizarro world, others may refer to as college campuses, which these days are synonymous.
“Black college students across the country have demanded that they be segregated from white peers, calling for ‘safe spaces’ on campuses meant only for so-called students of color.”
These Black student groups have crafted “76 demand lists, each from a different University.” These various “lists” have been
compiled by a website “run by a racial advocacy group called the Black Liberation Collective.”
The group’s name was obviously intentional and if you have an eye for these things, you’ll notice. The name appears innocuous enough, but it isn’t. Notice the word “Black,” not African-American. This harkens back to the black-power movement of the 1960s. Next, “Liberation,” which is code for black separatism and then of course the Marxist term “Collective.”
This “Black Liberation Collective” is nothing more than just another hate filled group designed for the express purpose of fomenting divisions between races, while enriching a select few à la Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
Many of the demands are for “safe spaces.” “At UCLA, the Afrikan Student Union is insisting upon an ‘African Diaspora floor’ as well as an ‘Afro-house,’” because “many black students cannot afford to live in Westwood with the high prices of rent. And Afro-house would provide a cheaper alternative housing solution for Black students.”
I guess the assumption is that all white students are rich and all black students are poor. That’s a pretty racist conclusion and black should be insulted by it. But evidently they are not.
Most of the “lists” demand segregated spaces for “people of color,” but if you browse the site, TheDemands.org , you’ll see that it’s all about the cash.
Virtually every list demands huge outlays of cash to support one project or another – $50,000 for this, $500,000 for that – all to fund re-segregation. And the “National Demands” list includes a demand of “free tuition for blacks and indigenous students.”
Speaking as a taxpaying white guy, this sounds perfectly fair and reasonable.
But these groups are a function of the times and they’ve learned from the race pimps and community agitators of yesterday and today. They claim discrimination and disrespect when it furthers their agenda and likewise segregation and racial pride when it suits them. They, as most leftists, want it both ways and if they can’t have it they make a loud enough fuss until some guilty white liberal administrator accedes to their demands – whatever they may be at that moment.
The only way to stop this madness is to say no. Sadly, considering the makeup of American universities, this demand/acquiescence model will continue until the demands can’t possibly be met. And then it will explode in riotous violence.
Jada Pinka and Spike Lee are calling on their fellow-black friends to boycott the Academy Awards because there were no black nominees. It’s not that blacks have not not been nominated in the past. Here’s a list from Wikipedia. Most people would be surprised at the number of black actors and actresses nominated and blacks who have won an Academy Award.
“Denzel Washington has the most nominations for an African-American Actor: Best Actor (4 nominations) and Best Supporting Actor (2 nominations).”
Will Smith was nominated in 2001 for Ali and 2006 for Pursuit of Happyness.
Jamie Foxx was the First African-American actor to receive two acting nominations in the same year. He won Best Actor for Ray and for Best Supporting Actor for Collateral, a film that Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of Will Smith, starred in.
In 2002, the best actress was Halle Berry and best actor Denzel Washington.
Were there some worthy Oscar performances in 2015? I thought Chiwetel Ejiofor did a fantastic job in The Martian. I haven’t seen Creed ((Baz Bamigboye: “Some critics have said that Michael B. Jordan’s turn as boxer Adonis Johnson in Creed should also have been nominated. I don’t disagree and think, perhaps, the film’s black director and writer Ryan Coogler should have been considered, too. Instead, a white actor — Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balbao, the sentimental favourite — will represent the movie at the Oscar ceremony on February 28 as best supporting actor nominee.)) or Straight Outta of Compton. ((Baz Bamigboye: “There are some good scenes, but it falls apart after 40 minutes and, frankly, for a few moments I thought I was watching a commercial for Dr Dre’s branded headphones. The film let itself down.”))
I did not see Will Smith’s performance in Concussion. Baz Bamigboye, who is black, writes in his “Stop Whining” article in the Daily Mail, “Concussion is an amiable picture and Smith’s performance is OK-ish — but it’s definitely not Oscar-worthy. His attempt at a Nigerian accent is woeful. I’d rather listen to Lenny Henry’s Katanga any day.”
Bamigboye notes that “it is worth recalling that the 2014 Oscars were a banner year for black talent, with 12 Years A Slave winning best picture, best supporting actress for Lupita Nyong’o and best adapted screenplay. Two years before, Octavia Spencer won for The Help and Viola Davis (The Help) was in a titanic battle for the best actress crown with Meryl Streep, who pipped her for her role as Mrs Thatcher in the Iron Lady, but Davis’s career took off like a rocket.”
Actually, I haven’t watched the Academy Awards for decades. It’s been that long since I’ve become disenchanted with the rubbish that comes out of Hollywood and the hypocrisy of so many leftist Hollywood actors and actresses. I’m upset that two nominations were given to the transgender flick Carol. So much of Hollywood is agenda-driven.
Liberals talk about how bad it is to objectify women, and yet films are filled with objectified women. Liberal Hollywood types support more gun control but have their own armed security and perform in films with hordes of gun violence scenes.
Demographics might have something to do with the interest level among black movie goers: “According to a 2014 study (PDF), 25% of frequent moviegoers were Hispanic, 10% were African-American.” (H/T: CNN) If any group should be ticked off it’s the Hispanics.
The Academy itself is mostly white males. I don’t know what the Academy makeup was when Berry and Washington won. Will there now be Affirmative Action nominees? Will the Academy be pressured to nominate blacks because of fear of boycotts?
This fight is a Hollywood problem, but it’s typical of how things are done in the United States: Identity first, public pressure second, talent third, and character fourth or at all.
Life’s not fair. We live in a right-handed world. When is the last time you saw a left-handed catcher in baseball? (I’ve only seen one.) Try to find a left-handed catcher’s mitt.
Scissors are made for righties. Left-handed baseball players rarely if ever play third or second base or shortstop. And yet left-handed pitchers are sought after.
The world is also made for tall people. A child’s first trip to an amusement park is often met with sadness because he or she is not tall enough to ride some of the more exhilarating attractions.
Growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, there was a large swimming pool facility. The lifeguards were always telling short kids to stay out of the deep end. The only way you could get in was prove you could swim the length of the pool. Tall kids didn’t have to do it. Rank discrimination!
When I was in school, we always had to line up shortest to tallest. I think about how my life would be different if I had been 5’ 6” like my father rather than 6’ 1”. Being short is a plus for gymnasts and jockeys.
Try playing basketball today if you’re 6 feet tall. You might make the high school team, but the pros are likely not to take you unless you’re as good as Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues (5’ 3”) or Anthony “Spud” Webb – 5’7″.
Blacks dominate the sprints and jumping events in track and field. Big guys, black and white, dominate the throwing events. The high school record holder in the shot put is black and very big. His record may never be broken.
The NBA is dominated by tall black men. “According to racial equality activist Richard Lapchick, the NBA in 2011 was composed of 83 percent non-white players, including 78 percent black, four percent Latino, and one percent Asian; 17 percent of the players were white. The league had the highest percentage of black players of any major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada.” It’s about the same for the NFL.
Try being a model if you don’t have “the look.”
You’re probably not going to make it in the music business if you don’t look good. There are exceptions, however. In the end, talent is the key, but it’s not always enough for some markets. Remember this from Simon Cowell and ‘Britain’s Got Talent’?
“Simon Cowell sneered and the huge audience at the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ show made the sort of faces associated with a bad smell. The object of their disaffection was contestant No. 43212, a plain, middle-aged woman from Scotland with bushy eyebrows and a dress and hairdo that might have been stylish when Dwight Eisenhower was president.
“The woman, who seemed somewhat unnerved by the bright lights and the big crowd in the concert hall where the show was recorded, said she was Susan Boyle. She said she was 47 years old, unemployed, and lived alone with her cat, Pebbles. She had never gone on a date and had never been kissed, she added in a thick brogue.”
It was her abilities that wowed the judges and the audience. If you haven’t seen and heard this, then you’re in for a treat.
The Social Justice Warriors now rule at the University of Missouri — to the point that they’re bullying the press and ordering the campus police around.
The crowd uses their bodies to move the photographer away. Then Melissa Click — an MU professor — goes after the videographer, declaring, “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”
The outrage prompted radical leaders to tell the troops on Tuesday that media are “allowed” on campus. Click even apologized.
That’s still some progress, as was the start of faculty voting to revoke Click’s affiliation with the Journalism Department — though not her Communications Department post.
On the other hand, campus police on Tuesday emailed the student body urging kids to report incidents of “hateful and/or hurtful speech or actions.”
The quest for “safe spaces” is starting to look a lot like fascism.
All this, after all, follows the forced resignation of the school’s president and chancellor — for acting too deliberately to a series of alleged racial incidents.
Yes, it was the strike threat from African-American members of Missouri’s football team that left the prez little choice. A forfeit of this week’s game against BYU would’ve cost MU a cool $1 million.
But that just goes to another huge problem in modern academia, one we’ve warned of for years now — schools’ addiction to the cash pulled in by marquee athletic teams.
Between the anti-democratic teachings of so many professors and the profiteering of administrators, today’s campuses look rotten to the core.
What surprise, then, that a minority of extremist students can take over — or that the Social Justice crowd is all too ready to call in the police to enforce its agenda?
Dr. Ben Carson. The ‘secret’ that Democrats can’t bear to face. Photo: Getty Images
Here’s something you may not know: Dr. Ben Carson is black.
Of course, I’m being a little cute here. The only way you wouldn’t know he’s black is if you were blind and only listened to the news.
For instance, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” — a program that often serves as a kind of artisanal boutique of inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom — host Joe Scarborough expressed consternation over Carson’s popularity. “I just don’t get it,” Scarborough said more than once. Remarking on some Carson ad he didn’t like, Scarborough said, “This guy is up 20 points in Iowa? . . . It’s baffling.”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski kept saying, “I just don’t get the Ben Carson . . .” before trailing off into in articulate exasperation.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson took a plausible stab at why Carson is popular. “They like him, they like him,” he repeated, referring to conservatives in Iowa and elsewhere who admire Carson’s dignified and soft-spoken demeanor.
True enough; Carson has the highest favorables of any candidate in the GOP field.
But what’s remarkable is that at no point in this conversation did anyone call attention to the fact that Carson is an African-American. Indeed, most analysis of Carson’s popularity from pundits focuses on his likable personality and his sincere Christian faith. But it’s intriguingly rare to hear people talk about the fact that he’s black.
One could argue he’s even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama, given that Obama’s mother was white, and he was raised in part by his white grandparents. In his autobiography, Obama writes at length about how he grew up outside the traditional African-American experience — in Hawaii and Indonesia — and how he consciously chose to adopt a black identity when he was in college.
Meanwhile, Carson grew up in Detroit, the son of a very poor, very hardworking single mother. His tale of rising from poverty to become the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital is one of the most inspiring rags-to-riches stories of the last half-century. (Cuba Gooding Jr. played Carson in the movie about his life.) He was a towering figure in the black community in Baltimore and nationally — at least until he became a Republican politician.
And that probably explains why his race seems to be such a non-issue for the media. The New York Times is even reluctant to refer to him as a doctor. The Federalist reports that Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in education, is three times more likely to be referred to as “Dr.” in the Times as brain surgeon Carson. If the Times did that to a black Democrat, charges of racism would be thick in the air.
Or consider the aforementioned Eugene Robinson, who routinely sees racial bias in Republicans. “I can’t say that the people holding ‘Take Back Our Country’ signs were racists,” he wrote in 2014, recalling a tea party rally four years earlier, “but I know this rallying cry arose after the first African-American family moved into the White House.”
Wrong. Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry all used the slogan incessantly when George W. Bush was in office.
How strange it must be for people who comfort themselves with the slander that the GOP is a cult of organized racial hatred that the most popular politician among conservatives is a black man. Better to ignore the elephant in the room than account for such an inconvenient fact. The race card is just too valuable politically and psychologically for liberals who need to believe that their political opponents are evil.
Carson’s popularity isn’t solely derived from his race, but it is a factor. The vast majority of conservatives resent the fact that Democrats glibly and shamelessly accuse Republicans of bigotry — against blacks, Hispanics and women — simply because they disagree with liberal policies (which most conservatives believe hurt minorities).
Yet conservatives also refuse to adopt those liberal policies just to prove they aren’t bigots. Carson — not to mention Carly Fiorina and Hispanics Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — demonstrates that there’s no inherent contradiction between being a minority (or a woman) and supporting conservative principles. And that fact is just too terrible for some liberals to contemplate.
Let’s face facts: The Black Lives Matter movement, if it can be called a movement, was a sham from the beginning. Far more blacks die in this country at the hands of other blacks than as a result of run-ins with law enforcement. The decisions of two grand juries not to indict police officers implicated in the deaths of two black men may have seemed like a convenient excuse for a protest, complete with its own Twitter hashtag. But there was never going to be a sustained grassroots movement because the grievance is built on a house of cards.
Lacking genuine motivation, BLM has had nowhere to go but left, becoming increasingly radicalized and co-opted by liberals — many of them, ironically, rich and white. This trend has manifested itself in recent news stories. Last week, a group of Ferguson protesters made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, specifically to the “Palestinian Territories” in the West Bank, in a show of solidarity against the “Zionist state.” Ahmad Abuznaid, legal and policy director of the Dream Defenders, organized the trip, whose goals he enumerated thus:
[P]rimarily to allow for the group members to experience and see first hand the occupation, ethnic cleansing and brutality Israel has levied against Palestinians, but also to build real relationships with those on the ground leading the fight for liberation.
SEE SECOND ARTILCE BELOW
Showing animosity toward another group that has suffered oppression, Jews, has always been a curious and ironic hallmark of radical black leaders — think Sharpton, Jackson, and Farrakhan. It is utterly unsurprising to see anti-Semitism as a credo of BLM. In a video interview with Noah McKenna, one of the white organizers of a protest cum traffic snarl outside Boston, he is asked about anti-Jewish postings on his group’s Facebook page (beginning around 0:50). His response? “This feels like trolling.”
Despite pleas from march organizers to respect the MLK event, demonstrators blocked Rue de la Place by the Old Courthouse, where the march was to begin Monday morning, protesting what they called a watered-down legacy of King. [Emphasis added]
The problem with claiming that King’s legacy has been “watered down” is that he left behind a body of literature that runs counter philosophically to everything these latter-day protesters claim to stand for — unless they have access to some heretofore undisclosed papers in which the civil rights giant endorsed rioting or looting.
Howard Portnoy has written for HotAir, NewsBusters, Weasel Zippers, Conservative Firing Line, RedCounty, and New York’s Daily News. He has one published novel, Hot Rain, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and has been a guest on Radio Vice Online with Jim Vicevich, The Alana Burke Show, Smart Life with Dr. Gina, and The George Espenlaub Show.
Ferguson protesters travel to Palestine in show of solidarity against ‘Zionist state’
[Ed. – A whole new reason to dislike these morons]
A group of Ferguson protesters has visited Palestine in support of activists aiming to create ties between the two groups and to “see first hand the occupation, ethnic cleansing and brutality Israel has levied against Palestinians.”
The group consists of members from the Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter, and other Ferguson protesters.
The ten day Palestine trip organized by the legal and policy director of the Dream Defenders, Ahmad Abuznaid, offered protesters to visit areas such as the West Bank.
“The goals were primarily to allow for the group members to experience and see first hand the occupation, ethnic cleansing and brutality Israel has levied against Palestinians, but also to build real relationships with those on the ground leading the fight for liberation.”
Activist Cherrell Brown asserted that the police violence carried out on African American is comparable to Palestinians currently living under the “Zionist state.”
Charles Ogletree, a personal friend of Barack Obama and a left wing ideologue, recently told a national network audience that race relations are worse than when his grandfather lived.
Bishop E.W. Jackson, a charismatic conservative leader, says in this exclusive video interview that he finds it “ironic” that Ogletree, whom he knows as a Harvard Law classmate, feels so victimized when he is “making a six figure salary.”
Jackson calls it “preposterous” that people living in mansions, driving the best cars and eating the best meals would say race relations are worse now than it was for their grandfather. Calling this a “tragic, false message,”he believes it comes as “a result of a kind of spiritual blindness.”
Jackson, a Marine Corps veteran, was the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor of Virginia in 2013. He currently serves as Founder and President of STAND, and Bishop of Exodus Faith Ministries in Chesapeake, VA. He is also a Senior Fellow at Family Research Council, where The Daily Caller filmed this interview
Jackson sees America as a gift with possibilities for all. Yet, too many Americans, in Jackson’s opinion, come to believe “the lie”of indoctrination from those like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. “There have been many totalitarian leaders who have said that if you tell a lie long enough, and you make it big enough, eventually, people will start believing it.”
Dispelling the progressive mantra of “white privilege” that attaches achievement to melanin levels, Jackson calls it “ludicrous” to assume that the “children of black billionaires, black CEOS, our black president, or our black Attorney General are, automatically, in a worse position than the children born in white projects like in Boston.”
Noting the progressive notion that truth, facts and law matter less than manufactured narrativesby the cultural elites, Jackson says, “If truth doesn’t matter, then the debate must end at the point of a gun, because might is what makes right. And that’s a very dangerous way for our country to go.”
Jackson sees a double standard when tea party protests are called extreme but looters and rioters are applauded. “If you [cultural elites] like what they stand for, you ignore the fact that they are rioting,”he states.
For Bishop Jackson, who is watching the public fomenting of select racial incidents, sees three sets of victims for manufactured national outrage. Police, who put their lives on the line everyday to make us safe, are the first he names. Next, are black youth, who are being sold a bill of goods. Lastly, the law abiding citizen who sees crime and is fearful of reporting it, as they risk being called a snitch and facing retaliation.
Jackson sees a high cost of the secular liberal policies that have been imposed on the black community, calling it “cancerous and devastating to the black family.”
As for the allegations of rape against comedian Bill Cosby, Jackson explains how Cosby came under vicious attack for his condemnation of black leaders who refused to preach self-responsibility. Jackson said, I “hate to think of him doing such things [rape], but whether he did them or not, they [his adversaries] were going to try to find something.”
“Bill Cosby is falling victim. I just hope he didn’t give them the ammunition.”
As a black pastor who grew up in the ghetto himself, Jackson has met with fellow black pastors in Ferguson, Missouri, who felt exploited by the out-of-towners. Jackson is joining a call for racial reconciliation and healing in America, something he wishes our first black President would have done once during his six years in office.
See Video Interview Below:
ABOUT THE AUTOR: Ginni Thomas
Virginia Thomas, 54, is a special correspondent for the Daily Caller producing videos of emerging leaders and educators in the public square. Her ear is to the ground outside the Washington Beltway as a social entrepreneur. Previously, she was the founder of LibertyCentral.org (nonprofit for citizen activists), and has worked at The Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College’s Washington office, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the senior levels of the legislative and executive branches of government. She has maintained her midwestern authenticity after 30 years in Washington, D.C. and enjoys motor homing and the Nebraska Cornhuskers with her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas. Her degrees are: Business Communication & Political Science from Creighton University, and J.D. from Creighton Law School (Omaha, NE).
Mrs. Thomas does not necessarily support or endorse the products, services or positions promoted in any advertisement contained herein, and does not have control over or receive compensation from any advertiser.
Since President Obama’s been president, racial division has escalated. That racial division has come from the president himself and a number of prominent racialists who are always leading the way in keeping racial divisions alive.
If racial divisions evaporate, so do political advantages. A similar thing is going on in the Middle East. What unifies the Muslim world is a common hatred for Israel. Peace with Israel would mean Islam would have to deal with its inherent problems.
Trayvon Martin is a racial red herring. It’s a tragedy that’s being used to mask what’s wrong with much of black culture, a culture that was in many ways created by our own government and egged on by self-appointed racialists, including the president. Consider the following:
“If we don’t do anything, then growth will be slower than it should be. Unemployment will not go down as fast as it should. Income inequality will continue to rise,” Obama said in an interview published Sunday by The New York Times. “Racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot. If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested, ” he said.
While channel surfing, I came across The House I Live In (1945), a short film starring Frank Sinatra. Made to oppose anti-Semitism and racial prejudice at the end of World War II, it received an Honorary Academy Award and a special Golden Globe award in 1946. It reminded me of where I grew up.
While Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my hometown, is not as ethnically diverse as a city like New York, it had a similar ethnic and cultural mix. I grew up with other Italians, Irish, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish families. When I was in the seventh grade, I got to know several black students. The high school I attended was equally diverse. While it wasn’t perfect, and neither were we, it was, as they say, the best years of our lives.
What made our neighborhood work so well? While we did not all share the same ethnic or religious backgrounds, we did share a common moral background. The disintegration of neighborhoods, schools, and governments today is not a result of migrating ethnic groups. Rather, the disintegration is taking place through the importation of moral diversity. A generation or two ago, our ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity did not keep us apart because we shared the same moral values.
Today, multiculturalism is more than an appreciation of varied cultural expressions; it’s part of an overall philosophy of life. As it is being framed by social engineers, school curricula, and special interest groups, multiculturalism is intimately tied to ethics. An appreciation of diverse cultures is being used as a dodge to smuggle in aberrational moral standards that have the effect of diluting the impact of biblical Christianity. Multiculturalism is a type of moral polytheism: many moral law-orders based on many gods.
Generations ago, immigrants assimilated. They adopted a unified American culture while celebrating their ethnic and cultural heritage; and no one minded. Think of the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding(2002). Today, there are groups who don’t want to be Americans. They want Americans to acquiesce to their ethnic and moral diversity. In fact, some of them want to impose their minority status on the rest of us while they remain excluded from the mainstream. For them, politics is the way to make us conform to their way of thinking.
In 2007, The House I Live In was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It’s a peek into another era that is a distant memory for people my age and another world for the younger set.
Plot
Frank Sinatra, playing himself, takes a smoking break from a recording session. He sees a group of ten boys chasing another boy and intervenes. He asks them if they’re Nazis and explains a few things about America, blood banks, World War II, and teamwork. He then tells a story how following the bombing at Pearl Harbor there was a successful American attack on an enemy warship. It was carried out by a Christian and a Jew of different religions fighting for the same cause. His main points are that we are “all” Americans because we share a set of common ideals.
The boys take Sinatra’s words to heart as they walk down the alley. The boy being chased is welcomed into the group and shows his appreciation to Sinatra’s intervention and kind but sober words.
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Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
March 5, 2016 by 
For decades blacks and whites have stood side-by-side – marched arm in arm, fighting for equality and desegregation. Though the odds at times were stacked against him, they persevered. However, some 
paid the ultimate price for the movement, including its champion, Dr. Martin Luther King.
“Black college students across the country have demanded that they be segregated from white peers, calling for ‘safe spaces’ on campuses meant only for so-called students of color.”
“Collective.”
But evidently they are not.
fund re-segregation. And the “National Demands” list includes a demand of “free tuition for blacks and indigenous students.”
What Did You Say? 
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