Political correctness

Tonight’s Cancellation

Featured image The NFL season starts tonight, as Paul noted a little while ago. So whoever sings the National Anthem at tonight’s game between the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Dallas Cowboys will have a wonderful stage. I don’t know who will sing the Anthem, but unfortunately it won’t be Victory Boyd. I had never heard of Miss Boyd until an hour or so ago, but she is a »

J.P. Sears on When Leftist Pieties Collide

Featured image You know the line of jokes that begins, “A priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar. . .” Well, the great J.P. Sears has run with this idea, imaging the intersectional train wreck when advocates for identity politics, critical race theory, and feminism run into each other in the faculty club bar. Enjoy: P.S.: In my experience of hanging around at the Berkeley Faculty Club bar (which »

When Will Liberals Wake Up to Wokery?

Featured image Everyone of a certain age will remember Bill Clinton’s famous “Sister Souljah” moment in the 1992 campaign, when he called out, in front of Jesse Jackson, black racism in rap music and au courant circles of black culture. (Sister Souljah had said, “if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”) Clinton had been looking for an opportunity to repudiate Jackson since »

Time to Convert to Soccer?

Featured image A lifelong baseball fan, I abandoned the game this year after MLB sided with the Democratic Party in its campaign against ballot integrity in Georgia. It wasn’t just that: my home town team has put a “Black Lives Matter” sign and a memorial to George Floyd in right field. If I can’t escape politics at a baseball game, I’d rather go somewhere else. For the first time in decades, I »

Cleveland Guardians?

Featured image The Cleveland Indians announced today that at the end of the season, they will become the Cleveland Guardians: Cleveland opted to change its name after several years of petitioning and challenges from Native American groups and fans around the country who rallied against the team name and the controversial Chief Wahoo logo. Owner Paul Dolan also said he had an “awakening or epiphany” after the death of George Floyd. Naturally. »

The courage of the individual

Featured image Andrew Sullivan has posted a 90-minute podcast with Yale Law School’s Professor Amy Chua here on Substack. Professor Chua has of course become something of a celebrity in her own right. She has certainly become a controversial figure at Yale, as reflected in the New York Times feature story “Gripped by ‘Dinner Party-gate.’” She must be on to something. I found the whole podcast worth my time. Indeed, it left »

Liberalism’s Endless Aggression Against America

Featured image Liberals get very testy when you suggest they lack patriotism, or worse, that they are ashamed of or actually hate the country deep down inside. But even the New York Times can’t conceal this any longer: A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite Politicians of both parties have long sought to wrap themselves in the flag. But something may be changing: Today, flying the flag »

Wokeism Is Not New

Featured image I was rummaging around again in my archive of old columns from the mid-1990s that never appeared online anywhere, and I found one, from December 1996, that shows the current CRT/”anti-racism” claptrap was rapidly gaining ground way back then: Still Trendier Than Thou: The Joy of Guilt-Mongering Nearly 20 years ago the late Paul Seabury of U.C. Berkeley wrote a sprightly feature article in Harper’s magazine about the Episcopal Church »

Soccer star deals blow to Coca-Cola

Featured image Soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo made news in two ways on Tuesday — one soccer-related, one not. In soccer news, by scoring two goals against Hungary, Ronaldo became the all-time leading soccer in the history of the European Championship tournament. No player from any nation has scored as many goals in this major competition as Ronaldo. In other news, Ronaldo snubbed Coca-Cola. He removed two Coke bottles from the table at »

Are We Worse than North Korea?

Featured image When it comes to free speech and independent thinking? I wouldn’t think so. But then, I’ve never been to North Korea. Defector Yeonmi Park, who grew up in North Korea and now attends Columbia University, says things might be worse here: A North Korean defector said she viewed the US as country of free thought and free speech – until she went to college here. Yeonmi Park attended Columbia University »

University of Michigan Memory Hole

Featured image These days, statues are coming down and buildings and monuments are being re-named as leftists scour the historical record for evidence of nonconformity with today’s conventional wisdom. Generally, I have little sympathy for this project, in part because I scoff at the idea that our forebears were less moral than we are. I do make exceptions, however: there is a statue of former Governor Floyd B. Olson on the grounds »

Will *France* Save Western Civilization?

Featured image Back in February we took prominent notice of how French President Macron and a number of other leading French officials decried the poisonous ideas emanating from American universities, which has led me to wonder why there aren’t at least ten Republican governors taking the same line. (So far the only one who has, and only to a limited extent, is Florida’s De Santis.) Well the next shoe has dropped over »

This Week in Cancel Culture

Featured image It has been suggested that “cancel culture” won’t end until it comes for enough liberals, though I am doubtful. In any case, it is bemusing to see that the latest victim of cancel culture is the aggressively atheist and hyper-Darwinian Richard Dawkins, who has had his “Humanist of the Year Award” from 1996 rescinded by the American Humanist Association. Why, you ask? Here’s the AHA statement: Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has »

Identity Politics Is Destroying America

Featured image David Horowitz has published a new book titled The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America. What follows is an excerpt from David’s book, published with his permission: White Male Christians Today Americans are more divided than at any time since the Civil War. So deep and intractable are the divisions that our most fundamental rights – to religious liberty, freedom of speech, and the presumption of innocence »

A Short History of Wokery

Featured image Wokery burst onto the scene much like covid or, more appropriately, the Black Death. Or World War II. Has so much stupidity been promulgated so quickly and so broadly at any time in human history? Maybe not. Previous stupid phenomena like the witchcraft scare and phrenology took longer to take root. James Kunstler offers a short course in wokism that includes a happy ending: What were the execs of these »

The Week in Cancellation: Bonus Obama Edition?

Featured image I’ve had a theory for a while now, for which there is some suggestive empirical survey data, that the left began to go nuts a couple years before Trump rode down the escalator in 2015 and caused full-blown leftist insanity. The theory, first suggested to me by Charles Murray actually, is that the activist left was frustrated and angry by around 2014 that President Obama was such a huge disappointment. »

The Week in Cancellation: Squidward Edition

Featured image This just tears it. The cancel madness has now set its gaze on Spongebob Squarepants. CNN reports that two “inappropriate episodes” are being pulled from rotation, one because of a plot line involving a virus that leads to a quarantine, and a second episode that involves a panty raid, which is now thought not “kid appropriate.” C’mon, man! This is getting beyond ridiculous. Except that it is a sneak attack »