Race
September 18, 2020 — Steven Hayward
As we’ve commented here many times, any liberal who talks about Republican “dog-whistles” is the dog. Right now Democrats are in a panic about Trump’s strong showing with Hispanic voters, which could flip Nevada and even New Mexico into Trump’s column. Today in the New York Times, two left-leaning academics totally blow the narrative with this passage reporting on the results of some in-depth focus groups with minority voters (with
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September 17, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Stanley Crouch died yesterday at the age of 74. Crouch is best known as a great jazz critic. His biography of Charlie Parker is a classic. But Crouch was also a literary critic and a critic of our culture. Here are some gems from his criticism: On rap: It is “either infantile self-celebration or anarchic glamorization of criminal behavior.” On Toni Morrison: She has a certain skill, but she has
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September 16, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that a “clear racial gap persists in District’s pot arrests.” In other words, D.C. police officers (a majority of whom are Black, by the way) are far more likely to arrest Blacks than Whites for marijuana-related offenses. According to the Post, Blacks account for almost 90 percent of those arrested on marijuana-related charges in D.C. and 84 percent of those arrested for public consumption of the
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September 15, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports on statistics released today that show “the coronavirus is killing Hispanic, Black and American Indian children at much higher numbers than their White peers.” According to the stats, more than 75 percent of children killed by the virus are Hispanic, Black and American Indian children. Yet, these groups represent only 41 percent of the U.S. population [note: in that age category]. The most significant finding here,
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September 14, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Colleges and universities are working extra hard to disgrace themselves this week, and four efforts in particular stand out. • What’s this? Another white woman claiming to be black? Inside Higher Ed reports: Historian Jessica Krug, who last week admitted to being white and faking being Black for her entire career, resigned from her associate professorship at George Washington University, effective immediately, the institution announcedWednesday. But on the heels of
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September 12, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Have you seen the clip below in which Jessica Krug, the white professor who pretended to be Black, imitates what she takes to be a mode of black speech? Her riff begins at about the one minute mark. Watch the latest video at foxnews.com Krug’s rant reminded me of Robin Williams imitating black argot and speech patterns when I saw him in San Francisco as a warm up act for
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September 9, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I’m starting to think that the left might be partially right with this whole “white privilege” thing. After all, we can see from a lot of videos that a large portion—the majority in some cases—of Black Lives Matter protests consist mainly of white people. No wonder no one is getting arrested or charged. It is time to end this white privilege from criminal prosecution now. And if the left is
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September 9, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Evidence from George Floyd’s autopsy, the toxicology report that accompanies the autopsy, and the 19 minutes or so of video of his arrest make it reasonably clear that Floyd died from a fentanyl overdose; or, at a bare minimum, that an overdose was the principal cause of his death. Last night, on the Dan Proft Show, I interviewed former state and federal prosecutor George Parry, who at one time headed
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September 6, 2020 — John Hinderaker
It may well be, if inflicted on a company’s or government agency’s employees. In July, the City of Seattle required employees to attend training on “Internalized Racial Superiority for White People.” Last week, U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow wrote a letter to Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, which is embedded below. Kirsanow questioned the legality of the City’s “training” program under federal civil rights law: This training likely violated Title
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September 5, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
It’s great news, as John says, that the Trump administration has issued a memorandum barring all federal agencies from “training” their employees in critical race theory or white privilege. However, it’s fair to ask why such a memorandum was issued so late in President Trump’s first term. As the memorandum notes, “executive branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda.”
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September 5, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday, OMB Director Russell Vought issued on behalf of the Executive Office of the President a memorandum to the heads of all federal departments and agencies. The memorandum bans all agencies from “training” their employees in critical race theory or white privilege. It is a thing of beauty. Here is the memo, in its entirety. It is also embedded below. The President should make this order, and his opposition to
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September 3, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Christopher Eisgruber is the president of Princeton University. He has been since September 2013. Before that, he was Princeton’s provost for nine years. Eisgruber is a lawyer. He clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Stevens. A constitutional law scholar, he taught at NYU law school and then headed up Princeton’s law and public affairs program. Thus, Eisgruber is charged with knowledge of the law and of American history.
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September 2, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
In the mid-1960s, when colleges began admitting black students who didn’t meet the standards applied to white ones, some observers presciently warned that the students admitted based on race preferences would carry a stigma. To my knowledge, however, no one one was prescient enough to realize that, in response, Blacks would try to stigmatize Whites — including those granting them the benefit of preferential treatment and those suffering the burdens
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September 2, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Professional sports are acting in unison to close the exits and force their politics down our throats. The latest news involves the NFL: On a conference call on Tuesday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the league will imprint “End racism” and “It takes all of us” in the end zones at each stadium during the 2020 season. “The NFL stands with the Black community, the players, clubs and fans confronting
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September 1, 2020 — John Hinderaker
The Log Cabin Republicans call themselves “the nation’s original and largest organization representing LGBT conservatives and straight allies.” I haven’t noticed much from them lately, but this Twitter video by Christian Walker is good, and is getting a lot of attention. Christian is Herschel Walker’s son:
[email protected] has watched BLM burn, loot and murder. Now he has a strong message for the violent leftists destroying our cities and killing patriots
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August 24, 2020 — Steven Hayward
“Liberal education,” Leo Strauss reminds us in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, “is not the opposite of conservative education, but of illiberal education.” Illiberal education is that which imposes and enforces an orthodoxy, whereas genuine liberal education necessarily involves an openness to and consideration of a wide spectrum of different and often conflicting points of view. Liberal education in this sense has been dying at universities for decades now, but nowhere
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August 21, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I have previously referred to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which is a mordant satire of the tyrannical world of perfect equality. If you’ve never read it, here’s the first paragraph: THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody
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