Race
January 27, 2020 — John Hinderaker
This report by Chris Stewart of Brightbeam is a blockbuster. It is titled: “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity For All.” Stewart is a liberal activist from Minnesota who undertook to find out why the Twin Cities’ left-wing public schools have some of the country’s worst achievement gaps between white and minority (black and Indian) students. Stewart compared achievement by race in
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January 20, 2020 — Steven Hayward
This special edition of the Power Line Show uses the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as the occasion to ponder his legacy in light of the lengthening of history and the dramatic changes in the poisonous racial politics of our moment. And who better to comment than “Lucretia,” Power Line’s international woman of mystery, along with special guest Peter C. Myers, who is professor of political science at the University
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January 18, 2020 — John Hinderaker
You probably remember the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal that came to light several years ago. Investigations have been ongoing since then, and one just-completed inquiry has made headlines in Great Britain. This is from the London Times: “Rotherham police chief: we ignored sex abuse of children.” A senior police officer admitted that his force ignored the sexual abuse of girls by Pakistani grooming gangs for decades because it was
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January 12, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
It looks like there will be no black, and indeed no non-white, candidates on the debate stage this month when the leading Democratic contenders square off in Iowa. That’s because no non-white candidate has met the objective criteria, including popularity in polls, for participating. According to the Washington Post, “critics say” that the all-white debate stage “threatens to undercut the party’s rhetoric of inclusivity.” But are rank-and-file black Democrats distressed
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December 30, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Bret Stephens is a columnist at the New York Times. On Friday he wrote an op-ed titled The Secrets of Jewish Genius. In that column, he speculated about why Jews have made such signal contributions to modern intellectual life, far out of proportion to their numbers. Stephens attributed the phenomenon to Jewish teachings and experience: There is a religious tradition that, unlike some others, asks the believer not only to
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December 23, 2019 — John Hinderaker
The demand for white supremacists vastly exceeds the supply, which is why we see absurdities like the controversy over military academy students supposedly flashing “white power” signs at the Army-Navy football game. Now, apparently, the age-old “OK” sign means you are a white nationalist, notwithstanding that there are pictures of pretty much everyone in public life giving the sign, like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and nearly everyone else. Or maybe
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December 23, 2019 — Steven Hayward
There are several new wrinkles in the saga of the New York Times‘s egregious and ideological “1619 Project” beyond the fine Roger Kimball essay that Paul highlights below. This can only mean one thing: time for another episode with “Lucretia,” Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, and scourge of all things politically correct. New developments in the story include a stinging letter to the editor of the New York Times
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December 23, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
I don’t know of anyone who skewers the subversive antics of the American left as savagely, yet as elegantly, as Roger Kimball. In this article for the New Criterion, Roger trains his guns on the New York Times’ 1619 project. That project is, in the words of the Times, an effort to “reframe [America’s] history, [by] understanding 1619 [when the first slave ships arrived here] as our true founding, and
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December 14, 2019 — Scott Johnson
We have been celebrating the twentieth year of publication of the second coming of the Claremont Review of Books with its new (Fall) issue. The magazine has moved to a new site with a new URL (claremontreviewofbooks.com). The editors have made the new issue freely accessible for the next few days. They hope to entice readers to become subscribers (subscribe here). I am, as usual, previewing a few reviews and
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December 12, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Once upon a time, Stanley Fish was a state of the art radical professor — “a scrappy advocate of multiculturalism, affirmative-action hiring quotas, campus speech codes and openly subversive strains of post-structuralist critical theory,” to quote the view attributed to his critics by the New York Times. Fish transformed the Duke University English department into a bastion of “deconstructionism” — the view that literary texts acquire meaning only as a
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December 10, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Is this the dumbest thing I have ever read? It definitely is a contender: “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” The link goes to an abstract of an article that was published by the University of Chicago–God help us!–by one Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies University of New Hampshire. You
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December 5, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
John wrote below about Democrats gone wild. Let’s file the following story under left-wing Democrats gone wild. Pete Buttigieg hasn’t been able to garner significant support from blacks. One reason is said to be his disagreements with black activists over policing in South Bend, Indiana, where Buttigieg is mayor. I doubt that this is Buttigieg’s main problem with black voters, but I’m sure it doesn’t help him. In any case,
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December 4, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Cory Booker moans that the Democrats are “spiraling towards a debate stage that could have six people with no diversity whatsoever.” This statement is flatly false. The six Dems who have locked up places on the debate stage are Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Tom Steyer. On this list are two women, a gay male, and a Jew. Clearly, it is a diverse group.
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November 19, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, I discussed Pete Buttigieg’s impressive surge in Iowa, but noted that will face a big, if not insuperable, barrier when the primaries come to states with a large number of African-American voters. The first of those states is South Carolina where, according to a new Quinnipiac poll, Buttigieg’s support among black voters is zero percent. Buttigieg’s rivals have attacked Buttigieg over police practices in South Bend and his response,
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November 14, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The Virginia attorney general’s office is undertaking an investigation of the Loudoun County Public Schools to determine whether the school system denies African-American students equal access to advanced programs. The investigation is a response to claims by the NAACP that Loudoun County does so. What is meant here by equal access? No particular racial group is entitled to equal participation in advanced programs. But everyone, regardless of race, has the
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October 5, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday my wife and I attended Turning Point USA’s Black Leadership Summit, including a visit to the White House and a small dinner afterward. Like last year’s event, which I reported on here, it was an inspiring day. The White House event took place in the East Room. It took an hour or so to get through security, but it was a beautiful afternoon in D.C. and the crowd was
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September 29, 2019 — Steven Hayward
What would we do without the New York Times warning us about the menace of . . . (checks notes) . . . surf Nazis! From yesterday’s Times: The first time I saw a swastika in the wild, I happened to be carrying a surfboard. . . At the time, the term “surf Nazi” often got applied to any surfer ferociously committed to the sport and territorial about his local
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