… check out Kevin Drum’s analysis of asymmetric polarization these past few decades. He shows relentlessly that over the past few decades, it’s Democrats who have veered most decisively to the extremes on policy on cultural issues since the 1990s. Not Republicans. Democrats.
On immigration, Republicans have moved around five points to the right; the Democrats 35 points to the left. On abortion, Republicans who advocate a total ban have increased their numbers a couple of points since 1994; Democrats who favor legality in every instance has risen 20 points. On guns, the GOP has moved ten points right; Dems 20 points left.
It is also no accident that, as Drum notes and as David Shor has shown: “white academic theories of racism — and probably the whole woke movement in general — have turned off many moderate Black and Hispanic voters.” This is why even a huge economic boom may not be enough to keep the Democrats in power next year.
We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown.
Andrew Sullivan, “What Happened To You?”, The Weekly Dish, 2021-07-09.
January 6, 2022
QotD: The centre cannot hold … because there’s barely any “centre” remaining
December 12, 2021
“[T]oday’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself”
Andrew Sullivan on the racism of modern “anti-racist” movements and his hope that Hispanic Americans may provide a way out of the current political deadlock:
Of all the acronyms, euphemisms and sophisms pioneered by critical theory, one of the most revealing is the term “black and brown people”. You hear it all the time now. Whether it’s about “the lack of Black and brown representation in Hollywood”, vaccine hesitancy in “Black and brown neighborhoods in large cities”, the right to vote for “Black and brown people”, or “allyship between Black and brown people”, the “B&b” formula is now yet another ubiquitous media virtue-signal. It’s subtler than some others. It doesn’t shriek woke like “BIPOC”; it isn’t as instantly risible as “2SLGBTQIA+”; it gives “Black” a Capital Letter, and “brown” feels a bit like a lower-case add-on — but at least it uses actual English words, and doesn’t end in an X.
Still: what does it tell you that a staggering and brilliant array of totally different ethnicities, races, religions, histories and cultures can now routinely be reduced to just two drab colors?
I think it speaks to two things. The first is that today’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself. A whole kaleidoscope of immigrant difference — from Kurds and Mexicans and Somalis to Dominicans, Chileans, Nigerians, and Pakistanis — has now been turned into one monochrome racial “brown” — just to fit into an oppressor/oppressed, white/black narrative.
Equally, a diverse African diaspora — ranging from Nigerian immigrants to descendants of Southern slaves to biracial men and women with mainly European ancestry who go back to this country’s miscegenated origins — is now just “Black”. And this new racial unit has one politics: left-Democrat. Individuals disappear; diversity of opinion within groups evaporate; all that matters is a single skin color and oppression.
The second aspect of critical theory that “B&b” helps reveal is that the crude binary of “black” and “white” simply has less salience with every passing day, as more and more races, ethnicities and cultures complicate and enrich our society, and render it structurally, demographically and culturally unrecognizable from even the recent past. To give one example: 60 years ago, four percent of Americans approved of inter-racial marriage; today, it’s 94 percent. Or check out the rapid decline in the “white Christian” share of the population — from 80 percent in 1996 1976 to 44 percent today. Look around you and you’ll see how the crude rubric of “white supremacy” is, in fact, wildly out of date.
This is why so many of the most passionately woke are so obsessed with history in America, and the further back the better, as the 1619 Project shows. The past is a world they are much more comfortable in than the present, a place where the racial divide was infinitely simpler, and racial inequality both brutal and actively enforced by the government. Before the Civil Rights Act in 1964, before mass non-white immigration began in 1965, before mass non-white illegal immigration since the 1990s, the “white supremacy” rubric had some lingering traction.
But in the 21st Century, it’s been hopelessly compounded by layer upon layer of mass immigration from every conceivable corner of the planet. The Latino population in the US is now larger than the African-American one; and Asians, of many different varieties, are now immigrating in higher numbers than Latinos. Before too long, the black/white dynamic may disappear into the multi-colored, multi-hued background entirely.
November 10, 2021
The organizational priorities of Canadian universities make for interesting reading
In Quillette, Jonathan Kay examines the 89-page agenda from a Universities Canada meeting, comparing the issues most people would identify as likely being of high urgency for a gathering of Canadian university administrators with the actual issues the organization considers urgent and important:
University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
Last week, 53 top Canadian academic administrators convened in Ottawa for a biannual membership meeting of Universities Canada, a group dedicated to “providing university presidents with a unified voice for higher education.” The 89-page meeting agenda, which was leaked to me after the event, makes for an interesting read.
The pandemic has been a challenging period for Canadian universities, as the adoption of virtual classrooms has caused some families to wonder whether the traditional bricks-and-mortar education model is worth the price. Many Canadian schools are financially dependent on foreign students, an income source that’s now in flux thanks to COVID. In April, Laurentian University in Ontario declared itself insolvent, cut dozens of programs, and laid off about 100 professors — an unprecedented development.
And yet none of these issues is listed on the October 27th Universities Canada meeting agenda. Laurentian University isn’t mentioned at all, in fact. And the only substantive reference to the COVID pandemic consists of an aside to the effect that “women are disproportionately being impacted negatively during the pandemic”. Instead, all of the agenda’s main action items are dedicated to social justice.
The first item updates attendees on Universities Canada’s multi-year effort to draft a statement on “Social Impact Principles”. A subsequent action item details the “Scarborough National Charter”, a document aimed at “mov[ing] from rhetoric to meaningful concrete action to address anti-Black racism and to promote Black inclusion.” There’s also a related item titled “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” under which members were asked, by formal motion, to affirm their commitment to an affirmative-action doctrine known as “Inclusive Excellence”.
Later in the document, there appears an action item relating to “Principles of Indigenous Education”, detailing the by-now year-and-a-half-long consultation process aimed at renewing Universities Canada’s original Indigenous Education manifesto (which itself was announced with much fanfare in 2015 after a year of work). Among the proposed editing refinements are that language be added “recognizing [the] intersectionality of Indigenous identities”; and that a new preamble be added “acknowledging that Universities Canada and its member universities are located on Indigenous lands across Turtle Island.” The final version, it’s predicted, will be ready by April 2022.
But the agenda’s real centrepiece is a 46-page standalone report commissioned by Universities Canada, called Building a Race-Conscious Institution: A Guide and Toolkit for University Leaders Enacting Anti-Racist Organizational Change.
The report’s main theme is that university leaders must decisively reject the idea of “colour-blindness” (which the author asserts should properly be termed “colour evasion”) in favour of becoming “race-conscious individuals” who “explicitly reflect on their ethno-racial identity and group membership.” The author also exhorts university presidents to “actively examine their personally mediated racial biases, consider their individual experiences with respect to racism, and acknowledge their relative race-related marginalization or privilege in the larger society.” To persist in colour evasion, the author warns, is to erect “discursive barriers to antiracist organizational change.”
And colour evasion is just one of 10 listed “dominant ideologies and pervasive narratives [that] undermine efforts to counteract racism.” Among the other “barriers” listed by the author are “equal opportunity”, “tradition”, and “tolerance”. The report also contains tangents on “white fragility”, “allyship”, and the “ethics of care” prescribed by “critical feminist and antiracist scholars” — as well as instructions regarding the use of certain words and phrases. For instance: “Representation gaps among students, scholars, and staff in higher education are not ‘achievement’ gaps, but rather ‘opportunity’ gaps.”
November 2, 2021
Election day in Virginia
Mark Steyn writing about the Tuesday state elections being held in Virginia, which certainly seemed to become much more competitive as larger concerns about the school system energized a lot of parents, and a Republican-in-name-only group plays dirty tricks on the Republican candidate for governor:
“Republican” group trolls Republican candidate in the Virginia election campaign, October 2021.
Tuesday is what less evolved societies than Virginia still quaintly call “Election Day”. The Democrat candidate, the unlovely Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, claims that “we are substantially leading on the early vote”. In the fullness of time he will also be substantially leading on the late vote, if he isn’t already.
That leaves the votes on Voting Day up for grabs. The Republican candidate, Mr Youngkin, is a squish of no fixed beliefs who will govern as Mitt did in Massachusetts or Pataki did in New York. But he has been handed a winning issue that he would probably not have chosen save for public outrage — the state of Virginia schools in an age of “critical race theory” and trans-mania. It’s bigger even than an education issue: The left is so boundlessly ambitious that it is abolishing biological sex, and if it gets away with it will leave an awful mountain of human wreckage in its wake, bigger even than its other innovations.
Every Virginian should vote on Tuesday — because Youngkin’s campaign is a classic example of Milton Friedman’s dictum: in politics you don’t wait for the right people to do the right thing, you create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing. That is what parents at school-board meetings have been doing, and they deserve to be rewarded for it.
Virginia is a state where a rapist gets transferred to another school because he/she belongs to a protected class, rapes again, and, when you protest the anal rape of your daughter by a known rapist, you’re the guy who gets thrown to the ground and arrested. Whether one finds the foregoing objectionable shouldn’t really be a Republican/Democrat thing, but such is the moral depravity of the cultural heights that Dems are all in on the convicted sodomizer and only squaresville low-status GOP candidates can muster even pro forma objections. So in 21st-century Virginia insouciance about schoolgirl anal rape is now a partisan thing.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether the state’s election system is sufficiently honest to reflect fairly that public outrage. If at, say, 10pm on Tuesday night Youngkin is narrowly ahead but you wake up on Wednesday morn to find McAuliffe has been the beneficiary of all the 3am votes, well, Republicans will be forgiven for suspecting that “fortifying” the “two-party system” into something rather more streamlined is here to stay.
I say that as an immigrant who never feels more foreign than on America’s hideously chaotic yet oddly purposeful election nights. But then in Northern Virginia a quarter of the population is now foreign-born, and half of those arrived in the last twenty years. That’s a remarkable statistic for a so-called “Old Dominion”. Demography is destiny, and in an ever more tightly circumscribed public discourse there are decreasing opportunities even to raise the topic.
October 10, 2021
“The NSBA letter is a blood libel against America’s dissenting parents”
In this Substack essay, C. Bradley Thompson calls the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) demand that the federal government treat dissenting parents as “domestic terrorists” a declaration of war against ordinary American citizens:
On September 30, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration denouncing the nationwide parental protests taking place at school board meetings against Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, pornography in the classroom, mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and remote learning. It turns out that parents all over the country are upset about the indoctrination and censorship in America’s government schools. An army of moms (and dads) have been asserting their parental responsibilities and their constitutional rights by showing up to school board meetings and voicing — sometimes angrily — their contempt and disgust for those school boards and teachers promoting and sanctioning ideas and ideologies opposed by the parents.
The NSBA letter (see here) begins rather ominously by declaring that “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat” and that “immediate assistance” is therefore “required to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.” The NSBA is essentially declaring a “State of Emergency” for America’s government school system. Let that sink in for a moment.
[…]
Let’s be clear about what the NSBA letter means in practice: first, it is dog-whistling a message which says that protesting parents are engaged in “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” (including, presumably, against their own children); and, second, it is requesting that the Biden administration use the full coercive power of the United States government — power that it has only previously been used against Islamic terrorists and foreign enemies of the United States — to monitor, investigate, arrest, interrogate, prosecute, convict and jail upset parents who are protesting AGAINST the teaching of systemic racism (i.e., CRT), pornography in the classroom, and the unscientific mask mandates for children.
The NSBA letter is saying, in effect, that complaining parents are the moral equivalent of jihadi terrorists, who are out to commit acts of violence and terror against America’s school board members, its teachers, and, yes, even the children. As such, these parents should be treated as a national security threat, and they must be dealt with by all means necessary.
The NSBA letter is a blood libel against America’s dissenting parents. In a decent, free, and just society such a letter would be condemned and dismissed out of hand, but that is not the kind of society in which we live today.
Rather than tossing the NSBA letter in the trash where it belongs, the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, read it and immediately ordered the FBI and America’s National Security State to mobilize its immense power against parents whose only real crime is to take seriously the education of their children. He did this within just a few days of receiving the NSBA letter.
I encourage you to read — and to read slowly — Garland’s official memorandum sent to the Director of the FBI and to various other law enforcement agencies, offices, and divisions.
Garland’s letter is a moral, political, and constitutional abomination. To say there are serious problems with the Attorney General’s Orwellian letter would be an understatement. The letter asserts, for instance, that “there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” It claims as fact a “rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel”. Neither the NSBA nor the Justice Department have provided any credible or meaningful evidence to support this unfounded claim, nor does Garland’s passive-aggressive letter specify what it classifies as “criminal conduct” or “domestic terrorism”. (Not surprisingly, Garland’s letter neglects to mention that some school board members and the teachers’ unions have been harassing and threatening parents for months. See here, here, here, here, and here.) The simple fact of the matter is that virtually no violence has occurred at school board meetings this year.
In support of the NSBA request, Garland’s memorandum announced that he has directed the FBI and each U. S. Attorney to convene meetings immediately with “federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district” in order to “facilitate the discussion of strategies” for dealing with threats against school officials. The Department of Justice will also “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response”. In other words, the government will establish “snitch” lines against parents. If a school board member doesn’t like what they hear in a public meeting, they will be able to report (presumably anonymously) threats of harassment and intimidation.
October 8, 2021
Critical Race Studies go international — “what was once considered an American eccentricity has gone global, and Britain’s curriculum engineers are doing their utmost to make up for lost time”
In The Critic, Frank Furedi looks at how quickly American elite fascination with the various incarnations of Critical Theory has spread beyond the US:
“My child has been told in a series of assemblies that she ‘has white privilege’, that she ‘subconsciously perpetuates it’, may even ‘consciously enjoy it’ and that she ought to be ‘starting to address it’. She has been shown slides of white BLM protesters holding placards that say ‘I will never understand’, told she needs to listen and educate herself and that intersectional theory shows that ‘whiteness will always insulate and protect her from racism’.”
Ten years ago, this mother’s story would likely be considered a joke; a parody of the culture wars that were starting to simmer across the Atlantic. But a lot can happen in a decade: the child whose mother recently reported the above attends an academy in London. Indeed, what was once considered an American eccentricity has gone global, and Britain’s curriculum engineers are doing their utmost to make up for lost time.
In the UK, curriculum engineers have embraced the approach of their American colleagues and are now busy targeting what they describe as outdated views and ideals. The term “outdated” serves as a euphemism for describing ideas and sentiments that do not accord with their project of distancing children from the traditions and way of life of their parents and grandparents. Under the banner of “relevance”, they wish to cancel the classics of literature and replace them with stories written by contemporary writers. Even the works of Shakespeare have been denounced for their outdated racist, antisemitic and misogynist views.
One of the most important and unremarked feature of recent developments in British classrooms is the uncritical and slavish manner with which curriculum experts imitate the cultural crusade of their American colleagues. Earlier this year it was reported that numerous American schools (including the prestigious $45,000-a-year Brentwood School in Los Angeles) were scrapping the apparently outdated To Kill a Mockingbird.
Evidently, some British curriculum leaders swiftly got the message. For example, the James Gillespie High School in Edinburgh decided that it no longer wants to teach classics like Of Mice and Men or to To Kill A Mockingbird in its English classes. The school claims that the “dated” approach to race of these wonderful novels disqualifies them from a place in the English literature curriculum.
Advocates of the project of decolonising schools target what they perceive as outdated views on issues as diverse as gender, trans culture, race and what it means to be British. School subjects as diverse as history, literature, geography and religious education are now used as vehicles for countering what they describe as “white privilege”. They encourage pupils to acknowledge their whiteness and perceive Britain as a society defined by its systemic racism.
September 12, 2021
Small signs of positive change in the culture wars?
Andrew Sullivan is hopeful that the small signs he mentions here are not just straws in the wind, but the beginning of a real reaction against “the Successor Ideology” among the ultra-woke cultural elite:
… both The Atlantic and The New Yorker have just published long essays that push back against woke authoritarianism and cruelty. Since both magazines have long capitulated to rank illiberalism, this is encouraging. And since critical theory is an entirely elite-imposed orthodoxy, it matters when the ranks of the elite crack a little.
Anne Applebaum links the woke phenomenon to previous moral panics and mob persecutions, which is where it belongs. She too begins to notice the obliteration of due process, individual rights, and mercy among her crusader peers:
Even if you have not been suspended, punished, or found guilty of anything, you cannot function in your profession. If you are a professor, no one wants you as a teacher or mentor (“The graduate students made it obvious to me that I was a nonperson and could not possibly be tolerated”). You cannot publish in professional journals. You cannot quit your job, because no one else will hire you. If you are a journalist, then you might find that you cannot publish at all.
Applebaum’s Atlantic piece is a good sign from a magazine that hired and quickly purged a writer for wrong think, and once held a town meeting auto-da-fé to decide which writers they would permanently anathematize as moral lepers.
Similarly, it was quite a shock to read in The New Yorker a fair and empathetic profile of an academic geneticist, Kathryn Paige Harden, who acknowledges a role for genetics in social outcomes. It helps that Harden is, like Freddie DeBoer, on the left; and the piece is strewn with insinuations that other writers on genetics, like Charles Murray, deny that the environment plays a part in outcomes as well (when it is clear to anyone who can read that this is grotesquely untrue). But if the readers of The New Yorker need to be fed distortions about some on the right in order for them to consider the unavoidable emergence of “polygenic scores” for humans, with their vast political and ethical implications, then that’s a step forward.
The profile also puts the following woke heresy into the minds of the Upper West Side: “Building a commitment to egalitarianism on our genetic uniformity is building a house on sand.” And this: “Genetic diversity is mankind’s most precious resource, not a regrettable deviation from an ideal state of monotonous sameness.” The New Yorker is also telling its readers that there are around “thirteen hundred sites on the genome that are correlated with success in school. Though each might have an infinitesimally small statistical relationship with the outcome, together they can be summed to produce a score that has predictive validity: those in the group with the highest scores were approximately five times more likely to graduate from college than those with the lowest scores.”
All of this is empirically true. But if this is empirically true, critical theory, which insists that absolutely nothing but white supremacist society leads to inequalities, is dead in the water. Refuted. Proven false by reality. Finished — even as it continues to be the premise of other countless pieces The New Yorker has run in the past few years. At some point, this will require a measure of rethinking, a moderation of the left’s absolutist blank-slatism just as the evidence is finally disproving it once and for all. The Successor Ideology, remember, holds that genetics play no role in human society, and that all inequalities are a function of the environment. Take that absolute claim away — which is to say to subject it to empirical testing — and it crumbles. And The New Yorker just took it away.
And then, in the better-late-than-never category, The Economist, the bible for the corporate elite, has just come out unapologetically against the Successor Ideology, and in favor of liberalism. This matters, it seems to me, because among the most zealous of the new Puritans are the boards and HR departments of major corporations, which are dedicated right now to enforcing the largest intentional program of systemic race and sex discrimination in living memory. Money quote: “Progressives replace the liberal emphasis on tolerance and choice with a focus on compulsion and power. Classical liberals conceded that your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. Today’s progressives argue that your freedom to express your opinions stops where my feelings begin.”
The Economist also pinpoints the core tenets of CRT in language easy to understand: “a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled.” These “systems of language and privilege” are — surprise! — freedom of speech and economic liberty. If major corporations begin to understand that, they may reconsider their adoption of a half-baked racialized Marxism as good management. Maybe that might persuade Google not to mandate indoctrination in ideas such as the notion being silent on questions of race is “covert white supremacy”, a few notches below lynching.
August 13, 2021
Millennial maternalism
In The Critic, Kittie Helmick considers the Millennial generation and their pronounced maternalistic worldview:
“Millennials” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The popular conception of millennials paints the generation as immature, living an extended adolescence: late to marry, late to have children, late to buy houses. Even the retort — that society hasn’t delivered on its promises; that an unfavourable job market has prevented them from living the lives expected of adults — reads as a refusal to accept responsibility.
The response to Simone Biles’s withdrawal from the Olympics demonstrates that the opposite is true. Millennials are not behaving like teenagers — they are responding like mothers. The breakdown in family life combined with quantum leaps in telecommunication technology has sent the 90s generation to their computer screens for meaningful connections. Instead of growing out of video games and chat rooms, millennials have grown with them. Online communities have not stunted young people’s growth, but absorbed it.
Millennials — now aged in their late 20s and early 30s, some with families of their own — have directed all the maternal instincts of adulthood towards online media. Rather than collect family albums, they amass Instagram and Tumblr accounts with thousands of images of their favourite characters and celebrities. Notifications act as little appeals for attention akin to the tug of a child’s hand. This otherwise unrealised yearning to nurture underpins much of the affective response to news stories about the latest victim of injustice.
There are many strands entangled in the knot of American leftism, but the maternalism of millennials manifests in the self-righteous defensiveness of Biles’s supporters and the emotional outrage they direct at anyone who criticizes the gymnast. Stripped of patriotic sentiments and religious traditions, millennials have nowhere to direct their human instincts of loyalty and affection but at the figures (fictional or fabled) who occupy so many of their hours.
The language of critical theory cloaks these sentiments in intellectual rigor, lending some dignity not only to the mouthpieces of these ideas, but also to the intended objects of their affections. Millennials don’t have to worry about infantilising Biles if they call her an “exceptional Black woman”, even while they simultaneously invoke the moral standards of a kindergarten classroom in asking, “How do we make it our responsibility to love and protect each other?”
Witness these impulses play out in the more thinly veiled account of a father who wonders if he has turned “soft” because his parental cares now eclipse his admiration of Kerri Strug’s feat during the 1996 Olympics: performing a “one-legged vault” on an injured ankle. The father implies that only a monster could cheer when a teenage girl sacrifices her health for victory. He makes no secret of the reason behind his change of heart: “Now that I have two young daughters in gymnastics, I expect their safety to be the coach’s number one priority.”
There is nothing amiss in his love for his daughters, or the extension of that concern to other children, but this father has lost sight of other principles that might compete for priority in the spotlit, split second decisions of athletes and trainers in Olympic competitions. Loyalty to something greater than oneself — to Strug’s teammates, to the country she represented — has fallen out of the picture, leaving behind only the petty incentive of winning. This perspective permits no higher motive to the coach responsible for urging Strug on, than greed for a gold medal.
Millennial parents run to the opposite extreme of the Spartan mother: instead of inculcating self-sacrifice for the good of the community, they insist, “Not my child.” They see their role as shielding children from the dangers of the outside world, rather than preparing them to face it.
August 4, 2021
QotD: The Bell Curve of the benefits of (modern) education
On the far left of the curve is a newborn — who has learned literally nothing, knows nothing, and has received no benefit from education.
As we learn from our parents at home and our teachers at school, we progress along the curve with benefits accumulating along the way.
But something happens somewhere between sophomore year Vivisecting the Deconstructed Patriarchy 201 at Bleeding Heart College and achieving the dream of earning that Ph.D. from the University of Charging More Than a Mortgage for your dissertation on Imposing Ruthless Meaninglessness on Others.
Somewhere just on the right side of the bell curve, we devolve along the curve with detriments accumulating along the way.
By the time you’re as well educated as Dr. Swannie Jett, you’re so untethered from reality that you’re basically impervious to knowledge.
Stephen Green, “Insanity Wrap #198: Looted & Burned Target Store Puts Up Mural Celebrating Arson”, PJ Media, 2021-05-03.
July 11, 2021
An “ongoing moral panic against the specter of ‘white supremacy’, which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history”
From Andrew Sullivan‘s Weekly Dish free excerpt:
“What happened to you?”
It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.
The real question is: what happened to you?
The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.
But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.
Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?
What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy”, which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.
We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.
Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.
This is the media hub of the “social justice movement”. And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy”, designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.
June 21, 2021
“… the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing”
An excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s most recent Weekly Dish looks at the burgeoning fight over the use of Critical Race Theory in public schools:
The stories in the mainstream media this past week about the broadening campaign to ban critical race theory in public schools have been fascinating — and particularly in how they describe what CRT is. Here’s the Atlantic‘s benign summary of CRT: “recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses.” NBC News calls it the “academic study of racism’s pervasive impact.” NPR calls CRT: “teaching about the effects of racism.” The New York Times calls it, with a straight face, “classroom discussion of race, racism” and goes on to describe it as a “framework used to look at how racism is woven into seemingly neutral laws and institutions.”
How on earth could merely teaching students about the history of racism and its pervasiveness in the United States provoke such a fuss? No wonder Charles Blow is mystified. But don’t worry. The MSM have a ready explanation: the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing. The MSM get particular pleasure in ridiculing parents who use the term “critical race theory” as shorthand for things that just, well, make them uncomfortable — when the parents obviously have no idea what CRT really is.
When pushed to describe it themselves, elite journalists refer to the legal theories Derrick Bell came up with, in the 1970s — obscure, esoteric and nothing really to do with high-school teaching. “If your kid is learning CRT, your kid is in law/grad school,” snarked one. Marc Lamont Hill even tried to pull off some strained references to Gramsci to prove his Marxian intellectual cred, and to condescend to his opponents.
This rubric achieves several things at once. It denies that there is anything really radical or new about CRT; it flatters the half-educated; it blames the controversy entirely on Republican opportunism; and it urges all fair-minded people to defend intellectual freedom and racial sensitivity against these ugly white supremacists.
What could be more convenient? NBC News “reporter”, Brandy Zadrozny, even decried parents’ attempts to discover through FOIA requests just what their children are being taught — and argued this week that, “for longtime ultra conservative activists, CRT is the opportunity of a lifetime.” CRT, she explains, is not a threat at all, and there is no proof that it is even being taught. It’s “just a catch-all term repurposed as a conservative boogeyman.” She goes on: “it harnesses pushback against 2020’s racial justice movement, covid denialism, and depends on a base still energized by Trump and misinformation, looking for political power.”
I’m sure the MSM will continue to push this narrative indefinitely. They are still insisting, after all, that “white supremacy” is behind hateful attacks on Asian-Americans, and that soaring murder rates are purely a function of Covid19. And you can see why: this dismissive take is extremely helpful in avoiding what is actually happening. It diverts attention from the stories and leaks and documents that keep popping up all over the place about extraordinary indoctrination sessions that have become mandatory for children as early as kindergarten.
June 6, 2021
Decoding NPR’s revised approach to reporting in a social justice age
At Ace of Spades H.Q., K.T. listens to some NPR broadcasts (so you don’t have to) including an insight into how NPR and probably other media organizations are changing how they report the news:
We Hold These Truths: How Newsroom Leaders Wrestled With Covering A Tumultuous Year
This was sort of a panel discussion (light on the “discussion”), with commentary on things like how social media pressured newsrooms, for example, to say that “police murdered George Floyd” rather than “George Floyd died”.
But I kind of homed in on an academic phrase that bothers me. Sara Just from PBS:
Yeah, I think that you’re absolutely right. There’s been a deeper understanding and deeper conversation about how much our lived experiences play into the reporting that we do. And there’s no question that it does for each and every one of us in different ways. And I think that lived experience we especially highlight now is valuable, whether it’s race or gender or the challenges. I don’t think people with those lived experiences have to carry the burden, though, of being the only ones to report on it by any means. And so that’s something that we are always balancing. (emphases mine)
So, are they balancing whether or not people without “lived experiences” can report on issues involving “lived experiences”? Like Lori Lightfoot deciding she would only do one-on-one interviews with journalists of color? Will white people be allowed to report on stories involving black people? Will men be allowed to report on stories involving women?
This is partly about local sources, but it is largely about people thought of as being in “oppressed groups”. This panel is informing us that news reporting will now be filtered through the language and perspective of Critical Social Justice, whether we realize it or not.
The indispensable Translations from the Woke at New Discourses provides the following information on Lived Experience:
In the Theory of Critical Social Justice, for what turn out to be surprisingly deep and philosophically (almost) sophisticated reasons, lived experience is the overwhelmingly primary way in which knowledge can be obtained. This should not be mistaken to mean one’s firsthand experience, which most of us already recognize to provide a rather weak claim upon knowledge, though it is both implied and claimed that this is what “lived experience” refers to in Critical Social Justice. Lived experience, as Critical Social Justice uses the term, refers more specifically to one’s life experiences in allegedly systemic power dynamics of dominance and oppression that shape society structurally as understood with a critical consciousness and interpreted through Theory. That is, one’s “lived experience” refers to the interpretation that Critical Social Justice Theory gives for the anecdotal accounts of experiences one has had.
Because “lived experience” refers to an interpretation through Theory, it is only the “lived experience of oppression,” as Theory will have it, that counts …
It appears that you can’t really understand the reporting on PBS, and probably NPR, now unless you have studied Critical Social Justice.
Certainly, the claimed “lived experience” of members of dominant groups cannot be in any way used to challenge or dispute the assertions of Theory or those claiming to speak from it …
This restriction extends to members of “minoritized” groups who disagree with Theory as well — Theory cannot be authentically disagreed with. One might think that the lived experience of a member of oppressed groups would be admissible as a valid challenge to the claims of Theory, but this not so. They may be talking about their own experiences in life, but they aren’t appealing to lived experience, which must comport with Theory …
This is all very confusing and appears to be exactly what it is — a form of manipulating knowledge and epistemology as a means of asserting power and rigging the system such that those assertions of power cannot be challenged. Nevertheless, it isn’t merely an application of power and has a rather interesting and deep philosophical explanation that must be understood to understand why “lived experience” holds the status that it does and why it must comport with Theory to be granted veridical status and epistemic weight. This has everything to do with the fact that the roots of Critical Social Justice are in critical theories and, especially, postmodern philosophy.
There is much more, but it is way too deep to include here.
The NPR panel goes on to discuss new understandings of “balance” and “objectivity”. They do not intend to be objective. “Balance” will mean something different than what it has meant in the past in the news business.
Many people have found the way that TV news shows report on events since 2016 to be rather different than what they’d been used to before that. Some changes are subtle and others are quite blatant and hard to ignore unless you already agree with the viewpoint of the presenter. TV news used to at least pretend to present the news objectively but from the start of the Trump presidency most media outlets abruptly changed from a pseudo-objective (but leaning progressive) to an outright full-on progressive stance from start to finish with little or no attempt to provide other points of view for balance.
May 12, 2021
Looking at a highly influential document among progressive groups
Matthew Yglesias on Tema Okun’s “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” and its role in furthering progressive emotions over what they consider to be the most racist society in human history (that is, the modern west but especially the United States):
Click to see full-size image.
Debating abstractions is difficult and frustrating, and the discourse about “wokeness” and “cancel culture” has become a snakepit of semantic debates, bad-faith actors, and people of goodwill talking past each other.
So I want to talk instead about one specific document, not because I think it’s the most important document in the world, but because I don’t really see anyone who I read and respect talking about it even though I’ve seen it arise multiple times in real life.
I’m talking about “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” by Tema Okun, which I first heard of this year from the leader of a progressive nonprofit group whose mission I strongly support. He told me that some people on the staff had started wielding this document in internal disputes and it was causing big headaches. Once I had that on my radar, I heard about it from a couple of other nonprofit workers. And I saw it come up at the Parent Teacher Association for my kid’s school.
It’s an excerpt from a longer book called Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups that was developed as a tool for Okun’s consulting and training gigs.
But today, even though it’s not what I would call a particularly intellectually influential work in highbrow circles — even ones that are very “woke” or left-wing — it does seem to be incredibly widely circulated. You see it everywhere from the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence to the Sierra Club of Wisconsin to an organization of West Coast Quakers.
Which is to say it’s sloshing around quite broadly in progressive circles even though I’ve never heard a major writer, scholar, or political leader praise or recommend it. And to put it bluntly, it’s really dumb. In my more conspiratorial moments, I wonder if it’s not a psyop devised by some modern-day version of COINTELPRO to try to destroy progressive politics in the United States by making it impossible to run effective organizations. Even if not, I think the document is worth discussing on its own terms because it is broadly influential enough that if everyone actually agrees with me that it’s bad, we should stop citing it and object when other people do. And alternatively, if there are people who think it’s good, it would be nice to hear them say so, and then we could have a specific argument about that. But while I don’t think this document is exactly typical, I do think it’s emblematic of some broader, unfortunate cultural trends.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
April 25, 2021
They don’t call it “neo-Marxism”, but that’s what Critical Race Theory really is
In City Journal, Christopher Rufo explains why Critical Race Theory is a natural child of orthodox Marxist thought:
Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s and built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions over the past decade. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human-resources departments, in the form of diversity-training programs, human-resources modules, public-policy frameworks, and school curricula.
Its supporters deploy a series of euphemisms to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, critical race theorists explicitly reject equality — the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of equity, UCLA law professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth, and redistributing them along racial lines. Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others deemed insufficiently “antiracist.”
One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since, according to Kendi, “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” In other words, identity is the means; Marxism is the end.
An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of “anti-Americanism” has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation: critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.
April 24, 2021
[“white” evil is] “not only objectivity, individualism, and writing, but linear thinking, quantitative reasoning, the Protestant work ethic, planning for the future, and being on time”
The latest post by John McWhorter at It Bears Mentioning discusses the “white” behaviours and thought patterns that many activists believe are as harmful to American blacks as outright white supremacism:
John McWhorter’s Twitter thumbnail image
The organization 1776Unites, founded by my mentor and model Bob Woodson, has tweeted out a video where various black people decry a now fashionable idea that “whiteness” includes being smart. As in, precise, objective, fond of the written word, oriented towards dispassion, on time.
Those things are all manifestations of intelligence, vigilance, discipline. But according to our Elect folk, we black people are best off channeling our Crazy Badass Mothafucka. Because that’s more “authentic.” And, I get the feeling, fun to watch.
Because so many think that the battle that I and others are waging against Critical Race Theory’s transmogrification into education for children is an obsession with something that isn’t a real problem, I want to explore a bit. Someone I deeply respect not long ago surmised to me that the idea that black kids should be exempt from real standards is something being promulgated via mere paper “handouts,” and that the real problem is censorship from the right. I just don’t think so.
First, watch this, the 1776Unites video. Just a few minutes.
And now, as to what we are referring to, it starts actually before last summer. I knew something was really wrong when in 2019 at a conference in New York City for the city’s principals and superintendents, participants were presented with an idea that to teach with sensitivity to race issues meant keeping certain issues in mind.
These included ways of looking at things that are “white” rather than correct: namely, objectivity, individualism, and valuing the written word. Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was fine with this, happily telling the media that it’s white people’s job to do the “work” of identifying the racist assumptions in how they go about their business.
So: to stand outside of matters and analyze them with one’s own private mind, and perhaps couch one’s conclusions with the considered artifice of writing rather than the spontaneity of speaking, is inauthentic for black and Latino people. It is racist to impose such things on black and Latino (and Native American?) kids. Or at best, brown kids should be taught this uptight “white” business only as a gloomy alternative to the realness of just hanging out sharing passing personal impressions via chatting.
[…]
This view of precision and detachment as white is a view about, more economically, reason. The idea is that to master close reasoning is suspect. It is exactly the roots of the “Math is Racist” notion, and if you want a whiff of how religiously people can glom on to such ideas, take a look at my Twitter feed in the week after I posted about that here.
Yet, seeing this educational philosophy laid out in the sunlight, The Elect cannot dismiss it as fringe “kookiness” — unless they want to insult the curators of a national museum devoted to celebrating the very black people The Elect live to liberate. At the African-American History Museum in Washington, D.C., for a hot minute or two in 2020 you could see a variation on the Jones-Okun business, an expanded presentation of what we must reject as “white” evil. An educational poster was displayed that slammed not only objectivity, individualism, and writing, but linear thinking, quantitative reasoning, the Protestant work ethic, planning for the future, and being on time.
