Culture Wars

Black history should be taught, but it first must be rescued from progressives.

Adam Coleman (Paraphrased)

Ideology is, in one sense, the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe that you hold with what advances your material interest

Adolph Reed

In a 2015 interview with The Real News, BLM founder Patricia Cullors said the following: "We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we're trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories."

BLM founder Patricia Cullors

Progressive Mother Tells Daughter That She's Beautiful Just The Way She Is, Unless She's Trans In Which Case She'll Need Extensive Plastic Surgery

Babylon Bee

Consider, for example, his message to Dems this week: "The median voter is a white person in their fifties who didn't go to college, their favorite TV show is NCIS, and their pronouns are, 'What? I don't know what the **** you're talking about, and get away from me,'" he said. "I haven't worked up an official campaign slogan for 2024 yet," Maher continued, "but I tell you what I have ruled out is, 'Vote Democrat Because White People Suck.' It's like trying to get laid by saying, 'You're ugly, you want to dance?'... You're alienating a whole lot of people...I'd say do the math, but math is still a form of white supremacy."

Bill Maher

The thing that so infuriating is that the elite left use race in a way that is disadvantages to poor blackS

Bob Woodson

I'm not opposed to discussing these ideas. I'm opposed to the expectations that students affirm them.

Bonnie Snyder, on CRT (Conv w Coleman)

The antifa left is hostile to anyone attempting to record the situation on the ground, because that gets in the way of them being able to control the narrative used by the media

Bret Weinstein

The left is selling a race first view of the world which is going to drive the right into a race first you have the world which it doesn't currently hold.

Bret Weinstein

The Democrats defense of people who have historically been marginalized is a team and a Roos and is not made in good faith [as can be seen when one of the constituent members of the groups breaks from the approved narrative]

Briahna Joy Gray

Weaponized identity politics can be defined as "the cynical emphasis on personal identity over political beliefs in order to advance candidates whose interests are inapposite to the needs of the groups they're presumed to represent

Brianna Joy Gray

Young Black men and teens made up more than a third of firearm homicide victims in the USA in 2019, one of several disparities revealed in a review of gun mortality data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The analysis, titled "A Public Health Crisis in the Making," found that although Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 make up just 2% of the nation's population, they were among 37% of gun homicides that year. That's 20 times higher than white males of the same age group.

CDC 2019 Report

A multi ethnic society is what we should be striving to achieve. Not a multi cultural society, but a multi ethnic society. We've kind of diluted our own values under the premise of inclusivity. We don't really understand what inclusivity means. We kind of think it means that OK everybody's welcome, we'll take all your values on board and dilute our own because we don't want to offend you. We don't want to be seen as anti-whatever you are, so we'll take all your values on board. And we've lost our own values on the way because we're so afraid of offending people.

Calvin Robinson

It's so fashionable to be anti-white. It's acceptable. You can say whatever you want about the white man and no one blinks an eyelid.

Calvin Robinson

In psychology, a measure is considered reliable if it has a test-retest reliability of at least .7, although it is preferred to be over .8. Studies have found that racial bias Implicit Association Test (IAT) studies have a test-retest reliability of only .44, while the IAT overall is just around .5. To put this in perspective, we would likely have an equal or higher reliability score if we were to hire random fortunetellers to determine our implicit bias towards other races. Their pal readings would likely be more useful than these pseudoscientific racial implicit bias tests.

Casey Petersen

Supporting real immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for our nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants Is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the future

Center for American Progress (GRT doesn't exist)

Racially dispirit outcomes in criminal justice - if you track it back, a lot of black prisoners in America come out of cities that are controlled by African-American elites, who, as judges, as police officers, and prosecutors, make great progress in their careers by beating up on the poor, African-American parts of the community. These aren't racist African-American prosecutors and judges doing this.

Christian Parenti

Comedy is supposed to be about rebellion. It's not supposed to be about enforcing the dogma of the political party in power

Clay Travis

If it's really true that the state is uniquely coming after your people and shooting them dead, that's the kind of thing that leads people to riot.

Coleman Hughes

Kendi has never engaged with his critics. If he was in the habit of engaging with alternative viewpoints of the likes of John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams, really anybody, then I wouldn't of made such a big deal of this. But he doesn't engage with any criticism of his views, which is a cardinal sin if you're claiming to be a serious thinker. And this is a wider problem among anti-racist intellectuals. It's difficult to find a single prominent so-called anti-racist that will talk to the people I've mentioned.

Coleman Hughes

Often we are blaming America for things that are flaws, and foibles, and unfortunate elements of human nature, and in fact we're not unusually bad, relatively speaking, or unusually good, relatively speaking.

Coleman Hughes

Once you get the main legislation passed for your cars, you don't suddenly say "we won. Everyone go home." Institutions have an inertia in a need for self justification. People don't like to declare their own irrelevance

Coleman Hughes

Feminists would tell you that forced Sharia law is not just another way of life. There is a conflict between the feminist movement and respecting the religious norms of certain systems of belief

DB

Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell: first born children dramatically outperform their siblings. It's not even close. More likely to be congressman. More likely to be astronauts. So you have to ask the question, if you can't expect equal outcomes from siblings who basically had the same life, how can we possibly expect the same outcomes from people with such different histories, different cultures, different values.

Dan Crenshaw

The Democratic pitch: you're a victim. You were being oppressed by somebody else. And your only way to fix it is to vote for me, because I'm going to give you all the stuff, I'm going to make sure you make it, I'm going to end the suffering. This is populism. I'm going to mirror your emotions. If you're down, it's not because of you. It's not because of something you did. It's always because of some thing that somebody else did, and they happen to be on the other side of the political spectrum. And if you vote for me I'll fix it for you

Dan Crenshaw

The pattern of offender is predictable, but the majority of people are not a problem

Darryl Cooper

It would be astonishing to an evolutionist if you observed profound sex differences in our anatomy and physiology and ZERO attending psychological and strategic sex differences that correspond to the different adaptive problems that the differences in anatomy and physiology create. Similarly, we expect similarities between men and women in all domains in which they face similar adaptive problems: Eating (fuel for the machine) - similar tastes but different when women get pregnant

David Buss, Making Sense #254

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume

Don't confuse the morality of a goal with the morality of a process.

Destiny

It seems like trans women can compete very effectively against biological women. I don't know of any cases where trans men have been competitive against biological men

Destiny

Black Lives Matter says that everyone who is opposing us and everything else we're smuggling in behind our first demand is a racist.

Douglas Murray

In the last five years, we see a new form of morality, and that is, in order to be a good person, in order to be seen as a good person, you would need to stress for instance that you were anti-racist, as if everybody else in society was profoundly racist and you were one of the few brave souls willing still to battle racists.

Douglas Murray

Over recent years the radical left claimed that words are violence. Say something they don't like and they will claim that you are causing them "harm." The same people claimed that "silence is violence." So if you don't nod along with everything they are saying you are committing an act of violence. Of course there is one thing that they don´t think is violence. And that's violence. That is why we saw the explosion of burnings, killings and lootings in the summer of 2020. Because the left and their media supporters claimed that actual violence was a form of speech.

Douglas Murray

Parents are right to call out CRT. They are right to say that you cannot talk about, for instance, white children as if they are a problem anymore than you should be able to talk about black children as if they were a problem.

Douglas Murray

Roger screwed and once said that his realization that he was a conservative came in Paris in 1969 when he saw middle class students throwing bricks at working class policeman, and he realized he wanted Paris to continue; he didn't want to terret down. I don't want to destroy the society. It can be improved. But it has to continue. I don't think that the other things that are on offer are better. I don't think that the dreams of the radical left sounds good to me. I don't like the idea of everyone being the same. I just think it's a boring view of society. I don't want everyone to need to have the same views, and read the same books, and like the same things.

Douglas Murray

The answer to the trans question is one which there is very very little known about. Now I say that T does exist - we don't know much about it - but we do, among other things, know that there is a massive overspill with the T issue. We get, for instance, people who are encouraged to identify as trans, but may not be. 80 to 85% of people having identified as having gender dysphoria in childhood turn out To be perfectly happy healthy heterosexuals or homosexuals in adulthood - they aren't trans. So this is a complex area.

Douglas Murray

The transgender ideology stuff is, "How dare you say that the big beefy guy can't enter the women's weightlifting competition and trounce all of the women. Who are you to say he shouldn't do that, you bigot?"

Douglas Murray

The west, in its positive forms, invites anyone who wants to sharing it to be a part of it. Not the case with other cultures. There's no way, even in the political systems of any other country outside of the West, if you were to migrate there, you would not be able to work your way up to the Prime Ministership, the presidency, or even the cabinet most other countries in the world if you were an outsider.

Douglas Murray

There is this idea that you can stand in judgment of everybody who came before you and say, well they must know what we know now. This is a very common fallacy. We don't know what we're going through as we are going through it. We don't know whether we are in the first act of the play or the fifth act. Quote: "Man operates in a fog and stumbles along a path". But that's not the interesting observation. The interesting observation is, " when we look back, we see the man, we see the path, but we don't see the fog."

Douglas Murray

When you see a society that's truly been destroyed, one of the things you see at the root of it is that the population agrees to things that they know aren't true (North Korea). Because if you agree to the thing that you know is untrue today, you will agree to a another set of untruths tomorrow. None of this is to say don't be unpleasant to people, but don't demand that we agree to things that we don't think are true, or at the very least, let's discuss it. Don't shut it down.

Douglas Murray

The barbarians will be at the gate and we'll be debating what pronouns we should use when referring to them.

Douglas Murray (paraphrase)

At the time of the country's founding, slavery was practiced virtually everywhere in the world. And so yes, they were complicit in slavery. Everyone was complicit in slavery. And it becomes this weird thing where white people are the only ones who acted badly in history, so you have to punish them now.

Douglas Murray, JRE 4/22/22

Socialism works great until you run out of other people's money

Dr Phil

5/28 tweet: "Burn that s— down. Burn it all down." 5/31 tweet: "They just attacked our sister community down the street. It's a gated community and they tried to climb the gates. They had to beat them back. Then destroyed a Starbucks and are now in front of my building. Get these animals TF out of my neighborhood. Go back to where you live."

Former ESPN NBA reporter Chris Palmer

When I'm weaker than you I ask for freedom because that is according to your principles. When I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles

Frank Herbert, Dune

Biophobia- the fear of truths proven through the study of biology

Gad Saad

In the pursuit of true social justice, we don't murder truth

Gad Saad

A lot of the gap stuff is latter day stuff. It's post-WWII stuff. It's not baked into the cake of slavery

Glenn Loury

In a democracy the pendulum is going to be pushed around mostly by the attitudes of the majority. That's a concession, I think, that if you are in the minority you may have to make. Whether it's a denial of your humanity is another question all together

Glenn Loury

The world is not standing still. The Chinese are coming. The American empire will not last forever. Black people are in no position to miss an opportunity to realize the full productive possibilities of our human potential.

Glenn Loury

There's no equality except equality. Equity is a dodge. It's a fudge. And everybody knows it

Glenn Loury

Was the killing of George Floyd a racially motivated event . . . can I even ask!?!

Glenn Loury

When a black man is shot by a white cop, mobs gather in front of courthouses demanding a specific outcome from a judicial process.

Glenn Loury

When you have just a slight difference in the means and you're looking way out on the tails, don't expect parity

Glenn Loury

With the disparities that persist in the wealth gap, I've got two choices. Either I blame the system or I say that black people are failing. It's completely unacceptable morally and, more importantly, psychologically to see the black people are feeling - and if you call attention to Asian Americans, now you're in the model minority business. And if you say single parent families, and out of wedlock bars, and acting white, etc., "oh so you're gonna make a cultural argument now. You're blaming the victim." So I really don't have a choice; it's gotta be systemic racism. "Either that or it's on us, and I can't handle it being on us"

Glenn Loury

You should live in good faith. You should live a life of intellectual integrity. You should be prepared to admit when you're wrong. And when you don't know something you should say so. You should be suspicious of your own motives for doing things; if it feels too comfortable it might not be right; it might just be the path of least resistance.

Glenn Loury

I'm the guy who has to report that the countries gone mad if you're going to celebrate the likes of Jacob Blake. And if you think what happened to him - given all the facts, a thorough investigation, was an event of his own making - umm, a city should burn?

Glenn Loury (GoodFellows - 11/30/21)

Nor, does any sensible person actually believe that 70% of African American babies being born to a woman without a husband is 1) a good thing, or 2) due to anti-black racism. People will say it. But they don't believe it. They're bluffing. They're dating you to observe this truth

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

Once we get into the habit of racializing such events, we may not be able to contain that racialization merely to instances of white police officers killing black citizens. We may find ourselves soon enough in a world where black criminals killing unarmed white victims come to be seen through a racial lens as well. This is a world no thoughtful person should welcome, since there are a great many such instances. These people are playing with fire by gratuitously bringing in racial sensibilities to all conversations. They are playing their race cards from the bottom of the deck. They may soon enough find that theirs is not the last word in that story.

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual, in his consciousness, . . . it must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness. To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.

Herbert Marcuse

"I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas," Kendi stated. The audience laughed out loud. Kendi then reiterated his definition and added: "And antiracism is pretty simple using the same terms. Antiracism is a collection of antiracist policies leading to racial ... equity that are substantiated by antiracist ideas."

Ibram Kendi

Are poor white people just not cashing their white privilege check to escape poverty?

Jason Rantz in response to Oakland program to pay $500/month to poor African-American families

There's a difference between A cause and THE cause

Jason Riley

Some of the cutting edge diversity, equity, and inclusion stuff That companies in schools are paying for is basically self help, in that there's often no evidence for it, or no solid evidence. Anyone who's trying to make money off of an idea should be required to prove the claims of what the benefits are.

Jesse Singal

I can tell you this, in 2013, Harry Reid, the majority leader of the Democratic Party invoked the nuclear option - which did away with the filibuster on appointments and circuit judges. Come back to 2017, we had leader McConnell, who did away with it for the Supreme Court. So what goes around comes around here. They all understand that. There were 33 Democrats in 2017 signed a letter in an effort to save the filibuster and to save our democracy.

Joe Manchin

Black kids tend not to do as well on standardize tests. Well, instead of saying how do we get them to perform better, which is something that has been done in the past, the new idea is to say well let's just get rid of the test Because the test must be racist. You don't have to specify how. Because black kids don't do as well on it, the test is a racist practice. That is a real leap. That is a real hyper-radical way of looking at things, that I think most people, if presented with the mechanics of the argument would immediately see as flawed.

John McWhorter

In language, terms evolve, and quickly -- witness, of late, how this has happened with cancel culture and even woke. To insist that "CRT" must properly refer only to the contents of obscure law review articles from decades ago is a debate team stunt, not serious engagement with a dynamic and distressing reality.

John McWhorter

Look at all of the white people pretending that Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi are geniuses. Look at all of those people following each other, reading those books, and pretending that this new anti-racism makes any ******* sense. Nine out of 10 of those people know deep down that this is a kind of a show. But we all seek the warmth of crowds. We all want a sense of belonging. We all want a sense of mutual endeavor

John McWhorter

The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions. However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country. Moreover, it is no tort to call it "CRT" in shorthand when: 1) these developments are descended from its teachings and 2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.

John McWhorter

In the political domain, you have a good versus evil narrative. But the problem with that narrative is that the evil is embodied in some other group, and the good is embodied in your group. In sophisticated literature, you don't have good guys and bad guys. You have a good and bad embodied in the same soul. If you don't have an abstract religious system that insists that the fight between good and evil is to be thought from within, then it degenerates into a battle between good and evil in the outside world with evil being conveniently located somewhere else.

Jordan Peterson

It is not the place of a therapist to affirm, or conversely, to deny the identity of anyone whom they admit into their care. The job of that therapist is to listen, to question, and to proceed with due caution

Jordan Peterson

Democrats don't want a colorblind society, they want a color coordinated society.

Larry Elder

Applying racial filters inherently proclaims that this person was not the best person for the job - they were the best person for the job only after the racial filters excluded all of the better options.

Leonydus Johnson

Heard too many people tell me that I was wrong for misinterpreting BLM's mission statement and I took their words out of context. You were saying... [links to article of BLM removing "disrupting nuclear family" from their website] " we know what identity politics does. It divides and it polarizes. No matter how good the intentions may be"

Marcellus Wiley, former NFL defensive lineman

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller

Joe Rogan has proved uniquely skilled in the kind of cultural combat that lifted the former president: projecting shared disdain for elite groupthink and liberal hypersensitivity

Matt Flegenheimer

Most are used to having their bullshit rubber-stamped and don't realize they're playing themselves," writes Taibbi, who cites a college professor triggered by Walsh's "transphobic" use of the word "truth." "Walsh is a ham and a satirist, a creature we never used to see on the political right decades ago. The verbose absurdity of modern leftist thought, coupled with the astonishing absence of a sense of humor in the landscape from whence the most extreme ideas come, has willed conservative comedy into being."

Matt Taibbi

If you make people choose between white pride and white guilt . . . you're not gonna like the answer there

Matt Taiibi

Under Trump: Kids in Cages Under Biden: Unaccompanied migrant children in overflow facilities

Meme

I will only name the bill for George Floyd if you think it is worthy of his name.

Nancy Pelosi responding to a request from the family of George Floyd

Intellectual elites considered critical theory as impervious to criticism or questioning of belief, because their vision of society is not judged by evidence of success, but strictly by the purity and justice of the moral vision.

Native Liberty

Virtue Signaling: merely possessing a belief or belief system somehow confers moral virtue or goodness upon that person

Native Liberty

Don't shut down conversations by assuming that all concerns about racism are #CriticalRaceTheory. Don't shut down conversations by assuming that all concerns about #CriticalRaceTheory are racism. Don't shut down conversations.

Neil Shenvi

In an increasingly multi ethnic society, does it really make sense to view the multitude of inequalities that we see across the board to the binary lens of white racism and black victimization?

New Discourses

What you've got to do when studying the past is to understand it in it's own terms. The purpose of studying history is not to take the value system of 2021 and March back through the ages and condescending to people in the past and finding them objectionable because of the racism, and sexism, and they're in sensitivity to transgender rights.

Niall Ferguson

Some of the same people who are wanting to put greater restrictions and speech that they considered to be violent are very comfortable with using actual violence to punish someone for saying something that they disagree with.

Nick Freitas

Anti-racism. Why does that bother me? I knew that racism was a concept that had undergone enormous creep. Different people have different ideas about what was in but was not racist

Paul Rossi

People who tell you to do the work, almost as a general rule, have not done the intellectual work themselves to figure out what the arguments against their positions are

Peter Boghossian

Twitter locked down the New York posts account for two weeks before a very close election for breaking a completely true story

Piers Morgan

The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation's political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.

Politico (GRT doesn't exist)

A lot of white people are looking for ways to help, ways to end racism. In the main stream when they're looking for ways to be antiracist, they are not hearing about Coleman Hughes, they are not hearing about John McWhorter or Glenn Loury. They're hearing Robin Diangelo or Ibram X. Kendi. So they are looking for ways to be anti-racist, they go to their local bookstore And they can pick up a copy of White Fragility. Thomas Sowell isn't in my local bookstore. They intake clips from various sources of media showing clips, without context, of black men being brutalized by cops.

Rav Arora

Police officers in America are the most under trained professionals in the country. There is no profession in America where we asked the professional to do more with less training invested in them than when we ask a police officer, which is a regular human being, to arrest a violently resistant and assaulting subject with four hours of arrest and control training every year or two. You couldn't create a worse scenario or someone asked to do a harder job.

Renee Gracie, Waking Up, #246

Robyn Diangelo sees "whiteness" as an almost mystical force that must be exorcised from the body, not through prayer, but through the kind of training sessions that earn her lots of money

Robby Soave

On the direction of the new American Right: The fights of the past or in the past. The fights in the future are: How do we teach our kids history? Is it OK to be outspokenly patriotic in popular culture and elite circles? Do we say merry Christmas again? Can we say "problematic" words? Can we roll her eyes at peoples pronouns in their email signatures without being called homophobic?

Sagaar Enjeti

Hypocrisy and the capitulation to BLM was well evident when epidemiologists shrieked about COVID when people on the far right were protesting lockdowns, but the moment the protest for George Floyd erupted, they not only didn't judge the protesters, but asserted that protesting itself was a positive contribution to public health

Sam Harris

I believe that much of white America is experiencing something analogous to what they experienced at the end of the OJ trial, where what they believe they saw was just a unanimous eruption of tribal solidarity that had no basis, or very loose basis, in fact.

Sam Harris

If you think about establishing society from the perspective of not knowing beforehand what demographic you would be a part of - from that position, virtually all of us would be able to converge on what sounds like a fair situation. No, that's not the absolute or last word on justice and fairness, but it's so much better than any group saying, well this is because of my gender, or because of my skin color - we have primacy because of our identity. Having a society where we keep having to do the algebra of identity, where it's just this game of dungeons and dragons, where we keep rolling the dice and racking up his points against the other identity - that can't be the way that we get out of this mess.

Sam Harris

It's simply not the case that we see white racists with their racism producing the levels of violence that we see in the black community in the inner-city, in a place like Chicago

Sam Harris

One thing we can begin to do, and begin to do immediately, is to figure out how to hold elections in this country that are secure in a way that everyone can recognize - transparent, and heckuva, where the right people get to vote, and they know their vote has counted, so that when you lose you can admit you lost. We simply have to figure out how to put such a system in place.

Sam Harris

The foundation of my approach is that I am totally allergic to identity politics. I believe for very good reason. All of our moral progress in the end is based on our growing tribal identity and extending the circle of morality more and more widely to encompass everyone in the end. And so any politics that seems to counsel that we take identity more and more seriously is leading us nowhere that we want to go, and is obviously in contrast with Martin Luther King's vision of living in a world where we want to judge people by the content of their character not the color of their skin. On the left we seem to have lost that and rebooted some other program.

Sam Harris

The hypocrisy here is pretty amazing because you're talking about people who Think they care about women's rights, political equality, equality of opportunity Between sexes, but they're totally sanguine about the compulsory veiling of half of the women in these Muslim societies and their forced illiteracy of the women in many of the societies. And the idea that you would criticize this behavior as an advocate for women never occurs to people on the left - The only way to criticize having women in burkas in Afghanistan is to Be insensitive of the ancient norms of a culture who doesn't want any of your colonial, racist bullshit, and that double standard should be obvious.

Sam Harris

The tactics being used here are shockingly dishonest

Sam Harris

What you think is not what is important here; it's always how you think; how you reason; whether you avail yourself to good chains of evidence and argument. If you were not available to those, then you were simply not in touch with reality and an unreliable witness to every subsequent event.

Sam Harris

And the media has turned these videos into a form of political pornography. And this has deranged us. We're now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has been poisoned by bad incentives, in this regard, and social media doubly so.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

And yet now we're inundated with messages from every well-intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. Black Lives Matter is everywhere. Of course, black lives matter. But the messaging of this movement about the reality of police violence is wrong, and it's creating a public hysteria.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

And, finally, if you're on the Left and don't agree with this vision of a post-racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race, and that racial identity is indissoluble, and that skin color really matters and will always matter—these people are white supremacists and neo-Nazis and other total ********.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. Think about it. He was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely that he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It's possible, of course. But it doesn't seem the likeliest explanation for his behavior.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

The difference between being very lucky in our society, and very unlucky, should not be as enormous as it is.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

You might think cops shouldn't carry guns. Why can't we just be like England? That's a point that can be debated. But it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns on the street. The United States is not England.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

An anti-science claim of the left is that all unequal outcomes must necessarily be due to unequal opportunity or racism; we can't have multi determined problems. And that's a very anti-science stance.

Scott Barry Kaufman

"CBS Sunday Morning" correspondent Holly Williams asked Tucci about "criticism from some quarters saying gay roles should be played by gay actors." "I have difficulty with that," Tucci responded. "I think that acting is all about not being yourself. If we were to use that as a template, then we would only ever play ourselves. I think what we need to do, we need to give more gay actors opportunities."

Stanley Tucci

"If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on "the legacy of slavery" with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals."

Thomas Sowell

If you can't get equality among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why on earth would you expect that you're going to get equality among people that have had such different histories and cultures around the world.

Thomas Sowell

If you have always believed that everybody should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would've got you label the radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.

Thomas Sowell

The last forty years have been focusing on replacing what works with what sounds good.

Tom Bilyeu quoting Thomas Sowell

Western countries were so self-destructively welcoming to their enemies

Tom Clancy, Dead or Alive, pg. 532

By what standard of medical ethics are you legitimizing the removal of healthy body parts

Transgressive, Tucker Carlson Original

Social safety net: If you were providing things, then you should also be able to have reasonable expectations for those whom you are providing to

Trey Gowdy

Have you had a look at what the organization stands for. So I send them the link, they find out they're Russian, and I don't hear back from them.

Triggernometry

America is not divided by race, color, gender, or sexual orientation. America is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, and sexual orientation.

Triggernometry quote

Businesses are closing, crime is rising, homelessness is soaring. For years there has been a rigid code among those smug fussy liberals of New York City - that you're not allowed to notice as things fall apart. To the extent that you do notice, you were supposed to think that it's charming, or diverse, or somehow related to equity . . . "More drug ODs in Penn Station . . . How vibrant!"

Tucker Carlson

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Voltaire

If you look at the agenda of BLM, it includes a lot of what aren't really on-the-ground narratives for the black community

Wilfred Reilly

In recent years, however, a much darker vision has emerged on the political left. America isn't a land of opportunity. It's barely changed since the days of Jim Crow. Whites, universally privileged, maintain an iron grip on American society, while nonwhites are little more than virtuous victims cast adrift on a plank in an ocean of white supremacy.

Zaid Jilani

If you've got 90-10 on the inputs, how can you have 50-50 on the outputs without having some serious discrimination going on in the middle? [is the problem in the pipeline, or the job pool]

Zuby

Why is BLM focused on .001% of black lives?

Zuby

Multiracial democracies of our size and scope, there's no great precedent for. That same fissure is tearing apart great swaths of the democratic world. And bringing together pluralistic majorities in the project of self rule in an equitable fashion is a very hard thing to do.

Chris Hayes

Perhaps the most brilliant move, an anti-capitalist ideology has moved into the C-suite of Fortune 500 companies

Chris Rufo

People are told that your past is reprehensible, not ordinarily reprehensible, but uniquely reprehensible.

Douglas Murray

Just replace the word white with black and we'd have a civil war on our hands

Gad Saad

"You don't know how my ancestors have suffered." "You don't know what it's like to be black." You think that's not power? Do you think the ability to shut down a conversation, to shut people up is not power? Do you think the people who exercise that prerogative don't know that they have power?

Glenn Loury

But here's the thing, slavery is a commonplace of human experience, going back to antiquity. Emancipation, freedom for the slaves, the abolition of slavery - that's a new idea. That's a Western idea. That's an enlightenment idea. And it was brought to fruition here in America.

Glenn Loury

The idea that Peter Thiel can be stripped of his gayness because he supports Trump, or that Kanye West can be stripped of his blackness because he supports Trump shows that identity is a platform, a party manifesto, something you can sign up for

JBP/Douglas Murray

The right deploys misinformation. The left deploys social coercion.

Jonathan Rauch

Ricardo Munoz was literally chasing a cop down the street with a Bowie knife when he was shot. Given that this produced riots and violence, it's difficult to imagine what might not.

Wilfred Reilly

Heaven and Earth are big, but not as big as the Party's kindness. Mother and Father are dear, but not as dear as Chairman Mao. A multitude of goodness is not as good as socialism.

"Father and Mother are dear, but Chairman Mao is dearer"

Who originated DEI? Why DEI and not another set of laudable values? Does "equity" refer to opportunity or result? How do those of mixed race fit in diversity assessments? Is the goal of racial representation proportionate to that of the population, the history of marginalization, or something else? DEI terms are defined so obtusely that they can refer to a spectrum of policies from mere platitudes to radical agendas including litmus tests and racial quotas.

'What do we really mean by 'diversity, equity and inclusion'?'

Scholars of all political stripes from a variety of disciplines objected to Hannah-Jones' essay immediately on its publication last August, especially this crucial line: "Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery." That's a lie, pure and simple, and the paper still hasn't corrected it. It "made an important clarification," in Hannah-Jones' words. A new "editors' note" explains, "A passage has been adjusted." Namely, it added two words: The essay now says protecting slavery was the main reason "some of" the colonists fought to rebel from England. Sorry: Preserving slavery was not a major motive for declaring independence, and next to no one fought in the war for that reason: The colonists didn't think slavery was under threat, because it wasn't.

1619 Project

Democrats are committed to standing up to racism and bigotry in our laws, in our culture, in our politics, and in our society, and recognize that race-neutral policies are not sufficient to rectify race-based disparities. We will take a comprehensive approach to embed racial justice in every element of our governing agenda, including in jobs and job creation, workforce and economic development, small business and entrepreneurship, eliminating poverty and closing the racial wealth gap, promoting asset building and homeownership, education, health care, criminal justice reform, environmental justice, and voting rights.

2020 Democratic Party Platform

This year just way to work up a crusade in favor of some cause is to promise people they will have a chance at maltreating someone. To be able to destroy was good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior "righteous indignation" - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

A. Huxley

It would be unfair to judge a 19th Century man by 21st Century principles. Assessing the people of Africa's past by today's standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains, denying us the right to fully celebrate anyone who was not influenced by Western ideology. Igbo slave traders like my great-grandfather did not suffer any crisis of social acceptance or legality. They did not need any religious or scientific justifications for their actions. They were simply living the life into which they were raised. That was all they knew.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, great grand-daughter of Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, a Nigerian slave trader

First they came for the socialists, and I helped them, Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I helped them, Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I helped them, Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, because they no longer needed my help

Alternate version of Martin Niemöller quote

The push to adopt the newly invented pronouns is not the evolution of language, it's the imposition of language

Andrew Doyle

I've had enough history books to know that the people that are doing the censoring are never the good guys

Andrew Tate

Racism of the Gaps Theory

Any place where we observe a success differential, the explanation is inherently racism

Built into the ideology of victimhood is innocence: if you're a victim then you're innocent; if you're a victim then you're innately virtuous; if you're a victim then everyone else is the aggressor, everyone else is the oppressor. It's a state that's seductive because it's one where people don't ever have to look at themselves, which we know is hard.

Ayishat Akanbi

People should always have the right to protest for whatever they want to believe in. Do you have the right to pressure people into doing that? I don't think so. If people don't want to do that, does that say something innately about their morality? I don't think so. It's likely that many of us here don't know the plight of a typical Pakistani woman in her village., and us not knowing, or if we do know, may not protest against the situation - is that a reflection of our morality? The fact that we're not speaking up for her issues?

Ayishat Akanbi

The movement is not so much in support of a race as it is in support of an ideology. The evidence for this is that if a black person speaks in a way that is not in lockstep with the movement, they as well are ostracized

Ayishat Akanbi

The weapons have been developed in academia, specifically in the humanities departments, to win status competitions.

Balaji Srinivasan

Wokes are the opposite of nazis, but they're both obsessed with race. One thinks that whites are the best; the other thinks that whites are the worst

Balaji Srinivasan

I learned this this week, because this put it on the front page. There are pretty basic things that I did not know about abortion. Like in Europe, the modern countries of Europe, are way more restrictive than we are, or what they're even proposing. If you are pro-choice, you would like it a lot less in Germany and Italy and France and Spain and Switzerland. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I learned most people who are pro-life are women. Did not know that.

Bill Maher

People are looking for something that's not catering to the excesses of the right, which of course we never did, but also of the left," he tells me of his show. Other late-night hosts "pretty much cleave to whatever the dictums of the woke are. The worst thing that seems in their minds to happen to a human being would be to say something and have the studio audience not approve of it. Which is, as we know, certainly not the way I've run my business, and I have many clips to prove it.

Bill Maher

This is one of the big problems with wokeness," Maher continued, "that what you say doesn't have to make sense or jive with the facts or even be challenged lest the challenge be conflated with racism. "But saying that White power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa Race Massacre? Higher than the years when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow went unchallenged? Higher than the 1960s when The Supremes and Willie Mays still couldn't stay at the same hotel as the White people they were working with? Higher than during slavery?" Maher, an unabashed liberal, admitted racism "is still with us," but said "is simply no longer everywhere." Maher cited, as an example, the Minneapolis police distancing themselves from ex-cop Derek Chauvin "and that never used to happen." The "Real Time" host then concluded, saying, "It's not a sin, and it's certainly not inaccurate, to say we've come a long way, baby. Not mission accomplished, just a long way."

Bill Maher

Movements are what take five or ten percent of people and make them decisive—because in a world where apathy rules, five or ten percent is an enormous number.

Bill McKibben

The narrative engine wants everybody to stick to one version of events that tells them exactly who the enemy is and what danger that enemy poses and then turns off their processes of reason so they can't discover that's not even true.

Brett Weinstein

Paradoxically, if you're an intersectionalist you can't abolish race the same way that you can gender, because there are loads and loads of invested groups who need race to be exclusive, and biological, and connected to the reality of the human body. The problem, however, is that these two narratives can't live together. One destroys the other: social constructionist or biological essentialist. The question remains is why can you change your gender?

Carl Benjamin

Everybody must be approached as an individual; it's wrong to judge people as groups. If we discard that ideal, we are opening the door to the kinds of governments that have been the lot of human kind for the past 10,000 years where the people who have the power arrange matters to favor people who are part of their group and punish people who are not part of their group. The United States was the first country to say "no, we aren't going to behave that way"

Charles Murray

As offensive as it may sound to today's sensitive ears, it was only in 2006 that a young and rising United States senator wrote the following about immigration: "When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I'm forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration." That senator was Democrat Barack Obama from Illinois. The quote comes from his 2006 autobiography.

Chicago Tribune

I've become concerned about misleading positions from the left defending CRT from criticism. There's good reason to fear the new trend in education, and I worry that the left has engaged in misleading discourse as part of this debate. Part of the difficulty is grasping what we mean by CRT. There's a decades-old academic component, which tends to center identity categories like race in human social exchanges, focusing on differences and how these create oppressor/oppressed classes. But there are also "pop" variants such as the antiracism of Ibram X. Kendi or "White Fragility" of Robin DiAngelo. Related concepts include exposing the construct of "whiteness," which The Smithsonian infamously connected to characteristics such as "objective, rational thinking" and "hard work." These various threads can make defining CRT difficult.

Chris Ferguson

The retreat to the inner-citadel: If you can't win at the game, you stop playing. You say that you never cared about the game. You create your own game with rules that you can more easily win at

Chris Williamson

Now everyone is a journalist. And anytime an altercation goes down between the police and civilians, people will be on hand to record it. And to be clear, I think that's a net good. However, it means that any altercation will immediately go viral, certainly between a white cop and a black suspect. In 2019, according to the Washington Post database, there were nine unarmed black Americans that were killed. Getting from 9 to 0 is it going to be harder than getting from 20 to 9.

Coleman Hughes

Politicians are taking their cues from social justice activists at Ivy League schools

Coleman Hughes

Rather than explaining societies where we have violent young men, what really needs to be explained is the societies that don't have young men behaving that way. And as far as comparisons, if you look at the early 20th century and look at the rates of crime that Irish immigrants were committing in comparison to Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, you find disparities just as large as those between blacks and whites today. If you look at the crime disparities between southern whites and northern whites, to this day it's rather large. So there's nothing strange or cosmically out of order with two groups of people that have very different histories, different cultures, different circumstances committing crime at very different rates. In a way it's the wrong question to ask - why that is. Unless of course you're solution oriented. I am very interested in solutions that will reduce violence, and I'm dismayed that that conversation is either only used as a way of dismissing police violence, or is used synonymously with racism.

Coleman Hughes

Talking about the bigotry of low expectations- the measure of how much you respect a person is what you would blame them for if they mess up. If I'm looking at the best chess player in the world and he makes a blunder, I blame him. I say I'm disappointed in him. If, on the other hand, I'm looking at someone for whom it's true to say that nothing They could do is so bad that I could blame them and them only, What I'm saying about them is that I do not view them as a full human being with agency and autonomy.

Coleman Hughes

The reason the term systemic racism is so useful is because of, not in spite of, its vagueness

Coleman Hughes

I think it did a great job highlighting just how radical gender ideology is. It is not simply pseudoscience, but is anti-science as it fundamentally rejects the notion of a stable and discoverable material reality." He added, "Gender ideology views truth as something that is literally socially constructed by language, and therefore rejects the notion of "The Truth' in favor of relativistic notions of your truth' and 'my truth.

Colin Wright, quoted in Matt Taibbi review of What is a Woman

The Comanche in the 1600s moved from the mountains in the North onto the Southern Plains. They came to dominate their new territory. They adopted the horse into their culture in the 17th century and quickly conquered vast tracts through subjugation and warfare. The Comanche were a Shoshone tribe when they lived farther north. They speak an Uto-Aztecan language that is still the same as spoken by the Shoshone people of today. Their later territory to the south overlapped with several other tribes, whom they drove out through war. According to some reports, they nearly wiped out the Apache people. Usually, the history of Native American tribes when they interact with Europeans is a tale of domination, slavery, displacement, and death —of the Indians. In the case of the Comanche, it's different, at least for a time. They killed or forced out Pueblo, Apache, and Jumano Indians in the southern Plains. By many accounts, the Comanche were merciless in war, killing all adult male captives, killing babies and abducting children between the ages of 3 to 10. They also tortured captives, some accounts say. Comanche torture was described as brutal and included burning people.

Comanche

It's important to be able to speak truth to power. And the ability of a social media mob to be able to amplify outrage is definitely power.

DB

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The mayor of Portland, Oregon, announced Thursday he would seek $2 million in one-time funding for police, other agencies and outreach programs to try to stem rampant gun violence in the city. The move by Mayor Ted Wheeler represents an about-face after city leaders in June voted to cut nearly $16 million from the police budget, reductions that included the elimination of a gun violence reduction unit. The cuts came amid racial justice protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Oregon's largest city has seen a spike in violence. So far this year, there have been 20 homicides, most the result of shootings. During the same period of 2020 — the deadliest year in the city in more than a quarter century — there was one.

Defund the Police

Through all this progress and building, there's this undercurrent of "F men. F all men. F white people." and it's like, OK, that's cool... And you can say that. But you can't tell me on one end that it's OK for every single black person to hate all of the F'ing police, because they have one bad experience with a cop and then turn around and say if you're a white person and you hear 50 million people say"F white people; Here's the mayo side; White genocide" that they're supposed to be cool with all of that?

Destiny

Every year in the US, there are 60MM interactions with police and the most armed citizenry in the world.

Douglas Murray

On affording a certain degree of politeness to the demands of LGBT: People should be afforded a certain amount of respect, but respect is not the only sheriff in town

Douglas Murray

One of the things that we're going through in our era is the need to absorb the complexities of things. I think that on a whole range of political issues that the public instinct is much more nuanced than the people who speak on behalf of them

Douglas Murray

Take the caste system in India: is that inequality? Yes. Is that systemic? Hell yes. Is there anything being done about it? Not really.

Douglas Murray

The footage in Washington DC; of these reprehensible, totally spoiled, mainly white, college-age kids going around demanding that restaurant goers put their fist in the air or taking the knee. It's all this modern crass iconography they want to force on the population. It doesn't matter what it is, so long as you demoralize people enough so that they do the thing you tell them to do. Do not do what the mob demands. It doesn't matter what the mob demands. It matters less what the mob is demanding than you do not do what it demands.

Douglas Murray

The pretense that has been going on for a while is, for instance, that the white male is always, in every way, in the position of power. And, in fact, not all the time, but certainly in the most public arenas, the opposite is the truth. Because, particularly the white male can, at almost in any moment, be completely taken out by another person making an accusation of racism. There is something very curious and our age that the most damaging claims are unprovable and impossible to be defended against. That accusation is a very powerful weapon that is just lying around, fully loaded, and there's no charge for firing it. And there's no charge for firing it insincerely.

Douglas Murray

The stakes are quite high for most people: they weigh the downside that could come from the slightest deviation from the driving narrative, or even asking the wrong question, against the relatively simple, painless action of doing what you're told to do today. And there will be follow on demands after that, as they methodically seek to further drive the narrative left.

Douglas Murray

We all almost learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century. We have nearly a total societal revulsion fascism, and nearly a total societal revulsion to racism.

Douglas Murray

Now if your sincere belief is that equality necessarily entails full and immediate acceptance of progressive conceptions of sex and gender, that's totally fine with me. I disagree, but I'm more than happy to hear you out The problem is that the left tries to shift the blame for inflaming cultural tensions onto the center and onto the right when they react to the left's demands for swift and dramatic change.

Emily Jashinsky

Not one of them was guilty of anything, but they belong to a class that was guilty of everything

Erenberg on the Kulaks (1934)

Adjustment of ethos: consider the difference in freedom from (oppression) and freedom to (pursue)

Eric Smith

China, in having Chinese nationals educated and participate in research in American institutions realize both the benefits of innovation produced under freedom and the benefit of the ability to execute with an iron fist.

Eric Weinstein

Culture doesn't belong to you; you belong to a culture. What does not belong to you cannot be, as Braswell puts it, "taken." Culture can, however, be copied, emulated, and adapted—with varying levels of success and sensitivity. If someone adapts the culture with which you affiliate, and the results are cynical, hollow, frivolous, or "cringe," it is reasonable to feel distaste. But the result hasn't failed because they "appropriated" or copied a form of cultural expression; everything is copied. It failed because its creator could not adequately cohere technique, feeling, and content. The correct descriptor, in this instance, is "bad art." There would be no Blues without the guitar or the influence of Negro spirituals. The guitar came to its current form in sixteenth-century Spain; the Negro spirituals were Christian, and therefore Levantine by way of Europe. Though American slave masters imposed Christianity on their thralls, black Christian faith subsequently became the basis for powerful expressions of spirituality and perseverance. New culture came about the way new people came about—by mixing.

Franklin Einspruch

When it comes to truth in the purest sense of the word, consequentialism should never win. I never sacrifice a millimeter of truth because it has some social justice positive implications. We don't destroy the edifice of truth in pursuit of equality. Pursue true social justice while never murdering truth.

Gad Saad

You cannot build a bridge with postmodernist physics, because the bridge collapse

Gad Saad

something is "woke" if it utilizes "the abuse of power—mostly social, not yet governmental—to silence debate and paralyze the spread of any ideas that challenge the prevailing ideological dogma." While this behavior is all-too-human and not exclusive to one side of the political spectrum, many have noticed a sudden rise in this tendency throughout our culture. While these impulses are understandable in terms of human nature, history has shown that the costs of such intimidation tactics falls predominantly on the societies least powerful and most oppressed. Destroying the mechanisms of democracy to preserve democracy won't work. We can't promote marginalized voices by telling them what is acceptable to say. We must fight to preserve the free flow of ideas, of debate and an open society, however uncomfortable it makes us. Democracy has never been a safe space.

Gary Kasparov

How far do you have to be removed from the ramifications of violence to not be worried about rioting. How dare you advocate for, or fail to repudiate violence, when you're rich enough to not have to be there when the out-of-town rioters and violent protesters leave, and let's say, the black community is left there to deal with the wreckage of their community. To be opposed to that message of peaceful protest is like saying, "I want to let people protest as long as they want. It's in a way that will never affect me. My children are not at risk. My family's not at risk. My house is not at risk. But I will use all the right language so that I can be protected and maintain all that." JBP - A lot of politically correct language, that would be language that's an alignment with any given doctrine Is an attempt to take on the moral virtues of that doctrine without necessarily Having to bear any of the responsibility of the actions in alignment with that doctrine or to bear any of the responsibility for the consequences.

Gregg Hurwitz on Jordan Peterson

No, that's not how science works. Science works by looking at patterns carefully and really really really trying to falsify your cherished results.

Heather Heying

The majority of martyrs that are being celebrated now due to police violence have very very questionable backgrounds. They are criminals. And that points out a reality of police violence - That it is overwhelmingly occasioned by criminal behavior or resisting behavior on the part of individuals. This is something that has been known by criminologists for decades - the biggest predictor of officer behavior is civilian behavior.

Heather MacDonald on Glenn Loury

The social justice label that we've always assumed from top to bottom is all good might just not be so. View point diversity exercise: when I hit the winning goal in the hockey game, what about the viewpoint from the goalie; what about the goalie's mom? Learning is a really disruptive, turbulent process to arrive at the best idea.

Heterodox Academy, Ep. 19

It's much more comfortable to see people as all good or all bad than to sit with these conflicts, nuances, and tensions. By pushing these conflicts out of awareness, splitting reduces anxiety, Increase his self-esteem, and makes the world look more simpler, more coherent, and more stable, at least in the short term. In a racially split worldview, white people tend to be associated exclusively with negative qualities such as racism and privilege, never positive qualities. And people of color can only ever be associated with positive qualities such as cultural strengths and innate talents, never anything negative.

Heterodox Academy: Episode 8

IK: I don't know of a single policy that can eliminate the life expectancy gap, but I do know of a single policy, if targeted and implemented correctly, that has the potential to eliminate the racial wealth gap, and that's reparations. EK: and so how would you build that policy to eliminate the racial wealth gap. IK: so that's not something that I know.

Ibram Kendi on Ezra Klein podcast

Caving to the primal brain is not a whites only privilege. All human groups do it. Yale's Jennifer Richeson and NYU's Maureen Craig Point out that Black Americans and Asian Americans become more conservative when reminded that Latin Americans are growing in number. The prospect of losing status triggers fear in everyone, everywhere.

Irshad Manji

Challenge in a way that leaves the other feeling respected rather than humiliated.

Irshad Manji

I am constantly told I don't understand my own books and I am constantly told that I have betrayed my own books. "My position is that I am absolutely upholding the positions I took in Potter. My position is that this activist movement in the form it is currently taking echoes the very thing I was warning against in Harry Potter.

J.K. Rowling

Critical theory is a means of applying uninformed and cynical criticism to cause social and political revolution. It exists to get rid of liberalism, to limit freedom, to control thought and action for our own good, which it says we can't be trusted to know.

James Lindsay

Critical Theory is very good at manipulating language, at manipulating its intent, to make it look like it's the more reasonable and valuable thing, where in fact it is a political agenda and the goal is to bring its politics into your institution.

James Lindsay - 9/26/20

Racism is used as an all purpose explanation for bad black outcomes in this country. And I don't think the data backs it up

Jason Riley

Thomas Sowell's first love was economics. He reluctantly turned to writing about race because, as he put it, they were things that need to be said, and they were too many people with the good sense not to see them.

Jason Riley

They no longer have shame about anything. They blame it on racism when it's really the destruction of the family and turning their lives over to the government.

Jesse Lee Peterson

It's this weird situation where you think that you don't have power, and then all of a sudden you realize you do. And all you have to do is talk, and tell someone, and share a story, made up or not. You can even have the power of life and death over other human beings. (Salem Witch Trials, CRT)

Jocko Willink

Freedom of speech cannot be held hostage to those of us who are easily offended, and more importantly, those of us who claim to be offended.

John Finn

The words that are used to have a kind of rhetorical power that distracts us from the logic of the case being made

John McWhorter

America is the most impressive engine for creating wealth amongst an immigrant population that has ever existed

Kmele Foster

I think Ibram Kendi's anti-racism take is dogmatic and approaches religious belief. And I don't know that there's anything to be gained in having people barking slogans at you such as "it's not enough to be not racist, you must be anti-racist, else you're explicitly racist." This is insanity in an Orwellian, 1984 sort of way. The prominence and his reach where he's training teachers in his practice of anti-racism makes me very nervous. Not to mention the fact that he's never called upon, or at least never answers the call, to publicly defend his beliefs. The purest incarnation of this thing in showing how dangerous it is, is that he can publicly advocate for A constitutional amendment that would create this unaccountable ministry of unelected bureaucrats, with an unlimited amount of funding, who can strike down any law in the country If it's so determined that it is racist. And what's racist? Well, will have a board of anti-racist professionals, and they'll be able to tell us what's racist and what's not. That is totalitarianism. And I am deeply concerned that he can wander around, never having to confront criticism or skepticism in public settings.

Kmele Foster

In the public narrative, Amy Cooper's fear is always presented as irrational, or unjustified, or totally performative. In short, we were told that she is definitely lying. But if there is a documented history of incidences playing out in similar ways between Christian Cooper and other people in the park, then we have a better basis from which we can make an assessment into whether Amy's account of his behavior is credible.

Kmele Foster on Bari Weiss 8/3/21

Part of the problem is that you've got a whole group of people who have formed their identity around compliance with pandemic restrictions. And once you formed that identity, that can be hard to let go of. It's a very satisfying identity. It puts you in a community. It gives you a sense of moral superiority, because you're doing all the right things even as you see others who aren't.

Krystal Ball

If Black America were a country, it would be the 15th wealthiest country in the world

Larry Elder

Why don't we hear about other black lives? It's simple. It's all about power. And what you're describing is what has been going on in Democrat-run cities for years. They talk about racism. I'm a civil rights attorney. I know what systemic racism is. It does not exist in Chicago, in LA, in Baltimore, when the people who are running the show are black people and brown people.

Leo Terrell

You can say that there's bias built in. There's wars that are incentivized, not to produce truth, but to produce consensus around a particular narrative. But that is how the entirety of the human civilization has operated and the determination that we have to make is where is it better and where is it worse?

Lex Fridman

"Reimagining society". Make no mistake, reimagining society it's just a weirdo euphemistic way of talking about revolutionary structural change. How does it happen? And if it happens all at once, and if it involves tearing down all of the existing structures, I would call that a revolution.

Liz Wheeler

Asking basic questions or making a request to discuss things or change behavior when someone unintentionally uses words that harm is how to call in rather than call out. But that is assuming that you care enough about "Uncle Frank" to treat him with respect, even if you disagree with what he says. But if you use your words as an excuse to not respect him, and to ruin the relationship that you have with him, then that's a different choice. I'm saying that we have choices with Uncle Frank at the dinner table without blowing up the relationship.

Loretta Ross on Ten Percent Happier

"Any program that elects all black candidates because they are black, and rejects all white candidates simply because they are white is politically unsound and morally unjustifiable."

MLK

Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race

MLK

BLM the organization is a Marxist organization with such end goals as abolishing the nuclear family. BLM the movement is about identity politics. And the cause is anti-racism.

Mahyar Tousi

I didn't know what I was for, I just came over yelling about what I was against

Matthew McConaughey on pledging allegiance to a political extreme

It's absurd to say because I might not believe the experience of a person of color that I belong in the white supremacy scale!

Megyn Kelly, 2.23.21

Venezuelans didn't vote for Venezuela, they voted for Sweden. They ended up with Venezuela.

Michael Malice

According to the Monmouth University Poll, 80% of the public also supports requiring a form of identification before a person can vote. The poll found only 18% in opposition to such policies. The public was more divided on voting by mail; 50% of the public supports making voting by mail easier compared with 39% of those polled who think it should be made harder.

Monmouth Poll on voting rights

Maybe we do. Maybe we defund 'em and pull them out of all the neighborhoods that don't want them. And they'll just, sort it out. I think that would go extremely f****** poorly. But sometimes the best thing to do is let people live in what the f*** they created. Give 'em what they want. You don't want any police? You won't get any. None.

Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan

Everyone has been into slavery. Not all slavery was as nasty as what went on in the sugar plantations of the West Indies or the Southern American colonies. But some of it was quite nasty. Some of those who were carted off, the slaves who were sold by West African kings to European traders and taken off to the Caribbean, had they stayed they might have had the fate of joining several hundred others upon the death of a king of being buried alive to join their master on his heavenly journey. There are reports of up to 1500 slaves being sacrificed, buried alive, to demark the funerals of African princes in 1790.

Nigel Biggar

All nations who have been around for some time have done awful things as well as great things. The Mongols committed some pretty serious micro-aggressions

Nigel Biggar / Konstantinos Kisin

"It is heartbreaking, and it is, I think, one of those situations in which if you have a system that overall is dysfunctional, you are going to get episodes in which what's happening right in front of you is something that nobody wants." Obama explained that while immigration may be a difficult issue because Americans want to help others in need, specifically when they see "families that are desperately trying to get" to the U.S. in order to escape from "violence or catastrophe," that there are also rules and laws. "We're a nation-state. We have borders. The idea that we can just have open borders is something that ... as a practical matter, is unsustainable," Obama said.

Obama

Before July, 2020, the ADL's definition of racism was "the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person's social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics." During the summer of America's "racial reckoning," however, the organization adopted a critically-informed definition: "The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people." After the Goldberg debacle, that newer definition of racism was quickly replaced with a more accurate "interim" one: "Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity."

Pamela Paresky, FAIR, 2/11/22

New Zealand enfranchised its female citizens in 1893, making it the first nation or territory to formally allow women to vote in national elections. At least 19 other countries also did so prior to the U.S. passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, according to our analysis. These countries are spread across Europe and Asia, and about half first gave women this right while under Russian or Soviet control or shortly after independence from Russia. Russia itself extended the vote to women after demonstrations in 1917.

Pew Research Center

The newsfeed gives you a biased sample of the worst things happening anywhere in the world on any given day. So that's the sample we're getting. It's not a random sample. When things go right, it's generally not news. When things improve, it's usually incremental; it's a few percentage points a year, which then add up, or even compound. There's not, say, a Thursday in October where it happens all at once. Any informed person - if they are informed by the news - is bound to have a biased sample of what's going on in the world.

Pinker on Conversations with Coleman

The pursuit of criminal justice reform at any cost and reducing incarceration, disimprisonment, at any cost causes dangerous people, violent offenders, with extensive criminal rap sheets, to remain on the streets.

Rafael Mangual

I thought we were talking about affirmative ACTION, and the whole point is that you are changing standards for a purpose. Now I am willing to defend the purpose to some extent, but let's not play around and deny that there's a lowering.

Randall Kennedy 11/5/21

According to the report, the Navy is placing far too much importance on how media, including social media, portrays it. It identified "an inversion of the chain of command" brought on by social media, in which "it is easy for a disgruntled junior officer or sailor to grind their axe with targeted leaks" online or to outside journalists. "This ease of access," the report said, "combined with the Navy's proclivity, or at least perceived proclivity, to bend the knee when a reporter files a negative story, has instilled in junior officers and sailors a notion that they can effortlessly exercise power over their senior officers.

Rebeccah Heinrichs

According to contemporary advocates, "critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law."

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction 3 (3d. ed. 2017).

There's no announcement that says "normally we welcome dissenting opinions. We like to analyze all the facts on the ground in a balanced, measured way. But for the next six months, we're not going to do this. We're going to focus on solidarity."

Rufus Griscom

The analogy between the insurrection in the BLM riots is idiotic, But it is easy to see how the media and the Democratic politicians have totally discredited themselves. That has to be corrected. There's so much here that has to be corrected, and to just dunk on the right as the orange goblin is driven out of office, it's just a colossal mistake, politically, pragmatically. We have to be able to figure out how to heal the divide in our country.

Sam Harris

Because, again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. If we can't reason with one another, there is no path forward, other than violence. Conversation or violence.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Identity politics, which is the politics of victimhood. You've got socialism. You've got BLM (racial politics), you've got feminism. Because they all operate along the same lines, they can all be bundled into the same package, which is Intersectionality.. and this is why they now have a racial and gendered hierarchy of oppression called the progressive stack. One of the most horrific things I've ever seen - to categorize people's privilege based on their race and gender.

Sargon of Akkad

The hegemony of far-left beliefs. The fact that I'm the wrong race means I can't talk about a particular topic? I reject that completely. I think anyone from any race can talk about anything as long as they're talking from a position of principle and are factual.

Sargon of Assad

it is worth remembering that, statistically, in a country of 328 million people with more than 60 million police interactions per year, the sample size is incredibly large. And with such a vast sample size, extremely unlikely events are more likely to occur, even if it is only 0.00002 percent of the time. The notion that young black men are being systematically hunted is simply untrue. And it's incredibly damaging for black youth to grow up believing that it is.

Scott Newman

Michael Brown is a means to power. You needed him to be a victim - a hapless innocent victim of virulent, unrelenting racism.

Shelby Steele

No one wants the truth, especially if the truth is less tragic. The power is in the lie

Shelby Steele

Every new media opens up a wild west, a carnival of nonsense. This happened with the printing press, The mass production of newspaper, and pamphlet, and radio. In the 19th century, newspapers reported sea monsters, and miracles, and other nonsense. People got fed up. It took a while for fact checking mechanisms and norms to be implemented.

Steven Pinker

Intellectuals have no interest in what creates wealth and what inhibits the creation of wealth. They are very concerned with the distribution of it, but they act as if wealth just exists somehow.

Thomas Sowell

The scam of our century is how corporate elites in America pretend that they care about something other than profit and power precisely to gain more of each. This represents an existential threat to our democracy because it means that a small number of investors and CEOs are determining what's most important to us on questions from racial justice to environmental change rather than the democracy at large.

Vivek Ramaswamy

But here's the dirty little secret about the climate religion - it has nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with making the west, and the United States, in particular, apologize for it, success, which it views as a sin.

Vivek Ramaswany

"the aggressive deletion of whole pages of their own history, reverse discrimination against the majority in the interests of minorities ... constitute movement toward public renewal." "It's their right, but we are asking them to steer clear of our home. We have a different viewpoint,"

VlaPu

"Well, if someone likes this, let them do it. I have already mentioned that, in shaping our approaches, we will be guided by a healthy conservatism. That was a few years ago, when passions on the international arena were not yet running as high as they are now, although, of course, we can say that clouds were gathering even then. Now, when the world is going through a structural disruption, the importance of reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed - precisely because of the multiplying risks and dangers, and the fragility of the reality around us."

Vladimir Putin

"Where are the humanitarian fundamentals of Western political thought? ... What are the general ethical limits in the world where the potential of science and machines are becoming almost boundless? ... Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, 'reverse discrimination' against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal. "Listen, I would like to point out once again that they have a right to do this, we are keeping out of this. But we would like to ask them to keep out of our business as well. We have a different viewpoint, at least the overwhelming majority of Russian society - it would be more correct to put it this way - has a different opinion on this matter. We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition, and the culture of our multiethnic nation.

Vladimir Putin

"Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risks being ostracized. 'Parent number one' and 'parent number two,' 'birthing parent' instead of 'mother,' and 'human milk' replacing 'breastmilk' because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times. "Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists - is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.

Vladimir Putin

Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new 'cancel culture' has turned it into 'reverse discrimination' - that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color. I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: 'I have 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 their character.' This is the true value. However, things are turning out differently there. By the way, the absolute majority of Russian people do not think that the color of a person's skin or their gender is an important matter. Each of us is a human being. This is what matters. "In a number of Western countries, the debate over men's and women's rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go - not only communalizing chickens, but also communalizing women. One more step and you will be there."

Vladimir Putin

Germany today is, next to Russia, the greatest exemplar of Marxian Socialism in the world

W.E.B. Dubois, 1937

The latest fabricated controversy over "white supremacist symbols" on Jeopardy! has shown two things. The first is that you don't have to be smart to be a Jeopardy! contestant. The second is that there is a far greater cultural demand for white supremacists to fight against than there are white supremacists.

Washington Examiner

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories. The group's bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.

Washington Post

The Indian massacre of 1622, popularly known as the Jamestown massacre, took place in the English Colony of Virginia, in what is now the United States, on 22 March 1622. John Smith, though he had not been in Virginia since 1609 and was not an eyewitness, related in his History of Virginia that warriors of the Powhatan "came unarmed into our houses with deer, turkeys, fish, fruits, and other provisions to sell us".[1] The Powhatan then grabbed any tools or weapons available and killed all the English settlers they found, including men, women, and children of all ages. Chief Opechancanough led the Powhatan Confederacy in a coordinated series of surprise attacks; they killed a total of 347 people, a quarter of the population of the Virginia colony.

Wikipedia

According to Bruce Bagemihl, same-sex behavior (comprising courtship, sexual, pair-bonding, and parental activities) has been documented in over 450 species of animals worldwide.[4] Although same-sex interactions involving genital contact have been reported in hundreds of animal species, they are routinely manifested in only a few, including humans.[5] Simon LeVay stated that "[a]lthough homosexual behavior is very common in the animal world, it seems to be very uncommon that individual animals have a long-lasting predisposition to engage in such behavior to the exclusion of heterosexual activities. Thus, a homosexual orientation, if one can speak of such thing in animals, seems to be a rarity.

Wikipedia - Homosexual behavior in animals

Further, of the violent inter-racial crime that does occur, more than 80 percent of reported incidents involved a black perpetrator and a white victim. The data tables in the 2018 Bureau of Justice Statistics Report include more than 500,000 black-on-white violent incidents, but well under 100,000 violent crimes that were white-on-black.

Wilfred Reilly, The Broken Mirror

In the post-1954 era, we've become the most successful multi-racial democracy in the history of the world

Wilfred Riley

It's fine to read the 1619 Project, but if you're going to read it, you need to understand that it's one perspective and you need to read the critiques to get the richer picture.

Zaid Jilani

The Taliban mean business. They are really cruel people. They are bad people. With a terrible ideology. And we're not prepared for it because our navies been told to read Ibram X Kendi's how to be an anti-racist.

Aayan Hirsi Ali

Equality is a social condition. Equity is social engineering. Equality is a defense against government, a mandate that everyone enjoy equal opportunity, free of discriminatory restrictions. Equity is government oppression, unleashing bureaucrats to impose equal results, which is conceivable only if opportunity is subject to discrimination based on race or other government-favored status. You can have the constitution to quality, or you can have Biden's equity. You can't have both.

Andrew McCarthy

We say we want representation, but what we get instead are avatars and caricatures. We behave as though all people from a particular identity group share a single experience, and that no one else can have or even understand that experience. As we try to increase diversity and representation in media, we end up flattening a wide range of humanity into a single narrative, trap ourselves in it, echo it in real life, and rage against attempts by others to complicate or deconstruct it. This is one of the reasons why the character of Will Smith on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is considered to be "authentically black," while Carlton Banks is seen as his shameful opposite. We hang onto this falsehood so tightly that we invent terms like "multiracial whiteness" and apply what I call the one-thought rule to anyone who doesn't fit our preconceived notions of what members of a group should think, say, feel, or be. Rather than having art and media expand our horizons, we use it to gatekeep, essentialize, and pressure others into conformity.

Angel Eduardo

- Every day, we recommit to healing ourselves and each other, and to co-creating alongside comrades, allies, and family a culture where each person feels seen, heard, and supported. - We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead. - We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence. - We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts. - We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and "villages" that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

BLM site as of 7/3/20

BLM's website lists many far-left ideals in its list of core beliefs, including: - We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence. - We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered. - We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts. - We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work "double shifts" so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work. - We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and "villages" that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable. - We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

BLM website

Too many black fathers, he said, are missing from too many lives and too many homes. "They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison," Obama said. "They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it."

Barack Obama

Having an ideology rise to such prominence like what has taken place on the left is evidence of our incredible success in the West. It's a luxury belief, to believe that America is a great evil. To believe that the west is not exceptional in its values, even with all of our flaws, it's a luxury belief

Bari Weiss

Who you are, your immutable characteristics, and determine how much truth claim you have in the world, how much your voice matters, which is illiberal and frankly veering towards totalitarian

Bari Weiss

The Biden administration has repeatedly suggested that equity is to guide all of its decisions. When they say equity, they do not mean equality. What they mean is that any program that does not achieve equal outcome on the basis of group is considered racist. And to become "anti-racist" doesn't mean to become not racist. It means I have become a person who wants to tear down all existing structures of power, castigating them as systemically discriminatory.

Ben Shapiro

Critical theory, as it has been applied in the Academy, seeks to stifle all criticism and recast it as harassment.

Benjamin Boyce

When people say "lived experience", they may say well you can have all of the data in the world on what it's like to be black in America, but there's nothing you can do that substitutes for my lived experience. And there's one way where this is undeniable. And there's another way in which we don't even know what lived experience means, because we don't know what kind of biases went into formulating it. We don't know how representative it is. We don't know anything that you'd want to know - it's not data.

Bret Weinstein

The one thing that you never hear critics of this country cite is some country which measures up to their standards

Brit Hume

Right now you have a bunch of criminals that love Black Lives Matter as an organization. They love when a black person dies. And we don't know what the reasons are. We don't know what happened. But it signals to them that they are now allowed to run into the streets and grab whatever they want.

Candace Owens

I've developed a simple test for academics and journalists covering my work: do they grapple with the substance of my reporting or do they retreat into defending critical race theory as abstraction? So far, it's been the latter, but the momentum is on my side.

Christopher Rufo

Should it be that my blackness is the place where I locate my pride? Because the truth is a hell of a lot of black people locate their pride in their blackness. I don't know white people who do this, other than actual racists, But I know Jews and Italians who locate their pride in their Jewish heritage and their Italian heritage.

Coleman Hughes

Why can't we bring a dose of the fluidity that we're discovering about gender identity to race?

Coleman Hughes

The problem is, I can't run your experiment with available data and get the same result, much less come to the same conclusion.

DB

What systemic racism is embedded in our culture that is not obvious to black and brown immigrants across the globe for whom America is the number one destination?

DB

Do millennials today has less opportunity than their parents? I don't know if that is clear to me. It kind of depends on the major you chose. Did our parents strive to live in cool downtown areas? I don't think they did necessarily. There's other questions that I always have and trying to ascertain the extent of the problem. One thing the left likes to do is to highly exaggerate the problem in order to justify their very radical solutions.

Dan Crenshaw

The complaints of the modern world pale in comparison to even 50 or 100 years ago.

Dan Crenshaw

Don't make the mistake of judging Socialism has a textbook theory, but judging capitalism by its necessarily imperfect outcomes. Judge like with like. In the real world, you find me a functioning socialist country that has delivered more than a free market alternative.

Daniel Hannan

We've got too many people being quiet so that other people can be comfortable

Dr Phil

Lawyers at the Justice Department are having a really hard time explaining in court what exactly happened at the Capitol building on Jan. 6, but the media, of course, are dead sure that it was white supremacy. Why not? Everything is white supremacy, according to liberals in the media. Gravity, math, and even attacks by black assailants on Asians are all evidence of white supremacy. Even when a white person isn't in sight for miles, there is still, as the NPR hilariously puts it, "multiracial whiteness" afoot. What is not on tape is even a single instance of anyone talking about Obama or expressing thoughts about race in America. We actually know why that mob of angry Trump supporters descended on the Capitol that day. They believed that the election wasn't fair. They believed that they had then-President Trump's support in righting that wrong. And that's all bad enough.

Eddie Scarry

The kind of action that is hardest for politicians to take: actions where the difficulties lie in the present, but where the evils to be prevented or minimized lie several parliaments ahead.

Enoch Powell

Every one of these viral incidents comes to us because the structure of information dissemination in our society

Glenn Loury

I lost faith in what became the posture of the civil rights movement. It started out as we want equal membership in the polity, but it becomes a systematized cover, I'm going to argue, for deficiencies which are discernable in black American society

Glenn Loury

The Academy is a place to go to reflect. It's a place to go to be challenged by the very best that's been thought and written about the most difficult matters of human existence. A place to be questioned.

Glenn Loury

The chickens will come home to roost here. You racialize a crime discussion in America When blacks are so vastly over represented amongst the criminals? Why would you do that? You think you can only talk about white cops and not black criminals? You can't. You can on the editorial pages of the New York Times. That's true. They'll tell you looting is as American as apple pie. But in the real America people are not fools. They see what's going on. We just have to keep doing what we're doing here.

Glenn Loury

The commitment to rigorous analysis and facts over feel-good narratives is what distinguishes thinkers like Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, and Glenn Loury in the space of public intellectuals today

Glenn Loury

The idea that there is "institutional racism" rife in an institution like Princeton, or Columbia, or Brown, makes so broad the institutional racism phrase that it comes to mean that "some black people might be made to feel uncomfortable by some stuff". "Student club had a party where some statement was made." "Somebody hang a flag outside their window that offended my sensibility." "Somebody choked on the sidewalk their support for President Trump." " The administration failed to make a strenuous denunciation of America after the George Floyd incident. They only made a tepid denunciation of America."

Glenn Loury

The reason that you have a disparity in the rate of African-Americans killed by cops it's because you have a disparity in the number of encounters between African-Americans and cops, which is driven by the behavior of African-Americans

Glenn Loury

This is a fight for America. Huge geopolitical forces are at play here. That three or five gender people would drive the agenda of American politics is a horrifying prospect.

Glenn Loury

Conservatives believe behavior drives outcome, liberals think structures and systems drive outcome

Heather MacDonald

But I believe that there is a "natural right" of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate. Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy

Herbert Marcuse

But I believe that there is a "natural right" of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate. Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy... If they use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one.

Herbert Marcuse

Overuse of "white supremacy" creates societal fiction. And it also creates a racial scapegoat. It's 1933 logic. A racial scapegoat that is producing and hoarding resources is reproducing 1933 logic.

James Lindsay

It's a more nuanced conversation than the media or the current environment allows the space for.

Jamil Jivani

The data shows that most people who are obese have obese parents, and they come from obese family, but they're all doing the wrong thing. "It's not there's not like a person in that family that's eating grass-fed steak and running marathons and lifting weights and getting up at six in the morning and getting a cold plunge, doing all these different things, but it's still fat

Joe Rogan

But now we are to see the book as some kind of controversial contraband, and why? Specifically, on one page a man of no delineated race (and thus we would declare him "white," I assume) is riding a kind of camel and has a mustache. A building in the background seems like, if anything (which it isn't) some kind of pagoda. The man has the billowy pantaloons we would associate with an "Arab." I understand, formally, the idea that this picture signals that this is a Middle Easterner. However, I cannot be honest with myself and view it as a "stereotype." In no way does this picture ridicule the man (or the animal), and in fact, the camel is a special kind (called a Spazzim) with elaborate horns that carry assorted objects which if anything make this man a mid-twentieth century homeowner. This is "Orientalism"? I understood the outcry when the original cut of Disney's Aladdin movie included a tossed off joke about dismembering people for crimes. Here, however, I suspect I speak for a great many perfectly enlightened reasonable people in seeing this man on his Spazzim as just a goofy picture. After all, some people in some parts of the world do ride camels. Why is it an insult to draw that? As to the possible interpretation that this person in the Middle East is the only Middle Easterner depicted and that it leaves an implication that all Middle Easterners ride camels happily, 1) this man is drawn as white (leaving aside just which race we consider Middle Easterners to belong to) and 2) how is it an insult to show someone riding a camel? And then, upon what empirical basis are we assuming that even if a child places this picture as depicting someone in the Middle East, it will lead them to think "All Middle Eastern people ride camels"? And again, even if my some chance they fell under this misimpression for a spell, is this really the equivalent of their learning that all black people are weirdly-clad servants? Then another page has a man whose hat and shoes could also be interpreted as Middle Eastern. But he also could be read as Balkan, or just, well, Seussian - and the weird object this time is a bagpipish instrument with the Celtic name of the "O'Grunth." This is Orientalism? The cancel culture mood neglects degree, in favor of oversimplification, absolutism, and ultimately fear. The Seuss people apparently quake in their boots at the possibility that a certain kind of person or organization will accuse them of the cardinal sin of racism, especially given that almost inevitably, as a cartoonist raised in the early twentieth century Seuss, even as a man of the left, penned some images that qualify as unquestionably racist today. So, not only do "natives" have to go, but even Spazzims and O'Grunths. On Beyond Zebra teaches kids to think out of the box. The idea that a labored interpretation of a single page in the book renders it suspicious contraband is a kind of thought trapped very much within a box, a modern proposal that we show that we are good people via performative paranoia. Yes, I know opinions will differ, that I'm free to do with my kids what I want to but many will prefer to toss out their On Beyond Zebra or will proudly make sure not to get around to showing it to their kids. However, I will continue to read it to mine, I dismiss any claim that to question its discontinuation is to be a white supremacist, and I hope that other people will avoid a sense that to not see logic incarnate in decisions like this one about On Beyond Zebra makes you a bad person in some way. Morality requires engaging degree, not dismissing it.

John McWhorter

Murray's work is too carefully reasoned and too deeply founded on scholarly sources to be dismissed as "racist," except by people whose definition of "racist" is "That which people of the black American race don't like for any reason.

John McWhorter

My point that Electism has become a religion stands. My point is that religion typically includes a wing of belief that must stand apart from empiricism, that at a certain point one must just "believe." Rather, it would seem to me that religious belief requires a person to sequester a part of their cognition for a kind of belief that is not based on logic.

John McWhorter

Of course History needs to be taught. No one is arguing otherwise. But, the question is, after the history is taught, and a white person thinks "God, that is awful", and they may even think "Hmm, my grandmother participated in that", are they then supposed to walk around feeling guilty?

John McWhorter

The American intelligencia here is complicit in encouraging the black segment of that intelligencia to have a noble victim complex - the idea that being a victim is the bedrock of your identity, it's what makes you interesting, it's what makes you special.

John McWhorter

Try again, Elects. "Well, you understand that black people have a special sensitivity to a case like Ferguson because of the long history of cops' mistreatment of black people in this country." I do get that, but I question whether we are to give black people a pass on sheer logic because of even that history.

John McWhorter

But the thrust of this pamphlet is that: 1. a focus on getting the "right" answer is "perfectionism" or "either/or thinking;" 2. the idea that teachers are teachers and students are learners is wrong; 3. to think of it as a problem that the expectations you have of students are not met is racist; 4. to teach math in a linear fashion with skills taught in sequence is racist; 5. to value "procedural fluency" - i.e. knowing how to do the fractions, long division ... -- over "conceptual knowledge" is racist. That is, black kids are brilliant to know what math is trying to do, to know "what it's all about," rather than to actually do the math, just as many of us read about what physics or astrophysics accomplishes without ever intending to master the math that led to the conclusions; 6. to require students to "show their work" is racist; 7. requiring students to raise their hand before speaking "can reinforce paternalism and powerhoarding, in addition to breaking the process of thinking, learning, and communicating." This, folks, is the "Critical Race Theory" that so many of us are resisting, not a simple program for "social justice." To distrust this document is not to be against social justice, but against racism. I am not cherry-picking especially ripe-seeming quotes from an otherwise perfectly normal document. I am referring to its principal tenets, often restated several times within it.

John McWhorter on Dismantling Racism Mathematics Instruction

The rise of concern for the African-American community is a good thing provided that we do not take the understandably volatile emotions of the moment and use it as an opportunity to exercise a sort of social vengeance that allows these certain groups of us to achieve short term political and social gains at the expense of the broader health of our democracy while also failing to advance the material progress necessary to impact the broader and deeper problems of the black community and America in general.

John Wood Jr.

At Emory University, in 2016, someone wrote Trump 2016 more than 20 places on campus overnight. What do you think happened? Do you think those tough Emory students got out there sponges and paper towels and went to work erasing it? Hell. No. They were scared. They were panicked. They said they were fearing for their lives. And they went, en masse, to the president of the university, demanding that he take action. Can you imagine somebody writing that in an election year? This is moral dependency.

Jon Haidt

Disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment. False accusations are bad things. And in our society false accusations of racism and sexism are virtue signaling. People do it all the time, because it's a good thing to accuse people of racism and sexism

Jon Haidt

Each side can really point to so much that the other side is doing wrong or manipulatively. There's a broad community that's center or nonaligned that you can call liberal. The two extremes are illiberal in different ways, using different tactics. The "exhausted majority" are part of the liberal tradition - they want to be able to talk about ideas, they want to be able to search collectively for truth - but there are intimidation tactics being deployed on both sides.

Jonathan Haidt

When you take young human beings whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking. And you feel those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side of the binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling, it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose. The radical social justice-oriented philosophy of critical theory, which includes the stated goals of replacing the liberal traditions in K-12 schools with an illiberal activist agenda to remake society is in opposition to the common humanity goals of education.

Jonathan Haidt

I would argue this: given the way we live now, where the basic unit of politics is the individual, there would be no good reason, and it would be unethical, to deny women equal access and equal participation. But for thousands of years, people didn't live that way; the family was the basic unit, there was a division of labor; the man was the political actor; the woman handled more of the domestic sphere and gathering while the man did hunting. So if you accept that that's the way hunter/gatherers lived, now, can you say that it is a FACT that women SHOULD have had equal political say; they were just WRONG that they were denied. I think that women's political equality is an emergent fact about the way we live now. It is not a fact like chemistry or the superconductuity of copper.

Jonathan Haidt on Making Sense

On the left, the call is not to return to the way things were, but to bring about equality, through violent means if necessary. Jacobin moments aren't about pulling up the bottom, they're about pulling down the top. You literally kill the people on top. The cultural revolution was started by college students. They humiliate their professors, anyone who is capitalist, who is bourgeoisie. Unfortunately, the revolutionary power on the left is not a call to return to what is time tested. It's a call to tear down the top. Tear down everything. Build a new utopia. And that, I think, has a track record of absolute zero success.

Jonathan Haidt on The Glenn Show

I don't have a problem with critical race theory as a set of ideas if they're propounded in an environment where people feel completely free to challenge and criticize them in a structured, organized way. I do have a problem with any idea, whether it's radical, conservative, or just boring, if it's enforced by using information warfare tactics like intimidation, consensus falsification, and so on.

Jonathan Rauch

A lot of the things that the radical left are pointing out are in some sense universal human failings. And so they have that truth about them. We could ask ourselves, given the implicit tendencies for human beings to have a pronounced in-group preference, and the potential we have for violence against out-group members, How do we all address our proclivity to "dam* the foreigner". Now, knowing that we all have these proclivities, how are they exacerbated by power and privilege? Right? Those are good questions! But as soon as we make it instantly racist, well we can't even ask the dam* questions properly anymore!

Jordan Peterson

Dismantling Racism Workbook 2001 Characteristics of white supremacy culture: Perfectionism - which is in element of conscientiousness, a fundamental trait; a sense of urgency; defensiveness; quantity over quality; worship of the written word; paternalism; either/or thinking; power hoarding; fear, hope, and conflict; individualism; progress is bigger and more; objectivity; right to comfort. Yeah, uh, it's quite the grab bag of conceptually unrelated items. It's incoherent at every possible level of analysis

Jordan Peterson

Don't casually criticize social institutions or creative achievement. We need social institutions; but they become corrupt. And so we need creative revolution; but it can get out of hand. So there's this constant war between the strictures of tradition and the transfer of creativity, and you can't say who's right, you can just talk it out.

Jordan Peterson

I've been stunned to see CEOs of these major corporations to just roll over in front of these DEI activists. And I think what the hell is wrong with you people? Why would you produce a fifth column within your organization that is completely antithetical To the entire manner in which you do business and the capitalist enterprise as such.

Jordan Peterson

If the current state of justice in our society isn't just as compared to the utopia in your imagination, you should bloody well be careful about that utopia in your imagination, because that justifies any means to achieving your end, Because you can do anything you want to bring it about and it's justifiable

Jordan Peterson

If you were just setting yourself forward as an avatar of an ideology, then there's nothing to you except, I look at it as the chattering of various forms of demons

Jordan Peterson

It's very very hard to find someone who isn't privileged in some manner. Like, the only person who isn't privileged is the person in the world who's suffering more than anyone else. There's only one of him or her. Everyone else is privileged.

Jordan Peterson

Justice is blind, and therefore impartial. But that isn't the kind of justice the left is pursuing. You're pursuing social justice, which is exactly what it says, which is something like equity., which essentially is equality of outcome, with the presumption that if there are differences between groups In terms of any given hypothetically desirable outcome, and that's an indication that the system is unjust

Jordan Peterson

Marxist ideology's were historically the owners of the means of production versus the working class. And French intellectuals played a slight of hand on that in the 1960s, and transformed it into something like oppressed versus oppressor an economic grounds. So it's the same bloody thing, just in new guise.

Jordan Peterson

People who are high and openness are more likely to be both liberal and entrepreneurial. But openness doesn't predict managerial or administrative competence - that would be conscientiousness. So you can make a very strong case that open types innovate and conservative types implement.

Jordan Peterson

So let's do a little bit of arithmetic here. A Disney exec said on a video meeting, "We'll, I have two kids - 5 and 7 - and one's trans and the other's pansexual." And I just thought right away, the yeah the chance of being a transsexual is one in 3000. That's not a very high probability. For simplicity's sake, let's say the odds of being a pansexual - which is rarer than trans - is the same. The joint probability that you have a transsexual and a pansexual kid is one in 9 million. The odds that you're a pathological narcissist sacrificing your own children to the glorification of your compassion is 8,999,999 to 1. So do you have a trans and pansexual kid, or are you a devouring mother. You can look at the odds and decide for your self.

Jordan Peterson

The people who think diversity, equity, and inclusion just means oh, we are no longer racist have no idea about the system of ideas that is driving this enterprise

Jordan Peterson

The reason I am an advocate for free speech above all else, is that it's because of the conversation between the right and the left that allows things to be kept in balance. There's no permanent solution.

Jordan Peterson

These "angry young white men" that I am hypothetically appealing to. Well, why did they need someone to appeal to them? Because the claim that our culture is an arbitrary expression of power, specifically white supremacist power, is a direct attack on their ambition. Let's say you're a young man who wants to make his mark in the world, well you're just a tyrant in training! Well, Christ, that's a terrible thing to tell young people! You couldn't tell them anything worse than that. You tell them they are noble, they are striving for something good if they could see it, that they are to be trusted Even though they are prone to error and sin. Not that you were a tyrant and training, and that you should check your privilege, and that you should shut the hell up, and that you should be embarrassed about who you are and who you could be

Jordan Peterson

What Haidt pointed out was that all of the safe space and trigger warning doctrines, and the speech codes that are increasingly forbidding, even sarcasm, are exactly opposite of the approach that you would take if you were a trained psychologist trying to produce people who are more resilient. You actually make them weaker, more anxiety prone, more depressed, and more hopeless.

Jordan Peterson

When I look at what happened in the United States, I'm not really thinking about it in terms of Trump. I'm thinking about it in terms of positive feedback loops that has developed between the radical left and the radical right. You can put it at Trump's feet, but it's not helpful. I mean, obviously he was the immediate catalyst for the horrible events, the inexcusable events that enveloped Washington. There's a feud going on. The left will do something and the right will react. And then the right will do something and the left will react. And they both claim each other and that's a feud. And they're both right. They can both point to incalculably stupid things that their opposites across the political spectrum have engaged in.

Jordan Peterson

Where does politically correct ideology come from? We haven't done an empirical analysis, but if you're reasonably familiar with the history of ideas, you can see two streams one of which is a postmodern stream, which basically emerged out of literary criticism, and is predicated on what I think is actually a fundamental and a valid critique—which is that It's very very difficult to lay out a description of the world without that description being informed by some value structure. That's at the core of what's useful about the postmodernist critique. I don't think you can look at the world except through a structure of value. Well then the question is, what is the structure of value? And I think that's where postmodernism went wrong, because the radical left types turned to Marxism to answer that question And said, well we organize our perceptions as a consequence of the will to power. And that's an appalling doctrine. It's an unstable means of social organization.

Jordan Peterson

You're in order when what you want to happen happens when you act. And that's reassuring because not only do you get what you want, but the fact that you get what you want indicates that your theory about how to get what you want is true. And every time you fail, you don't get what you want, but you also undermine the validity of the theory that you're using to organize your perceptions and actions.

Jordan Peterson

JP: You have an array of talents and abilities with which you pursue your outcomes. If everyone was equal, no one could trade, because you wouldn't have anything to offer me; you have to offer me something I don't have. All you have to bring to the world is what is unequal about you; and you'd think that the people that are on the diversity end of things would push that above all else. By forcing equality, you actually destroy what everyone has to bring to the table to trade, and punish them then for the best thing they have. Secondly, you deprive everyone else of the opportunity to benefit from what is unique about those that they would bring to the table. So there's a terrible contradiction between diversity as a value and equality of outcome as a desire. BW: In effect, our collective well-being is a matter of the creation of wealth through exchange, and the exchange inherently requires an inequality. JP: And you work for the inequality. Because let's say that you're only as good as everybody else, well then you're going to go out there and work like mad to develop a unique skill that most others don't have.

Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein

"When you say that men can become women, by saying they're women, you're making a statement about language, not a statement about reality"

Jordan Peterson, Helen Joyce

China has been rising much faster than anyone anticipated. This is due to the advent of technology mixed with them being hardhanded, authoritative nation, authoritative nation that doesn't deal with one of the downfalls of democracy, which is the inefficiency of needing to gain consensus and going through some red tape in order to make decisions.

Kim Iversen

CRT's roots, she writes, are a mix of "neo-Marxism, postmodernism, liberal integrationism, radical feminism, leftist Black nationalism and the like.

Kimberlé Crenshaw saying the quiet part out loud

The Republican Party wants to give the urban parent a voucher so that that parent can take their kid to any school that they can get in. If you're mandated to send your parent to an inferior, underperform, government school, it seems that's systemic racism. If you are incentivizing woman to marry the government and allowing men to abandon their financial responsibility as a parent causing the proliferation of black children being born outside of wedlock with all the intended social ills, that is systemic racism. If you are doing nothing about policing the borders of America so that more and more illegal immigrants come into the country and take jobs that would otherwise be held by unskilled black and brown workers and put pressure on their wages, that is systemic racism.

Larry Elder

For corporate America the calculation is simple. What's easier, giving up business models based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima?

Matt Taibbi on White Fragility

What are the stories? Structures dominate us and oppressed people. We shouldn't really look at what people do, lest we "blame the victim". Structures are bad people are good. Individuals should be held blameless, therefore efforts to assist them are pointless, unless we change "structures". If we say people have agency, they are to blame for their condition, therefore we must blame structures. Likewise, we can't have culture as a causative factor. This has resulted in "overstructuralizing" and "guilt politics "

Michael Jindra, Heterodox Academy

Greta Thunberg - you've got some random high school dropout who refuses to go back until everyone changes the weather for her.

Michael Malice

One of the questions that we often have in the west is how did Nazism happen? Were the Germans uniquely evil? Was everyone thinking, "well I've just got to get along or else I'm the next target?" What we saw was that once the decision makers create enough of an out class or an enemy, very quickly everyone is champing at the bit to join in on them. All of these people on social media love to think that they would be the one siding Anne Frank in their attic, but what we see is not only would they be the ones turning her in, but they would go on social media boasting that they turned in someone who's the enemy, that they're doing the right thing, and expecting to receive accolades for it.

Michael Malice

Where equality means that citizen A and citizen B are treated equally, equity means "adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal.

New Discourses

Wokeness is a paint by numbers path to righteousness and a sense that you're a good person

Paul Rossi

A lot of people have a mindset that the natural state of affairs is affluence, and equality, and understanding, and peace, and that if our world falls short of that that something has gone terribly wrong and things must be spiraling out of control. Whereas a better way of thinking about it is that the natural state of life is that we are ignorant, we are prone to competition, including violent competition - natural selection tilts us in that direction, We are vulnerable to disease, the natural state of affairs is poverty, not wealth - wealth has to be created. When you understand the human condition as beginning with a baseline of depredation, of competition, of ignorance, then you realize that our current shortcomings aren't a scandal or crisis compared to what's natural, and reminds us that human ingenuity and human sympathy, although quirky, can be enhanced.

Pinker on Conversations with Coleman

"White" traits include: self-reliance, the nuclear family, rational thinking, hard work, respecting authority, delayed gratification, time as a commodity, and being polite. The argument goes something like this: the system has been set up in such a way that those who manifest these "white" character traits will thrive and those who don't will fail. Apparently, we are to assume that things like hard work, delayed gratification, and being polite are not authentic characteristics of people of color. One wonders how the activists think a culture or society devoid of these characteristics could thrive. Do they imagine a happy society, free of white people and their "white" values, in which everyone relaxes all day, satisfies their every desire instantly, and engages in impolite exchanges? I remember when we used to call this sort of thinking "racism."

Quay Hanna

The study found positive levels of representation, with Black girls and women — 6.5% of the U.S. population — representing 6.1% of all characters and 5.7% of leading characters in 2019 family films. They were also more likely than white women to be portrayed as leaders or as working in a science, technology, engineering or math profession. And they were more likely to be depicted as "smart" than white female characters or other female characters of color. But the report found some short-comings, noting that nearly 80% of Black female characters have light or medium skin tones, suggesting that "colorism is persistent." The report also found that more than half of Black leading ladies in popular films from the past decade have hairstyles consistent with "European standards of beauty as opposed to natural Black hairstyles."

REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACK WOMEN IN HOLLYWOOD study

Writing this essay, I also have the immense privilege of being a person of color. I receive plentiful backlash for defending the positions I hold, but had I been a white person, I would have easily been demonized as "alt-right" or even a "white supremacist," despite having average libertarian or classical liberal views on politics. Fundamentally, privileges of all kinds exist: able-bodiedness, wealth, education, moral values, facial symmetry, tallness (or in other contexts, shortness), health, stamina, safety, economic mobility, and importantly, living in a free, diverse society. Rather than "whiteness," an exponentially more predictive privilege in life is growing up with two parents. This is why 41 percent of children born to single mothers grow up in poverty whereas only 8 percent of children living in married-couple families are impoverished. In a racial context, the poverty rate among two-parent black families is only 7.5 percent, compared to 11 percent among whites as a whole and 22 percent among whites in single-parent homes. In fact, since 1994 the poverty rate among married black Americans has been consistently lower than the white poverty rate. Furthermore, an illustrative study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that when controlling for family structure, the black-white poverty gap is reduced by over 70 percent.

Rav Arora

The frequency of documents containing highly politicized terms has been increasing consistently over the last three decades," the report says. "As of 2020, 30.4% of all grants had one of the following politicized terms:'equity,' 'diversity,' 'inclusion,' 'gender,' 'marginalize,' 'underrepresented,' or 'disparity.' This is up from 2.9% in 1990. Education and human resources jumped from a minuscule 4.3% in 1990 to a staggering 53.8% in 2020, while math and physical science increased from 0.9% to 22.6%. The report also details that in the last 30 years, grant abstracts have become increasingly similar, regardless of the academic discipline they are funding. "This arguably shows that there is less diversity in the kinds of ideas that are getting funded," the report says. "This effect is particularly strong in the last few years, but the trend is clear over the last three decades when a technique based on word similarity, rather than the matching of exact terms, is used." Taken together," the report continues, "the results imply that there has been a politicization of scientific funding in the US in recent years and a decrease in the diversity of ideas supported, indicating a possible decline in the quality of research and the potential for decreased trust towards scientific institutions among the general public."

Report by Leif Rasmussen

On the weekend thousands of local Chileans marched with anti-immigration slogans and set fire to belongings of Venezuelan migrants, tossing clothes and mattresses in bonfires in the street, after a camp was cleared by police on Friday. "They yell at us, 'Go back to your country. What are you doing here?' They yell at us a lot of ugly things," said Jaqueline Rojas, a Venezuelan in the city.

Reuters: 'They yell ugly things': Migrants in Chile's north fearful after fiery protests

You should never be intellectually safe on a college campus. Period. The brain is a muscle. And oughta hurt. It oughta burn. I want to stretch it. I want to push you beyond what is comfortable. Trigger? I am meant to trigger you. That's the goal. I'm pushing you passed your comfort zone.

Roslyn Artis

Thomas Jefferson was complicit in the pervasive sin of slavery. Did he write himself off as an evil, irredeemable hypocrite? Or did he believe that he could—even if he couldn't quite save himself—chart a better path for the future that might one day help his new nation escape the stain of chattel slavery? The story we tell ourselves is important. It can change the world. The same goes for you. Are you a person who fails at everything they do? Or someone who has failed toward success? Are you a flawed sinner without value? Or a good person trying to rise above their urges and circumstances? Do you believe that your country's history is one evil deed after another? Or has it been a valiant effort to march with progress and grow from the mistakes of the past?

Ryan Holiday

We have to leave the monkey behind. We have to get rid of tribal violence. We have to get rid of our disgust circuitry in all sorts of ways that lead us to condemn people for things that shouldn't be considered moral infractions. We have an understandable set-point emotionally and physiologically on various topics based on evolution, but we are in the process of rejecting many of those.

Sam Harris

What do you think it's not what's important here. It's always how you think. It's how you reason. It's the fact that your available to good chains of evidence and argument. And if you're not available to those things, you are simply not in touch with reality in an ongoing way. And you're an unreliable witness to every subsequent event. All you have is dogmatism if your views are not on the table to be modified by new evidence and new arguments. If a reliable chain of reasoning and evidence begins to push up against the boundary of some leftist shibboleth, you just reap a storm personal attacks, and lies, and there are no rules.

Sam Harris

I'll tell you the fear of the other that does seem warranted, everywhere, right now. It's the other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It's the other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can't join a conversation that converges on the truth, because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren't something to be corrected for, because they're the very foundations of his epistemology. We should fear the other who can't distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science. Or worse, can make these distinctions, but refuses to. And we're all capable of becoming this person. If only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature. We have to continually correct for it.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

If we're going to let the health of race relations in this country, or the relationship between the community and the police, depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again, the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed. About a week into these protests I heard Van Jones on CNN say, "If we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge." He said this, not as indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police. With 10 million arrests a year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

If you step back, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air. And it's destroying institutions. It's destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information—universities, the press. The New York Times in recent days, seems to be preparing for a self-immolation in recent days. No one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable—certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It's just become too dangerous. There are people being fired for tweeting "All Lives Matter." #AllLivesMatter, in the current environment, is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. That is how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the LA Galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Think about the politics of this - endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses, that were struggling to survive during the pandemic, and seeing the owners of these businesses being beaten by mobs cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Burning businesses and assaulting their owners isn't social justice. It isn't even social protest. It's crime. And having endless imagery of these crimes, highlighting black involvement, circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media, cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Your capacity to be offended isn't something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn't something that YOU should respect. In fact it's something that you should be on your guard for, perhaps more than any other property of your mind.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Even more widespread is the effectiveness of the branding of Black Lives Matter. It has this exact same pretense of being morally unassailable. And everyone seems to be taken in by it. To say any word of criticism about Black Lives Matter as an organization, or as a movement, with respect to its tactics, or extreme positions held by some of its loosely affiliated members; to utter anything other than mere assent to the branding is to be on the back foot trying to argue that you're not racist. And it's very clever and really insidious.

Sam Harris, Waking Up #217

The biggest mistake we made is to buy into the idea that our victimization is our source of power rather than ourselves - our skills, our talents, our development. The civil rights movement was much needed, but it seduced us into adopting the framework of social justice as our way ahead, as our way out. The tragedy of black America is that we gave up responsibility for our fate in the name of justice.

Shelby Steele

The vision of the left, which I think a lot of people underestimate, is really a more attractive vision In and of itself. And the only reason for not believing in it is it doesn't work, but you don't see that at the outset. If the world were the way the left conceives it to be, it would be a better world then the one the right conceives to be, it just happens that the world is not that way.

Thomas Sowell

Democratic immigration policies have their roots in political calculations. It has nothing to do with human rights, racial diversity, or ending sexism. That's all a diversion. This is about changing the political balance of the country.

Tucker Carlson

Such are the wages of the shift in "social justice" circles from equality of opportunity among the races (a rule of non-discrimination) to "equity." This recent shift is more accurately described as a call for discrimination. It insists that those selecting others for things such as employment, college admission, contracts, and public and private benefits must choose by race so that members of different groups are "represented" in acceptable proportions. In this view, there is no need to identify some particular discriminatory act or policy that has resulted in a particular discriminatory episode: It's racism all the way down. If all disparities are the result of racism, whether current or ancient, Kendi reasons, "the only remedy to resist racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination." Kendi writes that "the remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination" and "the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." Thus, "equity" calls for discrimination across the board. The ideas, long present on the academic left, that "color-blindness" is a myth and "race-neutrality" perpetuates injustice have obtained increased purchase.

"Why 'Equity' Is a Bad Fit for Our Legal System"

Baizuo

(White Left) is a Chinese neologism and political epithet used to refer to Western leftist ideologies primarily espoused by white leftists. The term baizuo is related to the term shèngmǔ (literally "Blessed Mother") or shèngmǔbiǎo (literally "Blessed Mother of Bitch"), a sarcastic reference to those whose political opinions are perceived as being guided by emotions or a hypocritical show of selflessness and empathy. The term evolved to criticize some people among the left who seemingly advocate for positive slogans like peace and equality to boast their sense of moral superiority, but are ignorant of real-world consequences, and utilize destructive behavior like political sacrifice and identity politics.

Standpoint epistemology is when you use the stories to counter or oppose the data. If you're just using the stories as a basis to form the hypothesis, perfectly fine. But it can't be used as evidence to confirm the hypothesis - you need independent data for that. So my criticism of CRT it's not that storytelling itself is bad. It when you use the stories to contradict the data, or use it as a confirmation of a hypothesis without data.

Actual Justice Warrior

The Arab slave trade, across the Sahara desert and across the Indian Ocean, began after Muslim Arab and Swahili traders won control of the Swahili Coast and sea routes during the 9th century (see Sultanate of Zanzibar). These traders captured Bantu peoples (Zanj) from the interior in present-day Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania and brought them to the coast.[3][8] There, the slaves gradually assimilated in the rural areas, particularly on the Unguja and Pemba islands.[9] Author N'Diaye estimates that as many as 17 million people were sold into slavery on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa, and approximately 5 million African slaves were transported by Muslim slave traders via Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert to other parts of the world between 1500 and 1900.[10] Historian Lodhi challenged N'Diaye's figure saying "17 million? How is that possible if the total population of Africa at that time might not even have been 40 million? These statistics did not exist back then."[11] However, French historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau also quotes the figure of 17 million as the total number of people transported from the 7th century until 1920, mentioning it amounts to an average of 6,000 people per year.

Arab Slave Trade

I think we need to start drawing a connection between ideologies both on the right and on the left. On the far right - that some people are more American than others. On the far left - some people are collectively guilty or innocent by way of their birth.

Bari Weiss

"I think therefore I am", has been replaced with "I am of this identity group therefore I am right" or "therefore I have a greater claim to truth or morality"

Bari Weiss (on Ben Shapiro)

The Left says "what's the way we get our base out?" And the way we get our base out as we have the next civil rights movement. We had black Americans - an excellent civil rights movement. Then we had gay Americans - the next round of the civil rights movement. And then it turned into men who believe they are women... and people started to go "woah, hold up. Wait a sec here. Now you're running up against a hard reality. " And when you start saying that, it's not just that we want gay lesbian Americans to be able to live in a free society the way they wish to live, we want to mandate that your children learn about that value system from a public school teacher. When that happened, the right was now left with this huge swath of land that they could now claim

Ben Shapiro

If you go to the much-vaunted Nordic countries, where they have all sorts of great social welfare benefits, The gap in earnings between men and women is larger than what you would see in developing countries. And the reason is when women work in countries where income is highly prized and you don't have a big social safety net, they choose the high-income jobs. And when they are in a social-safety-net-country, they get to choose what they actually want to do, which is not engineering, generally speaking. They pick the stuff that they like to do, which is more human-oriented jobs. Men like machines, women like people. Not true for every woman. True on average.

Ben Shapiro (Joe Rogan, #1732)

Of course the premise of intersectionality is true - if you fit into more than one box, maybe you're discriminated against in a variety of ways. The idea was then expanded out to suggest that there was essentially a hierarchy of victimization in the United States and that depending where you are on the hierarchy of victimization, you are no longer capable of causing offense and also if somebody is less victimized than you, you are free to do or say to them pretty much whatever you want

Ben Shapiro (w Bari Weiss)

What happens is that individuals who happen to be under privileged or oppressed at a statistical level are given the ability to implicitly or explicitly oppress or disregard the essential humanity of the people who are at the top.

Benjamin Boyce

For eons both sexes have made jokes about how the other is crazy, and no one but the perpetually offended thinks it means anything more than that the sexes get frustrated over how differently we each see the world. And yes, we relieve some of that frustration with humor... and scene...

Bill Maher

The mainstream press has proved compliant to a phony narrative about the US being a white supremacist place in which blacks are fighting for their lives in the streets every day. It's a narrative that's provably false. It may be a stand in for a narrative that's true, but much harder to describe. The mainstream press is looking for examples that point in the direction of "Trump is the problem", "It's the Republicans", "the solution is blue", "Biden is the answer". The Antifa left is utilizing this. They've been effectively trying to create incidents that the press can then edit down and say "A-ha! The federal fascists came to Portland and this ragtag band of resistors fought them off."

Bret Weinstein

The idea that intent doesn't matter has been used to advance the cause of critical race theory and very illiberal practices in so-called diversity and inclusion trainings where all it takes is for me to take offense to demonstrate that you were intending to give offense. It empowers anyone who wants to, including bad actors who wish to abuse this power to convict anyone they want by simply accusing them.

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Now, there is this bizarre thing which is really a recent issue in the United States, which is confusingly called critical theory, or critical race theory. I'm basically passing over that in silence, well, because there's nothing critical about it. It shares the word critical but nothing else. It seems to be anti-critical in the sense that it's a bunch of dogmas purporting to be absolute truths, intended for use as indoctrination in schools, which, of course, rather much of schooling turns out to be, but this critical race theory stuff is a return to Victorian-era religious instruction, perhaps something more like what occurs in socialist and communist regimes. It's not critical in the broader since of the word, and really has nothing to do with critical thinking.

Brett Hall

Incrementalism - the idea that in any domain we want to make incremental progress; as fast as possible, but always incrementally. If you incrementally change in some way, you can determine if the change has been made for the better or not. In policy making and government, you want to make incremental change such that you can check to see the effects and, if it works, continue in that direction, otherwise go backwards. This is opposed to the idea of revolution. Completely upending everything, you hope that what will come out the other end of that is something better. You've got no reason to believe that in upending everything you're going to result in something better. What you could expect is that by upending everything, you take yourself back to the Stone Age.

Brett Hall (8/27/21)

After the insurrection, the point was repeatedly made that "We all know what would have happened had this been black people." My immediate thought was in 2021 I actually have no idea how it would compare. I have seen so many instances where are the fact that black lives matter is being used as a banner provides an amazing level of protection from any police enforcement of the most obvious and important laws.

Brett Weinstein

From each according to his ability. To each according to his need. It's kind of a beautiful idea. The problem with that statement Is that if you set up that system, than anybody who creates need and fails to produce, wins at the expense of those who produce and limit their needs. So, the part of us that is built by evolution, which is to say our central driver, is built to detect opportunities to profit, that's what we do. So, people discover that they can profit in such a system by freeloading. The system then reacts by restructuring their incentives Essentially bye threatening them, and reducing their freedom, in order that they have no choice but to produce at the maximum level and consume at the minimum level, so automatically it descends into an authoritarian nightmare if it doesn't evolve into something that fits the label of communism.

Brett Weinstein

In order for all of the jobs to get done that make us collectively robust and well-off people have to arbitrage things that are undervalued. In other words, if there were a dearth of computer programmers, then it would be your desire to get ahead so that you could go into computer programming, which is the force that ensures that there are enough computer programmers in the next round of the game. And if you don't have that motivation, because everybody has been slated for an equal outcome, then there's no telling what you'll have too many of and too few of in the next round because there's no reward for figuring out which skills are too sparse.

Brett Weinstein

The irony is that conservatives are now defending the gains of liberals, and that's how it should be. We should be encouraging a system that produces better outcomes, and once we have those outcomes, we should be very skeptical of attempts to change them. The situation we have now, which is as we do achieve some kind of inequality for some previously unequally treated group, there is an urge to reinvigorate The complaint of oppression, and to be on the search forever smaller instances of it.

Brett Weinstein

What we are seeing is a portrayal of events that takes one bit of license and buys everything with it. And that one piece of license is that cause and effect have been inverted. The portrayal you'll see is that the federal government has attacked peaceful protests and that has resulted in riots. When in fact, what we have is a city refusing to enforce its own laws and the nightly attacks on the buildings necessitate some response.

Brett Weinstein

Why an apology works: It suggests an awareness of a debt. If somebody harms me and they don't acknowledge it, I simply have the cost. If they've acknowledged that they harmed me, and they've explained to me what they did wrong in their own words so that I know that they understand it, then not only is there the implication that they owe me for the harm that they have done, but there's also The ability to say "you knew that this was wrong." So it's a very potent force, and because it's a potent force, it's easy to co-opt it. And it's co-opted in the context where our natural impulse to treat it seriously As a thing of value causes us to turn against ourselves. If you are told that you have deep racism and have caused people to feel unsafe, your initial impulse is to think, "Wow? Did I do that?" End it may be in comment on you to figure out, and correct for, how you hurt people that you had no intent of hurting. So those natural impulses to self reflection and to treat other people well can be turned into a weapon very easily if someone is attempting to gain power by convincing you to hobble yourself.

Brett Weinstein

● You are not a person. You are only your ​race,​ and ​by your race alone you will be judged​.1​ ● Justice is about equal ​rights​, but ​Social​ Justice, or ​equity,​ is about equal ​outcomes​. Only Social​ Justice matters; Justice does not. To achieve equal outcomes, ​forget equal rights​. ● All unequal outcomes by race -- ​inequity​ for short -- are the result of racial ​oppression​. ● All Blacks are oppressed and all Whites are oppressors. This is ​systemic​:​ n​ ever ask ​whether oppression occurred, only ​how i​ t occurred. Everyone and everything White is ​complicit​. ● If you are White and won't admit you are racist, you are racist by ​implicit bias​. To reduce implicit bias, you must self-criticize, confess to ​privilege​, apologize to the oppressed race.2​ ● Whiteness​ is belief in, among others: ​achievement​, ​delayed gratification​, ​progress,​ schedules​ and ​deadlines​, ​meritocracy​, ​race-blindness​, the ​written word​, ​facts​ and ​objectivity (they deny​ lived experience)​ , ​logic​ and ​reason (​ they deny​ empathy​), ​mathematics​ and science ​(until they are ​de-colonized a​ nd ​humanized​).3​ ● CRT suppresses dissent with ​cancel culture​: publications withdrawn, college admissions rescinded, online presence wiped out, business relationships ended, jobs terminated.4

CACAGNY Denounces Critical Race Theory as Hateful Fraud

An intelligent observer would be hard-pressed to identify any area in American society where BLM's activism has benefited the Black community. What BLM has done is pervert the criminal justice system by engaging in activities that have resulted in a growing trend of trials by media," Swain said. "BLM has intimidated juries and judges. Its leaders have no interest in due process or the presumption of innocence. BLM focuses on scattered cases of police abuse, but ignores the horrendous Black-on-Black crimes that take place daily in cities around the nation. BLM does not want young Black men and women to know the importance of individual choice in determining how an encounter with police will end. Instead of modeling lawful behavior, BLM and progressive politicians in Congress seem to hold the regressive belief that Black people are always right even when they are clearly wrong. Many progressives — White and Black — hold a dangerous belief that black people are justified in challenging and disobeying lawful police orders. This encourages a dangerous double standard that erodes the rule of law and contributes to more criminal behavior.

Carol Swain

Central to the American creed is that people are to be judged as individuals.You take that person in front of you for who that person is; MLK. The assault from the left repudiates the American creed. It says the state MUST treat people as belonging to groups, Because certain groups have been systematically discriminated against, systemically oppressed, while other groups have been systemically advantaged, and therefore - and it's the "therefore" that's the problem - the state must use its power to create equal outcomes to overcome systemic racism. The state must treat people as groups. And if you do that, you have a very different kind of America than what you would otherwise have if we are to focus on people as individuals.

Charles Murray

Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they're missing out on much needed feedback.

Charles Negy, University of Central Florida

Does insurance cover Lasik? That's important, because when you don't have the insurance companies lobbying for the negotiating of prices, then the price will reveal itself through market forces so that the consumer knows exactly what everything costs. If you go into a hospital no one knows what anything costs. You don't know the cost for how long you stay there. You don't know the cost of the procedure. Lasik procedures were not covered by insurance. Therefore, consumers went directly to their doctors, they knew exactly how much it costs, prices are driven down by competition, quality goes up.

Charlie Kirk

The problem with the Marxist argument is the incentive structure. In a free market system everyone has incentive to create value, get a job, or take a risk and employ people. In a Marxist/socialist system, you are incentivized to either run for political office And get as much power as you possibly can to extract wealth away from people who don't have it.

Charlie Kirk

We are born into a world that we didn't create and every founder came into being in a country (and world) where slavery was everywhere. By the time they died slavery was less prevalent than ever before.

Charlie Kirk

My perception is that CRT suffers from several weaknesses that limit it as a teaching foundation. First, it's not a theory in any scientific sense, as it offers no criteria by which it might be falsified as a scientific theory should. Indeed, CRT proponents often appear largely incurious of data that conflicts with their worldview. Second, CRT proponents often appear hostile to any critique, which can be aggressively framed as racist or as an expression of white fragility. Even criticisms from people of color are sometimes framed as outgrowths of "multiracial whiteness."

Chris Ferguson

I do think creators need to be wary of double standards when it comes to cultural material. If it's bad to cast white actors in culturally non-white roles, it should be just as taboo to cast non-whites in culturally European stories. Double standards breed resentment. Definitions of "wokeness" also often speak to motives: Did showrunners make their choices because they made artistic sense, or to scold those with more conservative worldviews and show off their own moral bona fides to progressives? A recurrent situation in media culture wars arises: established franchises seek to provide more diversity in content—a worthwhile goal—and yet, instead of producing new content, they change the dynamics of existing characters and appear surprised at the blowback, which they immediately attribute to bigotry of some kind. The Star Wars franchise seems almost perpetually at odds with its own fans. A new gay Superman (technically the son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane) has divided fans. The reboot of Sex and the City makes clumsy and cringe-worthy lurches at "wokeness." The traditionally red-headed Little Mermaid will be played by black actress named Halle Bailey. The new Lord of the Rings franchise Rings of Power has similarly evoked concerns of playing to modern identity politics. There is clear tension between media companies feeling pulled to increase diversity in casts, but often doing so with franchises that already have established fan bases with a deep fondness for existing characters. Evidence suggests that black and LGBT+ characters are now overrepresented. Second, I suspect there's a perception that these decisions are less organic creative choices than they are pandering to a vocal minority of progressive activists (themselves mostly elite and highly educated).

Christopher J. Ferguson, PHD - FAIR (9/19/22)

As I documented in a paper for Heritage Foundation, the critical race theorists show nothing but scorn and contempt for the two-parent family, entry-level work, and merit-based education, dismissing them as vestiges of patriarchy, capitalist exploitation, and white supremacy. The reality, however, is that the institutions of family, work, and education are the three undisputed pillars of upward mobility, across all racial groups. Critical race theory is big business for ethnic studies professors, diversity consultants, equity apparatchiks, and public school bureaucrats, who never have to suffer the consequences of their own ideas.

Christopher Rufo

CRT takes the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed - that's the key categorical framework - but abandoning it from a class perspective and say we're not going to use virtual and proletariat, that has a kind of 100 year history of failure. We're going to do is graft a kind of 1960s style identity politics onto that binary. And now the new oppressor and oppressed framework is black and white. And then they manage at the margins other racial groups.

Christopher Rufo

Fair-minded liberals should consider this point: if Congress introduced legislation in 1955 to ban schools from teaching that "any race is inherently superior or inferior to any other race," it would rightly be considered "progressive"; today, however, so-called "progressives" oppose this exact legislative language because it would interfere with their new racial orthodoxy. This contradiction should make the modern Left think twice—their movement has slid into racial retrogression and, unless they adjust course, will eventually devour itself.

Christopher Rufo

I'll crib from a recent interview: critical race theory is an academic discipline that holds that the United States is a nation founded on white supremacy and oppression, and that these forces are still at the root of our society. Critical race theorists believe that American institutions, such as the Constitution and legal system, preach freedom and equality, but are mere "camouflages" for naked racial domination. They believe that racism is a constant, universal condition: it simply becomes more subtle, sophisticated, and insidious over the course of history. In simple terms, critical race theory reformulates the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of White and Black. But the basic conclusions are the same: in order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic, and political revolution.

Christopher Rufo

Inherent in diversity trainings today: - race essentialism: the idea that you as an individual can be reduced to a racial essence or racial category that's then loaded with connotations. So you see in some of these documents they load negative connotations onto this central quality of whiteness. - collective guilt: holding people accountable for things people who look like them did [regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group] - state sanctioned racial segregation

Christopher Rufo

Parents are in revolt because they don't want their children to be the experimental ground for the kind of sexual engineering of children that is clearly Disney's gambit.

Christopher Rufo

The truth is simple: corporate "diversity and inclusion" is a scam. It's a reputation-laundering mechanism for corporations and divides Americans into competing racial categories. Shut it down.

Christopher Rufo

There are only a few places on earth where radicals and their children ritualistically burn the American flag and chant "Death to America": Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul, Ramallah—and Portland, Oregon.

Christopher Rufo

This is what the debate around CERT is really about to me. It's who has authority over public institutions. Is it the bureaucracy? Is it teachers unions? Is it outside diversity training firms? . . . that are able to circumvent the democratic process; that are able to circumvent the public will and implement a curriculum outside of that process. Or is it voters through their state legislators, and also voters and the public through their school boards?

Christopher Rufo

We must promote the true story of America. The story that's honest about injustices in our history, But places them in the context of our nation's highest ideals, and the progress we've made towards realizing them.

Christopher Rufo

Whiteness is a pejorative label. It's a stand-in for all sorts of negative terminology

Christopher Rufo

Rufo: Yes, with some exceptions, school principals and corporate HR directors do not want to usher in the end of capitalism. But the key intellectual architects of critical theory and its derivative, critical race theory, absolutely want to destroy capitalism and usher in a collectivist society. This isn't a secret. Read Herbert Marcuse, read Paolo Freire, read Angela Davis. They originated all of the buzzwords that you find in today's schools and corporations: institutional racism, systemic inequality, prison abolition, pedagogy of the oppressed, antiracism. It's all there by the late 1960s. And when you read the work of today's critical race theorists and their allies in American institutions, it's the same ideas, but passed through a language-softening machine: they drop the revolutionary edge and rebrand them as "diversity and inclusion," "racial equity," and "culturally responsive teaching." But the core of the theory is still intact. Ibram Kendi, for example, is a totalitarian; he wrote a piece in Politico that advocated for a near-omnipotent "antiracist" bureaucracy that has the power to abolish any law and silence speech that is not deemed "antiracist" by his panel of experts. He says explicitly that in order to abolish racism, you must abolish capitalism. This isn't "racial sensitivity training." If you understand this historical and theoretical context, you understand that the school principals and the corporate HR directors are functioning as "useful idiots." They are softening the ground for more aggressive political action in the future. This is by design.

Christopher Rufo New Yorker interview

Change the calculation; raise the cost for doing these programs. Right now the risk management protocol for corporations is, "Well, we really don't lose anything by doing this, but we insulate ourselves from the attack of not taking a stance for social justice." Change that formula. Conduct a campaign of legal warfare against these programs.

Christopher Rufo on DIE programs

Such people have such a warped sense of reality that they will readily demonize anyone of European heritage who was connected to colonialism or imperialism yet always ignore the hundreds, if not thousands, of years of identical acts committed by people of African, Middle Eastern, Native American, and Asian heritage in building empires, oppressing other races, and colonizing faraway places. Their flimsy worldview depends on the idea that history began in 1492 and that the first group of people ever to come along and develop a conscience about such activities — namely, Europeans — are the only ones who should ever be held accountable for it.

Christopher Tremoglie, Washington Examiner

A lot of people think we're living in the world, or want to pretend that we're living in a world, where there is no trade-off between police presence and crime. It just seems so naïve to me to feel that there's no relationship between those two things; that the police can just back off, and nothing would change for the negative. And the truth is, I think the media pay attention more to the police abuses than to The aftermath of these scenarios when we have seen that crime increases; the rioters and the cameramen have left, and it's just the residents that have to deal with the long-term consequences of these scenarios

Coleman Hughes

All you have to teach is balanced world history and a rational person will come to the conclusion that there's something special about America. America is not your average country. There is a reason why it is the number one destination for black and brown migrants - migrants in general, but black and brown migrants in particular across the globe.

Coleman Hughes

An embarrassment to the theory that standardized testing is tilted in a wAy to advantage white people . . . The claim that standardized tests were created by Europeans for Europeans . . . And Asians are doing better than all!

Coleman Hughes

Blaming slavery and Jim Crow for the entirety of racial disparity - obviously, it's clearly a factor - but blaming it for the entirety of the problems that we see facing black people is actually a way of not taking responsibility for policy decisions that were made just in the last 50 years. Our prisons did not balloon until the 1980's. Unemployment for black and white youth was virtually identical until the late 1950s. So in blaming slavery and Jim Crow for everything, we fail to take responsibility for policy decisions that were made on both sides of the aisle in very recent history.

Coleman Hughes

Even in high crime communities, the vast majority of people are not criminals, so they are going to be unfairly picked on. And they are going to feel a grievance. And when you have to justify a higher police presence in that community, you inevitably have to talk about the differential rates of crime.

Coleman Hughes

From the perspective of a 22-year-old black man which, we'll say for the sake of argument, is not involved in organized crime, but grew up in that kind of environment where you have to have that masculine macho sensibility, and who understands that every time the cops pulled him over, they are more suspicious of him than they otherwise would be. He feels it, and he's not wrong, and he's not wrong to be angry that he is liable to more suspicion. At the same time, if I look at it from the cops point of view, it is objectively true, that people like him, that people who look like him, are massively over represented in violent crime. If you were a cop, and trying to do your job most intelligently and efficiently with the resources at hand, you would be a fool to focus just as much on the average white guy as you would be to focus on the average black guy, because at 14% of the population, black people are committing and suffering 52% of the homicides, and that's a massive disparity.

Coleman Hughes

I was chatting with some Nigerians, some West Africans, and asked them when you learned about this in school that perhaps your own ancestors captured fellow Africans and sold them into slavery, how did you feel about this? Did you feel guilt? Did you feel shame? Were you tought that this was a stain on the legacy if your family that you should feel a certain way about. The answer: No, we just learned it as a neutral fact.

Coleman Hughes

If you're a white guy living in Queens; if you're living in New York where a crazy percentage of violent crime is perpetrated by black offenders, you can't simply dismiss a psychological bias as a different reaction when you see a black guy versus a white guy as mere racism. That's dishonest.

Coleman Hughes

In practice, social movements have nuggets of history that are useful to them in the present, and nuggets of history that aren't useful to them in the present. And invariably they promote the history that's useful to them and don't promote the history that's not. So, slavery, for example - the enslavement of black Africans by white Europeans is an extremely useful historical fact for some thing like the Black Lives Matter movement. What's not useful is the enslavement of black Africans by other Africans, the enslavement of Europeans by other Europeans, the enslavement of Europeans by Arabs. All of these things are just as interesting historically. Some of them as consequential, some of them as large in terms of how many people were affected - but they're not useful.

Coleman Hughes

It's a little bit strange to me that we're having this national conversation without so much as hearing a cop's perspective. I haven't heard a single cop on Twitter or the news educate non-cops on what it's like to be a cop. Imagine if we were talking about dismantling the medical system and nobody heard from a single doctor or nurse. Because the truth is there are some things you can know only by talking with someone with the experience of having actually been through the job. You may not agree with everything the cop has to say - they may have a bias towards defending their own profession - but we have to understand it. If we're talking about it like we know about it, we have to understand it. What is it like to be a beat cop working in a neighborhood where someone is getting murdered every day, or where a certain amount of suspects DO have a gun in the glove compartment and they're waiting to pull it out.

Coleman Hughes

Nielsen Poll: Have you bought jewelry in the last year? Have you bought jewelry more than $500 in the past year? On all of these questions you find black Americans more likely, often significantly likely, to say they've purchased jewelry in the past year; they've purchased expensive jewelry in the past year; more likely than white Americans- and that's not holding income constant. So you're comparing a poorer population to a wealthier population, not holding anything constant, and finding the poorer population much more likely to purchase luxury items. This is a feature of that culture, and it may not be shared by all members of that culture, it may not even be shared by most, but it's shared to a degree that it's recognizable if you're a person that pays attention. The same point made in a comedy show goes over very differently compared to an essay or a Podcast. When Dave Chapelle or Chris Rock makes a joke about black men loving expensive rims on their cars, a black audience laughs in recognition. Or Dave Chappelle's old reparations skit, where everyone gets a reparations check one day and spends it on a gold chain the next day, the audience is laughing at this. They are laughing at it because they're understanding that the comedian is not coming from a place of hatred, and it's very fun to poke fun at one's own community over recognizable cultural elements. But then if you take that point seriously, if we are going to endlessly point to the 10 to 1 racial wealth gap between whites and blacks, are we actually serious about that, or are we trying to tug at the strings of white guilt? Because if it's the first one, how could we not be interested in the fact that black people, as the poor population, are spending more on luxury goods.

Coleman Hughes

The 1619 Project characterizes American slavery in a unique way that puts it apart from slavery that's been practiced all over the world for 10,000 years or more

Coleman Hughes

The average black person in our country is 10 years younger than the average white person (one of potentially many factors which plays into the wealth gap)

Coleman Hughes

The data on how many hours per day kids study are exactly what the stereotypes would tell you it is, which is to say black kids study much less than white kids who study much less than Asian kids. People on the left seem to think that the various gaps we notice can be closed (public policy interventions) without the underlying cultural behavior patterns changing.

Coleman Hughes

The first job is to educate yourself and to no be misled. We want to act, and that's understandable, but it's important to understand whether what you're acting about is real, and you have to understand that you are very easy to fool. Seek out the sources that you are tempted to disagree with and attempt to engage with them as charitably as you can possibly do. Stop thinking about this as a spiritual pursuit that can't be pierced by contrary evidence.

Coleman Hughes

There is no one that is going to put together a montage of videos showing people getting mugged, and all of the machinery of the situation and empathy that is due to those victims. The empathy is selectively used and all of it is put behind 1/2 of the conversation

Coleman Hughes

What institutional racism means for the people that use it today it's basically any departure of perfectly equal outcomes. If Black people are 14% of the population but 1/3 of prison inmates are black, to many people that's sufficient proof that we live in a systemically racist society. That's just an extremely superficial analysis of the problem - you haven't looked at disparate crime rates, you're operating under the assumption that everything should be equal, when that hasn't happened anywhere on earth for any group of people. Making life better for people on the bottom, regardless of race, should be the focus in my opinion.

Coleman Hughes

What they've done, which is what all successful propagandists do, is they have an indisputable facial argument, by which I mean who wouldn't agree that black lives matter. If you disagree with that, taken literally, you're a monster. On the one hand, they can say "All we're saying is that black lives matter", and you say, "But wait a minute. What about that abolishing the nuclear family thing." They can always say that we're about black lives matter and you're either with that or you're not, all the while hiding much more radical, controversial ideology in the movement.

Coleman Hughes

Why is it that people view this is something that only happens to Black people? And the answer lies in the massive coverage bias in the national media. Dozens, sometimes several dozen unarmed white people get killed by the cops every year. Those stories just die in the black hole of local news. They never escape and make it to national news. So people who are just following the news casually, understandably get the impression that this kind of thing only or overwhelmingly happens to Black people. And in many ways it's not their fault, because they are just following what the national media has fed them.

Coleman Hughes

As any intro stats student will tell you, you've got to control for the confounding variables. Men make up more than 90% of victims in all these cases - whether you're talking about police brutality, in prison, shot by the cops, or otherwise - men are of course only 50% of the population. Just viewing that fact doesn't tell you anything about anti-male bias per say. It's impossible not to talk about the impacts of racially disparate crime - 13% of the population commits, and suffers, 52% of the murders. That's probably the largest disparity, but if you're talking about all of the disparities - robbery, aggravated assault- virtually all the disparities except drunk driving and a few others, shows blacks, young black men in particular, showing up in heavily disproportionate rates, and that's a first order problem. Police are coming into contact with young black men as a result.

Coleman Hughes on Triggernometry

If I were a cop in New York where roughly 97% of the shootings every year - 97 %! - are committed and suffered by black and Hispanics - that means you can forget the white part of that and not even make a dent in the total number of shootings - is it possible that I would develop a kernel of racial bias, which is to say, that if I see a black or Hispanic person, I would suspect him more than I would a white person. I would love to say that I'm such an amazing human being that I wouldn't develop that, but I'm also not naive and I don't want to be such a self-flattering backseat driver to the cops, whose job it is to keep everyone safe, including black and Hispanic people, the vast majority of whom do not commit crime.

Coleman Hughes on Triggernometry

There is a subversive group in this country that wants to topple the current structure of the United States so that they can gain power because they think they can rule better. And a lot of those people, generally speaking, are Marxist. BLM the sentiment, I can get behind. BLM the organization, I cannot. They are not for the same thing. The organizers have admitted that they were trained Marxists.

Colin Noir

We've got to stop becoming emotionally charged about issues we haven't adequately researched because it's tearing this country apart. Merely reading a title is not research. Merely reading a single article is not research. Getting information from only one side is not research. Talk to your friends who disagree without getting emotional and go into those convos open to the idea that you might be wrong. But having an opinion and voicing it without any or adequate unbiased research is intellectually dishonest as hell. Don't just feel your opinion, research your way to your opinion.

Colion Noir

"Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law."

Critical Race Theory: An Introduction - Delgado and Stefancic

I have an issue with people kneeling for the flag. Some will say, well it's a different sign of respect. And I just don't buy that based on the rhetoric that's being used. But, my question is always, "At what point will you stand for it? What needs to change? What can we fight together for? What is the systemic issue that we can fight together so that we can solve it? And if you can't identify that for me, I feel lost here.

Dan Crenshaw

The Left's intentions when it comes to voting it's a bit of a mystery to me. It's like why is this the only thing that you don't want regulated? Everything else you want ultra regulated. It seems strange to me, and it makes me feel like you want to cheat.

Dan Crenshaw

The left says, "these people aren't winning the race, so we need to change the rules. "The right says, "are the rules just? And if they are, outcomes be what they will. "

Dan Crenshaw

We're not making any progress with critical race theory - looking at everything through the lens of race and gender - it's regressive

Dan Crenshaw

When every single policy that you partake in result in more illegal immigration, then using deduction, it serves to reason that maybe you want more illegal immigration

Dan Crenshaw

DC - The reason it's so hard to defend against Post modern ideas that you never see them coming, so it takes some time to develop the arguments arguments and effective messaging. JP - You're also called upon to defend things that you have no idea how to articulate. Now, if you believe that a family should have a mother and a father, that can be seen as prejudiced. So now you have to come up with an articulated defense of a dual sex family. It's like, I don't know how to do that. Everyone agreed that that was the ideal, and even the norm. So if everyone agrees that that is the ideal in the norm, you don't need to articulate a defense.

Dan Crenshaw and Jordan Peterson

She's a skilled rhetorician. She's good at this kind of juvenile argumentation; but it is juvenile. It is always below the belt. It's never honest. It's always a misconstruing of words. She misconstrues what people say deliberately to make her seem like a victim. That's the underlying ideology of the left - a sort of hierarchy of victims. Once you understand their social justice way of framing every argument, their arguments become pretty predictable. She's just better at it, and more aggressive and most other members of the left. And I think that's why she's popular. But it really is about elevating that victimhood as a virtue.

Dan Crenshaw on AOC

Critical race theory flows from the more general philosophy of education called "critical pedagogy," which, in brief, seeks to leverage every math class, English lesson, history unit, elective, and scientific concept as a means to inculcate a political goal: the overthrow of Enlightenment-based, classically liberal principles—including the scientific method, objective reasoning, evidence-based argument, and so on. "Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order," writes Richard Delgado, an early scholar of CRT, "including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law." Though its proponents defend CRT as merely teaching "accurate" racial history, the discipline's aim is to use race and history as a lens through which to judge—to condemn—Western values. Each branch of critical pedagogy proceeds accordingly, using gender, say, in the same way. An experience common to many early-career teachers is the realization that they never actually learned how to do their job in teacher prep. Time spent learning critical pedagogy instead of the nuts and bolts of running a classroom represents a giant opportunity cost. Having gone through these programs ourselves, we can attest to the lack of training in areas like writing instruction, the science of reading, basic grammar, rhetoric, and argument—subjects once at the heart of teacher training.

Daniel Buck, James Furey - Units of Study

"The amount of violations of human rights in a country," argued Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country." In other words: the better things get, the worse they seem.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"This entire incident has exploded over an employee that did not want to follow the rules. Plain and simple. We did not fire her, we did not force her out, she made her own decision to quit because she did not want to follow the rules," the restaurant posted on its Facebook page on Wednesday. However, the restaurant had a seeming change of heart after Stout's video went viral, prompting a backlash in the form of negative reviews on Yelp, (which were paused due to a Yelp policy that prohibits reviews that are not based on actual experience at a business) and, as Toulze told the San Francisco Chronicle, death threats, threats to burn the building down and a planned BLM protest on Sunday. The restaurant shut down temporarily and issued a new statement on Thursday, also via Facebook. "The girl & the fig prides itself in creating an inclusive, diverse and welcoming environment for our staff and our guests since we began 23 years ago," the company wrote. "We thought we understood the Black Lives Matter movement and were being appropriately supportive. The events of this past week have demonstrated that we have more learning and listening to do to deepen awareness of the right ways to be the best advocate we can be for the Black community."

Demoralized as a result of pressure from the mob

I do see white supremacy, and I see it in extraordinarily obscure corners of the culture. In British culture there are some white supremacists. They are as far away from the political center as is possible to be. They have never achieved any political power in the UK. And they don't have any influence in their attempts to influence media or public discourse.

Douglas Murray

If you didn't know America very well, and you read that this white cop was allowed to kill a black man on camera for 8 minutes, and that that was ok, and that this happens a lot . . . you would join Black Lives Matter. Absolutely. You would want to join something that says that's not right.

Douglas Murray

If you weren't for gay marriage before almost anyone else was, you are now a homophobe. In 2007, Barack Obama didn't support gay marriage. But people are going back into the past and saying "you didn't hold views that people hold now." There's this terrible moment, and I'd say this is in every rights claim where equal doesn't seem to do it for some people. They say "No, now we've got the upper hand. We're going to behave to you in a way we would have hated when you did it to us."

Douglas Murray

It is not fair to characterize America as an unbelievably racist society. Where and who are you comparing us to? What's your measure here in the US for that and what's your measure internationally for that? The Chinese Communist Party interned in concentration camps 1MM uyghurs in recent years. Is that racism? Is it systemic racism? If so, how does it compare to the alleged racism in Great Britain or America? How are you measuring it?

Douglas Murray

On why identity politics has picked up the last few years: I don't have all the answers but I have some thoughts. In the 20th century we saw examples of what can happen with excessive pride in one's nation. So if nationalism is not a unifying force than what is? People have found community based on identity - be it sexual orientation or race as long as we're not talking about white race.

Douglas Murray

So called anti-fascists, who have more in common with the second bit of their name than the first, just go out on the street and want to create chaos. They want to harm people. They want to hurt people. They want to beat people up, to hospitalize them. They enjoy violence. They get off on it. They're thrilled by it. These are people who get off on the kick of violence. They've existed throughout human history. They always will exist. And the question for society is always the same: Do you decide that the people who get a kick from committing violence, and will use the cover of any name to perpetrate it, do you decide if they can do it, or not? That's an important decision to make because the call you make on which way to go on that one decides if you will have civilization and law or not.

Douglas Murray

The question that we contend with now is: is it correct to see the remaining struggles that we see now as needing to be fought over with the same vociferousness, and indeed the passion, that those earlier struggles were fought over? I would say not. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be fought over. But we shouldn't be pretending that with the enemy is now is the same as what the enemy was then.

Douglas Murray

The striking thing about the people who are pushing through the cancel culture is how strikingly dogmatic and assertive they are. The assert all sorts of things about history, but they always seem to turn out to be the least knowledgeable people in any room.

Douglas Murray

This is what cultural revolutionaries have done throughout history. From the ancient world onwards. You go into the temples of your enemies. You tear down their statues. You urinate on their alters. You go into their sanctuaries and say "Your gods are dead, we've got new ones for you."

Douglas Murray

When do you know you've won with a rights struggle? When do you know it's time to go home and get on with life? I do suggest that one of the problems with a rights crusade is that there are industries created around them. There are people whose livelihood is dependent on the revolution continuing

Douglas Murray

When you talk about such fringe issues, and go on and on about them, and police language, At the same time that you have mass homelessness in your country, mass and literacy, and mass innumeracy, children leave schools woefully unprepared for the real world. And when America's competitors, particularly China, are going in exactly the opposite direction, and preparing their children very well for the world we're going into, what will the world look like?

Douglas Murray

With the modern left, since certainly the end of the cold war, they basically had a supply and demand problem. They want racists. They want Nazis. They want Bechets. And thankfully in our society today, they are in fairly short supply. And the people they find aren't too small of a number to really give them enough of the political identity they're after. So they stretch it out and use as deliberately offensive terms that they can, all well knowing that the people they're using it against do not fit that. They've muted certain terms of any meaning: racism

Douglas Murray

You can ally with anything you need to ally today. You can say how ashamed you feel. These are all religious instincts. You can even pay your tithes. If you're a corporation, you know this mob might come for you. The cheapest way you can get out of it - a bank that has a reputation for hiring a bunch of men... why don't we just pay our tithes to Black Lives Matter and get over it.

Douglas Murray

The reason why every inch of land is fought over so hard politically, is because every inch of land does matter. America is the still point of the turning world. This is the place where if you get it wrong, the whole next century could go wrong. If you get it right, the whole next century could be better.

Douglas Murray (Rubin interview (11/3/21)

There are people who think that America isn't exceptional, but think that America is only exceptional at being exceptionally evil, well then you don't have a future if that idea catches on, and it seems to have caught on on a significant sway of the American left.

Douglas Murray on Joe Rogan

Wouldn't it be good if we realize that people in the past, even the best people, acted given the knowledge they had in the circumstances they found themselves in. They weren't sort of evolving themselves in some abstract experiment to see if they could pass muster in 2020. You would hope that you'll be somewhat forgiving of the ways people acted in the past that you don't approve of now, because you also hope that people that come after us look at us with a certain amount of forgiveness. Because there are some things that we are doing now that are insane. And people that come after us, we would hope that they would look at us and say well, maybe they did this, not because they were evil people, but because they were acting on the knowledge and certain presumptions of the time, which we now know to be incorrect

Douglas Murray on Joe Rogan

In films today almost all characters from the past think, talk and act as we do. It doesn't matter whether it is ancient Egypt, 18th-century England or the interwar period. The makers don't realise that people in the past weren't the same as us. Of course they had the same immutable human passions and flaws. But their preconceptions, preoccupations and priorities were often wholly different. Not least because they didn't know what we now know. The most obvious example is that every-one now knows which side they would have been on during the second world war. In large part because we know how history went. Yet history is less clear as you are living through it. If say, you were a Dutchman in the 1940s, you had no damn idea how long the present order was going to last or even if it would ever end.

Douglass Murray

Is the argument that transgender ideology legitimizes transracial ideology? I think there is no logical way to escape the idea that it does. If gender and race are both largely social constructs, then who's to say that one domain can be fluid while the other domain must remain static. When a transgender person identifies as an opposite gender, they are really talking about the experience living as that opposite gender. They feel as though that gender expression better fits with their identity. One could argue that it's all about being treated and viewed by society in a certain way. Applying the same logic to transracial ideology, what if a person wants to experience life as a certain race, and they feel that that race better fits with their identity. How are they some type of terrible person for identifying in accordance with their feelings. One could argue that the debate is academic. It's not illegal to be transgender or transracial. If a person wants to be either one, or both, they have the right to do that. Whether the person will be accepted, of course, is another story. Legitimizing any movement based only on the beliefs of the individual is not the domain of science. It is the domain of opinion. So society needs to define which social constructs are allowed to be fluid and which ones are fixed. One of the difficulties with trans gender and trans racial ideology: if the person is lying, nothing can be done about it. There's no way to know for certain. Only that person knows the truth

Dr. Grande, 9/17/22

Most people are afraid of social isolation. Therefore people constantly observe other people's behavior in order to find out which opinions and behaviors are met with approval or rejection in the public sphere. People exert "isolation pressure" on other people, for instance, by frowning or turning away when somebody says or does something that is rejected by public opinion. People tend to hide their opinion away when they think that they would expose themselves to "isolation pressure" with their opinion. People who feel public support, in contrast, tend to express their opinion loud and clear. Loud opinion expressions on the one side and silence on the other side sets the spiral of silence into motion. The process is typically ignited by emotionally and morally laden issues. In case of consensus on an issue in a given society, it is unlikely that a spiral of silence will be set into motion. The spiral is usually elicited by controversial issues. The actual number of partisans of an opinion is not necessarily decisive for their weight in the spiral of silence. The opinion of a minority may actually be perceived as majority in the public sphere if their partisans act assertively enough and publicly defend their opinion with emphasis

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, the Spiral of Silence

Why is Antonio Garcia Martinez less tolerable than Dr Dre? The truth is that neither threatens Apple's culture of inclusion, but Garcia Martinez is an easy target for the performative outrage that the elite left now uses to shield corporations from serious scrutiny, signal in-group status, and artificially boost their own reputations and their own power. The result is that actual corruption metastasizes in the shadow of these distractions. The same happens when the target is less politically convenient such as treatment of racist comments made by President Bidens's son against Blacks and Asians vs treatment had they been made by the son of a Republican politician

Emily Jashinsky

Douglas Murray is America's true friend. He is not the man who tells you that you look great and laughs at all your jokes, but the one who pulls the big mac out of your mouth, flushes your cigarettes down the toilet, locks your liquor cabinet and personally drives you to rehab until you straighten yourself out.

Eric Weinstein

In essence, what we have now is a limbic business model And there's nothing better to feel that you are part of an exciting team on a conquest to save the country for the good of the world. It's going to come as a huge shock that I think there are two cults called Wokistan and MAGistan - neither of these is particularly serious, and they're both capable of taking the country down.

Eric Weinstein

Not everything that Europe achieved can be attributed to plunder, slavery, and oppression after all. Much of it was simply Europeans achieving by thinking more clearly and courageously than their rivals.

Eric Weinstein

Seek the people where the description of them inside the generated institutional narrative (GIN) is maximally divergent from reality: - Ben Shapiro is a nazi - Sam Harris is an Islamophobe - Bret Weinstein is alt-right That's the place the system showed you. Let the system tell you who it fears. And seek the people in the chairs who are feared most; who are maximally mis-portrayed.

Eric Weinstein

BLM Toronto Founder: "...whiteness is subhumxn...". Totally ok. So if you're a teacher posts in their bio that they support BLM, don't question that, because to say that the white children in the class are subhuman is totally ok. Don't complain parents. Don't be bigots. BLM Toronto Founder: "and white people are a genetic defect of blacks." So far so good. I see no problem here. It's all social justice. It all makes sense to me.

Gad Saad

Two ways we can get people to change their perspectives are by power or by moral suasion. Power is whenever someone does something because other people are pressuring them to do that. Power can be fiscal power, social power, cultural power, legal power, political power. In one problem that we have is at least some diversity training is based on power - institutional power to get you to do certain things or say you believe certain things. But power brings its own problems. It doesn't create lasting change. If I'm doing something because people have power over me, then as soon as they don't have power over me, I go back to doing what I was doing. Power also contains the possibility of abuse, because if you get some thing with power, you're tempted to use power to keep getting it.

George Yancey

"What did they see? They saw a white man in a puffy jacket and huge mittens, distant not only in his social distancing, but in his demeanor and attire," Seyer-Ochi wrote, adding, "What did I see? What did I think my students should see? A wealthy, incredibly well-educated and -privileged white man, showing up for perhaps the most important ritual of the decade, in a puffy jacket and huge mittens. I mean in no way to overstate the parallels. Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel," What a stupid and appalling article: all based on how Bernie dressed. As stupid and gross as it is, it represents a large and growing sector of left-liberal thought

Glenn Greenwald responding to Ingrid Seyer-Ochi

And nowhere has anyone suggested that my views about the political issues of the day, if conservative, are unacceptable, injurious, and illegitimate for me to express. Still, I can't help but think that if I were not Black I'd have a much harder time. Let me be concrete. Let's look at the Black family as a social institution. Let's look at the out-of-wedlock births and the prevalence of single parent families. Let's look at violence in the inner cities. Sociologists may not readily admit this, but the structure of the family is actually very important for social outcomes. While this is a complex cultural phenomenon under the influence of historical forces and larger economic and social dynamics, they are nonetheless reflective of the internal constitution of the community. Part of our problem regarding the gaps of academic achievement are attributable to what is valued by the Black family.

Glenn Loury

But something is missing, which is that there was a lot of support within communities of color for punitive responses to the upsurge in crime and violence that one sees through the 1970s and the 1980s. For example, the crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparity is well documented. It was about how much weight would trigger a mandatory minimum prison sentence and it was a 100 to one ratio. You can argue that it was racially disparate punishment. But a lot of Black representatives supported it. We see that echoed in the argument about "defund the police" and so on. [Black people] live in urban communities where there are murders and carjackings and robberies and so on. The residents want more police. Of course, they want police who are not going to abuse them, because they are outraged by police violence and police brutality. But they want something to answer when they call 911. Because they're the ones who are suffering the consequences of most of the violent crime that goes on in the cities.

Glenn Loury

Calling someone a racist for making objective factual observations Is not a rebuttal to what they've said, it's a move to try and take control of the conversation by accusing someone of having bad character because they said something that made you uncomfortable, which you can't deal with so you think you can shut them up by calling them a racist. You might as well be calling them a witch, with all the lack of evidence that would come along with that.

Glenn Loury

Consider the educational test score data. The anti-racism advocates are, in effect, daring you to say that some groups send their children to the elite universities in outsized numbers compared to other groups due to the fact that their academic preparation is magnitudes higher and better and finer. Their excellence is an achievement. One is not born knowing these things. One acquires mastery over them through effort. Now, why have some youngsters acquired these skills while others have not? That is a very deep and interesting question, one which I am quite prepared to entertain. But the simple retort, "racism," is laughable—as if such disparities have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what peer groups value, with how people spend their time, with what they identify as being critical to their own self-respect. Anyone who believes such nonsense is, I maintain, a fool.

Glenn Loury

Development. The test scores. This whole edifice that we've built of diversity and inclusion - it's founded on a lie John, because the issue is performance, and the Asians have demonstrated that. It's an open society. African-American under representation is a symptom of African-American under development. Now we can go onto the historical reasons for that. If the issue is who's to blame, there will be plenty enough blame to go around. The fundamental imperative is to advance development. And that won't happen unless you acknowledge the absence of it. The test scores reflect an inadequate acquisition of functional and cognitive capacities essential to operating in the modern world. The gaps are enormous.

Glenn Loury

Empathy can also motivate intellectual bravery. In addition to the grocer, Havel writes about the samizdat-producing Czech intellectuals who came to see "living within the truth" as an imperative, an act of courage that some paid for with their lives. To be clear, I'm not saying that current mainstream anti-racism, "cancel culture," and wokeness is anything like totalitarian rule, but each of us does face today a genuine personal challenge: do I adhere to my convictions and live within the truth, or do I, by degrees, submit myself to a kind of tyrannical domination by others? To feel that you have to withdraw within yourself, that you have to be Havel's grocer and hang a sign in your window just to be passed over and left unmolested by the mob, that you can't say what you're actually thinking—this is to submit to a kind of domination. So, herein lies another value of literature: We (whether nonwhite or white) can understand through our capacity for human empathy the courage and heroism of Havel's dissidents, and then think about our own situation, and model or simulate how their courage might manifest in our own hearts today, faced with the roughly comparable situations that we face.

Glenn Loury

Equal opportunity plus disparities shifts the burden on the parties who are lagging behind. Taking equity as a normal amounts to defining an outcome as illegitimate unless it shows parity. So ipso facto the existence of a disparity is an indictment of the system for the person who talks about equity. People don't want to face the possibility that the system might be OK, and that the people lagging behind might have some issues. Not to say that they're intrinsically incapable.

Glenn Loury

Finally, I want to say that equity is not equality. I could name them but I won't: the writers in the US who are so prominent now — Ibram X. Kendi comes to mind — in promoting a certain ideology assert, "I see a disparity. I want equity." And by equity they mean an equal representation. This is not equality. If you use a different standard of assessment in order to achieve equity, you have just patronised me. You have just communicated tacitly that you don't think I'm capable of performing according to the objective criteria of assessment as well as anybody else. I am now your client. I am now a ward. I go or come by your leave. This argument that "We blacks must be made equal and you have to open up the doors and let us in! Never mind that our test scores are not as great" is pathetic. It's a surrender of dignity. You will not be equal at the end of that argument even if you get what you ask for. There's no substitute for earning the respect of your peers: if they grant it to you out of guilt or pity they have just reduced you, not elevated you.

Glenn Loury

History is not a playbook for your political program. History is nuanced and subtle and difficult to know and hard to fathom.

Glenn Loury

How are you talking thinking about race has consequences that cannot just be measured in dollars and cents, but in stagnant lives, and dead bodies

Glenn Loury

How many statues can you take down a founding fathers? How many crowing exhibitions can you have about the demographic shift making white people into a minority? How many books can you ban because they use a word outside of the current acceptable lexicon? How many baseless accusations of racism can you throw around and not engender a backlash? If a white person were to stand up and say, "hey, what about my civilization?", and call attention to the Enlightenment, and call attention to the advances of modern medicine, which rests on the foundation of science, almost all of which is a product of European intellectual development.

Glenn Loury

I can say this much about political correctness. On my account, a regime of political correctness is a moral signaling equilibrium in which people who don't want to be thought of as being on the wrong side of history will suppress an honest expression about what they believe about some controversial issue because people who are known to be on the wrong side of history are prominently saying the same things.

Glenn Loury

I think it's a world historic achievement that African-Americans are the freest, most powerful, wealthiest, most prosperous people of African descent. It's not only about denying a sense of agency, it's about being faithful to the deepest truth about the American experience, which is a affirmation of freedom - I could go into the Cold War, I could go into fighting fascism in the 20th Century. Something important has happened here in the last couple hundred years, and of course the experience of African-Americans and dealing with the fact of slavery is an important and absolutely fundamental part of it. But it's not the whole story. It's not the root of the story in my opinion or my sensibility. That's what animates my resistance to the 1619 Project.

Glenn Loury

I want to know what they are talking about when they say "structural racism." In effect, use of the term expresses a disposition. It calls me to solidarity. It asks for my fealty, for my affirmation of a system of belief.

Glenn Loury

I wonder if we're not seeing the beginnings of an interesting trend, a harbinger of where the Democratic Party might find itself in upcoming cycles - A reaction against their complicity with the access is on the left, the people who say America ain't s***, white supremacy is determining everything, racism racism racism, And who have nothing to say when black moms like they did in Chicago the other day on State Street Assault innocent white bystanders who happen to be walking by and beat them to a pulp in public, rob them, and then TWERK and dance in the streets in a sense of celebratory engagement with the assault.

Glenn Loury

I would add that there is an assumption of "black fragility," or at least of black lack of resilience lurking behind these anti-racism arguments. Blacks are being treated like infants whom one dares not to touch. One dares not say the wrong word in front of us, to ask any question that might offend us, to demand anything from us, for fear that we will be so adversely impacted by that. The presumption is that black people cannot be disagreed with, criticized, called to account, or asked for anything. No one asks black people, "What do you owe America?" How about not just what does America owe us — reparations for slavery, for example? What do we owe America? How about duty? How about honor?

Glenn Loury

I'll go one step further on this campaign of self aggrandizement. I am also capable of articulating in detail exactly what they believe, even as I reject it. And they would not be able to even begin to give a coherent and nuanced account on my behalf. Their representations of me are all stick-figured, and slogan hearing, and platitudes

Glenn Loury

If I insist on population proportionality, then I am implicitly devaluing the achievements of the groups that happen to do better for whatever the reasons are

Glenn Loury

If you are a person who is interested in the well-being of black people, do you really want to invite a close scrutiny of the race of people who hurt other people in this country? Because if you do, you'll find that whites attacks on blacks are out numbered probably by an order of magnitude by blacks attacks on whites

Glenn Loury

If you baselessly call someone a racist, you may shut someone up, but you're not gonna change their minds. And at the end of the day, they are going to go to the ballot box, they are going to pick up their store and move it to the other side of town, they're going to keep their children away from the places that they think the influences are are are harmful to their children. They may not even talk about it publicly. But you can believe that in private they're talking about it with each other

Glenn Loury

If you have high rates of offending in a racially identifiable community, it's going to be hard for law-enforcement to ignore that fact. So, even if the proportion of offenders Is a small proportion of the total population, which is certainly true—the fraction of young black men in any city who have a gun tucked into their belt, who are prepared to pull it out and use it on a police officer, has got to be a low number. Still, if it's a large percentage that are black of those that are prepared to behave this way, a police officer, pulling someone over at 2o'clock in the morning because they're driving a radically, noticing that it's a young black man in the driver's seat, It's hard to ask that officer not to be mindful of the fact that there's a risk involved in that situation, and not to have his sense of that risk heightened by observing that the person is black.

Glenn Loury

If you resist arrest, you're more likely to end up getting injured. Now that's not an endorsement of cops injuring people, it's just a statement of fact.

Glenn Loury

In The Power of the Powerless, the Czech politician and playwright Vaclav Havel invites us to empathize with those "living within the lie" during the time of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Envision the dilemma of a simple man, a grocer who every morning puts a sign in the window next to his tomatoes and his lettuce that says "Workers of the World Unite." Havel asks, why does this grocer do this when everyone knows it's a fraud? "Workers unite?" The party lies constantly. Everyone knows that the official ideology of the state is completely bankrupt, and yet this goes on for decades: people reproducing and reinforcing this idea, this lie, out of a desire merely to be left alone. So, we should ask ourselves, how many "Black Lives Matter" signs in shop windows reflect the same instinct as Havel's grocer? That's not anti-racism, genuine human empathy, or authentic concern for your fellow citizen, for your brother or sister. That's living within the lie. Just as there's a great tradition of black (and other nonwhite) literature that's sure to generate empathy in any attentive white reader, so black (and other nonwhite, not to mention white) readers may come to see the plight of not only their white fellow citizens but also themselves through the lens of Havel's Czech grocer. Empathy does and should work both ways, or better yet, every which way.

Glenn Loury

In my mind, it's not equality to have jails overflowing with black felons. Let me just say it one more time, people who have broken the law, people who have stolen, people who have hurt other people - the jails are not full of innocent, non-violent, drug offenders who have been scooped up by racist cops. The jails are full of people who are dangerous, contemptuous of social order, and a threat to their neighbors particularly their black neighbors.

Glenn Loury

Let's just look at the facts; they're pretty astonishing. There's a big difference in participation in crime across the races in American cities. That's a fact. Are police officers supposed to be oblivious to that fact? Are residents who decide where to live, where to send their kids to school, where to open up a business, where to drive not supposed to know about this? Are voters supposed to be oblivious to this? Are we in touch with reality when we discuss race, crime, and punishment largely in terms of white police officers killing black people?

Glenn Loury

Listen, I would never be a chest thumping, jingoistic, flag waving, America's-the-greatest-civilization-that-has-ever-existed blowhard. America is the Vietnam War and capitalism run amok. Certainly, there are legitimate critiques that could be made about our foreign and domestic policies. However, I wouldn't be shy about affirming the greatness of the American civilization. The ratification of the Constitution and the framing of the structures of government here are remarkable and we can observe that when people get to vote with their feet and move around, they don't mind coming here. A lot of immigrants arrive here and prosper, wave after wave after wave, which I put forth as tangible proof of the virtue and value of this civilization

Glenn Loury

Look—here we are. We're African Americans but we are Americans first. We are not African in any way that's meaningful. Yes, our ancestors may have been enslaved, but they were also emancipated. We are literally the richest and most powerful people of African descent on the entire planet. We have ten times the income on average of the typical Nigerian. There's an enormous Black middle class and Black billionaires. Woke racialism claims the American Dream doesn't apply to Blacks, which is a patronizing lie that robs us of agency and authenticity and self-determination and dignity. It doesn't acknowledge that we possess the ability to rise to meet our challenges and carry the torch of freedom.

Glenn Loury

Nine or 10,000 homicides with blacK victims a year can go completely undiscussed by some of these people while any incident involving a white police officer And a black CRIMINAL, where the criminal end up losing his life because of his behavior can become a cause celeb - "Say their name. Say their name."

Glenn Loury

On the Cold War - should we, in our enlightened position on humanism be indifferent about what the outcome of the Cold War could have been? Would we rather that the ideas and the spirit that animated the Soviet Union have had more sway and more influence around the world of peoples of color, or less. There's no free lunch. It doesn't come from nowhere. You need incentive, you need industry, you need investment, you need entrepreneurship, you need the forming of organizations, you need creativity, you need human aspirations. No more effective way of creating wealth has been identified. That experiment was run multiple times in the 20th century and the jury's in on that.

Glenn Loury

One day we're going to see white people demonstrating, we're going to see pieces published in quasi-respectable outlets that catalog the awful and unspeakable crimes of black people against white people. Because they're happening. And I dread the day and I hope it's warded off by stressing a more balanced and deracialized discussion of these issues.

Glenn Loury

One risks cancellation for saying this, but the right idea is the idea of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.: to transcend our racial particularism while stressing the universality of our humanity. That is, the right idea, if only fitfully and by degrees, is to carry on with our march toward the goal of "race blindness," to move toward a world where no person's worth is seen to be contingent upon racial inheritance. This is the only way to address a legacy of historical racism effectively without running into a reactionary chauvinism. Promoting anti-whiteness, and Black Lives Matter often seems to flirt with this, may cause one to reap what one sows in a backlash of pro-whiteness.

Glenn Loury

Part of the racial inequality in this country is not just due to redlining or slavery, or Jim Crow or whatever, but it's also due to cultural patterns that are evident and consequential and divergent across different population aggregates. I repeat this with respect to affirmative action. If you're transitioning from a culture of Black exclusion, you may want to rely upon some preferential methods as a temporary, stop-gap mechanism. However, ultimately, we cannot ignore the underlying fundamental developmental deficits that are causing these inequalities. Using preferential selection criteria is a cover-up for the consequences of the historical failure to develop African American performance fully. It's fake equality.

Glenn Loury

Slavery is not unique to the United States. Slavery is not unique to the western hemisphere. Enslavement of people. The trafficking of human chattel is something that one sees on global basis going all the way back to antiquity. So the question that we might ask is how is it that people came to turn their backs and eradicate the practice? Where did that begin?

Glenn Loury

Slavery was a commonplace of human culture. The founding fathers didn't invent slavery. The thing that distinguishes the American story is the emancipation. It's abolition. It's the liberty of African-Americans. I mean, find another wholesale serfdom of disenfranchisement which in the course of a couple centuries goes from chattel slavery to Lebron James, Barrack Obama, Oprah Winfrey. It's a remarkable story. We're 10x richer than the average Nigerian at the median. We're the most powerful people of African decent on the planet. We're free!

Glenn Loury

The Democrats complain that the Republicans are trying to make it hard to vote? They act as if every possible regulation that you could have on voting is an attack on democracy? They're just partisans. They just want the rules to be favorable to the outcome of the election that they're after.

Glenn Loury

The de policing movement does not have the endorsement of the rank and file in the black community, I can assure you that.

Glenn Loury

The founding of the country, 1776 in 1787, The creation of the United States of America was a world historic event In which the enlightenment ideals got instantiated into government institutions. And as a matter of fact, within a century slavery was gone. And you know what? The people who were African chattel became citizens. Not equal citizens. Not at first. It took another century. But they became equal citizens. America thought fascism in the Pacific and fight fascism in Europe and save the world. American democracy became a beacon to the free world. We stood down, under the threat of nuclear annihilation, the horror that was the union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We have had the greatest transformation in the social status of a serfdom people probably than you can find anywhere in world history - 40 million strong. The richest people of African decent on the planet. By far. This is a question of narrative. Are you going to see the United States through the lens of a racist, white-supremacist, genocidal, illegitimate force, or are you going to see it for what it is, which over the last 300 years is the greatest force for human history on the planet. That's worth fighting for. That these people at the New York Times lay down to a latter-day woke ideology and debase their country is despicable.

Glenn Loury

The history was bloody, brutal, racist, it involved domination, it involved genocidal dynamics in many instances. And the west came to dominate the world for a period of time. And we can sort out how we think that's good, bad, or indifferent. But the west was not just militaristic and exploitative domination. It was, and is, also a set of ideas - ideas about liberty, ideas about the individuality of the person, about representative democracy, etc. It leads to emancipation, which flourished in Britain, and also here in the United States, and ultimately extirpated slavery. It leads to the declaration of human rights. It leads to situations where we are a palled at the treatment of women in certain societies. Those ideas come substantially, not entirely, not exclusively, but substantially out of the same cultural matrix that we decry as white supremacist and genocidal. If you look around the world today, there's still slavery in many places. Not in the west. Not any place where the West has significant influence. A supple and complex moral sensibility would take these things onboard. It would not have our students in the 21st-century walking around looking at the color of their skin and deciding on the basis of that who were intrinsically victims and who were intrinsically oppressors. In fact, the very language that we have for indicting history is itself a product of the western political, economic, and social evolution that people are so quick to decry. There's something so anachronistic about this using our present day sensibilities which has come about BECAUSE of the historical processes that we are indicting, which are the foundation that we now stand as we make our moral assessments, and are projecting it backwards onto people who did not have the benefit of our hindsight and who were captives of the time in which they lived.

Glenn Loury

The invocation in political argument of "structural racism" is both a bluff and a bludgeon. It is a bluff in the sense that it offers an "explanation" that is not an explanation at all and, in effect, dares the listener to come back. So, for example, if someone says, "there are too many black Americans in prison in the United States, that's due to structural racism," what you're being dared to say is, "no: Blacks are so many among criminals, and that's why they're in prison; it's their fault, not the system's fault." And it is a bludgeon in the sense that use of the phrase is mainly a rhetorical move. Users do not even pretend to offer evidence-based arguments beyond citing the fact of the racial disparity itself. It does not go into cause and effect. Rather, it asserts shadowy causes that are never fully specified, let alone demonstrated. We are all just supposed to know that it's the fault of something called "structural racism," abetted by an environment of "white privilege," and furthered by an ideology of "white supremacy" that purportedly characterizes the society. It explains everything. Confronted with any racial disparity, the cause is asserted to be "structural racism."

Glenn Loury

The minimum wage is a very inefficient way of helping people who are poor. I think it prices out of the labor market individuals who have few skills. I worry that it encourages employers towards automation tendencies to minimize their dependence on labor that's becoming more expensive, which will have a long-term detrimental effect on the well-being of poor people. If you want them to have money, give them money, subsidize it. Don't force the employer to pay them more than the employer thinks they're due.

Glenn Loury

The problem used to be exclusion and discrimination; the problem today is freedom. We're well into the 21st century and African Americans have equal citizenship before the law in the United States, as a matter of fact. Don't bother me with anecdotes. I'm talking about the basic structure of citizenship. It's a level playing field; it's an open field. The ball is in our court. The issue is, what shall we do with our freedom?

Glenn Loury

The reflex to get rid of the instrument of assessment because it reports to us the objective fact of racial disparities in performance must be resisted.

Glenn Loury

The stark fact of differences by race in the acquisition of the functional capacity to master certain skills; that stark fact calls out for some kind of account, some kind of narrative; how can we explain it? And what better than to wrap oneself in the warm blanket of anti-racist outrage. What better than to denounce the entire corpus that your people are not mastering by saying it's somehow alien to or in fact repressive of the essence of your people. This is an avoidance of the reality of underdevelopment. It seems to betray a lack of confidence in our people to actually do what everybody else in the world, by the way, in the WORLD. Go to China, go to Pakistan, go to Sri Lanka and find out what they're teaching there. Those lids are learning mathematics! But the descendants of African slaves here in the rich and powerful country the United States of America with every opportunity are going to be presumed a priori incapable, because that's in effect what you're saying - we can't cut it. You're trying to change the name of the game, but what you're really saying is we can't cut it, and that's racist.

Glenn Loury

The student who says "n******" in reference to the actual n-word, who can't bear being exposed to a string of digits that are in reference to a concept of a word when, if you turn on the radio to a hip-hop channel, you hear the word endlessly. And I'll bet the same student has been at college parties were the word is being screamed out in unison. Spectacle of that kind of move - that's a power move, man. That's a play for control, control of the conversation, control of the institution. What is the mindset? What is the psychology? What are the students saying to each other in a private gatherings when they concoct these schemes?

Glenn Loury

The young men who are killing each other on the streets of St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago are behaving abominably. Those bearing the costs of such behavior are mainly black people. As I have said, an ideology describing that behavior to racism is a bluff. It can't be taken seriously by serious people. Nobody believes it. Not really.

Glenn Loury

There's a lot of virtue signaling and moral posturing and branding. For example, this spate of corporations coming out for BLM. You can't tell me they have a politics. They don't have a racial politics. It's just like the Super Bowl, you know, you want to have your brand advance by making a statement within a certain context.

Glenn Loury

To put it in perspective, there are about 17,000 homicides in the U.S. every year, nearly half of which involve black perpetrators. The vast majority of those have other blacks as victims. For every black killed by the police, more than 25 other black people meet their end because of homicides committed by other blacks. This is not to ignore the significance of holding police accountable for how they exercise their power vis-a-vis citizens. It is merely to notice how very easy it is to overstate the significance and the extent of this phenomenon, precisely as the Black Lives Matter activists have done.

Glenn Loury

We actually have to earn equal status. Please don't cancel me just yet because I am on the side of black people here. But I feel obliged to report that equality of dignity, equality of standing, equality of honor, equality of security in one's position in society, equality of being able to command the respect of others — this is not something that can be simply handed over. Rather, it is something that one has to wrest from a cruel and indifferent world with hard work, with our bare hands, inspired by the example of our enslaved and newly freed ancestors. We have to make ourselves equal. No one can do it for us.

Glenn Loury

We now look at the black family lamenting, perhaps, the high rate of births to mothers who are not married and so forth — but that is a modern, post-1960 phenomenon. In fact, the health of the African American social fiber coming out of slavery was remarkable. Books have been written about this. Businesses were built. People acquired land. People educated their children. People acquired skills. They constantly faced opposition at every step along the way, "no blacks need apply," "white only," this and that and the other, and nevertheless, they built a foundation from which could be launched a civil rights movement in the mid-20th century, that would change the politics of the country.

Glenn Loury

We should talk about that. I'm generally skeptical about the wisdom of such legislation of an all out banning of critical race theory. On the other hand, parents who want to swarm into a school board meeting and say, "what the hell are you teaching my children about their country, about their identity. I want to have a saying that." I think have every bit of a right as someone who is concerned about teaching creation and science or teaching sex education to six-year-olds.

Glenn Loury

Where does the US fit into world history over the arc of the 20th century - WWI, WWII, the Cold War - we're the good guys (I'm aware of Vietnam). So you get 20 years into the 21st century and the main chroniclers of American life, cannot affirm the virtue of the American experiment, then they're leaving out a big, important part of the history of this country.

Glenn Loury

With the 1619 project, there was an enormous amount of institutional support put behind a narrative that had problems. NHJ did assert that because a few members of the founding generation of Americans feared the British potentiality of interfering with slave tracking and for that reason were motivated to fight in the revolution that therefore was the driving force behind the entire revolution which was false. She also claimed that 1619 and not 1776 was a better metaphor for understanding the large scale narrative of the country and then backed away from that, saying no she didn't mean to replace 1776 with 1619, she just meant to recenter the narrative and somehow elevate the role of African-American exclusion and the aspiration for inclusion should play in the narrative.

Glenn Loury

Yes there is racism, but there are also many serious problems from within the community, And we must take responsibility for properly raising our children and for seizing the opportunities that exist, as have many millions of immigrants, many of whom come from non-European points of origin, have done for the last half-century in the United States.

Glenn Loury

Yes, it's private citizens, we are coming home from a party, after having a few drinks, at 1 o'clock in the morning, walking down a dark street, and we observe two or three people walking towards us on the other side of the street, you can't tell me that our reaction in that situation is not going to be conditioned by whether those are old ladies are young men, whether they're black or they're white, Whether they're in business attire carrying an attaché case, or whether they are wearing hoodies with their hands in their pockets.

Glenn Loury

You can't fetishize group disparity without implicitly indicting groups that were successful. If you insist on viewing social outcomes in terms of essentialist groups, in terms of racial differences in success, then you've got some losers, some "victims" of the system, who are on the bottom, and you've also got some winners, who are on the top. But what about, say, the Jews? How can you avoid antisemitism, given this way of construing group differences? If you think that blacks and Latinos are underrepresented, how do you avoid the conclusion that Jews are overrepresented? Similarly, how do you address black and Latino underrepresentation in STEM disciplines without seeking to reduce the number of qualified Asians in STEM? Those fractions have to add up to one. You can't have an under-representation without having an over-representation. Are the people who come out on top guilty of "privilege"? Did they "steal" their success? Do they owe their success to the denial of opportunity to someone else? Even if so here or there, is it universally true in every case? Is that a dictum that we have to adhere to? I would submit that this is the wrong way to think about social outcomes.

Glenn Loury

The woke movement is susceptible to collapse. People to a certain extent are bluffing. To think that mass incarceration is a conspiracy to confine black people in the face of stupefying rates of homicide and crime that's going on in the black communities is wearing a little bit thin. Ibram X. Kendi's argument that any disparity is the result of discrimination is a house of cards and it's falling apart.

Glenn Loury (11/13/21)

Freedom is going into life without the backstory, or cover story, of "my ancestors were victimized". Is accepting the responsibility for, if it's a high rate of criminal offending, out of wedlock births, intellectual development deficits reflected in instruments of social measurement. As long as you have the security blanket, you're living in his (the white man's) head.

Glenn Loury (11/5/21)

Let me tell you when it's not. It's not poverty. Because there are poor communities where you don't see this behavior. It's not racism in any direct sense, because we're talking about the actions of individuals who have to be assumed to have the exercise of free will over their actions. To say that a 3-year-old was shot on their mother's lap sitting on the porch because somebody carelessly fired a gun out the car window and it's due to racism - well, that requires a PHD in sociology. It's hard not to use the word culture here

Glenn Loury (11/5/21)

The lowering of the standards is an anathema. It's the exact opposite of what you want to do. You may need to lower the standards to get people into the environment, but you need to understand that there's a first order trade off That's been created when you do that. And the attempt to bluff it, to say no no no there's not any difference after the fact when you lower the standards, it either degrades the integrity of the institution or you force this kind of phony bluff where are you have these people kind of bluffing saying, oh they don't have anybody that's black in the physics department. When what you need is to be able to do physics to be a black person in the physics department.

Glenn Loury (11/5/21)

The vicious black murderers who are taking lives in the thousands on the streets of American cities ARE DESPICABLE. Their behavior is absolutely contemptible. It should be possible to run a political campaign against them. The fact that they are vastly disproportionately black prevents the willingness of responsible black leaders to condemn this pathology within our own community

Glenn Loury (11/5/21)

We shouldn't racialize the police discussion, because the two points - 1) police need to be regulated because sometimes they act in anti-black ways, and 2) there's a real crime problem - could be related to each other. Because the crime problem has a racial component; sorry to report. If you're a police officer in one of these cities, you have to consider the possibility that you're gonna get killed. Maybe you're exaggerating the likelihood, but certainly you're not imagining that there are gang bangers out there killing people, car jacking, mugging. There are! Now we can say in the comfort of our Ivy League offices that they shouldn't see race, they should not notice, they should have no prejudice or implicit bias, they should be perfect, they should be colorblind. But that's unrealistic. It is unrealistic to think that they're not afraid of that young black kid when they smell reefer coming out of the front of the car, and they don't know whether there's a pistol under the seat.

Glenn Loury (11/5/21)

But the plain fact of the matter is that some considerable responsibility for this sorry state of affairs, lies with black people ourselves. Date we acknowledge this? I don't take any pleasure in saying this. I am merely trying to stay in touch with reality.

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

Here's an unspeakable truth. Socially mediated behavioral issues lie at the root of the racial inequality problem. They are real. They must be faced squarely to grasp why racial inequalities persist. This is a painful necessity. Downplaying such racial disparities is actually a bluff. Anti-racism activists on the left of American politics who claim that white supremacy, implicit bias, and old-fashioned anti-black racism are sufficient to account for black disadvantage - those making such arguments are in fact daring you to disagree with them. They're threatening to cancel you if you don't accept their account; "You must be a racist."

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

In calling their bluff, one risks being convicted of the offense of blaming the victims m. But, I tell you, this is a dare. It's a debater's trick. At the end of the day, what are those folks saying when they're declaring that mass of incarceration, so called, is racism; that the high number of blacks in jails is self-evidently assigned to racial antipathy. To respond: No. it's primarily a sign of anti-social behavior by some criminals who happen to be black, one risks being dismissed as a moral reprobate. This is so even if the speaker is black. We should all want to stay in touch with reality. Common sense and much evidence suggests that those in prison are mainly those that have hurt someone, who have stolen, or who have otherwise violated basic behavioral norms that make civil society possible. Seeing prison as a racist conspiracy to confine black people is something that no serious person could really believe.

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

Intellectual mastery is achieved through effort. No one is born already possessing it. So why are some youngsters acquiring these skills and others no? That's a deep and interesting question; one which I'm prepared to entertain at length. But the simple retort "racism" is laughable. As if such disparities have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what peer groups value, with how people spend their time. Anyone who actually believes that nonsense is a fool.

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

Terms like white guilt, white privilege can not exist except also to give birth to a white pride backlash, even if the latter is seldom expressed in white company overtly, it currently being politically incorrect to do so. Confronted by someone who constantly bludgeons me about the evils of colonialism in the 21st century, who insists that I apologize for what white people have done to various peoples of color in centuries past, who demands that I settle my historical indebtedness to them via racial reparations, I might well begin to ask myself, we're I one of these white oppressors, on exactly what foundation does human civilization in the 21st century stand? I might begin to enumerate the great works of philosophy, mathematics , and science that ushered in the Age of Enlightenment, that allowed modern medicine to come into being, that gave rise to the core of what human beings know about the origin of the species, and the origin of the universe. I might begin to tick of the great artistic achievements of European culture, the books, the paintings, the symphonies. And then, we're I in a particularly agitated mood, I might ask these people of color, who think that they can dimply bully me into a state of guilt-ridden self loathing, "where is your civilization?"

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

The claim that something called white supremacy or systemic racism has put a metaphorical knee on the neck of black America is a lie being told daily by prominent spokesmen. A lie that the media are repeating uncritically. Let me speak plainly. The idea that as a black person I dare not step from my door for fear that the police would round me up, gun me down, or bludgeon me to death because of my race... is ridiculous. The idea that violent conflicts between police and African Americans, which are inevitable in our society, are viewed as latter-day lynchings... is preposterous. Being cancelled is the only thing that keeps many white people from saying it out loud... but it does not keep them from thinking it. White silence is not violence. And it is also not tacit agreement. It it should worry us. People are not blind. They are not fools. People see what's happening on the mean streets of urban America. Rhetorical bullying and hysterical tantrum throwing, which have been on full display since the killing of George Floyd, won't change a single fact on the ground.

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

The fact is, the consequence of the Civil War, along with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, enacted just afterwards, made the enslaved Africans and their descendants into citizens. In the fullness of time, they became equal citizens. Should that have taken 100 years? No. Should Africans have been enslaved on the first place? No, they ought not to have been. But we must not forget that slavery was a commonplace of human experience since antiquity. The emancipation is the new idea. The freeing of slaves en masse as the result of a movement for abolition... that was a new idea. It was a western idea. It was the fruit of enlightenment. It was an idea brought to fruition over a century and a half ago in these, our own, United States of America with the liberation of 4M former slaves. Such an achievement surely would not have been possible without the philosophical insight and moral commitments cultivated in the 17th and 18th centuries in the west

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

Those taking lives on the streets of StLouis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, are to a man behaving despicably. Moreover, those bearing the cost of such pathology are almost exclusively other blacks. An ideology that ascribes this violent behavior to racism is simply not credible.

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

Twice as many whites are killed than blacks every year. You wouldn't know that by the activist rhetoric. Now 1,200 overall may be too many. I'm prepared to entertain the idea. I'd be happy to discuss the recruitment, training, and rules governing engagement with citizens. These are all legitimate questions. And there is a racial disparity, although as I have noted, there is also a huge disparity rate in black's participation in criminal activity. There may be some discrimination, especially in the use of non-lethal force. This is a debate over which evidence could be brought to bear. But in terms of killings, we're talking roughly 300 black victims per year. Very few of these are unarmed innocents. Most are engaged in violent conflict with police officers. Some are instances like George Floyd, unquestionably problematic and deserving of scrutiny. Still we need to bear in mind that this is a country of 300M people with scores of concentrated urban areas where police regularly interact with citizens. There are 10's of thousands of arrests occurring daily. So these events, which are extremely regrettable and sometimes do reflect poorly on police, are nevertheless rare. To put it in perspective, there were nearly 20,000 homicides in the US in 2020, almost half of which involved black perpetrators. The vast majority of those had other blacks as victims. For every black person killed by a police officer, more than 25 black people meet their end because of homicides committed by other blacks. This if course is not to ignore the significance of holding police accountable for how the exercise their power. It is merely to notice how very easy it is to overstate the significance and extent of this phenomenon, precisely as BLM activists have done.

Glenn Loury (Whose Fourth of July?)

If you can see it, and I can see it, then everyone can see it. But what about the other 300 million Americans? What keeps somebody else from coming out and just saying well this is a fraud, I'm not going to be railroaded by you people, and obviously the man was a thug, and I'm not going to apologize for using that word because that's what he was. You attacking armed police officer? Who are you but a dangerous criminal? I can imagine what else you're doing when you're not in the presence of law-enforcement. I'm not gonna lie down prostrate to you people and let you bludgeon me with some guilt trip. Because I can see the reality. The reality is that there's way too much black crime. If Black people and police weren't coming into contact with each other so frequently we wouldn't have many of these incidents. Almost all of them are criminals attacking a cop, and that's a minstrel show you're trying to run on me and I'm not gonna play that game.

Glenn Loury on Mike Brown

Is there any period in human history were there hasn't been conquest, occupation, domination, extermination anywhere on the planet? What did the Mongol hoards do coming out of east Asia? What were the native populations of various stripes doing amongst one another? What were the African populations of various stripes doing amongst one another? The millions of Africans who are sold into bondage were sold my other Africans having had their freedom extirpated in combat and conquest. That's simply been the way of the world.

Glenn Loury, 9/10/21

Americans care about crime. They don't care about statues any more than they care about trans bathrooms or pronouns. But someone does. It's our craven leaders, who are under the sum of a tiny woke mob.

Greg Gutfeld

And I don't just believe that cracking down on hate speech failed to decrease intolerance, I think there is solid grounds to believe that it helped increase it. After all, censorship doesn't generally change people's opinions, but it does make them more likely to talk only to those with whom they already agree. And what happens when people only talk to politically similar people? The well documented effect of group/political polarization takes over, and the speaker, who may have moderated her belief when exposed to dissenting opinions, becomes more radicalized in the direction of her hatred, through the power of group polarization.

Greg Lukianoff

In my experience it's not the slippery slope fallacy, it's the slippery slope tendency. Once you get the idea in someone's head that "I can ban things because they're offensive?" "Well, we really mean Nazis." "But hey, I really hate that comedian so get rid of him." As soon as you open the door a little bit for someone's mind to say, "Wait, you're giving me a weapon over people I don't like? I'll take it!"

Greg Lukianoff

To tell students that show up on your campus, "oh I know you have really high rates of depression, suicide, and self-harm. By the way, here's an ideology in which you are evil. And almost all of you, with some exceptions, are oppressed and oppressors. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it other than feel deep deep guilt and shame. You should isolate yourself from other people. These are your characteristics. You have no locus of control. You have no individual identity.

Greg Lukianoff

The annual purchasing power of nearly 47 million black Americans—$1.6 trillion—exceeds Nigeria's gross national income. Nigeria contains over 200 million people.

Greg Thomas

Instead, these disparities can be attributed to what she calls "systemic dysfunction," which emerged from "New Deal welfare policies and the 1960s drug and sexual revolution [that] pushed fathers out of homes and children into drugs and gangs." Let's say that this critique is at least partly true. Many liberals avoid accepting this argument because, to them, it constitutes "blaming the victim." But this reasoning ignores two crucial factors. First, that personal and familial responsibility are still important in shaping outcomes, and second, that it is possible for a victim to overcome victimhood status. As the great artist, author, and philosopher Charles Johnson has said, just because we aren't blind to racial injustices of the past (and present) doesn't mean we have to be bound by them either.

Greg Thomas citing Carrie Sheffield

Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. ...censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. ...We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

Harper's Letter

The bad faith actors who are largely driving the conversation, who are yelling the loudest so they get more of the air space than they deserve, are not trying to end oppression, they are trying to turn the tables, to reverse the polarity of the oppression that has historically existed.

Heather Heying

The problem with pronouns is it no longer just a courtesy; it's now a truth claim. When someone says my pronouns are she/her, they are not just asking for a polite concession, they are saying I am a woman. And that's not just a personal claim, it's a societal claim. It's something that fits them into public policy

Helen Joyce, Conv w Coleman, 2/30

THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period--a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression. The author is fully aware that, at present, no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice, but he believes that it is the task and duty of the intellectual to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities--that it is his task to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does.

Herbert Marcuse

Diversity related training programs are intended to serve a range of purposes. For instance, they can provide organizations with a signaling device to show that companies are "with it" and doing some thing about bias, inequality, or discrimination. This can be useful for PR purposes, and can also shield organizations from legal liability. But of course these objectives are largely implicit. The training would not work as a virtue signaling tool if it was explicitly acknowledged as such.

Heterodox Academy #13

"Beware of identity politics," Hitchens wrote in his 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian. "I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics." "I don't have any allegiances," he said in a November 2001 interview. "I don't ask what people's politics are. I ask what their principles are."

Hitchens

First, the cornerstone institution—the family—remains in a state of deep disarray across all races. The share of non-marital births for women of all races 24 and under surpassed 72 percent in 2020. And to demonstrate impact across race, for the 11th consecutive year, more than 90 percent of children born to black women under 25 and more than 60 percent to white women of the same age range, entered the world without the highest form of privilege: a married, two-parent household.

Ian Rowe

In his response, Rowe argued that slavery was not a uniquely American practice, but rather "an accepted, grotesque feature at the center of a world ordered around the normalcy of human bondage." So while it is necessary to accurately portray America's shameful participation in this act, it is also important to stress how uncommon "America's post-abolition march toward becoming a multiethnic society" truly was. Rowe explains that the challenge educators face today is figuring out how to "portray slavery in America as an example of state-sanctioned oppression that is central to our history...while also celebrating how our nation's enduring principles have provided the world an indispensable model of how formerly enslaved people came to regularly produce some of the country's most influential leaders in virtually every facet of American life."

Ian Rowe

Often times there are these high profile events that occur, there are a bunch of assumptions, and then a couple of months later, as more details come out, it actually didn't turn out to be what it was thought to be at the beginning, but the reaction to the retraction moves silently under the surface

Ian, The Invisible Men

The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . . . The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

Ibram X. Kendi

I actually think what we're looking at with this woke movement- and I know we've compared it to a cult - I actually think that it's evil. It plays on people's best nature. It takes good people and twists them to its purpose. The whole game is to try and make you a nicer, more caring person - it takes your compassion and turns it into something totalitarian. You're not allowed to disagree with it. Anything you say that is not in lock step will get you get branded with stigmas or cancelled. It's trying to use people's compassion and program them in a certain way of thinking.

James Lindsay

In the words of Robin DiAngelo this way: "The question is not 'Did racism take place?' but 'How did racism manifest in that situation?'" That is, they assume racism is present in everything and look for it "Critically" until they find it. Importantly, this is assessed subjectively according to the "lived experience" of racism and does not depend upon there being any evidence of racism.

James Lindsay

Part of the critical mythology is that everybody doesn't know how to act in their best interest. And it's the job of the critical theorists, the awakened few, to go around and consciousness-raise and wake people up.

James Lindsay

Tearing down things is easy. Building things up is hard. And there's been this bias the last 100 years in academia towards this easier thing - criticism, critical theory - and away from the harder thing - traditional theory, understanding things, developing things, research, philosophy, science.

James Lindsay

Universities, law societies, corporations, even some cities now have diversity officers. The diversity training industry is a now more than $10BB industry. This is an industry that produces no tangible product whatsoever, and almost none of what it claims to do is supported by evidence in its favor; some of what it does, there is evidence against.

James Lindsay

When you actually live in a properly racist or white supremacist society, the response is definitely not bending over backwards. it's telling people to get in their place and shut up. That was the reality of 1950s, for example. That was the unambiguous reality.

James Lindsay

"Diversity" is a doorway, it's a Trojan horse, for a very different thing, for "we need to bring in people who have the genuine, authentic view of what it means to be an aggrieved person with whatever identity. When you talk about CRT, the goal is to teach people to see the grievances everywhere that they can find them. The first assumption of CRT is that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society and is not an aberration. And it's up to the critical theorist to be able to teach people to see that racism. So it's teaching people to find reason for racial grievance. So it's important to understand if your diversity program is something that's based in critical theory or is this based in something that's more rigorous and more serious.

James Lindsay - 9/26/20

An inclusive space is one in which no protected class will encounter anything which they find offensive. Offense by proxy - where no actual offense is expressed but a "white knight" expresses concern that someone could take offense.

James Lindsay - 9/26/20

The way that you "know" systemic racism is happening is that equity is not achieved. Systemic racism is the racism of the gaps, meaning if we have gaps in our understanding as to why there are differences in outcome, systemic racism must be it.

James Lindsay - 9/26/20

The way these critical social justice theories see the idea of diversity is that the viewpoint diversity that's necessary to make progress in the world is only located, and I genuinely mean only located, in having the different critical perspectives of different identities. So when they say we need more diversity in this organization, what they mean more specific is that we need more people who think according to the critical social justice, or woke, way of thinking who occupy different identity positions. So we might need a black woman who thinks in terms of black feminism. We might need a Latino man who is homosexual to have that suite of identity factors.

James Lindsay - 9/26/20

"Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law." Critical race theory, therefore, is not a continuation of the Civil Rights movement. It is in fact a repudiation of it. To critical race theorists, Martin Luther King was both wrong and naïve. Whites can never judge blacks by the content of their character, they can only judge them unfavorably, either consciously or unconsciously, by the color of their skin.

James Lindsay quoting Richard Delgado

Think of Wokeness not as a body of ideas or even a belief system, but as a political project, an activist movement that is posing as scholarship. Similarly, very often what we have in the universities is not professors who happen to be woke. We have woke activists who are posing as professors.

James Lindsay, 11/2021

Pursuing equity for historically disadvantaged groups should not come at the cost of denying others the right to achieve. A previous generation would have encouraged kids of all backgrounds to copy what the Asian kids are doing to achieve high scores, presumably studying. Virginia is one step ahead of New York in promoting equity by leveling. Education is not a zero-sum game. The fact that some kids get ahead through discipline and hard work does not deny that opportunity to others who face the same choices. But taking opportunities from kids because they are too successful is a backward approach that will erode America's competitive advantage in global science and technology.

James Robbins

Higher encounters are driven by the way violent crime is dispersed in a city or given geographic area. Is prejudice and bias a factor? Just like prejudice and bias is a factor in many other areas of life. it's part of the way human beings think and experience the world.

Jamil Jivani

I think there's a glorification of criminality in a lot of pop culture. A lot of that pop culture is big business that makes money off of the art an expression of young black men. And it's very incentivized for a lot of young black men to embrace criminality, at least from a cultural perspective, if not in your actual actions and behaviors. I wish we held people who see their cultural role to address Systemic racism to the same standard when it comes to addressing criminality in some of these neighborhoods. It's heartbreaking when people are making billions of dollars a year selling gangster fantasies, and it's young black man who have to pay the price for that

Jamil Jivani

There is a role for communities themselves to play. A lot of black Americans understand that there's a tension there between the need to address violence in black neighborhoods and also to create conditions where the police interact with young black men less often. Where I don't think that tension is appreciated is among the people who shape the narrative and don't live in those neighborhoods where we have that very real tension on the ground. If you don't have to worry if, when you see on the news, that a shooting has happened, and it could be the intersection where your mom or your sister lives, then you probably don't have the real value of police on your mind on a regular basis. So there's a broader class dimension, where if you are privileged enough to not need the police, it's easier to vilify them, but if you live in a situation where you need the police, and you see their value, you necessarily have a more complicated worldview. And Black Lives Matter who, as a community group that has emerged to provide a voice on this issue, reflects where there is a class difference.

Jamil Jivani

Japan: Mostly after the launching of the Pacific War, Westerners were detained by official authorities, and on occasion were objects of violent assaults, sent to police jails or military detention centers or suffered bad treatment in the street. This applied particularly to Americans, Soviets and British; in Manchukuo at the same period xenophobic attacks were carried out against Chinese and other non-Japanese.

Japan in WWII - Wikipedia: "Racism in Japan"

Internees Under the War Claims Act, compensation of civilians was to go only to "civilian American citizens," i.e., "...any person who, being then a citizen of the United States, was captured by the Imperial Japanese government on or after December 7, 1941, at Midway, Guam, Wake Island, the Philippine Islands or any Territory or possession of the United States attacked or invaded by such government, or...while in transit to or from ... or who went into hiding at any such place." Thus civilian internees held by Japan were able to file for compensation

Japanese internment of Americans during WWII

When you're putting in front of kids, as early as kindergarten, he said the talking points to get them to believe something, it's much easier to develop in mold their minds in to one particular perspective. When you're telling them at a young age that black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise, which is part of the lesson plan, or that any incarceration of black people is an act of state violence, When you're giving them context free data points like black Americans are disproportionately killed by police compared to white Americans, they're not understanding the nuance or context of these points.

Jason Rantz

The poverty gap has been whining in America, but if you look at the poverty rate for black married couples, it's in the single digits, and it has been for 20 years. So is the black white poverty gap a function of racism, writ large? Or is it a function of the make up at the family, regardless of your race

Jason Riley

The poverty gap has been widening in America, but if you look at the poverty rate for black married couples, it's in the single digits, and it has been for 20 years. So is the black white poverty gap a function of racism, writ large? Or is it a function of the make up at the family, regardless of your race

Jason Riley

It's commonly said that America's strength is our diversity; and by that, people usually mean racial, and ethnic, and religious diversity. But America's true strength has been to overcome problems associated with diversity, and focus instead on what we all have in common. That's been our strength.

Jason Riley (The Case for Black Patriotism)

The problems of blacks amount to more than just what white people do to them

Jason Riley paraphrasing Thomas Sowell

Transgender is really a thing. But what Douglas Murray was saying is that some of them aren't really that. They're just latching onto this need to get attention, or to be special, or to stand out., to be a victim in a world where there's not that many victims anymore (as compared to the past. You're not experiencing real adversity or real discrimination, so you create discrimination against yourself.

Joe Rogan

I'm real concerned with places like Google and Facebook altering the path of free speech, and leaning people in certain directions, and silencing people who have a posing viewpoints.The fact is that they think that they're doing this for good because this is how they see the world. And they don't understand that you have to let ideas play out In the marketplace of free speech and free ideas. If you don't let people debate the merits, the pros, the cons, what's right, what's wrong, you don't get real discourse. If you don't get real discourse, you've got some type of an intellectual dictatorship going on. And because you think it's a progressive dictatorship, do you think it's OK.

Joe Rogan #1386

Not only is there inequality of outcome, but there's also inequality of effort. And people who don't put in the effort but want the same outcome have found cultural shortcuts to achieve an exorbitant amount of attention. Maybe all you have to do these days is paint your nails and call yourself queer

Joe Rogan (4/22/22)

Since 2005, we have reduced our CO2 emissions by about 14%. In the same time, China has increased their's by 70%. As far as I know, there are no boundaries in the sky, and if we wreck our economy by driving emissions down further, who comes out the winner? It's not gonna help the environment. It's not going to help the United States. But it sure is heck is going to help China

John Kennedy

The Democrats want to legalize ballot harvesting. This allows a paid political operative to come knock on your door and say, "I've got a ballot here. Let me help you fill it out, and I'll turn it in for you." What could possibly go wrong?

John Kennedy

"Anti-racism" turns a blind eye to most black homicide (black on black)

John McWhorter

A great many black people are exaggerating in a way that deserves to be dismissed. I'm so sorry . . . dismissed.

John McWhorter

A useful document for parents in the new resistance just released by the Manhattan Institute may be useful for those who still bristle at the use of CRT to refer to ... well, what it now means. One could be more precise: "What we are interested in here might be termed "critical pedagogy." "Critical pedagogy" names — without exhaustively defining — the host of concepts, terms, practices, and theories that have lately taken hold in many public and private schools. This term alludes to a connection to CRT — it might be thought of as critical race theory as applied to schooling — but also to "critical studies" and "critical theory," a broader set of contemporary philosophical ideas that have been particularly influential in certain circles of the modern Left."

John McWhorter

And amidst all of this, it would appear that "racist" means "anything that a black person doesn't like for some reason," and we are to bow down and accept this as post-Enlightenment, morally binding truth because black people have a hideous history. That is not a real discussion. It renders black people something less than human, in feigning that we are beyond serious critique. We are lying to one another and nervously hoping nobody will blow the whistle on what we are told to pretend is about "social justice." Do I think Sellers should have been fired? Well, all I can say is that in our current climate I don't see how she could teach effectively, although I'm not sure if that's fair, because I cannot know whether she is "a racist," because what she said did not demonstrate that at all, even if not said with optimal grace. (Is gracelessness "racist"? - if so, that's a whole new discussion we must have.)

John McWhorter

And yet, my irritation and discomfort remain. This is for a specific reason. I revile decisions like these when they are made with black people in mind. We can have a conversation about whether standardized tests are fair, about whether there might be other ways of fairly assessing students, about whether classical texts really need to be encountered in the languages they were written in. However, to have those conversations within the context of excusing black students from challenge is, in my view, impermissible and yes, in its way, racist. The kid who doesn't know he isn't supposed to mention the emperor's nakedness - and there is a little of that kid in most people - will always know, for example, that the reason for pulling the test from requirements at schools like Stuyvesant was "because black kids couldn't handle the test." No amount of sermonizing about "holistic" this and "welcoming" that will distract sensible people from this basic fact. And it won't do. The tacit idea is people guilty about their white privilege saying over a Zoom meeting "If we want to have more black students, we can't be making people learn Greek and Latin anymore." Ugh - see how that reads when exposed to the sunlight?

John McWhorter

Around June of 2020, proponents of what used to be the obscure school of thought called critical race theory saw what was happening as an opportunity to make their way of looking at things have more purchase than it had before. And they found America uniquely poised to listen to what they were saying. And what they ended up doing was not making their case as a scholar would. You have a certain kind of person that decided that what they were going to do was exert a reign of terror, where is if people don't agree with you and start refashioning their institutions in the image that you suggest, you're going to call them terrible names on this thing called Twitter. Very few people are up for that, so people started buckling under. So what we're seeing now is not so much a change in peoples attitudes as a reign of terror. And I don't see that as the fringe. I see that as the core

John McWhorter

Cantu and Jussim have done a useful job in summarizing the lot of it. The literature ignores legions of black people it surveys who deny that acts are microaggressions, does not show that supposed microaggressions correlate with racist sentiment of any kind, is based on tiny sample sizes, is never replicated, and explains away discrepancies with glum little speculations that would not pass as scientific reasoning among any evaluators not cowed by The Elect. I'll let the authors speak for themselves: "Microaggression research provides a veneer of scientific credibility to vested critical premises, as those studies have statistics, p-values, and reliability coefficients, all useful for creating the appearance of scientific foundations for assumptions, so long as one does not examine the methodological details too closely. But the undertone of much microaggression research is not one of caution commensurate with the guardrails normally imposed by the scientific method."

John McWhorter

Criticizing Critical Race Theory as it operates in 2021 does not require perusing the oeuvre of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the critique is not invalidated by the differences between what articles like that contained and what's happening in our schools now.

John McWhorter

Cultural Appropriation: when white people do things that anybody else does; as opposed to the anybody else who do what white people do, and that's considered ok. That is as if people are looking for a reason to be angry. As if people who are limiting in proximity aren't going to imitate one another to a certain extent.

John McWhorter

Do you want your children taught that battling power differentials is the central endeavor Of intellectual, moral, and artistic pursuits. I think all of us would like a concern power differentials as may be one of 10 things in educational focus, maybe one in 6, but not the only thing. That is what is being referred to in shorthand as CRT. And for someone to look at this and, like a squid shooting out black ink, and start talking about papers that Kimberley Crenshaw wrote 40 years ago, obscures what is a real matter of educational concern.

John McWhorter

However, what we are trained to think next is that we must get rid of this racist response to the black "confrontational cadence". The cops have to shed their subtle bias against black people and master a subtle change in the pitch and melody of their voices when talking to them. They must also cease to hear a certain challenging edge in the way especially younger black men often talk as threatening or disrespectful.

John McWhorter

I highly suspect that most people have always had to make a slight mental adjustment to get comfortable with this idea, as standard as it now is in enlightened discussion. Do students in classes with a certain mixture of races learn better? Really? Not that there might not be benefits to students of different races being together for other reasons. But does diversity make for better learning? Has that been proven? As you might expect, it has not - and in fact the idea has been disproven, again and again. No one will tell you this when the next round of opining on racial preferences comes about. But this doesn't mean it isn't true.

John McWhorter

If our only approach must be to show that we aren't racists by "eliminating the racism" embedded in societal procedures, then of course the new idea is that we should eliminate whatever it is that is challenging black students. Just tear it down. But here is where we get whites smiling nervously and pretending to think that actually getting the answer is white, that being competitively tested is white (unless, I guess, it's on a basketball court or in a rap battle?), that being expected to raise your hand and give an answer is white. And anyone who misses that this is exactly the way Strom Thurmond wanted it is all but working to be ignorant.

John McWhorter

If the data shows that, which they do, that on average cops are harder on black people, then I'm going to listen. I have no reason to sit and deny it. If the data say that, nevertheless, that cops do not kill black people disproportionately, then those are the facts too. Anybody's gut instinct to think that that's what would've happened because they're black or because they feel they have a moral duty to support what some kinds of black people say . . . I'm sorry, that's not reasoning.

John McWhorter

If you cannot make those sorts of generalizations—and If you can't make them without it being clear that you know that it doesn't apply to every single member of the group in question—but you want to make generalizations, and you're told that it's racist to make any kind of generalization, that's based on a myth that's being pounded into us these days, that people are all individuals and there's no such thing as group traits EXCEPT the new idea that you were allowed to depict white people—especially mail, heterosexual white people—but white people in general as this roiling, malevolent mass of alternately rapacious or clueless people. So you're allowed to qualify them, but you're not allowed to say anything about any other group of people except to say that they are oppressed by this white hegemony. This is ridiculous; we knows there is such a thing as cultural traits; we know there is such a thing as tendencies within cultures; But these days we were told that the only culture that we can attribute traits to is White people, and less we are talking about the trade that has to do with the shit that white people give us.

John McWhorter

Importantly, psychologists specify that the victimhood mindset need not come from actual victimhood: trauma may, but may not create the mindset, and the mindset may, but may not come from trauma. Rather, one can be socialized into embracing the victimhood mindset because, on a day to day level, it can function as a source of comfort and even belonging. Psychologists have noted this tendency in various groups worldwide. Claims that somehow this analysis is mysteriously inapplicable to the descendants of African slaves in America will require careful argumentation, and will be unlikely to stand.

John McWhorter

In a dialogue premised on good faith, we can assume that when politicos and parents decry "Critical Race Theory," what they refer to is the idea of oppression and white perfidy treated as the main meal of an entire school's curriculum. In other words, the issue here is not whether schoolkids should learn about racism. A certain kind of person loves to stand and breezily say that there are swarms of people out there who don't want kids to know about racism - and they say this with admirable oppositional poise but not a shred of evidence.

John McWhorter

In a little while, our chattering classes are going to have a field day roasting Charles Murray over a spit for his next book, which will openly argue that it has been scientifically proven that black people are, on the average, not as cognitively nimble as other people. For about a month, the usual suspects will jostle for space condemning the very address of this subject as racism incarnate. Okay - but any public discussion that both reviles the idea that black people are less intelligent than others while also lustily demanding that it's "racist" to submit black people to cognitive challenges is hopelessly incoherent. We disparage rape culture, diet culture - this exemption culture is premised on a basic assumption that it's unsavory to require serious challenge of black students Because Racism.

John McWhorter

In my experience, however, the idea that to be black is to live under threat from state-sponsored racist murder by the cops runs so deep, is held so fiercely, and elicits such unreachable contempt when denied, that more than a few are simply impervious to hearing anything else. It doesn't help to note that there is indeed evidence that cops are racist in other ways, such as in deciding who to pull over on drug searches. To propose that this racism does not lead to casual murder is to depart from qualification for interaction with polite society.

John McWhorter

In the 1960s, a new and powerful fashion in black thought, inherited from the general countercultural mood, rejects championing assimilation to proposing that opposition to whiteness is the soul of blackness. Meanwhile, white leftists encourage as many poor black women as possible to go on welfare, hoping to bankrupt the government and inaugurate a fairer America. Soon, being on welfare in poor black communities is a new normal - hardly the usual, but so common that people grow up seeing not working for a living as ordinary. Then at this same time, a new War on Drugs gave poor black men a way of making half of a living by selling drugs on the black market, amidst a violent culture of gangland turf-policing. This feels more natural to them than it would have to their fathers because 1) the new mood sanctions dismissing traditional values as those of a "chump," 2) it no longer feels alien to eschew legal employment, and 3) the Drug War helps make it that most boys in such neighborhoods grow up without fathers anyway.

John McWhorter

It is more likely that there could be meaningful legislation about what the cops do to people If it were not seen is something that only happens to young black men who, as often as not, or in some kind of trouble. Not all the time. But as often as not

John McWhorter

It made sense for about twenty years but it was a strategy that should have been applied like chemotherapy, which does massive harm amidst what it does right. Open-ended preferences on the basis of skin color are condescending. (And yes, even amidst the lingering of systemic racist inequities.) They make it less urgent for those kids to master getting the tippy-top grades and scores other kids do, because they don't have to. They will always seem unfair to white and Asian onlookers no matter how crafty the justifications are

John McWhorter

It seems to me that we can't forget that the fundamental claim of the 1619 project is that the revolutionary war was fought over slavery. And the issue is: is that true? And the reason that it's important to stress that is Because, for example, it's not that Nicole Hannah Jones was responsible for showing that anyone who had anything to say about the revolutionary war was concerned with slavery. The issue is whether it was a dominant issue, and that's what she says. And we have to face the very inconvenient fact that without that claim, it wouldn't be getting the degree of attention that it is does, it wouldn't be shaping our historiographical discussion in any way, and as much as I hate to say it, Nicole Hannah Jones would not have gotten the Pulitzer without that earth shattering claim.

John McWhorter

Many interpret this as [Kendi] being some kind of power seeker. This is inaccurate - he gives no indication of being that kind of person. He is irritated at real questions because he has had no experience with actual academic give and take. He likes referring to his work as "my scholarship," for example, apparently thinking of "scholarship" as unquestionable: you just gather and present facts and you have achieved "scholarship" immune to question.

John McWhorter

Many will suppose that either the data must be wrong - but without showing how - or that Murray shouldn't have aired it because airing something that shows black people in a bad light "is racist." As if we are the only group of humans in the world with only positive cultural traits? If the answer to all of this is an eye-roll and a cluck of the tongue, then there has been no answer.

John McWhorter

Most disparities between Black and white people, though they exist and are not something Black people deserve any kind of blame for, are not due in 2022 to "racism" in any sense compatible with clear and honest language. To insist on using the term this way so challenges basic understanding that it can only encourage less discriminating observers to see it as "playing the race card," confused by the idea that the racism of the past leaves behind a system that continues to exert that trait as if it were sentient. Calling systems, structures and institutions "racist" encourages a kind of anthropomorphization of abstract matters, which is a simplistic and even unscientific mode kind of thought."

John McWhorter

On the one hand, you can make a certain room applied if you say "In order to have a diverse class at an elite University, you have to suspend the understood sense of what good grades in test scores are. You must adjust our sense of what one needs in order to come here in order to have a diverse class. Also it's very important to have a diverse class in order to have valid class discussions. We need diverse people to contribute their view." [applause] Now, you can go into the same room a week later and say, "It's racist to expect black students to talk about their experience in classes. They don't like being singled out. It's also racist to assume that kids have been admitted into the classroom via affirmative action." [applause] Those two things make no sense when juxtaposed and said to the same people. Those sort of things are allowed to pass because saying those things is a way of assailing society is racist. As long as they both do those things, the fact that they make no sense together is OK. That's religion. You were supposed to keep those two contradictory ideas in your head and not say anything. That's something that your pastor expects of you.

John McWhorter

On the role lived experience plays: Here's where I'm going to give you the clip that's going to get around that's going to depict me as an *******, but I'm going to give you honesty. Yes, there is a lift experience, and I can tell stories, things happen to me every now and then. They happen. But a great many black people are greatly exaggerating the extent to which racism touches their lives. I'm aware of George Floyd. However, the idea that to be a black man, and to walk out in the streets, and be at risk of being abused by a cop or be treated in a starkly inferior way by a white person is a lie. And I'm sorry to say that, but I think that an awful lot of black people today are taught to say that out of a sense of allegiance to their race Or the sense that white people need to be taught a lesson. And I get it, I try to put myself in their heads. There is a problem with the cops, but for every tragic death that makes its rounds on the media, the same thing happened, often not long before, to a white person, and we never heard about it

John McWhorter

One thing that we have to realize is that a person can use a term and they can mean something more specific than they know. So, this idea that the hyper-woke, that -- these people I call the elect, are pursuing social justice -- They'll say, "Aren't you in favor of social justice?" But what they mean by "social justice" is a world where, for example, Black people don't have to do math. That's not what most of us think of social justice as being, and so the idea is not to get a little nervous and hide in the corner when they say that you're against social justice. Say, "Yes. I'm in favor of social justice. But what you mean by it is something quite different."

John McWhorter

Our racial "reckoning" could use a reckoning about the term systemic racism. It is often used with an implication, a resonance, a tacit assumption, that to question is unthinkable. Uttered by a certain kind of person, often with a hint of emphasis or an eyeroll, we are to assume that the argumentation behind it has been long accomplished; the heavy lifting was taken care of long ago and we can now just decide what we're going to do about this "racism" so clearly in our faces. The problem is that this heavy lifting has not occurred. This usage of systemic racism is more rhetorical bludgeon than a simple term of reference. For all of the pungent redolence of the word racism in general when uttered by a certain kind of person, complete with the inherent threat to whites that they are racists to have anything to say but Amen, we must learn to listen past this theatrical aspect of the word and think for ourselves.

John McWhorter

People suspend their belief when it comes to black people being victimized because it's become a badge of morality

John McWhorter

So, whenever a body of lawmakers (or anyone else) is against their kids being taught not how, but what, to think, and call this "Critical Race Theory" just as many of its teachers do, that body of lawmakers is a nest of racists. Let's break this down. Elects commonly insist that critics of CRT would feel differently if they read actual foundational articles about it. But the issue is what is being done in CRT's name, not what some articles contained decades ago. The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions. However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country. Moreover, it is no tort to call it "CRT" in shorthand when: 1) these developments are descended from its teachings and 2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.

John McWhorter

Some of the tenets of CRT in schools: Given the buzzwords, the period of composition, and current practice at such schools nationwide, we are reasonable to assume that the program Taylor is espousing will include excusing black students from real standards, teaching students to distrust one another across racial boundaries, narrowing scholastic coverage to "center" issues of oppression and inequity, "decentering," well, just plain school as "too white," assigning KenDiAngelonian texts as scripture, and creating an atmosphere where students and teachers are afraid to take issue with any of this because they don't want to be rhetorically roasted alive and socially excommunicated.

John McWhorter

The data, unless Murray is holding back reams of data with opposite results, cut brutally through all of this. It isn't that black people are on the bottom on one big test in one big study, but that a certain order of achievement manifests itself in one study after another with relentless and depressing regularity. Asians on top, then come the whites, then Latinos, and then black people. People will insist that none of this has anything to do with intelligence, but one thing cannot be denied - whatever it signifies, black people have a big problem performing on intelligence tests. The consistency of the results, if it is unconnected to intelligence, is clearly connected to something, or the results wouldn't be so damnedly consistent.

John McWhorter

The question I ask is, is that something that happens so disproportionately to black people that we can identify it as systemic racism? And if the answer to that question is yes, then I say yeah, I don't deny that systemic racism may be manifesting itself or is a valid concept at all. But I just don't like the way that it's applied willy-nilly to any discrepancy between whites and blacks.

John McWhorter

There are differences between white and black people in terms of ability to be able to compete in certain ways - those things are there. Usually those things are traceable in some Rube Goldberg or mouse trap fashion to some kind of racism in the past. But when you call it systemic racism it leads to a mental habit of thinking that what needs to be combated is racism of some kind. And I think anybody who's seriously thinking about it knows that it's not necessarily about making people have less racist sentiments.

John McWhorter

There are many different cultural predilections. It might be that there are just not that many black people that want to play the bassoon. But now we're supposed to say that because they are not that many black people playing the bassoon, that it's because of racism - that people don't like black people, or the black people don't have the resources to become bassoonists. But it might just be, that if black people had the resources to become bassoonists, that they would not choose that instrument. Or to avoid the cartoonishness of that example, it might be that they are are not as interested in classical music as, for example, many East Asian immigrants kids are. There's no room for acknowledging different cultural predilections, i.e. diversity, in the discussion.

John McWhorter

There are not academic surveys yet as to where this is happening (CRT in school curriculums) and to what degree. But, the anecdotal and journalistic evidence is coming so fast and thick that we can see this, quite simply: if there were exactly this much evidence of cops killing black men - one in Detroit, one in Atlanta, one in New England, something happened in L.A. - if that's what there is, it is considered a national epidemic, a racist stain, America has a problem, America must atone. All it takes to make a splash in that sense is exactly the amount of evidence that we have for this takeover of CRT.

John McWhorter

There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do. Thus, it is unnecessary to subject us to top-level standards. This leads to things happening too often that are never written as explicit directives but are consonant with the general cultural agenda: people granted tenure with nothing approaching the publishing records of other candidates, or celebrated more for their sociopolitical orientations than for their research

John McWhorter

There is type who, understanding the above points but viscerally devoted to smoking out the evil operators who want to keep racism secret out of "fragility," insists that the modern version of CRT is not actually being foisted upon students anywhere - or at least, not enough to matter. Well, there are crystal clear reports of the takeover of this ideology at several schools in the New York area these days - I am aware of seven at this writing. Then, there are reports of school boards actively considering ideas like these nationwide. Then there is a source that I admit needs to be processed so that it can be aired officially, that we could call "Glenn Loury and John McWhorter's inboxes" - a good 15 messages we get from concerned parents and teachers every single week (now since last summer) about this ideology permeating schools nationwide. The organization FAIR will also attest to the sheer volume of cases of this kind. As do the contents of the message sections of certain Substack newsletters. Still just a bunch of anecdotes? Okay, let's try this. If there were this volume of reports of exactly this kind - the same combination of media and independent testimony - of cop killings of black men, it would treated with no hesitation as evidence of a national scourge. It would treated that way if the corpus consisted of about a quarter of the volume of the one I refer to. Anyone who claimed that this body of reportage and testimony qualified as mere "anecdote," and that there could be no verdict until the data were all in and subjected to years' worth of statistical analysis (over which the experts would then fight for another then yielding no real conclusion ...), would be dismissed as a pariah within milliseconds.

John McWhorter

There was a warrant out for Jacob Blake for sexual assault (repeated alleged violations). And yet somehow the fact that he is the black victim of a cop shooting completely overrides an aspect of him which if he were white - even if he got shot by a cop and we're white - the idea would be no, he was violent against women, I'm sorry but we have to move on.

John McWhorter

This is what Thomas Sowell memorably terms the conflict of visions in his invaluable book. The unconstrained vision supposes that the world can be transformed, that the possibilities for change are endless. The constrained vision assumes that human nature will always have a seamy side and that no societal arrangement will be perfect.

John McWhorter

This just in. At the Yale Law Journal, if you're black, you have a 62% rate of acceptance to think about. That is, a black applicant can think "I will pretty likely get in." If you're Asian, the rate is 27%. An Asian applicant can think "I'd be lucky at best to get in." It's because, partly, there's a 20 bonus for a "diversity statement." But Asian apparently isn't diverse enough ... "complicated," we say, making sure to not look at the person while we say it. Yes, it matters. Most people looking on will know that black people on the Yale Law Journal weren't accepted for the same reasons as white and Asian people there were. And if anybody thinks that George Floyd is somehow a justification for that, well -- if anyone tells you it is, notice that they are looking over your shoulder instead of into your eyes.

John McWhorter

What institutions are the violent right taking over? So we have this extreme left contingent that is taking over, that is muzzling major institutions, making people pretend to believe things that they don't, and you see the dominoes falling every day. A lot of people misinterpret that as me asking What institutions has the "right" taken over As if I don't know that there are conservative lead institutions - I mean the violent right. So they do the things that they do, but the question is are they take over institutions in an equivalent way. Who Is marching to their tune now who wasn't say around June 2020. You could maybe argue that there is some more sanctioning by certain people on the right, but I don't think it's as resonant or as significant As our moral, intellectual, or artistic culture being turned upside down by people whose modus operandi is to shut people down and call them names to make them pretend to believe what they believe. I am talking hard left versus violent right. Who has more influence now? I think it's the hard left. What institutions is the violent right taking over? They do what they do, but who is marching to their tune other than them? I would be more worried about them if they were taking over in that way.

John McWhorter

Whether we are talking about CRT as exemplified by a 40-year old article of a brilliant law professor, or CRT in terms of the anti-racist struggle session struggle session training that's being used in an increasing number of schools across the country, those - whatever your politics or philosophy may be - are not about presenting many different sides of a question. Both of those approaches are predicated on an idea that they are truth. That is particularly the way that what is now being called CRT is being used in classrooms. Students are not being taught how to think. They are being presented with something put forth as truce that students are for bidden from dissenting from, that teachers, if they dissent from it, end up having to resign or get fired. If I say to somebody "drink", we know that I don't mean lemonade. It means alcohol, nobody has to be told. In the same way, when I say CRT In schools, we know that I don't mean are fifth graders being presented with an excerpt from Kimberly Crenshaw And then they were given an excerpt of something written by Pat Buchanan and then they're asked to grapple with the merits of each.

John McWhorter

Yet I am often asked why I am so concerned about this wokester takeover rather than about the alt-right. I have an answer: I am a little French. I highly suspect this question would not be asked in France. I say that our intellectual culture is being subverted and people ask me "How is that important when racist boobs invaded the Capitol." Upon which I note that a certain M. Macron has signalled France as opposed to the CRT ideology. Yep - I know: to the American left this means that Macron is bigoted against Muslims. But it isn't that simple - Macron is battling the idea that everything comes down to who is more powerful than who and that this question must guide everything. Everything. And even mean that your experience as someone not white is fact, exempt from logic, exempt from the empiricism of the Enlightenment.

John McWhorter

You and I both know most often the corporations and bodies that are imposing that sort of thing on their employees - they don't really care about this stuff. They've just learned that if they don't, they are going to get called racist.

John McWhorter

You might hear on NPR "7 youths killed last night at a barbecue." And you don't even need to wonder. It's always, always black people in certain neighborhoods. Now that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the people, but the question is why aren't any poor white people doing that? Why isn't that happening in poor China town? Why isn't that happening in any towns in India? Poverty alone doesn't explain that. It's partly what came to be seen as normal in the wake of the black power mood, and also the expansion of welfare, with black people in mind, starting in 1966, which was pernicious for family relations, although nobody knew that was what was going to happen at the time. So poverty is one thing, but to the extent that anyone here is bristling a little bit- there's more. There's a black thing. And it's very hard to talk about, but it's there.

John McWhorter

You are reading the paper. Probably Monday. And you read about a carjacking; the usual story, you read about the three-year-old girl who got killed in a crossfire. You don't even need to wonder. The newspaper's trying to make it seem like it could just be anybody. But we know, the people who did that, are almost certainly black. The person who did that carjacking was not named Ethan. Sometimes girls do it; they are not named Katie. If you look a few days later, you find they published the names and you can see by the names even though they're still trying not to let you know. What is the reason that the people who are doing that are not white. Those boys killing themselves over sneakers, none of them are named Liam. Many people will say racism, and frankly they're kind of sloppy when they say it.

John McWhorter (11/5/21)

Where it gets thorny, and there's a tacit assumption that underlies critical race theory, is that where facts, and efficacy, and pragmatism conflict with the idea that you were questioning, not overturning, but questioning power differentials, the facts have to lose. It's less about what actually is, than about displaying your intention, and supposedly overturn, but mostly overturn, and show that you don't like power differentials.

John McWhorter on CRT

Now in what way is the standardized test racist? 40 years ago a question maybe asked what kind of wine goes with chicken. That hasn't been true for generations, so it's not as if the tests are asking people things that they have no reason to know. Now how is it racist? And there are some people who will imply that black thought is incompatible with tests like that, which is very close to saying that Black people are in capable of disembodied abstract thought

John McWhorter on JBP

There's this massive lurch towards this hard left thinking that becomes very popular in June [George Floyd incident]. And certain people such as you and myself [John/Glenn] started pushing back. I feel like everything was beginning to feel a little insane in June and July. And some people decided to say, "no, wait a minute ". It's one thing to be interested in progress. It's another thing to have this religion going on.

John McWhoter

The great victory of welfare and The Great Society is that it eliminated hunger for a good many people - the Heritage Foundation would concede that point; it was successful in that way. What it did not do is provide an avenue for social mobility. It provided some discretionary income to African Americans as economic opportunities were contracting. It also disincentivized family formation, and that's a very important thing. Disincentivizing two-parent households because you get more benefits when you're a single parent. Eventually as we move past the assassinations of major black leaders as we go into the 70's and certainly into the 80's, you have the advent of heroin, the advent of crack-cocaine, and a drug-based economy that winds up being serviced by gangs. In the absence of economic opportunity and social mobility, but in the presence of discretionary income and systematic policies that are already undermining family formation in the black community, this becomes an economic center in the black community that is self-poisoning and further decimates the black family and black men, but that also restructures much of the cultural foundations of the community. And that also emerges in tandem with the police response to that epidemic. And so you have the expansion of the police state, you have the beginnings of mass incarceration, you have the failings of the educational system, you have the flight of black middle-class families and black professionals into integrated communities. All of this is the immediate ancestor to the anger and vitriol we see erupting out of black America right now, but nobody is able to positively identify it for what it is. It really is a cluster of systemic forces interacting with our culture in a way that has hemmed us in to self-destructive behavior, and the most anyone can say about this is well this is just systemic white supremacy in action or this is just black people not living up to what they should do for themselves. There's some grain of truth to each of those things, but they are wildly simplistic in attempting to get at the truth.

John Wood Jr.

Academic publications in the humanities, perhaps just the culture of academia in the humanities in particular is subject to a way of interacting with the world that has nothing to do with logical rigor or empirical truth and everything to do with social agendas and ideologies

John Woods Jr.

Slavery and racism were colossal problems with which the American Republic has had to contend from its inception, but the principles of the Founding Fathers have been the basis for ending them.

Johnny B Davis

Where we land on this question is incredibly consequential. At stake is whether the whole system needs to be torn down, or if the solution is to fully live up to those founding principles and apply them to today's problems.

Johnny B Davis

the merits and intentions of which can be debated—the Declaration's principles still had slavery in its crosshairs. In 1807, the United States became the first nation to ban the slave trade—an event that marked great progress in the advancement of human rights. The end of slavery in Canada happened shortly afterward, and England banned the slave trade that same year. Some argue that America only did this because it no longer needed to import slaves, and could therefore alleviate its guilt and hypocrisy while losing nothing of value. This argument, however, ignores the reality that slave owners in the United States actively argued against the ban, and the confederacy later attempted to reinstitute the slave trade in its Confederate Constitution. America was clearly divided on the issue, but abolition was already beginning to win out.

Johnny B Davis

As scientists, who generally are on the left, got more politically active, and as universities moved from leaning left to being very far on the left, the right distrusted all of that. So, when, early in the pandemic, you had scientists saying "Don't wear masks! Don't wear masks! They're not going to help you. But we need them for the medical personnel, because they'll really help them, not you." People were like, "What!?" Especially, then, when so many epidemiologist came out in favor of lockdowns. Don't go out. Don't socialize. Don't be with people. Oh, unless you're protesting with black lives matter. Then it's OK. Things like that just confirmed the pre-existing suspicions of the right, that scientists are partisans. [The degree to which this has undermined the confidence in public health messaging, cannot be understated.] There is a distrust, not of science in general, but of scientists in the scientific community.

Jon Haidt / [Sam Harris]

I believe that anti-racism has a place at SPSP, and I said so to King. Let there be speakers, panels, and discussions of this morally controversial and influential idea at our next conference! But to adopt it as the official view and mission of SPSP and then to force us all to say how our work advances it, as a precondition to speaking at the conference? I thought this was wrong for two reasons: First, it elevated anti-racism to be a coequal telos of SPSP, which meant that we would no longer rotate around the single axis of excellent science. Every talk would have to be both scientifically sound and anti-racist, even though good science and political activism rarely mix well. Second, it puts pressure on social psychologists — especially younger ones, who most need to present at the conference — to betray their fiduciary duty to the truth and profess outward deference to an ideology that some of them do not privately endorse

Jonathan Haidt

If you have a moral framework that is so anti-racist, that it is focused on micro aggression, On interpreting any outcome difference as caused by structural racism, it's possible that the framework that you use to understand can get antiracist faster than reality.

Jonathan Haidt

In general, facing hardship makes you tougher. Making the princess and the pea, if you've been spared from hardship, somebody putting a pea 20 mattresses down, you can't sleep on such discomfort!

Jonathan Haidt

Some parts of the left has shifted from equal opportunity, an idea which is deeply American, to equal outcomes, which is not deeply American. The idea that we all need to end up with an equal amount. No trace of that in any of the founding documents If you insist on equal outcomes, that means people who work harder and achieve more must be stopped. More reasonable to say if you work hard and play by the rules, you should get ahead. But there is a more European, egalitarian movement on the left that says if it's not equal outcomes it must be due to structural racism.

Jonathan Haidt

The more you are in a moralistic community, the more you suppress dissent. The more you suppress dissent, the more you are structurally stupid

Jonathan Haidt

The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers' unions and teaching colleges that shape K-12 education

Jonathan Haidt

This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian--focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights. The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not "traitor"; it is "racist," "transphobe," "Karen," or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group.

Jonathan Haidt

We've spoken to a lot of clinical psychologist who have done work on PTSD. And they've all said the same thing: exposure in a graduated way is the cure; moving away from reminders is a symptom of PTSD, not a cure. So far there is no evidence that trigger warnings reduce PTSD. I submit that thinking this way makes you see more threats. It makes you have more of an external locus of control because these vast forces are what determine your outcome. And my God does it waste your four years because you could be learning, but instead you are obsessively focused on "defeating the enemy"

Jonathan Haidt

When social justice, as we practice it in this country, demands equal treatment, it is justice, it is right, it is good. And when it demands equal outcomes without concern for inputs, or differences, it is unjust. And the only way to achieve those equal outcomes is through injustice.

Jonathan Haidt

I am a Durkheimian. I think that Emille Durkheim got it right. I think you have to see communities as absolutely needing a sense of cohesion, trust, shared values, a sense of who we are. This is why mass immigration can be a bad thing. I'm Jewish, my grandparents came to the US in 1906, fleeing intolerance; I see the same thing with people fleeing Syria; so I'm sympathetic to the moral case. And as a Durkheimian, I think you can have immigration if you have massive assimilation which is what my parents went through. So if you have a society that has tomorrow resources to say, "this is America. Welcome. Adapt. Learn English. You get free education. You're going to be an American.", then you can have mass immigration. But you have some on the left saying that a simulation is genocide, which is ridiculous. Generous redistributionist welfare states, which is particularly the case in Europe, can only work if people have a strong sense of social solidarity. And - the sociology is kind of worrisome - if you have diversity, diversity is naturally divisive.

Jonathan Haidt on Making Sense

So, all over the country, presidents are caving, they are giving in, they are validating this victim narrative, and they're promising to do things, like more micro-aggression training, more diversity training, which are going to make things worse. I've been reviewing the literature on this. Diversity training, especially if it's done in a vindictive way, backfires!

Jonathan Haidt on Making Sense

The whole culture of micro aggressions only emerges in places that are very, very egalitarian (on the left), but that also have administrative bodies that will punish opponents. It's the very presence of all the diversity committees, all of the ways that you can punish people for saying things you don't like

Jonathan Haidt on Making Sense

The key to the new morality is a method of looking at society, and looking in terms of power and privilege. The old idea is come to campus, we're going to teach you to look at things from a lot of different perspectives- what would an economist say, what would a Marxist say. We used to have a lot of different perspectives. And the problem with some students now - and this is only happening in a few departments - is they're learning one perspective to look at everything. There's a good kind of identity politics such as if black people are being denied rights, let's fight for their rights. But there is a bad kind, which is to train students, train young people, to say let's divide everybody up by their race and gender and other categories, and we'll assign them moral merit based on their privilege being bad and their victimhood being good. Now let's look at everything through this lens: Israel, the Palestinians, the victims, are the good, and the Israelis are the bad (even though these students have hardly a surface-level knowledge of the issue). All social problems are reduced to this simple framework.

Jonathan Haidt on SJW worldview

If you can begin to silence people, you can begin to falsify the consensus.

Jonathan Rauch

Is critical race theory like Marxism, in which if we expose it to criticism and we don't give it the power to dictate, that we'll get some good stuff out of it, we'll find the wheat amid the chaff? Or is it inherently totalistic, such that wherever it applies it squashes dissent and you cannot have a rational, knowledge-seeking conversation about it. In which case it's more like Marxism/Leninism and is incompatible with liberal order order.

Jonathan Rauch

What trolls are doing and what cancellers are doing, both coming from very different places, also have something in common - which is that they're both forms of information warfare. By that, I mean they are organizing and manipulating the social and media environments for political gain to advantage themselves at the expense of opponents. It's a totally different game than rational criticism, which gives a science and truth. It's a deeply political game. They both play on our psychological vulnerabilities in very clever ways. Trump and the trolls are flooding us with this information so we no longer know which way is up, we don't know who to trust. Classic Russian-style disinformation which has been brought over and apply to US politics amazingly well. On the other hand, there's a different way of manipulating opinion, which isn't to confuse people. We decide what we believe, what we perceive, in large part based on what the people around us believe. We want to be in tune with that and are likely to be influenced. Because we're consensus driven, that creates an opportunity for a group of people, who tend to be extremists and an ideological minority to say, "let's spoof that consensus. Let's change the social environment so that we can use social coercion to suppress certain points of view that are not our points of view. And if we do that, a lot of people will think our point of view is the predominant point of view. They'll be afraid to speak out against it or they'll actually begin to think that their point of view is wrong." This is the game of canceling. Not the use of government force, but social coercion, pile-ons, firings, damage to reputation, investigations. Using all of those tools to intimidate, to keep one group silent so that the other group can dominate the conversation while exempting itself from the critical process.

Jonathan Rauch

All of these political movements - black lives matter, antifa, and the right wing identity politics, white supremacists types - they are all offering this type of romantic adventure . . . you can join this revolutionary group and take yourself out of this day-to-day mundane existence. And there's a real attraction in that. It's very difficult for main stream political ideas to compete with that because you need an adventure, especially young people. But I don't believe there's any more intense an adventure than saying what you believe to be true

Jordan Peterson

It's not always easy to establish that racism is real in a given situation because it's hard to distinguish between in-group preference.

Jordan Peterson

The convenient part of the oppressive white male narrative is that it gives people an identifiable enemy and that gives you something to strive for romantically and morally, but it's extraordinarily dangerous.

Jordan Peterson

The game that those types of People are playing is the laying of unavoidable tripwires - because it's a dominance game. And all I have to do is put out enough tripwires and you will definitely stumble across one.

Jordan Peterson

The idea that racism and in-group preference is something that human beings struggle with is true. And if you twist it and say well, it's particularly true of white people because they hold the power, it's like well, it's an interesting proposition. But the question is, if it's true, exactly how is it true, and what's its limits? How does that play out in other races or groups, Asians, for example? And what are the dangers of putting the idea that way? And what makes you so sure that that's also not sure if your group?

Jordan Peterson

The less egalitarian the society, the more men and women are the same in personality. The more egalitarian the society, the less men and women are the same. Also, the other thing that happens is that in the more egalitarian countries the differences in male and female in terms of interests also grows rather than shrinks. Even in the Scandinavian countries the vast preponderance of nurses are female and the vast preponderance of engineers are males, and no amount of social engineering short of tyranny looks like it's likely to ameliorate that. It's not a difference in ability. The data on that are pretty clear - There might be a slight edge for men in special intelligence in a slight edge for women in verbal intelligence, but the fundamental driving factor which determines career choice looks like it's interest, not ability. When you understand that you have to be really interested in something to pursue it as a career, then even small differences between men and women can drive huge differences in occupational choice at the extremes, which is where all the selection takes place.

Jordan Peterson

The problem with the postmodernists is that whenever they want to make a move forward in their attempts to undermine the categorical structure of the patriarchy, they always pick a victim group to use as a front so that they can claim that what they are doing is motivated by compassion and that their enemies are bigots, racists, and horrible people. And that's an absolutely awful way of maneuvering politically, but it's extraordinarily effective.

Jordan Peterson

These kids on the campuses who are claiming identity with the oppressed at somewhere like Yale?! How in the world you can speak about oppression if you happen to be at somewhere like Yale is beyond me. First of all, your North American which puts you in the top 1%. And then of north Americans you're in the top 1%. So you're in the top 1% of 1%. So you want all the power that goes along with that, and you also want the moral authority that comes along with being a representative of the oppressed. Do you want all the power and you want all the victimization at the same time.

Jordan Peterson

What do we put forward as a vision on the family policy front to facilitate the encouragement and the maintenance of long-term and monogamous two-parent couples who are child-centered, and to make increasing the birth rate part of that policy. In the west, because we are very immature, we think that the purpose of a marriage is the happiness of the husband and wife, and that's just not the purpose of marriage at all. The purpose of the marriage is the facilitation there, long term, psychological and spiritual development and the establishment environment that's beneficial to children. It's tricky, because I think the ideal has to be long-term, monogamous, heterosexual relationships. I do think you have to have an idea at the center of every concept. But the ideal can't be too rigid, because people aren't perfect. Nobody attends the ideal. The ideal hasta be surrounded by a fringe of tolerance. But that doesn't mean you sacrifice or abandon the idea. There's a literature on fatherlessness. It's a bloody catastrophe, fatherlessness.

Jordan Peterson

I think that's helpful clarifying testimony. I think it's something this committee and Congress is going to have to grapple with as we move forward—that there was a political reaction to events that happened over the summer. And that political reaction resulted in restraints being put on guard deployment which ultimately ended up being dangerous on January 6.

Josh Hawley response to testimony from Deputy Asst Secretary for Homeland Defense, Robert Salesses

LBJs war on poverty, launched in the mid-60's, had the best intentions. He felt that it was going to make people more self-sufficient. All it's done is to create dependency - it has incentivized women to marry the government and incentivize men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility.

Larry Elder

American opinions about transgender youth have shifted dramatically in the past 15 years. The pendulum has swung from a vile fear and skepticism around ever treating adolescents medically to what must be described, in some quarters, as an overcorrection. Now the treatment pushed by activists, recommended by some providers and taught in many training workshops is to affirm without question.

Laura Edward's-Leeper and Erica Anderson article

"Let me answer the question," Cox says, and he says to Lenny: "We believe that the government is obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income ... see ... but if the white businessman will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessman and placed in the community, with the people." Lenny says: "How? I dig it! But how?" "Right on!" Someone in the back digs it, too. "Right on!" Julie Belafonte pipes up: "That's a very difficult question!" "You can't blueprint the future," says Cox. "You mean you're just going to wing it?" says Lenny.

Leonard Bernstein, Radical Chic to Don Cox, Black Panther

Micro aggressions - The research shows pretty clearly that you were not reading somebody's expressions. There's no such thing as body language. Movements, and vocalizations are not a language for you to read like words on a page. Your brain is making an inference. The whole problem with micro aggressions is the assumption that there is an aggressive intent because there is an aggressive impact. Who is responsible for that? Micro aggressions assumes that because somebody experiences something as aggressive, and their nervous system might respond that something is aggressive, that therefore it's aggressive.

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Sure, we read books by brutal dictators - Lennon, Marx, Mao - to study to know your enemies. There's a difference between reading something to understand the poisonous ideaology which motivates the opposition versus teaching some thing as if it's objective truth. And that's what the derivatives of critical race theory are. We are not teaching kindergartners critical race theory so that they can learn to think critically, it's being taught as objective truth.

Liz Wheeler

What I will tell you is that critical race theory is a theory that actually emerged out of critical legal studies. It is a theory that makes an attempt to understand the law through the lens of race and it's founded on some fundamental presumptions. One is the intractability of race and racism, meaning it's an intractable problem in America and that we have to use the lens of race to make sense of things. It also is based on the use of counterstories. ... These are two big theories, two big pillars of it. And so what we wanna do is, if you wanna ban it, you have to explain to me why.

Marc Lamont Hill

A filmmaking decision made for cultural reasons rather than artistic reasons — can be found in the 2019 film, The Aeronauts. The story of The Aeronauts is based on an amazing, real-life accomplishment. James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell were scientists and balloon pilots who broke the world altitude record in 1862 by ascending to over 31,000 feet in a hot-air balloon. For the 2019 film, director Tom Harper made the writing and casting decision to replace the part of Henry Coxwell with that of a female, who was played by Felicity Jones. It shows that there's a very real difference in people's minds between decisions of artistic representation and decisions of cultural representation, and that they can tell when something is done for cultural rather than artistic reasons. It stands out. The real difficulty with cultural representation might be that, regardless of what the decision is, pure cultural representation opens the door to the possibility that a decision was made in spite of the art, not for it.

Mark Dobratz

Her simplistic binary view of the world - one is either on board with her conception of "antiracism" or a white supremacist - is a recipe for disaster, just like any doctrine that separates human beings into rigid categories of good people and bad people, citizens and uncitizens. This is the logic of the witch hunt and it's the reason a generation of young activists is on the hunt for lives to destroy, because in this theology the bad people are unredeemable agents of systemic evil and therefore not deserving of rights. This ideology does not believe in the common human experience, generosity, love, or spirituality. It assumes that people ultimately are ruled by bottom-line racial motivations in the same way Leninists assumed people were their class affiliations. It's an extremely dangerous idea, and needs to be identified as such, hence the article.

Matt Taibbi

If you sell culture wars all day, don't be surprised at the real-world consequences. The old idea of news is that you would try to appeal to the entire audience or as broad an audience as possible. With the advent of cable news (FOX news specifically), new strategies were developed where a specific demographic was selected and you tried to keep it and dominate it, Feeding it politicized, slanted contact. And now that's everyone's strategy. Weeks the media hype to sub for weeks, warning about demonstrations in all 50 states, armed uprisings, people storming the capital, Trump is declaring martial law, what if he invokes the insurrection act?, These are all big stories, End it just disappeared. It wasn't even a follow up to say this was a real threat but it didn't happen. And that's why we don't trust the media anymore. They're constantly stoking us to worry about stuff, and then they just drop it if the news doesn't go in the direction of further sensationalism.

Matt Taibbi

People in the United States are just too cavalier about giving away their ability to communicate and report freely. They're begging companies like Facebook, and Google, and Amazon, and Apple to regulate everybody else's speech because they want to feel more safe and secure. But they are going to regret it down the line, because once you give those rights away, they don't come back.

Matt Taibbi

DiAngelo isn't the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

Matt Taibbi on White Fragility

People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of "anti-black racism" to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other's careers before they've even finished growing? "People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don't want people like that to keep getting jobs," one 16 year-old said. "Someone rly started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives... I love twitter," wrote a different person, adding cheery emojis.

Matt Taibbi on White Fragility

Yet these ideas are taking America by storm. The movement that calls itself "antiracism" - I think it deserves that name a lot less than "pro-lifers" deserve theirs and am amazed journalists parrot it without question - is complete in its pessimism about race relations. It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors. Where we reside on the spectrum of righteousness is, they say, almost entirely determined by birth, a view probably shared by a lot of 4chan readers.

Matt Taibbi on White Fragility

The idea that all people should be treated equally regardless of how they look or where they're from is an idea that simply did not exist in the world 400 years ago. That idea had to be thought of and codified into law. And guess who thought of it. That's right. White men. Now granted the white men who came up with it did not apply consistently, because when it came down to it, they shared the flaw that was ubiquitous and almost all human beings on earth at that time. But he certainly set the stage for racial equality under the law. They put the framework in place. A significant achievement.

Matt Walsh

Politicians create new identity cleavages to try and mobilize people [which is a bigger problem in a very large heterogeneous country]

Matt Yglesias

We are a nation that cheers louder when our opponent misses a shot than when he who we are cheering for makes a shot.

Matthew McConaughey

We've seen many examples where someone who has power of someone who's powerless engage in, not just harm, but cruelty. It's not just oppression. It's that mediocre person with a little bit of power and now they're standing between you and what you need [medicine for your daughter], and they love it. They love to make you dance, because they are now, for the first time in their life, in a position of power. I think that's the more common nature of evil.

Michael Malice

When the riots were happening here, I tweeted out that they are within about 48 hours from getting corporate sponsorship . . . it was within minutes

Michael Malice

You have entire population's that are one mind in many many persons Who will watch John Oliver or some show on the right, and the next day not only are they repeating these views, but they're repeating them verbatim. That is when you realize oh there's no mind there. We've been trained since we've been kids that it's important to be current on events. So what these shows do very perniciously is that they'll bring up an issue What's the person hasn't heard of before, which is important to understand, but will immediately train them on how to look at this issue and what the correct emotional response is. And people want to present themselves as informed, but they don't have the time or the capability to put forth the site to formulate a well-reasoned position.

Michael Malice

I think it's a great con-job for upper-middle class, college educated, urban elites to feel good about feeling bad about themselves

Michael Malice on CRT

As the pandemic took hold, most epidemiologists have had clear proscriptions in fighting it: No students in classrooms, no in-person religious services, no visits to sick relatives in hospitals, no large public gatherings. So when conservative anti-lockdown protesters gathered on state capitol steps in places like Columbus, Ohio and Lansing, Michigan, in April and May, epidemiologists scolded them and forecast surging infections. When Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia relaxed restrictions on businesses in late April as testing lagged and infections rose, the talk in public health circles was of that state's embrace of human sacrifice. And then the brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25 changed everything. Soon the streets nationwide were full of tens of thousands of people in a mass protest movement that continues to this day, with demonstrations and the toppling of statues. And rather than decrying mass gatherings, more than 1,300 public health officials signed a May 30 letter of support, and many joined the protests. That reaction, and the contrast with the epidemiologists' earlier fervent support for the lockdown, gave rise to an uncomfortable question: Was public health advice in a pandemic dependent on whether people approved of the mass gathering in question? To many, the answer seemed to be "yes." "The way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like ... politicizing science," essayist and journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in The Guardian last month. "What are we to make of such whiplash-inducing messaging?"

Michael Powell (NYT)

The left has always attracted a certain number of people for whom it's appealing because it gives their cruel desires a veneer of justice.

Michelle Goldberg

This situation on our southern border has required FEMA to be called in. So either this is the first time FEMA has been deployed just to admire a situation that is going smoothly, or the administration is not being straight with the American people.

Mitch McConnell

We also need accountability as civilians. If you're told to get your f***in hands up, then get your f***in hands up. Don't run away. Don't start digging through your car and s***. They are responding already stressed the f*** out, hoping that they don't die, or hoping that they don't get shot. Do the minute you make them more nervous, they have to make a judgement call, and they have to make it quick.

Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan

Anti-racism turns out to be "let's now discriminate against the others" in the way that, for example, African-Americans were previously discriminated against. And so we end up in a territory that is, for me, kind of topsy-turvy. The notion of equality before the law is kind of thrown aside, and we end up in a new and systematic form of discrimination, it's just the sign are reversed.

Niall Ferguson

In my heretical position, and it's been my view for at least 20 years, the benefits of the British empire far outweighed the costs. If one does the cost benefit analysis of British imperialism, one comes to the conclusion if they are in any way rigorous about it that it was a remarkably benign empire compared to other available empires. The basic argument of Empire is an economic one. It is that if you think about what the Empire became in the 19 century, it became an empire of Iiberalism, an empire of free trade, an empire of free migration, of free capital movement, and it was also an empire that turned away from slavery before others did. The argument of the book was, compared with the available alternatives, including indigenous empires - because that was the alternative - the British empire was a very positive force in the 29th and even more in the 20th century. This is a deeply unfashionable view.

Niall Ferguson

It's extremely depressing to me that a MacArthur genius award it's just been given to Ibram Kendi, who no one needs one less. His basic agenda appears to be to relegitimize racism on a tit for tat basis. If there was racism by white people to black people in the past and they should turn the tables in the racism in the other direction. This man has been rewarded for institutionalizing racism in the name of anti-racism

Niall Ferguson

On Social Justice: I would just say beware of superfluous adjectives. What's wrong with justice? When people start to qualify justice, you should study the language of totalitarianism. (Orwell)

Niall Ferguson

Repudiating the claims of the 1619 project does not mean that the significance of slavery is not important, it just means that if you were going to explain the significance of the United States to a visiting Martian, you wouldn't start with slavery because that wasn't in especially unique feature of the United States. There was slavery that lasted much longer in Brazil. There was Slavery, and it was far harsher, in the Caribbean colonies of Britain and other European states. So what's the defining characteristic. What's the thing that makes the United States distinctive? It's not slavery. The interesting thing about the United States is that it represented an experiment in governance. Any good historian acknowledges that there are debits as well as credits.

Niall Ferguson

The biggest danger that we face is not climate change. The biggest danger that we face is totalitarianism. Because totalitarianism was responsible for more avoidable death in the 20th century than anything else. Totalitarian regimes killed their own people and they killed other people and they did it on a massive scale. Whether you were talking about Stalin, Hitler, or Mai, those regimes were responsible for an insane amount of avoidable death. Unfortunately we did not kill off totalitarianism at the end of the first Cold War, because it survived to fight another day in China. And not only did it survive, but it went on to flourish, by going On to exploiting the benefits of the market economy without sacrificing the dominance of the one-party state.

Niall Ferguson

"When you'd have a person that has the lack of pigment, the lack of melanin, that they know that they will be annihilated," Cannon said. "So therefore, however they got the power, they have the lack of compassion that — melanin comes with compassion. "So the people that don't have it are a little — and I'm going to say this carefully — are a little less. And where the term actually comes from, because I'm bringing it all the way back around to Minister Farrakhan." "So then these people who didn't have what we had — and when I say we, I speak of the melanated people — they had to be savages," Cannon continued. "They had to be barbaric because they're in these Nordic mountains. They're in these rough torrential environments. So they're acting as animals. So they're the ones that are actually closer to animals. They're the ones that are actually the true savages. "So I say all that to say the context. And when we speak of whether it's Jewish people, white people, Europeans, the Illuminati, they were doing that as survival tactics to stay on this planet. We never had to do that."

Nick Cannon

Americas enemies are taking the talking points delivered by officials from the Biden administration; and they're using those points to attack America. I can't think of the US in ministration in the past, possibly with the exception of the Obama administration, that actually did public relations work for the enemies of the free world by attacking the United States.

Nile Gardener

The job of propaganda isn't necessarily to convince anyone. Propaganda is a recruitment tool; it gathers and retains the people who understand the true message and who are willing to repeat it. The propaganda may drum up interest and expositors may be invited onto talk shows to explain their weird theory to bring the thought to the marketplace of ideas where it may be debunked whilst some of the audience says "oh, I get it. [taps nose] today is Wednesday." The liberal love of free speech is a good thing, but it assumes that everyone is coming to the table in good faith.

Olly Thorn (Antifa)

"Staying at home, social distancing, and public masking are effective at minimizing the spread of COVID-19. To the extent possible, we support the application of these public health best practices during demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy. However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators' ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives. Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported."

Open letter advocating for anti-racist public health response

Christian motivations no doubt played a part in atrocities committed by expanding empires. On the other hand, in the wake of Hawaiian missionaries, there was a decrease in female infanticide. In the wake of the conquistadors, ritual human sacrifice was stopped. And in the week of the 20th century African missionary activity, medicine was made available that wasn't available before. There is both good and bad that can be laid at religion's door.

Patrick Grim - Questions of Value, Lecture 6

So I asked the question, "what is a white feeling? ". And she responded "those are just things that might be . . . defensiveness." And I said, "yes, but what makes them white?" I was thinking to myself, "I live in New York. If I feel a pain within myself, is that a New York feeling?" I just didn't understand why this was tied to race in such a blatant way when all races may have feelings of defensiveness in various settings.

Paul Rossi on Megyn Kelly, 2.23.21

The biggest problem with the whole thing is prioritizing impact over intent. Our justice system doesn't discount intent for a very important reason. Intent is central to our understanding of our common humanity. In society, if you harm someone with no intention of doing so, it's a lesser charge.

Paul Rossi on Megyn Kelly, 2.23.21

You can't make moral claims in public if you don't believe those things in private. I think that's wrong

Paul Rossi on Megyn Kelly, 2.23.21

We're talking about rare events, but the frequency may not be as important in driving public reaction as the publicity and the narratives.

Pinker on Conversations with Coleman

According to a recent PEW survey, 83% of Americans think that the typical police officer has discharged their firearm in the line of duty. In reality, only about one and four police officers ever discharge their firearms at any point during their long careers. Police very rarely use force, and when they do it very rarely result in serious injury. In 2018, United States police officers discharge their firearms in estimated 3043 times. That year they made more than 10.3 million criminal arrests. If you attributed to each of the discharges to a unique officer, it would mean that 0.4% of officers purposely discharged their firearm. And if you assume that each shooting happened during the course of a separate arrest, it would mean that police apply deadly force in AT MOST 0.003% of arrests.

Rafael Mangual

There has arisen a certain form of excusing. You can't use the word riot. No no no. It's uprising. It's a rebellion. If you have somebody that's taking pot shots from a roof. They are engaged in a rebellion. Somebody throwing a Molotov cocktail in to a police car. They are not criminal arsonists. They are engaged in a rebellion. We see it when we hear black people can't be racist. That's become axiomatic. That's a yawn. We see it when the word thugs is used. Oh, don't say that. What do you mean don't say that? This person who's beating up on this innocent person, taking their money; I can't say that they are acting like a thug? They are a thug!

Randall Kennedy (11/5/21)

"White privilege" is a racial stereotype that has gone and checked for whatever reason. Normally we would consider racial stereotypes to be bad, for example, if I were to say "black criminality" as a stereotype because there are disproportionate rate of crime in the black community, but we don't arbitrarily assign this attribute to every member of the community

Rav Arora

And yet, this definition suffers from several shortcomings. For one, it ignores anti-Semitism — the second leading cause of hate crimes in America, according to the FBI. In addition, the growing demonization of whiteness now means that white people are no longer immune to racism. I can think of several instances where friends and colleagues have been racially targeted for being white and holding contrarian but intellectually defensible positions such as "we need to have generous, but reasonable limits on our immigration system" or even "I don't think racial minorities are systematically oppressed in Western society today." ... And the concept of white privilege can't explain why several historically marginalized groups out-perform whites today. ... by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans nearly vanished. Today, Japanese Americans outperform whites by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores and incarceration rates. ... One could argue the successful stories of my family, Cuban Americans and Japanese Americans are cherry-picked cases. But whites are far from being the most dominantly successful group in Western society. A wealth of data collected in a longform Quillette analysis, shows overwhelming white underachievement relative to several minority groups among health outcomes, educational achievement, incarceration rates and economic success. On the whole, whatever 'systemic racism' exists appears to be incredibly ineffectual, or even nonexistent, given the multitude of groups who consistently eclipse whites. According to median household income statistics from the US Census Bureau, several minority groups substantially out-earn whites. These groups include Pakistani Americans, Lebanese Americans, South African Americans, Filipino Americans, Sri Lankan Americans and Iranian Americans (in addition to several others). Indians, the group I belong to, are the highest-earning ethnic group the census keeps track of, with almost double the household median income of whites.

Rav Arora

Interestingly, several black immigrant groups such as Nigerians, Barbadians, Ghanaians and Trinidadians & Tobagonians have a median household income well above the American average. Ghanian Americans, to take one example, earn more than several specific white groups such as Dutch Americans, French Americans, Polish Americans, British Americans and Russian Americans. Do Ghanaians have some kind of sub-Saharan African privilege? Nigerian Americans, meanwhile, are one of the most educated groups in America, as one Rice University survey indicates. Though they make up less than 1 percent of the black population in America, nearly 25 percent of the black student body at Harvard Business School in 2013 consisted of Nigerians. In post-bachelor education, 61 percent of Nigerian Americans over the age of 25 hold a graduate degree compared to only 32 percent for the US-born population. These facts challenge the prevailing progressive notion that America's institutions are built to universally favor whites and "oppress" minorities or blacks. On the whole, whatever "systemic racism" exists appears to be incredibly ineffectual, or even nonexistent, given the multitude of groups who consistently eclipse whites.

Rav Arora

None of the statistics in this piece discount racial prejudice, unequal opportunities or the privilege of not experiencing racism. They simply point to the glaring fallacies of the all-consuming white-privilege narrative which has degraded our national discourse into identity politics and racial tribalism. White people are now one-dimensionally seen as an undifferentiated mass of privilege and wealth whereas minorities are seen as powerless victims oppressed by a society ingrained with white supremacy and racial bigotry. To cohere as a multiethnic, pluralistic society this standard must be applied to all colors and ethnicities. But until we collectively repudiate race-based stereotyping and fallacious, inflammatory generalizations, we shift the focus away from real inequity and discrimination — and never truly make progress.

Rav Arora

Internal anti-woke dialog: I care about truth. Those who are saying the most clearly false things and given status for it are my enemies. It doesn't matter if on the surface it looks like me and a women's studies professor are doing the same thing because we both write papers that include references. In fact, those who say and write absurd things are even more grotesque while doing something that looks like "science," because it makes a mockery of something sacred and creates more difficulty in discerning truth from lies. I group myself in with the restaurant manager who is going through his books and making sure the numbers add up, while putting the fortune teller, the race scholar, and the DEI administrator in the opposite camp.

Richard Hanania

Internal woke dialogue: Most people are small-minded, tribal, and ignorant. Those who are more intelligent and willing to reflect a little bit see that racism, sexism, and heteronormativity are serious barriers to equality. Most scientists, academics, and thinking people more generally are liberal because this is obvious to anyone who seriously contemplates social and political issues. I am one of those serious and moral people, so of course I believe in overcoming white privilege and trans rights.

Richard Hanania

Luxury beliefs, according to Henderson, are "thoughts that can only be afforded by people whose wealth shields them from the very harm those beliefs can cause to the rest of us." One example of a luxury belief is reflected in the slogan "defund the police" which, while popular among many college-educated upper-class progressives, receives little support by lower-class people who rely more on the police to protect their neighborhoods from violent crime.

Rob Henderson

Progressives are right that, at its essence, CRT is an obscure academic theory often tied in grad school about how important racism is in modern life. But it has inspired a whole coterie of activists, educators, authors, and D&I consultants to stress that the difference in races explain all sorts of inequities in society. The con artist author is like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi who scam gullible white audiences out of huge sums of money by highlighting in pointless workshops for them that stress the audiences culpability in white supremacy and provide no meaningful avenue for ever overcoming it . . . those were inspired by critical race theory. I have seen CR theorists writings appear in diversity training documents and curriculum diversity requirements in K-12 schools. Critical race theory itself is not talked, but a whole host of highly questionable related topics are, and are often taught by people who did study CRT.

Robby Soave

I think society is overly inclined to harshly punish, sanction, or ostracize people who've done trivially bad things at some point in their life.

Robby Soave on cancel culture

Coverage about critical race theory has tended to focus on what is not controversial (notably whether or not schools should teach about racism and slavery), while eliding almost entirely its most inflammatory facets—specifically, CRT's rejection of ideas and principles that are foundational to Western thought and values. He found that media accounts in those outlets almost never mention CRT's immensely controversial intellectual foundations. As Education Week's Stephen Sawchuk observed, "Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism." Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, two founders of the CRT movement, write in their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, "Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law." To put the matter as mildly as possible, it would be strange to think that a system of thought that questions the "very foundations of the liberal order" would be regarded as anything other than an existential threat to an education system built on that very order.

Robert Podiscio commentary on Rick Hess report on CRT

He found that coverage about critical race theory has tended to focus on what is not controversial (notably whether or not schools should teach about racism and slavery), while eliding almost entirely its most inflammatory facets—specifically, CRT's rejection of ideas and principles that are foundational to Western thought and values.

Robert Pondiscio reporting on findings of Rick Hess

Democrats have become a little more aware of the possibility that some of the identity politics that they are being encouraged to pursue are not all that big among the ethnic groups that they thought would be gratified by them, and sometimes they're more of a hobbyhorse of the liberal elites of that ethnic group. There's a lot of discussion on the voting patterns among Latinos along the Texas and Mexico border who didn't vote for Biden in the numbers that were hoped. And if you took a poll and asked them how they feel about the word "Latinx" most of them would say "I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with that word. I'll tell you some things I would like."

Robert Wright

This is one reason the current state of America bothers me. If we don't have enough cohesion to get anything done, from what I can tell. You know, part of having a nation state is having people identify with it. I think we all agree that there are benign and healthy forms of identifying with your nation and being proud of it. And then there are forms of it that are pathological, and history is full of those types of examples.

Robert Wright

In 2010, using nationally representative data on thousands of individuals in their 40s, I estimated that Black men earn 39.4% less than white men and Black women earn 13.1% less than white women. Yet, accounting for one variable-educational achievement in their teenage years--reduced that difference to 10.9% (a 72% reduction) for men and revealed that Black women earn 12.7 percent more than white women, on average. Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, and William Johnson were among the first to make this point in 1996: "While our results do provide some evidence for current labor market discrimination, skills gaps play such a large role that we believe future research should focus on the obstacles Black children face in acquiring productive skill."

Roland Freyer

Meanwhile, the left writ large opted instead for a striking merger of technocracy and progressive ideology: a world of "Believe the science," where science required pandemic lockdowns but made exceptions for a March for Black Trans Lives, where Covid and structural racism were both public health emergencies, where scientific legitimacy and identity politics weren't opposed but intertwined. The idea that the left is relativistic belongs to an era when progressives were primarily defining themselves against white heteronormative Christian patriarchy, with Foucauldian acid as a solvent for the old regime. Nobody watching today's progressivism at work would call it relativistic: Instead, the goal is increasingly to find new rules, new hierarchies, new moral categories to govern the post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-cis-het world. To this end, the categories of identity politics, originally embraced as liberative contrasts to older strictures, are increasingly used to structure a moral order of their own: to define who defers to whom, who can make sexual advances to whom and when, who speaks for which group, who gets special respect and who gets special scrutiny, what vocabulary is enlightened and which words are newly suspect, and what kind of guild rules and bureaucratic norms preside.

Ross Douthat - How Michel Foucault Lost the Left and Won the Right

"She's thin-skinned" vs. "She clapped back". Using different phrasing to describe the same thing, but painting one entity in a good light, and the other in a bad light.

Russell conjugation

What Couric didn't include in the Yahoo News interview was Ginsburg saying that athletes protesting in this way were showing "contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life ... which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from."

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

If you turn the phrase "follow the science" into a partisan club that people beat each other with across the divide, [that leads to more tribalism around issues that should be non-partisan.]

Ryan Grimm on The Rising

It's not everyone else's job to keep you feeling safe and supported. It's not the world's job to conform to your worldview. On the contrary, truth is a battlefield. You better be prepared—to fight, to defend, to be challenged. Because that's how ideas work. That's how truth is uncovered and vetted. Getting offended? That's your problem. That someone else dared to express their opinion and you don't like it? Your problem. That the evidence is challenging what you'd like to believe, what you've gone on the record supporting? Your problem. But, as we've said, it's also your opportunity: To change your mind. To engage. To discuss. To question. To learn. To reply. To grow.

Ryan Holiday

It's worth taking a minute today to consider one particularly brilliant and inspiring part of King's approach to civil rights. What Martin Luther King didn't do in the 1950s and 1960s was simply point out how hypocritical and flawed the United States was. He didn't use his immense skills as an orator to paint a depressing, bleak picture of the racial state of affairs. On the contrary, what MLK did was work hard to capture the true essence of what America was supposed to be. He picked up all the central beliefs of the Founding Fathers—justice, freedom, equality—and then said: We can live up to this. We can do this together. We are capable of better.

Ryan Holiday, 1/17/21

I am worried about the asymmetry that it's easier to break things than to fix them. It's easier to light a fire than to put it out. I do worry that when technology gets more and more powerful, it's easier for the minority that wants to screw things up to effectively screw things up for everybody. Thousands of years ago it was impossible for one person to derange the lives of millions, much less billions. So now there's some level of caution that needs to be taken west type of emergent technology that can enable this.

Sam Harris

It's in part understandable. What is really understandable is that there's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding that's being amplified. So if you're going to be outraged about the racist behavior of racist cops, or the racist consequences of systems that promulgate racism, whether there's actually any living racists around to implement those systems . . . I'm additionally concerned that we not find racists where they don't exist. If you're going to find racists everywhere, you're going to find racists nowhere.

Sam Harris

It's not that you can't explain [the OJ verdict] by all the terrible inequality and grievance that has preceded it. We have a history of white and black America to explain that moment. But within the frame of that trial and that verdict, and that moment, there was something cynical about it because, I think it was widely understood, if not universally understood, that he was obviously guilty. And everyone knew it. And everyone knew that everyone else knew it. There was no sense that all of these black faces who were tearful in joy over the outcome here thought that this man hadn't nearly decapitated his wife. They were playing a very different game that had nothing to do with truth or justice in this case, or putting an actual murderer behind bars, or setting an innocent man free.

Sam Harris

Some peoples racism detectors are so poorly calibrated that they just find it everywhere ... the forms of racism that people think they've discovered just get subtler and subtler. Let's acknowledge the progress. Many of the people who are pretending to be finding racism everywhere are acting like this is the worst of all times with respect to race. Having a two-term black president meant nothing. Many of the charges levied against Trump on racism are so poorly targeted that they would find racists in other contexts which are clearly not racist or not motivated by racism. And I say this as someone who really has no doubt that Trump is a racist, I believe I know enough about the man to say that, but you have to be precise and making specific allegations, and the left is so hysterical that precision is almost never what you're confronted by.

Sam Harris

Take the variable of police violence. It's very important if you're going to worry about the consequences of racism, and the way it's causing black men to be disproportionately shot and killed in America, you have to find out whether in fact that's happening - whether black men are being shot in greater numbers in proportion to their encounters with police officers. And whether a higher number of encounters with police officers, if there's any explanation for that other than racism My concern currently in America, is that any disparity that you currently find, whether it be with respect to police violence, or employment, or wealth, or any variable of interest, and of great social importance, currently on the left, anywhere you go left of center, politically, the only explanation that is acceptable - and this really does have the kind of quality of a blasphemy test in religion - is racism, or systemic racism.

Sam Harris

The left and right have broken down in many ways, but whatever you call them, the extremes have gone mad. Mainstream Republicans have capitulated to Trumpism to a degree that I wouldn't have thought possible. And the ideological capture of media and other institutions by wokeness has been just as amazing. One has to reference the behavior of cults to begin to understand what's going on here. It's worth asking yourself, are you in a cult? Are you actually thinking clearly about anything? Are you getting good information about anything? It has become genuinely hard to find a pass through the information space that leads to anything like daylight now. Do you think there was a massive voter fraud in the 2020 election and that Trump actually won, and that public election officials, and secretaries of State, and judges were all in on the plot? Well if you do, you're in a cult. Do you think that racism, and sexism, and other forms of bigotry enough are our main problems in society now, and that they explain all current inequality. Do you think the great companies, and schools, and the entertainment industry, and other desirable places to learn and work are currently in the business of excluding qualified people of color and women out of a preference for white males? Is that really what you think? Then, you are in a cult? Do you think the COVID pandemic is basically a hoax? That's the lockdowns were imposed to destroy the economy and defeat Trump? Do you think we are being told to wear masks just to comply with arbitrary limits on our freedom? Well then you're in a cult.

Sam Harris

We are now living in a moment where we are having a kind of moral panic advertised to us, and Black Lives Matter is one of the names of this movement and is one of the groups that is making the most noise on this topic at the moment. It's as though we've made no progress. It's as though this moment in American history exemplifies the worst with symptoms of racism. And that's quite delusional. Obviously we've made a tremendous amount of progress. Obviously this is one of the least racist moments in human history - generally, globally, and in American history.

Sam Harris

We want a future with real prosperity. And obviously we need a model for global growth that's sustainable. The endgame for us isn't to cease innovating and improving technology. We want our technology to become more effective and benign. So this already rules out some visions of the future. This can't be a hippie paradise where everything is made of hemp. Capitalism, for all its flaws, really seems to have this part right. We need to work with the grain of human nature, and leverage people's selfishness and their desire for status in a way that brings out the best in us, not the worst.

Sam Harris

We've seen vast numbers of people born away on a tied of misinformation and conspiracy thinking and has rendered them totally unreachable. Our society appears to have shattered itself into competing cults: The cult of Trumpism, with its especially crazy core of QAnon; and the cult of wokeness with its core of critical race theory. I'm not saying these problems are precisely the same or necessarily proportional, but they are the same in being constituted almost primarily by propaganda to a degree that should only be possible in dystopian fiction. It's like we have come ashore on the proverbial island of liars, and it's just deranging.

Sam Harris

Could it have been an assumption by the people staffing law enforcement presence at the capital, that a pro-Trump rally would be by default pro-cop? This could be contrasted with a BLM rally, where much of the animus is explicitly directed against law-enforcement. The reason I think you can strip a race as a variable completely out of the equation, is that whatever assumption that would be made about a BLM rally, would have been made perhaps in triplicate against and Antifa rally. Antifa is certainly a mostly white organization, so the variable here seems to be perceived attitude towards law-enforcement, not skin color.

Sam Harris #231

Everything else that is racialized in this moment is the wrong thing to be doing. The fact that Joe Biden just announced his COVID relief package would be targeted to non-white people suffering the economic affects of the pandemic video. Many of you have probably seen that video. He stepped before the cameras and said that this aid would preferentially go to people of color, Latinos, he threw Asians in there as though Asian-Americans were an especially beleaguered bunch, even though in aggregate they're doing better than anyone. This was an act of breathtaking political stupidity. Given the political needs of the moment; given the need to figure out how to build a bridge right of center; at a minimum given the need not to confirm the paranoia of everyone right of center - that there's a tsunami of wokeness now breaking over all of society. And the future for people wanting to get beyond racializing every question in American life will be one of reeducation by pink-haired lesbians. There is a culture war that needs to be one here, and racializing everything isn't the way to win it. And I defy anyone to justify a skin color preference in the doling out of COVID aid when the only ethical basis really is economic need. If you don't think there are white people who suffered the utter destruction of their economic lives during the pandemic, that you were living in some kind of malignant fantasy world. And judging from how this went off on social media, this was a Lionel Messi style bicycle kick into the wrong goal.

Sam Harris #231

It was dangerous and irresponsible to protest lockdowns (not being able to be with loved ones who were dying or attend their funerals), but perfectly fine, or even necessary, to protest against racism following the murder of George Floyd. Anyone right of center took one look at that and said, "all right we're done here. I don't need to hear anything from the Anthony Fauci's of the world. This is how they bend their scientific advice in response to woke identity politics." This was insanity. The virus does not care about the justice of your cause. This is not rational.

Sam Harris w Nicholas Christakis

Our police officers are shockingly ill-equipped to deal with the challenges they face. So when members of the general public believe they are witnessing the murderous sadism and racism of an oppressive police force, in many cases that's not at all what is happening. What we are seeing other people who are poorly trained and very much in over their heads once things turn violent. And I really don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the pervasive misunderstanding here is tearing our country apart.

Sam Harris, #246

"The Ferguson Effect." The police still answer 911 calls, but they don't investigate suspicious activity in the same way. They don't want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. Fryer estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into 1000 extra homicides, and almost 40,000 more felonies, over the next 24 months in the US. And, of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. One shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we're about to see nationwide... I'm sure the morale among cops has never been lower. I think it's almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force. And it will be much more difficult to recruit good people. Who is going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealist about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It's not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know you didn't do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I'm going to ask that again: How could the fact that you're innocent, that you're not a threat to cop, that you're not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment he's attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest? Unless you called the cops yourself, you never know what situation you're in. If I'm walking down the street, I don't know if the cop who is approaching me didn't get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I know I didn't do anything, but I don't know what's in the cop's head. The time to find out what's going on—the time to complain about racist cops, the time to yell at them and tell them they're all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct—is after cooperating, at the police station, in the presence of a lawyer, preferably. But to not comply in the heat of the moment, when a guy with the gun is issuing commands—this raises your risk astronomically, and it's something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they're not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

And here we arrive at the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black-on-black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black-on-white crime. For more than a generation, crime in America really hasn't been a story of much white-on-black crime. [Some listeners mistook my meaning here. I'm not denying that most violent crime is intraracial. So, it's true that most white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Per capita, however, the white crime rate is much lower than the black crime rate. And there is more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime.—SH] The murder rate has come down steadily since the early 1990's, with only minor upticks. But, nationwide, blacks are still 6 times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities their risk is double that. And around 95 percent of the murders are committed by members of the African American community. [While reported in 2015, these data were more than a decade old. Looking at more recent data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, the number appears to be closer to 90 percent.—SH] The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide—when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community, 92 people were shot, and 27 killed, in Chicago alone—one city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this is far more representative of the kind of violence that the black community needs to worry about. And, ironically, it's clear that one remedy for this violence is, or would be, effective policing.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

And if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the killing of Tony Timpa. It's also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos. Tony Timpa was a white man in Dallas, who was suffering some mental health emergency and cocaine intoxication. And he actually called 911 himself. What we see is the bodycam footage from the police, which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived—a security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over, and they restrain Timpa on the ground, by rolling him onto a stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner. And they keep their weight on him—one cop has a knee on his upper back, which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck—but they crush the life out of him all the same, over the course of 13 minutes. He's not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There's no animus between them and Timpa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe that they're responding to a mental health emergency. But they keep him down on his belly, under their weight, and they're cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he's going to be dead by the end of this video, make their jokes seem pretty callous. But this was about as benign an imposition of force by cops as you're going to see. The crucial insight you will have watching this video, is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Timpa, they don't take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they're doing is perfectly safe—perfectly within protocol. They've probably done this hundreds of times before. If you watch that video—and, again, fair warning, it is disturbing—but imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Timpa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Timpa's skin, then that video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crushed the life out of a black Tony Timpa... Given the nature of our conversation about violence, given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way that people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching. And yet, it would not have been a lynching.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So, people of any race, are right to be horrified by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this. There are very likely to be a few tripwires installed there, and I'm about to hit them. So just do your best to remain calm. Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States? Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States? In other words, do we have reason to believe that, had Floyd been white, he wouldn't have died in a similar way? Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years, of black men being killed by cops, do they prove, or even suggest, that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men and that this violence is motivated by racism? Most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that to even pose them as I just did is obscene. The answer is YES, and it's a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets. The problem, however, is that if you take even 5 minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence, the answer appears to be "no," in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I'm not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990. But in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US, and so has the police use of deadly force. And as you're about to see, the police used more deadly force against white people—both in absolute numbers, and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society. But the public perception is, of course, completely different.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

As I said, when you're with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open. And any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn't know what you're going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. Most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person without shooting him—for good reason, because they're not well trained to do that, and they're continually confronting people who are bigger, or younger, or more athletic, or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They're ordinary people with insufficient training, and once things turn physical they cannot afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer the benefit of the doubt. This is something that most people seem totally confused about. If they see a video of somebody trying to punch a cop in the face and the person's unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back, and any use of deadly force would be totally disproportionate. But that's not how violence works. It's not the cop's job to be the best bare-knuckled boxer on Earth so he doesn't have to use his gun. A cop can't risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out, because there's always a gun in play. This is the cop's perception of the world, and it's a justifiable one, given the dynamics of human violence.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

At one point the woman who's running the city Council in Minneapolis that has decided to abolish the police force was asked by a journalist " well what do I do if someone's breaking into my house in the middle of the night. Who do I call?" And her first response was "you need to recognize what a statement of privilege that is." Now she has since had to walk that back because it's one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said, But this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone is breaking into your house, and you're terrified, and you want a police force to respond, that that fear is a symptom of white privilege. That's where democratic politics goes to die

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

But Fryer also found that black suspects are around 25 percent less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations, where officers were not first attacked, but nevertheless fired their weapons at a suspect, they were more likely to do this when the suspect was white. Again, the data are incomplete. This doesn't not cover every city in the country. And a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But, as far as I know, the best data we have suggest that for, whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted. And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And it is simply undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

But the truth is that even if we got rid of all bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people the best possible training, and we gave them the best culture in which to think about their role in society, and we gave them the best methods for de-escalating potentially violent situations—which we absolutely must do—and we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books, so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem necessary and just—so the war on drugs is obviously over—even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified, and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter, or father or mother, or brother or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface, and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen. So, while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand that there are very likely always to going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable, or inexplicably stupid, that results in an innocent person's death, or a not-so-innocent person's death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year. And we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well-oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic and our response to it has been totally inept. On top of that, we're being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a full-on economic depression. And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing some horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics. And these videos will keep coming. And the truth is they could probably be matched 2 for 1 with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way? In light of the belief that the disparity must run the other way, people are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves, and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting this civil unrest from the sidelines, because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump—and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment, they have an almost impossible job. If you're making 10 million arrests every year, some number of people will decide not to cooperate. There can be many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill, or drunk, or on drugs. Of course, rather often the person is an actual criminal who doesn't want to be arrested. Among innocent people, and perhaps this getting more common these days, a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do, ethically or politically or as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes, he did nothing wrong. Why are the cops arresting him? I don't know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race. But I can well imagine that if it's common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police, that could lead to greater levels of non-compliance. Which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. This is certainly one reason why it is wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it's policing. Unfortunately, there's no evidence that this will reduce lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is a likely explanation for police behavior, which itself might reduce conflict.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

I've seen many videos of people getting arrested. And I've seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be inappropriate use of force by the cops. One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don't understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos, and from the public reaction to them, this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don't get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody, for whatever reason, it's not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match, you're very likely to get injured or killed. This is a point I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Loury, and it became essentially a public service announcement. And I've gone back and listened to those comments, and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand. And it's something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly: If you put your hands on a cop—if you start wrestling with a cop, or grabbing him because he's arresting your friend, or pushing him, or striking him, or using your hands in way that can possibly be interpreted as your reaching for a gun—you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

If you care about justice—and you absolutely should—you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn't the case—it cannot be the case—that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be the most offended by conversation itself. So, I'm going to speak the language of facts right now, in so far as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people's assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong. And that should matter to you. So just take a moment and think this through with me. How many people are killed each year in America by cops? If you don't know, guess. See if you have any intuitions for these numbers. Because your intuitions are determining how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis. The answer for many years running is about 1000. One thousand people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year, and about 10 million arrests. That's down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually throughout the 1990's. So, of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police, and the police decide to make an arrest, about 1000 of those people die as a result. (I'm sure a few people get killed even when no arrest was attempted, but that has to be a truly tiny number.) So, without knowing anything else about the situation, if the cops decide to arrest you, it would be reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around 1/10,000. Of course, in the United States, it's higher than it is in other countries. So I'm not saying that this number is acceptable. But it is what it is for a reason, as we're about to see.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

If you're attacking a cop, trying to get his gun, that is a life and death struggle that almost by definition for the cop, and it most cases justifies the use of lethal force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of anti-racist moral outrage is not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

In a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30-year low for police shootings. Think about that.... Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles, peacefully and violently, do the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds—in many cases, businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods—do the people who caused so much damage to the city, that certain neighborhoods, ironically the neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, will take years, probably decades to recover, do the celebrities who supported them, and even bailed them out of jail—do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30-year low for police shootings in Los Angeles?

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People who have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world—or young people who fear they never will—people who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops—people by the millions are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself eager to make honest contact with reality.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

People aren't always nice or ethical. But being white, and living in a majority white society, I've never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I had encountered yet another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that's one form of white privilege.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Racism is still a problem in American society. No question. And slavery—which was racism's most evil expression—was this country's founding sin. We should also add the near-total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race. And the legacy of these crimes —crimes that were perpetrated for centuries—remains a cause for serious moral concern today.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Roland Fryer's paper is titled, this from 2016, "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force." Fryer is black, and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there's an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at black men. But he didn't find that. However, he did find support for the suspicion that black people suffer more nonlethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do. The study examined data from 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. Generally, Fryer found that there is 25 percent greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones—cuffing them, or forcing them to ground, or using other non- lethal force.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

So back to the data: Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we're talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren't the cases we're worried about. We're worried about the unjustifiable homicides. Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. Afterall, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism. Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts: Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes. If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don't know. But I'm pretty sure it's not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I'm pretty sure that most black people wouldn't set the dial at 13 percent either.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

So the question for the rest of us—those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings, merely—the question is, how do we get there? How does racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by our having thousands of institutions whose funding (and, therefore, very survival) depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world? Can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object, ringed on all sides by taboos? Can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood, at any moment, by saying one wrong word about it?

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

The future we want is not one in which we have all become passionate anti-racists. It's not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult—the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn't age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don't agree with that, what did you think Martin Luther King Jr was talking about?

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

The main problem with using individual cases, where black men and women have been killed by cops, to conclude that there is an epidemic of racist police violence in our society, is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them. ... So, this is also a distortion in the media. The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops; activists are not demanding that they do this. I'm sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot, who knows? But in terms of the story we're telling ourselves in the mainstream, we are not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

The problem with the protests is that they are animated, to a remarkable degree, by confusion and misinformation. And I'll explain why I think that's the case. And, of course, this will be controversial. Needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. I could have invited any number of great, black intellectuals onto the podcast to make these points for me. But that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, these guys might not agree with everything I'm about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I'm now stepping out on far more credibly than I can. But, you see, that's part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person's skin, or even his life experience, matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. For the discussion we really need to have, the color of a person's skin, and even his life experience, simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break this spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

There are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police. This may be psychologically understandable when you've spent half your day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I'll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind. Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime, and solve crimes when they occur, and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system, is the necessary precondition for almost anything else of value in society. We need police reform, of course. There are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing —its hiring practices, training, the militarization of so many police forces, outside oversight, how police departments deal with corruption, the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job, and yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks we can do without the police—or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones—this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. We should have psychologists or social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill. Perhaps we're giving cops jobs they shouldn't be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we're witnessing now is a matter of the cops being over-resourced—that we've given them too much training, that we've made the job too attractive—so that the people we're recruiting are of too high a quality. That doesn't make any sense.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth, and what we're seeing now is clearly a response to that. But it's a confused and a confusing response. And worse, it's a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation. And this makes it dangerous. This isn't just politics and human suffering on display. It's philosophy. It's ideas about truth, and what it means to say that something is true. What we are witnessing in the streets, and online, and in the impossible conversations that we are attempting to have with one another in our private lives, is a breakdown in epistemology.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

There's a similar problem with Black Lives Matter—though, happily, unlike ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I'm discussing is more ideological, and it's much bigger than Black Lives Matter—though BLM is its most visible symbol of this movement. The wider issue is that we are in the midst of a public hysteria and moral panic. And it has been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the Left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations, and fear being hounded into oblivion online—this is nearly everyone left-of-center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

This is more or less the full continuum of violence short of using lethal force. And it seems, from the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. What accounts for this disparity? Racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it's inconvenient to note that other data suggest that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. I'm not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that. Are there other explanations? Well, again, could it be that blacks are less cooperative with the police. If so, that's worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force. Whatever is true here is something we should want to understand. And it's all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops, due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands-on these suspects, with or without an arrest, for whatever reason—it's easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism, whether or not racism is the underlying motivation. It is totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And, given the level of crime in the black community, a disproportionate number of innocent black men seem guaranteed to have this experience. It's totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle that we must find some way to interrupt.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Trust in institutions has totally broken down. We've been under a very precarious quarantine for more than 3 months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political Right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They've been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public officials by the thousands, signing open letters, making public statements, saying it's fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy. Especially so, because the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

We have to pull back from the brink here. And all we have with which to do that is conversation. And the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments— a willingness to update one's view of the world when better reasons are given. And that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

We need police reform; we need criminal justice reform; we need tax reform; we need health care reform; we need environmental reform—we need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce the inequality in our society. If we did this, African Americans would benefit, perhaps more than any other group. But it's not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

We've seen in this video of police inflicting violence on truly peaceful protesters. And yet we've also seen police standing idly by while looters destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them, and simultaneously trying to teach a lesson to the rest of society by letting crime and mayhem spread elsewhere the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? I mean, how representative are these videos of what is actually going on? Is there much less chaos occurring than is being advertised to us? Again, it's very hard to know. What is easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. And it seems to me we have long been in the situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum are amplifying one another, and threatening to produce something that is truly dangerous.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask, how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth? And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts. The problem with the social activism we are now seeing—what John McWhorter has called "the new religion of anti-Racism"—is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It's almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university, or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic—and, perversely, they may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group, even a group that has a long history of real victimization.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

When a cop goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest, that person's resistance poses a problem that most people don't understand. If you haven't studied this topic. If you don't know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non-compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven't thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt while attempting to do that—a gun that can be grabbed and used against you, or against a member of the public—then your intuitions about what makes sense here, tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad. And there is another fact that looms over all this like the angel of Death, literally: Most cops do not get the training they need. They don't get the hand-to-hand training they need—they don't have good skills to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects. Cops also don't get the firearms training they need. Of course, there are elite units in many police departments, but most cops do not have the training they need to do the job they're being asked to do.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

Why is all of this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down. And they are rare events. They are 1/10,000 level events, if measured by arrests. 1/50-60,000 level events if measured by police encounters. And the number of unarmed people who are killed is smaller still. Around 50 last year, again, more were white than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent. Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops. Again, the data don't tell a clean story, or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that blacks get more attention from the cops—though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don't know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, which is bad. But, again, it simply isn't clear that racism is the cause. And contrary to everyone's expectations, whites seem more likely to get killed by cops. There's a lot we don't understand about these data. But ask yourself, would our society seem less racist if the disparity ran the other way? Is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed a form of white privilege? We have a problem here that, read either way, you can tell a starkly racist narrative.

Sam Harris, Making Sense #207

One thing that largely goes unacknowledged is that there are videos of the thing that the cops are most worried about - suddenly getting shot in the face by a person who, until a moment before, showed no sign of being armed - those videos are there too. I mean, the thing that explains how spun up the cops are in these circumstances, where they're shouting commands and going increasingly berserk in the presence of a non-compliant person - it speaks to their lack of training, that they simply don't have the tools they need to nonviolently control somebody

Sam Harris, Waking Up, #217

[Tulsa] - Every cop knows on an hourly basis that this is a possibility every single time they have an encounter with a member of the public. It is absolutely obvious from a cop's-eye view of the world that it's very hard to tell who the bad guys are. And we live in a society awash with guns. You owe it to yourself if you're someone who's been successfully propagandized by the Black Lives Matter take on all the famous videos - you need to see a few videos like this one from Tulsa to know what cops are dealing with. This is a traffic stop, and you get to watch one cop be executed because of it. And that's the complete conversation about this. Whatever you're being arrested for, it doesn't matter that you know you're innocent. You have to follow directions so as to minimize the possibility that the cop feels that something that you're doing with your hand presents such an intolerable risk to his or her safety that they have to draw their gun and point it at your head, or risk being killed for no good reason.

Sam Harris, Waking Up, #217

This is a dangerous and divisive ideology, one that assigns moral value to people on the basis of their skin color. It is inconceivable that anyone could look back at human history and not see that singling out a particular racial or ethnic group as the cause of all societal problems can quickly lead us to a very bad place. Yet preventing supporters of this ideology from making their case is not the answer. We know what it is like to have our right to free speech suppressed, because it is happening day in, day out to the critics of CRT and other left-wing ideologies at educational institutions around the country. I understand why it is so tempting to fight fire with fire, but that won't advance freedom and equality in the long run. Jonathan Rausch: I feel more confident than ever that the answer to bias and prejudice is pluralism, not purism. The answer, that is, is not to try to legislate bias and prejudice out of existence or to drive them underground, but to pit biases and prejudices against each other and make them fight in the open. That is how, in the crucible of rational criticism, superstition and moral error are burned away. Rauch is right. The battle against these identity-based ideologies needs to be waged in the marketplace of ideas, not through censorship. Proponents of CRT, critical feminist theory, postcolonial theory, etc. have every right to argue for the validity of their positions, just as we have the right to argue for the validity of ours. We must recognize their rights even as we try to convince the world of the dangers of their arguments. That does not mean, however, that they have the right to indoctrinate our children, or to create a hostile environment in which students or teachers are continually treated as "less than" on the basis of skin color. When these things happen — and they are happening — then we must fight back hard not only in the court of public opinion, but in courts of law as well.

Samantha Harris on CRT

No diagnosis is beyond dispute or review. Blood clots and panic attacks can mimic MIs (myocardial infarctions). Missing a clot can cause death. Missing a panic attack risks unnecessary treatment. Doctors never simply affirm a patient's self-diagnosis for a new condition, except for gender dysphoria. For every other condition, a patient's self-diagnosis presents a place for physicians to start collecting a medical history. Tests and treatment follow. Multiple specialists might need to review a challenging case. Sherwin Nuland, surgeon and best-selling author, wrote in The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a life in medicine , "The process is one of sifting, weighing, and judging ... Disease never reveals all of itself; the path toward healing may appear visible, but it is always poorly lit and subject to changes in direction." Gender-affirming care inverts this paradigm. Doctors must not probe or ask. Questions could be construed as unsupportive, even subversive. Gender is identity, not diagnosis. Asking about gender could be a sneaky way to inject " conversion therapy" on the sly. Never mind whether or not we should transition minors. What ethical principle supports transition with so little evidence available about long-term side-effects? Outside Canada, people have shifted away from unvarnished affirmation to sober reflection. The shift led regulators to shut down the flagship Tavistock Gender Clinic in the U.K. this year.

Shawn Wheatley

Think of all the brownie points he thinks he's getting with black people. "I shut Shelby Steele down. That's how devoted to you as a black person I am. I see your enemies maybe even more clearly than you do." He's an enemy. Watch out for him. His motivation is to assert and establish his own racial innocence and he's really saying "Look how innocent I am. That's how free of racism I am." Trying to get your agency as a human being, white guilt is one of the most pernicious social forces. The terror of being seen as a racist. They will do anything, they will sell their mother down the river to not be seen as a racist.

Shelby Steele

A new survey commissioned by Skeptic Research Center reveals the extent to which the public is misinformed on the issue of police violence. Participants across the political spectrum in the nationally representative survey were asked how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. The results were revealing. Overall, nearly half of surveyed liberals (44 percent) estimated roughly between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men were killed whereas 20 percent of conservatives estimated the same. Most notably, the majority of respondents in each political category believed that police killed unarmed black men at an exponentially higher rate than in reality. Over 80 percent of liberals guessed at least 100 unarmed black men were killed compared to 66 percent of moderates and 54 percent of conservatives. But, according to a close database compiled by Mapping Police Violence, the actual number of black men killed by the police in 2019 is 27. The second question the survey asked was: "In 2019, what percentage of people killed by police were Black?" While the survey states that the actual percentage is around 25 percent, the average survey respondent guessed 50 percent (58 percent for liberals and 41 percent for conservatives). The disconnect between perception and reality couldn't be starker.

Skeptic Research Center poll results as reported by the New York Post

Women out-earn men in health sciences, social sciences, and education doctoral degrees and to a lesser extent biology and agricultural sciences. Men out-earn women in engineering, mathematics, computer sciences, and physical sciences doctoral degrees and to a lesser extent business degrees.

Statists.com

Utopia is a deeply dangerous concept. Because people imagine a world without problems, and since people disagree with each other, that means in order to have complete harmony and agreement, you've got to get rid of all of those nuisances, all of those people who are not on board with your plan for utopia. This is why the utopists have been the most genocidal regimes in history.

Steven Pinker

Whatever your vision of utopia is, not everyone is going to agree with you. In order to carry out a scheme that is perfectly laid out on paper, how do you deal with the people who don't get with the program? If you sincerely believe that the people who disagree with you are the only thing standing between the current world and a world that would be infinitely better, then you're justified in using any means to eliminate your enemies.

Steven Pinker

White Americans don't know that some studies show that most white Americans were against secession in the south. White Americans don't know that there were roughly 5,000,000 poor, non-slaveowning whites in 1860. White Americans don't know that white people were rioting for food in the middle of the Civil War and fleeing the confederate army in droves. White people don't know that white people had to go to court to try and get some of the Jim Crow laws lifted because it was making it harder for white people to vote. We are not talking about higher incidences of white men dying by suicide following the rule back of gun laws.

Surprisingly, Ibram Kendi citing instances that point more towards class inequality than race inequality, presumably to make his ideas more wide-reaching. However, one with dignity should resist seizing on this victimhood mana.

When I say "woke," I'm referring to a political movement that is driven by a narrow focus on identity, and that promotes an ever-evolving, yet uncompromising — and harshly-enforced — cluster of views, particularly on race and gender. The ideology behind this movement arises from academic theories like critical race theory and intersectionality. It spreads through social media. And it focuses its revolutionary energy on transforming language and speech norms, interrogating interpersonal conflict, advancing DEI trainings and policies, representing racial and gender diversity in pop culture, pursuing symbolic wins like the toppling of statues — and ostracizing anyone who disagrees with any item on its agenda. The woke ideology presents itself as leftist, but it is not. It resists class analysis, avoids talking about material conditions, and frequently operates in economically elite spaces. It distrusts the public in general, and working-class people in particular, as it views many of their interests and concerns as problematic. And, while wokeness promotes itself as a natural extension of previous civil rights movements, it is actually antithetical to these movements in that it rejects the tenets that made landmark victories possible — namely free speech and open debate.

Tara Henley

The actor concluded his thoughts on the matter by noting that the small spark Smollett's hate crime story created could have "set the world on fire." While he stopped short of admitting that Smollett faked the attack, he noted that if it were deemed to be true, it would have had an impact on the Black community in America. "If they had gotten away with it, whoever orchestrated it. Whatever was set up. If they got away with it, then we would have the potential of Blacks feeling like they need to defend Black people against MAGA, and it could have turned into something very, very scary and very ugly," he said. "People would have gotten hurt and killed and if that was the case, the blood on someone's hands would have been massive."

Terrence Howard

Our DA's, as well, should be held personally accountable for letting people out of jail who shouldn't be. I know personally that Jim's murderers should have been locked up. If they had been kept in jail where they deserve to be, I wouldn't be spending today, April 22, my 26th wedding anniversary testifying on his behalf at this congressional hearing. Jim should be here. His life mattered.

Terri O'Connor testimony before judiciary committee

I don't doubt that there are problems in the Republican Party, and Donald Trump's influence is clearly a part of the problem. But, given the voice between capitalism—that is markets, that is private property, the rule of law, a relatively free economy with a relatively small central government, the necessary services being provided to people, the greatest scope possible being given to initiative and liberty—and what AOC would impose on us, it's very clear in my mind that it's not crazy to resist the avant-garde cultural revolutionist who are redefining ways of life among American people, along norms that have not been vetted by any democratic process, but rather are being imposed upon us by a sanctimonious and self-righteous elite.

The Glenn Show - 6/17/22, 21:37

MA - Liberal media outlets are shrouding the entire reality of political power both in the figures of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is shrouding reality in their own personal biographies in a way that really has to make you trust in them as symbols, as human beings, not as powerful figures who really have a lot of control over the way you live your life. KB - Basically, we are supposed to be satisfied with people like Kamala Harris and other ambitious climbers achieving their dreams and aspirations, and if you were not excited about that and unquestionably delighted that they are achieving their dreams and aspirations, then there's something wrong with you.

The Rising - Max Alvarez and Krystal Ball

Most people have not recognize the fact that if you go back into the 20s, you find that married couples with families were much more prevalent in the black community than they are today. As late as 1930, blacks had lower unemployment rates than whites. So all of these things that we complain about and attribute to slavery, those things should've been worse in the past than in the present, when in fact the opposite is true. And I think if you want to look for a turning point, that would be in the 1960s.

Thomas Sowell

Prevailing explanations provide an alibi for those who lag. And an alibi is, for many, an enormously valuable asset that they are unlikely to give up easily. As Eric Hoffer put it "there are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not sell anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day. We have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are "fixed" so to speak for life.

Thomas Sowell quoting Eric Hoffer

Emboldened minority

Those of a fringe ideology whose vociferousness particularly on social media makes their views appear to be more commonly held than they are. Ideology often has a virtuous patina which covers radical agenda.

If you were to think of yourself in Nazi Germany in the 1930's, don't think of yourself as the one hiding Anne Frank in the attic, think of yourself as the one guarding the concentration camp. Because as much as you want to think of yourself as one of the ones hiding Anne Frank in the attic, the numbers just don't bear it out.

Tom Bilyeu with Jordan Peterson

By promoting critical race theory, the military is peddling ideological poison that will degrade the cohesion and combat effectiveness of its troops. As I learned during my tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting alongside courageous soldiers of every race and background, the military's strength is not its "diversity" but its ability to weather adversity through unity.

Tom Cotton

I guess I was taking a nap when border security became controversial. What is controversial about having a border with integrity? And knowing who is coming and going? I honestly do not understand the argument against a sovereign country controlling it's border. People are welcome to differ on a path to citizenship, asylum and whether that needs to be reformed, refugee status, what the numbers should be, student visas, and I do make an effort to understand the other side of these issues, the other side from where I stand myself, but I do not understand the other side of the argument against having control of the border.

Trey Gowdy

Attorney General Bill Barr complimented John Lewis after his passing. It was the appropriate and decent thing to do, and based on my interactions with former Attorney General Barr, he meant every single word of it. But soon to be Vice President Kamala Harris said quote, "Attorney General bar had no business speaking John Lewis's name". Why is this relevant, you ask? This past week would've been the 92nd birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. good people who did good things should be shared and celebrated by all people of good conscience, regardless of whether we share the same race, gender, nationality, political orthodoxy, or religion.

Trey Gowdy Podcast 1/19

A young woman lost her life, and it is hard to watch a life being taken. But watch it, and tell me what headline you would write. What is the fair headline? What is the accurate headline? I mean think about that phrase for a second, the phrase they used in that headline, "holding a knife". I mean was she at the dinner table holding a knife, was she at the cutlery section at a department store holding a knife, was she in the school cafeteria enjoying lunch and holding a knife? Or did she have a knife in her right hand while pursuing another young girl, thrusting the knife in the direction of that young girl? That's what happened. And if you want to call that holding a knife... I hold a knife every time I eat an apple. I have yet to thrust that knife at another living soul, and consequently, I have not, at least not today, been shot by a police officer.

Trey Gowdy, 4/27/21

On MAGA teens: Well it's hard to remember the last time the great American meme machine produced a starker contrast between good and evil. It was essentially an entire morality play shrunk down to four minutes for Facebook. On one side you had a noble tribal elder - weatherbeaten, calm, and wise - he seems like a living icon. You can imagine a single tear sliding slowly down his cheek at the senselessness of it all. And on the other side you had a pack of heedless sneering young men from the South, drunk on racism and white privilege. The irony was overwhelming - the indigenous man's land had been stolen by the ancestors of these boys in MAGA hats, and yet they dared to lecture him about walls that were designed to keep people who look very much like him out of their country. It was infuriating to a lot of people. At the same time, it was also strangely comforting to those who watched it from Brooklyn and LA. The people who run this country have long suspected that middle America is a hive of nativist bigotry, and now they had proof of that. It was a cause for a celebration of outrage, because there's nothing quite as satisfying as having your own biases confirmed.

Tucker

George Floyd died,BLM started screaming, calling everybody a racist, and everyone just obeyed their most ludicrous demands

Tucker Carlson

Pronouns are a kind of secret handshake that lets everyone else in the cult know that you're also a member.

Tucker Carlson

Quick Kamala Harris, name three global problems of any kind that are not caused by racism, and sexism, and climate change, AND whose solutions don't make you more powerful. Cause that's the acid test - does the solution cost you, or does it help you.

Tucker Carlson

Media push negative narratives on net, so we have to mentally adjust for that when attempting to extract the genuine sentiment of society

Tyler Cowen

The advocates of so-called 'social progress' believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags, as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs, and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones - all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs. "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices - which we, fortunately, have left, I hope - in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past - such as Shakespeare - are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what color or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Putin

I myself am an occasional member of at least 4-5 Black professional organizations: the NAACP, the National Bar Association, various alumni associations, and the like. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but no Caucasian equivalents for most of them exist or practically could. As I recently noted on social media: "a real issue in American race relations is that only whites are actually expected to follow what is presented as the universal normative standard: no ethnic-over-national identification, no slurs or mild ethnic jokes ever, no admitting to some preference for your group, etc."

Wilfred Reilly

In Taboo, I point out that about 75 percent of individuals fatally shot by police in a typical year are Caucasian whites or Hispanics. However, national media outlets devote less than 20 percent of their police violence coverage to these cases. A Google search for "well-known police shooting," conducted in 2020 in connection with the book, turned up articles which covered two police shootings of Latinos, four police shootings of whites, and 36 police shootings of blacks. This level of over-representation of black victims in coverage (2,400 percent) could hardly be the result of anything but very conscious choice—and respected social scientists like John Lott have argued empirically that media treatment of a range of issues, from political extremism to mass shootings, follows a similar troubling pattern.

Wilfred Reilly, The Broken Mirror

Giant groups that vary in something as noticeable as ethnicity also vary in dozens of other, what you would call, cultural characteristics. For example, the most common age for a black man is 27 and the most common age for a white man is 58. Black people are 2 to 3 times more likely to live in the south, where wages are lower for everyone. Adjusting for three or four of these types of things close most of the black and white and Asian gaps in the USA. And it's worth noting that today Asians usually bit weights. So do Nigerians and Indians. If you just go to Britannica or Wikipedia and look up top-earning income groups, you'll see that eight of the top 10 in the USA Today are people of color. And this doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to fight discrimination where we see it, but it's hard to make the argument, when the majority of the wealthiest groups are minorities, that the United States is a white supremacist hell hole.

Wilfred Riley

In 2018, there were 59,778 white-on-black violent crimes, compared with 547,948 black-on-white violent crimes, out of roughly 20million total crimes. This category of crime, broken down along racial lines, is just over 90 per cent black-on-white. Those figures are not entirely typical, but the black-white ratio has been at least 75:25 in every postwar year I have ever examined. While a significant number of the hate-crime incidents serious enough to be reported to a police department and then the FBI (1,930 in 2019) do target blacks - again, crime is bad, and scumbags of all races should be arrested - it is also the case that blacks are dramatically overrepresented as hate-crime offenders. Out of 6,153 hate-crime offences in 2019, 1,385 (23 per cent) involved a black lead offender while 3,564 (58 per cent) involved a white offender. This is striking, given blacks make up just 12 per cent of the US population while whites, here including Caucasian Hispanics, make up 75 per cent. People notice when the 'trusted experts' blame red cars for one horrific murder and an entire race for a different one more suited to the 'white supremacy is rife' narrative

Wilfred Riley

Many Americans, especially on the political left, seem to hold black Americans to a much lower standard in practice, while simultaneously constantly telling us we are unfairly held to a higher one. This behavior has real, sometimes remarkable effects. In their 2012 book Mismatch, the social scientists Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. point out that, when a group of black respondents was asked whether a black applicant to a selective U.S. university would have an advantage over an equally qualified white applicant, 65% of them said that the white guy would have an advantage. Only 5% stated that the black kid would. In reality, of course, the advantage for the black applicant would be on the order of 100 to 300 SAT points.

Wilfred Riley

Not to drone on, but it also does not seem to be true that journalists—representatives of a profession which leans only 7% conservative—and other media figures go out of their way to make black people look bad. If anything, the reverse is the case: people of color, and specifically black folks, are dramatically "over-represented" across much modern media. A widely circulated letter to a major newspaper recently contended that about 50% of all individuals appearing in television advertisements—presumably almost all in positive roles like "new car buyer"—were black. A 2022 quantitative analysis confirmed that something close to this level of representation did in fact exist during the latest Super Bowl, when more than 35% of commercial actors were black. Black Americans make up 12-13% of the national population.

Wilfred Riley

Racial discrimination has been formally against the law for 57 years. Pro-minority affirmative action has been in the law for 53 years. Most of the wealthiest groups in America are racial and religious minorities - eight out of 10. Most of the gaps that we see between groups clothes if you were just for a very basic things like age and study time. To the question of how could anything besides race explain the difference between the black and white wealth gap. My question is why there is no Asian white wealth gap except maybe one in favor of Asians. As it turns out, if we're curious, much younger people in the south have much less well that much older people in the north. Whether or not you have a married, to parent family is the biggest thing that predict how much wealth and income you'll have in life. And all of this implies to incarceration as well. Asians are about a third as likely to go to jail as white people are - That includes Indian and Chinese Americans who have faced terrible bigotry from time to time. In 2021, the main reason that there are a lot of cops in my old black and Irish neighborhood on the south side of Chicago isn't racism. Our flaws as a country are universal, but our successes are unique

Wilfred Riley

The affirmative action and SAT data also debunk Kendi's core argument: that gaps between racial groups must indicate racism (if not genetic "inferiority"). According to Kendi, there is no other possible explanation for them. From this standpoint, Asian kids could not score almost 100 SAT points higher on average than longer-settled and often wealthier whites; Caucasian Hispanics should not perform on par with African Americans rather than whites; and Nigerian Americans could not be the most educated group in the country. Yet these are all facts, borne out clearly in the data. From a center-right perspective, these questions can be answered very easily. Groups which differ in terms of big and 'important' traits like race or ethnicity also almost inevitably differ in terms of cultural variables like study time, median age, region of residence, and the crucial presence of a father in the home. While racism is real and still present in America today, it is these other variables that largely predict success for humans of all colors. The Kendi debate reveals this essential message. People—human beings—are complex creatures, defined by a countless number of traits. Thus, we should be judged as individuals, almost defined by life's complexity, rather than solely as members of set groups based on immutable characteristics. Be pro-human, you might say.

Wilfred Riley

The claim that "we know significant racism exists because the thing we have defined as significant racism exists" is not serious. If we were to accept it wholesale, it would mean, among other things, that the United States is a Korean-supremacist country. According to the proposed definition of racism, there's no other way to interpret the outsize success of Korean Americans. This is why words must mean something.

Wilfred Riley

There's another measure we use here. There's a source called World Population Review that ranks the world's countries in terms of racism. In 2021, we were tied with Brazil and the UK as the least racist countries in the world. Guatemala and New Zealand did almost as well. The most racist countries were India and Palestine/Israel. So the USA isn't heaven, or utopia, we lose every race if we were competing against those places, but we are doing pretty well against earth. That's my take.

Wilfred Riley

This reaction is a microcosm of a broader pattern that has become common in recent years: high-profile defenses of "POC" and/or attacks on "white" people, combined with claims that no one ever defends minorities or criticizes whites.

Wilfred Riley

Words mean something. A lot of the debate about whether America is racist is a semantic one. There obviously are plenty of racists in America, but when we talk about institutional racism, the logical take from my discipline would be that we have to be talking about about a society where racial discrimination is encouraged (a la pre-1964 South Africa), or at least legal, or at least where there's more of it than most other places. And the modern US doesn't really fit any of those bills.

Wilfred Riley

The story of humanity is brute violent force in a battle for tribal supremacy. It's our base nature. We were, and still are, a tribe of different people, with different religions and different ethnicities united around the idea that all men are created equal. We haven't always lived up to that ideal. And at times we have failed, and failed spectacularly. But for too many, the way to correct course is to double down on our differences, to run to our tribes, to jettison our ideals. Stand up to hate. All of it. Not just the kind that is politically convenient.

Will Cain

Unfortunately, all racially exclusive groups, intentionally or not, are polluted by a message of "us" vs. "them," suggesting one race of people is a danger to another. The Wellesley email implied that Asian students weren't safe when their white peers were present. It told students of color that, at best, their white classmates are incapable of understanding or respecting their feelings and, at worst, that their white classmates are a threat to their mental health. It teaches them that only people who look like them are safe to be around. Rather than one-time gatherings in response to a tragic event, many school-sponsored affinity groups have become entrenched in the culture of our schools. In the long run, these affinity groups could condition impressionable young children to be hypervigilant and distrustful of their peers. Students interacting with one another in this environment will inevitably see threats in places and in people where none exist. When people feel threatened, they are more likely to make errors in judgment and behave aggressively in what they perceive to be self-defense. I argue that "common humanity" should refer to human beings' innate ability to empathize with people who have drastically different personal experiences and identities. It is the ability to see beyond our superficial differences, stay curious, and look deeper, without being blinded by identity groups or other cultural identifiers. It means that when we find marginalized people's experiences perplexing and unbelievable, we control our instinct to be dismissive and cast judgment too quickly, and instead listen, understand, and respect each person as sharing in the human experience

Ye Zhang Pogue

"Whiteness is not humxness," reads the statement. "in fact, white skin is sub-humxn." "White ppl are recessive genetic defects. this is factual," the post later says. "white ppl need white supremacy as a mechanism to protect their survival as a people because all they can do is produce themselves. black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to." Khogali says that white people have a "higher concentration of enzyme inhibitors" which suppresses melanin production adding that melanin is important for a number of things such as strong bones, intelligence, vision and hearing. She adds, "melanin directly communicates with cosmic energy." In another post, Khogali tweeted, "Plz Allah give me the strength to not cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today."

Yusra Khogali - BLM Toronto leader

And yet, unlike the suspect arrested for the crimes in Atlanta's, few of the attackers in most of these cases are even white, let alone white supremacists. Take the case of Vicha Ratanapakdee, who was slain in San Francisco. The suspect in his death, Antoine Watson, is a 19-year-old African American man. That didn't stop marchers in New York City from organizing a march to "unite against white nationalism" in response to anti-Asian attacks using promotional art demanding justice for Ratanpakdee's death. Amanze Emenike: Emenike explained that he wasn't motivated by hatred of Asian Americans so much as the perception that they are easy targets. "When I was introduced to the crime scene, I was put on to rob Asians and Latinos on Third Street," he wrote. He went on to explain that the "reason Asian kids are getting robbed because there is an assumption that young Chinese kids on Third Street are filthy rich and have an i-Pod or laptop on them. Commission on Civil Rights, 1992: "many Asian immigrants operate small retail stores or restaurants in economically depressed, predominantly minority neighborhoods. The entry of small businesses owned by Asian Americans into these neighborhoods and their apparent financial success often provokes resentment on the part of neighborhood residents." Surveys of New Yorkers in the early 1990s found that many African Americans and Korean Americans held negative stereotypes about the other group. This complexity is completely absent from our current conversation. One of the tenets of modern progressive thought is that almost all of the power in society lies in the hands of white people. But this ignores the reality that an increasingly racially diverse America means an America where all sorts of people increasingly hold power and influence events. If prejudice in the hands of white people can be destructive—and anyone with any knowledge of American history knows that it can be—then prejudice in the hands of others can be just as terrible. We will not stop the wave of violence against Asian Americans if we can't admit where it's coming from. Blaming white supremacists will almost certainly ensure that these attacks continue. But equally important is the cause—and effect—of the taboo on assigning blame where it belongs. Many progressives would recoil at the thought of acknowledging that there is real prejudice among members of minority groups, including prejudice that could be driving some to violence. To this milieu, this would be considered "blaming the victim." But relegating someone to victimhood status suggests that they lack agency.

Zaid Jilani

The late conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton once wrote of encountering a 'peculiar frame of mind' across the Western world that 'felt the need to denigrate the customs, culture, and institutions that are identifiably ours.'" Scruton coined a word to describe this cultural self-loathing: oikophobia. While xenophobia indicates a distrust and disdain of foreigners, oikophobia refers to being fearful of one's own native land. According to Jilani, we've seen a surge of oikophobia among America's opinion-making institutions in the past several years. Politicians, the news media, the creative class, and even heads of major corporations, frequently describe America as a dark place beset with backward, racist, and sexist inhabitants who lack the enlightened attitudes of our peers in the developed world. Jilani states: The conservative response to such left-wing disdain for America has often been "love it or leave it." But conservatives have been less keen to adopt the flip side of this strategy: perhaps we should welcome those around the world who want to come here precisely because they love this country so much.

Zaid Jilani

There could be something wrong with me because I see Negroes neither better nor worse than any other race. Race pride is a luxury I cannot afford. There are too many implications bend the term. Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? If I glory, then the obligation is laid upon me to blush also. I do glory when a Negro does something fine, I gloat because he or she has done a fine thing, but not because he was a Negro. That is incidental and accidental. It is the human achievement which I honor. I execrate a foul act of a Negro but again not on the grounds that the doer was a Negro, but because it was foul. A member of my race just happened to be the fouler of humanity. In other words, I know that I cannot accept responsibility for thirteen million people. Every tub must sit on its own bottom regardless. So 'Race Pride' in me had to go. And anyway, why should I be proud to be Negro? Why should anyone be proud to be white? Or yellow? Or red? After all, the word 'race' is a loose classification of physical characteristics. I tells nothing about the insides of people. Pointing a achievements tells nothing either. Races have never done anything. What seems race achievement is the work of individuals. The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. The Jews did not work out Relativity. That was Einstein. The Negros did not find out the inner secrets of peanuts and sweet potatoes, nor the secret of the development of the egg. That wad Carver and Just. If you are under the impression that every white man is Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching.

Zora Neale Hurston