Spectator Life

Last month the New Yorker published an essay about a grotesque experiment that took place in West Germany in the 1970s, in which young boys who had been taken from, or abandoned by, their parents were placed with known pedophiles. It was no accident. It was quite deliberate. The powerful sexologist Helmet Kentler believed that pedophilic guardianship would foster an open and unashamed attitude towards sex that would preclude the development of fascistic attitudes. As the New Yorker says: ’Kentler’s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.”’ A sensible reader could guess what happened to the boys.

Maddie, my three-year-old daughter, is home this week because one of her classmates tested COVID positive. You read that right. It’s July 2021, but our toddler, who is at virtually no risk of transmitting or getting sick from COVID, is forced by the ruling class to be out of school, as are her 23 tiny classmates. So while I try to do work as I listen to Maddie talk to her imaginary friends, I’d like to pose a question to those making and enforcing policy in Sacramento and Los Angeles. When is it enough? The folks now telling our beloved Montessori school to shut down the offending class do not seem to be the brightest among us — what with their unwillingness to grasp and apply basic science — so I’ll define the ‘it’.

The two largest state College Republican federations will unanimously vote to secede from their national organization in the coming days after allegations of election fraud. The chairmen of both the New York College Republicans and Texas Federation of College Republicans told The Spectator they have enough votes to exit the College Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, the California Federation of College Republicans is also ‘seriously considering’ secession, the group’s leader tells The Spectator. The rift would put into question the future of the CRNC and may result in the creation of a competing national GOP college organization. The secession efforts follow the controversial election of Courtney Britt as chairwoman of the CRNC.

Here’s how to tell when Republican politicians or journalists or activists are making headway: left-liberal media networks start accusing them of being — wait for it — conspiracy theorists. In recent days, for instance, NBC’s Ben Collins and Joy Reid claimed that the grassroots parent uprising over critical race theory in schools was being driven by QAnon. Or remember last February when Sen. Tom Cotton raised questions about the origins of the coronavirus? The New York Times headline read, ‘Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins’. In May, when Sen.

Congratulations to Nikole Hannah-Jones for parlaying the intellectual imposture of the 1619 Project into a job for life. Hannah-Jones has been hired by Howard University as a professor in Race & Journalism. Both of these fields are rife with dubious standards and historic embarrassments, so she should fit right in. There are those on the pipe-smoking right who object to allowing a mountebank like Hannah-Jones onto the verdant lawns and into the stinky precincts of the institutions of what used to be the higher learning. They protest about academic standards, as if they still exist.

I knew that critical race theory was spreading rapidly through America’s institutions, including not just schools and corporations, but also the military. But I was still taken aback when the burger at my favorite tavern arrived branded (literally) as a CRT special. It was, fortunately, mere coincidence. The Clear River Tavern in Pittsfield, Vermont was not after all making a political statement. But almost everyone else is.

'Who are you going to believe, me, or your lying eyes?' Poway Unified School District in San Diego, California all but told concerned parents who say the school is injecting critical race theory into two new elective courses on offer to students. The two courses, 'Ethnic Literature' and 'Ethnic Studies', were made available to high school students 'in response to our racial equity plan and community conversations held with students, staff and families’, according to the school district's Facebook page. Ethnic Literature, a course guide says, seeks to promote 'empathy' by examining how 'systems of power in the United States' have affected various minority groups.

Before anyone says anything else about Amy Chua, it’s worth noting that we still have no idea exactly why people are talking about her. This is a peculiar state of affairs for a person whose offenses and subsequent downfall have been the recent subject of reporting in multiple major media outlets. There's an allegation: that Chua, a Yale Law School professor, violated both protocol and decency during the 2020 school year by hosting dinner parties at her home for students and elite members of the legal profession. There's a punishment: the alleged infraction cost her a position as the head of one of the Yale Law School's intimate classes for first-year students known as a ‘small group’.

Tensions ran high at the Loudoun County School Board meeting on Tuesday evening, following a Virginia judge’s decision to reinstate an elementary school teacher suspended for refusing to call transgender students by their preferred pronouns. Earlier, Circuit Judge James E. Plowman Jr ordered the school district to ‘immediately reinstate’ Tanner Cross as a physical education instructor at Leesburg Elementary School. Cross was suspended for speaking out at a board meeting in late May against a proposed policy that required teachers to use transgender students' preferred pronouns and names. On June 1, Cross filed a lawsuit against the district's superintendent Scott A.

Cancel culture has come back to campus! Cockburn was dismayed to learn that 1619 Project curator Nikole Hannah-Jones had been denied tenure at the University of North Carolina. Hannah-Jones had been announced as a Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism last month. Her New York Times magazine supplement the 1619 Project had earned Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, despite garnering criticism for playing fast and loose with the facts of America's founding from Bret Stephens in the New York Times Opinion section and several history professors in the New York Times Letters page. Who doesn't love a heterodox publication?

You get a look at your high-school daughter’s smartphone. You see a note there, a note to you and your family. It’s a suicide note. What to do, that is, what after seeing the troubled girl through time on a psychiatric ward? You sue. I refer to litigation brought by desperate parents in Los Angeles and San Diego counties in an effort to get their kids back into public schools. While looking into the effects of COVID lockdowns, I happened upon certain court documents. I have since been provided others by one of the plaintiffs’ law firms, Aannestad Andelin & Corn. But let’s not consider these cases as literally what they are: legal prayers for relief in state courts, relief from persisting, on-and-off, lockdowns; relief from COVID hysteria.

Shhh...quiet. Can you hear that? Listen closely. That’s the sound of backpedaling. Beautiful, isn’t it? The left’s panic is conspicuous as their woke figureheads try to reverse course on the lockdowns. The real unraveling began on Thursday morning when the New York Times ran a piece headlined ‘President of Key Teachers’ Union Shares Plea: “Schools Must Be Open” in Fall’. This ‘plea’ came from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. It likely came as quite a surprise for parents across America. After all, they had been pleading with the AFT’s head honcho to open schools for over a year now. But Weingarten was too busy flying all over the United States on Boutique Air flights to worry about valid concerns from desperate families.

One of the great successes of modern feminism is the public awareness campaigns to recognize sexual harassment in the workplace. Universities have encouraged whistleblowing and anonymous complaints procedures so that women can safely report such targeting. But when women in academia are subject to vile slurs such as ‘TERF’, all bets are off; it is considered reasonable to publicly hound and humiliate those women. Interestingly, the vicious, censorious mob tend not to target the handful of male academics who speak out against the sort of extreme transgender ideology that results in the removal of women’s hard-won sex-based rights. Holly Lawford-Smith is associate professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne (UM), Australia.

Once upon a time, a CRT was a Cathode Ray Tube, that bulky thing that ran old televisions. Those tubes have been replaced by sleek new liquid crystal displays, but the initialism lives again as the hottest thing in totalitarian ideology: Critical Race Theory. CRT is still an idiot box, however. It tells you what it wants and shuts out everything else. But instead of showing you I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke (or Miami Vice and Knight Rider) it shows you that America is a racist monstrosity that inculcates white supremacy at every turn. Don’t try to change the channel, CRT is at every frequency. Sit back and obey. Efforts to enforce the CRT regime just got a signal boost. On April 18, the Department of Education posted its 'Proposed Priorities' for American history and civic education.

When racist graffiti appeared on the walls of a dormitory at Albion College in Michigan, the college heads and student body were outraged. The graffiti, which included racial slurs, anti-Semitic remarks and multiple references to the Ku Klux Klan, prompted college officials to put forward a $1,000 bounty for anyone with information as to the perpetrator. Albion College President Mathew Johnson warned that ‘if they are Albion College students, they will also immediately be subject to the student conduct process — including the potential for suspension or expulsion’. Criminal charges would follow. More than 450 Albion College students and staff members marched across town to boycott the injustices they believed were happening on campus.

As America itself chokes to death on debt, drugs, and deep-fried Oreos, as its military trades war-fighting for wokeness, its culture still spreads across the globe inexorably. In years past, complaints about American culture dominance focused on its music, its movies, its fast food and its hyper-capitalist economics. But America has now adopted a radical new ideology that it is exporting worldwide with vigor. Belgium has Black Lives Matter riots. Romania has church vandalism in the name of progress. And now, Australia has America’s particularly malignant approach to sexual disharmony.

Wheaton College will be removing and replacing a plaque honoring a group of alumni who were murdered by an indigenous tribe during a missionary trip to Ecuador. Why? Because it uses the word 'savage', the school's president announced in an email Wednesday. 'Recently, students, faculty, and staff have expressed concern about language on the plaque that is now recognized as offensive,' president Philip Ryken said in the email. 'Specifically, the word "savage" is regarded as pejorative and has been used historically to dehumanize and mistreat indigenous peoples around the world.

For a thousand years, Western universities were the champions and guardians of reason. Now, they know better. Such is the lesson from the sorry tale of Georgetown University Law Center professor Sandra Sellers, whose career abruptly ceased to exist Thursday for the crime of being able to observe patterns. Of course, Sellers’s remarks aren’t a shocking revelation. They’re common sense. Georgetown proudly maintains an 'Office of Affirmative Action Programs'. What is affirmative action, if not a pledge to admit less-qualified students for identity reasons, even if it means watching them struggle in class? Any poor soul who has hit the rock bottom of applying to law school knows that 'Under-Represented Minority' (URM) status is a boon for law school applications.

Here is a bonus for those who go around saying that the great majority of whites are 'racists' of some deplorable variety or another. You’ve got a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card for inaccuracies, misinterpretations, or any amount of unpleasantness. You don’t have to be right; you just have to be woke. The media will report and gravely acknowledge your grievances, historic or newly found. What target of your righteous indignation is likely to look you hard in the eye and say, 'You don’t know what you’re talking about?' It happens, just not often enough. Which is what gives an ongoing row at the University of Texas, in Austin, its freshness, not to mention its role in showing us all how to take down by several notches the careless accuser, the racial self-promoter.