Nikole Hannah-Jones

Thursday

Douglas Murray

I like a good hypocrite

I’ve always admired Diane Abbott, one of the most left-wing British MPs, though admittedly only for one thing. Many years ago she campaigned against private schools. As a good socialist this comes as part of the ideological package, and Abbott was more than happy to join in the class war against parents who are in a position to educate their children outside the state system. However, as some readers might remember, when it came to her own school choice Ms. Abbott looked around the local state schools and decided that none of them was good enough for her own progeny. So she sent her son to the City of London School, a private school for boys. Confronted with this hypocrisy, Abbott did the sole thing that I admire her for.

Friday

Cockburn

Please stop taking nudes in the halls of Congress

The so-called hallowed Halls of Congress play host to a plethora of indecent acts every day — but one staffer for Senator Ben Cardin is taking it to new levels.The public Twitter account of the audacious young “twink” is comprised almost solely of him in flagrante delicto with his older “bear” partner. The images and videos are explicit — and conspicuously and deliberately contain the staffer’s face.One pic in particular, shared privately with Cockburn, raised his eyebrow, as it was taken in what certainly appears to be a conference room in the Hart Senate Office Building, where his boss’s office is located.In the photo, the strapping young gentleman is naked but for a jock strap, on on all fours, facing away from the camera.

Monday

David Christopher Kaufman

Being curious about race does not make you racist

When you exist in a mixed-race family like I do — black dad, white Jewish mom, Asian uncle, Latino ex-husband — race is something that’s hard to escape. We talk about our similarities, explore our differences and consider how the experiences of one generation might be similar or different for the next. Race is somehow always on our tongues. But that doesn’t necessarily make my family racist. Nor does it make the royal family racist either.  Back in March 2021 during Oprah Winfrey’s sit-down with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, I was horrified by their now infamous exchange over the alleged concern by unnamed Windsors about the skin color of the Sussexes’ first kid. We all know what supposedly went down.

race

Monday

Marc Oestreich

Four bold but real predictions for public schools this year

Last year’s report card for public schools? A resounding “must do better.” Trans athletes ruined competitive sports, the 1619 Project rewrote American History class and non-gendered bathrooms received their first human litter boxes.  As the final school bells rang on the 2023-23 school year for many Americans, popular opinion of our public schools plummeted. One Gallup poll showed just a quarter of Americans now have either a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in public schooling. That represents a stark downward trend from around 1975 when more than 60 percent were confident in what schools were offering our youngsters. While trust tanked and academics atrophied, spending on education has climbed in direct inverse.

schools

Tuesday

Cockburn

Nikole Hannah-Jones almost goes back to work

Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the "1619 Project”, almost brought herself to lift a finger in defense of affirmative action — almost. She took to Twitter on Thursday to denounce the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action. The anger was not strong enough, though, to make it worth picking up the pen. Hannah-Jones tweeted: “Was going to write an essay about it, but why even bother. (Also, Clarence Thomas is actually irrelevant here. So thanks but no thanks)” The Wall Street Journal’s new editor-in-chief has criticized the work ethic of the paper’s staff, but clearly the New York Times is not much better — Hannah-Jones wrote her last piece for the paper in February 2023, which itself was the first in two years.

europe nikole hannah-jones
reparations
Peter Wood

The poison of reparations

Reparations are a recipe for rancor. Under the guise of settling a grievance, they intensify and often eternalize it. They almost inevitably plant seeds of enmity that last for generations. However large the cost, the victorious side eventually feels it settled too cheap. And the side that humbly paid comes to recognize it paid too dearly and gained nothing more than a pause in the demands. Reparations don’t repair. They turn the original grievance into institutionalized animosity. The topic comes up because today’s doyen of racial resentment, the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, says that monetary reparations are ‘What Is Owed’ to black Americans for centuries of slavery and ‘slavocracy’.

Monday

Cockburn

Nikole Hannah-Jones to join NYT walkout

The New York Times Guild announced on Friday that about 1,000 of its members would walk out if their demands regarding raises and pensions, among other issues, were not addressed by December 8, this coming Thursday. And Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project essayist, has since announced her intention to join the walkout. Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men?... Cockburn is somewhat perplexed, because to participate in a walkout, you would presumably have to be an active employee doing some form of work for the New York Times. Hannah-Jones tweeted on December 3 that, “I will be joining my NYTimesGuild colleagues in walking out if [the New York Times] doesn’t agree to a fair contract by December 8.

nikole hannah-jones

Thursday

Ben Domenech

An errand into the wilderness

Four hundred and two years ago this month, a group of courageous Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic on a ship seasoned from years of service in the English Channel. Their ship was the Mayflower. It bore a people with characteristics — bold, daring, foolish, devout — essential to the founding of a new nation that would become the envy of the world. The year was 1620. Europe was two years into a thirty-year religious war that would raze its cities, starve its citizens, unleash plagues and take kings. They set their backs to the old ways — and bet their lives and their families on America. What started in Plymouth changed the world — and changed it for the better.

pilgrims

Sunday

Casey Chalk

Debunking the grievance industry in our schools

City Journal last month released a survey that asked eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds whether they had been taught six concepts related to critical race theory. These included: “America is a systemically racist country,” “White people have white privilege,” “White people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people," “America is built on stolen land,” “America is a patriarchal society,” and “Gender is an identity choice.” Each of these was answered in the affirmative by a majority of participants, of whom more than 80 percent attended public schools. That’s curious given that public educators and their defenders in corporate media have been claiming for years that CRT is not taught in schools.

mcwhorter
Gilbert T. Sewall

John McWhorter versus the progressive elect

In his timely new book Woke Racism, Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter examines the force of an ascendant political religion that to his mind “has betrayed black America.” “White privilege becomes the original sin that requires perpetual atonement,” McWhorter observes. Woke rebukes white America for its passive, unpardonable complicity within a fundamentally racist system. One is cleansed only through self-mortification. According to McWhorter, a multi-racial Elect thinks of itself as a bearer of exclusive wisdom and empathy. Woke positions itself against the white race, men, Christianity, capitalism and private property, heterosexuality — in other words, against people, institutions, belief systems and worldly activities at the nation’s core.

Friday

Chadwick Moore

A rogues’ gallery of diversity consultants

Last Thursday, the Biden administration launched what its calling a Chief Diversity Officers Executive Council to help implement strategy for diversity, equity, and inclusion training across the federal government. While researching my book, So You’ve Been Sent to Diversity Training: Smiling Through the DEI Apocalypse, I was plagued by the question: what kind of person aspires to become a diversity czar? Unfortunately, no czars would speak to me, perhaps suspecting I may not have their best interests in mind. Instead, I talked to workers from across the economy about their experiences with DEI training on the job. From our conversations, I drew up a taxonomy of the DEI consultant.

dei

Monday

Gilbert T. Sewall

The end of history

Read chronicles of ancient peasant life, or examine photographs taken a century ago. Behold castes, tortures, and endless annals of servitude and uncertain order. Backbreaking work and darkness fill short lives in a cruel world of grandees, subjects, and slaves. The injustices and trials of 21st-century life in this thing we call the US and West pale by comparison. Did this freedom and plenty just happen by accident? Or should we rethink what seemed to be political, economic and social triumphs as crimes against nature, and for good measure reimagine world history as a global casualty of Anglo-European rapacity? History is in trouble. Less-than-progressive staff at historical societies, archives, and libraries have been retired or purged.

Wednesday

Grayson Quay

Woke Twitter wonders: did Anne Frank have white privilege?

Did you spend any time on Twitter last weekend? If not, you missed a good one. Apparently Anne Frank had white privilege. Yes, that Anne Frank. The Jewish girl murdered by Nazis at the age of 15. TMZ reports that it’s “[u]nclear how this toxic discourse first started,” but the gist is that “Jews had the benefit of their skin color to go unnoticed in public, if only temporarily, during that bleak time in history,” while “POC, historically, haven't been able to do so.” Which, of course, explains why Anne Frank spent her days in Amsterdam strolling openly along the canals, playing Cupid for cancer-stricken teens and blasting Justin Bieber’s latest album through her earbuds. Oh wait. A few examples: @Ka1zoku_Qu0d: “yeah Anne Frank had white privilege.

Monday

Peter Wood

Stop reading

Like you, I enjoy reading. I know, of course, because you are reading this. But perhaps you also share my interest in preventing others from reading. In case you are not yet enlisted in the Restricted Literacy Movement, allow me to point out our three basic claims. (Call it RLM, why don’t we: acronyms don’t have to be read, after all.) First, literacy beyond the rudimentary has become unnecessary. Most people can do their jobs and find fulfilling leisure without it. Second, attempting to produce literacy in the unwilling is an expensive, typically futile undertaking. Third, literacy is simply harmful to many who have acquired it. It engenders discontent, self-doubt and destructive impulses.

reading

Saturday

Peter Wood

The reporter who covered up the Ukrainian famine

Now would seem to be an excellent time for the Pulitzer Committee to withdraw the award it bestowed on Walter Duranty in 1932 for his reporting on events in the Soviet Union. I know I am far from the first to call on the Pulitzer Committee to withdraw the award. I know as well that the Pulitzer Committee responded to one such call in 2003 by declaring that it could find no “clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in Duranty’s 1931 reports from the Soviet Union published in the New York Times in 1931. Those thirteen reports on which the original award was based, admits the Pulitzer statement, amount to work that “measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short.” And time has moved on, etc., etc.

walter duranty

Wednesday

Peter Wood

Is Europe a continent? Does it matter? 

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is never at a loss for a tweet, ridiculed Americans who are expressing alarm over the threat to Europe implicit in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. She put down those spoilsports for their referring to Europe as a “continent.”  Quoth Hannah-Jones, under her nom-de-plume Ida Bae Wells: What if I told you Europe is not a continent by definition, but a geopolitical fiction to separate it from Asia and so the alarm about a European, or civilized, or First World nation being invaded is a dog whistle to tell us we should care because they are like us. The triumphant silliness of the author of the 1619 Project always comes down to her desire to find racism at the root of whatever happens.

europe nikole hannah-jones

Wednesday

Peter Wood

Nikole Hannah-Jones schools a teacher

Jen Tafuto, an elementary school teacher in Manchester, Connecticut, posted a two-minute video on Twitter in which she announced her resignation from her position. She explained, ‘After six years as a teacher in Connecticut, I decided to resign from what I thought would be my forever career because I felt more like a political activist than a teacher in my own classroom.’ Her announcement, originally posted by 1776ActionOrg on August 30, quickly drew a lot of attention in the media. Fox News, RealClearPolitics, USA Today, the Daily Caller, a local Hartford station and a great cloud of bloggers too.

nikole hannah-jones

Tuesday

Dominic Green

The rights and wrongs of Nikole Hannah-Jones

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.

nikole hannah-jones

Friday

Cockburn

Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones will see you now

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?

nikole hannah-jones

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds, New York Times edition

Anyone who wants to peek into the engine room of the mainstream media’s megalomania should pay close attention to the Twitter account of the New York Times. You have to act fast, though, because some of the most revelatory tweets soon disappear like dew on a feminist’s jackboot. No, silly, those messages are not suppressed by Twitter.  This is the New York Times, after all, warden of wokeness, prefect of political correctness. The commissars of conformity running Twitter exist to enforce the dispensation smiled upon by the New York Times and other unofficial outposts of Democratic machine, not silence them. But every now and then the Times, like other such tools of The Narrative, fail to observe the important advice offered by Gertrude Stein.

times