Race

The Olympic Games in Tokyo are doomed. Before the opening ceremony, before even the torch is lit, it’s not going to be OK. The games, I’m afraid, just aren’t woke enough. Apologies to Tokyo and Japan — and #StopAsianHate and so on. But for the international left, sport no longer matters unless it can be used to win on Twitter and advance the War for Progress. Professional football can no longer be about the game. It must be a staging ground for raising awareness for racism and police brutality. Classrooms can no longer be about math and reading. They must be a nursery for implanting and implementing critical race theory. Now, the Olympics must be about anthems, swimming caps — and weed.

Cockburn is going to get ahead of things and announce it right now: ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is doomed. Accept it, and the pain will be lessened. Over the weekend, conservatives were piqued (as they almost always are) when the track and field athlete Gwen Berry turned her back on the American flag as the national anthem played. How could she dare sully the integrity of the women’s hammer throw in this manner? Dan Crenshaw says Berry should be booted off the Tokyo Olympic team. Ted Cruz asked why the left ‘hates America’. They should have just let it lie. Instead, the GOP has let Berry’s stunt become a multi-day controversy. And in doing so, they have sealed the anthem’s fate.

Score one for unexpected nominative determinism! All this time, people figured Sheldon Whitehouse’s name must foretell a quixotic attempt at the presidency. Instead, it turns out he just likes sitting in a giant house full of white people. Last Friday, as part of the nation’s Juneteenth ebullience (at least eight dead so far!), some enterprising reporter decided to ask the Rhode Island senator about his membership in the Spouting Rock Beach Association, better known as the Bailey’s Beach club. Whitehouse was asked if the club was still all-white — and if he was still a member. Whitehouse was apparently unprepared for the question, which is fairly inexcusable for a politician who has spent a year seeing others consumed by America’s racial 'reckoning’.

Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act this afternoon, which designates June 19 as a federal holiday. In recent years, the date has been a cause to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. On June 19, 1865, Union Maj. Gen. George Granger assumed command of 2,000 federal troops on the island of Galveston in Texas and transmitted the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to the state's residents, freeing the slaves at the end of the Civil War. But in 2021, June 19 falls on a Saturday. According to the US Code (specifically 5 U.S. Code § 6103), 'Instead of a holiday that occurs on a Saturday, the Friday immediately before is a legal public holiday for...employees whose basic workweek is Monday through Friday.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2021 World edition.  The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return. Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us.

Chris Matthews, the former MSNBC host who was unceremoniously canceled a little over a year ago thanks to a GQ article accusing him of sexual harassment, made his return to cable television this week. During an appearance on his old network, Matthews asserted that he takes 'ownership' of his behavior: 'I took ownership of it — using a nice modern phase — I have took complete ownership. I did not deny it. I lost my show over it. That’s it — so that’s the truth.' Matthews's not-so-triumphant comeback follows in the footsteps of other once-canceled personalities like former NBC News contributor Mark Halperin, who has been appearing as a guest on Newsmax, and comedian Louis CK, who is selling out live shows around the country.

Cockburn was vaguely aware that yesterday, May 31, marked the centenary of one of America’s darker episodes, the ‘Tulsa Race Massacre’ of 1921, when a mob of white residents rioted in Greenwood, Oklahoma, aka the ‘Black Wall Street’. Today, President Biden is in the city, to offer his sympathies to the surviving victims and their descendants. The rampage left an estimated 300 black Tulsans dead, 11,000 homeless and scores of black-owned businesses, school, churches, hospitals and homes in ruins. In the intervening years, the city has done its best to try and pretend the whole thing never happened. There have been no statues or memorials, official commemorations, or public apologies. Until the early 2000s, it wasn’t even in the local history books of Oklahoma schools.

Give some credit to Lori Lightfoot. She’s really good at wrecking things. When America’s most Innsmouth-ian politician took over Chicago in spring 2019 (presumably for lack of any other volunteers), it was hard to imagine screwing up the city worse than it already was. The city was already losing population. It already had the most murders of any US city and a top-30 violent crime rate overall. But Lightfoot rose to the challenge and then some. She inherited a city with 563 murders the year before she took office. In the 365 days between George Floyd’s death and the one-year anniversary of his demise, the city clocked more than 800, including 105 in a single month and 18 in a single day.

The trial of Derek Chauvin continues to generate headlines — weeks after the former Minneapolis police officer’s April 20 conviction of the murder of George Floyd. This week the story is about juror number 52, who appears to have added considerable weight to Chauvin’s argument that his trial was not fair. Among Chauvin’s current motions is one asking the trial judge Peter Cahill to recall the entire jury for interrogation over possible juror misconduct. He may have a case. Brandon Mitchell — juror number 52 — stepped forward to identify himself and make the media rounds. He is a 31-year-old black Minneapolis high school basketball coach.

‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden.’ So said writer and academic Yascha Mounk in the Atlantic in the run-up to last November’s elections. It was a sentiment that echoed across what we might call the respectable anti-woke world: that Trump is to identity politics what kerosene is to a dumpster fire, so a win for the moderate Joe Biden would calm everyone down. As predictions go, it’s right up there with Trump saying the pandemic would be over with by Easter 2020: it’s been proven spectacularly wrong, remarkably quickly. Trump may well have been the perfect foil for the identitarian movement, but the even older, whiter guy who beat him makes an unlikely tribune. Biden’s presidency has done nothing to abate racial paranoia.

The latest target for online mobs is South Carolina’s Republican senator Tim Scott. His 'crime' is apparently being a black conservative who gave a thoughtful televised response to President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress. The mob responded by calling him 'Uncle Tim', a none-too-clever play on the old racial epithet, 'Uncle Tom'. Twitter allowed that hashtag to trend. Scott has endured such insults before. So have all black conservatives.  They shouldn’t have to stand alone in their response. Good people, including those who disagree sharply with conservatives, should stand with them. Slanders like these, left unanswered, degrade us all. Sen. Scott spoke because Republicans chose him to give the party’s official response to President Biden’s address.

Two weeks ago, while speaking to Revd Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, America’s ambassador to the United Nations said ‘When we raise issues of equity and justice at the global scale, we have to approach them with humility. We have to acknowledge that we are an imperfect union – and have been since the beginning — and every day we strive to make ourselves more perfect, and more just.’ She said that she had recently spoken to the UN General Assembly about growing up in the segregated South adding ‘I shared these stories and others to acknowledge, on the international stage, that I have personally experienced one of America’s greatest imperfections.