Racism

Tuesday

Dave Seminara

Why are Democrats so obsessed with the abortion 1 percent?

Amid 40-year-high inflation, dwindling investment portfolios, and 20-year high mortgage rates, the Democratic Party appears most concerned with protecting the abortion rights of rape and incest victims. I live in Florida, and almost every day in recent weeks, I've gotten at least one flyer warning me that one Republican candidate or another wants to “imprison victims of rape.” Last week, I got three different flyers about “extremist Audrey Henson,” a young Republican candidate for the Florida House of Representatives, all concerning her alleged support for criminalizing abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. One featured an image of a book supposedly written by Ms. Henson with the title, “Why I am Pro-Life as a Millennial Woman.

Tuesday

Cockburn

J.D. Vance owns Tim Ryan after Ryan calls him a racist

Cockburn watched with delight last night as Ohio’s Democratic candidate for US Senate, Tim Ryan, served up an absurd accusation against Republican candidate J.D. Vance — only to have Vance spike the allegation in Ryan's face with the force of Kerri Walsh Jennings. It all started when one of the debate moderators, in a blasé, 1960s Firing Line kind of way, asked Ryan for his opinion of the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that powerful Jews are conspiring to replace white Americans with minorities and foreigners. Ryan said he thinks the theory is nonsense, “grounded in some of the most racially divisive writings in the history of the world.

Friday

Casey Chalk

Exposing the logical fallacies of Critical Race Theory

In a late September article for the Washington Post magazine, staff writer DeNeen L. Brown declared that she has “decided to eventually leave America.” Though when or where she will go she “can’t say for sure,” she is “finally ready.” “I want to engage in intellectual debates without having to explain the history of this country’s racism,” she writes. "I want to live in a country where racism is not a constant threat.” There are other things about America that frustrate Brown. It's a country that “seem[s] to be increasingly dangerous for Black people” — an observation that is, in fact, true, though, as data indisputably demonstrates, this stems far more from black-on-black crime than it does from a supposedly “white supremacist” regime.

Thursday

Amber Duke

A volleyball player’s hate crime accusation falls apart

Duke University volleyball player Rachel Richardson claimed that she was the target of racial slurs during a match against Brigham Young University this past weekend — but her story seems to have less evidence than the rape allegations once leveled against members of her school's lacrosse team. It was actually Lesa Pamplin, Richardson's godmother, who first made the accusation on Twitter. She claimed that Richardson was called the N-word "every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench." Richardson later confirmed the alleged incident in her own Twitter statement.

byu duke volleyball rachel richardson

Wednesday

Cockburn

Black Lives Matter’s $40,000 dog

Outspoken Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King has unleashed his Grassroots Law PAC campaign finance disbursements, and it appears he used $40,000 of donor money to buy a dog for his family. The financial disclosures reveal that the “PAC” paid Potrero Performance Dogs in California a total of $40,650 over the course of two months. The Washington Free Beacon reports that a few days after the second and final payment was made, “King welcomed a ‘new member of the King family’: an award-winning mastiff bred by Potrero named Marz.” (King’s Facebook post about the pup is now gone.

Monday

Bridget Phetasy

I apologize for my white baby

I’m here to apologize to my brothers and sisters of color — my white daughter’s pale skin has brought me nothing but shame. I have failed as an ally. For if whiteness is the root cause of systemic racism, then what does that make me for having a white child? How can I extol the virtues of anti-racism and dismantle white supremacy while simultaneously birthing another white person? These two seem incompatible. If I were truly honoring my commitment to decolonizing white spaces, I would have had my tubes tied or had myself euthanized and done the BIPOC community and the planet a favor. I’m such a coward. My therapists will have their work cut out for them this week. “Love is love,” unless you fall in love with a cishet white male.

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Gilbert T. Sewall

The War on Normal

The eagerly anticipated midterm elections, now in a countdown, will no doubt reveal vast electoral dismay and division. Inflation, recession, crime, and border invasions are half of it. The Democratic-inspired War on Normal is the other. However impressive GOP victories might be, the fifty-year-old progressive hegemon will endure. Identity hustles, handouts, lawlessness, and cultural rot won’t disappear after the midterms. Disparate impact, non-binary fantasies, and Supreme Court oppositionists in primal breakdowns will persist. Beyond November, cunning propagandists with opportunities at thought control unprecedented in human history will seek to discredit their adversaries. Militants will intimidate authorities. The commercial republic and its assets are the prize.

guston
Andrew L. Shea

Philip Guston in the padded room

It was once a cliché of modern art that its principal aims included shocking its audience. Aesthetic aggression was the correlative of class warfare. It’s no accident, as the Marxists say, that avant-garde comes from the military lexicon. In painting, Gustave Courbet’s 1866 “L’origine du monde,” a rudely realistic, closely cropped view of an anonymous woman’s nude genitals, is often hailed as an early shot across the bow. Five years later, the artist would lead the Paris Commune in toppling over the Napoleonic Vendôme Column. For pugnacious creatives like Courbet and his descendants, consciousness-raising was always going to be a little bit uncomfortable. One can imagine how easily this gets out of hand.

Wednesday

Steven F. Hayward

The ‘natcons’ are here to stay

Cast your mind back to the 1990s for a moment. The left, dispirited at their generation-long rout at the hands of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and enraged by the ratification of limited-government trends at the hands of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, were looking for a new rallying point. By the end of the decade, the intellectual left had settled upon a new epithet: “neoliberalism.” Although the term was not brand new, it exploded in popularity in left academic journals and soon in left media too. Simply put, “neoliberalism” means “democratic capitalism.

Cockburn

New York City wants to rename monkeypox because racism

Color Cockburn shocked that the medical establishment is once again enforcing political correctness. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recently issued a letter begging the World Health Organization to rename the highly contagious monkeypox virus. Why? They were concerned the word “monkeypox” was offensive to minorities. Cockburn — and Twitter for that matter — know this is a misalignment of priorities. Some names are purely innocent and playing PC police is not the job of the NYC Department of Health. Also why is it that New York authorities hear “monkeypox” and immediately think about black and brown people? Physician, heal thyself! And how far are we supposed to take this?

Thursday

Grayson Quay

The mainline Protestantism clown show

Just when I thought woke, mainline American Protestantism couldn’t descend any further into self-parody, the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America went and surprised me. Here’s a summary, courtesy of Dr. Jordan B. Cooper, a pastor in one of the conservative rump denominations that didn’t join the ELCA: Neurodivergent nonbinary trans pastor is made bishop. This individual then disciplines abusive latinxpastor. But this is unknowingly done on a Hispanic holiday and is thus racist. Woman archbishop rebukes bishop but isn't harsh enough so is then also racist. Wait, what?

Monday

Casey Chalk

AAPI, an incoherent identity

May is Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which if you work for the government or for woke capitalists, you probably already knew. It’s a time, we are told, not only to celebrate the achievements of Asian Americans, but as HR departments and Diversity, Inclusion and Equity offices declare, to help us understand the racism Asian Americans face as “persons of color.” One such example of the many trials and tribulations endured by Asian Americans as objects of micro-aggressive racist behavior is what a 2021 New York Times article referred to as “The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian.’” This apparently occurs when non-Asians misidentify one Asian for another Asian, typically in the workplace.

aapi

Thursday

Roger Kimball

Woke is truly going broke

It looks like Susan Sontag was ahead of her time. Back in 1966, she (in)famously wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” (After her own bout with cancer a few years later she emended that statement, noting that, on reflection, she thought it was unfair — to cancer.) Back then, such statements were “provocative,” a euphemism for outrageously mendacious. But it wasn’t long before lots of white liberals, abetted by sundry black race-hustlers, got in on the game. To accompany its 1993 biennial exhibition, the Whitney Museum of American Art passed out little pins that said, “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White.

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chesa boudin
Gilbert T. Sewall

Chesa Boudin’s soft-on-crime policies will doom him

California’s ballots went out early this month, and the drawn-out mail-in primary election ends on June 7. Turnout looks to be low, as there are no competitive statewide races, and November elections are a lock for the Democratic incumbents. Governor Gavin Newsom has one eye on the camera and the other on the White House. Senator Alex Padilla — appointed last year by Newsom to fill Kamala Harris’s seat — is a reliable placeman for the ruling Democratic junta. The contest that politicos will be watching is an up-or-down recall vote for San Francisco’s district attorney Chesa Boudin. It would be a major upset if he kept his job. He might be deposed in a landslide, as was San Francisco’s zany school board, or lose more narrowly.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Princeton fires professor who opposed ‘anti-racist’ agenda

Princeton University’s Board of Trustees voted to fire tenured classics professor Joshua Katz on Monday — and the reason why has Cockburn adjusting his monocle to look a bit closer at the circumstances. Katz first came under scrutiny in 2018 for a consensual sexual relationship he had with a student at least a decade prior. At the time, he was suspended from his job for a year without pay. Then, new allegations arose that Katz had not been fully honest nor had fully cooperated with the previous investigation. Much to the chagrin of any frat guy looking to him for advice on how to score, Princeton gave him the boot.

joshua katz

Wednesday

Casey Chalk

How ‘defund the police’ hurt the black community

Murders skyrocketed in the United States in both 2020 and 2021, increasing 5 percent over 2020 and 44 percent over 2019, according to an analysis of crime trends released earlier this year by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ). That increase was felt the most in major urban areas, and affected black Americans more than any other demographic. Just don’t tell that to the corporate media. They’re still obsessing over supposedly deadly and racist police. The Washington Post recently featured a front-page story on an African immigrant family whose son was killed by police in Michigan. The angle was obvious: yet another example of how police in America are disproportionately killing blacks. Nor is this piece an anomaly at the Post.

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

The white guilt in your coffee

How do you take your coffee? With cream? Sugar? A splash of white shame? “The unbearable whiteness of coffee” is the click- and race-baiting headline of a Fast Company article that’s making the internet rounds (my innocent online purchase of Chemex coffee filters must have prompted this suggested guilt trip). I really didn’t want my most sacred morning ritual — and bright spot of many afternoons, for that matter — to be added to the list of things I shouldn’t enjoy because it’s racist. So I poured myself a large mug of fortifying Joe — potentially my last — and gripping it tightly, read the dreaded article and did some digging.

coffee

Friday

Michael Warren Davis

The trans debate shows we’re all supremacists

Why did Lia Thomas bother changing his name? According to the gender-studies mavens, it wasn’t strictly necessary. A trans woman doesn’t need a vaginoplasty or breast implants. He doesn’t even need to wear dresses. He doesn’t have to date men, or watch Downton Abbey or merge into traffic without checking his blind spots. Those are all socially constructed ideas of femininity. Trans women don’t have to conform to these sexist, patriarchal norms. Womanhood is a state of mind. The question, of course, is: what kind of state? The LGBT lobby refuses to answer that question. The official line is that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman. If Hugh Jackman came out today and said, “Oi, mate, I’m a sheila,” a sheila he’d be. Fair dinkum.

Wednesday

Casey Chalk

Home is where the racism is

My sophomore year of college, I studied abroad in Ireland. I had pretty high expectations: my mother’s side of the family is almost entirely of Irish descent, and I suppose in some inchoate way I yearned to “go home,” as it were, even though the last of my Irish ancestors had arrived on American soil more than 150 years ago. Still, the Emerald Isle seemed to call to me (admittedly I was listening to a lot of The Chieftains). Boy, was I disappointed. It wasn’t that the Irish aren’t welcoming (they are), or that the adult beverages weren't delicious (they are). It was that Ireland was definitely not my home — not culturally, culinarily, or familialy.

racism

Friday

Casey Chalk

How to resist the age of grievance

At a recent session of the Virginia House of Delegates, Don Scott, a Democrat, blasted Republicans for employing “the old southern strategy to use race as a wedge issue.” He was referring to Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s repudiation of Critical Race Theory in public school curricula during his recent gubernatorial campaign. Scott further warned Republicans not to use racially charged politics to “rally your base.” That’s a bit rich, given how much energy liberals expend accusing conservatives of racism to rally the base during, oh I don’t know, every election cycle. “The Republicans aim to reinstitute Jim Crow; the Republicans are stoking white supremacist movements; the Republicans want to whitewash American history.

youngkin grievance