Social justice

Wednesday

Julia Friedman

What monuments stand to teach Americans about themselves

Why do we raise monuments? Why do we tear them down? These questions hover over MONUMENTS, now on view at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick. The premise is straightforward enough: gather the remains of America’s shattered sculptural conscience – decommissioned Confederate statues and their graffiti-marred plinths – and display them alongside contemporary works on racial topics. This comparison is supposed to reveal something about America’s nature and history, and it certainly does: it shows us just how attached we are to grievance. Both the raising and the destruction of monuments nourishes convictions on either side, ensuring that the argument can never end.

monuments

Monday

Zoe Strimpel

Michelle Obama’s new book about style lacks substance

First lady is a strange role. Even when your husband is the first black president, and you’re a Princeton and Harvard-educated former corporate lawyer, America still projects its most regressive ideas about gender onto you. So I understand that Michelle Obama, like Hillary Clinton before her (skipping Laura Bush, a more classical first lady, along with, more recently, Jill Biden and Melania Trump), might have felt constrained, faced with expectations she could never satisfy. I don’t doubt that being black added enormously to that burden. Yet there is nothing more irritating than the person of Michelle Obama complaining. And she is always complaining.

michelle obama

Tuesday

Michael Young

Is our education system radicalizing young men?

My 11-year-old son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents’ orientation night held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious why young men rage against the larger social system and why they might find a character like Nick Fuentes attractive. The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and decorations that all invoked the various totems of diversity. Black Lives Matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging and basically every sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present.

young men

Tuesday

Spectator Editorial

The fight ahead

If there could ever be a positive that comes out of the horrific terrorist attacks in Israel in October, it’s this — the battle lines have never been clearer. That may seem obvious in the context of Israel versus Hamas, but for Americans, watching the drawing of the fault lines has been extremely clarifying. In the hours that followed the atrocities, the people who reject any sort of nuance in politics wanted to “put into context” the murders of 1,400 Jews — including elderly Holocaust survivors, women and children. The Manhattan chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remains a member, tweeted support of Palestine and its intention of holding a rally in Times Square.

editorial cover

Thursday

Robin Atkins

Is your therapist trying to brainwash you?

Mental health therapists are supposed to be deliberate in making sure that their personal politics don’t get in the way of treating their patients. I was taught during graduate school that separating my “stuff” from my patients’ therapy was essential. After all, their therapy was all about them.   But that has changed in this country — everywhere from college-level classes and professional organizations, to therapy practices both public and private.   Earlier this summer, in a private group of mental health professionals that I administrate, I witnessed how the critical theory ideologues are destroying mental healthcare.

therapy sessions therapist

Monday

Amber Duke

Scoop: how Critical Race Theory is taking over your therapy sessions

Leaked Facebook messages provided exclusively to The Spectator reveal how therapists are using counseling sessions with their patients to push left-wing ideas of race and gender. Approximately half a dozen licensed mental health professionals in a Facebook group in Indiana had in-depth discussions about how to inject systemic racism into sessions with patients who problems or goals were seemingly unrelated to that topic. The therapists also strategized on how to work with patients who were resistant to the idea that the real source of their issues was societal bigotry or that they might be bigoted themselves.

therapy sessions therapist

Wednesday

Dave Seminara

Maryland prioritizes social justice over stopping murders

Baltimore has the highest murder rate in the country, so one would imagine the state’s legislators would be seeking ways to get tough on violent criminals and safeguard the city’s residents. Instead, nine members of the Maryland House of Delegates, all Democrats, have co-sponsored a bill designed to benefit young killers. The deceptively named Youth Accountability and Safety Act (HB 1180) prevents prosecutors in the state from charging anyone under the age of twenty-five with first-degree murder.   Under Maryland law, first-degree murder includes premeditated murder, along with various other types of murders, including those committed while perpetrating arson, rape, burglary, carjacking, kidnapping, escape from a correctional facility, sexual offenses and others.

maryland murders

Monday

Sally Satel

Social-justice shrinks: how identity politics infected therapy

In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.” “We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology. Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.

therapy sessions therapist

Friday

Dave Seminara

Welcome to the woke World Cup

The World Cup has just begun and it’s already shaping up to be the wokest iteration of the world’s grandest sporting event in history. Twelve years ago, corrupt FIFA officials awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a Gulf state of less than three million people and about the size of Connecticut. In the intervening years, most of the criticism of this decision focused on the bribery scandal that engulfed FIFA and claims from human rights groups that some 6,000 migrant laborers died on the job during the frenzied construction of eight stadiums and other buildings for the tournament. Attacks on the host country have broadened in recent days, focusing predominantly on Qatar’s laws criminalizing homosexuality.

Monday

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.

Thursday

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.

chesa boudin

Monday

Teresa Mull

Cancel culture gets its comeuppance

Cancel culture has struck again, but this time its would-be victims aren’t apologizing. The Daily Mail — a publication notorious for being “free” with its own speech — is leading the anti-cancel culture charge this month with a series of stories that point to an encouraging trend. A handful of prominent creatives are standing up to woke bullies and noting the dangers (and impracticalities) of their demands, which essentially amount to writers and entertainers forsaking their imaginative talents by only addressing things they’ve personally experienced. Except they aren’t supposed to be candid about those things, either, as they might offend someone if they’re too honest.

Wednesday

Will Lloyd

Silence isn’t violence

In the evenings, when I want to relax, I watch a Russian named Max build a log cabin. Max is, I suppose, a YouTuber. The log cabin is found on the remote shores of Lake Ladoga, the largest freshwater lake in Europe. The lake was created 40,000 years ago, when a meteorite made landfall between what is now St Petersburg and the Finnish border. Max is a lawyer but his videos are about bushcraft. Years ago he bought a parcel of land near the lake and became a slavic Robinson Crusoe. His dispatches have names like 21 Days Alone in The Northern Wilderness and Two Chainsaw Secrets and Bear-Proofing My Log Cabin. I did not seek Max out. I left YouTube playing and returned to find him on screen, calmly narrating the day he built an overflow valve for his dam.

utopia

Saturday

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

The truth according to social justice

We have reached a point in history where the ideas that sustain the liberalism and modernity at the heart of western civilization are at great risk. The precise nature of this threat is complicated. It arises from at least two overwhelming pressures, one revolutionary and the other reactionary, that are at war over which illiberal direction our societies should be dragged. Far-right populist movements claim to make a last desperate stand for liberalism and democracy against a rising tide of progressivism and globalism. They are increasingly turning toward leadership in dictators and strongmen who can maintain and preserve ‘western’ sovereignty and values.

social justice

Saturday

Andrew Stuttaford

Something woke this way comes

Man’s refusal to accept reality can take entertainingly paradoxical form. One of the more enjoyable is the New Atheists’ crusade (I use the term advisedly) against God — a battle with human nature which, like most battles with human nature, can never be won. God may never have appeared in a burning bush, but, he, she or they came to life in the brains of some ancient hominids, probably as a bug in a new pattern-recognition app. It was a bug with benefits, and as evolution is an opportunist, God has never gone away since. Tara Isabella Burton, who has a doctorate in theology, does not deal with the sources of religious belief in Strange Rites, Instead, she focuses ‘primarily on what a religion does’.

rites

Wednesday

Will Lloyd

The Oscars and the triumph of Social Justice Realism

Today, politics is show business and show business is politics. Last week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new efforts to improve inclusion institutionally and for the Oscars themselves. A task force has been created to come up with new inclusion standards for Oscar eligibility by the end of July. The Academy’s president Dawn Hudson said: ‘The need to address this issue is urgent. To that end, we will amend — and continue to examine — our rules and procedures to ensure that all voices are heard and celebrated.’We have traveled a long way from 2003. Then, when Michael Moore made an overtly political acceptance speech about George W. Bush, he was forced off the stage as a result.

bong joon-ho oscars

Saturday

Daniel McCarthy

The roots of riot

That LEGO set or Louis Vuitton bag you’ve always wanted can be yours free if you just wait for the next black suspect to die in police custody. That’s the lesson so far from the riots in Minneapolis, Portland, Atlanta and elsewhere following the death of George Floyd. Arson and luxury looting are not the most obvious ways of fighting racism or police brutality, but at this point riots are a ritual. ‘Antifa’ means bourgeois bolshevism — college-educated mock revolutionaries performing to a predictable script. This is the most sterile rebellion any country has ever seen. Far from terrifying the establishment, it reflects exactly what is taught in schools and preached over the airwaves and in respectable op-eds.

riot

Thursday

Melissa Chen

The unholy alliance between atheists and evangelicals

The setting was the Gladstone Library, a dramatic, imposing room named after one of Britain’s most cherished politicians, though on closer inspection, its grandeur was somewhat faded. Ornate faïence-tiled columns held up lofty, sculpted ceilings punctuated with chandeliers above mahogany shelves along the room’s perimeter lined with faithful replicas of the 30,000 volumes spanning 17th- to 20th-century political material now safely housed at the University of Bristol. In many ways, this staid, cavernous hall filled with ersatz books at the very heart of the National Liberal Club established by William Gladstone himself is the perfect metaphor for the state of liberalism today.

atheists

Friday

Toby Young

Colleges should be ‘islands of excellence’

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. America’s colleges and universities are in crisis. According to the latest data released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment is down 1.7 percent compared with 2018, following a drop of 1.8 percent the previous year. If you contrast 2019 with 2017, that’s more than half a million fewer students. The brunt of this decline is being felt in New England, the center of America’s higher-education sector. In eastern Massachusetts, eight colleges have either closed or merged in the past four years, while in Vermont three colleges have gone to the wall in 2019 alone. Most experts think things will get a good deal worse.

yale colleges

Monday

Roger Kimball

Will history survive?

The news that the University of Notre Dame, responding to complaints by some students, would ‘shroud’ its 12 134-year-old murals depicting Christopher Columbus was disappointing. It was not surprising, however, to anyone who has been paying attention to the widespread attack on America’s past wherever social justice warriors congregate. Notre Dame may not be particularly friendly to its Catholic heritage, but its president, the Rev. John Jenkins, turned jesuitical when queried about the censorship. He said, apparently without irony, that his decision to cover the murals was not intended to conceal anything, but rather to tell ‘the full story’ of Columbus’s activities.

history