Heather Mac Donald

Decarlos Brown Jr. should never have been on the streets. The man suspected of murdering 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August had been arrested 14 times in almost as many years, charged with armed robbery, shoplifting and property damage. According to his sister, he is a schizophrenic who suffers from paranoid delusions. But he was free to roam in part because of the race hustle. Want to fire an employee? Good luck if that employee is black; such a dismissal would be presumptively racist For decades, pointing out that any action, public or private, had a black target or fell disproportionately on black people was sufficient to discredit that action, regardless of whether it was couched in terms of race or had a racist intent.

Jordan Neely was given a hero’s funeral in Harlem last Friday, eulogized by New York’s most prominent race activists before an audience of the city’s Democratic elite. Neely died on May 1 on a New York City subway car, after being restrained by a Marine veteran who was trying to protect his fellow passengers from Neely’s psychotic outbursts.   Neely has been turned into a symbol of a racist system of law enforcement and of civilian values that exaggerate the threat of mentally ill vagrants to keep minorities down. Three weeks after Neely’s death, on May 21, another homeless man in New York City slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, likely paralyzing her for life, if she even survives.

Racism has become an unfalsifiable proposition. Such is the central take-away from the race industry’s tortured reaction to a brutal police beating in Memphis, Tennessee. Five Memphis officers responded to what was initially reported as a car driving the wrong way down a street. The officers’ tactics during the stop of driver Tyre Nichols, captured on video, were an abomination: while shouting contradictory commands, the officers immediately escalated their use of force without apparent cause. It was Nichols who tried to deescalate the chaos — a responsibility usually put on officers, not on suspects. The cops struggled without coordination to cuff him, while delivering gratuitous kicks, punches to the face and baton strikes.

Since the 1980s, conservatives have warned about the academic left’s “deconstruction” of Western culture. The fetishization of race and sex was shrinking our inheritance to a cartoonish morality play, they alleged. Academic identity politics would not stay put; its foundational conceits would migrate into the world at large. Such warnings had no effect. Corporations, law firms, banks, tech companies, publishers, museums, orchestras and theater troupes now routinely denounce the alleged racial oppression that is said to be endemic to the United States in particular, and to the West more broadly. Conservatives have responded in generalized terms: “The left is dividing us! It is betraying the ideal of judging people by the content of their character!

The outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election will reveal whether the feminized, therapeutic culture of the university has become the dominant force in the American psyche.During the last eight months of coronavirus panic, a remarkable number of Americans have deliberately — one might even say, ecstatically — embraced fear over fact. They have shut their ears to the data, available since March, showing how demographically circumscribed the lethal threat from coronavirus infection is: concentrated among the very elderly and those with multiple and serious preexisting health conditions. A remarkable number of Americans have voluntarily cowered in their homes despite the lack of a scientific basis for doing so.

The coronavirus doomsayers could not even wait until the fall for the apocalyptic announcements of the dreaded second wave. Because the red states recklessly loosened their lockdowns, we are now told, the US is seeing a dangerous spike in coronavirus cases. ‘EXPERTS SKETCH GLOOMY PICTURE OF VIRUS SPREAD: FAUCI TELLS OF “DISTURBING” WAVE, WITH A VACCINE MONTHS AWAY,’ read the front-page lead headline in the New York Times on Wednesday. ‘VIRUS SPREAD AKIN TO “FOREST FIRE”’ read another front page headline in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, quoting Michael Osterholm, one of the media’s favorite public health experts.

Fear is gripping the American public health and media establishments: they are losing control. States are belatedly (and far too tentatively) easing their coronavirus lockdowns, many without having met the absurd CDC benchmarks for doing so. Customers are joyfully returning to previously shuttered restaurants and parks, some even discarding that symbol of subjugation: the outdoor mask. The mainstream media and health experts are not going down without a fight, however; their newfound power over almost the entirety of human life has been too exhilarating to give up now. Their reaction to the current rebellion provides a glimpse of the strategies that will be deployed during the much-hyped 'second wave' of infections this fall in order to shut the economy down again.

It was just a matter of time before the coronavirus was leveraged as a tool of race politics. With the US presidential campaign in suspension, Democratic broadsides against America’s white supremacy have lost a valuable outlet. Now, however, the media, politicians, and race activists have found a new theme: 'Black Americans Bear The Brunt' of COVID-19 deaths, as the New York Times put it.America’s medical personnel have gone overnight from being heroes to being bigots. Three failed presidential contenders — Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, joined by Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Robin Kelly — have asked the CDC and the FDA to investigate doctors’ 'implicit biases'.

Less than 24 hours after California governor Gavin Newsom closed 'non-essential' businesses and ordered Californians to stay inside to avoid spreading the coronavirus, New York governor Andrew Cuomo followed suit. 'This is about saving lives,' Cuomo said during a press conference on Friday. 'If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.' Cuomo’s assertion that saving 'just one life' justifies an economic shutdown raises questions that have not been acknowledged, much less answered, as public officials across the country compete to impose ever more draconian anti-virus measures: Is there any limit to the damage we are willing inflict on the world economy to mitigate the infection?

Conservative pundits and Republican politicians are joining the Democratic outcry against former vice president Joe Biden, accusing him of inappropriately touching females. They are making a serious mistake. Conferring legitimacy on this latest and craziest flare-up of #MeToo hysteria will further weaponize females to take out any man of their choosing, based simply on their feelings. More consequentially, it will make society impossibly fraught and brittle, intolerant of the ordinary messiness of human interactions and unaccepting of generational differences. The crusade against Biden began last week when a left-wing Democratic operative and social justice advocate accused Biden of having inappropriately kissed her in 2014.