Brian Johnson (AC/DC) and Mark Knopfler are both from the North of England, Newcastle to be specific. Brian has done a series of interviews for his show and this is an excerpt from his interview with Knopfler, done at the site of the former Spanish City amusement park, the setting for Knopfler's great tune Tunnel of Love, which he says he wrote in response to Springsteen's songs centered on American landmarks. A fun interview which towards the end even has a Spinal Tap moment as the two try to sing a song they heard as kids 60 years ago.
Earlier this month, I wrote two posts on Israel/Gaza and one on the implications of the support on American campuses and elsewhere for Hamas. Rather than do continued posts on those topics I've been adding additional material and doing some editing on an ongoing basis on each post, particularly on the latter one for which I've also changed the title, so I'm going to repost the links.
And it's in the collection of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History! The CorningWare Ceramic Casserole began manufacturing in the 1960s, was discontinued in the early 90s, but brought back in 2009 due to popular demand.
From the mountain top where they keep the most impassioned love songs of the 60s, it's Bernadette by the Four Tops, written by Holland-Dozier-Holland. One of the best Motown lyrics, nested in a stirring arrangement, and powered by the vocal intensity of Levi Stubbs. Released in February 1967, it hit #4 on the charts.
Bernadette, people are searchin' for The kind of love that we possessed Some go on, searchin' their whole life through And never find the love, I've found in you
And when I speak of you, I see envy in other men's eyes And I'm well aware of what's on their minds They pretend to be my friend, when all the time They long to persuade you from my side
They'd give the world and all they own For just one moment we have known
Bernadette, they want you because of the pride that gives But Bernadette, I want you because, I need you to live
Here is the trailer from The Killers, the 1964 film that marked the last movie appearance of Ronald Reagan's career. Directed by Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Shootist (John Wayne's last film)) and also starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and the legendary Norman Fell!
The trailer includes the shocking scene in which Reagan slaps Angie Dickinson. Reagan later said he regretted doing the film and should have retired before making it.
A fantastic original Trailer for Ernest Hemingway’s
A soulful ballad written by Jimmy Cliff in 1969 and covered by many artists since. Featured in the movie The Harder They Come, about a struggling musician in Jamaica, and which helped to popularize reggae music. I made four visits to Jamaica from 1966 through 1969 and have many fond memories. The country was much different and was not yet the tourist mecca it became. My father spent a lot of time there from the mid-60s into the early 70s, both for business and pleasure and knew many people on the island, many of whom I met on my visits. With my dad we took drives all over the island back in a time when we never worried about our safety. We mostly stayed in Montego Bay but on one trip stayed with a family in Kingston. I remember attending a house party with the kids from the family somewhere in Kingston, where I heard music I'd never heard before - the precursor to reggae.
"Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele
reporting was ever corroborated: not the salacious allegations of events
at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, not the allegation of there being a
'well-developed conspiracy of co-operation' between Trump and the
Russians, not the allegations of a secret meeting involving Page and
certain sanctioned Russians (namely, Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin), and
not the allegation of Page serving as Manafort's conduit for
information between the Russians and the Trump campaign. This is true
even after the FBI offered Steele $1 million or more for such
corroboration and after Danchenko was signed up as an FBI CHS
[Confidential Human Source] and paid more than $220,000 for information
on other matters."
"When [the FBI] checked with another U.S.
intelligence agency on matters relating to the Steele reporting, they
received no corroborating information back. As one long-time
counterintelligence expert at that agency told [the Durham
investigation], the Dossier contained unverified allegations from
sub-sources who allegedly provided the information, information that the
government could not obtain despite its vast intelligence resources and
paying millions of dollars for intelligence. Indeed, after the Steele
Dossier was leaked and became public, that expert's reaction was to ask
the FBI, 'You didn't use that, right?'".
From Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaign (the Durham Report), submitted to Merrick B Garland on May 12, 2023 (pages 236-37)
It was all a fantasy, a cleverly designed fantasy, paid for and promoted by the Clinton campaign, masterminded by Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, seized upon by the Intelligence Community, media, and others and converted over time for different uses by Donald Trump's opponents. In an astonishing twist, it turns out that the narrative of Trump connections with the Kremlin was created by those who themselves had multiple connections with Russian intelligence services and oligarchs!
FusionGPS, retained by the Clinton campaign to investigate Trump and Russia was, at the same time, working for a Russian oligarch on repealing Congressionally imposed sanctions. Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative, hired by Fusion to compile the dossier was, at the same time, working for yet another Kremlin connected oligarch (currently under U.S. indictment). Steele's main sub-source for the dossier was a Russian national, Igor Danchenko, of whom the FBI had earlier conducted a counterintelligence investigation because of his connections with Russian intelligence (only to incompetently lose track of him), allegations of which he was never cleared. The source for the notorious alleged incident when, in 2014, Trump supposedly demanded President Obama's suite at the Moscow Ritz Carlton and had a group of prostitutes come to the room and urinate on the bed, was a DC lobbyist doing PR for the Kremlin, meeting regularly with Putin's spokesperson, who was also a long-time Clinton associate; a senior advisor to Hillary in 2008 and Virginia Chairman of the Clinton-Gore Campaigns in 1992 and 1996, along with being former Executive Director of the Democratic Governors Association! Raising the question, who was playing whom in 2016?
It helped that they were dealing with a gullible and conspiratorial minded Donald Trump, around whom they created an actual conspiracy, and aided by candidate and President Trump's reckless rhetoric which played right into that narrative.
There has not been, and now appears there never will be, any personal or
institutional accountability for the combination of deliberate and
negligent actions taken to undermine the campaign of a Presidential
candidate and then to obstruct and impede the normal proceedings of the
Executive Branch after January 20, 2017, using a continued series of
false claims in a conspiracy designed to defraud the American people and manipulate our
election processes. Hey, maybe someone could file some indictments
based on that theory! (1)
I've written a lot about the Russian collusion story and my initial take that there might be something to it based on Trump's own statements and demonstrable ignorance of history and the basics of foreign policy. By the fall of 2017, and with the revelation that the Clinton campaign was behind the Steele Dossier, I decided to spend more time examining the evidence and reading source documents, including the Intelligence Community Assessment, court filings and rulings, the Page-Strzok texts, the Mueller report, the DOJ Inspector General reports, the more than 5,000 pages of House Intelligence Committee witness transcripts suppressed by Adam Schiff for almost a year and a half, and finally the Durham Report.
The Russia Collusion Hoax is the greatest political scandal of my lifetime; a scandal much worse than Watergate with the added bonus that it was as if Watergate happened but the New York Times and Washington Post were taking the side of the Nixon Administration.
In a subsequent post I'll plunge into the details of the Durham Report and the story behind the conspiracy.
Since 2016 there has been a deliberate attempt to confuse two questions. Did the Russians attempt to influence the 2016 elections? Did the Trump campaign collude with the Kremlin on a plan to win the election? As to the former, I have no doubt. It's what they did as the Soviet Union and now do as Russia. As to the latter, it's a definite no. I'm addressing the latter. My take on the former can be found in What Was Putin Up To In 2016? The bottom line is that Putin was about sowing the maximum discord within America and weakening its institutions. With the revelations since 2017 we now know that Clinton, Schiff, the Intelligence Community, the Democrats, the New York Times and Washington Post, were Putin's collaborators in sowing that discord, acting effectively as agents of the Kremlin.
One further point before plunging into the details. Those who still believe in the Russia Collusion fantasy like to say that there was more to it than the Steele Dossier. Actually, with only one exception that's not true. The Dossier covers all the "greatest hits" - Moscow Ritz Carlton, Trump Tower Moscow, Deutsche Bank, Alfa Bank, the Republican Platform on Ukraine, meetings of Trump campaign officials with Russians and more. The only significant event not in the dossier is the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, about which I wrote here. That fiasco was due to the stupidity of Fredo Trump Jr, who lacks the feral instincts and weird charisma of his father. The Clinton Campaign knew how to do it right - when you deal with the Russians you do it through cut-outs.
. . . more to come
-------------------------------------------------
(1) This is a reference to Robert Mueller's disastrous failed prosecution of Russian entities, and Special Counsel ongoing criminal case against Donald Trump, both of which use this theory, a theory that could have been applied to the principals in the Clinton Campaign as well as against the 51 former Intelligence Community officials who signed the letter, coordinated by the Biden Campaign, stating the Hunter Biden laptop incident had "all the hallmarks" of a Russian disinformation operation.
I drove a Plymouth Duster (manufactured from 1969 to 76), passed on down from my dad. Great car. Slant-6 engine lasted forever; too bad the body rusted out so fast! And, yes, it did not explode.
Henry Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays.
Don't know the date but from the years before Henry Aaron's passing in January 2021. Willie is now 92, Sandy turns 88 in December, while Johnny, only 75, is the kid in the group. The Real Home Run King, arguably the greatest catcher in major league history, the most dominant pitcher in baseball until arm problems forced his retirement at age 30, and arguably the greatest all-round player in baseball history.
Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972, Sandy has been a living member longer than any other player since its founding in 1936. Willie was inducted in 1979 and is the oldest living Hall of Fame member. Johnny was elected in 1989 in his first year of eligibility.
Theoretically, Israel has a choice. It can choose to take the course of action it has done in the past in response to rocket attacks and murders by Hamas; target Hamas leadership and supply depots in Gaza in a mostly aerial and artillery campaign limited in time. However, the scale and ferocity of the recent attack make such a strategy no longer viable. Since October 7, Hamas has repeatedly and publicly stated that it will continue to launch attacks and its goal remains to eliminate the Jewish state. It has also bragged that its moderating behavior over the past couple of years was a deliberate deception in order to allow it to carry out its massacre. The other choice is to do what the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is preparing to do. Enter Gaza with ground forces to, the extent possible, eliminate Hamas and its infrastructure. (1)
Doing so will take weeks, if not months. The best analogy to what is about to happen was the retaking of Mosul, Iraq from ISIS in 2016-7, a process that took months, destroyed most of the city, and inflicted thousands of civilian casualties. The assault was undertaken by Iraqi ground forces, supported by American air power and logistics. It was brutal but also remote from active media coverage and received limited attention in the Western press. Secretary of Defense Austin, who participated in the attack on ISIS, visited Israel a few days ago, examined the aftermath of the Hamas attack, and commented that the atrocities committed by Hamas were even worse than those of ISIS. UPDATE: This is a link to an article on the siege of Mosul and a preview of what the IDF is likely to face in Gaza.
In the case of Gaza, a bigger and more difficult urban area than Mosul, the IDF will incur many casualties and, despite efforts to avoid collateral damage, civilians will be killed and injured and there will be occasions when individual IDF soldiers act improperly. The Israeli hostages, mostly women and children, will, with few exceptions, die. The civilian situation will be exacerbated by Hamas interference with those trying to flee and by its use of human shields. And, unlike Mosul, everything will be available via the media, real and fake. It will be long, costly, and horrible but it must be completed.
And there are even bigger questions. Most conflicts move beyond the original control and intentions of the combatants. War is unpredictable; it is uncontrollable. Forecasting the specific course is a fool's errand. In this case, there is a significant chance of a wider war in the Mideast and a small, but real, chance of a global conflict being ignited.
How will Hezbollah, Syria, and the Iranian Guards present in Syria react? All are under the control of Iran, a country that is the main arms supplier to Hamas. If they attack Israel, the IDF will respond in a massive way. How do Iran's allies, Russia and China, respond? How will the U.S. respond? (2)
Will another actor try to take advantage of the chaos. Could North Korea attack South Korea? Could China attempt to retake Taiwan by force? How would the U.S. react? Can it react effectively, given how hollowed out and overstretched our military and our supply systems are?
From Israel I read a number of sources and recommend Times of Israel, a politically centrist publication unlike the Jerusalem Post (right) and H'aaretz (fringe left).
UPDATE: Oct 21 - I came across this article which provides a good explanation of the Israeli strategic, political, and intelligence failures leading up to the Oct 7 attacks. Much of this has been reported in various US and Israeli outlets before, but this piece provides a succinct summary.
------------------------------------------
(1) For those saying Israel has another choice - end the occupation of Gaza and make peace with the Palestinians, those are not real choices. The Israeli occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, when, in the midst of much Israeli opposition, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered several thousand Jewish settlers to evacuate the area, an order carried out using force in some instances. Economic development plans were drawn up for Gaza. In 2006, Hamas won local elections, murdered Palestinian Authority personnel, seized control and there have been no further elections.
The Hamas charter opposes any presence of Jews in Palestine and calls for their deaths. Hamas does not want a two-state solution. There had been hopes by some in Israel that Hamas might as, a practical matter and despite its charter, moderate its demands. It turns out they mean what they say. Hamas is not interested in Peace. Its interest is Death.
To the extent Israel and Egypt have limited access to Gaza, it is in response to terrorist attacks by Hamas. This is a choice made by Hamas, not Israel and Egypt. Since 2005, Gaza has been the largest per capita recipient of foreign aid, including from the U.S, in the world. The hope had been that infrastructure could be improved and significant economic development take place. Hamas has diverted aid to purchase and make arms and build its underground infrastructure. It has chosen to make destruction of Israel its priority to the detriment of the population of Gaza. It's strategy to gain foreign support has to provoke Israel and when Israel responds claim it is "occupied" or an "open air prison", a rhetorical trick. Hamas gains strength by pretending to be oppressed.
During times of peace, Israel provides free electricity and water to Gaza. Over the past four years, the Israeli government has provided economic assistance to Gaza and issued 17,000 work permits for Gazans to enter Israel, all in the hope that economic improvements would deter Hamas. After the recent massacre it has been discovered that some of those issued work permits were Hamas operatives casing Israeli towns and kibbutz in preparation for the slaughter. Israel also provides humanitarian medical assistance, bringing Gaza residents with serious conditions to Israel for treatment.
Among those murdered by Hamas last week were Israeli volunteers for the ambulance service bringing Gazans to Israeli hospitals. The music festival at which 260 were killed and others kidnapped was a peace festival organized by those opposed to current Israeli government policy regarding the Palestinians. At the same time, a kite flying event at the border, organized by a family each year to symbolize their support for Gaza was also attacked. The family (husband, wife, two children) were killed by Hamas.
In 2008, Yahya Sinwar, a member of Hamas, was in an Israeli prison because of his terrorist activities. After becoming ill, Sinwar was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Israeli doctors removed the tumor, saving Sinwar's life. In 2017, Sinwar became the head of Hamas operations in Gaza and oversaw this month's massacre. If Israel is really genocidal, it's really bad at it. By the way, in 1948 there were 800,000 Palestinians. Today, in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza there are 7 million. In 2022, life expectancy in the West Bank and Gaza was 75.4 years. In the U.S. it was 77.3 years. Like I said, Israel seems to be very inept in this genocide business.
Words and phrases like "genocide", "carpet-bombing" and "war crimes" have lost any meaning by overuse and deliberate misuse, much as "racist", "transphobe", "hate speech", and "misinformation" have lost any meaning in America. Israel does have the ability to obliterate Gaza and kill a sizeable percentage of its population, without incurring losses itself. It has chosen not to follow that course of action. Every Israeli soldier dying in Gaza is doing because of Israel's choice to minimize harming Palestinian civilians.
(2) Speaking of which, why do we still have military bases in Iraq and Syria? The U.S. is leaving its forces at the mercy of Iran which can decide if, when, and where it wants to attack them or obtain hostages. I simply do not understand our strategic thinking. Why would we leave the initiative with our enemies?
The reactions to the Hamas slaughter of Israeli civilians (1) on American campuses and by some of the media has surprised and shocked people who wonder why there are so many instances of outright support for Hamas being expressed, and justifying the murders by calling the victims settler colonialists. A number of progressives and many in the Jewish community have expressed shock at the statements supporting those who committed the atrocities. Here's an example from reliable progressive Julia Ioffe, who's written for The Atlantic and many other publications:
Until the last few days, the phenomenon of Western lefties defending barbarism in the name of a desired utopian, egalitarian ideal was a historical abstraction to me.
That is to her credit, but Julia and others should not have been surprised. It is the natural outcome of the ideology preached by many of our leading institutions, not just some small cadre of crazed Leftists. Whether called Woke, Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, Social Justice, Equity, Systemic Racism, DIE (Division, Intolerance & Exclusion), Intersectionality, Anti-Fascism etc, or justifying the murder of Israelis because they are "Zionist settler-colonialists", it all springs from the same set of ideas designed to divide us and deny our common humanity:
Group identity is the most important facet of society. Group, not individual characteristics, are determinate.(1A)
Whites have manipulated the structures and language of our society in order to construct a world in which they can maintain their power and White supremacy. (1B)
Whiteness is Evil. White people are inherently evil. It's in the blood, passed on through the generations. (2)
Whites are Oppressors.
Jews are White. For White Nationalists for whom whiteness is the ultimate good, Jews cannot be White, but for the Equity crowd, for whom whiteness is the ultimate evil, Jews must be White.
The proof is that Jews occupy positions of power and influence substantially above their percentage of the population. (3) In most areas of our society, except athletics, Jews are the most over represented group in the U.S., which is an inequitable result, proving they are part of the White supremacy conspiracy (South and East Asians are quickly moving up in some areas, which is causing problems for them with the Equity crowd). The very success of American Jews condemns them. (4)
The evils of Whiteness include colonialism, the nuclear family, and the sexual binary - all allegedly inventions of 16th, 17th, and 18th century Europeans designed to maintain White Supremacy.
Traditional pillars of liberal thought such as fair play, treating people with respect, treating people with regard to their individual merits, colorblindness in society's operations, due process, equality under the law, rule of law, free speech, and respect for the Constitution are merely tools designed to maintain White Supremacy. They must be rejected. (4A)
Those who are not Oppressors are the Oppressed. The Oppressed cannot be racist; their lived experience must be privileged. The relative power of Oppressed and Oppressor groups should be determined by the principles listed above. Whites and Jews should be at the bottom. (I first noted the implications of this ideology for Jews in a post on October 18, 2020).
Power is all that matters, the pillars of liberal thought must be discarded.
Individual members of Oppressor groups can become Allies of Oppressed Groups, but not in the sense of mutually working together. An Ally in the Equity sense is someone who will accept, without question, instructions from the Oppressed.
This is a conspiracy theory. It has many names but we can just refer to it as Equity (you'll hear some people refer to Critical Race Theory (CRT), or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) which is applied CRT. (4AA)
While anti-semitism lies behind some of the justifications for the
murder of Israelis by Hamas, the reaction is amplified by the underlying
ideology which condemns Whiteness, a term that includes Jews, as evil.
It would be an error to think that the reaction is solely because of
Jews. The same people and groups justifying the actions of Hamas are
those who routinely attack Whiteness and preach about equity. What the Equity crowd has done through its formulations is to normalize antisemitism, reviving it from its discredited and disreputable position in American society. By tying Jews to Whiteness it has bestowed legitimacy on antisemitism, giving it an intellectual foundation that fits comfortably within the reigning academic paradigm. It is no accident that the organizations and academics claiming to advocate for the Oppressed, whether black, hispanic, asian, feminist, queer, or transgender are united in their position on Jews and Israel. The ideology demands it. I refer to "claiming to advocate" because there is evidence that large numbers of those in each of these categories do not agree with the positions being taken so vocally on their behalf by these activist and well-funded organizations.
Update: Nov 12 - This sign, from a recent pro-Hamas demonstration in London, sums it up well:
Here's how this all plays out in American academia as described in this article by
Tabia Lee, a black woman hired in 2021 as the Diversity, Equity, and
Inclusion Director at De Anza College in California. She was under the
mistaken impression that DEI embraced concepts like tolerating
different viewpoints, and ended up being fired two years later. From the article:
In fact, I can safely say that toxic DEI ideology deliberately stokes hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people.
As a black woman, I was the perfect person for the job — on paper.
Yet I made the mistake of trying to create an authentically inclusive
learning environment for everyone, including Jewish students.
Turns out, a toxic form of DEI (which is more accurately called “critical social justice”) demanded I do the opposite.
I was told in no uncertain terms that Jews are “white oppressors” and
our job as faculty and staff members was to “decenter whiteness.”
I was astounded, but I shouldn’t have been.
At its worst, DEI is built on the unshakable belief that the world is
divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.
Jews are categorically placed in the oppressor category, while Israel is branded a “genocidal, settler, colonialist state.”
In this worldview, criticizing Israel and the Jewish people is not only acceptable but praiseworthy.
(Just as it’s OK to attack America and white people.)
If you don’t go after them — or worse, if you defend them — you’re actively abetting racist oppression.
I have never encountered a more hostile environment toward the members of any racial, ethnic or religious group.
This outpouring of antisemitic hatred is the direct result of DEI’s insistence that Jews are oppressors.
What started with rhetorical attacks has morphed into defending and calling for violent attacks.
It’s inevitable for an ideology that demeans an entire group of people while accusing them of perpetrating massive injustice.
When you stoke that kind of division and anger, you unleash fires you can’t control.
Speaking of Diversity, the legal concept originated in Supreme Court Justice Powell's opinion in the 1977 Bakke case. However, going back and rereading Powell's opinion made me realize the original idea has been turned on its head, as Powell's interest was in fostering an intellectual diversity in opinion and thought, the precise opposite of what the Equity crowd believes. 21st century Diversity is used to suppress unapproved opinions and limit discussion. It is trying to create a monoculture. For more read Opinions. And read all the posts in my Your Future series which I started in 2020.
For a further discussion of the relationship between Equity and Jews read this 2021 piece from Pamela Paresky.
I recognized elements of it prior to 2020, but it was only in the insanity of that year, when I began reading more, and as its proponents became more open about their agenda, that I realized how it tied together.
Those well-intentioned people on the left who have been shocked by the events of the past week, need to understand that this is not just about Jews. Although only a relatively small group are participating in open support
of Hamas, the adherents of this creed are throughout all our leading
institutions. The logic they are applying to Israel and Jews is the
same logic they apply to White people in general. Since 2020 there have been numerous liberals, progressives, and socialists who have come to recognize that if the Equity crowd carry the day it spells the end of liberal democracy (here's an article from Bari Weiss in 2020 explaining what's happened - Bari is a progressive run out of the New York Times for insufficient fervor in supporting the new racists). As one observer has noted:
"the heart of the problem is that well-meaning people have not
confronted that fact that these causes have been hijacked by people with
profoundly different moral beliefs than they have, and who use the same
words to mean very different things."
Another observer summed it up well:
DEI is a machine that consumes liberal multiculturalists and outputs racists.
The Equity crowd uses the tools of process liberalism to achieve power
but believe in discarding them once they achieve power; if you spend any time examining it you will realize the underlying ideology is anti-democratic. As President Erdogan of
Turkey once told King Abdullah of Jordan:
Democracy is like a bus. When it gets to my stop, I get off.
These anti-democratic theories govern most of academia. The adherents have gained control of most of the liberal arts departments in our colleges and universities and have prevented those who dissent from obtaining positions. They are backed by most of the administrators.
We've seen the same happen in K-12 education where administrators, schools of education, and teachers unions are fully on board with Equity. In 2020 the New York City teacher's union voted to endorse the entire BLM platform. The resolution included the full language of the BLM plaform which denounced colonialism, the nuclear family, and called for the destruction of Israel. The major national unions; the AFT and NEA have openly endorsed these concepts. In fact, Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, buddy of President Biden, and de facto head of the CDC, has bemoaned the existence of a "privileged Jewish ownership class" which has pulled up the ladder of success behind it. In states and muncipalities dominated by progressives we see new Ethnic Studies curriculum designed to emphasize group identity, and the evils of White "settler-colonials". These curriculum use racial stereotypes and scapegoating, designed to ensure belief in a new racial hierarchy - some races good and some bad - is instilled in our children. This is not "treat each other decently regardless of race, creed, or color" instruction, though it is often portrayed that way to ensure parents don't look at the details. The other tactic employed by the Equity crowd is to manufacture controversy by making false accusations about what their opponents want taught in public schools; read Myth Making for a recent example.
In the university demonstrations we've seen frequent use of the term settler-colonialists to justify the killing of Israeli civilians. This term is used in higher education and also part of the Ethnic Studies and History curriculum in K-12 pushed by progressives. One thing the recent demonstrations have shown is that a term some thought was purely academic is now being used to justify murder. Just remember the next time you are asked to make an Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, that settler-colonialism is ethnic cleansing as practiced by the Left. This is an example (notice the reference to "Zionist settler colonialism"): (4B)
If Israel is an illegitimate nation because of colonialism what does that make the United States? This is teaching children their own country is illegitimate.
Here's Harvard's attempt to decolonize itself and end settler colonialism led by a Latinx Studies Professor no less.
But, wait a minute! Weren't universities created in the Middle Ages by Europeans? Isn't the best way to decolonize to simply close the universities? [Added: After publishing this post I came across this article by Christopher Rufo on Harvard's decolonization project. Turns out the answer to my last question is not to close the universities but make them into zombie institutions carrying the same name but with different substance inside. It also explains where the language used by Harvard's Hamas contingent comes from. You better listen because these people mean what they say.] In one sense, perhaps we can say that decolonization is about bringing the modern university back to its roots. The earliest European universities (Bologna, Paris, Oxford) were founded by the Church around the turn of the 11th/12th centuries to educate and train a new generation of clergy who would go out and impose the new unitary orthodoxy on the population and erase the heretics. In that respect, the New Faith of the 21st century takes us back to the 12th century. The Equity agenda is reactionary in so many ways.
While we're at it, why are we only talking about White settler colonialism? Wasn't Islam imposed by conquest? Didn't the Aztecs and Incas create empires by subjugating indigenous peoples? Didn't African empires conquer other tribes, enslave people and sometimes sell them to Europeans? Foolish you! These non-White people are Oppressed; by definition, only Whites can be settler colonialist. Do you get it yet?
We've seen the creed accepted by many professional associations, and DIE professionals in the corporate world are now implementing its principles.
We see it in the media where the New York Times is one of the leading practitioners. In 2019, its editor announced the paper would be dedicated to creating narratives based on race and gender using the principles of Equity, processing all events through these "lenses". This means Equity's enemies cannot be normalized while Equity proponents of mass murder and repression must be normalized (for examples, read this and this). How many articles has the paper published about the problems of Whiteness? A lot. I just searched Google on "New York Times Whiteness" and came up with 5.6 million results. And, as for Jews, well the Times' problem with Jews and Israel has gone on for quite some time (read this example I wrote about in 2015) but more recently the paper has launched a jihad against Hasidic Jews, based on alleged defects in the education provided to Hasidic children. (5) The Times campaign is illustrative because it combines several elements.
It targets distinctively Jewish looking Jews. They seem odd even to many other Jews.
The created narrative is those greedy Jews (Oppressors) are stealing state education funds from black kids (Oppressed). Well, what else do you expect from privileged Jews? (Let's ignore that the Hasidic community is poorer in general than non-Hasidic Jews).
State support should be reduced and Hasidim schools must be made to conform their instructional programs to state requirements, which include equity. In other words, Hasidic children must be taught their parents are racist White supremacists and they should be ashamed of them and of their religion.
To allow educational flexibility by these schools would make other children feel unsafe, cause harm, and encourage racism. It's why the progressive state must control every aspect of life.
Bigger message - all private schools must be either abolished or under close State control to ensure conformity.
Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.
The Times is careful to not reference the disaster of the New York City school system, with its enormous costs and massive failure to educate black students.
[UPDATE: Oct 18 - We've just seen in real time the dedication of the Times to creating narratives. Desperate to offset sympathy for Jews created by the brutality of Hamas, the paper immediately seized upon claims by Hamas that the Jews destroyed a hospital in Gaza, killing 500, using blaring headlines. Published with the headline was a photo of a destroyed building which was not the hospital! Actually spending a few hours investigating before doing so would have revealed the truth. The incident was caused by an errant missile launched from Gaza as part of a larger barraged fired against Israel, it landed in the hospital parking lot, the hospital was not destroyed (large parts were not even damaged), and while there were casualties it was many fewer than Hamas claimed. (The most recent update is that there were NO deaths of either medical personnel or patients at the hospital and damage was mostly contained in the parking lot). This was in line with Hamas practices from other incidents over the years. They lie. Will this cause a change in the approach of the Times? In 2016 I wrote of the Times editor noted above, Is Dean Baquet Dumb? Well, yes, but the reason the Times won't change its approach is because it is deliberate, not a mistaken - narrative, above all - Dean's no longer the editor but the same ideology rules. Eleven years ago, I wrote about the use of agitprop to propagandize and distort history. The Times has become a master in its use. ]
And it even permeates the Federal government and its bureaucracy. As mentioned in my previous post on Hamas, I applaud President Biden's remarks and stance on Israel and Hamas. According to some reports he has also actively told the State Department to back off its usual pathetic stance regarding Israel's actions. But his administration is riddled with Equity concepts identical to those that inspired the American supporters of Hamas, thought I am not sure if the President fully understands it. As Andrew McCarthy noted at the beginning of the administration;
The Biden administration, including its incoming attorney general who will be enforcing the civil-rights laws, does not want you worrying your pretty little head about equity versus equality. But there is a world of difference. That is why Biden officials are so insistent on supplanting the latter with the former. . . Equity is government oppression, unleashing bureaucrats to impose equal results, which is conceivable only if opportunity is subject to discrimination based on race or other government-favored status.
You can have the Constitution's equality, or you can have Biden's equity. You can't have both.
By Executive Order, Equity concepts, which I believe violate the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act, are being installed in every federal agency, with personnel and positions being added to ensure it happen. The EO even requires that AI is implemented "in a manner that advances equity".
On the day Biden was inaugurated he revoked a Trump EO which banned employee training based on racial stereotypes and scapegoating (see Righteous Acts for details). Though the media portrayed the Trump EO as banning diversity training this was an outright lie. Instead, the Biden Administration has fully endorsed stereotyping and scapegoating training for Federal employees and contractors (for examples of what is being taught read the footnotes to this post).
The Department of Education is fully on board with supporting K-12 and higher education in implementing Equity concepts. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is a strong supporter of Equity. The priority of DOE, the teachers' unions, and education professionals is the indoctrination of our children with Equity concepts. As we know from trends in test scores, learning reading, writing, and math aren't that important. Children only need enough schooling in those areas to be activists advocating for Equity, which merely requires they know enough to recite its creed and make sure they don't learn to think for themselves.
The head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has made it clear she believes the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act do not apply to Whites and most of the lawyers in that Division have been recruited from NGOs which take the same position. DOJ also supports discrimination against Asian Americans in college admissions. And the Justice Department is investigating parents and parent groups opposed to Equity concepts.
We also see indirect federal support for the academic institutions pushing Equity. The attempt to bail out student college loans without seeking any reforms from the higher education institutions which have suckered young adults into taking on massive debt is essentially a subsidy to those institutions which are actively working to instill Equity into the minds of students.
As to the Democratic party, its national politicians either support equity initiatives or remain silently complicit. (6) Dominated in its staffing by the Equity crowd, the Biden administration is the most radical in American history.
Mainstream Jewish groups, most notably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), have also failed to understand the need to attack Equity on broader basis, and to seek real allies, not Equity style Allies, in order to be effective. If they maintain this position it will have dire consequences for us.
Let's look at how Tracy Castro-Gill, Washington Ethnic Studies Now founder, and a leader in the creation of the Seattle Public Schools Ethnic Studies Program, describes how Jews will be treated in the program:
"We would also critically analyze how white Jewish people benefit from systems of oppression that disenfranchise all people of color. I know there is some question about the 'race' of American Jews, however, data show that Jewish Americans benefit from current systems of power and, for the most part, have access to and control of systemic power. For these reasons, Judaism would not be a central topic in an ethnic studies program."
Here's the nonsense she passes off as history in the process:
“[T]he creation of The Federal Housing Administration restricted housing
opportunities to ‘whites only,’ so people who were previously
considered ‘ethnic’ groups, like Jewish Americans, chose to forgo
identification as an ethnic group and instead selected whiteness.”
“Using whiteness instead of racism reminds white people they have an
ethnicity, too, and they’ve lost a piece of their humanity by
perpetuating whiteness. … "
“People of color cannot be racist but they can engage in whiteness. I do
not believe people of color can be racist. Never in history has any
non-white group had the systemic power to oppress whites or any other
group of people.”
These views are not an aberration. This is mainstream Equity thinking, being taught on college campuses and increasingly in the K-12 systems controlled by progressives.
The State of California passed legislation requiring an Ethnic Studies Curriculum for K-12 public schools. Taking the curriculum is a mandatory graduation requirement for California students. State legislators and educators could care less whether students graduate with adequate reading, writing, and math schools but it is essential they know their place in the intersectionality rankings, which of them are the Oppressed and which the Oppressors, and who is tainted with the bad blood of their ancestors. The draft curriculum had terrible stuff in it regarding Jews and Israel. Jewish groups protested and some changes were made so it is now merely bad instead of terrible. However, it was a mistake for Jewish groups to limit their opposition. Jewish groups must oppose the basic principles of Equity as applied to all American citizens, rather than seek special treatment, because failing to do so means Jews will ultimately come under attack, and when it happens they will lack true allies who, by that time, will either be destroyed or alienated from the Jewish community.
I mentioned the ADL earlier because its leaders several years ago decided it was more important to be progressive politically than to represent Jewish Americans. Jonathan Greenblatt, who leads the ADL, has been a disaster. He recently was on MSNBC and rightfully denounced its treatment of Israel and Hamas, but he ignores, or is unwilling to face, the larger problem with the underlying philosophy of Equity, a philosophy that inevitably leads to Jews being considered Oppressors. Instead, in 2020, the ADL embraced BLM, despite its intolerant platform and call for the destruction of Israel, and even changed its definition of racism to meet the requirement of Equity. When, on The View, Whoopie Goldberg made remarks to the effect that the Holocaust was merely a dispute between two groups of Whites and not a matter of racism, people realized that using the new ADL definition she was correct! The ADL is caught in a trap of its own making. Mainstream Jewish organizations need to do some soul-searching. They cannot embrace the concepts of Equity, merely seeking an exemption for the Jewish community. It will not work in the longer term because Equity is inherently hostile to Jews - their ideology dictates it. Jews will only be tolerated if they accept leadership from non-whites and occupy positions of power in accordance with their numerical presence in American society. The ADL and other Jewish organizations need to attack the entire underlying ideology, instead of providing cover for those embracing the ideology. In providing such cover they are simply being used by the Equity crowd, and will be discarded once Equity achieves final victory. The extent of the ADL's delusions can be seen on Greenblatt's October 11 appearance on CNBC when he stated:
"If you have a DEI program and it doesn't include antisemitism, if you're not standing with Jewish students, you're doing it wrong."
How can the President of the ADL say something this stupid? How can he not understand what Equity and DEI are about? Under DEI, Jews are White and Whiteness is Evil. DEI is doing its work in accordance with its ideology. It is Greenblatt who is wrong and he sounds pathetic. What a monumental error for a once-respected institution.
UPDATE, Oct 31: Now, this from Greenblatt:
“It has been an incredibly clarifying and terrifying moment at the same time for many progressive Jews. They’re calling me, tweeting, messaging, expressing shock and sadness that the people they marched with, the causes they marched for, have abandoned them in their hour of need.”
I can understand how well-intentioned supporters of the ADL, who don't have the time to delve deeply into everything, relied upon the ADL to understand and interpret events. When the ADL portrayed BLM and like groups as merely extensions of traditional liberalism and those who opposed them as anti-liberal it is understandable why those supporters accepted it. What I cannot understand is Greenblatt and his team. This was their full-time job; what they were being paid for. As I discovered by looking at the ADL website when the Whoopi Goldberg incident occurred, the ADL was actively promoting BLM even though that organization's own public platform called for the destruction of Israel and of the nuclear family, along with openly opposing the Enlightenment values that allowed the Jews of Europe to escape the ghettos. The ADL actually included in its Hate group listing those who opposed BLM because of its positions on these issues! The ADL changed its definition of racism so that antisemitism was no longer considered racist and that Jews would be considered White, and therefore evil in the eyes of Equity, and only changed it when they were caught out and people realized the implications.
I think what happened is that Greenblatt knew very well what all this was about, generally supported its goals, and figured the ADL could walk the tightrope and carve out some exception for Jews. Now that his donors and members have discovered what Equity really is, Greenblatt is under great pressure to salvage his position. He will do just enough to get this to blow over and once he thinks it safe, will continue on his preferred course of submitting the Jewish community to the will of the Oppressed (this looks like the same tactic being rolled out by President Gay of Harvard). It is for this reason that Greenblatt and anyone associated with him must go. If I am wrong about Greenblatt's motives, it means he is simply an incredibly naive fool and needs to go for that reason. (6A)
Update: Nov 16 - The terrible mistake made by Greenblatt and the ADL was identified by Jacob Siegel several years ago:
It
turns out that once you condone and normalize forms of collective guilt
and racial original sin you can't keep them from spreading. It doesn't
matter how many graduate seminars you hold, how many diversity
consultants you hire, how many 'dear white men' explainers you roll out.
. . . Once you start to traffic in blood myths you can't keep them
quarantined and they will poison your multiethnic democracy.
In 2016, I noted something similar in the post What Would Otter Do?, about Paul Ryan's pathetic comments in the aftermath of Donald Trump's idiotic remarks about Federal District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was hearing a case involving Trump University. Trump claimed that having a "Mexican"judge was a conflict of interest and Curiel would be unfair (Curiel was born in the U.S.; his parents came from Mexico). In the post, I suggested how to deal with this from the perspective of political rhetoric, but noted that, if those advocating for what we now call DEI were correct, then Donald Trump was correct. If racial and ethnic essentialism rules the world, trumping all other possible ways of looking at things, then Curiel, as part of the Oppressed would serve justice by ignoring the "rule of law" and "equal treatment" of parties because those terms are merely tools to maintain white supremacy. This still holds true today. If DEI is correct, wouldn't someone who is white feel compelled to respond on the same basis? As Siegel notes, you can't quarantine blood myths.
By any objective standard, Judge Curiel treated Trump fairly in the litigation, making a number of rulings favoring his side of the case. I wish I had the same confidence in more recent graduates of the American legal academy. In recent years, most law schools (including my alma mater) have fully embraced Equity and seek to instill in students an ethos in which the law should be applied in an Oppressed v Oppressor framework. (6B)
-----------
UPDATE, Oct 30: Another recent example. A few days ago, Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California School of Law at Berkeley, wrote an impassioned piece in which he states:
I am a 70-year-old Jewish man, but never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks . . . On Friday, someone in my school posted on Instagram a picture of me with
the caption, “Erwin Chemerinsky has taken an indefinite sabbatical from
Berkeley Law to join the I.D.F.” Two weeks ago, at a town hall, a
student told me that what would make her feel safe in the law school
would be “to get rid of the Zionists.” I have heard several times that I
have been called “part of a Zionist conspiracy,” which echoes of
antisemitic tropes that have been expressed for centuries.
The Dean goes on to cite several other instances.
My question is why is Chemerinsky so surprised? He's been a law school professor since 1980, a Dean at Berkeley and before that another University of California Law School since 2007. Supposedly an intelligent man. A card-carrying liberal who believes in all the right things. He's not a crazy leftist but is generally supportive of trends in legal education which are all in the direction of Equity. Earlier this year he was caught on video, speaking to a class on how to get around the California Constitutional requirement to avoid discrimination, advising them on how to do "unstated affirmative action" in which the "college or university doesn't tell anybody, doesn't make any public statements", though he admits it is easier to do for faculty hiring than student admissions and then warns the class, "if I'm ever deposed, I'm going to deny I said this to you." Doesn't he understand that, as Berkeley philosopher and gender studies professor Judith Butler said:
Understanding Hamas and Hezbollah as social movements that are on the Global Left is extremely important.
I suspect that for both Greenblatt and Chemerinsky it has been about deliberately avoiding thinking through the implications of Equity and refusing to face the consequences of the social movements they support that have led to this fiasco.
When I see what these individuals and organizations have done, I am reminded of this scene from No Country For Old Men:
--------------------
Jewish organizations and individuals who have fallen into the trap need to step up and clearly reject the divisive and bigoted Equity agenda and embrace the inclusive Equality agenda. Who is better placed to make the case for Equality? The worst action for these organizations is to merely argue for a Jewish exception to Equity, which will backfire, because at the end of the day it will leave Jews with no true allies.
If American Jews fail to understand the danger they are facing from this ideology, we will end up a subservient group, as we were until the 19th century in Europe, and as we always remained in the Muslim world, dependent upon bestowed tolerance revocable at the whim of our superiors. (6C)
Taken on its own terms, Equity is intolerant in the traditional American sense. It rejects freedom of speech and academic freedom, although it has used both concepts to gain power and then attacked the concepts to ensure no dissent is allowed. They have put into practice Frank Herbert's words in Children of Dune:
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles."
The academic mediocrity who recently became President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, just demonstrated this technique in action. Harvard has a terrible free speech record, but Gay just released a statement defending freedom of speech for the university's Hamas supporters. You can be sure she will revert to her usual stance of encouraging speech suppression or staying silent when it's speech she doesn't like.
They have managed to invert words and concepts. They refuse to debate because that would be platforming hate. Hate speech is that which does not agree with the principles of the new racism as expressed in Equity and thus does not deserve to be heard. Fascism is that which does not accept all the concepts of Equity, as is racism. Being anti-Democratic means not accepting all the concepts of Equity. Misinformation is facts and opinions not in conformance with Equity. Not accepting all the concepts of Equity makes the Oppressed feel unsafe and thus is violence and so expressions of opposition must be shut down. Logic, structured thinking, precision, and accuracy are all techniques of White supremacy and should be ignored. (7) Diversity does not mean diversity in thought. Diversity in thought is "harmful" and "misinformation", along with being racist. As one liberal observer has noted:
The woke are not trying to intellectually defeat you with arguments and evidence, they are trying to socially replace you with power plays and social moves.
Critics who complain about the "double standards" at play here are missing the point. From the Equity perspective there are no double standards. If you are in the Oppressor category your views can be denounced or lied about, but similar sounding views if said by the Oppressed are legitimate. It is your identity that controls "truth". The fact that not all people in each group think alike is irrelevant, because they should think alike. It also doesn't matter if some people in an Oppressed group are actually more powerful than some in the Oppressor group. It is the category, not the specifics that count. And here is the really neat part from the Equity perspective - an Oppressed group is always an Oppressed group; an Oppressor group is always an Oppressor group. That's why arguments based upon traditional liberal thought get you nowhere with the Equity Gang.
Equity is un-American. Equity is a repudiation of the founding
principles of the United States. In his 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington spoke
of tolerance as "no longer something bestowed" but rather that which we
mutually owe to each other. Equity rejects Washington's words and
wants us to revert to the medieval concept of bestowed tolerance, with
the Oppressed determining who will be tolerated. Equity takes us backward, not forward.
The extent to which this poisonous doctrine has embedded itself in many of the most powerful institutions of our society is disconcerting. (8) Whether it is still possible to stop is an open question. The opportunity provided by the Equity Gang's open support for Hamas and mass murder does provide an opportunity as it has opened some eyes. But this can only succeed if the whole rotten ideology in which the Hamas supporters were marinated is completely uprooted. We cannot survive as a society if the commanding heights are dominated by those who would overturn the traditional pillars of liberal thought.
Let's return to Harvard President Claudine Gay, one of those on the commanding heights. She's now defending free speech when it comes to the Equity Gang. But she actually doesn't believe in "free speech" as a concept; she is using it as a tactic. Last month, Foundation for Individual Rights & Education (FIRE) rated Harvard as the worst American university on free speech, with the worst score ever achieved by any academic institution during its annual surveys. FIRE advocates and litigates on free speech issues and has represented those on both the left and right (unlike the ACLU they actually are a non-partisan free speech organization). Gay herself is no slouch when it comes to cracking down on dissent. Her hallmark achievement as a Harvard Dean was manipulating the disciplinary process to derail the career of a black economics professors who performed well-regarded research undermining one of the claims of Black Lives Matter. Can't have that at Harvard!
Gay's free speech maneuver is representative of how universities are largely responding to faculty and student open support of Hamas. Administrators who, since 2020, had no problem rolling out public statements on every conceivable U.S. or world action, carefully aligning their opinions with the views of the Equity Gang, have, when it comes to Israel, remained silent, issued statements supporting free speech, or made anodyne statements about "good people on both sides".
UPDATE: Nov 1 - Well, that didn't take long. Gay has appointed a task force to assist Harvard students "doxxed" because of their support for murdering Jews. She's also appointed an advisory board to address antisemitism, a bureaucratic move to make it look like she is doing something, which can go away once this current situation blows over. And think about this - Harvard has invested in creating a huge DEI bureaucracy over the past few years, yet the DEI staff is apparently unable, or, more accurately, unwilling, to address antisemitism. No surprise there. (8A)
My mistake was in "misunderestimating" what was going on in the educational establishment. I thought it was just some crazy kids and wacko faculty. No one in real life could really believe this stuff, I thought. The kids would wise up when they got to the real world. The opposite happened. In retrospect, you can see it in various polling and data analysis that attitudes start to change more broadly between 2011 and 2013. Equity linked terms start appearing widely in the media, social media explodes, and societal trust begins to erode. It was a slow but steady deterioration, that erupted in 2020. It's like the chest-bursting scene in Alien. A powerful predator appears on the scene that cannot be appeased, totally beyond the comprehension of the spaceship crew. In American society the chest-bursting moment came in 2020, when something gestated in academia erupted into public view, driving the remaining dissenters out of academia, then spreading into our wider society in an attempt to purge or silence all non-believers. If I get around to it, I'll do a post compiling the indicator trends starting around 2011 but this did not happen by accident. It was a concerted campaign. As one example, Gallup has conducted polling going back 40 years on how whites and blacks characterize race relations. Those characterizing relations as good or okay had slowly and steadily grown until 2012, when 72% of whites and 67% of blacks characterized it in that way. It then starts to decline and finally plunges. The 2021 figures are 42% for whites and 34% for blacks. Interestingly, when asked about their direct personal experience of interracial relationships people of both races are more positive, but what they keep hearing is that relations are worse because the Equity people want us to be at each other's throats. The advocacy groups and media have taken bizarre and repulsive academic theories and imposed them on the real world. We've been influenced by concepts which make us ignore the underlying reality of our society.
As dissident progressive Zaid Jilani has noted:
The portion of people who view their race as defining them declined a
lot during the 20th century, coinciding with a big decline in implicit
and explicit bias. These folks really looked at that and said we want to
crank it up again?
The answer is evidently YES! But why would we want to become the new Yugoslavia?
Conservative influence on most of these institutions is limited. (8B) To have a chance to win this battle, those liberals who still believe in the liberal principles discussed above, along with Jewish organizations, need to fully understand and face what we are dealing with and join the fight. The Equity Gang has managed to posture this as either supporting them or being a Right Wing Fascist. That is a false choice. This is not about Democrats v Republicans or Progressives v Fascists. It is about whether you support Equality and, if so, are you willing to fight for it; to support the institutions, businesses, politicians, and community groups that believe in Equality, and to vocally oppose those who do not. And, if you are a Democrat who still believes in liberal ideas, are you willing to fight to regain control of your party and the institutions which have fallen under the sway of this odious ideology?
Scott Greenfield, a liberal criminal defense lawyer, has described the task before us:
"It's going to be a lot harder now, after so much of the intellectual infrastructure of our society has been bastardized to placate the woke, to call bullshit and end it. But if we don't put away the guilt and grow some guts, the damage may be unfixable. People may not be guilty for society's historic transgressions, but we will be guilty for the cowardly failure to put an end to it."
If you are one of those older donors with fond memories of your college days and a regular contributor to that institution STOP! And for that matter, stop making any NGO or Foundation contributions unless you determine they have no elements of the Equity Gang agenda. These are likely not the same institutions you remember (see for example the ACLU, Amnesty International, or the Southern Poverty Law Center which today is an actual hate group). They are zombie institutions with the same name but containing completely different values; values that are the very opposite of what you cherish.
You must start with the assumption they are all zombies. If, after investigation, you determine that they are not, then resume. But you need to find out, (1) do they have a DIE department or administrators; (2) do they require diversity statements from all job applicants? (answering a DIE screening statement by stating you believe in treating students equally will disqualify you for consideration at many institutions); (3) what is their record on supporting dissenters (individual and groups) to the dictates of Equity?; (4) how and where does the institution use the word "equity" in its key documents and press releases?; (5) what are their admission practices?; (6) who really runs the academic departments and what is being taught? Many of the same questions can be asked of NGOs and Foundations. It is particularly important to carefully examine what organizations Foundations are supporting.
More broadly, all those who still adhere to the traditional pillars of liberal thought must work together, whatever their other differences may be. Divided we will surely lose.
The most difficult challenge is the asymmetrical nature of the conflict. This is not about two groups which agree on the rules of the game and can conduct a contest within those rules. In this case, only one side still adheres to the traditional rules of liberal process. The other side will only use those rules to achieve power and then discard those rules in order to ensure its power is perpetual and unchallenged. If you continue to play by those rules and the other side doesn't you are playing a losing hand. How do we deal with this?
We will need to change the tools we are willing to use to combat the Equity Gang. In the late 1940s, liberal Democrats organized Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), with the purpose of driving any communist influence out of the party. It was necessary since communists (9) do not believe in the pillars of liberal thought and only use them to gain influence, and the ADA effort succeeded. Equity Gang adherents need to be driven from academic institutions, from embedded bureaucracies, from the Foundation/NGO industrial complex, from every institution. Many institutions will need to be reformed. In states where the Equity Gang is not in control, legislatures and governors must assert control over state-funded educational institutions. If possible, teachers unions need to be disenfranchised and schools of education reformed or closed. (10) No federal or state funding for educational institutions with DEI departments or requirements. Litigation needs to be used aggressively, and life needs to made difficult for cult adherents. Ending, or placing strict limits on the use of, qualified immunity by public employees as a defense against civil lawsuits would encourage lawsuits to be filed against individual teachers and administrators.
Another area are professional associations and credentialing institutions that have been given quasi-governmental authority by states or the federal government. Most of these have been captured by the Equity gang, embracing the New Racism. Their quasi-governmental authorities need to be revoked.
Just describing the scope of what will be required illustrates how difficult the task.
What about free speech, you ask? I admire much of FIRE's work but, because they advocate neutrality on speech, their efforts will ultimately fail since the Equity Gang will use it for protection when needed, and then suppress speech in power. The neutral principles that underlay liberal thought only work when a substantial majority in society accept those principles and are willing to work within that framework. That situation does not exist today. This is not about free speech (though it is useful at times to make that argument), this is about right and wrong, and whether our multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-religious society will have a viable democratic future. It is difficult enough to achieve a democratic and free society given all our differences but we have made progress. As the twitter account The End Times, wrote:
"The curse laid on our politics is of fundamentally intellectual people
who view human society as a problem to be solved, once, finally and for
good and forever and for all places and times, and not as an endless
process of living together as best we can from one day to the next"
I think this an important point. Along with their authoritarian attitude and intolerant principles, the Equity Gang has an astonishing level of intellectual arrogance and hubris. They can justify any horror based on their way of reasoning and still feel good about themselves. We encountered the awful results of that combination during the 20th century.
The Equity Gang seeks to undermine that achievement and impose a uniformity of thought, and government action, inconsistent with everything this country has stood for. Five years ago I would never have proposed this but, having realized the scale of the threat, I believe it is, with all the risks attendant, the only way forward for us.
We have a daunting task but I believe that the American people, when presented clearly with the choice and the right arguments will reject the noxious beliefs of the Equity Gang. We have an example of that in 2020. In California a coalition of academics, public employee unions, NGOs, foundation, and tech oligarchs managed to place on the referendum ballot a proposition to repeal the anti-discrimination provisions of the California constitution (discrimination being a core principle of the Equity Gang). During the campaign, the media overwhelmingly supported the proposition and the Equity Gang outspent the opposition 16-1. Despite this, the proposition lost by double digits. We need to present the American people with these crystallized decision points, instead of allowing the Equity Gang to obscure their agenda. This moment, when the Equity Gang supports mass murder based on religion and race, provides an opportunity to show people the consequences of this vile and immoral ideology, an ideology which denies our common humanity.
Observing the wreckage of 2020, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
The debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a liberal [Equality] or an anti-liberal [Equity]. And of those two options, I have no doubt where I stand. Do you?
And choose a side you must. The anonymous author of the twitter account The End Times (anonymous, as he has explained, since as a young person trying to build a career he runs the risk of losing his livelihood because his views do not align with any particular ideology), observed:
A lot of people keep thinking they’re somehow immune to the breakdown of social order, maybe because they believe the right things, maybe because they work in the right industry, maybe because they have the right friends.
Every last one of them is horribly mistaken.
(1) The massacre included not just Jewish Israelis but Arab Israelis as well, Thai, Filipino, Nepalese and other foreign workers, and American citizens. There is a video taken by Hamas showing two terrorists arguing over who should kill a captured Thai worker. The dispute is resolved by one shooting the worker and the other sawing off his head. One of the purposes in not making distinctions among those killed is to isolate Israel by discouraging other foreign workers from coming there.
(1A) For more on the implications of this worldview here are some excerpts from a recent article by Josh Barro:
Obsession with structural factors has led people on the
identity-obsessed left to discard the idea that people are individual
moral actors with responsibility for their actions. Instead, they rely
on a moral framework that looks solely at a person’s or group’s position
within a hierarchy of oppression, awarding culpability in any conflict
to the person who ranks as less oppressed, regardless of actually
existing evidence about who did what and why.
More broadly, any inconvenient facts must be re-explained in a
way that allows any phenomenon to be shoved back into the framework of
hierarchical oppression.4 Rising violence against Asian Americans? Must be white supremacy, even when the perpetrators are black. Anti-gay attitudes and policies in the Middle East? If they exist at all, it must be due to British colonialism. And the atrocities committed by Hamas and ordinary Gazans against Israeli civilians? Well, apparently they didn’t happen and also they were justifiable because every Israeli — even an Israeli who immigrated there to flee oppression in the Middle East or North Africa, and even an Israeli eight-year-old — is a settler-colonialist and therefore not a civilian.
In
both the globally important case of Hamas and the trivial case of del
Valle, left-wing students and faculty have shown an inability to analyze
a conflict through any frame other than “systems of oppression.” That
is, Hamas is less powerful than Israel, and therefore it cannot be
morally culpable for murdering, raping and beheading Israeli civilians
(or must not have done so at all); and del Valle is a minority woman, so
if she spray painted a white, male professor’s door with a message that
he is a “sex addict,” it must be because she didn’t receive adequate
support from her employer that a white employee would have.
How powerful and pervasive is this framework that treats oppressed
identity as the sole determinant of moral agency, one that produces
clean and clear results every time? It depends where you look. . . It is dominant within the left-wing charitable foundations that
fund and shape the work of left-wing NGOs which, in turn, seek to shape
the work of governments run by left-of-center officeholders. It is
common at the staff level within liberal organizations, including the
offices of Democratic elected officials. And it pervades the burgeoning
DEI bureaucracies inside all kinds of
not-otherwise-especially-ideological organizations.
Update, Nov 4: Here's another example of how it all works together.
Since October 7 we've seen Free Palestine also identified as a transgender, reproductive rights and immigration, anti-capitalism, and people of color issue. The ideology demands alignment on all aspects. Any deviation is punished by expulsion.
(1B) It took me a while to understand what seemed to me the bizarre way of thinking of the Equity Gang. I was used to a world where you could have a discussion about politics, policy, or anything for that matter. The participants might disagree about the relevant facts, their interpretation, or the policies or actions that might derive from those facts. But we all agreed that facts were important. The ideology of Equity rejects that; only power and the language used to achieve power are important, while power should only reside in particular identities. Underlying "facts" are not important. Equity believes that language and the narratives it creates are reality, rather than there being a reality that we use language to describe. It holds that "white" language is merely a construct and by changing the language, reality can be changed, and new historical memories constructed. John Gillis (then a history professor at Rutgers) wrote that memory has "no existence beyond our politics, our social relations and our histories", adding "We
have no alternative but to construct new memories as well as new
identities better suited to the complexities of a post-national era". This is the pure expression of Equity ideology.
By narrative, I don't mean what I used to think of as narrative, as in, for instance, a narrative history. Equity uses narrative in a different way. As described further in the post, in 2019 the then-editor of the NY Times told his staff that going forward they would be devoted to constructing narratives around identity. Everything would be strained through the lenses of identity and narratives created to support it. And since everything is political, and nothing purely personal, he meant everything. And identity would be the only lense since it is the only thing that matters. Equity eliminates the role of the individual, it eliminates the role of ideas and creativity, it eliminates contingency, it eliminates multifactorial causation, it eliminates the reality of human history - people making decisions or taking actions based on partial information, on misunderstandings, struggling to make sense of complex events in a complex world.
The current crisis provides a good example of Equity narrative building. The Equity Gang describes Israeli actions as "genocide". In traditional liberal thought one might respond by pointing to definitions of "genocide" and then evaluating Israeli actions against that. The Equity Gang will simply not respond in kind; they refuse to acknowledge the argument. They will merely keep asserting that Israel is acting in a genocidal manner and if enough people believe the assertion they have won and a new reality created.
(2) About 20 years ago, Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs and Steel, which became a best seller. Diamond is a believer in geographic determinism and the book's thesis is that Western dominance of the world over the past few hundred years was merely geographic happenstance and that if other groups had ended up in the same areas they would have had the same results. The book was well received at the time by progressives because it "proved" that Europeans should not take inordinate pride in their accomplishments because they happened simply by accident of location. However, in recent years, Diamond has come under attack by the Equity Gang because if European dominance is merely a geographic accident and not due to purposeful intent, it undermines that case that Whiteness is evil. Academic theory requires a White supremacist conspiracy, not happenstance.
(3) My parents were liberal Democrats and civil rights advocates. They thought America was a great country. My father was so proud of his father who escaped from Russia, came to America and joined the Army, serving six years and obtaining his US citizenship. My grandfather spoke six languages but insisted only English be spoken in his presence because he was an American. My parents would point out that America had provided a great opportunity for Jews and we had achieved great success. Their words today would be seen as proof by the Equity crowd that they were white supremacists and racists. I wrote about their view of America in What Happened?
(4) An example - in the fall of 2020, the New York Times published a piece describing what it called the most powerful people in America; a list of about 900 designed to show how inequitable our society is. By that time I was looking at some white nationalists and Woke to try and understand better what the hell was going on in my country. I found that both the nationalists and the Woke quickly identified the same thing - Jews made up about 14% of those on the list, though they only constitute 2% of U.S. population. They both went on to note that if the "inequitable" part of the Jewish presence was transferred to Blacks these two groups would have achieved equity.
(4A) - Many academic institutions have adopted DEI screening processes for job applicants. Along with demographic data, applicants must submit DEI statements. The statement "I believe in treating all people fairly and equally" is not considered to be supporting DEI, in fact it results in lower scoring. Applicants must pass the screening process before you can be considered by the hiring committee.
This is from Richard Delgado, one of the leading Critical Race Theory ideologues:
Unlike traditional civil-rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism
and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very
foundation of the liberal order; including equality theory, legal
reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of
constitutional law.
A pithy summary from another academic: Lauren Hall-Lew, Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh:
FYI: 'academic freedom' and 'freedom of expression' are dog-whistles for silencing decolonial, anti-racist, anti-trans, and other progressive voices.
(4AA) - One of the tacticsused by the Equity crowd is to ask opponents to define terms. To avoid this game playing, the socialist writer Freddie de Boer suggests asking, "Please just f *****g tell me what term I am allowed to use for the sweeping social and political changes you demand."
(4B) - Nov 15 - For another example of how this fits together here is the National Council for Teachers of English on how racism and the Palestinian narratives fit together and how the classroom can be used to "combat dehumanization".
This really shouldn't be a surprise, you wouldn't expect English teachers to be focused on teaching English, would you? Here's the agenda for the annual conference of this group which is occurring right now. Some sample sessions:
Learning for Critical Consciousness
"strategies for engaging with BIPOC narratives, histories, and literacies . . . "
Nonfiction Books to Inspire Activism & Advocacy in the Classroom
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
"In this session, we trace the scholarly paths that formed CRP and CSP,
and move toward Emancipatory English Language Arts–the reimagining of
ELA that creates experiences for youth to engage and own literacy
capacities for personal transformation and social change. We call for
pedagogies that sustain the cultural and community histories and create
space to practice critical literacies."
Equitable Teaching Frameworks
"Most teacher education programs hope that PSTs exit their program with
the ability to enact equitable teaching practices. In this session, we
share three key principles that support PSTs in connecting their
university coursework with their future teaching practice, particularly
in contexts that are increasingly more hostile to equity and inclusion." [NOTE: What is meant by this last phrase is how to instill CRT even when opposed by school boards and parents.]
Using Critical Race Theory to Deconstruct the Historical Context in a Short Story
Ungrading and Power Dynamics
Using Critical Practices to Support an Immersive Social Justice Education
Throughout we see the use of a specialized language, the language of Equity. The NCTE is not an exception. Over the past three years, I've looked at a lot of the curriculum in Schools of Education and in teachers association and union conferences. It is immersed in this stuff. And, as explained above, the Equity curriculum leads directly to what we have seen since October 7. They want to convert American schoolchildren into activists who can be easily led. When you see the word "Critical", it means there is one, and only one, interpretative theory allowed in education and children must be educated so that they are unaware there are alternatives and refuse to even engage in discussion if presented with alternatives.
And don't forget to attend the Workshops at the NCTE conference!
This stuff is everywhere in K-12. This is Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of the Los Angeles Teachers Union back in 2021, on school closures and the purpose of education:
“There is no such thing as learning loss,” she responds when asked how
her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the
last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten
through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK
that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They
learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned
critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a
protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”
Other controversial non-COVID initiatives pushed by Cruz and the union
involve calling for the elimination of the LAUSD school police and
revamping curriculum in ways deemed more “culturally relevant,” which
include getting a bigger commitment from the district to fund ethnic
studies.
She goes on to assert, "Education is political".
It should come as no surprise that in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel in 2021, that Myart-Cruz pushed for the union to support the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel. Her effort was finally derailed by a coalition of Jewish and other groups.
Myart-Cruz was recently reelected.
You cannot separate antisemitism from Equity.
(5) I have no opinion on the substance of the allegations, other than to
say I've looked at the data used by the Times in support of its case
and my conclusion is "case not yet proven". I spent much of my business
career analyzing data and had many people make presentations using data
to convince me to spend money, claiming they had solved a problem, or use it to support the case for how
well they were doing. Based on the data presented in the Times
articles, I would have thrown the authors out of my office, and given
them a list of 10-15 methodological questions they needed to answer
before coming back to talk with me.
This is all par for the course by the Times. They've recently rehired a stringer in Gaza, who'd they'd previously fired for praising Hitler. He's already been given a couple of bylines in the paper. I'm sure we can count on him for fair reporting. This from the paper that in 2020 fired an editor for approving an op-ed by a U.S. Senator and also ran Bari Weiss out for platforming occasional voices opposing Equity. It also reminds me of the jaw-dropping article the Times published in 2015 when the Iran Nuclear Deal was being debated in Congress, where it listed those opposing the deal, highlighting whether they were Jewish in yellow (I guess they thought yellow stars would be going a little too far), and showing the percentage of Jewish population in their districts. If you are interested in the details of the Iran Nuclear Deal, and since I appear to be one of the few people who actually read the agreement in full, you can find my coverage here.
(6) There is also a growing problem of antisemitism on the
right, particularly in what is called the alt-right. It is very
disturbing but, as of now, its reach is much more limited than that of
the Equity people with their doctrines of the new racism and who control and
influence so many of our institutions and political structures. However, as pointed out in the section on the ADL, things are apt to get out of hand across the political spectrum because the very nature of Equity creates reactions also based on race essentialism.
As for the GOP, the Trump personality cult is not the answer to any question in America, and the Nikki Haley/Romney/McConnell wing just wants to go back to the days of George W Bush's foreign policy and the Chamber of Commerce's domestic policy and ignore the cultural and educational issues creating the current disaster. [I've more recently seen that major Trump supporters like TPUSA and Candace Owens have openly adopted antisemitic tropes. So far The Donald has remained silent about this development.]
(6A) - Nov. 6 - Unbelievably, Jonathan Greenblatt has decided to dig himself a deeper hole. Today's Wall St Journal publishes a letter from Greenblatt arguing that one of its columnists "mischaracterizes our position and posture toward the Black Lives Matter movement" for the views of "some of its chapters in recent weeks". Actually, it is Greenblatt who is mischaracterizing his own organization's position and posture towards BLM, which it has fully endorsed, even though from the outset the BLM platform and actions were clearly antisemitic, anti-family, and anti-Enlightenment. He really gives his game away when he writes "There are still serious issues of systemic racism in this country". "Systemic racism" is the specific language used by BLM and the Equity Gang. Greenblatt and the ADL continue to embrace the poisonous creed of the Equity Gang. He writes ". . . we must and we will continue to find ways to work with the African-American community". I agree with that sentiment, but why doesn't he use the language of "equal opportunity","improving educational outcomes", "fighting discrimination"? He doesn't because those phrases are forbidden by the Equity Gang. It is time for the ADL Board to step in and tell Greenblatt, "let us take the shovel from your hands".
6(B) Nov 16 - I recently came across an example of the degeneration of the legal academy right here in Arizona. The Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law at Arizona State University recently hired Professor Khaled Beydoun. Here is how the Law School describes Beydoun:
Professor Beydoun is author of the critically acclaimed book American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, co-editor of Islamophobia and the Law – published by University of Cambridge Press, and author of The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. Professor Beydoun's research examines the First Amendment, race, national security, and their intersections.
In addition to his academic and popular writing, Professor Beydoun has
mounted a broad following on social media. He currently has over 1
million followers over a myriad of platforms. In recent years, he has
emerged as a leading voice on Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim identity
on the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) space, holding trainings
at Fortune 100 companies including Apple, Meta, Nike, Google, and many
more.
They are certainly not hiding anything! I examined Beydoun's Twitter feed (he has 295,000 followers). It's an unrelenting stream of Hamas propaganda. Claims we know are completely false are still on the feed with no clarification. I looked at his postings for October 7. There is no mention of the attack on Israel by Hamas. Beydoun tweets begin with concerns about attacks on Gaza by Israel!
And, no surprise, Beydoun was a Soros Open Society Fellow, and is currently Scholar-in-Residence at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, an institution committed to finding ways to censor views that conflict with Equity.
That someone like Khaled Beydoun even has a career in the American legal academy is a disgrace. Why does the ASU law school even need a "scholar" on Islamophobia? Because of DEI, and only because of it. DEI not only justifies it, it is required by the ideology. Opposing it, for any reason, means you are a racist and should not be platformed and removed from your job and educational opportunities.
6(C) Nov. 11 -Watch this Congressional testimony from a Jewish student at Stanford in which she explains why the outbreak of antisemitism should not be surprising based on her high school experience, what is happening at Stanford and why it would be a mistake for Jews to seek inclusion in DEI.
“A lot of people have expressed their shock about what’s happened on college campuses… but I wasn’t shocked. And I want to tell you why.”
Update: Nov 16 - Yesterday, NYU announced it is creating a Center for the Study of Antisemitism thanks to a "seven figure donation" [presumably from a Jewish donor]. Like at Harvard, NYU is moving to contain Jewish reaction at an acceptable level in order to maintain the flow of donor monies. This is simply a diversion of donor funds that could be used elsewhere to effectively combat antisemitism under the delusion that all of this has nothing to do with the broader issues discussed in this post. 21st century American antisemitism can only be defeated if DEI is destroyed. The adoption and promotion by our educational system of Equity concepts have given an academic stamp of approval to DEI. The innocuous words "diversity, equity, and inclusion" contain a poison that will continue to infect the body politic no matter how many Centers for the Study of Antisemitism are established. NYU is one of the most notoriously Woke campuses in America. It's entire curriculum is built around DEI and the NYU administration has fully embraced it. We don't need Centers for Study, we need action, we need a direct confrontation with DEI and a reaffirmation of the American values like Equality. The Jewish community will find allies, real allies not the submissive type of ally envisioned by DEI, if they pursue that course of action. The exception strategy will fail, and once it fails we will find it more difficult to find allies. The NYU and Harvard administrations understand this dynamic and it is why they are encouraging the formation of Centers for Study and Advisory Boards. They are playing the long-term game. Jewish organizations and donors need to do the same.
(7) Think I'm joking? Here are some charts from actual anti-racism training:
These charts were being used by the Smithsonian!
Here's another chart, put together more than 20 years ago and which has become the basis for an entire range of similar charts used in diversity training over the past decade.
Talk about racial stereotyping!
(8) In another perversion of language, those who call themselves Oppressed and powerless, actually are the Oppressors and hold the power in today's America. Their shtick is to always present themselves as victims no matter what.
(8A) - Another example of the games played by the Equity Gang has come to light in the last couple of days. During the last academic year at Stanford Law School, the appearance of a Fifth Circuit federal judge (and conservative) was disrupted by demonstrators organized by the student president of the school's LBGT+ organization, an action supported by the DEI dean. In its aftermath, the law school dean pledged to support free speech and announced that students would have to take a half-day course on free speech (imagine having to teach law students about free speech!). The course never materialized, and the dean was promoted to another role at Stanford. The school just announced the search committee for the new dean. The only student on the committee is the president of the LBGT+ organization! As to faculty on the committee, not only are none of the few conservative professors on it, the traditional free speech liberals also have no representatives. The named faculty are all Equity Gang members who advocate deplatforming anyone who is "hateful" or spreading "misinformation" - two words used to describe anyone who does not adhere to the equity creed. Can't wait to see who's named as the new Dean!
Update: Nov 10 - I've now read President Gay's full announcement and looked into the members of her Antisemitism Advisory Board and can admire, though not approve, of her cleverness. Gay's professional career and her personal ideology are based upon DEI and Equity. Therefore, her task is to do something visible to quiet down the public criticism generated by the open displays of antisemitism on campus and keep Jewish donor money flowing into Harvard, without addressing the underlying causes. Certainly, the members of her Advisory Board are prestigious and she's been careful to salt it with members from the Harvard bureaucracy (Dean of Students, Vice-Chair of the Harvard Board of Overseers) to make sure the Board doesn't rock the boat. There's a professor from the Harvard School of Divinity, which proudly displays an awful DEI statement on its website. Martha Minow, former Dean of Harvard Law School, is a member and she's written articles carefully navigating between Equality and Equity of the "good people on both sides" ilk. Other members are certainly strong on antisemitism, but, even in the best of all worlds, all we will see some cosmetic changes, unless the Board goes rogue. Unless the DEI bureaucracy is dismantled, DEI statements eliminated, and faculty hiring practices changed so the Equity gang can no longer block academics who believe in Equality, nothing will change in the long-term. In fact, things will only get worse as the respite purchased through the cosmetic changes will only give more time for Equity to embed itself deeper in the university, which I believe is President Gay's goal.
I also note that one member of the Advisory Board is on the Board of the ADL and another was recently named as the ADL's Inaugural Rabbinic Fellow. Let's see if they advocate for taking the right steps to extract the ADL from the mess it's gotten itself into.
(8B) Several years ago, when we still lived in Connecticut, I attended a program at the Yale Center for the Study of Antisemitism. The establishment of the Center had not come without controversy and was only approved by Yale on the condition it not hold programs on Muslim Antisemitism since that would be Islamophobic! This particular program featured Ken Stern, formerly of the American Jewish Congress, who was starting an initiative to combat antisemitism in academia. During the Q&A at the end, an audience member asked "as a conservative" what he could do to support Stern's effort. Stern's reply was the best thing he and any other conservatives could do was to "stay out of it". Stern's views was that the campuses were dominated by the liberals and the left, and the involvement of conservatives would only damage efforts by liberals like Stern to combat antisemitism. After the meeting attended I spoke with the acting director of the center who was also an assistant professor at the school. When I asked if antisemitism at Yale was really that bad he told me it was much worse than I could imagine.
(9) By communists I mean actual communists, not socialists. In fact, Norman Thomas, leader of the Socialist Party in the 1930s, was an adamant opponent of the communists because of their opposition to democracy. Michael Harrington, a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the early 1960s, also opposed communists. In yet another example of zombie institutions, today's DSA, of which several Democratic congressional representatives are members, is part of the Equity Gang, opposing core beliefs of Thomas and Harrington. The 21st century DSA is authoritarian.
(10) Ending tenure is not one of the recommended strategies. Most of academia is controlled by the Equity Gang; without other reforms being in place, ending tenure will just facilitate the purging of the remaining dissidents from faculty positions. Be smart on tactics and strategy, think like Soros, not the Koch Brothers.
(11)Nov 7: Tablet just published an article by Bari Weiss, End DEI, which echoes much of what I've written about in this post. The subtitle is "It's not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews - but America itself." The key passage:
The answer is not for the Jewish community to plead its cause before the
intersectional coalition, or beg for a higher ranking in the new ladder
of victimhood. That is a losing strategy—not just for Jewish dignity,
but for the values we hold as Jews and as Americans.
Weiss understands the essential. It is not just tactically wrong to seek an exemption from DEI for the Jewish community, it is morally wrong because, as Bari points out, "Jews, who understand that being made in the image of God bestows
inviolate sanctity on every human life, must not stand by as that
principle, so central to the promise of this country and its hard won
freedoms, is erased."
And on the tactical level, whatever short term accommodation the Equity Gang might appear to make to Jews it cannot, and will not, last. If Jews, the most disproportionately successful group in America, gain exemption, the whole ideological underpinnings of Equity fall apart. The Equity Gang will not allow that to happen. The additional irony is that if Jews seek such an exemption they will be making the argument, "we are not white", to which white nationalists will respond, "see, we were right all along!"
