A few years ago there was a study of Harvard students comparing their knowledge of American history when they were entering freshmen to when they were university graduates. The results were that they were less knowledgeable after four years at Harvard. Not actually surprising.
I was reminded of this reading a New York Times puff piece on NPR President Katherine Maher, published on December 30. A Times reader would finish the piece not having any idea why Maher is controversial and a less knowledgeable and informed citizen than before reading the piece,
Before getting to the Times article, let's review what we knew about Maher before the article was published.
Katherine Maher is the daughter of a Goldman Sachs executive and grew up in the very wealthy suburban town of Wilton, Connecticut. I'm from Wilton's significantly less wealthy neighboring town of Norwalk, so know Wilton quite well.
Armed with a university degree is in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from NYU, Maher did post-graduate work in Cairo and Damascus. Academic Middle Eastern studies was a field was initially funded by the Federal government back in the 1950s in the expectation that it would train experts in that area of the world who could help advise the government. The 9-11 postmortems found that these programs were abject failures in providing graduates who could make accurate assessments of what was happening in the Middle East. Instead, the programs had been taken over by academics hostile to the West and instead used to promote the theory that later became known as settler-colonialism, in which the West was responsible for everything bad that happened in the Islamic world. This was the setting in which Maher was marinated (it's only gotten worse since then).
Post-graduate employment followed with UNICEF, the World Bank, and the National Democratic Institute. In 2014 she joined the Wikimedia Foundation, initially as Chief Communications Officer and then as Executive Director, remaining with the organization until 2021. Along the way Maher also became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council. During the Biden Administration she joined the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. She has all the right credentials.
The Wikimedia Foundation sets the strategy for Wikipedia and, under Maher's direction, it made a significant change in its approach. Even by 2014, Wikipedia was beginning to have credibility and reliability issues due to its editing process and susceptibility to manipulation. However, its stated purpose was still to be an accurate reflection of current knowledge. That was to change with Maher.
According to an article in the August 2024 edition of Pirate Wires, "How the Regime Captured Wikipedia, the proposed changes generated controversy within Wikimedia:
"The controversy was ultimately about who would control the site
containing “all the world’s knowledge,” and hundreds of millions in
Wikipedia funding. Would the site’s community of decentralized,
uncompensated editors continue to govern it according to its principles
of openness, transparency, and neutrality, or would a handful of highly
paid NGO technocrats re-orient Wikipedia toward endorsing and promoting
the ever-shifting currents of the Western elite social justice regime? "
"The Movement Strategy, also known as Wikimedia 2030, was indeed a
massive undertaking. Launched in 2017 by then-WMF executive director and
CEO Katherine Maher, the strategy would be a complete re-imagining of WMF and Wikipedia’s
mission. Where Wikipedia had been built on the principle of
decentralized knowledge, the Movement Strategy would veer into the
hyper-centralized space of top-down social justice activism and
advocacy."
"As the driving force behind the Movement Strategy, Maher would directly
endorse this view in comments revealed after she took the top job at NPR
this year, in which she said she opposed the “free and open” ethos of
Wikipedia because it was rooted in “white male Westernized construct” that precipitated the “exclusion of communities and languages.”
Further, Maher played a critical role in establishing the Wiki Endowment:
"The central aspect of WMF’s new financial strategy was the establishment
of the Wikimedia Endowment, a pool of money that, as its name suggests,
is designed to fund the organization essentially “in perpetuity.”
Distinct from Wikimedia's budget, which funds Wikipedia's day-to-day
operations, the Endowment was set up in 2016 as a donor-advised fund at
leftist mega-fund, Tides Foundation, an $800 million fund that’s part of
the wider Tides Center, a network of such funds “that partners with
social change leaders and organizations to…accelerate social justice.”
The Tides Foundation’s IRS 990 filing lists its mission as “Grantmaking through funds to accelerate the pace of social change.”
When you use Wikipedia you will often see a page asking for donations to support Wikipedia. However, this is misleading because Wikipedia has more than enough funding to continue its current operations. Instead, your donations go to the Wikimedia Endowment which funnels money to left-wing causes.
In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive
ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very
active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through
conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions
related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.
In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight
against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see
is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech
protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress
“bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real
market economy around it.”
Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support
efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms
of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions,
could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.
The City Journal goes on to note:
On the surface, this appears to be a contradiction. Maher backed
dissent abroad but suppressed it at home. She not only censored content
at Wikipedia but also supported deplatforming then-President Donald
Trump, who opposed the domestic revolution following the death of George
Floyd. “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists,” Maher wrote
on Twitter, after Trump was effectively removed from social media.
“Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”
This is not hypocrisy; it is the politics of friend and enemy. For Maher, “democracy” means the advancement of left-wing race and gender ideology all over the world. This requires
elevating progressive dissidents overseas, while suppressing
conservative dissidents at home. For partisans of Color Revolution,
dissent and censorship are not in contradiction—they are two sides of
the same coin.
This misuse of "democracy" is common across leftists in the countries of the West. According to EU bureaucrats, voting the way they want is supporting democracy but voting against the desired policies of bureaucrats is anti-democracy. Any opposition to progressive policies is anti-democracy.
What Maher did to Wikipedia, and here statements about why or, as she would say, "intentionality", demonstrate why she is such a danger to a free society. Wikipedia has always had its problems, but under Maher it deteriorated into a propaganda machine that is now integrated into larger communication networks. While Wikipedia is still useful if you want to find out the release date of Reach Out (I'll Be There) by The Four Tops or the birth and death dates for a person, it is useless when it comes to any topic that progressive ideology believes is political. The network designed for spreading Wikipedia's agitprop includes Google, where Wikipedia results show at the top of every search (Google also poured more than $200 million into the Wikipedia Foundation), and many of the AI models include Wikipedia as one of the sources used for their training. The result is Google searches and AI incorporate deliberately misleading information approved by Maher and people who think like her.
It's also why total control of social and traditional media is so important to people like Maher and why progressives became so hysterical when Elon Musk took control of Twitter. That progressives still controlled most social and traditional media was not the point. Any outlet they could not control in order to suppress dissent is considered a danger to democracy. In the case of Twitter pre-Musk, people were banned or suspended for misgendering, accounts were permanently suspended for merely posting Department of Justice crime statistics without making any comment, or accounts suppressed if then-President Trump retweeted them. I saw all of this happen; these weren't nutcase conspiracy or hardcore MAGA accounts, they just happened to not be progressives, or were progressives who dissented from orthodoxy on a particular topic.
In Maher's worldview everyone should be like her in following the strict progressive line, not deviating one inch. In 2016 she criticized Hillary Clinton for using the phrase "boy and girl" because “it’s
erasing language for non-binary people”, and it's no surprise that in 2020 she tweeted that "America is addicted to white supremacy".
So, in 2024 when Maher was named as CEO of National Public Radio, there were legitimate questions about her lack of commitment to free speech and her express agenda to privilege left-wing beliefs; Particularly germane questions for an organization receiving significant taxpayer funding when she so publicly disdained the views of many Americans.
But according to the Times you would be mistaken if there were legitimate questions to be asked of Maher. Let's look at how the story starts:
NPR’s C.E.O. Was a Right-Wing Target. Then the Real Trouble Started.
Katherine
Maher has taken an unyielding approach to NPR’s biggest battles — which
has sometimes put her at odds with her colleagues in public media.
A flattering photograph depicting a resolute Maher notes that she "has dealt with plenty of criticism this year. Did she consider quitting? "I really don't like bullies," she said.
The third sentence of the article tells readers, "Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts on social media and tried to get her fired."
Remember that when reading the New York Times what you need to focus on is not the substance of a story. The key questions are why is the Times publishing this story at this particular time and what is the narrative it is trying to create?
For the narrative part look at the beginning; title and sub-title, photo, and opening sentences. The narrative here is Katherine Maher is one of the "good guys" since she was a Right-Wing Target (which in Timespeak is equivalent of being a Nazi). She's "unyielding", a fact reinforced by the photo and legend telling the reader those attacking her are "bullies". And just to make sure there is no doubt, we learn "Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts". Ah, those Nazi dredgers! And, since they are old posts of what possible relevance could they be?
All this to set up the closing part of the narrative - that some of those who should be her allies in public media may not be as steadfast as they should be in supporting here because of that nasty right-wing intimidation. They need to strengthen their backbones to deal with those Nazis!
Here are some other excerpts with my comments. The entire article is linked at the start of this post.
She
has become a target not just of NPR’s traditional opponents on the
political right but of some within the tightknit world of public
broadcasting, who wanted her to take a more pragmatic tack. At one
point, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
one of NPR’s biggest supporters, told Ms. Maher she should quit. Her predecessors were accused of bringing a tote bag to a knife fight. “The
government targeted public funding to punish specific editorial
decisions it disagreed with,” she said in a recent interview with The
New York Times. “That’s not a funding dispute dressed up as a
constitutional case; that’s textbook First Amendment retaliation." Ms.
Maher’s stance brought support pouring in for her organization. NPR
emerged from the biggest political battle in its history on firm
footing, generating record donations.
This is a warning to those in public broadcasting to toughen up. Maher is a role model. It also casts her as a champion of the First Amendment. The First Amendment argument is absurd. Maher would never stand up for the First Amendment rights of someone she disagreed with and arguing that a decision by the government not to fund an organization dedicated to bias and being one-sided has anything to do with the First Amendment is simply nonsense. It is Maher's sense of entitlement that makes her demand that I fund NPR. She is compelling my support of her speech, while wanting to suppress mine even though I'm not seeking federal funding.
As we've seen Maher was singing a different tune before being appointed to NPR. So was the Times. Remember that after the 2022 midterms, when it was looking like Biden would be reelected and the Democrats could also control the House and Senate, the Times began running news stories and op-ed pieces about how "we" needed to rethink the First Amendment. If the Democrats had achieved a trifecta and controlled Congress the crackdown on speech would have been brutal. The Progressive view of speech and freedom is expressed in this quote from Frank Herbert's 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 Times then tells us about the crisis faced by Maher as her critics "seized the moment".
In early April 2024, Ms. Maher and NPR faced
an unexpected crisis. Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, published an
essay in The Free Press accusing the network of a liberal bias in its
news coverage.
The
crisis deepened a week later. Chris Rufo, the conservative activist who
ran social media campaigns against figures including Claudine Gay, the
former Harvard president, circulated years-old social media posts from
Ms. Maher that criticized Donald J. Trump and supported liberal causes.
(“Also, Donald Trump is a racist,” read one.)
NPR’s
critics seized the moment. In early May, Republicans in Congress called
on Ms. Maher to testify on allegations of bias. Compounding the
situation: Some at NPR were surprised by Ms. Maher’s social media posts;
she told The Times that the board hadn’t asked her about them before
she was hired.
The hearing was predictably divided along partisan lines. The
Republicans, who argued that NPR and PBS were outmoded, a waste of
taxpayer money or liberally biased, interrogated Ms. Kerger and Ms.
Maher, asking the NPR chief executive about her social media posts and
the network’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
There are several things to note about this section. The Uri Berliner piece created an uproar. Berliner was a long time NPR employee and, by 20th century standards, a card-carrying liberal who voted against Trump. You can read his article here. To describe it as "accusing the network of a liberal bias" is a misleading characterization; that's not what Berliner is complaining about. He writes;
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my
tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy,
but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years,
however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its
coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a
very small segment of the U.S. population.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That
wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a
niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s
devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how
they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about
instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate
apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of
Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.
He goes into some detail using three examples, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and COVID coverage, of the bias and distortion in NPR and how it failed to admit mistakes.(1)
Berliner also tells us, "I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay." Of course it would not be corrected by NPR because, at the time, the Democratic priority was to damage Governor DeSantis, so anything that aided in that goal was fine. It is also consistent with traditional media practice in referring to Republican bills by the name Democrats give it, while referring to Democrat bills by the name preferred by Democrats.
Finally, he writes of the madness that descended upon NPR in the wake of George Floyd and transgender mania. He never uses the word, but what Berliner describes is a corrupt organization.
Berliner was suspended without pay for writing the article and resigned several days later.
The Times article is very careful not to be too specific about the allegations made by those nasty right wingers. The author and his editors want the reader to understand who the bad guys and good guys are and not get too caught up in the details. The piece also states that Maher was criticized for supporting "liberal causes", but Maher is not a liberal, she's a progressive authoritarian. A liberal supports free speech, freedom of conscience, due process, equal protection under the laws, fairplay, treating people equally. 21st century progressives reject all of this.
The only two specific "right-wing" claims mentioned in the article are Maher's characterization of Donald Trump and NPR's coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop. NPR refused to cover the story at all, with its managing editor for news writing “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really
stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on
stories that are just pure distractions.” As we now know, the FBI validated the contents of the laptop in 2019 and the 51 Intelligence Community former officials who denounced it were very clever in stating that it had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation", allowing them to later claim that they never said it was disinformation. The truth is that NPR refused to cover the story because of the potential damage to the Biden campaign.
Near the end of the Times story we encounter this passage:
On
a call this spring, Patricia Harrison, the chief executive of the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, asked Ms. Maher whether she would
be willing to say anything to members of Congress or the press to
acknowledge concerns from listeners who viewed NPR’s reporting as
biased, according to two people familiar with her remarks.
Ms.
Maher rebuffed that suggestion. She didn’t believe that NPR was biased,
and she thought saying so would undermine the organization and fail to
placate those who were critical of the network, according to a person
familiar with her thinking.
Maher is one of those folks who talks about "her truth" and "your truth" and how we all have truths. But, in truth, she believes her truth is the real truth and if you don't agree with it you are wrong, so she is not biased and you have no right to speech. Katherine Maher and the New York Times are blights upon this nation. They are at least as great a threat to our future as creatures like Tucker Carlson.
--------------------------------
(1) Berliner notes how on Russia, "we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff. Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations,
Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking
points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports".
If you've read my Russia Collusion posts, you know that Adam Schiff lied about everything. I've read the same testimony he heard and then lied about. None of the "journalists" at NPR had the slightest interest in comparing documentary evidence with Schiff's claims because it would have undermined their desired narrative.
The entire New York Times Editorial Board published an opinion piece on anti-semitism in the June 14 issue of the paper.
It is welcome to see the Times address this issue, but how the Board chose to do so illustrates the shortcomings of its blinkered worldview and why, at the end of day, it amounts to a bunch of meaningless words because of the Board's refusal to even mention the underlying causes in today's America, including the role of the Times in fomenting that hate among its heavily progressive readership.
I also see that the structure of the editorial which, as always with the Times, starts with an attack on Trump, is done in the hope that their left-leaning readers will pay attention to what follows.
For these reasons, the Board uses tortured language and phrasing throughout.
My interests are not in defending either party. I've voted in every presidential election since 1972, but in 2024 left the presidential line blank because both Trump and today's Democratic Party were unacceptable to me, albeit for very different reasons. A former long time reader, I've written about my own discouragement with the Times here.
Below is the editorial in full, with my comments entered in brackets and boldface.
Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses.
The list of horrific antisemitic attacks in the United States keeps growing. Two weeks ago in Boulder, Colo., a man set fire to peaceful marchers who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages. Less than two weeks earlier, a young couple was shot to death while leaving an event at the Jewish Museum in Washington. The previous month,
an intruder scaled a fence outside the official residence of Gov. Josh
Shapiro of Pennsylvania and threw Molotov cocktails while Mr. Shapiro,
his wife and children were asleep inside. In October, a 39-year-old Chicago resident was shot from behind while walking to synagogue.
[Important to note that all of these incidents were by supporters of Hamas, who are also linked to the Left, a fact admitted by the Times later in this article.]
The
United States is experiencing its worst surge of anti-Jewish hate in
many decades. Antisemitic hate crimes more than doubled between 2021 and
2023, according to the F.B.I., and appear to have risen further in
2024. On a per capita basis, Jews face far greater risks of being
victims of hate crimes than members of any other demographic groups.
American Jews, who make up about 2 percent of the country’s population, are well aware of the threat.
Some feel compelled to hide signs of their faith. Synagogues have hired
more armed guards who greet worshipers, and Jewish schools have hired
guards to protect children and teachers. A small industry of digital
specialists combs social media looking for signs of potential attacks,
and these specialists have helped law enforcement prevent several.
[The Jewish population of the U.S. was at its peak in 1940 when Jews constituted about 3.7% of the nation's population. Relative to America's overall population, the Jewish population has been shrinking which has societal and political consequences. Even with this decrease in relative population, demographic changes since WW2 have resulted in 80-85% of the world's Jews living in just two countries, the U.S. and Israel, with about equal populations. The next three largest populations, about 400,000 each in the UK, Canada, and France, constitute about 7-8% of the world's Jews. The first two countries are governed by political parties hostile to Jews. In France, the governing party is not hostile but although Jews constitute less than 1% of the population they are the objects of more than 60% of hate crimes. And all three countries have large and rapidly growing Muslim populations, which the governing parties are desperate to placate. It looks like the Jewish population will become even more concentrated in Israel and the U.S. Overall, since the Holocaust, the global Jewish population has, at best, been restored to its pre-1940 numbers even as the world's population has more than tripled.]
The
response from much of the rest of American society has been
insufficient. The upswing in antisemitism deserves outright
condemnation. It has already killed people and maimed others, including
an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was burned in Boulder. And history
offers a grim lesson: An increase in antisemitism often accompanies a
rise in other hateful violence and human rights violations. Societies
that make excuses for attacks against one minority group rarely stop
there.
Antisemitism is sometimes
described as “the oldest hate.” It dates at least to ancient Greece and
Egypt, where Jews were mocked for their differences and scapegoated for
societal problems. A common trope is that Jews secretly control society
and are to blame for its ills. The prejudice has continued through the
Inquisition, Russian pogroms and the worst mass murder in history, the
Holocaust, which led to the coining of a new term: genocide.
In
modern times, many American Jews believed that the United States had
left behind this tradition, with some reason. But as Conor Cruise
O’Brien, an Irish writer and politician, noted,
“Antisemitism is a light sleeper.” It tends to re-emerge when societies
become polarized and people go looking for somebody to blame. This
pattern helps explain why antisemitism began rising, first in Europe and
then in the United States, in the 2010s, around the same time that
politics coarsened. The anger pulsing through society has manifested
itself through animosity toward Jews.
The
political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame.
Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college
campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious
about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext
for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education.
The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan
issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented
realities.
[What the Times describes as a "pretext" for a "campaign against the independence of higher education", is actually an attempt by the administration to stop blatant violations of the Civil Rights Act by academic institutions, violations that have led to the outbreak of antisemitic incidents at the most progressive universities in this country. It's not Donald Trump that created a partisan issue. The partisan issue was created by progressives turning much of academia and other institutions into platforms where only their opinions are considered legitimate, where dissent is suppressed, and where discrimination is rampant against disfavored groups. In fact, the Supreme Court case that gave birth to "diversity" used the term because of the perceived importance of diversity of opinion, which is not allowed today on most campuses. Without addressing these violations, which the Times apparently supports, antisemitism in academia will never be effectively curtailed, because it is embedded in the very essence of academia. I discussed this at exhaustive (and probably exhausting) length in The Danger Within: Equality or Equity, Which Side Are You On?]
[Donald Trump can be, and has been, reckless and careless at times in his actions and rhetoric, as I've pointed out at length in numerous posts, but it is his administration that has tried to dismantle the ideological framework leading to the increase in antisemitism. In contrast, while a number of Democratic politicians have voiced support for Israel and/or opposition to antisemitism, I don't know of any prominent figure in the party who objected to the Biden administration's goal of embedding this hateful ideology into the federal government and American society as a whole.]
Even worse, Mr. Trump had
made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of
groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he
entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and
L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims
to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including
governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine
people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that
featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least
one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the
big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer
has said.
["Even worse, Mr Trump had made it normal to hate". Doesn't the Editorial Board read its own newspaper? According to the 1619 Project, which the Times published to much fanfare, America from its inception has been a nation founded on the principle of whites hating others. According to the Times, we've always been a horrible country. And, if you don't accept the Times characterization of this country, let's look at another indicator of hate and race relations. Since the early 1970s the Gallup organization has been regularly polling white and blacks on the status of race relations, asking whether they are good, okay, or bad. Over four decades, starting in 1972, those of both races responding good or okay had slowly but steadily climbed, reaching in 2012 to 72% of whites and 67% of blacks. And then the trend began reversing, well before Trump's appearance on the scene. By 2022, the figures were 42% for whites and 33% for blacks. You can now look at numerous surveys of use in the media of terms like "racism", "white supremacy", and see an enormous upturn in their use during the second Obama administration. Fomenting racial tension and resentment has been part of the declared mission of the Times over the past decade.]
[The term "Since he entered the political scene" is doing a lot of work here. According to the FBI data there was no increase in hate crimes for much of Trump's first term. There is a huge surge during the George Floyd riots of summer 2020 (make of that what you will), and while it is followed by a rapid decrease, hate crimes during the Biden administration occur at a rate of about double that of the Trump administration. The increase in Asian attacks is, uncomfortably, attributed to a highly disproportionate number of assaults by blacks, which is why it has attracted less attention after an initial outburst aimed at alleged white anti-Asian hate. Perhaps the Biden administration's relentless emphasis on race essentialism and promoting the conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have plotted to maintain White Supremacy may also have had something to do with the increase.]
[By citing the Charlottesville quote, the Times shows it is a prisoner of its own false narrative. It is part of the "unexamined life" of those that work at the Times. The full transcript of Trump's remarks show that right after he says "very fine people", he goes on to state he is not talking about neo-nazis and white nationalists. Later in the same ramblings, he restates he is not talking about neo-nazis and white nationalists, adding "they are bad people". In the context of his remarks it is clear Trump is referring to the debate over what to do with the Lee statue and clear he condemned those the press explicitly and repeatedly said he refused to condemn. In 2024, the leftist "fact checker" Snopes finally acknowledged that the prevailing media use of the term was misleading and false. Nonetheless, President Biden, VP Harris, and former President Obama all used the false accusation during the 2024 campaign, with Biden saying it was the reason he decided to run in 2020.
The Charlottesville incident also demolished the last bit of lingering respect I held for the traditional news media. While, by 2017, I mistrusted most of what I heard and read from those sources, I still felt that they could get the basics right. My mistake. When I first heard about Trump's Charlottesville remarks my reaction was "Well, the guy's an idiot" and assumed he said it and meant exactly what the media told me he meant. It was only a couple of years later when I came across a full transcript of the press conference that I realized I had been lied to.]
["On Jan. 6, 2021, at least
one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the
big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer
has said." Oh, my God, one rioter!! And the source is Chuck Schumer? The Times is really reaching here for examples. Here's something we do know about Senator Schumer. In 2024, confident that the Dems would hold regain the House, and hold the Senate and the Presidency, he reassured Columbia University, in an email obtained by a Congressional committee, that it could ignore all those Republicans pestering the school about antisemitism because it would all go away after the election. I don't think the Times wrote a story about that email.]
The
problem extends to popular culture. Joe Rogan, the podcaster who
endorsed Mr. Trump last year, has hosted Holocaust conspiracy theorists
on his show. Mr. Rogan once said of Jews, “They run everything.” In the Trumpist right, antisemitism has a home.
It
also has a home on the progressive left, and the bipartisan nature of
the problem has helped make it distinct. Progressives reject many other
forms of hate even as some tolerate antisemitism. College campuses,
where Jewish students can face social ostracization, have become the
clearest example. A decade ago, members of the student government at
U.C.L.A. debated
blocking a Jewish student from a leadership post, claiming that she
might not be able to represent the entire community. In 2018,
spray-painted swastikas appeared on walls
at Columbia. At Baruch, Drexel and the University of Pittsburgh,
activists have recently called for administrators to cut ties with or
close Hillel groups, which support Jewish life. In a national survey by
Eitan Hersh of Tufts University and Dahlia Lyss, college students who
identified as liberal were more likely than either moderates or conservatives last year to say that they “avoid Jews because of their views.”
["Progressives reject many other
forms of hate even as some tolerate antisemitism." Can we please stop with this progressive self-congratulation? How many articles has the NY Times published in the past decade about white people, that had it been done regarding any other race would be promptly denounced as racist? Answer: A google search in October 2023 on 'NY Times Whiteness" came up with 5.6 million results. The Times supported continuing the documented Ivy League practice of discriminating against Asians in admissions and denounced the Supreme Court decision banning the practice. And have you read the outpouring of hate by some progressives against Hispanics because of their increased support for Trump in 2024?]
[And progressives don't just "tolerate antisemitism", they encourage it with the ideology they promote.]
[Notice how all the college examples they give are of students, none of administrators or the institutions themselves, despite many well-documented incidents. There is no mention of the recent report on Harvard's blatant anti-semitism. That's because mentioning antisemitism condoned or practices by the institutions would be seen as pro-Trump and lead to bigger questions about what is happening more broadly in education. Both college and K-12 education is failing on many fronts, but regarding Jews, unless there is radical reform soon, the doctrines being taught to our children will increase antisemitism, making this country increasingly hostile to Jewish life, a point the Times refuses to address.]
One
explanation is that antisemitism has become conflated with the divisive
politics of the current Israel-Hamas war. It is certainly true that
criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as
antisemitism. This editorial board has long defended Israel’s right to
exist while also criticizing the government for its treatment of Palestinians. Since the current war began, we have abhorred
the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza. Israel’s
reflexive defenders are wrong, and they hurt their own cause when they
equate all such arguments with antisemitism. But some Americans have
gone too far in the other direction. They have engaged in whataboutism
regarding anti-Jewish hate. They have failed to denounce antisemitism in
the unequivocal ways that they properly denounce other bigotry.
[There are many Jews, including me,
who don't like Netanyahu and think at least parts of the settlements
policy in the West Bank are bonkers. But there are vanishingly few Jews
who do not support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. The
small cadre of anti-Zionist Jews can be found primarily in academia or
the NGO community where their real religion is Progressivism. We see a
recent example in the proud announcement of Harvard Divinity School
regarding its first Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Shaul Magid, an
anti-Zionist Jew. A reviewer accurately calls his most recent anti-Zionist book "an intellectual crime". The school boasts of Magid, “His disciplinary range stretches from Hasidic mysticism and American Judaism to critical Black studies and political theology".
We know what that phrasing really means. This is Harvard Divinity
School saying to those protesting Harvard's antisemitism, "screw you Jews, you better know your place." It also illustrates why institutions like Harvard are incapable of reforming themselves without outside pressure being brought to bear. Otherwise they will succeed in their strategy of waiting things out until a Democratic administration, tolerant of their discrimination, is back in power.]
["This editorial board has long defended Israel’s right to
exist while also criticizing the government for its treatment of Palestinians." This is a joke. Yes, the Times defends Israel's right to exist but it opposes both editorially and, more importantly, in its news sections, anything Israel does to ensure its continued existence. The slant of the Times news section regarding Israel has been evident for years. Remember when one of their most experienced reporters wrote an article casting doubt on whether a Jewish temple ever existed on the Temple Mount, endorsing an outrageous claim made by the Palestinians? I do. More recently, since October 7, the Times news staff credulously reports any claim made by Hamas and continues to do so no matter how many lies Hamas is caught in, while treating any Israeli claim cautiously, inserting every possible caveat and doubt. The Times problem is not just with Israel. The Sulzberger family have always been uneasy around "Jewish" Jews and Jews who dress "funny" and in recent years the paper launched a full scale assault on those "embarrassing" Jews, starting a jihad against Hasidic Jews, based on alleged defects in the education provided to Hasidic children. 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.
Looking at the support for the allegations made by the Times, I would have sent the reporters back to answer a dozen questions about methodology and have them do a comparison with the performance of New York City public schools before proceeding with publication. The Times, interested only in creating narratives to support its preferred policies, would not take the risk of finding anything that would disrupt that narrative.]
Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, has suggested a “3D” test
for when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism, with the D’s
being delegitimization, demonization and double standards. Progressive
rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years. “Americans
generally have greater ability to identify Jew hatred when it comes from
the hard right and less ability and comfort to call out Jew hatred when
it comes from the hard left or radical Islamism,” said Rachel Fish, an
adviser to Brandeis University’s Presidential Initiative on
Antisemitism.
["Hard right" and "hard left" are false equivalencies. The "hard left" includes the most progressive universities in this country, as well as publications like, well, like the New York Times. And all of this antisemitism is nested within the broader race essentialism promoted as its top domestic priority by the Biden administration and embraced by many of our leading institutions. These are power centers within our country. There is also a growing and very disturbing trend towards antisemitism in the "hard right". Some of it from those who've gone insane over the past few years like Tucker Carlson, some from grifters like Candace Owens, some from nasty pieces of work like Nick Fuentes, among others. They do have a lot of followers but where do they rate against the institutional strength of the "hard left"? Another way to look at it is polling data regarding Jews and Israel, which demonstrate a lot more support from Republicans and conservatives, with less and rapidly eroding support from Democrats and progressives.]
Consider the double
standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and
little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan,
Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning
groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and
express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — Iran-backed
terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often
people use “Zionist” as a slur — an echo of Soviet propaganda
from the Cold War — and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public
spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the
existence of Israel.
[Glad for the Times to say that last sentence clearly. On the other hand, why does the Times consistently refer to Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student the administration seeks to deport, and who enthusiastically supports the murder of Zionists, as simply "a Columbia pro-Palestinian activist"? To be fair, Khalil is consistent as he also supports the destruction of the U.S. as a settler-colonist entity. A good example of why it is important to rigorously review people before they are admitted in to this country.]
Historical
comparisons can also be instructive. The period since Oct. 7, 2023, is
hardly the first time that global events have contributed to a surge in
hate crimes against a specific group. Asian Americans were the victims
in 2020 and 2021 after the Covid pandemic began in China. Muslim
Americans were the victims after Sept. 11, 2001. In those periods, a few
fringe voices, largely on the far right, tried to justify the hate, but
the response from much of American society was denunciation. President
George W. Bush visited a mosque on Sept. 17, 2001, and proclaimed, “Islam is peace.” During Covid, displays of Asian allyship filled social media.
Recent
experience has been different in a couple of ways. One, the attacks
against Jews have been even more numerous and violent, as the F.B.I.
data shows. Two, the condemnation has been quieter and at times
tellingly agonized.University leaders have often felt uncomfortable
decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia. Islamophobia,
to be clear, is a real problem that deserves attention on its own. Yet
antisemitism seems to be a rare type of bigotry that some intellectuals
are uncomfortable rebuking without caveat. After the Sept. 11 attacks,
they did not feel the need to rebuke both Islamophobia and antisemitism.
Nor should they have. People should be able to denounce a growing form
of hatred without ritually denouncing other forms.
["University leaders have often felt uncomfortable
decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia". This is a misunderstanding about why university leaders are uncomfortable. They are uncomfortable because the principles of critical race theory are so embedded in curriculum and the very ethos of progressive universities that antisemitism cannot be denounced unequivocally because it would undermine the entire oppressor/oppressed analytical structure the universities have embraced without reservation.]
Alarmingly,
the antisemitic rhetoric of both the political right and the left has
filtered into justifications for violence. But there has been an
asymmetry in recognizing the connections. After a gunman murdered 11
people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, observers correctly noted
that he had become radicalized partly through racist right-wing social
media. There has been a similar phenomenon in some recent attacks, this
time with the assailants using the language of the left.
The
man who burned marchers in Colorado shouted “Free Palestine!” and
(awkwardly) “End Zionist!” The man charged with killing the young
Israeli Embassy workers in Washington last month is suspected of having
posted an online manifesto titled “Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War
Home.” His supporters have since published a petition that includes
“Globalize the Intifada.” The demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the
right bore some responsibility for the Pittsburgh massacre; the
demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the left bears some
responsibility for the recent attacks.
Americans should be able
to recognize the nuanced nature of many political debates while also
recognizing that antisemitism has become an urgent problem. It is a
different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism.
Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life
expectancy in today’s America. Yet the new antisemitism has left Jewish
Americans at a greater risk of being victimized by a hate crime than any
other group. Many Jews live with fears that they never expected to
experience in this country.
[These sentences reveal the Times worldview; "It is a
different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism.
Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life
expectancy in today’s America". In other words, racism is America's real problem while antisemitism is a problem for Jews and one that distracts from America's real problem which is why antisemitism needs addressing. This means that Times has learned nothing, or wants to learn nothing, about the ideology and fake history, as in the 1619 Project, it has promoted in recent years. In that respect, the Times continues to endorse a racist ideology in which the only reason for any discrepancy between races and ethnic groups in our society is because of white and Jewish supremacy. The Times will never escape its contradictions until it repudiates racial essentialism.]
No
political arguments or ideological context can justify that bigotry. The
choice is between denouncing it fully and encouraging an even broader
explosion of hate.
The position of the Times reminds me of the recent book, Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in which they breathlessly report how the media, including Tapper, were hoodwinked by the Biden administration into believing Joe Biden was actually functioning as president. The truth, as anyone observing Biden during the 2020 campaign and his presidency could see, was that he had severe difficulty in functioning, leading many of us to wonder who was really running the White House. The legacy media including Tapper, wanted to be mislead because reporting honestly would have helped the Republicans and avoiding that was much more important than the truth, and that part of the story is ignored in Original Sin.
Same thing with the Times. This editorial studiously avoids examining the paper's role in its reporting, and that of progressive institutions, in support of the poisonous ideology of critical race theory in leading to the eruption of antisemitism among those who share the beliefs of the Times own staff. Instead it is all attributable to this mysterious "hard left", about which the Times gives us no details as to constitutes this faction.
The closing words of the Times editorial are meaningless. Just words. I guess it now allows them to say they denounced antisemitism even on the left and now they can go back to doing exactly what they've been doing all along.
You can read all of my reporting on the Times here.
Regarding the kerfuffle about Tim Walz's military service, we've seen defenders of Walz claim he is being "Swiftboated", an allusion to attacks on John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. A recent example is from PBS News Hour Anchor Amna Nawaz who asserts:
“This is so reminiscent of that swiftboating attack on John Kerry back in 2004 . . . Why run with these attacks when there’s no evidence for what they’re saying right now?”
She goes on to say that the attacks on Kerry were “discredited". If Nawaz was drawing a comparison with the attacks on Kerry, the accurate one would be that the allegations against Kerry and Walz were similar, in that both are correct. However, I doubt that is what she meant.
Walz did not have the rank claimed as of his retirement and, on multiple occasions, stated, or left the impression, he had served with his unit in combat in Iraq, rather than resigning once he learned the unit would be going to Iraq. The governor's immediate superior, battalion commander, and unit chaplain, all confirm the allegation. Attempts to defend Walz have relied upon mischaracterizing the allegations.
As for Kerry and Swiftboating, I wrote in 2016 (and updated in 2020) about the true story:
For those of you who may not remember, the "Swift Boat Incident" or
Swiftboating as Democrats liked to call it, was in their version the
slandering of Presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam War record
during the 2004 campaign. If you notice, Baquet refers to it as an
"allegation". In the preferred liberal summary, the Incident was about
mischaracterization of Kerry's record as a Swiftboat commander during
the war and the awarding of his combat medals. In reality, the
television ads by Swift Boat Veterans For Truth focused primarily on
Kerry's alleged treasonous actions in carrying out secret negotiations
with the communist government of North Vietnam and in denouncing his
fellow soldiers for atrocities in front of the U.S. Congress, a
denunciation used by the communists as justification for torturing
American POWs. All of this is completely true.
A secondary theme was an attack on Kerry's claim, made on the floor of
the Senate, that he spent Christmas on his Swift Boat in Cambodia, in
what would have been an illegal incursion at the time, a demonstrably
false claim. The final claim was that his actions in combat were not
deserving of his medals and that he had manipulated the system to obtain
them. This claim is controversial and the only one by the Veteran's
group which may not be accurate (unfortunately the Wikipedia entry on
this topic focuses almost exclusively on this last point and is very
one-sided).
When YouTube first became available several years ago, I went back and
found the original Swiftboat ads. Unfortunately, they are not all still
available but my fragmentary notes indicate that six of them focused on
Kerry's post service actions - negotiating with the enemy, his
Congressional testimony and throwing the ribbons from his medals away in
a protest. Two others and part of a third dealt with his Christmas in
Cambodia fabrication and one part of one raised the question of the
validity of his medals. I view all except the last as fair game.
The Swift Boat Veterans were a coalition of two groups. The first were
POWs, held in North Vietnam under brutal conditions, who deeply resented
John Kerry's support for the enemy. The second were members of the
Swift Boat unit who had served with, before or after Kerry. The leader
of the second group was John E O'Neill, who had debated Kerry on the
Vietnam War back in 1971 on the Dick Cavett show. I happened to see
O'Neill on C-Span during the 2004 campaign. In response to a question
he referred to President Bush as "an empty suit". This was always about John Kerry, not Bush.
By mischaracterizing the substance of the Swiftboat attacks and turning
them into merely a dirty political tactic, Democrats and their media
accomplices sought to avoid dealing with the substance raised by the
ads; Kerry's statements after his service disparaging the U.S and his
fellow servicemen and the question of why so many people disliked the
man. I was still reading the Times back then and the Swift Boat ads
were out there for weeks before it wrote a word about them. It was as
if it was awaiting instructions from the Kerry campaign about what to
do. Finally, the Kerry campaign responded and the Times printed a front
page story but as it was mostly an attack by Kerry without a full
explanation of what the controversy was about it must have been very
baffling for most readers. In any event, Baquet appears to have fallen
for this hook, line and sinker.
If what Nawaz meant to reference were inaccurate and discredited allegations there is an example from the 2004 campaign that fits the bill - the attacks on George W Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG). In fact, the better term for unjustified and false allegations about a candidate's military service is being "TANGed", not "Swiftboated".
In the case of the TANG controversy, Dan Rather of 60 Minutes used the vice-chair of the Kerry election campaign as his primary source for the allegations against Bush, a man whose claims had been denounced by his own daughter (a fact not disclosed on the broadcast)! Rather himself, a native Texan and partisan Democrat, also had a son who was running fundraisers for the Texas Democratic Party. 60 Minutes ignored the substantial evidence contradicting its thesis (no one who served with Bush confirmed the story) and, most famously, used a document to seal its case, allegedly from 1973, that turned out to have been composed using Microsoft software not invented until the late 1990s!! Oh, and Rather's producer gave a heads up to the Kerry campaign before the broadcast, so they were in position to release campaign ends as soon as the segment broadcast.
Whether it is New York Times editor Dean Baquet in 2016 or Aman Nawaz in 2024, they exist in a enclosed universe in which their crowd just repeats the same lies to each other over and over again, until they become accepted truth. This is the same crowd claiming to be so alarmed about misinformation, by which they mean information they disagree with. The press has beclowned itself in recent years. Yesterday, the White House correspondent for the Washington Post pleaded with the White House to do something to shut down Elon Musk's interview with Donald Trump.
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!"
