Free Republic

Ohio may be a red state with a Republican governor and state legislature, but the Ohio Department of Education kicked off this school year by promoting far-left, racialist, anti-police propaganda in the form of its recommended “Anti-Racist Allyship Starter Pack,” a resource for social studies teachers. The starter pack contains about 200 links to “antiracist” op-eds, essays, and blog posts, which exemplify what President Trump meant when he spoke of a “left-wing cultural revolution” in our schools “designed to overthrow the American revolution” in favor of “far-left fascism.” The ODE recommended an article on “The Souls of White Folk.” The...

A question I’ve wrestled with this past year or so is a pretty basic one: if critical race/gender/queer theory is unfalsifiable postmodern claptrap, as I have long contended, how has it conquered so many institutions so swiftly? It’s been a staggering achievement, when you come to think of it. Critical theory was once an esoteric academic pursuit. Now it has become the core, underlying philosophy of the majority of American cultural institutions, universities, media, corporations, liberal churches, NGOs, philanthropies, and, of course, mainstream journalism. This summer felt like a psychic break from old-school liberalism, a moment when a big part...

As July 4 and its barbecues arrived this year, the activist and former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick declared, “We reject your celebration of white supremacy.” The movie star Mark Ruffalo said in February that Hollywood had been swimming for a century in “a homogeneous culture of white supremacy.” The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of New York City’s most prestigious museums, acknowledged this summer that his institution was grounded in white supremacy, while four blocks uptown, the curatorial staff of the Guggenheim decried a work culture suffused in it. The Los Angeles Times editorial board issued an...

When the University of Chicago English Department announced over the summer that, in response to the protests after the death of George Floyd, they would only admit graduate students willing to work in Black Studies (a proclamation that, after media attention brought criticism, they recently removed from their webpage), observers of the increasing dominance of extremist ideas on race and race relations in higher education were not surprised. Indeed, as things go ever crazier inside American universities with respect to racial politics, it becomes more and more difficult for those of us on the inside, watching things deteriorate on a...

... Out of all the major political movements on Earth, none is more Orwellian than “social justice.” No other movement is so dedicated to achieving the opposite of what its slogans proclaim – or so aggressive in the warping of language. While every ideology is prone to a little doublethink, “social justice” is doublethink at its core. To see what I’m talking about, picture North Korean and Chinese communism. Their official story is that totalitarian rule by the Communist Party is wonderful – and they impose totalitarian rule by their respective Communist Parties. The official story of Islamic fundamentalism is...

The campus battle over what I’ve previously called the equity agenda has recently shifted almost completely from a focus on gender to a focus on race. This has been accompanied by a series of surreal spectacles at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I teach. In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, student activists have made new demands upon the school’s administration, while scathingly denouncing anyone they perceive as dissenters. Just consider our university president, Ana Mari Cauce—a Latina lesbian whose activist brother was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. One would imagine that she’d command a certain...

Leaders in business, academia and government are increasingly adopting “antiracist” training and policies in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. In some cases, this reflects genuine interest in decreasing racial discrimination. In others, it is a salve for what Shelby Steele calls “white guilt.” Elsewhere, it arises from fear that even liberal institutions may otherwise become vulnerable to cancel culture. When properly conceived, antiracist programs can provide a powerful response to hate and bias incidents. The problem with much of today’s antiracism is that it doesn’t really oppose invidious discrimination and may even foment it. The new antiracism is...

How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi (One World, 320 pp., $27.00) In 2016, Ibram X. Kendi became the youngest person ever to win the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His surprise bestseller, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, cast him in his role as an activist-historian, ambitiously attempting to make 600 years of racial history digestible in 500 pages. In his follow-up, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi––now 37, a Guggenheim fellow, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic––reveals his personal side, weaving together memoir, polemic, and instruction as he invites the reader...

Dear President Price: On June 17, you published a 1,400-word “Statement to the Community Regarding Anti-Racism.” The document contains many expressions of concern, fully in tune with the current national mood about the evils of racism and the problems of the African American community. Nevertheless, the measures proposed, and the assumptions made, in this document raise troubling questions: First, I say a word about the assumptions behind your statement; second, about the actions you propose to take. Assumptions (Quotes are all from the Statement.) How widespread is racism? You say: “Those of us who are not subject to the daily...

School will be a very different place next year. Classes will be less full. Desks will be rigorously sterilized. And, if the education establishment has its way, teachers will be aggressively “woke.” “We are living at a time of obscene inequities and merely trying to compensate is not enough,” the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) recently announced. “Equity is more than making things more accessible and AASA’s work on equity must go further and become actively anti-racist. . . . Leading a system-wide effort requires that we ensure that cultural responsiveness permeates all levels of the district.” For many...

Last year I did an interview with two communist militants in a Chicago Mall Food Court entitled Coffee With Communists, WHO THEY ARE WHY THEY KILL The two were part of a little known Marxist street gang known as Anti-racist Action or Antifa. These disgusting animals wanted to kill Americans and bragged that they had killed Americans, namely veterans. Their message to America, revolution was coming and that those who opposed socialism and opposed their agenda would be violently killed. In the past week Antifa made headlines and is no longer under the radar. In Berkeley and in other cities,...

Tim Wise is a white “antiracist” and crusader for “social justice.”Recently, in an interview that he gave to Salon, Wise brought his “expertise” on race to bear upon the Trump phenomenon. Donald Trump, he claims, exploited the “market for white resentment [.]”Trump’s supporters, Wise assures us, are “crazy, bigoted, misogynistic” and “racist.” Moreover, they suffer from a “fragile masculinity” that’s threatened by the prospect of “pluralism,” of having to “share space” with those who aren’t white, Christian, heterosexual men.  To these folks, Wise bluntly states, “there’s a part of me that wants to say, ‘Fuck you.’”  He admits to wanting...