Tag: identity politics

Former Columnist Exposes Scientific American’s Sudden Descent Into Left-Wing Ideology

Admin
Michael Shermer

Scientific American, a top science magazine that has been around since 1845, has become increasingly captured by the political left to the detriment of its scientific goals, a whistleblower told City Journal in a story published Sunday.

While the magazine previously pushed for authors to debate accepted perspectives, it has recently moved toward far-left ideology on issues, such as race, gender and climate, Scientific American author Michael Shermer, who wrote for the outlet from 2001-2019, told City Journal. Shermer, who wrote a column called “Skeptic” for the publication says he faced pushback for writing pieces on progress in reducing discrimination as well as for criticizing the ideology of “intersectionality,” commonly referred to as “identity politics.”

Read the full story

Haley on Defense as DeSantis, Vivek Take Turns Throwing Bombs

Just the News

The fourth Republican presidential primary debate saw former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley play defense in the face of relentless attacks from Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and tech executive Vivek Ramaswamy.

Haley has emerged as a media favorite in recent months, drawing considerable airtime and headlines, but has remained in a clear third place behind Donald Trump and DeSantis in most polls. At present, Trump boasts 61.0% support in the RealClearPolitics polling average, compared to DeSantis’s 13.5%, Haley’s 10.3%, Ramaswamy’s 4.9%, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s 2.5%.

Read the full story

Commentary: 10 Reasons Why Affirmative Action Died

Admin

The end of affirmative action was inevitable. The only surprise was that such intentions gone terribly wrong lasted so long.

First, supporters of racial preferences always pushed back the goal posts for the program’s success. Was institutionalized reverse bias to last 20 years, 60 years, or ad infinitum? Parity became defined as an absolute equality of result. If “equity” was not obtained, then only institutionalized “racism” explained disparities. And only reverse racism was deemed the cure.

Read the full story

Teachers’ Union’s ‘Schools in Transition’ Guide Instructs How to Bolster Gender Ideology in Classrooms

Susan Berry, PhD

A lesser known document created in 2015 by the National Education Association (NEA), a group of LGBTQ activists, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) laid the “groundwork” for the gender ideology movement in schools years before the recent increase in the numbers of transgender young people, reports the Freedom Foundation.

NEA, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, provides a “toolkit” website page that features “NEA LGBTQ+ Resources,” the purpose of which appears to be to offer “support to transgender and non-binary students,” to indoctrinate all students with “LGBTQ+ history in their classrooms,” and to engage students in a political agenda that includes stopping “LGBTQ+ bias and intolerance in our public schools.”

Read the full story

South Carolina Mom Asks School Board ‘Why Are Adult Teachers Allowed to Sponsor a Group Regarding Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity with Minors?’

Susan Berry, PhD

A South Carolina parent challenged the school board of Richland School District Two in Columbia where Blythewood High School (BHS) hosted the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) “No Place for Hate” program that invites children to “explore identity,” and “apply this understanding to recognize the relationship between identity, bias and power.”

ADL’s No Place for Hate program also seeks to “build the capacity to recognize and confront bias within oneself, others and institutions. Examine the relationship between individual biases and systemic oppression, including the impact of intersecting oppressions.”

Read the full story

Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Identity Politics Absurdities and the Ridiculousness of Reparations

Admin

The last time racial reparations made the major news was on the eve of September 11, 2001 attacks. The loss of 3,000 Americans, which for a time fueled a new national unity, quickly dispelled the absurdities of the reparation movement, and turned our attention toward more existential issues.

Now the idea is back in vogue again. Here are 10 reasons why the nation’s—and especially California’s—discussions of reparatory payouts are dangerous in a multiracial state, and why reparations are not viable either in an insolvent state or a bankrupt nation at large.

Read the full story

Commentary: An American Awakening

Admin

The seemingly novel developments of the last several years have not taken me by surprise. When I completed American Awakening in May 2020, the national election was still five months into the future, and the stringent measures ostensibly instituted to hold the Wuhan Flu at bay had just been implemented. I thought then that a Democratic Party victory in November 2020 would promise the American electorate a return to normal politics, but in fact would operate on the basis of what, in American Awakening, I called the politics of innocence and transgression; and that if Joe Biden became the Democratic Party nominee, in order to demonstrate that he was the-right-kind-of-white-man, he would champion this sort of politics. 

Read the full story

Civil Rights Commissioner Warns Schools Touting Segregated Programs and Graduation Ceremonies They Are in Violation of Civil Rights Act

Susan Berry, PhD

U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow has warned two schools that have announced programs or graduation exercises that intend to segregate students by race or other identifying feature they are in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

In recent letters to both California Polytechnic State University and Oakton Community College in Illinois, Kirsanow, writing as a single member of the commission, reminds the schools’ officials that they are “subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Read the full story

Commentary: America Is Not Divided, It’s Being Hijacked

Admin

It seems lately like everywhere, on both the Right and the Left, we are hearing a chorus of voices tell us America is hopelessly divided and on the brink of a second civil war.

The level of rancor and incivility characterizing much of our contemporary political dialogue appears to confirm as much on a daily basis. It appears Left and Right have arrived at irreconcilable worldviews, disagreeing on first principles, core convictions, specific policy choices and ultimate ends. Increasingly, they seem unable to see eye to eye even when it comes to pure matters of fact.

Read the full story

Georgia State Senate Republican’s Bill Would Ban ‘Discrimination on Basis of Race, Skin Color, or Ethnicity’

Susan Berry, PhD

Georgia state lawmakers are debating a bill that would ban the teaching of the concepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT) by prohibiting “discrimination on the basis of race, skin color, or ethnicity.”

State Sen. Bo Hatchett (R-50), the primary sponsor of Senate Bill 377, defended his legislation Monday as Democrats claimed the bill was unnecessary, arguing that CRT is not taught in Georgia public schools, and that the bill would prevent students from learning about America’s history concerning slavery and racism.

Read the full story

Commentary: Adopting a ‘Woke Culture’ Hurts Diversity and Inclusion

Admin

I have been watching with great personal and professional interest over the past few years as employers, predominantly the larger publicly traded companies, but sometimes the smaller companies as well, have been forcing their employees to make political choices instead of general work condition choices when weighing career decisions. Likewise, they are forcing their customers to make the same sort of political calculus when deciding whether or not to purchase their company’s goods or services.

Read the full story

Mesa Public Schools Updates Dress Code Policy to be ‘More Equitable,’ Will Define ‘Hate Speech’ Based on Dictionary

Corinne Murdock

Mesa Public Schools (MPS) updated their dress code policy to make it more equitable and prohibit “hate speech.” Nowhere in their current policies does MPS define “hate speech.”

As reported by The Arizona Sun Times last month, MPS General Counsel Kacey Gregson said that students would have a right to express their political beliefs unless it could be perceived as “hate speech,” promoting violence, or immediately or potentially causing substantial interference with the learning environment.

Read the full story

Commentary: Tribalism Turns Toxic in the Social Media Age

Admin

Man is by nature a tribal creature. For many thousands of years, human existence was defined by family connections, with ties of blood and marriage providing the social network that ensured cooperation and support necessary to sustaining life. Loyalty to one’s kinship group — the tribe or clan — was vital to this system of cooperation, and from the deeply rooted tribal nature of human life emerges the sense of national identity that inspires what we call patriotism.

Read the full story

Commentary: The Privilege of Identity Politics

Admin

Last month, Melinda Gates announced that “we need to apply a gender lens to solving this [coronavirus] crisis.” She linked to a March 12 story in the New York Times reporting that with women making up to 70 percent of healthcare workers worldwide, women are at “disproportionate risk.” COVID-19 may very well end up “exacerbating gender, social and economic fault lines,” Gates claimed.

Read the full story

Commentary: Crack-ups at the Crossroads of Intersectionality

Admin

by Victor Davis Hanson   Progressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole – each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures: out of one nation arise many innately different and separate peoples. Progressivism’s signature brand is now tribalism: all of us in different ways are victims of a white male Christian heterosexual patriarchy – or a current 20 percent hierarchy that past and present has supposedly oppressed anyone not like themselves. In contrast, our differences define who we are, and are not incidental to the content of our characters. The salad bowl, not the melting pot, is the new national creed. America is to be a conglomeration of competing tribal parties in the fashion of the Balkans, Rwanda, or contemporary Iraq. How does the relative victimhood work politically? Progressive elites (oddly often white, but “woke,” males) serve as umpires who adjudicate familial spats and intersectional fractures. Like good cowboys, they ride herd, directing the squabbling and snorting flock in the right direction without losing too many strays on the way to…

Read the full story

Commentary: Democrats’ Collapse Could Happen Quickly

Admin

by Karin McQuillan   There are signs of Democrats’ coming electoral collapse, some anecdotal, some by the numbers. Most Democrats are staying loyal to their party, no matter how far how left their party shifts. But President Trump doesn’t need most Democrats; he only needs a few to get turned off by the Democrats’ radical proposals and identity politics. Immediately after the 2018 midterms, it looked as if the strategy of dirtying President Trump in the eyes of low-information voters was working well for them. The collapse of the Russian collusion hoax has changed the equation. Congress continues to dominate the media with ginned-up hysteria, but many voters are ready to move on to more substantial issues that affect their lives. Real life is a weaker arena for Democrats. They seem to be avoiding it as much as possible, focusing instead on claims that Republicans are white supremacists. The Democrats’ 2020 presidential candidates are competing with their own congressmen for air time and the never-ending Russian collusion hoax. Each one is pursuing their slice of the limited identity politics pie. All of them, including former Vice President Joe Biden, are committed to the social justice agenda. This is a losing strategy because identity politics…

Read the full story

234 House Democrats, Two Republicans Co-Sponsor Bill Forcing Schools to Let Male Athletes Compete on Girls’ Sports Teams

Admin

by Peter Hasson   Every House Democrat but one has co-sponsored a bill requiring schools to allow male athletes who identify as transgender girls to compete on female sports teams. Democrats’ Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make “sexual orientation and gender identity” protected characteristics under federal anti-discrimination law. Among other things, the bill would force public schools to expand female athletic teams to include biological males who identify as transgender girls. Sarah Warbelow, director of the left-wing Human Rights Campaign, praised the bill’s impact on high school sports in written testimony submitted to a House subcommittee on Tuesday. “Opponents of equality in athletics for transgender athletes have argued that girls who are transgender have unfair physiological advantages over cisgender girls and as a result, will dominate women’s competitive sports,” Warbelow wrote, calling it not “rooted in fact” that biologically male athletes will outperform their female counterparts. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York, made a similar argument during an April 2 hearing his committee held on the legislation. “Many states have sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination laws, and all of them still have women’s sports. Arguments about transgender athletes participating…

Read the full story

Commentary: The Phrase that Launched a Thousand Grievous, Leftist Failures

Admin

by Jeffery Tucker   In 1969, the salad days of New Left activism, a writer named Carol Hanisch penned an essay that the editor called “The Personal Is Political.” She was seeking to explain the ethos of the women’s therapy sessions she was running. The point was not to improve psychological well being. The point was “political therapy;” that is to motivate people to political action. The idea is that one’s own grievances ought to be turned into political action. “There are no personal solutions at this time,” she wrote. “There is only collective action for a collective solution.” Let’s leave aside the case for or against her brand of politics. The slogan itself was fire. It spread to every cause, every group, every nook and cranny of life. If you experience dissatisfaction in your life, don’t look within for a personal solution; get active, join a collective, and demand a political solution. Think of this as the left-wing application of the Schmittian principle that only through politics do we find meaning (the very opposite point that has become the main theme of Jordan Peterson’s work). Fifty years later, I’ve been following the meltdown of a number of “social justice” organizations and causes over the…

Read the full story

Commentary: The Democratic Socialist Platform Echoes the Madness of the Khmer Rouge

Admin

by Barry Brownstein   In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over, they quickly emptied the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. This was to be year Zero; a rebirth of Cambodia as an engineered egalitarian, classless rural society with “the corruption and parasitism of city life” eliminated. Several million had to leave at once, including hospital patients. Those who refused were summarily executed. Those who left were forced to work in fields, where many died while being fed starvation rations. Genocide against their own citizens resulted in up to 2.5 million dead out of a population of 8 million. Over 1.3 million of the dead were executed. Driven mad by class politics, Khmer Rouge soldiers dehumanized their victims. Khmer Rouge soldiers “fired aimlessly at innocent civilians as long as someone offended them in any way.” They reserved special brutality for those in Cambodia’s middle class, “the doctors, bankers, teachers and merchants, the people who read books and even the ones who just wore glasses.” Dehumanizing those you murder is characteristic of totalitarian regimes. Hitler killed Jews. Stalin killed kulaks. Mao killed landlords. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge took the “most violent and ignorant people, and…taught them to lead, manage, control,…

Read the full story

Commetary: The Democrats’ Real-Life ‘Animal Farm’

Admin

by Victor Davis Hanson   Tennis great Martina Navratilova until recently had long been coronated as a social justice trailblazer. She was one of the first marquee celebrity athletes to come out as gay, and then to advocate lesbian issues in and out of sports. But suddenly the icon seems out of step with her progressive legend status. Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes. A frustrated Navratilova was editorializing mostly in the context of men “transitioning” to women, while in many cases still enjoying innate muscular and size advantages over females in same-sex sporting events. As a result, she is being demonized unfairly as an intersectional traitor (“transphobic”) and thus increasingly disinvited from a number of events by what is known as the LGBTQ community. In other words, her intersectional femaleness and gayness are revoked by improper ideology. Barack Obama, once the progressive “god” who was acclaimed to have the power to cool the planet and halt the rising of the seas, had the recent audacity to suggest, quite understandably, that young black teens…

Read the full story

Democrats Targeting a Very Specific Demographic for 2020

Admin

by Grace Carr   Newly-announced presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris will visit South Carolina Friday in an attempt to appeal to black women voters, who have historically been a solid voter base for Democrats. The California Democrat will visit with her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters during the trip to the early-primary voting state, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Ninety-two percent of black women voted Democrat in the state’s 2018 midterms, according to an Associated Press VoteCast poll. Black women made up 37 percent of the electorate in the state’s 2016 Democratic primary — the largest voting block when broken down by race and gender, according to a CNN exit poll. “Black women have enormous power. We vote overwhelmingly for Democrats no matter what,” said Our Revolution President Nina Turner. The group is an American progressive political action organization. Nearly 30 percent of South Carolina’s population is black, according to Census data. Black women were “critical” to Democrat Doug Jones’ victory over Roy Moore for the the Alabama Senate seat, according to Harris. Harris announced Monday that she is officially running to be the next president of the United States. Harris raised roughly $1.5 million Tuesday after her announcement. I'm running for president. Let's do this together. Join us: https://t.co/9KwgFlgZHA pic.twitter.com/otf2ez7t1p — Kamala Harris…

Read the full story

Commentary: What the Hoax Papers Tell Us About the Decline of Academic Standards

Admin

by Phillip W. Magness   By now, most followers of the higher education press have heard of the “grievance studies” or Sokal Squared hoax. In this incident, a team of three researchers successfully published several hoax papers on intentionally absurd subjects in ostensibly serious scholarly journals. Their purpose was to demonstrate the susceptibility of these venues to low-quality, ideologically charged “research” that advances left-wing identity politics. The hoax articles lampooned the academic fashion ability of its chosen subject areas. Samples of the published papers included an article on “rape culture” among dogs in urban dog parks, a piece espousing a theoretical framework for the acceptance of obese bodybuilders, a nonsensical string of computer-generated “therapeutic” political poetry, and even a passage of Mein Kampf repackaged as critical gender theory. No doubt the hoaxers used the academy’s political inclinations advantageously, and indeed their critics have accused them of an unfair “put down” that targeted scholars of gender and racial discrimination—two worthy areas of academic study that champion historically disadvantaged persons and communities. Allow me to suggest that both their supporters and critics have largely missed the mark by focusing on the political objectives of the perpetrators. While identity politics have dominated the…

Read the full story

Commentary: Progressive Politics Are Not Really Progressive

Admin

by Victor Davis Hanson   Some progressives lamented the apparent defeat of radical progressive African-American candidates such as gubernatorial nominees Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Florida’s Andrew Gillum by blaming allegedly treasonous white women. Apparently white women did not vote sufficiently en bloc in accordance with approved notions of identity politics tribalism. According to this progressive orthodoxy, being female, gay, or minority trumps everything else. But, of course, no one believes in such mythical notions of solidarity, least of all progressives themselves. White women were expected in Michigan, for example, to vote against a sterling African-American senatorial candidate John James, whose résumé was far more impressive than his victorious opponent, incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow. There was no such thing as minorities on the collective barricades when it was a matter of defeating California congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, first-generation child of refugees, Asian, female, former Stanford student body president, and Yale MBA in her singular bid to unseat a seven-term white male Democratic incumbent. The outraged identity politics industry has entered the realm of insanity when it screams at the “treason” of white women while bragging that 95 percent of black women voted for a white male Robert O’Rourke against Latino…

Read the full story

Dr. Carol M. Swain Commentary: The Rejection of Absolute Truth Strips Leftists of the Moral Authority to Criticize Elizabeth Warren’s Ethnic Fraud

Admin

by Dr. Carol M. Swain   The Left has created quite a conundrum for itself. As a consequence, it has no moral language to justify its condemnation of Senator Elizabeth Warren for her decades-long decision to self-identify as a Native American. The Leftists we see on television depicted in the forms of Democratic Party spokespersons such as Senators Cory Booker, Diane Feinstein and Kamala Harris, see the world through a postmodernist lens. While secular humanists dismissed religion and believed in science, reason, objective truth, and free will, postmodernists believe in everything, thus they believe in nothing. Postmodernists see humans as social beings, shaped by a particular culture and the times, operating in a world without objective realities and moral constraints. While the humanists believed man could eventually solve man’s problems through science and human ingenuity, the postmodernists reject such ridiculous pie-in-the-sky notions. Their critique of modernism and theism have led them to believe that what some people see as human progress is merely the continuation of a dominant European worldview and a set of privileges that lie at the root of the world’s problems (See Dennis McCallum (ed.) The Death of Truth: Responding to Multiculturalism’s Reject of Reason, 1996). From…

Read the full story

College Student Back in Class After Being Kicked Out for Defending Two Genders

Admin

Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s president on Monday allowed a student who had been kicked out of a religious studies class for claiming there are only two genders to return to the course, intervening before the Academic Integrity Board could rule on a dispute.In an email to the campus, IUP President Michael Driscoll said he decided to “indefinitely pause” the proceedings — while reserving the right to restart the process.

Read the full story

Carol Swain: Americans Must Reject Identity Politics And Multiculturalism

Wendy Wilson

MURFREESBORO, Tennessee — Americans need to turn away from identity politics and multiculturalism and embrace an American identity, conservative writer and speaker Carol Swain said Tuesday at a Rutherford County GOP luncheon. That’s the only way our country can move beyond the conflicts we’re experiencing, said Swain, echoing a message she has given in interviews on Fox News in the aftermath of violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday between white supremacists and radical leftist counterprotesters. On Fox, Swain defended President Trump for blaming both sides. Swain said Tuesday that the ranks of those attracted to “white identity and white consciousness” is growing, but that it’s illogical to maintain that blacks, Hispanics and Asians can promote an identity for themselves rooted in race, but that whites can’t. The solution, she believes, is to support and promote an American identity to cultivate a unifying bond. Tickets for Tuesday’s luncheon at the DoubleTree Hotel sold out. With 85 people attending, it was the largest quarterly luncheon gathering the Rutherford County GOP has hosted. Tuesday also marked Swain’s last official day as a law and political science professor at Vanderbilt University. But Swain has no plans to retire from writing and traveling to…

Read the full story