How far is too far in removing history? We are already there.
By Salena Zito
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Sixteen months after statues of Christopher Columbus began falling — either force or by political decree — part of a chain reaction to the brutal death of George Floyd, Columbus native Tom Maraffa wonders if it is only a matter of time before the name of the city is stripped away as well.
“I’d like to believe that would ever happen…” Mr. Maraffa said, as his voice trailed off.
The Youngstown State University geography professor was born, attended high school and graduated from Ohio State here — the state capitol — and his question is not outside of the realm of possibility; the county commissioners here stripped Columbus Day from the calendar around the same time that the 22-foot bronze statue of the 15th century explorer was removed by a construction crew on orders from the mayor, in the summer of 2020.
Activists actually did support the idea of changing the name — to “Flavortown” — and a Change.org petition garnered more than 130,000 signatures in support.
Mr. Maraffa said the decision to take the statue down was made in the heat of a very contentious moment in this country. “When you make the decisions in the heat of the moment, you are probably not making the best decision. Had there been a process that was more thoughtful than an emotional political response and then it was decided to be removed, it would have been better for everyone.”
Monuments and markers have meaning as symbols of places and events, Mr. Maraffa explained, and “As such, they have different meanings for different people.”
The Columbus statue removal didn’t happen just here. At least three dozen have been taken down in other locations. In Pittsburgh, his statue has been shrouded and sits on the edge of the Oakland neighborhood, awaiting the outcome of a court challenge.
Francis X. Caiazza, a former Lawrence County common pleas court judge, retired U.S. magistrate judge and grandson of Italian immigrants, says Columbus was an imperfect, contradictory, yet profoundly important figure “He was also considered an intellectual who disproved the notion that the world was flat as well as this aspirational figure for Catholic and Italian immigrants during a very dark time when they were the subject of deep prejudice.” Mr. Caiazza said a culture and society should be measured enough to recognize the wrongs that Columbus did — along with what he accomplished — without banishing him entirely from the telling of the American experience.
Like Mr. Maraffa, Mr. Caiazza is concerned that the erasing of historic statues will lead to the erasing of their mentions in the history books or intellectual discussions. Both men are correct to worry. History proves that in culture, once a thing is considered tainted, it does not take long for it to disappear. We are in one of those historical moments when society has lost its mutually shared cultural touchstones, and reaching consensus on new ones or negotiating a more inclusive narrative of our shared past is hampered by extremism and intolerance. As a consequence, we have become unmoored from meaningful discussions on much of anything, let alone historical figures or monuments.
What happens instead is we tend to cede the debate to the loudest voices. Rarely are they the most reasonable. And our cultural curators put popular sensitivities first. That’s something that deeply concerns state Rep. Parke Wentling, a Republican representing Western Pennsylvania’s 17th District and a member of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
Since 2018 the PHMC has been attempting to bring diversity, equity and inclusion to determining what markers should and should not exist. As part of that process, the commission has been reviewing — and removing — historical markers.
The problem is when your commonwealth has more than 300 years of history, much of it happened in times that weren’t always diverse or inclusive, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Past ugliness shouldn’t be lauded, but neither should it be forgotten.
One of those historical markers currently under review is now situated inside the National Aviary on Pittsburgh’s North Side. The marker notes that the aviary sits on the former site of a 19th century penitentiary that at one time housed “the only Confederate prisoners of war held in Pittsburgh.” But the historical marker is now housed in a birdcage, awaiting its fate because of complaints that its plaque was funded nearly 100 years ago by the Daughters of the Confederacy.
For his part, Mr. Caiazza wonders, “Where does it stop? …or if you can stop it? The answer is, ‘I don’t know if you can.’ And I am not sure that is good.”
Click here for the full story.
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About time:
Republican lawmakers introduce bill to designate Muslim Brotherhood as terror group
Several U.S. allies, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, have already done so.
(November 12, 2021 / JNS)
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) have reintroduced legislation that urges the U.S. State Department to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization.
The measure, which was introduced in the Senate by Cruz with a companion bill in the U.S. House of Representatives by Diaz-Balart, requires the State Department to report to Congress about whether the Muslim Brotherhood meets the legal criteria for designation, and if so, will enable the United States to take action that could stifle the funding they receive to promote their malign activities.
The Senate bill is co-sponsored by Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). The House bill is cosponsored by Reps. Kay Granger (R-Texas), Chuck Fleishmann (R-Tenn.), Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.), John H. Rutherford (R-Fla.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Mike Bost (R-Ill.), Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) and Pat Fallon (R-Texas).
Several U.S. allies, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, have designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror group. Hamas, which is a Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, is designated a terrorist organization by the State Department
Cruz said in a statement that “it’s high time we join our allies in the Arab world in formally recognizing the Muslim Brotherhood for what they truly are—a terrorist organization. We have a duty to hold the Muslim Brotherhood accountable for their role in financing and promoting terrorism across the Middle East.”
He introduced similar bills in 2015, 2017 and 2020.
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Everything Biden is doing is helping destroy America as we know it. He is either committing acts of terrorism himself and/or allowing them to be done by others. Biden will turn out to be the most dangerous president ever and I am not sure we can recover. Our nation is under attack from all sides and every institution is being challenged.
Borders opened, dope peddlers free to roam along with M 15 criminal element. Reflects weakness to our adversaries and disregards Congress and our constitution by acting like a dictator. Doing nothing to stop treacherous behaviour against social order. Lying about use of Atty General to use FBI to intimidate parents, wrecking the economy by virulent spending and you name it.
Biden is delivering the final blow pertaining to Obama's desire to transform and destroy our nation.
It only takes a few bad apples and Biden is rotten to the core.
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Religion is in decline and along with it morality. The Marxist Left have embraced using anti-racism as their religion according to McWhorter.
John McWhorter Argues That Antiracism Has Become a Religion of the Left
Chris Gash
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WOKE RACISM
How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America
By John McWhorter
Growing up in the 1990s, I was raised to be optimistic about American society. That society welcomed my parents from Pakistan with open arms; it produced the Georgia man who, in the days after 9/11, approached my family and told us that if anyone harassed us in any way because of our Muslim faith, he would come to our aid.
I knew the country still had problems. I decided to become a journalist so I could shed light on society’s imperfections. But I did so in a spirit of hopefulness.
In recent years, however, a much darker vision has emerged on the political left. America isn’t a land of opportunity. It’s barely changed since the days of Jim Crow. Whites, universally privileged, maintain an iron grip on American society, while nonwhites are little more than virtuous victims cast adrift on a plank in an ocean of white supremacy.
This worldview has swiftly implanted itself into major institutions, from our universities to our corporations. Why has it captivated so many people?
The Columbia University linguist John McWhorter attempts to answer that question in “Woke Racism,” which seeks to both explain and rebut this ideology. (McWhorter and I both sit on the board of advisers of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.)
McWhorter, who also writes a newsletter for The Times’s Opinion section, is a Black liberal who dissents from much of the left’s views on race issues. In 2000, he published “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America,” where he argued that counterproductive cultural beliefs and practices, not racial prejudice, were the main forces preventing more African Americans from succeeding. Some of his targets in that book were left-wing academics, who he worried were helping transform victimhood “from a problem to be solved into an identity in itself.”
Yet in the two decades since, those academics seem to have become more influential than ever. In his latest book, McWhorter suggests that’s because their ideology has been elevated into a religion.
“I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in this comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion,” he writes. “An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.”
While praising earlier generations of civil rights work, he objects to what he calls “Third Wave Antiracism,” which preaches that “racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ ‘complicity’ in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for Black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.”
Borrowing a term from the author Joseph Bottum, McWhorter refers to the prophets of the Third Wave as “the Elect.” They see themselves as “bearers of a Good News that, if all people would simply open up and see it, would create a perfect world.”
McWhorter says that the Elect’s unshakable convictions have led them to persecute people with unfair accusations of racism. He cites cases like that of David Shor, a young white progressive analyst who was fired from his consulting firm for tweeting a study showing how violent protests can backfire. Many of these inquisitions have been led not by people from minority groups but from the white Elects themselves, who are described as carrying a sort of “self-flagellational guilt for things you did not do.”
It’s easy, however, to mock the lengths to which white liberals will go to be seen as antiracist. McWhorter is more interesting when he discusses why some African Americans have chosen to join the ranks of the Elect. “Humans seek pride where they can get it,” he writes, noting that “to be a Black Elect is to have a sense of belonging.” It allows African Americans to “adopt an identity as a beleaguered Black person, where you are united with all Black people, regardless of social class or educational level, by the common experience of suffering discrimination.”
As in his previous books, McWhorter views it as a mistake to forge one’s identity around victimhood. He characterizes the woke racial worldview as harmful not for normalizing antiwhite prejudices or treating the social categories of race as something concrete, but because it deprives Black people of their humanity by infantilizing them. He objects to lowering standards for minorities, as when certain members of the Elect claim that “objectivity, being on time and the written word are ‘white’ things.” (The Smithsonian Institution of all places posted a graphic promoting these ideas.)
Where McWhorter is less effective is in his critique of some of the Third Wave’s high priests. Although he takes aim at writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi and The New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, he only briefly quotes their writing. A more compelling pushback would have involved a thorough analysis of their arguments (he has reviewed Kendi and DiAngelo elsewhere).
Yet if you doubt the necessity of McWhorter’s intervention into the debates about race, consider the following episode: In the summer of 2020, a journalist friend of mine named Lee Fang attended a Black Lives Matter rally and, in a video clip he posted to Twitter, interviewed a young Black man named Max about his thoughts on policing issues.
Max spoke from a place of personal pain. He’d had two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. He was sympathetic to the outcry over the death of George Floyd, but he was equally troubled by high rates of violence in some minority communities.
“I always question, why does a Black life only matter when a white man takes it?” he asked Fang. “Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of.”
A co-worker of Fang’s reacted to the tweet by publicly decrying him as a racist. Soon, thousands of others chimed in to condemn him, including quite a few journalists from major outlets. Eventually, he released a public apology.
Welcome to the world that the Elect are trying to create. The only story they want us to tell is one where whites are the villains and minorities are the victims. Honest discussion of why homicide is the leading cause of death for young Black men is off limits.
Unlike McWhorter, who is a staunch atheist, I believe that religion is a force for good in the world. It was Malcolm X’s pilgrimage to Mecca, after all, that finally opened his eyes to the reality that not all whites are wicked. A firm belief that all humans carry souls bestowed by God precludes prejudging them through such corporeal categories as race.
But I agree with McWhorter that a religion that seeks to defeat white supremacy by insisting that nonwhite people cannot be expected to uphold the same standards of conduct and ethics as white people isn’t one worth believing in.
And:
Radicals use new subtle words to redefine everything they wish to attack and destroy.
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Finally:
The former president of St John's College's Annapolis Campus is trying in Austin, Texas:
Higher education is broken. Can a new anti-woke start-up make a difference?
Bari Weiss and other independent thinkers are right in thinking that it’s time for a new approach to college. But the war on wokeism will require more than just advocacy for open discourse.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(November 12, 2021 / JNS) As toxic as Twitter can be, sometimes the orgies of abuse and mockery for which the social media forum is so well-known can tell us something important. When the woke world is competing to see which blue-checked left-wing wiseacre can come up with the most cutting and condescending snark about a subject or person, it’s often a sign that the object of their contempt is on to something important. That’s exactly the case with the reaction to the announcement of the formation of a new institution of higher learning: The University of Austin, whose avowed purpose is to create a haven for open discourse at a time when academia has become best known for the way cancel culture enforces the new left’s aversion to debate about its orthodoxies.
The public announcement of the effort earlier this week by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who is a member of the proposed school’s board of advisors, set off a tsunami of derision from many of the usual suspects in journalism and academia who think there’s nothing wrong with shutting down those who raise questions about woke sensibilities.
Their contempt for Weiss, who is best known for leaving the Times last year after claiming that the same forces were making it difficult, if not impossible, to report about anti-Semitism or have an open discussion about issues like the Black Lives Matter movement, is already well-established. But as historian Niall Ferguson, another of those who are involved in this project, wrote in Bloomberg that the plague of illiberalism on college campuses is destroying the modern university:
“Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S.”
The fact that college faculties and administrations skew almost completely to the left in terms of their politics has had a devastating effect on the pursuit of free inquiry. Publicized incidents in which conservatives or even liberals who question some element of the new leftist orthodoxy are disinvited or deplatformed when invited to speak are common. But the problem goes deeper than that. The suppression of dissenting views in the name of protecting the potentially hurt feelings of those students who cannot tolerate the presence of opposing ideas has become widespread. The dominant culture of the academy has become one in which only certain thoughts are acceptable, and those who don’t agree must often keep their real views quiet or find themselves denied tenure or hounded out of academia altogether.
We have already seen how toxic ideas like critical race theory and intersectionality have migrated from college campuses to mainstream journalism outlets like the Times—whose fallacious “1619 Project” is the best example of how twisted lies about the past can impact both discourse and public schools—and then the public square.
The question, then, is what to do about it. The answer from Weiss, Ferguson and their friends—a collection of academics, writers and thinkers—to stop complaining and start their own school makes sense. Indeed, the negative response to them shows just how threatened the chattering classes and the academic establishment they support are by the idea.
Some of their complaints about the new school and its backers are particularly appalling. Weiss, in particular, has come in for personal attacks. One was published in New York Magazine, which claimed she was a hypocrite because she allegedly engaged in her own form of cancel culture while a student at Columbia University. This is a noxious lie but also important because it goes directly to the problem of modern universities.
What Weiss did in her student days was to speak out against professors and courses on Middle East studies at Columbia that demonized Israel, validated anti-Semitic themes, and marginalized and silenced Jewish students. But in the bizzaro mindset of woke leftism, it was the efforts of Weiss and other Jewish students to expose hate speech and prejudice that was transgressive. It was precisely because Middle Eastern studies was becoming an academic model in which anti-Zionism was the only type of thought that was acceptable that made a protest necessary. What happened at Columbia has now become a common experience in academia in nearly every field of study other than the hard sciences, which have remained somewhat impervious to wokeism.
As Ferguson noted in his article, most universities didn’t begin as places where free speech and academic freedom were respected. Most were begun as schools intended to foster religious orthodoxies of various types. It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that a wave of reform and enlightenment facilitated their evolution into places that valued free discourse as the foundation for scholarship and advanced thought. That not only made them better, but also allowed them to become places where Jews and other minority groups could excel. Without them, the transformation of a poor, immigrant community into one where its members could find a place in virtually every sector of American society would never have been possible.
Though Jews faced anti-Semitism in academia a century ago, that was a relic of a past that was being discarded. The problem today is that the forces that now label themselves as “progressive” are the ones that, in the guise of advocacy for diversity and anti-racism, are handing out a permission slip for Jew-hatred.
That’s why it is so important that an alternative to the current academic culture must either be created or that the existence of competition spurs schools to change.
Can the new school that plans to begin with a summer course next year, and then gradually roll out graduate programs and admit its first undergraduate class in 2024, succeed? Time will tell, but given the obvious need for it, I wouldn’t underestimate its chances of survival or even of eventually being regarded as an important institution of higher learning.
While the effort to provide an alternative to the current model of college is praiseworthy, it’s also likely that the forces now pouring scorn on their plans will work to ensure that the school sprouting in the capital of Texas will be regarded solely as a haven for outliers. The impulse for the best and the brightest students to continue heading to elite institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Columbia, regardless of how badly wokeism is compromising them, will remain great. Still, the very fact of an alternative could help to fuel a counter-revolution within those institutions and others to help begin the process of returning them to a state where open discourse is allowed.
While I firmly count myself among those cheering for the new school, it’s also necessary to point out that there’s more at stake here than merely free discourse. The problem plaguing our colleges and universities is not merely a culture of censorship. Toxic woke myths about history, language and ideas are already changing American society in ways we’re only just beginning to understand, as parents protesting school-board decisions about curricula have demonstrated.
The answer to leftist orthodoxy can’t just be advocacy for free speech, important though that may be. Bad ideas must be opposed with good ones. Concepts that are aimed at tearing down our civilization and sense of ourselves as a nation must be answered with those upholding liberal ideals of patriotism, as well as support for rigorous objective standards of scholarship. The response to collectivist leftist ideas must be those that uphold economic freedom and values that are rooted in the best of Western thought that is at the heart of the traditional scholarly canon.
Twitter snark notwithstanding, the stakes in this battle are nothing less than the intellectual soul of America. If the woke are allowed to prevail, the consequences for all Americans as well as Jews will be enormous.
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