RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-great-jackass-terrorist-alliance

This weekend marked 100 days since Israeli civilians were brought as captives into Gazan tunnels: girls raped, men tortured.

Here, in hip New York, an unending series of escalating demonstrations hamper the city’s functioning and citizens’ general sense of trust and stability. What are the protesters calling for? An immediate Israeli ceasefire. Whom do they represent? An enormous coalition of jackasses.

If the thousands of Gothamites who pretend to care about Arabs (except when other Muslims oppress and slaughter them) really wanted a ceasefire, they would demand that Hamas release innocent civilians and renounce terrorism.

But they don’t actually want a ceasefire. What they want is to be jackasses.

In 2024, New Yorkers need to stop tolerating those who think the fun of disrupting the system is more important than everyone else’s daily lives.

Like cities nationwide, the Big Apple has been sliding down a slope from tolerating jerks to letting them ruin the joint. Since 2014, the post-Ferguson police-shooting moment has blurred the lines between protesters genuinely concerned with how police respond to lawbreakers and those who think lawbreaking is pretty groovy. The more civil faction (the non-jackasses) has been scared to resist this great stand against authority. So, when the most strident voices in the coalition insisted that minor offenses should not be policed, the non-jackasses indulged them, thinking it a necessary sacrifice, even if, deep down, they valued quality of life and public order.

But low-level offending matters. And while we should work to balance community and law-enforcement responses to bad behavior, pretending that such infractions are no big deal is to let the jackasses win. And winning they are: multiple overlapping policy and political shifts, each diminishing our seriousness about low-level crime, have enabled New York City’s masked, belligerent, solipsistic demonstrators to get away with mayhem.

https://www.thefp.com/p/banned-books-kelce-2024-pandemic?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_

The left claims that progressive books are being censored in public schools. But my research proves the opposite is true.

Over the last couple years, the media have peddled a narrative of “book bans” sweeping the nation. Book bans (ostensibly by the right) are “eating away at democracy,” according to The Guardian, and are “taking an emotional toll,” warned CNN. The outrage has reached such a fever pitch that free-speech advocacy group PEN America co-filed a lawsuit (along with parents, authors, and publisher Penguin Random House) against Florida’s Escambia County School District and School Board, accusing them of removing books “discussing race, racism, and LGBTQ identities.” Oral arguments in the court case began on January 10.

But the truth is a lot more complicated. 

Last spring, I wrote about the hijacking of high school debate for The Free Press. I detailed how judges disqualify students for advancing conservative arguments that the judges personally disagree with—effectively taking the debate out of high school debate.

Since that article, I’ve spent time meeting with students, parents, teachers, and school board members. Several students complained that their school libraries had become one-sided, offering only books in line with progressive orthodoxy. 

So I decided to investigate just how one-sided things actually are. I surveyed the library catalogs of 35 of the largest public school districts in eight red states and six blue states, representing over 4,600 individual schools. All of these records are publicly available online. (Here are just three online catalogs I searched: Broward County, FL, Austin, TX, and Oklahoma City, OK.) What I discovered isn’t so much a problem of banned books. It’s that kids are often exposed to only one side of the story. 

For example, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, which argues that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” is stocked in 42 percent of the U.S. school districts I surveyed.

Meanwhile, only a single school district—Northside Independent School District (ISD) in San Antonio, Texas—offers students Woke Racism by John McWhorter, a book that challenges the borderline religious “anti-racist” ideas advanced by Kendi.

https://www.thefp.com/p/john-sailer-the-dei-rollback

When he took office in 2021, Utah governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, made advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” a key priority. He appointed a high-level diversity officer to his administration. His senior leadership was put through a “21-Day Equity Challenge,” which instructed them in microaggressions and antiracism.

The universities were on board. Utah State’s annual diversity symposium featured talks such as “Decentering Whiteness.” The university also required DEI statements from applicants to the faculty, explaining how they infused diversity and equity—a focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of “marginalization”—into their work. Even for positions in fields such as insect ecology and lithospheric evolution. 

Then, in December, Cox announced a different priority: reversing the excesses of DEI. At a press conference he said, “We’re using identitarianism to force people into boxes, and into victimhood, and I just don’t think that’s helpful at all. In fact, I think it’s harmful.” So harmful that he announced his intention to bar the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring, condemning the practice as “bordering on evil.”

Spencer Cox is not alone. After what appeared to be an inexorable rise of the DEI bureaucracy through government, higher education, and business for the past few years, many now feel like Cox—and are taking action. Legislators have proposed and passed laws curtailing DEI practices. Businesses have trimmed their DEI positions. Some universities have voluntarily ditched mandatory diversity statements. DEI is still deeply entrenched at our institutions—but retrenchment is well under way.