DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order

Critical race theory was never designed to reveal truth—it was designed to achieve power.

Christopher Rufo

The ambition of the critical race theorists and their confederates in “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not simply to achieve cultural hegemony over the bureaucracy, but to use this power to reshape the structures of American society. But in the miasma of mystical reasoning and therapeutic language, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the critical question: What specifically do they want?

The answer is to be found in the original literature of critical race theory which, before its transformation in the euphemisms of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” was remarkably candid about the discipline’s political objectives. They had abandoned the Marxist-Leninist vocabulary of their precursors, such as Angela Davis and the Black Panther Party, but the critical race theorists imagined a revolution that struck just as deeply. They cobbled together a strategy of revolt against the Constitution, using the mechanisms of institutional power to change the words, meanings, and interpretations that provide the foundation of the existing order.

“The Constitution is merely a piece of paper in the face of the monopoly on violence and capital possessed by those who intend to keep things just the way they are,” said legal theorist Mari Matsuda. Tearing it down was not a transgression; it was a moral obligation. When necessary, Matsuda argued, the critical race theorists could appeal to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution to advance their interests, but ultimately, they believed, “rights are whatever people in power say they are.” The point was not to uphold the principles of the Constitution, but to wield them as a weapon for securing authority.

In place of the existing interpretation, the critical race theorists proposed a three-part overhaul of the American system of governance: abandoning the “colorblind” notion of equality, redistributing wealth along racial lines, and restricting speech that is deemed “hateful.”

To begin, the critical race theorists made the case that “color-blind constitutionalism” functions as a “racial ideology” that “fosters white racial domination” and advances an implicit form of “cultural genocide.” The system of individual rights and equal protection, they argued, provided an illusion of equality that failed to ad- dress the history of racial injustice. The way stations of “multiculturalism,” “tolerance,” and “diversity” were inadequate substitutions for “legitimate governmental efforts to address white racial privilege.” To rectify this deficiency, the critical race theorists proposed a new interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that moves from a system of negative rights—or, protection against state intrusion—to a system of positive rights, or an entitlement to state action.

As Derrick Bell explained, the remedy for the limitations of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had failed to achieve substantive racial equality, was to “broaden the Constitution’s protections to include economic rights” and an “entitlement to basic needs—jobs, housing, food, health care, education and security—as essential property rights of all individuals.” In practice, the implementation of this view would require a system of affirmative ac- tion, racial quotas, reparations, and group-based rights. The Constitution would thus become “color-conscious” and the state would treat individuals differently according to race, deliberately reducing privileges for whites and securing privileges for minorities. “The only substantive meaning of the equal protection clause,” explained Mari Matsuda, “mandates the disestablishment of the ideology of racism.”

There is no bottom to this line of thinking. For the critical race theorists, the word “racism” included everything from explicit discrimination to unconscious bias to unequal outcomes of any kind. And, as Bell insisted, it had an eternal, indestructible power over American society. As a consequence, the critical race theorists abandoned the hope of racial integration and equality under the law, which was deemed naïve, and would replace it with a permanent machine of racial reasoning and reapportionment.

At the abstract level, this would mean foreclosing the promise of the Declaration, the Emancipation, and the Fourteenth Amendment. At the practical level, it would mean permanently categorizing, ranking, sorting, rewarding, and punishing individuals on the basis of identity, rather than character, merit, or individual accomplishment. For the critical race theorists, the question was how, not if, racism has occurred, and any alternate explanations for disparities, such as family, culture, and behavior, were dis- missed as rationalizations for white supremacy.

How could this system of white supremacy be corrected? First and foremost, through the equalization of material wealth through racial redistribution.

The key justification for this policy came from UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris, who wrote an influential Harvard Law Review paper called “Whiteness as Property,” which was celebrated by Derrick Bell and republished as one of the founding texts in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. In the essay, Harris argued that property rights, enshrined in the Constitution, were in actuality a form of white supremacy and must be subverted in order to achieve racial equality.

“The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination. Even in the early years of the country, it was not the concept of race alone that operated to oppress blacks and Indians; rather, it was the interaction between conceptions of race and property which played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination,” Harris wrote. “Only white possession and occupation of land was validated and therefore privileged as a basis for property rights. These distinct forms of exploitation each contributed in varying ways to the construction of whiteness as property.”

Harris thus established the emotionally loaded premise—whiteness and property are inseparable from slavery—that she then projected onto modern society. “Whiteness, initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property, historically and presently acknowledged and protected in American law,” she wrote. But this had been mystified by the racial ideology of the Constitution. “Although the existing state of inequitable distribution is the product of institutionalized white supremacy and economic exploitation, it is seen by whites as part of the natural order of things that cannot legitimately be disturbed. Through legal doctrine, expectation of continued privilege based on white domination was reified; whiteness as property was reaffirmed.”

Harris, however, believed that this system was not inevitable and, through the process of demystification, could be overthrown. She argued that the basic conceptual vocabulary of the constitutional system—“‘rights,’ ‘equality,’ ‘property,’ ‘neutrality,’ and ‘power’”—are mere illusions used to maintain the white-dominated racial hierarchy. In reality, Harris contended, “rights mean shields from interference; equality means formal equality; property means the settled expectations that are to be protected; neutrality means the existing distribution, which is natural; and, power is the mechanism for guarding all of this.”

The solution for Harris was to replace the system of property rights and equal protection, which she described as “mere nondiscrimination,” with a system of positive discrimination tasked with “redistributing power and resources in order to rectify inequities and to achieve real equality.” To achieve this goal, she advocated large-scale land and wealth redistribution, inspired in part by the African decolonial model. Harris envisioned a temporary suspension of existing property rights, followed by a governmental campaign to “address directly the distribution of property and power” through property confiscation and race-based reapportionment.

“Property rights will then be respected,” Harris noted, “but they will not be absolute and will be considered against a societal requirement of affirmative action.”

In Harris’s formulation, if rights were a mechanism of white supremacy, they must be curtailed; if property was “racialized property,” it was the legitimate subject for racialist reconquest. And the state is justified in pursuing a regime of “affirmative action,” which Harris defined broadly as “equalizing treatment,” including South Africa–style wealth seizures, which, she said, were “required on both moral and legal grounds to de- legitimate the property interest in whiteness—to dismantle the actual and expected privilege that has attended ‘white’ skin since the founding of the country.”

The next question facing the critical race theorists was more practical: How would this proposed system of group-based rights and racialist redistribution be enforced? The answer was clear: through the regulation of “harmful” speech.

In a book titled Words That Wound, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw laid out the case for dramatically restricting the First Amendment in order to suppress individuals and institutions that represent the forces that would “advance the structure and ideology of white supremacy.”

The foundation of their argument was that speech can be a form of violence and, as such, must be restricted by the state in a similar manner. “This is a book about assaultive speech, about words that are used as weapons to ambush, terrorize, wound, humiliate, and degrade,” they write in the book’s opening paragraph. As with private property and colorblind equality, the critical race theorists proposed that the First Amendment was not designed to protect individual speech, but to cynically enable “racist hate speech” and protect the system of white supremacy.

Freedom of expression, they argued, does not serve citizens equally; in fact, it is both a means and a mask for the subordination of minorities. When the state permits harmful speech, which ranges from subconscious racial messaging to explicit racist polemics, it threatens the physical and psychological safety of racial minorities. “We are not safe when these violent words are among us,” Matsuda wrote. “Victims of vicious hate propaganda experience physiological symptoms and emotional distress ranging from fear in the gut to rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing, night- mares, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis, and suicide. Patricia Williams has called the blow of racist messages ‘spirit murder’ in recognition of the psychic destruction victims experience.”

In order to adjudicate guilt, the critical race theorists argued that the concept of “harmful speech” must be interpreted through the lens of intersectionality, with the victim-perpetrator distinction offering a rubric for culpability. The writers of Words That Wound were explicit in their argument that whites, and whites only, had the capability of committing speech violence.

Racist language used by minorities against whites, such as Malcolm X’s famous tirades against the “white devil,” would be exempted from restrictions. “Some would find this troublesome, arguing that any attack on any person’s ethnicity is harmful,” Matsuda argued. “In the case of the white devil, there is harm and hurt, but it is of a different degree. Because the attack is not tied to the perpetuation of racist vertical relationships, it is not the paradigm worst example of hate propaganda. The dominant-group member hurt by conflict with the angry nationalist is more likely to have access to a safe harbor of exclusive dominant-group interactions. Retreat and reaffirmation of personhood are more easily attained for members of groups not historically subjugated.”

In addition to racial speech, the critical race theorists would also regulate political speech. Under their ideal regime, Marxist speech would be protected by the First Amendment; “racist,” “fascist,” and “harmful” speech would not.

In practice, the critical race theorists would institute a system of speech codes, behavior regulation, bias detection, and reshaping of the subconscious in order to produce a predetermined outcome of “anti-racist” speech, behavior, and culture. The justification, following the example of Cheryl Harris’s treatment of private property, was that speech power must be redistributed in order to dismantle the institutions and ideologies that prop up the racist system. Speech that embodies “whiteness” must be suppressed; speech that embodies “blackness” must be supported. The content of speech, beginning with “unconscious racism” and ending with the “fighting words” of racial threats, must be reordered and redirected toward the substantive goal of overturning the existing system.

Taken together, the three pillars of the critical race theorists’ ideal system of governance—the replacement of individual rights with group rights, the race-based redistribution of wealth, the suppression of speech based on a racial and political calculus—constitute a change in political regime.

Under the ideology of the critical race theory, the meaning of the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the protections of private property would be demolished. The result would be a form of tyranny: the state would not only control the distribution of material resources, as in a collectivist economic regime, but would also extend its domain over individual psychology, speech, expression, and behavior. These twin goals— material and nonmaterial reapportionment—would be achieved through the heavy hand of the state, which would be granted unprecedented intrusion into public and private life.

As the ideologists and bureaucrats of critical race theory entrenched themselves in the institutions, they worked to turn these concepts into pol- icy. They believed their ideas were ready to see the light of day.

The rise of the DEI regime is no longer an academic exercise.

In recent years, left-wing bureaucracies have proposed and enacted a range of policies predicated on the logic of critical race theory. For example, during the coronavirus pandemic, some states created a race-conscious formula for distributing vaccinations that would deny treatment to whites in order to achieve “racial equity.” On the West Coast, some cities have created income transfer programs exclusively for racial and sexual minorities. In government, some agencies have started to mandate separate

employee training programs for “whites” and “people of color” so that whites can “accept responsibility for their own racism” and minorities can insulate themselves from “any potential harming [that] might arise from a cross- racial conversation.” Some public schools have followed suit, segregating students by race for field trips and extracurricular activities, which are, according to school officials, designed to “create a space of belonging,” which, they say, without a hint of irony, is “about uniting us, not dividing us.”

At the federal level, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced an “Anti-Racism in Public Health Act” that seeks to use the theory of “intersectionality” to direct resources to favored racial-political factions and to embed the monocausal “racial disparities” doctrine into every appendage of the federal government. Likewise, on his first day in office, President Joseph Biden issued an executive order seeking to nationalize the approach of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “embed equity principles, policies, and approaches across the Federal Government.” In business, every Fortune 100 corporation in America has submitted to the ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

This is only the beginning. This movement seeks to establish itself in every layer of the public and private administration, which will be refitted to advance the substitute morality of critical race theory and replace governance by the Constitution with governance by the bureaucracy. The strategy is not to amend the Constitution through the democratic process— which, the critical race theorists concede, would be an impossibility—but to subvert it through a thousand administrative cuts. Their gambit is to normalize the regime of group-based rights, active discrimination, speech suppression, and racialist redistribution of resources through small administrative decisions, which can, over time, legitimize broader policies.

The critical race theorists’ ultimate ambition is to establish these principles as state orthodoxy from the top down. In an essay for Politico Magazine, Boston University professor and bestselling popularizer of critical race theory Ibram Kendi unveiled his proposal for an “anti-racist amendment” to the Constitution. “The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” Kendi explained. “It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Antiracism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state, and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

In other words, the scope and power of the new “Department of Antiracism” would be nearly unlimited. In effect, it would become a fourth branch of government, unaccountable to voters, that would have the authority to veto, nullify, or suspend any law in any jurisdiction in the United States. It would mean an end to the system of federalism and to the lawmaking authority of Congress. Furthermore, under the power to “investigate private racist policies” and wield authority over “racist ideas,” the new agency would have unprecedented control over the work of lawmakers, as well as auxiliary policymaking institutions such as think tanks, research centers, universities, and political parties.

Although Kendi’s proposal is framed as an amendment to the American constitutional order, it is better described as an end to the constitutional order. In the name of racial justice, the critical race theorists and their fellow travelers would limit, curtail, or abolish the rights to property, equal protection, due process, federalism, speech, and the separation of powers. They would also replace the system of checks and balances with an “anti-racist” bureaucracy with nearly unlimited state power—and every other institution would be forced to fall in line.

If critical race theory should succeed as a system of government, it is easy to imagine the future: an omnipotent bureaucracy that manages trans- fer payments between racial castes, enforces always-shifting speech and behavior codes through bureaucratic rule, and replaces the slogan of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with the deadening euphemism of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

This is not yet the regime in America, but unless there is a reversal within the institutions, the slow, hulking machine of critical race ideology will continue to accumulate power and marginalize democratic opposition. Once the public has been sufficiently alienated from the Constitution of 1789— when its heroes have been destroyed and its memories severed from their origins—the Constitution will finally become “merely a piece of paper,” a palimpsest to be written over in pursuit of the “total rupture” with the past. It will become, in the words of Derrick Bell, nothing but “roach powder” used to suffocate and destroy American liberty.

The triumph of the new ideological regime would mean the end of a society oriented, however imperfectly, toward the eternal principles, and the installation of society of racial score-settling and bureaucratic leveling, abandoning the individual to his fate.

A River Runs Through

Doomberg
Nov 29∙Preview

“In wilderness, I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.” – Charles Lindberg

Jim and Ted Baird are brothers, adventurers, videographers, and rugged wilderness enthusiasts. They gained significant notoriety by winning the fourth season of the History Channel’s hit series Alone, outlasting the other contestants, and capturing the show’s $500,000 prize. The pair spent a grueling 75 days in the remote Quatsino Territory on Vancouver Island, surviving with nothing more than the 10 tools they selected to bring with them, the skills they learned before appearing on the show, and their trust in each other as brothers. While their relationship can at times be humorously cantankerous, don’t doubt for a second that if you stepped up to one of them in a bar, you’d best be prepared to fight both.

Since winning Alone, the brothers have continued to document their adventures on YouTube. In an epic 24-part series titled “Beyond the Height-of-Land,” the Bairds chronicled their nearly 450-mile canoe trip up the remote Barrington River in Northern Manitoba, across a brutal portage over a height-of-land, and downthe South Seal and Seal Rivers to the coast of the famous Hudson Bay. Along the way, they paddled across huge lakes, encountered a dizzying array of wildlife (a wolverine, a moose, countless seals, and a half dozen polar bears among them), enjoyed incredible fishing, navigated dangerous whitewater rapids with mixed success, and dealt with the unrelenting assault of hordes of summer bugs.

In Episode 19, the pair were near the end of their journey down the Seal when they happened upon a small cabin constructed by Environment Canada, a powerful arm of the Canadian federal government. This was the first sign of civilization the brothers had seen in weeks, and yet they were less than thrilled with the discovery. Jim pointed the camera at himself and explained why (emphasis added throughout, lightly edited for clarity):

Environment Canada cabin on the Seal River

Those less familiar with Canadian culture might have missed important clues in Baird’s statement that reveal the extent to which hydropower dams dot much of the country’s otherwise spectacular landscape. In using the phrase “get the hydro out of here,” Baird was referring to electricity, but in much of Canada the words “hydro” and “electricity” are practically synonymous. One’s “electricity bill” is commonly referred to as a “hydro bill,” and a child might be instructed by their parents to turn off a light switch to “save on hydro.”

This cultural nuance makes sense when you consider that hydropower provides 60% of Canada’s electricity, compared to just 6% in the US. The province of Québec gets more than 95% of its electricity from hydropower and is a major exporter of power to the US Northeast. New York City recently signed a contract to obtain 20% of its future electricity needs from Hydro-Québec.

As one might imagine, damming Canadian rivers to supply electricity to Americans is a controversial subject in the Great White North, a sentiment that finds its way into Baird’s use of the phrases “that we don’t even need” and “to God knows where.” He knows where, but to notoriously polite Canadians, some things are best left unsaid, even words that protest the relegation of one’s country as a mere energy vassal to the world’s dominant suzerain.

The debate over hydropower in Canada crystalizes the undeniable fact of trade-offs in all decisions about energy. While hydropower is commonly understood as “renewable” and “green” (and therefore “good”), the full picture is decidedly more complicated. As the West attempts to reengineer society around minimizing carbon emissions, what role can, should, and will hydropower likely play in the coming decades?

Leftists Don’t Want To Talk About The Abortion Rate Of Black Babies

FEB 25 

WRITTEN BY AUSTIN STONE & T.W. SHANNON

This article originally appeared at the The Federalist.

In a hearing last week about racism in public school curriculum, Arizona state Rep. Walt Blackman said any “honest conversation” about America’s past of slavery and discrimination must also acknowledge the genocide of our present age: abortion.

“There are more black babies aborted than born every day,” he said.

White leftist activists constantly talk about racism, but they conveniently ignore that their sacred cow of abortion is racist to its core.

Abortion should never have become a political football. It used to be something every American, Democrat and Republican, agreed was wrong.

Democrat politician and activist Jesse Jackson is a good example. In 1975, he compared the Roe v. Wade decision to slavery: “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life … That was the premise of slavery.” But after Jackson ran for the Democrat presidential nomination in 1988, he conformed to the pro-choice party line.

Since then, a tragic dissonance has ensued in the black community over party affiliation and abortion. While most black Americans (54 percent) think abortion is morally unacceptable, they are still more closely associated with the Democratic Party and its abortion-friendly platform. Many black voters find themselves out of step with Democrat candidates seeking their votes, especially on social issues, similar to blue-collar voters who feel Democrat policies have left them behind.

Democrats can easily reconcile with their voter base on this issue. Restoring respect for all life would win the hearts of many in the black community.

A recently released report from an organization we work with, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), shows the devastating effects of abortion on generations of black Americans. The report details the abortion industry’s predatory practices — how abortion providers seek out minority women, advertise directly to them, and sometimes perform illegal procedures, like the infamous late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell. This multi-billion dollar industry isn’t trying to protect anyone’s rights; it’s trying to profit off desperate women, especially black women.

In 2012, the Life Issues Institute reported that “79% of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are strategically located within walking distance of African-American and/or Hispanic communities.” In 2017, they updated these numbers to include 25 new abortion mega centers, 100 percent of which were within walking distance of minority neighborhoods. With each abortion bringing in hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on whether they are early- or late-term abortions, it’s clear that abortion providers are engaging in a grisly sort of supply-side economics.

Worse still, abortion has always been a tool of racial eugenics, the ideology that seeks to limit “undesirable” black births. Star Parker, the founder of CURE and author of the report, argues that “From its inception, the abortion industry has sought to control and hinder the growth of the Black population, a core objective of the movement’s founders.”

This is a historical fact. Margaret Sanger, the founder of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, was a racial eugenicist who was concerned that “the mass of Negroes … still breed carelessly and disastrously,” and hired black pastors lest “word go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” Many other early abortion activists, such as Hugh Moore and Edward Ross, sought to expand abortion to prevent non-white population growth. Today, there are still abortion activists who behave like the black community needs more abortions.

The politicization of abortion — an issue that is moral to its core — is a wound in our national fabric that we feel deeply and personally. One of us was born to a single mother and later adopted, but many others in the exact same situation were aborted. We work with CURE to support policies that help mothers with unplanned pregnancies avoid the grievous act of abortion. Black mothers especially face intense manipulation and pressure because of the politics of abortion.

We must restore bipartisan moral common sense and offer hope to these women. There is no hope without justice, and there’s no justice without truth. We can’t talk about racism without talking about the dark stain on our society that abortion represents. Black Americans, who suffer disproportionately from abortion, deserve equal rights, including the right to life. The unborn deserve racial justice too.

The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies

Rejecting the Moynihan report caused untold, needless misery.

By Kay S. Hymowitz

Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.

To go back to the political and social moment before the battle broke out over the Moynihan report is to return to a time before the country’s discussion of black poverty had hardened into fixed orthodoxies—before phrases like “blaming the victim,” “self-esteem,” “out-of-wedlock childbearing” (the term at the time was “illegitimacy”), and even “teen pregnancy” had become current. While solving the black poverty problem seemed an immense political challenge, as a conceptual matter it didn’t seem like rocket science. Most analysts assumed that once the nation removed discriminatory legal barriers and expanded employment opportunities, blacks would advance, just as poor immigrants had.

Conditions for testing that proposition looked good. Between the 1954 Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal racism had been dismantled. And the economy was humming along; in the first five years of the sixties, the economy generated 7 million jobs.

Yet those most familiar with what was called “the Negro problem” were getting nervous. About half of all blacks had moved into the middle class by the mid-sixties, but now progress seemed to be stalling. The rise in black income relative to that of whites, steady throughout the fifties, was sputtering to a halt. More blacks were out of work in 1964 than in 1954. Most alarming, after rioting in Harlem and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1964, the problems of the northern ghettos suddenly seemed more intractable than those of the George Wallace South.

Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and one of a new class of government social scientists, was among the worriers, as he puzzled over his charts. One in particular caught his eye. Instead of rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment running parallel as they always had, in 1962 they started to diverge in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.” In the past, policymakers had assumed that if the male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men—though still “catastrophically” low numbers—were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls. Moynihan and his aides decided that a serious analysis was in order.

Convinced that “the Negro revolution . . . , a movement for equality as well as for liberty,” was now at risk, Moynihan wanted to make several arguments in his report. The first was empirical and would quickly become indisputable: single-parent families were on the rise in the ghetto. But other points were more speculative and sparked a partisan dispute that has lasted to this day. Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. Though black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had already introduced the idea in the 1930s, Moynihan’s argument defied conventional social-science wisdom. As he wrote later, “The work began in the most orthodox setting, the U.S. Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what ‘everyone knew’: that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so.”

But Moynihan went much further than merely overthrowing familiar explanations about the cause of poverty. He also described, through pages of disquieting charts and graphs, the emergence of a “tangle of pathology,” including delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and fatherlessness that characterized ghetto—or what would come to be called underclass—behavior. Moynihan may have borrowed the term “pathology” from Kenneth Clark’s The Dark Ghetto, also published that year. But as both a descendant and a scholar of what he called “the wild Irish slums”—he had written a chapter on the poor Irish in the classic Beyond the Melting Pot—the assistant secretary of labor was no stranger to ghetto self-destruction. He knew the dangers it posed to “the basic socializing unit” of the family. And he suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of blacks, since their “matriarchal” family had the effect of abandoning men, leaving them adrift and “alienated.”

More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.”

Astonishingly, even for that surprising time, the Johnson administration agreed. Prompted by Moynihan’s still-unpublished study, Johnson delivered a speech at the Howard University commencement that called for “the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.” The president began his speech with the era’s conventional civil rights language, condemning inequality and calling for more funding of medical care, training, and education for Negroes. But he also broke into new territory, analyzing the family problem with what strikes the contemporary ear as shocking candor. He announced: “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” He described “the breakdown of the Negro family structure,” which he said was “the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice.” “When the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged,” Johnson continued. “When it happens on a massive scale, the community itself is crippled.”

Johnson was to call this his “greatest civil rights speech,” but he was just about the only one to see it that way. By that summer, the Moynihan report that was its inspiration was under attack from all sides. Civil servants in the “permanent government” at Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and at the Children’s Bureau muttered about the report’s “subtle racism.” Academics picked apart its statistics. Black leaders like Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) director Floyd McKissick scolded that, rather than the family, “[i]t’s the damn system that needs changing.”

In part, the hostility was an accident of timing. Just days after the report was leaked to Newsweek in early August, L.A.’s Watts ghetto exploded. The televised images of the South Central Los Angeles rioters burning down their own neighborhood collided in the public mind with the contents of the report. Some concluded that the “tangle of pathology” was the administration’s explanation for urban riots, a view quite at odds with civil rights leaders’ determination to portray the violence as an outpouring of black despair over white injustice. Moreover, given the fresh wounds of segregation, the persistent brutality against blacks, and the ugly tenaciousness of racism, the fear of white backsliding and the sense of injured pride that one can hear in so many of Moynihan’s critics are entirely understandable.

Less forgivable was the refusal to grapple seriously—either at the time or in the months, years, even decades to come—with the basic cultural insight contained in the report: that ghetto families were at risk of raising generations of children unable to seize the opportunity that the civil rights movement had opened up for them. Instead, critics changed the subject, accusing Moynihan—wrongfully, as any honest reading of “The Negro Family” proves—of ignoring joblessness and discrimination. Family instability is a “peripheral issue,” warned Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League. “The problem is discrimination.” The protest generating the most buzz came from William Ryan, a CORE activist, in “Savage Discovery: The Moynihan Report,” published in The Nation and later reprinted in the NAACP’s official publication. Ryan, though a psychologist, did not hear Moynihan’s point that as the family goes, so go the children. He heard code for the archaic charge of black licentiousness. He described the report as a “highly sophomoric treatment of illegitimacy” and insisted that whites’ broader access to abortion, contraception, and adoption hid the fact that they were no less “promiscuous” than blacks. Most memorably, he accused Moynihan of “blaming the victim,” a phrase that would become the title of his 1971 book and the fear-inducing censor of future plain speaking about the ghetto’s decay.

That Ryan’s phrase turned out to have more cultural staying power than anything in the Moynihan report is a tragic emblem of the course of the subsequent discussion about the ghetto family. For white liberals and the black establishment, poverty became a zero-sum game: either you believed, as they did, that there was a defect in the system, or you believed that there was a defect in the individual. It was as if critiquing the family meant that you supported inferior schools, even that you were a racist. Though “The Negro Family” had been a masterpiece of complex analysis that implied that individuals were intricately entwined in a variety of systems—familial, cultural, and economic—it gave birth to a hardened, either/or politics from which the country has barely recovered.

By autumn, when a White House conference on civil rights took place, the Moynihan report, initially planned as its centerpiece, had been disappeared. Johnson himself, having just introduced large numbers of ground troops into Vietnam, went mum on the subject, steering clear of the word “family” in the next State of the Union message. This was a moment when the nation had the resources, the leadership (the president had been overwhelmingly elected, and he had the largest majorities in the House and Senate since the New Deal), and the will “to make a total . . . commitment to the cause of Negro equality,” Moynihan lamented in a 1967 postmortem of his report in Commentary. Instead, he declared, the nation had disastrously decided to punt on Johnson’s “next and more profound stage in the battle for civil rights.” “The issue of the Negro family was dead.”

Well, not exactly. Over the next 15 years, the black family question actually became a growth industry inside academe, the foundations, and the government. But it wasn’t the same family that had worried Moynihan and that in the real world continued to self-destruct at unprecedented rates. Scholars invented a fantasy family—strong and healthy, a poor man’s Brady Bunch—whose function was not to reflect truth but to soothe injured black self-esteem and to bolster the emerging feminist critique of male privilege, bourgeois individualism, and the nuclear family. The literature of this period was so evasive, so implausible, so far removed from what was really unfolding in the ghetto, that if you didn’t know better, you might conclude that people actually wanted to keep the black family separate and unequal.

Consider one of the first books out of the gate, Black Families in White America, by Andrew Billingsley, published in 1968 and still referred to as “seminal.” “Unlike Moynihan and others, we do not view the Negro as a causal nexus in a ‘tangle of pathologies’ which feeds on itself,” he declared. “[The Negro family] is, in our view, an absorbing, adaptive, and amazingly resilient mechanism for the socialization of its children and the civilization of its society.” Pay no attention to the 25 percent of poor ghetto families, Billingsley urged. Think instead about the 75 percent of black middle-class families—though Moynihan had made a special point of exempting them from his report.

Other black pride–inspired scholars looked at female-headed families and declared them authentically African and therefore a good thing. In a related vein, Carol Stack published All Our Kin, a 1974 HEW-funded study of families in a midwestern ghetto with many multigenerational female households. In an implicit criticism of American individualism, Stack depicted “The Flats,” as she dubbed her setting, as a vibrant and cooperative urban village, where mutual aid—including from sons, brothers, and uncles, who provided financial support and strong role models for children—created “a tenacious, active, lifelong network.”

In fact, some scholars continued, maybe the nuclear family was really just a toxic white hang-up, anyway. No one asked what nuclear families did, or how they prepared children for a modern economy. The important point was simply that they were not black. “One must question the validity of the white middle-class lifestyle from its very foundation because it has already proven itself to be decadent and unworthy of emulation,” wrote Joyce Ladner (who later became the first female president of Howard University) in her 1972 book Tomorrow’s Tomorrow. Robert Hill of the Urban League, who published The Strengths of Black Families that same year, claimed to have uncovered science that proved Ladner’s point: “Research studies have revealed that many one-parent families are more intact or cohesive than many two-parent families: data on child abuse, battered wives and runaway children indicate higher rates among two-parent families in suburban areas than one-parent families in inner city communities.” That science, needless to say, was as reliable as a deadbeat dad.

Feminists, similarly fixated on overturning the “oppressive ideal of the nuclear family,” also welcomed this dubious scholarship. Convinced that marriage was the main arena of male privilege, feminists projected onto the struggling single mother an image of the “strong black woman” who had always had to work and who was “superior in terms of [her] ability to function healthily in the world,” as Toni Morrison put it. The lucky black single mother could also enjoy more equal relationships with men than her miserably married white sisters.

If black pride made it hard to grapple with the increasingly separate and unequal family, feminism made it impossible. Fretting about single-parent families was now not only racist but also sexist, an effort to deny women their independence, their sexuality, or both. As for the poverty of single mothers, that was simply more proof of patriarchal oppression. In 1978, University of Wisconsin researcher Diana Pearce introduced the useful term “feminization of poverty.” But for her and her many allies, the problem was not the crumbling of the nuclear family; it was the lack of government support for single women and the failure of business to pay women their due.

With the benefit of embarrassed hindsight, academics today sometimes try to wave away these notions as the justifiably angry, but ultimately harmless, speculations of political and academic activists. “The depth and influence of the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s are often exaggerated,” historian Stephanie Coontz writes in her new book, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. This is pure revisionism. The radical delegitimation of the family was so pervasive that even people at the center of power joined in. It made no difference that so many of these cheerleaders for single mothers had themselves spent their lives in traditional families and probably would rather have cut off an arm than seen their own unmarried daughters pushing strollers.

Take, for instance, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, who wrote a concurring assent in the 1977 Moore v. City of East Cleveland decision. The case concerned a woman and her grandson evicted from a housing project following a city ordinance that defined “family” as parents—or parent—and their own children. Brennan did not simply agree that the court should rule in favor of the grandmother—a perfectly reasonable position. He also assured the court that “the extended family has many strengths not shared by the nuclear family.” Relying on Robert Hill’s “science,” he declared that delinquency, addiction, crime, “neurotic disabilities,” and mental illness were more prevalent in societies where “autonomous nuclear families prevail,” a conclusion that would have bewildered the writers of the Constitution that Brennan was supposedly interpreting.

In its bumbling way and with far-reaching political consequences, the executive branch also offered warm greetings to the single-parent family. Alert to growing apprehension about the state of the American family during his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter had promised a conference on the subject. Clearly less concerned with conditions in the ghetto than with satisfying feminist advocates, the administration named a black single (divorced) mother to lead the event, occasioning an outcry from conservatives. By 1980, when it finally convened after numerous postponements, the White House Conference on the Family had morphed into the White House Conference on Families, to signal that all family forms were equal.

Instead of the political victory for moderate Democrats that Carter had expected, the conference galvanized religious conservatives.

Later, conservative heavyweight Paul Weyrich observed that the Carter conference marked the moment when religious activists moved in force into Republican politics. Doubtless they were also more energized by their own issues of feminism and gay rights than by what was happening in the ghetto. But their new rallying cry of “family values” nonetheless became a political dividing line, with unhappy fallout for liberals for years to come.

Meanwhile, the partisans of single motherhood got a perfect chance to test their theories, since the urban ghettos were fast turning into nuclear-family-free zones. Indeed, by 1980, 15 years after “The Negro Family,” the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks had more than doubled, to 56 percent. In the ghetto, that number was considerably higher, as high as 66 percent in New York City. Many experts comforted themselves by pointing out that white mothers were also beginning to forgo marriage, but the truth was that only 9 percent of white births occurred out of wedlock.

And how was the black single-parent family doing? It would be fair to say that it had not been exhibiting the strengths of kinship networks. According to numbers crunched by Moynihan and economist Paul Offner, of the black children born between 1967 and 1969, 72 percent received Aid to Families with Dependent Children before the age of 18. School dropout rates, delinquency, and crime, among the other dysfunctions that Moynihan had warned about, were rising in the cities. In short, the 15 years since the report was written had witnessed both the birth of millions of fatherless babies and the entrenchment of an underclass.

Liberal advocates had two main ways of dodging the subject of family collapse while still addressing its increasingly alarming fallout. The first, largely the creation of Marian Wright Edelman, who in 1973 founded the Children’s Defense Fund, was to talk about children not as the offspring of individual mothers and fathers responsible for rearing them, but as an oppressed class living in generic, nebulous, and never-to-be-analyzed “families.” Framing the problem of ghetto children in this way, CDF was able to mount a powerful case for a host of services, from prenatal care to day care to housing subsidies, in the name of children’s developmental needs, which did not seem to include either a stable domestic life or, for that matter, fathers. Advocates like Edelman might not have viewed the collapsing ghetto family as a welcome occurrence, but they treated it as a kind of natural event, like drought, beyond human control and judgment. As recently as a year ago, marking the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, CDF announced on its website: “In 2004 it is morally and economically indefensible that a black preschool child is three times as likely to depend solely on a mother’s earnings.” This may strike many as a pretty good argument for addressing the prevalence of black single-mother families, but in CDF-speak it is a case for federal natural-disaster relief.

The Children’s Defense Fund was only the best-known child-advocacy group to impose a gag rule on the role of fatherless families in the plight of its putative constituents. The Carnegie Corporation followed suit. In 1977, it published a highly influential report by Kenneth Keniston called All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure. It makes an obligatory nod toward the family’s role in raising children, before calling for a cut in unemployment, a federal job guarantee, national health insurance, affirmative action, and a host of other children’s programs. In a review in Commentary, Nathan Glazer noted ruefully that All Our Children was part of a “recent spate of books and articles on the subject of the family [that] have had little if anything to say about the black family in particular and the matter seems to have been permanently shelved.” For that silence, children’s advocates deserve much of the credit—or blame.

The second way not to talk about what was happening to the ghetto family was to talk instead about teen pregnancy. In 1976 the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm, published “Eleven Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done About the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancy in the United States?” It was a report that launched a thousand programs. In response to its alarms, HEW chief Joseph Califano helped push through the 1978 Adolescent Health Services and Pregnancy Prevention and Care Act, which funded groups providing services to pregnant adolescents and teen moms. Nonprofits, including the Center for Population Options (now called Advocates for Youth), climbed on the bandwagon. The Ford and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations showered dollars on organizations that ran school-based health clinics, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation set up the Too Early Childbearing Network, the Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsored “A Community Strategy for Reaching Sexually Active Adolescents,” and the Carnegie, Ford, and William T. Grant Foundations all started demonstration programs.

There was just one small problem: there was no epidemic of teen pregnancy. There was an out-of-wedlock teen-pregnancy epidemic. Teenagers had gotten pregnant at even higher rates in the past. The numbers had reached their zenith in the 1950s, and the “Eleven Million Teenagers” cited in the Guttmacher report actually represented a decline in the rate of pregnant teens. Back in the day, however, when they found out they were pregnant, girls had either gotten married or given their babies up for adoption. Not this generation. They were used to seeing children growing up without fathers, and they felt no shame about arriving at the maternity ward with no rings on their fingers, even at 15.

In the middle-class mind, however, no sane girl would want to have a baby at 15—not that experts mouthing rhetoric about the oppressive patriarchal family would admit that there was anything wrong with that. That middle-class outlook, combined with post-Moynihan mendacity about the growing disconnect between ghetto childbearing and marriage, led the policy elites to frame what was really the broad cultural problem of separate and unequal families as a simple lack-of-reproductive-services problem. Ergo, girls “at risk” must need sex education and contraceptive services.

But the truth was that underclass girls often wanted to have babies; they didn’t see it as a problem that they were young and unmarried. They did not follow the middle-class life script that read: protracted adolescence, college, first job, marriage—and only then children. They did not share the belief that children needed mature, educated mothers who would make their youngsters’ development the center of their lives. Access to birth control couldn’t change any of that.

At any rate, failing to define the problem accurately, advocates were in no position to find the solution. Teen pregnancy not only failed to go down, despite all the public attention, the tens of millions of dollars, and the birth control pills that were thrown its way. It went up—peaking in 1990 at 117 pregnancies per 1,000 teenage girls, up from 105 per 1,000 in 1978, when the Guttmacher report was published. About 80 percent of those young girls who became mothers were single, and the vast majority would be poor.

Throughout the 1980s, the inner city—and the black family—continued to unravel. Child poverty stayed close to 20 percent, hitting a high of 22.7 percent in 1993. Welfare dependency continued to rise, soaring from 2 million families in 1970 to 5 million by 1995. By 1990, 65 percent of all black children were being born to unmarried women.

In ghetto communities like Central Harlem, the number was closer to 80 percent. By this point, no one doubted that most of these children were destined to grow up poor and to pass down the legacy of single parenting to their own children.

The only good news was that the bad news was so unrelentingly bad that the usual bromides and evasions could no longer hold. Something had to shake up what amounted to an ideological paralysis, and that something came from conservatives. Three thinkers in particular—Charles Murray, Lawrence Mead, and Thomas Sowell—though they did not always write directly about the black family, effectively changed the conversation about it. First, they did not flinch from blunt language in describing the wreckage of the inner city, unafraid of the accusations of racism and victim blaming that came their way. Second, they pointed at the welfare policies of the 1960s, not racism or a lack of jobs or the legacy of slavery, as the cause of inner-city dysfunction, and in so doing they made the welfare mother the public symbol of the ghetto’s ills. (Murray in particular argued that welfare money provided a disincentive for marriage, and, while his theory may have overstated the role of economics, it’s worth noting that he was probably the first to grasp that the country was turning into a nation of separate and unequal families.) And third, they believed that the poor would have to change their behavior instead of waiting for Washington to end poverty, as liberals seemed to be saying.

By the early 1980s the media also had woken up to the ruins of the ghetto family and brought about the return of the repressed Moynihan report. Declaring Moynihan “prophetic,” Ken Auletta, in his 1982 The Underclass, proclaimed that “one cannot talk about poverty in America, or about the underclass, without talking about the weakening family structure of the poor.” Both the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times ran series on the black family in 1983, followed by a 1985 Newsweek article called “Moynihan: I Told You So” and a 1986 CBS documentary, The Vanishing Black Family, produced by Bill Moyers, a onetime aide to Lyndon Johnson, who had supported the Moynihan report. The most symbolic moment came when Moynihan himself gave Harvard’s prestigious Godkin lectures in 1985 in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of “The Negro Family.”

For the most part, liberals were having none of it. They piled on Murray’s 1984 Losing Ground, ignored Mead and Sowell, and excoriated the word “underclass,” which they painted as a recycled and pseudoscientific version of the “tangle of pathology.” But there were two important exceptions to the long list of deniers. The first was William Julius Wilson. In his 1987 The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson chastised liberals for being “confused and defensive” and failing to engage “the social pathologies of the ghetto.” “The average poor black child today appears to be in the midst of a poverty spell which will last for almost two decades,” he warned. Liberals have “to propose thoughtful explanations for the rise in inner city dislocations.” Ironically, though, Wilson’s own “mismatch theory” for family breakdown—which hypothesized that the movement of low-skill jobs out of the cities had sharply reduced the number of marriageable black men—had the effect of extending liberal defensiveness about the damaged ghetto family. After all, poor single mothers were only adapting to economic conditions. How could they do otherwise?

The research of another social scientist, Sara McLanahan, was not so easily rationalized, however. A divorced mother herself, McLanahan found Auletta’s depiction of her single-parent counterparts in the inner city disturbing, especially because, like other sociologists of the time, she had been taught that the Moynihan report was the work of a racist—or, at least, a seriously deluded man. But when she surveyed the science available on the subject, she realized that the research was so sparse that no one knew for sure how the children of single mothers were faring. Over the next decade, McLanahan analyzed whatever numbers she could find, and discovered—lo and behold—that children in single-parent homes were not doing as well as children from two-parent homes on a wide variety of measures, from income to school performance to teen pregnancy.

Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, McLanahan presented her emerging findings, over protests from feminists and the Children’s Defense Fund. Finally, in 1994 she published, with Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent. McLanahan’s research shocked social scientists into re-examining the problem they had presumed was not a problem. It was a turning point. One by one, the top family researchers gradually came around, concluding that McLanahan—and perhaps even Moynihan—was right.

In fact, by the early 1990s, when the ghetto was at its nadir, public opinion had clearly turned. No one was more attuned to this shift than triangulator Bill Clinton, who made the family a centerpiece of his domestic policy.

In his 1994 State of the Union Address, he announced: “We cannot renew our country when, within a decade, more than half of our children will be born into families where there is no marriage.” And in 1996, despite howls of indignation, including from members of his own administration (and mystifyingly, from Moynihan himself), he signed a welfare-reform bill that he had twice vetoed—and that included among its goals increasing the number of children living with their two married parents.

So, have we reached the end of the Moynihan report saga? That would be vastly overstating matters. Remember: 70 percent of black children are still born to unmarried mothers. After all that ghetto dwellers have been through, why are so many people still unwilling to call this the calamity it is? Both NOW and the National Association of Social Workers continue to see marriage as a potential source of female oppression. The Children’s Defense Fund still won’t touch the subject. Hip-hop culture glamorizes ghetto life: “ ’cause nowadays it’s like a badge of honor/to be a baby mama” go the words to the current hit “Baby Mama,” which young ghetto mothers view as their anthem. Seriously complicating the issue is the push for gay marriage, which dismissed the formula “children growing up with their own married parents” as a form of discrimination. And then there is the American penchant for to-each-his-own libertarianism. In opinion polls, a substantial majority of young people say that having a child outside of marriage is okay—though, judging from their behavior, they seem to mean that it’s okay, not for them, but for other people. Middle- and upper-middle-class Americans act as if they know that marriage provides a structure that protects children’s development. If only they were willing to admit it to their fellow citizens.

All told, the nation is at a cultural inflection point that portends change. Though they always caution that “marriage is not a panacea,” social scientists almost uniformly accept the research that confirms the benefits for children growing up with their own married parents. Welfare reform and tougher child-support regulations have reinforced the message of personal responsibility for one’s children. The Bush administration unabashedly uses the word “marriage” in its welfare policies. There are even raw numbers to support the case for optimism: teen pregnancy, which finally started to decline in the mid-nineties in response to a crisper, teen-pregnancy-is-a-bad-idea cultural message, is now at its lowest rate ever.

And finally, in the ghetto itself there is a growing feeling that mother-only families don’t work. That’s why people are lining up to see an aging comedian as he voices some not-very-funny opinions about their own parenting. That’s why so many young men are vowing to be the fathers they never had. That’s why there has been an uptick, albeit small, in the number of black children living with their married parents.

If change really is in the air, it’s taken 40 years to get here—40 years of inner-city misery for the country to reach a point at which it fully signed on to the lesson of Moynihan’s report. Yes, better late than never; but you could forgive lost generations of ghetto men, women, and children if they found it cold comfort.

Talking Honestly About Abortion

In most cases pregnancy is not an accident, which as moral actors should tell us something.

by Doug Bandow

I was listening to an online debate over abortion. It was a good forum, seeking to encourage civil dialogue among those holding radically different views. There may be no more incendiary issue, yet participants treated each other with respect; only occasionally did passions flare and voices rise ever so slightly.

The topic was focused on the impact on women’s equality, which created a sometimes stilted discussion. Perhaps as a result, some fundamental issues failed to make more than a brief appearance. Thus, the forum missed a chance to force greater understanding.

Addressing abortion is never going to be easy. It involves intimate conduct, is ill-suited to government regulation, and requires trade-offs between the fundamental values of liberty and life. Like family affairs, it would be best if government never had to get involved. However, like family affairs, sometimes government must get involved.

The first point, which was generally ignored by advocates, is that abortion is not just another “medical procedure.” Rather, a second life is involved. Which counteracts the standard (and otherwise persuasive) arguments about personal autonomy.

People who advocate restricting the right to an abortion are not bluenoses worried about what other people are doing behind closed doors. There has never been a lobby seeking to ban masturbation. After the Supreme Court tossed out sodomy laws in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas no national movement arose to overturn the result. Morality loses political potency when it involves protecting people’s souls rather than people’s lives.

One need not get lost in theological arguments or philosophical assessments about when personhood attaches. Whether at conception or implantation, a process begins which, if not interrupted, will yield a human being. That delivers moral value irrespective of the level of fetal development. After seeing a sonogram few putative parents speak of a “collection of cells.” The preferred term is “baby.” At some point, whether viability or another measure, it is impossible for any serious observer to deny that potential becomes real.

Consider how most people react to pregnancy. Strangers respond to moms-to-be and their babies with solicitude, compassion, concern, and protectiveness generally irrespective of cultural, religious, and political viewpoints. Abusing a pregnant woman is seen as particularly wicked. Victimizing a pregnant woman results in an additional legal charge. Harming a baby often is a separate crime. Almost everyone implicitly recognizes that the child-to-be has independent moral status. The latter is not extinguished by citing the legal rights of others.

One can still contend that the mother-to-be’s well-being and desire trump her baby’s interests. Indeed, most pro-life advocates believe abortion is justified if the mother’s life is in danger. However, balancing moral equities is not simple. The interests of the baby, already possessing moral value and soon to become what all acknowledge to be an equal person, also must be respected. Moreover, it becomes increasingly implausible to dismiss the developing life as his or her development proceeds. Late-term abortions look and feel like infanticide for a reason.

An equally important factor, which as far as I could tell went unmentioned in the forum, is that pregnancy is not a condition forced on most people. Other than the case of rape — an important but very limited exception — people choose to have sex. And having sex is what yields babies. That means most pregnancies are the result of voluntary action if not explicit intent.

Making the point is not a censorious attempt to punish people who abandon traditional religious strictures regarding sex. Rather, it is to indicate that in a typical case parents have what should be an obvious moral responsibility for the children that they create. Bring someone into the world, even if inadvertently, and you bear some obligation for and to the resulting life.

There is nothing unique about this argument. Conduct normally has consequences even if the specific result was not intended. Drive recklessly or drunk and you will be held liable if you cause harm — even if that was not what you planned to do. Shoot and kill someone without justification (e.g., self-defense) and you will be held responsible, even if his or her death was not your intent. Although mens rea will, appropriately, affect charge and punishment, lack of desire does not mean exoneration.

Again, one can argue about degrees of responsibility and appropriate remedies. But a serious conversation is required. There’s nothing mysterious about the connection between sex and babies. Take the risk and create a life … something more than just “oops, that was an accident, so where can I get an abortion?” is necessary in response.

Such a discussion is most likely to happen in 50 state legislatures. Roe v. Wade was recognized as bad law by many liberals at the time. Seven justices concocted a fundamental right out of constitutional emanations, effusions, exhalations, and eruptions. As Yale Law Professor John Hart Ely observed: “It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”

Overturning Roe, which as bad constitutional law should be reversed, would not outlaw abortion nationwide. Rather, such a ruling would return the issue to the states, where it was evolving when Roe short-circuited the political process. The New York Times figured that more than half the states would likely keep abortion legal without Roe.

That result seems so outrageous to the Left only because it gained a total victory — extreme even compared to most abortion laws elsewhere in the world — a half century ago when the Supreme Court decided to seize power and act like an uber legislature. A reversal of Roe would force the pro-abortion lobby to become a normal political movement again and make its case to the American people rather than federal judges.

Abortion is a tough issue. However, any discussion needs to be honest and address the most fundamental issues. Which requires recognition that more than one life is involved and pregnancy is no accident. When a baby shows up someone should take responsibility for their actions. We might still argue over what that means for the legality of abortion. But only then will the conversation be honest and the response be legitimate.

How the Democrats fell for Mussolini

America’s elite has adopted the fascist dream of a corporate oligarchy

BY JOEL KOTKIN

There’s a tendency today to see Benito Mussolini as a pathetic sideshow, an incompetent blusterer who went from Adolf Hitler’s idol to his lapdog. Yet in many ways, Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world, albeit in an unexpected form: in the worldview of those progressives who typically see “proto-fascism” lurking on the Right.

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Indeed, Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet.

Wherever it appears, whether in the early 20^th century or today, fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. In 1922, for instance, large corporations and landowners helped finance Mussolini’s Black Shirts for their March on Rome. Confindustria, the leading organisation of Italian industrialists, was glad to see the end of class-based chaos and welcomed the state’s infrastructure surge.

Elsewhere, the German cartels and Japanese zaibatsu both kowtowed to and benefited from fascist state support and contracts. Even today, China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. Since 2000, a hundred billionaires sit in the country’s Communist legislation, a development that Mao would never have countenanced. ¹

Capitalist countries have historically resisted such concentrations of power, but this process seems inexorable after a pandemic which devastated small businesses yet saw the ultra-rich grow richer and the largest firms record eye-watering profits. A handful of giant tech corporations now account for nearly 40% of the value of the Standard and Poor Index, a level of concentration unprecedented in modern history.

Companies like Amazon are our zaibatsu, with influence over a vast array of industries, from online retail to cloud computing, the health food business, media and even space travel. Once such firms may have adhered to free market capitalism, but they have increasingly grown to see the value of a larger, more centralised and pervasive state.

This parallels the alarming transformation of the US Democratic Party, the putative “party of the people” , now increasingly a subsidiary of the corporate elite. Among financial firms, communications companies and lawyers, Biden outraised Trump by five-to-one or more. Today’s oligarchs are particularly keen on the progressive non-profit sector, which provides important support for their political and social advocacy — a means for them to make politically correct statements about climate change, gender and race, while still obtaining enormous profit margins and unprecedented wealth.

But whereas the old fascism sought greater prosperity, its new form, at least in the West, supports only an expanded welfare state that keeps the beleaguered middle and working classes both quiescent and stripped of aspiration. Worthies such as former Bank of Canada and Bank of England chief Mark Carney even embrace “de-growth,” a conscious slowing of the economy and embrace of declining living standards.

Indeed, the widely hailed Club of Rome report in 1972 — “The Limits to Growth” — was financed not by green activists but by the Agnelli family from Fiat, once a linchpin of Mussolini’s original corporate state.² The Report predicted massive shortages of natural resources, slower economic growth, less material consumption and ultimately less social mobility.³

Fast forward to today’s new economic order, and it’s clear that not all economic animals are equal. There are opportunities galore for Wall Street investors, Silicon Valley tech oligarchs, cobalt miners, electric car manufacturers and renewable energy producers through the massive subsidies for producing green.

And these woke oligarchs, like their fascist counterparts before them, see little use for democracy. Eric Heymann, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, suggests that to reach the climate goals of Davos, corporations will have to embrace “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship”.⁴ After all, it would be difficult to get elected officials to approve limits on such mundane popular pleasures as affordable air travel, cars, freeways and suburbs with single-family houses, unless they were imposed by judicial or executive fiat.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest losers will inevitably be the poor. Wherever the conventional green policies central to the “Great Reset” have been imposed — California, Britain, Canada, Australia, Greece, Germany, France — the result has been to create high levels of “energy poverty”; the Jacques Delors Institute estimated that some thirty million Europeans were not able to adequately heat their homes during the most recent winter.

But then there are many hypocrisies at the heart of today’s incarnation of Mussolini-style fascism. Our new elites, for example, see no contradiction in supporting claims of “systemic racism” and “social justice” at home, while cooperating with Chinese authorities who abuse basic human rights in Hong Kong or to impose forced labour in Xinjiang. Boldly progressive firms like Airbnb have no problems sharing customer data with China’s security state; nor does Apple show compunction in relying on Uighur labour to build their products.

But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

In contrast, the tired capitalism of our corporate elite — who seem to have given up on broad-based economic growth — seems increasingly detached from the interests and aspirations of their own citizens’ needs.

Apple’s Tim Cook, for example, waxes enthusiastically about a “common future in cyberspace” with autocratic China. Wall Street also actively lobbies on behalf of Beijing, hoping to cash in on investments that strip America’s productive capacity but enrich them. Oligarchs like Michael Bloomberg describe China, a country of business opportunity for his firm, as “ecologically friendly, democratically accountable, and invulnerable to the threat of revolution”.

How do we combat this trend towards fascist structures? The answer is straightforward, if unprescriptive: to resist them with liberal ideals and a renewed commitment to upward mobility. That won’t be easy. As of today, the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

Yet despite their riches and technical know-how, the oligarchic elites face widespread and growing scepticism towards both the traditional and social media outlets under their control. Similarly, it’s also unlikely many in the middle class will embrace their programme of race indoctrination, or accept a marked decline in living standards.

But building a coalition against the new fascism requires avoiding destructive nativism and instead focusing on how to restore competition and protect consumers from the overweening power, and vast wealth of the corporate elites.

Will a citizenry, dependent on transfer payments and increasingly voiceless, still put up a fight? To slow fascism’s spread, either from China or from within, requires a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority that has long marked human progress and now seems far too rare.

FOOTNOTES

1. See Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (New York: Harper, 2010), 206–8; David S. G. Goodman, Class in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 26, 86.
2. See “Club of Rome a Worldwide Organization,” New York Times Archives, February 27, 1972; Enclycopedia Britannica Online, s.v., “Agnelli, Giovanni,” accessed May 11, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giovanni-Agnelli-Italian-industrialist-1921-2003.
3. Norman Yoffee, “Orienting Collapse,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 4–5.
4. Eric Heyman, “What We Must Do To Rebuild,” Deutsche Bank Research, November 2020.

Male Transjacking Will Ultimately End Women’s Sports

Transgender males are increasingly entering and dominating women’s sports at all levels, taking away opportunities that women have fought years to win. By Kaeley Triller Haver

In 2016, Therese Johaug, a Norwegian three-time Olympic cross-country skiing champion, received an 18-month suspension from the sport she loved after it was discovered that the team-approved lip balm she was using to treat her badly sunburned lips contained a performance-enhancing steroid.

A devastated Johaug lamented, “I feel I did everything right. I went to an expert who gave me the ointment, and I asked him if the cream was on a doping list. The answer I got was ‘no.’”

But the powers that be were undeterred from their well-established hard line of fairness, and Johaug was forced to watch the 2018 winter Olympics from the sidelines.

It’s an unfortunate set of circumstances that raises the question: If chemicals from a necessary, medicated lip balm can be construed as such an unjust physical advantage, how on Earth can athletic authorities continue to turn a blind eye to the litany of physical advantages the transgender men increasingly competing in women’s sports so obviously possess in their male bodies?

The ‘Standards’ for Trans Athletes Are Ludicrous

This question remains unanswered, as the International Olympic Committee continues to waffle over the rules for participation in Olympic women’s events. Their rules presently allow men to participate as women, provided their testosterone levels are below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least 12 consecutive months.

These standards completely fail to consider the host of other advantages inherent in the male body: increased 02 capacity, overall musculature, bone size and density, increased joint stability, and lower body fat, to name a few. These advantages don’t magically disappear with the wave of a synthetic estrogen wand.

For those tempted to believe the male takeover of women’s sports is such a fringe issue that it’s not likely to be an important or frequent enough problem to merit any concern, think again. Here are just a few of the many ways women and girls are losing to their impersonators.

Men Easily Dominate in Women’s Sports

Fallon Fox is a male, American mixed martial arts fighter who competes in the women’s division. Fox ended the career of his opponent, Tamikka Brents, within the first three minutes of their fight when he shattered her eye socket, an injury requiring seven staples in her head, prompting her to declare, “I’ve never felt so overpowered in all my life.”

Hannah Mouncey is going to injure someone if allowed to continue dominating on the Australian women’s national handball team. He played on the men’s national team before deciding to grow out his hair and declare himself a woman.

Rachel McKinnon is a man and two-time women’s world cycling champion, who also uses his status as a professor of philosophy at College of Charleston in South Carolina to bully those who disagree with him, responding to dissenting opinions on Twitter with threats such as, “Abigail Shrier got wrecked on FOX Nation. I’ll do it to you, too.”

Gabrielle Ludwig is a 6-foot-6-inch man who took a starting spot on the women’s basketball team at Mission College in California. He was named first team all conference and mysteriously led the league in rebounds.

Fewer than 5,000 spots are available on NCAA Division III women’s volleyball teams. That didn’t prevent Chloe Anderson, a male, from taking one of them at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Some of Alaska’s finest female track athletes watched the state final race from the sidelines after Nattaphon Wangyot, a male, edged them out of their places in it.

Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood are a dynamic duo from Connecticut, where the unmedicated, post-pubescent boys took first- and second-place state championship titles in girls’ track events. When asked about his obvious physical advantage, Miller flippantly said the girls “should work harder.”

Similarly unmoved by the inequity of his male advantage is Cece Telfer, a man who ran on the Franklin Pierce University men’s 2016-17 track and field team before deciding he would rather race against women. He became the women’s 2019 Division II national champion in the 400-meter race, beating his closest opponent by a second and a half.

Amelia Galpin is a man who competes against women in the Boston Marathon. He, ironically, was featured on “the body edition” of Women’s Running Magazine, sending the message loud and clear that the ideal woman’s body includes a penis. How very progressive.

Laurel Hubbard and JayCee Cooper are two men doing their darndest to dominate women’s powerlifting. Hubbard took gold in two women’s heavyweight categories at the Pacific Games. Cooper filed a discrimination claim against USA Powerlifting, demanding a right to lift against women.

Caroline Layt is a man who was once voted “Women’s Rugby Player of the Year.” Britney Stinson, also a man, has broken into the Women’s Football Alliance and USA Baseball. Maxine Blythin is a man who just recently won the title “Women’s Cricketer of the Week.” Cate McGregor — you guessed it, another man — is on the Canberra women’s cricket team.

Lies Are Informing Public Policy

The list goes on and on, and so does the utterly nonsensical rhetoric relentlessly shoved down the public’s collective throat as fact. In the Human Rights Campaign’s “Guide for Schools in Transition,” the section related to trans-identified people in sports reads, “Concerns about competitive advantage are unfounded and often grounded in stereotypes about the differences and abilities of males vs. females.”

This is the kind of rhetoric informing public policy — the notion that men’s advantage in sports is nothing more than a sex stereotype that can be overcome with a little more elbow grease and courage from the females. It’s fascinating, is it not, that given this newfound clarity, we don’t somehow see females identifying their way onto the starting lineups of NFL or NBA teams.

Does anyone else remember what happened when Serena Williams challenged the 203rd-ranked player from the men’s league? I’ll give you a hint: She lost. Badly. The dominant U.S. women’s soccer team routinely loses to high school boys teams.

Sex-Based Protections Exist for a Reason

I take no pleasure in acknowledging this reality. As a former small-college basketball player, I’ll never forget the day a group of meathead-looking men showed up for our open gym and asked to play against us. I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder and something to prove, so I played as hard and aggressively as I possibly could.

At one point, I decided to try to stop one of the men from completing a fast-break layup. I sprinted in front of him, planted my body on the block outside the key, and braced myself for impact.

I was still seeing stars 10 minutes later. I had never been hit by so much brute force in my entire life. I later discovered I had, in fact, taken a charge from then-Seattle Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander, so my bravado was actually sheer stupidity, but the point has stayed with me, stamped into my memory for more than a decade now: No amount of 5 a.m. practices or extra drills or mental toughness or “working harder” would ever be sufficient for me to overcome the physical gap between our abilities.

That’s why sex-based protections exist in the first place. Without them, women like me would never be able to afford our college educations, as men would have swept up the scholarships we received. And that’s exactly what’s starting to happen.

Fight Back to Protect Women’s Sports

I hesitated to write this article for quite some time because it’s so profoundly discouraging to know that every time I talk about this, plenty of men are sitting around saying, “Women’s sports are a joke anyway,” or, “Feminists made their bed; now they need to lie in it.”

The fact that I feel compelled even to consider writing an extra paragraph unpacking the merits of women’s sports is evidence of the volume of work we have left to do. Ambivalent men will always find a way to blame women for our mistreatment, and it’s why feminism will always continue to exist: Someone has to care about this stuff. It’s not right, and it needs to stop.

Men’s and women’s bodies are different. It’s not rocket science, it’s biology, and it turns out biology is one bigoted son of a gun. Anatomy discriminates. Women have known this for centuries. Biology is science, however, and as the left is constantly reminding us, science denial is pretty dangerous.

It’s time to step up and speak up and stop this nonsense once and for all. It’s going to take all hands on deck. Women, girls, and the people who love them need to complain loudly and often whenever they’re faced with the prospect of having to compete against the men who would cheat them out of what is rightfully theirs. Film the lunacy of it all. Share it broadly on social media.

Women had to fight loud and hard to acquire athletic opportunities in the first place. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear we will have to fight long and hard to keep them.

 

 

Elizabeth Warren’s “Accountable” Court

Considering that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a professor at Harvard’s law school, one would think her policy pronouncements would be more in line with judicial procedure and requirements…but that doesn’t seem to be the case, an analysis by Greg Weiner

Elizabeth Warren, the Senator from Harvard Law School, has a plan—of course she does—for guaranteeing an “impartial and ethical judiciary” based on “the basic premise of our legal system,” which is “that every person is treated equally in the eyes of the law.” Shortly before its unveiling, she tweeted a promise to nominate “a demonstrated advocate for workers” to the Supreme Court.

In other words, she seeks a justice who would violate Canon 3 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which requires jurists to disqualify themselves from cases in which they have “a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party.” The Code does not apply to the Supreme Court, but buckle up: The aforesaid “plan for that” would extend the ethical rules to the Supreme Court, which means Warren is promising to appoint justices whose conduct she will seek to classify as unethical.

This tangle of contradiction—as to her plans, Warren likely wants us to behold the magnificence of the forest, not the individual trees—illustrates the outcome-based constitutionalism that has infected American jurisprudence. It may be true, as Chief Justice John Roberts has said, that we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges. But we are apparently supposed to have worker judges or employer judges, abortion judges or gun judges.

Conspicuously lacking from Warren’s plan for an impartial judiciary is any sense of what that means for the judge’s role in the constitutional order. The bulk of the plan seeks to root out among judges the corruption Warren sees lurking around the corner of every disagreement. Judges retire to escape ethics inquiries; take away their pensions. “Ban judges from owning or trading individual stocks.” Supreme Court justices would have to explain recusal decisions. She would apply to Supreme Court justices the judicial code of conflict. She would fast-track impeachment of judges by changing the rules of the House of Representatives.

There may be some merit in some of this. There is certainly none in her comical description of the Federalist Society as “an extremist right-wing legal group.” (Try the American Bar Association as “an extremist left-wing legal group.” Neither rolls plausibly off the tongue.)

Other proposals, such as Congress dictating which justices can rule in which cases, may present separation-of-powers concerns. Requiring justices to explain recusal decisions because litigants asked for them would encourage frivolous recusal requests. As to fast-tracking impeachments, could someone please tell the vaunted law professor that (Article I, Section 5) “each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings”? There is nothing there, and everything disturbing, about the president telling Congress what its rules for impeachment should be.

But the plan’s real significance lies in two broader points. The first is the overall thrust of the proposals, which assume, as the Progressive movement did, that sweeping away the detritus of corruption will do away with disagreement (read: politics) and illuminate right answers in all their sparkling clarity. In this schema, we can be done with the messiness of prudential judgment.

The second is the negative space. Warren has no conception of the proper judicial role other than that it should favor litigants whose political stances she supports. The plan does not even do the courtesy of endorsing living constitutionalism. It apparently assumes that such is the natural result of eliminating corruption.

The first rule for constitutional law students should be that if their policy preferences and constitutional conclusions always align, they should reassess their interpretive methods. A similar question of judicial nominees—from Warren or others—would be to name a case in which a policy was substantively wrong but constitutionally permissible. Warren’s constitutional and policy views coincide with suspicious consistency. Nor is she alone. Robert Bork used to say that most constitutional law was a question of whose ox was being gored.

That appears to be the case for Warren. But what is even more striking is that she elucidates no judicial philosophy at all other than evaluating judges according to the outcomes they reach and assuming that those who reach the wrong ones must have been corrupt. This is a one-way standard, of course, unless Warren would assume that her pro-worker judges must be corruptly beholden to organized labor.

To be sure, corruption among judges should be rooted out, and there is a case for continuing investigations after judges leave the bench. But this incessant talk of “accountability” is no substitute for a judicial philosophy that encompasses a substantive, constitutional idea of the judge’s role in a republic.

There is nothing inherently wrong with holding misbehaving judges—according to Federalist 81, even judges who consistently rule abusively—accountable. But to reduce jurisprudence to accountability is to assume that judges have two choices in every case: Warren’s preferred outcome and the corrupt one for which they must be held responsible.

Would that constitutionalism and politics were so simple. On second thought, we may be thankful they are not. The need for judgment is what makes politics as opposed to technocracy possible. If Warren is to be president, as opposed to a senator-cum-orator, she had better get used to the fact of politics. The sheer scope of Warren’s plans for everything means she has no hope of achieving them if her legislative strategy is to stigmatize those with opposing views as corrupt.

Perhaps most disturbing, while Warren’s judicial proposals evince no judicial philosophy, there may in fact be a latent constitutional theory discernible in her spate of “plans for that.” It is that the president runs the regime and everyone else is a minion in it. We have ingested an ample serving of that philosophy for the last 12 years, perhaps longer. The word “Congress” appears only twice in Warren’s judicial plan—once to refer to judges lying to Congress and the other to demand that Congress “take action” when a judge is accused of an ethical violation. Consider this in reverse: Would anyone give serious consideration to a congressional candidate whose platform was to proclaim how the president will behave?

They would not. Nor should they. If the basis of Warren’s candidacy is that she has a plan for everything, perhaps she should have a defensible plan for the Constitution too.

Deniable Dishonesty

An analysis of an answer Sen. Warren gave in a recent debate by Theodore Dalrymple

A paradigm shift is a sudden change in fundamental assumptions about, or way of looking at, the world. Senator Elizabeth Warren illustrated one of the most startling ones of recent years with the answer that she gave to a question put to her recently on television.

“How would you react,” she was asked, “to a supporter who said to you, ‘I’m old-fashioned and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.’” Warren replied, “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that. And I’m going to say, then just marry one woman. I’m cool with that. Assuming you can find one.”

The audience, reportedly, laughed. The Guardian newspaper said that she had won plaudits for this sally, but it surely must have been something other than the sheer wit of her distinctly sub-Wildean reply that caused the audience to laugh.

For many centuries it was assumed that marriage is between a man and a woman. However, we have changed all that, as Sganarelle, pretending to be a doctor, said when he was told that the heart is on the left and the liver on the right. And we have changed it all in an historical twinkling of an eye.

Senator Warren’s semi-facetious reply was a masterpiece of deniable dishonesty. In that sense it was worthy of admiration for its subtle employment of the old rhetorical tricks of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi. What did her assumption that it was a man who asked the question mean to imply? Surely that men are the principal beneficiaries of marriage and that women its victims—under the assumption that human relations are a zero-sum game. In one circumstance, the senator’s implication was correct: that of forced marriage as practiced, say, by the people of Pakistani descent in Britain, which allows men their freedom to play around while the wife stays at home as a drudge, whether domestic or sexual or both. But it is unlikely that the senator had this situation in mind, since it would have contradicted her multicultural sensibilities, and her audience’s politically correct sensitivities, to have said so.

In fact, ample evidence exists that marriage is protective of women rather than harmful to them, to say nothing of their children. If I were a Marxist, I would say that Warren’s attitude was a means by which she strove to protect the interests and power of the upper-middle classes against those of the lower classes, for the higher up the social scale you go, the stronger the institution of marriage becomes, for all its hypocrisies and betrayals. The upper-middle classes pretending to despise marriage are no more sincere than was Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess, though they do more harm by their pretense than Marie Antoinette ever did, for no one was ever encouraged to become a shepherdess by her playacting. It is otherwise with the upper-middle class’s playacting.

But perhaps the most destructive (and surely insincere) aspect of Warren’s answer was the implication that it now requires tolerance to countenance marriage, the assumption being that marriage is abnormal and therefore to be reprehended—the need for tolerance implying reprehension, for there is no need to tolerate what we already approve of.

As for the senator’s implication that men with traditional views will have difficulty in finding a woman to marry—or even have trouble getting a second date, after they express their deplorable opinions on the first one—my experience of treating unmarried mothers is that they hope that their daughters will not follow their own path in life, but rather find a responsible, stable man as the father of their children. The problem is that such men seem in short supply in their social sphere.

The audience’s laughter implied that at least a part of the population is willing, perhaps eager, to be complicit in Warren’s dishonesty. If criticized, she could always claim that she was only joking, but behind her joke she was deadly serious. Or should I say deadly frivolous?

Candace Owens: Dems Using White Supremacy Issue to Scare Blacks into Voting for Them

By Melanie Arter | September 20, 2019 | 3:25 PM EDT

Conservative commentator and Blexit leader Candace Owens testified in Congress Friday at a hearing on confronting violent white supremacy, telling a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that Democrats are using the issue of white supremacy to scare blacks into voting for the Democrat Party.

During her opening testimony, Owens acknowledged that white supremacy is “indeed real,” but added that “despite the media’s obsessive coverage of it, it represents an isolated, uncoordinated and fringe occurrence within America.”

 

“It’s a fringe occurrence that is being used in my opinion by Democrats to scare Americans into giving up their votes to a party that can no longer win based on simple ideas, which is why we’re seeing so many of these hearings back-to-back despite other threats that are facing this nation,” she said.

“I want to reiterate that point. White supremacy is real, just as racism is real, but neither of these ideologies are real in this room. They have become mechanisms for the left to continue to call these hearings and to distract from much bigger issues that are facing this country and which threaten minorities, much bigger issues that they are responsible for,” Owens added.

She ticked off a handful of issues that she said are greater threats to black America: father absence, illiteracy, and abortion.

White nationalism sounds a lot better as a threat than father absence. When are we going to call a hearing on the 74 percent of single motherhood rate in black America today? My guess is probably never. Since Democrats are the author of that epidemic, which leaves us – black Americans – 20 times more likely to end up in prison, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, and five times more likely to lead a life in poverty and to commit crime.

White nationalism also sounds a lot better than illiteracy rates. I’m assuming we’re never going to call a hearing on that, which is a real epidemic which is facing black Americans and minority Americans today, an epidemic which by the way has a lot closer of a tie to our nation’s history of white supremacy. Slave codes in the early 19th century made it illegal for black Americans to learn to read. Why? Because if slaves could read, they could access information. I don’t believe that much has changed.

On the most recent National Assessment of Education and Progress, just 17 percent of black students scored proficient in reading at a 12th grade level. Eighty-three percent of blacks in America were not found proficient in reading at a 12th grade level. Are we going to have a hearing on that? Probably not.

White nationalism also sounds a lot better than abortion as a threat, which has resulted in the slaughter of 18 million black Americans since 1973 and points to a bigger crisis, which is the fact that the black population growth has stagnated in this country. The crisis, and in major cities like in New York, we have more black babies aborted than born alive. If we’re talking about preserving lives and we’re talking about white supremacy, we should probably have a conversation about that.

Owens said that Democrats in the hearing are focused on white supremacy on the Internet so they can get permission to censor conservatives.

“But today in this room, we’re going to see Democrats try to connect the dots to white supremacy on the Internet. So the question is why? So that people who have absolutely nothing to do with propagating white supremacy are censored, silenced and controlled. What they are actually after is our permission to censor and silence and control any dissenting voices that go against the mainstream narrative that they wish to propagate,” she said.

Owens described attempts by liberals to silence her on social media.

To give a glimpse into just how absurd and expansive the definition of white supremacy has become, I offer to the committee that I have been libeled and smeared by Democrat media cohorts as someone who supports white supremacy. You need but look at me to determine that that just isn’t true.

Why? Because I routinely say black people don’t have to be Democrats. I am now considered somebody that is radicalizing people on the Internet. What a radical idea – black people waking up to the abuses in the Democrat Party, which has been instigated upon black America over the last 60 years. There have been sincere attempts – just so everybody knows – to censor me on social media, because I am radical.

YouTube once censored me for criticizing Black Lives Matter. They reversed the censorship, and they apologized, and they called it a mistake. Facebook once censored me for calling out liberal supremacy as a threat facing black America. What I said specifically was that in any community where liberal policies reign supreme, you’ll find that black America is hurting. I stand by that assessment.

Facebook reversed my censorship, apologized and claimed it was a mistake. Of course, I’m fortunate that I have a big enough platform that when I get branded something extreme, I can reverse it, but the majority of Americans don’t have that platform. The majority of Americans with dissenting opinions are silenced forever.

Owens said that liberals use the term racist to silence those who disagree with them and the term white nationalism is being used to anger black Americans into voting for the Democrat Party.

Many words which have once held very serious meanings have come to take on a very different definition over the last couple of years as Democrats have desperately tried to grapple with the fact that they are no longer able to manipulate Americans with broad claims and broad strokes of racism, sexism, misogyny and the like, words like racism, which today most nearly means anything or anyone that disagrees with a liberal and terms like white nationalism, which today and in this room and upon this floor most nearly means that it’s election time in America.

It’s time for the left to do what they do best – divide, distract and hope to keep the most important voting block to their party – which is black Americans – angry and emotional and reactive enough to keep voting for the same party that has systematically destroyed our families, sent our men to prison, and deferred all of our dreams.

I will close out by telling you that this is not going to work. America and more importantly, black America, is waking up to the ploy, the bad acting, the faux concern, these hearings. It’s not going to stop black America from breaking the chains of victimhood, and it’s certainly not going to stop me from being one of the loudest voices against it.