I am the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings which was a partnership between the Chinese operating through CEFC/Chairman Ye and the Biden family. I was brought into the company to be the CEO by James Gilliar and Hunter Biden. The reference to “the Big Guy” in the much publicized May 13, 2017 email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden. The other “JB” referenced in that email is Jim Biden, Joe’s brother.

Hunter Biden called his dad “the Big Guy” or “my Chairman,” and frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals that we were discussing. I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business. I’ve seen firsthand that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.

I realized the Chinese were not really focused on a healthy financial [return on investment]. They were looking at this as a political or influence investment….

The Biden family aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions of dollars from foreign entities even though some were from communist controlled China.

Nevertheless, the liberal media and the Democrats have largely ignored the story.

Not to say that it hasn’t afforded occasions for their characteristic paranoia about Russian interference.

“The origins of this whole smear are from the Kremlin and the president is only too happy to have Kremlin help in trying to amplify it,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on CNN.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe issued a rebuke: “Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign, and I think it’s clear the American people know that,” Ratcliffe said during an appearance on Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria.

“It’s funny that some of the people that complained the most about intelligence being politicized are the ones politicizing intelligence and unfortunately in this case, it is Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who as you pointed out on Friday said that the intelligence community believes that Hunter Biden’s laptop and e-mails on it are part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” Ratcliffe said.

“Let me be clear, the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that and we shared no intelligence with Chairman Schiff or any other member of Congress that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign. It’s simply not true,” Ratcliffe continued.

“This is exactly what I said would stop when I became the director of national intelligence, and that’s people using the intelligence community to leverage some political narrative,” the DNI added. “And in this case, apparently Chairman Schiff wants anything against his preferred political candidate to be deemed as not real and is using, or attempting to use, the intelligence community to say, ‘There’s nothing to see here.’”

Members of the Biden family allegedly had a specific system for distributing the money they earned through influence peddling; according to a text on Hunter Biden’s hard drive, members of the Biden family were expected to give half of their profits to “pop”—a.k.a. Joe Biden. “I love you all but I don’t receive any respect, and that’s fine, I guess,” Hunter wrote to Joe Biden’s granddaughter Naomi Biden. “Works for you, apparently. I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for thirty years. It’s really hard, but don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

A text message from May of 2017 obtained by the Federalist shows a Hunter Biden business partner warning Tony Bobulinski not to use “Joe’s” name in communications unless they are “face to face.”

“I know you know that, but they are paranoid,” James Gilliar said in the text.

It goes without saying that if the Trump family were faced with such allegations, the liberal media would not hesitate to cover them.

The story of the Biden family’s corruption did get a mention in a weekly newsletter from the public editor at National Public Radio: “Carolyn Abbott writes: Someone please explain why NPR has apparently not reported on the Joe Biden, Hunter Biden story in the last week or so that Joe did know about Hunter’s business connections in Europe that Joe had previously denied having knowledge?”

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR managing editor for news Terence Samuel told me. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was…a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”

Like Schiff, NPR apparently finds that anything negative concerning their preferred political candidate can easily be dismissed or attributed to political partisanship. So it is with the current left, the party of lies and delusions for which Biden is such a fitting leader.

“Joe Biden’s a crook—has been for years, and why are you so surprised?” asked Rudy Giuliani on a recent podcast. “The man starts off by plagiarizing in law school. Cheats his way through law school, plagiarizes the first time he runs for Senate. Is it possible he’s a fundamentally dishonest man? Well, it turns out he is.”

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by ‘The Post.’

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.

An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The blockbuster correspondence—which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings”—is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

Coming just three weeks before the presidential election, this is bad news for Biden. He is, however, the preferred candidate of Big Tech, which therefore sought to minimize the damage done by the article. Twitter users could not post the article. Accounts belonging to the White House press secretary, House Judiciary Committee, and Trump’s campaign were locked for sharing the Post’s coverage. Facebook announced it would reduce the paper’s visibility until third-party fact-checkers could validate the reporting. (In an alarming report published in August, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson found that eighteen of twenty Facebook “independent” fact-checkers have ties to left-wing political activist George Soros or his foundations.)

In a tweet Wednesday night, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said the actions by Facebook and Twitter “are potential violations of election law, and that’s a crime.”

The first-term senator, a Big Tech critic who has pushed for the repeal of the FCC’s Section 230 protections for social media platforms, also sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission on Oct. 14. It read in part:

Federal law prohibits any corporation from making a contribution to a federal candidate for office. 52 U.S.C. § 30118(a). Twitter and Facebook are both corporations. A ‘contribution’ includes ‘anything of value…for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.’ 52 U.S.C. § 30101(8)(A)(i). Twitter’s and Facebook’s active suppression of public speech about the ‘New York Post’ article appears to constitute contributions under federal law. There can be no serious doubt that the Biden campaign derives extraordinary value from depriving voters access to information that, if true, would link the former vice president to corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs.

“The attempt to rig an election, which is what we’re seeing here, by monopolies is unprecedented in American history,” Hawley told reporters Oct. 15 during a break from Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) sent Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey a principled letter asking a series of questions about the platform’s decision to censor the New York Post.

Senate Republicans announced Thursday they plan to subpoena Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday to compel testimony from both tech titans next Friday.

The Republican National Committee has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Twitter. In a letter to the FEC’s general counsel on Friday, the RNC accused Twitter of violating federal campaign finance laws: “Through its ad hoc, partisan suppression of media critical of Biden, [Twitter] is making illegal, corporate in-kind contributions as it provides unheard-of media services for Joe Biden’s campaign.”

What is so galling about Big Tech is its hypocrisy. In censoring the New York Post, Twitter cited its policy against “linking to hacked materials.” A few weeks ago, The New York Times published a story on President Trump’s tax returns, which was shared widely across the internet. In fact, Twitter and Facebook helped promote the story on their platforms, notwithstanding pushback from the White House and Trump businesses. Now it is a crime to disclose a person’s tax returns without his consent or permission from a court. The Times story would therefore be based upon a criminal act. And yet, this fails to meet Twitter’s “hacking” standard. (Of course, the contents that were provided to the New York Post were hardly acquired by “hacking.”)

“Have you ever censored news articles referring to the ‘murder’ or ‘killing’ by the police of fentanyl abuser George Floyd, when neither has been proved in a court of law and autopsies suggest neither is likely?” Steve Sailer asked Jack Dorsey on Twitter on Oct. 14. “If not, why not?” And Sailer continued:

How many tweets did you blithely transmit promoting the lies that Michael Brown at Ferguson said “Hands up, don’t shoot” or that George Zimmerman was white?

How many stores therefore have been looted and building[s] burned in part due to your activities?

You are still using your monopoly power to censor, @Jack, and thus interfering in the election.

Why don’t you just knock it off and apologize for it?

The answer is that, as a man of the left, Dorsey’s main interest is in power, not preserving a free press, essential though it is to democracy.

At Yelp, we value diversity, inclusion and belonging, both internally and on our platform, which means we have a zero tolerance policy to racism. We know these values are important to our users and now more than ever, consumers are increasingly conscious of the types of businesses they patronize and support. In fact, we’ve seen that reviews mentioning Black-owned businesses were up more than 617% this summer compared to last summer….

Over the summer, Yelp rolled out a number of initiatives to help users find and support Black-owned businesses. We partnered with My Black Receipt on the launch of a Black-owned business attribute and joined the 15 Percent Pledge to further amplify Black-owned businesses. While searches for Black-owned businesses surged on Yelp, so did the volume of reviews warning users of racist behavior at businesses. Today, in response to this, we will now place a distinct Consumer Alert on business pages to caution people about businesses that may be associated with overtly racist actions.

Communities have always turned to Yelp in reaction to current events at the local level. As the nation reckons with issues of systemic racism, we’ve seen in the last few months that there is a clear need to warn consumers about businesses associated with egregious, racially-charged actions to help people make more informed spending decisions…. Now, when a business gains public attention for reports of racist conduct, such as using racist language or symbols, Yelp will place a new Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert on their Yelp page to inform users, along with a link to a news article where they can learn more about the incident.

What could possibly go wrong with this? To start with, Yelp has said nothing about how it intends to distinguish false reports of racism from the real thing. It explains that

We advocate for personal expression and provide a platform that encourages people to share their experience online, but at the same time it’s always been Yelp’s policy that all reviews must be based on actual first-hand consumer experiences with the business. This policy is critical to mitigating fake reviews and maintaining the integrity of content on our platform.

It’s as if “actual first-hand consumer experiences,” such as the belief that you are a victim of racism, are not prone to erroneous interpretations.

Unsurprisingly, Black Lives Matter is involved with the new policy:

The new Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert is an extension of our Public Attention Alert that we introduced in response to a rise in social activism surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement…. So far in 2020, we’ve seen a 133% increase in the number of media-fueled incidences on Yelp compared to the same time last year. Between May 26 and September 30, we placed more than 450 alerts on business pages that were either accused of, or the target of, racist behavior related to the Black Lives Matter movement.

More than 450 alerts! More than a few, I would venture, are like the Starbucks incident of April 2018, in which two young black men cried “racism” after the manager of the coffee shop called the police on them since they insisted on remaining in the store without purchasing anything. Matt Walsh, summing up their own account, given on Good Morning America, wrote:

They walked into the store, grabbed a table, and then asked to use the restroom. The manager told them that they had to buy something to use it. They declined, and went back to sit at the table without having purchased anything. Now that they had called attention to themselves, the manager was aware of their presence and aware that they were not paying customers. She approached them and offered to get them drinks or anything else they might want. They declined. They were asked to leave and they declined. The police came and asked them to leave and they declined. This is their own version.

Our culture is rife with persons who have been taught by “higher education” and the media that they are victims. So that there is no lack of people who are given to take any negative experience, be it a rude or negligent waiter, as a sign of “racism.” And since Yelp’s only criteria for establishing racism is “actual first-hand consumer experiences,” that is to say, one’s subjective interpretation of phenomena, the new policy is sure to be abused.

No matter for Yelp. The company makes it clear that its interest is not fairness, but advancing a woke agenda throughout the workplace:

Many local businesses want to create a more inclusive environment for employees and customers alike, but they often don’t have the resources that larger companies do to access training materials, educate employees, and develop language to share with their customers and employees. That’s why Yelp and Open to All® have partnered to bring local businesses a new toolkit that allows them to take the next step in creating an inclusive community. The toolkit includes a 60-minute unlearning bias training video for employees, outreach language for customers and employees, social media assets, and more. With more than half a million businesses indicating themselves as Open to All on their Yelp business page, Open to All has created resources for small and medium-sized businesses to uplevel their diversity and inclusion practices.

I suspect, however, that cant about greater “diversity and inclusion” will provide no comfort for any business owner whose company has suffered due to false accusations of racism on Yelp.

Meanwhile, the left, thanks to Yelp, has another tool for smearing people and ruining their lives.

There are other problems with the Platinum Plan. It promises infrastructure investment of $500 billion in black communities, aiming to create 3 million new jobs, and 500,000 black-owned businesses. But as Washington Watcher II comments at VDARE: “As part of a general economic plan that would benefit all Americans, that wouldn’t be so bad. But this is a pledge intended only for blacks. Is this legal?” Moreover, is it not likely to alienate at least some of Trump’s white working-class voting base?

“President Trump’s historic First Step Act has been hailed as the most meaningful criminal justice reform in a generation, bringing fairness to our prison system and preparing inmates for reentry into society,” says Corrin Rankin, a Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board Member. “With his commitment to enact a Second Step Act in his second term, President Trump promises to bring justice to communities that have been denied fairness for far too long.” Actually, however, as Tucker Carlson noted on his television show in July,

when the First Step Act was being debated, we were all told that only nonviolent criminals would be the beneficiaries of the law…. But that turned out to be completely untrue. In less than a year, the First Step Act has granted early release to a lot of dangerous people, and it didn’t require any of them to do anything to earn it. Here’s one example.

In October 2008, Okin White participated in the robbery—an armed robbery—of a Brooklyn apartment. During that robbery, White and his accomplices tied up two children, including a 7-year-old girl. They pistol-whipped a woman and threatened to kill her and her entire family if she didn’t reveal where the cash and the drugs were hidden.

“The Platinum Plan seems to be a futile effort to appeal to blacks, at the high cost of alienating Trump’s white working-class voting base.”

Every victim of that robbery had to be hospitalized; one, for more than a week. Now, White would still be in prison right now where he deserves to be, but thanks to the First Step Act, he was released last week. Here’s the key. He didn’t join any recidivism reduction program. Instead, since the bill retroactively increased his good-behavior credits, his sentence was simply shortened. White didn’t have to do anything. He is out of federal prison now, along with hundreds of other people like him convicted of sex crimes, robbery, assault, and other acts of violence.

Since the bill passed in 2018, about 4,700 incarcerated people have been released or had their prison sentences reduced. “Why the hell did I do that?” Trump reportedly yelled at his senior aides after the policy he implemented failed to improve his polling numbers among black voters. Trump’s “commitment to enact a Second Step Act in his second term” may prove to be similarly unfruitful.

According to Daily Wire editor in chief Ben Shapiro, “Juneteenth should absolutely be a national holiday. It’s a reminder of the horrors of slavery and racism, and the virtuous quest to vitiate the evils of bigotry and tyranny by vindicating the universal ideals of the founders.” That is a lofty but dangerously naive take. “That the US doesn’t have an Emancipation Day to mark our abolishing an institution antithetical to our founding ideals of freedom & liberty speaks to the ongoing cover-up and our inability, still, to acknowledge what we did and who we are,” 1619 Project director Nikole Hannah-Jones has tweeted. These words highlight the problem with making “Juneteenth” a national holiday (one that is lost on Shapiro): that it would serve mainly to instill shame in Americans and hatred for the nation’s past. In effect, it would be little more than a tool for the manipulative left and race hustlers.

To be sure, the Platinum Plan is not altogether wrongheaded. It promises “favorable trade deals to bring back manufacturing jobs and help black contractors, farmers, inventors, and consumers.” Such deals would not benefit blacks only, of course. The Platinum Plan also seeks to protect jobs through immigration policy.

Excellent, too, is its advocacy for school choice, from which underperforming black students have much to gain.

All in all, though, the Platinum Plan seems to be a futile effort to appeal to blacks, at the high cost of alienating Trump’s white working-class voting base. The president has done better by stressing the need for law and order, calling out Antifa and Black Lives Matter to that end. Trump supporters are also pleased, no doubt, that he recently created the 1776 Commission to counter the teaching of the 1619 Project and other anti-American propaganda in our schools. “Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character,” Trump said at the White House Conference on American History on Sept. 17.

The comment now seems particularly absurd, given the violence that has plagued the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). Seattle police Tuesday morning reported the third shooting in the area since Saturday. The victim was in his 30s. There were two shootings over the weekend—one early Saturday that left a 19-year-old man dead and another person critically injured, and one Sunday night that left a 17-year-old wounded.

In response, Durkan said the city would move to dismantle the police-free zone because the violence was distracting from the message of the “peaceful protesters.”

“The cumulative impacts of the gatherings and protests and the nighttime atmosphere and violence has led to increasingly difficult circumstances for our businesses and residents,” Durkan said at a news conference. “The impacts have increased and the safety has decreased.”

“There should be no place in Seattle that the Seattle Fire Department and the Seattle Police Department can’t go,” she added.

CHAZ occupants disagree. According to the New York Post, Seattle police were prevented from responding to the deadly shooting Saturday by “a human chain of protesters”: “A high-ranking police source told The Post that cops were not only blocked from reaching the victims at the scene, but were confronted by armed protesters at Harborview Medical Center and kept from entering.”

Journalist Andy Ngo spent five days and nights undercover in the CHAZ. He writes:

In Seattle, as soon as police evacuated from the station nearly two weeks ago, masked protesters stole city property—barricades, fencing and more—to create makeshift barriers. These barriers became the official border checkpoints in and out of the CHAZ. They were later fortified with additional layers of security: more blockades and 24-hour guards. A large team of volunteers assembled to designate themselves “security” for the CHAZ. Many of them wear patches signaling they’re part of the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, a far-left militia-type organization named after the radical abolitionist. Last year, one of the group’s members carried out an armed attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Tacoma, Wash. Police said Willem van Spronsen tried to ignite the 500-gallon propane tank attached to the facility. He was killed by police….

Mainstream media reports have focused on the “block party” atmosphere of the occupation, repeating a talking point from the Seattle mayor. She, along with Gov. Jay Inslee, a fellow Democrat, have gone to great lengths to emphasize the “peaceful” nature of the occupation. For media crews that arrive during the day, that is certainly what they will see. People have barbecues in the street. Many bring their children to make street art. People walk their dogs.

But at night, a whole different side of the CHAZ emerges.

Lacking agreed-upon leadership, those who have naturally risen to the top have done so with force or intimidation. For example, rapper Raz Simone, real name Solomon Simone, patrols the CHAZ on some nights with an armed entourage. Simone, originally from Georgia, has an arrest record for child cruelty and other charges. He usually conducts his patrols carrying a long semi-auto rifle and sidearm. Last weekend, a livestream recorded Simone handing another man a rifle from the trunk of a car.

Seattle police chief Carmen Best has said that rapes, assaults, burglaries, and vandalism have also been reported around the protest area since police abandoned the precinct.

But of course, for without the police to enforce law and order, there will be little of it.

The police were removed “in an effort to proactively de-escalate interactions between protestors and law enforcement outside the East Precinct,” Mayor Durkan said in a statement earlier this month. She added that

we will continue to remain focused on what we can and must do to address the systemic inequities that continue to disproportionately impact our Black residents. Yesterday, we announced a commitment to invest $100 million dollars into community—in addition to existing city programs—and to work with community to create a Black Commission that will help to amplify black voices in City Hall.

What “systemic inequities”? No doubt the race hustlers will be glad to get their hands on that $100 million investment.

The best take on CHAZ belongs to the president. “Radical Left Governor @JayInslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before,” President Trump wrote on Twitter. “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game.”

In contrast, Mayor Durkan is quite willing to be manipulated by the mob that occupies CHAZ, a mob that has published a list of demands claiming that

The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand abolition. We demand that the Seattle Council and the Mayor defund and abolish the Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus. This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police. At an equal level of priority we also demand that the city disallow the operations of ICE in the city of Seattle.

You have only to consider the lawlessness that has characterized CHAZ to imagine what would become of Seattle (or anywhere else, for that matter) without a police department and criminal justice system.

It is unfortunate that CHAZ ever happened to begin with. Plainly it should not have. One wonders whether Mayor Durkan, now that she intends to restore law and order to the region, has learned anything from the experience.

All that, you might say, over the murder of George Floyd? Yes, and there’s a lot more, including the purging of the past.

“Activists and organizers and people who are part of these racial-justice movements, including young white people, recognize that we can’t change policing in America until we change the culture of America, and the culture of America has been deeply steeped in white supremacist celebration and racist norms, of which Confederate monuments are the most visible symbols,” says Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard University.

So runs expert progressive opinion, and accordingly, the U.S. Marine Corps announced a ban on all images of the Confederate flag last Friday, and on Thursday morning, a statue of a Texas Ranger at Dallas Love Field Airport was removed after a reexamination of the Ranger’s “racist history.” On Tuesday night, protesters toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus in Richmond, set it on fire, and rolled it into a lake. The protesters left a message reading “Columbus represents genocide.” In Richmond on Saturday, protesters toppled a statue of Confederate Gen. Williams Carter Wickham.

On June 4, Virginia governor Ralph Northam announced that Richmond’s largest Confederate statue will be removed—one among the many statues in honor of the Confederacy that are being taken down in cities across the U.S. For more and more, white people are submitting to the left, and evidencing a hostility to their own heritage.

Statues have already been removed in Alexandria and a slave auction block was removed in Fredericksburg, Va., on June 5.

Early Monday, Louisville, Ky., officials removed a statue of John Breckinridge Castleman, a Confederate officer. The city had been fighting the state for two years to remove the statue, and on Friday a Jefferson Circuit Court judge sided with the city.

In Nashville on Thursday, the Montgomery Bell Academy promised to remove a statue of Sam Davis, a Confederate soldier, within a week after an alum of the school began a petition.

Even NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag at its events, saying in a statement:

The presence of the confederate flag at NASCAR events runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry. Bringing people together around a love for racing and the community that it creates is what makes our fans and sport special. The display of the confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties.

On Monday, the filmmaker John Ridley wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times urging HBO Max to remove Gone With the Wind from its streaming library. “It is a film that glorifies the antebellum south,” wrote Ridley, who won an Oscar for the 12 Years a Slave screenplay. “It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color.”

On Tuesday night, HBO Max temporarily pulled the film from its catalog, citing the need for “an explanation and a denouncement” of the movie’s depictions of race relations.

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees recently expressed his patriotic disagreement with those NFL players who chose to kneel or sit during the national anthem. “I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country,” he said. “Is everything right with our country right now? No, it is not. We still have a long way to go. But I think what you do by standing there and showing respect to the flag with your hand over your heart, is it shows unity. It shows that we are all in this together, we can all do better and that we are all part of the solution.”

Having been fiercely criticized for his comments, Brees said in the video apology he promptly posted:

I know there’s not much I can say that would make things any better right now, but I just want you to see in my eyes how sorry I am for the comments that I made yesterday. I know that it hurt many people, especially friends, teammates, former teammates, loved ones, people that I care and respect deeply. That was never my intention.

I wish I would have laid out what was on my heart in regards to the George Floyd murder, Ahmaud Arbery, the years and years of social injustice, police brutality and the need for so much reform and change in regards to legislation and so many other things to bring equality to our black communities.

I am sorry. And I will do better. And I will be part of the solution. And I am your ally. And I know no words will do that justice.

Brees’ apology is all too predictable, an example of the eagerness of whites to submit to the left. There is indeed a kind of plague of white submissiveness afflicting the country today. Often the white people are well-meaning, like Brees, but they are nonetheless naive for that, and dangerous insofar as they seek to appease the left, as opposed to holding their own ground. We see the white submissiveness in the examples I have given, and given the hysteria that has swept over so many people, we can expect to see a lot more of it in the future.

It remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country…. This tragedy, in a long series of similar tragedies, raises a long overdue question: How do we end systemic racism in our society?… The doctrine and habits of racial superiority, which once nearly split our country, still threaten our Union.

Bush may have meant well, but his words, being inaccurate, aren’t doing Americans any favors. As Heather Mac Donald wrote recently in City Journal,

Far from destroying the black body, whites are the overwhelming target of interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Blacks are less than 13 percent of the national population.

And, as Andrew McCarthy put it in National Review,

While African Americans are involved in two times more police shootings than their percentage of the population would seem to warrant, they commit 53 percent of murders and 60 percent of robberies—well over four times their percentage of the population. The political establishment would have you assume this statistical disparity is caused by institutional racism that myopically beams police attention onto black men. But we know the statistics accurately reflect reality because crimes get reported by victims—a large percentage of whom are black (also outstripping their share of the overall population).

Still, the myth of systemic racism, like the view that whites are a privileged group, persists. Why? The answer is that the left needs it. For if the United States is an irredeemably racist country, then the left will be justified in destroying it, which is precisely what the left seeks to do.

Nor should we underestimate its organization, resources, or commitment. On Sunday night, New York’s top terrorism cop, Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller, detailed his office’s analysis and investigation into why the New York City protests have become so violent and damaging.

“No. 1, before the protests began,” Miller said, “organizers of certain anarchist groups set out to raise bail money and people who would be responsible to be raising bail money, they set out to recruit medics and medical teams with gear to deploy in anticipation of violent interactions with police.”

He added, “They prepared to commit property damage and directed people who were following them that this should be done selectively and only in wealthier areas or at high-end stores run by corporate entities.”

“And they developed a complex network of bicycle scouts to move ahead of demonstrators in different directions of where police were and where police were not for purposes of being able to direct groups from the larger group to places where they could commit acts of vandalism including the torching of police vehicles and Molotov cocktails where they thought officers would not be.”

“We believe that a significant amount of people who came here from out of the area…have…advance preparation, having advance scouts, the use of encrypted information, having resupply routes for things such as gasoline and accelerants as well as rocks and bottles, the raising of bail, the placing of medics,” Miller said. “Taken together, this is a strong indicator that they plan to act with disorder, property damage, violence, and violent encounters with police before the first demonstration and/or before the first arrest.”

On Monday, a restaurant owner in Santa Monica told CBS LA that the looters who hit his business traveled in SUVs and were “very well organized.”

“They were very well organized, they came with duffel bags, SUVs,” Jeffrey Merrihue, the owner of Heroic Italian Restaurant, said. ”They went from shop to shop. They went in, cleared out with full duffel bags, another SUV would pull up. It was very impressive, actually, to be honest.”

Merrihue, who opened his restaurant for business on Monday despite his losses and damages, said he had cell-phone video showing the looters in action.

“The vandals broke in, stole our cash machine, stole a few cases of wine,” he said.

A police chief in Bellevue, Wash., which was hit by looting and violence Sunday night, said he thinks the people responsible were organized, from out of town, and being paid.

“There are groups paying these looters money to come in and they’re getting paid by the broken window,” Bellevue’s police chief Steve Mylett told KIRO 7.

“This is something totally different we are dealing with that we have never seen as a profession before,” he said, adding that the group appeared to be trying to deplete police resources.

“We did have officers that were in different areas that were chasing these groups,” he explained. “When we make contact, they just disperse.”

Former New York City mayor and President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said Monday that he has personally seen enough evidence now to conclude that “there was a guiding hand in some of this.”

“Definitely there’s organization behind this,” he said on Sebastian Gorka’s America First podcast.

Giuliani told Gorka that one of the benefits of designating Antifa a terrorist group is that the government now has the ability to investigate the group’s finances.

“It will help a lot in being able to tie together some of the loose ends that could tell you how well organized this is,” he said. “It could answer the Soros question, too, because you get into their books. How much money does he donate and how closely associated is he with them?”

A good question. Meanwhile, the FBI put out a statement on Tuesday saying that the Bureau is seeking information and digital media depicting individuals inciting violence during the protests/riots.

Law enforcement officials say that as the terrorism threat has impacted more of the country, police agencies have redirected their focus on foreign terror groups and terror acts that those foreign terror groups seek to inspire in the United States. As a result, the breadth of understanding of these anti-fascist and anarchist groups is not robust. Let us hope that that changes soon, for clearly these groups are quite serious and dangerous. They have, to be sure, no positive or constructive vision for America; only an agenda fueled by resentment, and founded on lies.

In response, there has been rioting and looting throughout Minneapolis. Social media users posted videos on Twitter Wednesday night that showed burning businesses and looters entering a local Target store and making their way out with bags full of items. Protesters threw objects including water bottles and rocks at police and firefighters during a fire that was started at AutoZone.

Near the 3rd Precinct, a Cub Foods, a liquor store, a Dollar Tree, and an auto-parts store all showed signs of damage and looting. Fire erupted in the auto-parts store, and city fire crews battled the flames. Protesters set other fires in the street and at an under-construction housing complex.

Vandalism, looting, and fires also occurred in the Uptown area. Businesses damaged include a Hi-Lake Liquors and the Apple Store.

A man was found fatally shot Wednesday night near a pawnshop. Asked to confirm reports that he had been shot by a store owner, police spokesman John Elder said that was “one of the theories.”

Joe Biden has called Floyd’s death a “tragic reminder that this was not an isolated incident, but a part of an ingrained systemic cycle of injustice that still exists in this country.” But though Floyd’s death is certainly tragic and unjust, there’s no evidence of “an ingrained systemic cycle of injustice” against blacks in this country. Biden’s words, if they serve any purpose, will be to excuse the mob rule that has occurred in response to Floyd’s death. And needless to say, there’s no justification for rioting or looting because of Floyd’s death.

Police chief Medaria Arradondo told the local Fox 9 TV station that he ordered the use of teargas after violence and looting. He said that he is committed to protecting the rights of people to demonstrate and most did so peacefully, but there have been groups committing criminal acts.

“Justice historically has never come to fruition through some of the acts that we’re seeing tonight, whether it’s the looting, whether it’s the damage of property and other things,” Arradondo said in the Fox interview.

Protesters also gathered Wednesday night at the suburban home of Derek Chauvin as well as the Minneapolis home of Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County prosecutor who would make a charging decision in the case. No violence was reported in those protests.

In another example of racial tension and mob rule, there is the fate of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called police on a black man in Central Park during an encounter involving her unleashed dog. Amy Cooper was walking her dog Monday morning while Christian Cooper (no relation) was bird-watching at a wooded area of Central Park called the Ramble. They both claim their dispute began because her dog was not on a leash, contrary to the Ramble’s rules.

Christian Cooper recorded video of part of their encounter and posted it on Facebook, where it has since been shared thousands of times and became a trending topic on Twitter.

“I’m taking a picture and calling the cops,” Amy Cooper says in the video. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.” But no such threat was made. It was all in her head.

In comments to CNN as the video spread widely, Amy Cooper said she wanted to “publicly apologize to everyone.” “I’m not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way,” she said, adding that she also didn’t mean any harm to the African-American community.

Still, Cooper was fired from her job at an investment management company on Tuesday. After an internal review, Franklin Templeton said it “made the decision to terminate the employee involved, effective immediately.” “We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton,” the company added.

Even more strange, in a Facebook post, Abandoned Angels Cocker Spaniel Rescue, Inc. wrote that “the owner has voluntarily surrendered the dog in question to our rescue while this matter is being addressed.” Apparently, the “racist” woman is not fit to care for the dog!

It would be difficult to imagine more absurd circumstances than Amy Cooper’s. The woman was fired over a trivial private encounter that didn’t concern her performance in the workplace. And it’s doubtful that Franklin Templeton really cared about the issue of racism; most likely, they just wanted to protect their image, and thereby the company’s bottom line. However, our age of social media readily promotes just this sort of cheap thing. Immediately, Amy Cooper was made into a “Karen,” that is, an entitled white woman who calls the police for no reason. And while she may have been just that in regard to Christian Cooper, hers remains an unjust fate, for there is no proportion between her bad behavior and her firing, or the loss of her dog.

Of course, however, mob rule is not meant to be fair or rational. It aims to punish, as in the Amy Cooper example, or to allow people to vent their resentments and realize their passions and prejudices, as in the rioting and looting example. The death of George Floyd is certainly a great moral evil. But while people are rightly angry about it, they are not justified in vandalizing or taking goods from stores. Inevitably destructive, mob rule is no substitute for the rule of law, which alone can provide justice in Floyd’s case.

The Beaver County Board of Commissioners announced on May 8 that the District Attorney will not prosecute businesses that violate Governor Wolf’s order and reopen. Beaver County remains a red-phase county, while the rest of the state’s western and southwestern counties moved to the yellow phase on May 15. Lawrence and Mercer counties got the yellow signal to reopen May 8.

“Beaver County finds itself singled out as the only western Pennsylvania county in the red category surrounded by a sea of yellow,” said Commissioner Chairman Daniel Camp. “This is an invisible wall surrounding and isolating Beaver County residents and businesses…. [O]ur business owners and residents cannot become prisoners in our own county.”

While the state still considers Beaver County in the red phase, District Attorney David Lozier said he will not prosecute businesses for reopening and following the guidelines set out for counties in the yellow phase.

Lancaster County is the most recent county to announce plans to reopen, having sent a letter to the governor saying the county is ready to reopen May 15. County leaders noted hospitals have not been overwhelmed and have the capacity to treat COVID-19 patients.

“We prefer to act with your cooperation, but we intend to move forward with a plan to restore Lancaster County,” the letter states. “Governor, we don’t question your motives, however given all that has unfolded over the past several weeks, we must question your methods. We believe we share the same goals: public health, safety and an economy that can begin to recover.”

In addition, district attorneys from several counties, including Lancaster, York, Lebanon, and Dauphin, have said they will not prosecute any businesses for reopening. And some county sheriffs have also said they will not enforce the restrictions.

County sheriffs in Cumberland and Perry counties have posted statements on Facebook that they will not cite businesses that operate in defiance of Governor Wolf’s shutdown order.

“Our Office will not be enforcing any ‘order’ that violates our Constitutional Rights,” said the post on the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department Facebook page. “Sheriff Anderson has stated ‘I have no intentions in turning local business owners into criminals.’”

A similar statement was posted on the Perry County Sheriff’s Department website: “Our Office will stand with the citizens in defense of all of our Constitutional Rights! Our Office will not be enforcing any ‘order’ that violates our Constitutional Rights. David A. Hammar, Sheriff of Perry County.”

In Bellmawr, N.J., however, the state has proved to be less hospitable to individual liberty. The owners of a South Jersey gym that continues to reopen in violation of the governor’s executive order were cited for a third time on Wednesday, officials announced. In addition to a summons for violating Gov. Phil Murphy’s stay-at-home order, Atilis Gym owners Ian Smith and Frank Trumbetti were charged with making a public nuisance this week, according to Superintendent of the State Police Colonel Patrick Callahan.

After being issued the citation, Trumbetti told NBC10, “I will not close my doors again unless I am behind bars and unable to unlock the door. I guarantee you this door will be open every single day.”

Speaking during a Tuesday-afternoon news conference, Colonel Callahan said the Bellmawr Police Department and the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office are considering additional charges against patrons.

“Prosecutors’ offices and local law enforcement are the first lines of attack,” Murphy said during the news conference, adding that the state was not “there yet” on reopening gyms. “It’s indoors, it’s close, physical activity. We’re concerned about it.”

Callahan said the state has been fairly evenhanded across the board with respect to businesses violating the executive order. Barbershops, massage parlors, and other businesses have all been cited multiple times before eventually being shut down.

The owners could be fined up to $2,000, but owners Ian Smith and Frank Trumbetti told 6ABC they plan to take the matter to court. An online fundraiser was also launched to help the gym raise money to pay for its court costs. It had raised more than $40,000 as of Wednesday.

The Law Offices of Jef Henninger has offered to represent for free gym members at Atilis Gym who get arrested for violating the governor’s executive order.

“Unfortunately, at least one arrest was made today at Atilis Gym,” the law office said in a statement.

We continue to stand by to assist gym employees or members that get arrested today. If any protesters get arrested or cited, we can discuss the case with them as well. There is no need for a GoFundMe page because if we take the case, it will be pro bono. We will not take any money from anyone that was arrested today. We will either accept the case or we won’t, although we hope to be able to accept as many people as possible if there are multiple arrests.

Last week, a lawsuit was filed in Lake County, Ohio, against Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton on behalf of 35 gyms across the state to be allowed to reopen as many other businesses have. On Wednesday, the judge granted the injunction, saying law enforcement officers, prosecuting attorneys, and the attorney general are not allowed to enforce penalties for violating the public health order to stay closed. The ruling did state that gyms and fitness centers do need to operate in compliance with all applicable safety regulations.

“The general public would be harmed if an injunction was not granted. There would be a diminishment of public morale and a feeling that one unelected individual could exercise such unfettered power to force everyone to obey,” wrote Common Pleas Judge Eugene Lucci. “The public would be left with feelings that their government is not accountable to them. Prolonged lockdowns have deleterious effects upon the public psyche.”

It is good to see that there are so many Americans who are willing to push back against the authority of the state’s lockdowns. After all, in our devastated national economy, who gets to decide what counts as an essential business? Those who have control over the language? And don’t people have a fundamental right to take certain risks in living their lives?

“Whether a business opens, and whether an individual feels safe enough in his surroundings to patronize the business, are questions our citizens must answer for themselves,” says Lebanon County District Attorney Pier Hess Graf. “Law enforcement exists to protect and serve our communities; we do not exist to enforce arbitrary regulations which rip away a roof over a family’s head or food in a child’s mouth. Our police officers have tough enough jobs without the added duty of prosecuting local small businesses.”

In reality, most violence in the U.S. is intra-racial, but when it comes to interracial violence, blacks are considerably overrepresented, as they are in regard to violent crime generally. Still, the constant media hype obscures these simple truths, which people nevertheless know to be true from their own experience. Whenever, for example, people speak of “a bad neighborhood” in an inner city, it’s taken for granted that the neighborhood is a black one.

There is no sign that black violence and crime is going to cease being a national burden anytime soon. To the contrary, among mainstream intellectuals and journalists, the official story is one of black victimization. So it seems worthwhile, then, to think about alternatives to the welfare state that effectively sustains black violence and crime and the culture of irresponsibility from which they issue. Is there some way of reorganizing the welfare state so that it would be less conducive to criminal elements?

The conservative social scientist James Q. Wilson thought there was. In an interview in Reason magazine (February 1995), Wilson, reflecting on the failed welfare state, said that

These are communities where people are growing up absent any social norms. Among industrialized nations, this is a distinctly American problem, although it also exists in backward nations and developing nations.

“There is nothing in human nature that makes our urban ghettos necessary.”

There has always been some disorganized lower class—we used to call it skid row. Now, of course, we have whole residential areas that are skid rows. There is not an inherent dynamic in human nature that makes it necessary for hundreds of thousands of people—as opposed to thousands—to live in totally disorganized communities. Nothing has changed in human nature in the past 40 years that should have produced this. What I think has happened is that a downward cycle of neighborhood decay has gotten to the point where the situation won’t improve as long as people stay there. If you take people out of those neighborhoods and put them elsewhere, they might well have a chance at a decent life.

For Wilson, “the great society” has not turned out to be great. But there is nothing in human nature that makes our urban ghettos necessary. Not that his analysis is not bleak: He thought, for instance, that “a downward cycle of neighborhood decay has gotten to the point where the situation won’t improve as long as people stay there.” In other words, the communities are beyond reform, and the best we can do is to get people out of them.

Wilson goes on:

I’ve been toying around with this idea in which young mothers who want welfare would be required to live in group homes. These could be located physically very near where the mother is now living. But you would still be taking them out of the neighborhood in the sense that no drugs would come in and no drugs would come out, including alcohol. And the children and the mothers would be under the supervision of responsible adults.

The problems of our urban areas are rooted in the failure of parents to raise decent children. Admittedly, it is a failure partially excused by the horrifying conditions under which these children must be raised. But these horrifying conditions themselves reflect a collapse of family structure from the prior generation….

It is a problem created when children grow up and learn in an environment in which they never see a married man working for a living at a legitimate job and supporting his family. These children learn, since they have never seen such behavior, that it isn’t an available alternative, or if it is, it’s an undesirable one. They see fear, they see drug use, they see gangsterism, they see disorganization. This is what they learn.

I submit that the experiment in social order that Wilson describes would be worth undertaking. After all, what, at this point, is there to lose? There is no doubt that, with respect to the perpetrators of black violence and crime, many “never see a married man working for a living at a legitimate job and supporting his family.” Rather, “they see fear, they see drug use, they see gangsterism, they see disorganization.” And so they eventually become what they’ve seen.

“For many of these children,” Wilson believed, “the only thing that will work is if they are raised in radically different settings.” “This means they are either raised by somebody else or they are raised by their own mother but in an environment in which the mother herself is taught how to be a mother and the child is given a decent environment.”

But, some will object, this is paternalism! Moreover, we’d be letting parents off the hook who didn’t properly raise their children. These charges Wilson met head-on:

Yes, it is paternalism. That is exactly what it is. What these children lack is paternalism. That’s a very good way to put it. And it is a fair criticism to say it will let some parents off the hook. But for some people I think that’s exactly right. I’ve increasingly come to the view that, for some children, we have to accept the fact that their parents will slough off their responsibility. We also have to reinforce the legal and cultural sanctions that support the maintenance of those responsibilities, but we have to face the fact that in some cases these cultural reinforcements will not work.

…Most of these [women] can be decent mothers, provided they’re put in an environment where they’re taught how to be decent mothers and protected from those influences outside that make it impossible to be decent mothers. That’s why I support pooling the welfare checks into group shelters where mother and child would live together. This could help the child. Remember that we know how to raise babies. This is not a problem. Society has spent 50,000 years learning that. Putting a mother in a group shelter doesn’t absolve her of her responsibilities. It says, “If you want help raising your baby, you’ve got to go to this shelter.” Most of these mothers love their babies. They don’t want to abandon them.

And it would be voluntary in the sense that, if you want public support, that’s the way you get it. You don’t have to go there. But you won’t get any money and you won’t get any housing units.

What bears mentioning is that the ecological effect of large numbers of single mothers is large numbers of unattached, non-responsible males—and communities with those are in for trouble. Men are the locus of destruction. In short, the black community is saddled with reams of undomesticated men. That spells chaos, and black violence and crime, among other things, reflects it.

Rather than continuing this present state of things, it would surely be better for the welfare state to adopt Wilson’s model: “pooling the welfare checks into group shelters where mother and child would live together.” Social workers and perhaps others could see to it that “the mother herself is taught how to be a mother and the child is given a decent environment.” This is exactly what does not happen in the cases of many who get welfare today, and the result is a vast burden on society as a whole.

Indeed, the current model essentially rewards irresponsibility, a mother getting government funds because her children are illegitimate. But since the 1960s this intergenerational cycle, which is highly conducive to dysfunction and crime, has been running its depressing course. It is high time, then, to rethink the welfare state. And the likely reduction in black violence and crime would be just one of the benefits of doing so.

Later that afternoon, while I was out walking, out of nowhere, someone yelled at me from his bike, “Hey, do us all a favor and wear a mask!” “Don’t worry about me, buddy!” I said. “I’m worried about us all!” he responded, adding something else that I could not make out. (It could have been an insult.) I told him to come closer and say that again, but he pedaled off. The man must be a liberal yuppie from out of town, I thought, because if anything in the world is true, if you’re from Philly, or grew up in the area, you have enough sense not to just bark random orders at some guy on the street whom you don’t know from Adam.

Then the other day in CVS I encountered another busybody: While I was at the cash register, my mask partially fell off my face for half a moment, whereupon the cashier, in schoolmarmish fashion, quickly told me to cover my nostrils. She was just doing her job, of course, but the speed and robotic manner with which she did so made her seem like a high school hall monitor.

And I am not the only one who has been dealing with such annoying persons. People around the country have been, and many of you will surely be able to relate to the person whose story Jeffrey A. Tucker provides at his website:

My neighbors cannot be trusted to fight for liberty or have a logical debate. I have been yelled at for stating the stats. Someone even threatened to report me. They have fetishized this situation. They have become petulant minions of petty tyrants. They are driven by emotions and have no sense of reason. People are unexpectedly gullible.

“Do you have it within you to make your life worth living despite the hard corona days?”

The government emptied the prisons and jails. Crime in my neighborhood has increased 10-fold. I live in the safest zip code in Minneapolis. I feel like a sitting duck. Very few people around me are questioning this. People aren’t making the connection to this policy. It seems as if they’re accepting it, because “we’re all in this together,” you know.

I lived in Brazil in the 1990s during their currency crash. I have this sense of doom. It feels like we’re going to face 1,000% inflation. No one around me fears this. No one is questioning the printing of money. Indeed they demand more.

When I do get out to Menards (Home Depot) or the grocer, speakers that used to blast music are blasting talking points and these catchphrases. There are placards everywhere telling me to stay away from other people. It’s like living in a B horror film.

This has destroyed my optimism for humanity. We are really controlled by our overlords and a good portion of the public will fall into line. I will have a hard time trusting people again….

The author is certainly right that “a good portion of the public will fall into line” with whatever it is “our overlords” want us to do. Still, while he feels “like a sitting duck,” anyone who thinks that the measures taken to deal with the coronavirus have been unwarranted or excessive needs to engage the data on infection rates and to offer an alternative. It is too easy to just assert that the lockdown is wrong because it’s so inconvenient.

Then there is the woe of career women. Alice Thomson writes of it in her April 29 article in The Times, ”Women are the losers when life’s in lockdown”:

It’s been five weeks since lockdown began but editors of academic journals have already started noticing a strange phenomenon: women seem to be submitting fewer papers than usual while men are submitting more. According to the American writer Caroline Kitchener, some female academics say they are struggling to balance full-on childcare and home schooling with work, while their male counterparts are viewing quarantine as a chance to focus on their writing projects.

Poor dears! The patriarchy remains productive, but the career women miss those happy Human Resources departments. Not to mention the properly psychotic personal trainer they used to screw while beta bucks was toiling away at the office.

Most depressing of all, there is William Wan, who, writing in The Washington Post, tells us that

Nearly half of Americans report the coronavirus crisis is harming their mental health, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll. A federal emergency hotline for people in emotional distress registered a more than 1,000 percent increase in April compared with the same time last year. Last month, roughly 20,000 people texted that hotline, run by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Online therapy company Talkspace reported a 65 percent jump in clients since mid-February. Text messages and transcribed therapy sessions collected anonymously by the company show coronavirus-related anxiety dominating patients’ concerns….

Mental-health experts are especially worried about the ongoing economic devastation. Research has established a strong link between economic upheaval and suicide and substance use. A study of the Great Recession that began in late 2007 found that for every percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, there was about a 1.6 percent increase in the suicide rate.

Using such estimations, a Texas nonprofit—Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute—created models that suggest if unemployment amid the coronavirus pandemic ends up rising 5 percentage points to a level similar to the Great Recession, an additional 4,000 people could die of suicide and an additional 4,800 from drug overdoses.

But if unemployment rises by 20 percentage points—to levels recorded during the 1930s Great Depression—suicides could increase by 18,000 and overdose deaths by more than 22,000, according to Meadows.

We see here just how very devastating the coronavirus can be. The problem is not only that the virus itself is deadly; “the ongoing economic devastation” it has led to may produce a lot of suicides and drug overdoses.

Wan says that “the United States’ mental-health system—vastly underfunded, fragmented and difficult to access before the pandemic—is…[not] prepared to handle this coming surge.” “That’s what is keeping me up at night,” said Susan Borja, who leads the traumatic stress research program at the National Institute of Mental Health. “I worry about the people the system just won’t absorb or won’t reach. I worry about the suffering that’s going to go untreated on such a large scale.”

So, how should people respond to the coronavirus despair? It should be regarded as a test of will or of self-reliance, I think. Do you have it within you to make your life worth living despite the hard corona days? What are you living for? And are those values not worth suffering for now? Don’t they make the hard times a little easier to bear?

By asking these questions, you can come to know yourself better, and therefore live a more focused and principled life.

“Something absolutely unacceptable happened in Williamsburg tonite: a large funeral gathering in the middle of this pandemic,” de Blasio tweeted afterward. “When I heard, I went there myself to ensure the crowd was dispersed. And what I saw WILL NOT be tolerated so long as we are fighting the Coronavirus.” And he added:

My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.

Tough talk, strong man!

And yet, by Wednesday afternoon de Blasio already seemed to be trying to cover his ass, tweeting:

On #YomHaatzmaut we pause to recognize a country and a people whose strength and perseverance in the face of adversity, hatred and evil are an inspiration to all of us. To all who celebrate: Happy Israeli Independence Day.

What happened in the interval? What happened, it goes without saying, is that de Blasio faced a lot of silly charges of “anti-Semitism.”

As Liam Stack has related in The New York Times,

The authorities have dispersed several well-attended religious gatherings since restrictions on such events were enacted in the face of the outbreak. The events that were broken up included weddings and funerals in New York neighborhoods with large Jewish populations.

In other words, as in Lakewood, New Jersey—an area that also has a large number of Orthodox Jews—a disproportionate number of Jews in New York City violated the social restrictions, and in both locations the violations concerned important religious practices (weddings and funerals). Still, it’s been true since the end of the Second World War that anything negative concerning Jews will be met with reflexive cries of “anti-Semitism,” and so it was in this case.

Thus, Chaim Deutsch, a City Council member who represents a section of Brooklyn with a large Orthodox Jewish population, said on Twitter:

This has to be a joke…Singling out one community is ridiculous….Every neighborhood has people who are being non-compliant. To speak to an entire ethnic group as though we are all flagrantly violating precautions is offensive, it’s stereotyping, and it’s inviting antisemitism. I’m truly stunned.

Well then, have a drink, poor fellow!

We need to ask: Just how was de Blasio “singling out one community”? For though Deutsch is certainly right that “every neighborhood has people who are being non-compliant,” de Blasio was also right when he said at a press conference on Wednesday:

Let’s be honest…. This kind of gathering has happened in only a few places and it cannot continue. It’s endangering the lives of people in the community. I understand politicians, every one has said, “Oh look, you know, this is like people gathering in the park.”… No, it’s not like people gathering in the park. It was thousands of people. Can we just have an honest conversation here? It was not acceptable.

Here “in only a few places” means places with lots of Jews, and clearly there is a big difference between a religious gathering consisting of a few hundred or a few thousand people (i.e., what de Blasio meant by “this kind of gathering”) and, say, a neighborhood pickup basketball game.

As it happens, a disproportionate number of blacks lack voter identification cards. But, contra leftist paranoia, it hardly follows from this that the purpose of such cards is to “target” blacks, as if everyone didn’t have to use them in order to vote. Likewise, whether one agrees with the social restrictions in place in New York City or not, they do apply to everyone; but if it happens that Jews disproportionately violate them, then good police work will reflect that group difference.

Speaking of good police work, Dermot F. Shea, the New York City police commissioner, was quite right to criticize events such as the funeral on Tuesday for putting police at unnecessary risk.

Nor is it clear that de Blasio implied that “an entire ethnic group” was “flagrantly violating [the] precautions.” Yes, he used the phrase “the Jewish community,” as he did the phrase “and all communities,” but with respect to the particular funeral in Williamsburg, what language should he have used? Plainly the persons in question were not Chinese or other gentiles, but Jews attending a Jewish funeral. True, de Blasio could have been more precise—saying “the Hasidic Jewish community” instead—but anyway, in context the view that language such as “the Jewish community” entails “singling out” is absurd; and the view that such language “invites anti-Semitism” is even more so. (Besides, I suspect that even if de Blasio had been more accurate, Deutsch and others still would have been “offended”; they still would have felt “singled out.”)

And it’s not sensible, either, to interpret de Blasio (a man not known for exactitude in language) as saying that all Jews in New York City were “flagrantly violating [the] precautions.” The truth, however, is that men like Chaim Deutsch perceive reality itself from a victimist point of view, and hence they are forever reading their own anxieties, fears, and “issues” into things. Moreover, they get paid to do so. They are elected to do so.

Although the list of official victim groups is ever expanding, there is no doubt that any adequate list would include blacks, Hispanic immigrants, women, gays, and Jews (fascinatingly, the sole victim group on the right). All of these groups, indeed, contain numerous persons who peddle a professional victimist agenda. Thus, Jonathan Greenblatt, the National Director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, declares on Twitter: “The few who don’t social distance should be called out—but generalizing against the whole population is outrageous especially when so many are scapegoating Jews.”

Once again, though, it’s not obvious that the whole New York City Jewish population has been generalized against. For, as I say, surely de Blasio, in using the phrase “the Jewish community,” did not literally mean all Jews in New York City. But what’s really interesting, and rather revealing, is the modifier “especially when so many are scapegoating Jews.” Reading Greenblatt over the years, one has the impression that “especially when so many are scapegoating Jews” is for him an unanswerable argument-clincher that can be tacked on to anything. “It’s a very bad time for stocks to fall, especially when so many are scapegoating Jews.” “Not the best time for the Knicks to make that trade, especially when so many are scapegoating Jews.” “We should get to the ballet early, especially when so many are scapegoating Jews.”

In a post on Twitter, the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council has complained, with reference to de Blasio’s controversial words, “that thousands of New Yorkers [also] failed to [social] distance for 45 minutes to watch a flyover.” But this is nothing but petty whataboutism. If you wish to be ethically consistent, rather than a mere hypocrite, then you cannot gripe that “your group” didn’t receive an exception; what you must do is call for consistent enforcement of the general law or rule.

I was struck this week by a friend’s comment on social media regarding “the community tensions” in New York City (I am withholding his name in order to protect him from any personal or professional repercussions):

This may get bad. My friend is a police officer in Brooklyn. He tells me that the community tensions between the ultra-Orthodox Jews and everyone else are already very high. He says that they commonly provoke fights with NYPD officers and then claim anti-Semitism. They also have a lot of political power in New York. That coupled with mayoral overreach could have terrible results. I remember the Crown Heights race riots between black people and Jews in those same neighborhoods.

Smart and shrewd words these seem to me. As I have said elsewhere, Jews on the right are like Black Lives Matter on the left: Each is a kind of special victim group that is supposed to be beyond criticism or reproach, embodying what Bertrand Russell called “the superior virtue of the oppressed.” And yet, gross partisanship is the norm in human affairs, and here Jews are of course no exception. Neither are they an exception in their tendency to try to use actual past evils (the Holocaust, anti-Semitism in the U.S. and in Europe) to advance their current interests, even if that involves manipulation. Indeed, in all so-called victim groups there are many base partisans who act as if they have only to utter certain magical words—“the patriarchy,” “the gender wage gap,” “systemic racism,” “anti-Semitism”—and presto! other people should just do whatever they please.

But we should recognize that such hubris “coupled with mayoral overreach could have terrible results.” Besides the increased racial tensions and problems, Jews themselves should recognize that finding “anti-Semitism” behind every nook and cranny invariably leads to the real thing itself. Hence, for example, the many people on the internet who, in their resentment toward Jewish manipulators and gatekeepers, think that—somehow, someway—everything that is wrong with the world is the fault of the Jews.

Having so far been altogether critical of facile notions of Jewish victimization, let me end by expressing a little gratitude. Few things, after all, have amused me more over the years than the faithful spectacle of politicians and right-wing journalists tripping over themselves to denounce “anti-Semitism” and to profess their undying love for Israel—“our greatest ally,” you know. Besides the high comedy they provide, such persons are tremendously refreshing, since in a time when almost nobody has the spine to be what he really is, they readily show us that, like whores on the corner, they are for sale and had cheap.

If anything good has come from these hard corona days, it’s the occasion they’ve provided for rethinking education. Parents around the country are homeschooling their children, and though that is hardly an easy endeavor, it can still be better than public education in lots of ways. Best of all, parents, by determining what their children study, can save them from the baleful influence to which public schools are almost certain to expose them.

Consider, for instance, The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Although it was published only last August, the project, in the form of “educational material,” had already been disseminated through many public schools before the corona epidemic forced them to shut down. According to the paper of record, the project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” To that end, the Times bizarrely claims that America’s actual founding date is not 1776, the year the colonies declared independence from Great Britain, but 1619, when a few dozen enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Virginia.

Rife with bias and error, the project recalls Howard Zinn’s popular propaganda that, though also quite inaccurate, has long led students, in both secondary and “higher” education, to ignore what is good in American history and to dwell on what is bad (the latter often terribly simplified).

Fortunately, the project has been debunked by several distinguished scholars. Gordon Wood, an eminent historian of the American Revolution and emeritus professor at Brown, has said that the only responsible way to use the project in the classroom would be “as a way of showing how history can be distorted and perverted.”

But of course, today distorting and perverting history in the service of a political agenda is precisely what a great many “scholars” want to do. And needless to say, the liberal media is happy to help. In the words of the project’s leader, Nikole Hannah-Jones:

You cannot read the entire magazine and not come away understanding that a great debt is owed and it’s time for this country to pay…. When my editor asks me, like, what’s your ultimate goal for the project, my ultimate goal is that there’ll be a reparations bill passed…. I write to try to get liberal white people to do what they say they believe in…. I’m making a moral argument. My method is guilt.

Although she thinks that a reparations bill may not be passed, Hannah-Jones wants “this project…[to] get white people to give up whiteness.” And in any event, “it can certainly expose for them what whiteness is.”

Now, at this point, unless you’re familiar with whiteness studies, you’re probably wondering what on earth the woman means by “whiteness.” For the resentment-driven identity-politics left, which requires a unifying scapegoat, whiteness is a kind of satanic concept. If you’re white, it says in short, then you’ve got it very good, though, in your “privilege,” you probably don’t know it. If you’re not white, and especially if you’re black, then you’re a victim, and white people are to blame. So, pay up, white devils!

Yes, the concept of whiteness—a typical product of the sham that is academia—really is that crazy. For example, for Robin DiAngelo and other “scholars” of whiteness studies, even to consider explanations for unequal outcomes besides racism confirms racism.

Well, no wonder. There’s simply no limit to the sophistry academics will peddle in their desperate efforts to distinguish themselves to fellow mediocrities. The main value of academia is clear: It’s a certain social signaling or credentialing system. But as the scholar Joseph S. Salemi has argued, there are many students who, having neither the aptitude nor the attitude for college, shouldn’t be there. Still, we keep up the pretense that it’s otherwise, because academia is a lucrative racket, and it makes progressives feel good to try to advance what they call “equality.”

The worst and most insidious effect of academia is that today’s trendy cant at Harvard, Yale, and the rest is tomorrow’s dogma in the media and in the primary school classroom. As a result, though blacks continue to underperform (relative to other racial groups) on various measures, significantly improving this situation—which only they can do for themselves—is a long shot since, again and again, blacks are told that it’s “racism and poverty” (as opposed to deep cultural dysfunction) that hold them back. Nor is there any dearth of blacks who embrace that tiresome excuse. Likewise, it’s likely that blacks will continue to be a national burden with respect to crime (and violent crime especially) since, again and again, people are told that racial differences in crime rates are due to “racism and poverty” (as opposed to deep cultural dysfunction).

Anyhow, as I say, it’s high time to think about alternatives to public education. For though the 1619 Project, like Howard’s Zinn’s work, has been debunked, it won’t just go away for that reason. It would be naive to think that the administrators and teachers who don’t recognize the project’s egregious errors and palpable bias will take the trouble to fairly consider its critics and then elect not to use the “educational material.” “This planet is largely inhabited by parrots,” said A.E. Housman, “and it is easy to disguise folly by giving it a fine name.” Moreover, the 1619 Project is but one of many means by which public education poisons young minds and thus the future.

Of course, since education is a uniquely effective tool of power, the left, which controls education, shouldn’t be expected to support, let alone advocate, alternatives to public education. For example, in an article in the Arizona Law Review, Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, “recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.”

This is outrageous and unjustifiable, but before we see why, let’s hear Bartholet’s reasons. She writes: “We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling…. [I]f you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.” Hence, “people can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves.”

Back in 2006 and 2007, when I was earning my undergraduate degree, I tutored some students who had previously been homeschooled. And while I found that many were rather underprepared, having been taught by parents who didn’t know what they were doing, it is a problem for Bartholet’s position that our public schools, too, are failing many students, with the result that parents sensibly choose to take control over their child’s education.

Plus, it’s not obvious that public school is superior to homeschooling. “[M]ost peer-reviewed studies on homeschooling outcomes,” writes education researcher Kerry McDonald at FEE, “find that homeschoolers generally outperform their schooled peers academically, and have positive life experiences.”

“Many [parents] homeschool,” says Bartholet,

because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy, determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives. Many promote racial segregation and female subservience. Many question science. Abusive parents can keep their children at home free from the risk that teachers will report them to child protection services.

Most of this paragraph is absurdly biased, and absurd besides. According to the most recent data on homeschooling by the U.S. Department of Education, the primary reason that parents chose to educate their children themselves was “concern about the school environment, such as safety, drugs, and negative peer pressure.”

What are those “views that might enable [children to exercise] autonomous choice about their future lives”? Bartholet gives the answer in her claim that it’s “important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.”

At this point, it will be well to take note of Bartholet’s professional background. “Before joining the Harvard Faculty,” we read at America’s most powerful university’s website, “she was engaged in civil rights and public interest work, first with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and later as founder and director of the Legal Action Center, a non-profit organization in New York City focused on criminal justice and substance abuse issues.”

Here, then, is a lifelong professional leftist who, in her unwitting arrogance, thinks that in order to live well as an adult, your 10-year-old needs to become a partisan of “diversity,” “inclusion,” feminism, gay marriage, transgender bathrooms, and so forth.

The claim that many homeschooling parents “promote racial segregation” is so ridiculous that it merits nothing but dismissal. Get out of your insular seminar, Dr. Bartholet. Go fly a kite or something.

It may be that a disproportionate number of homeschooling parents advocate traditional gender roles and even “female subservience,” but if this is the case, then so much the better to my mind, for I’d argue that these things are necessary conditions for any sustainable civilization or any civilization worth having, though I haven’t the space to do so here.

What’s wrong with questioning science? It goes without saying, among serious scientists, that all dogma is dubious, and science necessarily provisional. It’s one thing, certainly, to be mindlessly dismissive of science, but with her assumption that science should not be questioned, Bartholet comes off as just the sort of scientistic ninny whom the brilliant scholar David Berlinski has long deftly taken to task.

Regarding Bartholet’s concern about child abuse, let me quote McDonald again:

[M]any parents choose to homeschool their children to remove them from abuse at school, whether it’s widespread bullying by peers or, tragically, rampant abuse by teachers and school administrators themselves.

Child abuse is horrific wherever it occurs, but singling out homeschooling parents as potential abusers simply because they do not send their children to school is both unfair and troubling. Child abuse laws exist in all states and should be rigorously enforced. Banning homeschooling, or adding burdensome regulations on homeschooling families, who in many instances are fleeing a system of education that they find harmful to their children, are unnecessary attacks on law-abiding families.

In response, Bartholet might say that she isn’t “singling out homeschooling parents as potential abusers,” but focusing on a particular context because it allows abuse to occur unreported.

McDonald is quite right, in any case, that many parents are trying to keep their children from harmful environments in public schools. She is also right to observe, contra Bartholet’s bias against flyover country and white deplorables, that

[m]uch of the current growth in homeschooling is being driven by urban, secular parents who are disillusioned with a test-driven, one-size-fits-all mass schooling model and want a more individualized educational environment for their children. Federal data also reveal that the percentage of black homeschoolers doubled between 2007 and 2012 to 8 percent, while the percentage of Hispanic homeschoolers is about 25 percent.

There are other problems with Bartholet’s article, but as I am running out of space, let me come to the biggest, namely her call for “a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.” How very characteristic this is of leftist ideology. Bartholet thinks something is desirable, and just as night follows day, so it’s for the government to bring this aim about.

Implicit in Bartholet’s view is the unjustifiable premise that children belong not to their parents but to the state. But legitimate government depends on the consent of the governed, who are obedient to the state and its laws in return for protection. Having a power grab in view, Bartholet has altered the natural and rightful character of the social contract. She assumes that children are (as it were) the state’s property, so that parents must justify homeschooling to it. But alas for her, in so doing the silly woman only reveals her own dismal ineptitude.

Such hypocrisy, I’ve argued in a two-part essay for New English Review, stems from nothing other than human nature itself and the nature of the human mind. So it is very formidable indeed.

A universal vice, hypocrisy is by no means specific to liberals. Still, it’s especially annoying in their case, given how self-righteously critical liberals are of other people, and of conservatives in particular. Thus, Gina Rippon, a liberal who is certainly allergic to any notion of “male superiority,” in her review of Sharon Moalem’s new book, The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women, published last Friday in The Guardian, exclaims:

Let’s hear it for the female of the species and (more guardedly) for her second X-chromosome! Female superiority in colour vision, immune response, longevity, even basic survival from birth to death are illustrated in Sharon Moalem’s ‘The Better Half.’ After decades, if not centuries, of bad press for women and their vulnerable biology, this book argues that in fact “almost everything that is biologically difficult to do in life…is done better by females.”

In her subsequent summary of the book, Rippon omits to tell us that before feminism, the belief that women are “the weaker sex” was accompanied by the reverential treatment that was chivalry, which took it for granted that women were uniquely valuable, and therefore worthy of the greatest sacrifice. For Edmund Burke, chivalry had an essential moral function, softening the natural greater harshness of men and enabling society to have a higher type of manners than the modern age “of sophisters, economists, and calculators.”

Not that Rippon’s omission is surprising. A professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham, she thinks the view that “the brains of men are different from the brains of women” is an “unproven assumption.” Rippon has written a whole book arguing that dubious case—the trendily titled The Gendered Brain—for which she has been widely criticized. Remarking that “Moalem has perhaps missed a good opportunity to counter estrogen’s frequently negative press,” Rippon comes off as yet another boring liberal ideologue—a lame scientist whose overarching agenda is in the service of identity politics.

In light of recent advances in science, it is now reasonable to argue that IQ differences have a genetic basis. As a corollary of the greater male variability in intelligence, both most geniuses and most dunces are men. Neither the average IQ nor the below-average one is worth all that much, so, one might argue, by way of pushing back against Rippon, that as regards intelligence men are genetically superior to women. There are also researchers, such as Steven Goldberg, who hold that men are higher (on average) in motivation than women—another reason men have long outperformed and continued to outperform women at the highest level in virtually all cognitive and creative domains. In Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment, women are not only underrepresented, but statistically trivial.

Yet why bother arguing for the genetic superiority of either sex? In general, whether it’s owing to nature, nurture, or some combination of both, men are better (on average) at some things, while women are better (on average) at others. At their best, the sexes complement one another. That’s real equality, or something like it. By contrast, who but an anxious and insecure dullard, or vulgar careerist, would write a zealously partisan article such as Rippon’s, or Moalem’s book that she has reviewed?

For those on the left, how is the all-important end of “gender equality” served by such petty work? Plainly, it is not. And this brings us to the matter of liberal hypocrisy. Like so many liberal outlets, The Guardian has long published articles against “essentialism” and against arguments about genetic superiority. But given Rippon’s article, it seems that these things are only bad when it comes to men, and doubtless, to white men most of all.

More evidence of liberal hypocrisy is furnished by the histrionic article “The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists,” published on April 7 at ProPublica. According to Kofman et al.:

Interviews with more than two dozen former Amazon employees suggest that the company’s drive for market share and philosophical aversion to gatekeepers have incubated an anything-goes approach to content: Virtually no idea is too inflammatory, and no author is off-limits. As major social networks and other publishing platforms have worked to ban extremists, Amazon has emerged as their safe space, a haven from which they can spread their message into mainstream American culture with little more than a few clicks.

Where, one wants to ask Kofman and her co-authors, is the “tolerance” on which liberals pride themselves? Whatever happened to those old leftists, like Noam Chomsky and Peter Singer, who were averse to “gatekeepers,” stressing that absurd ideas and “hate speech” are the price we must pay for free speech? Are we to believe that democracy, and culture, and the life of the mind come at no cost?

ProPublica describes itself as “journalism that holds power to account.” But in order to do that, is it necessary to object to “extremists” having a “safe space”? Despite much liberal hysteria and paranoia, there are very few white supremacists in our country today, and such persons have little cultural influence and no political power.

Kofman et al. continue:

From the start, Bezos was determined that nothing should interfere with the company’s relentless quest for scale. He instilled in employees an almost dogmatic rejection of gatekeepers—those intrusive editors and critics who stand between authors and readers, deciding what the public should or shouldn’t consume….

Nevertheless, Amazon has begun to make some of the hard decisions it had previously avoided. In recent years, it has taken down hundreds of works of Holocaust denial, including a large portion of the catalog of Castle Hill Publishers, a revisionist press. In 2019, it banned several books by Greg Johnson and his white-nationalist publishing house, Counter-Currents. It has also removed works by the alt-right influencer known as Roosh and the Islamophobic author Tommy Robinson, both of whom had self-published through KDP. And in March, following decades of campaigns by Jewish organizations, the retailer blocked editions of “Mein Kampf” sold by third-party merchants or reprinted through KDP; the book can still be purchased directly through Amazon….

[W]hile books such as Johnson’s “The White Nationalist Manifesto” have been removed from the site, self-published manifestos such as “The Declaration of White Independence” and “Foundations of the 21st Century: The Philosophy of White Nationalism” remain for sale. We also came across nearly a dozen Holocaust-skeptic books still available on Amazon, including some for sale in Germany, where such texts can be illegal. In response to our questions, Amazon took three of them down….

Is getting books taken down the purpose of ProPublica’s “investigative journalism”? Is it for journalists to decide “what the public should or shouldn’t consume”?

Citing the profoundly partisan and discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, and referring to Julius Evola as a “far-right Italian ideologue cited in a 2014 lecture by Steve Bannon,” Kofman et al. leave no doubt as to their liberal bias. Reading ProPublica’s website, one finds no articles about (let alone exposés of or objections to) the publications of the far left, whether these are self-published or not.

And no wonder. Today, from the academy to the media to Hollywood, the far left is the norm. Far leftists therefore don’t need to self-publish or worry about being removed from Amazon or social media. Reading America’s most influential newspaper The New York Times, with its now-casual hatred of white people, one would not think that racism against America’s largest racial group and founding stock is a moral evil. Nor would one get that message from the many antiwhite liberal journalists on Twitter, whether they write for the Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, or elsewhere.

And the situation is even worse, perhaps, in the dreadful academy, which “educates” liberal journalists before they go on to make mischief in print and on the web. Jonathan Church, in two essays for the web journal that I edit, has demonstrated that “whiteness studies” is nothing but internally incoherent sophistry, itself guilty of the very racism it purports to oppose. In this insidious field, Robin DiAngelo and other pseudo-scholars are of course liberal hypocrites par excellence. And as always with the left, the actual aim is not equality or any other actual good, but sheer power.

And yet, even here egotism, that stubborn and insidious thing, has a way of creeping in. Callard writes:

The most adroit players are always finding new ways to mix it up, so the successful lighten their self-importance by emphasizing the struggles they face or their humble origins; likewise, you can add zest to the Leveling Game by finding ways to turn empathy into a status battleground. This is what the game of competitive wokeness is all about. In an academic context, I’ve noticed that complaining about how busy one is hits a sweet spot of oppression—I cannot manage my life!—and importance—because I am so in demand! When you’re playing with a master, it can be hard to tell which game you’re in.

Exuberant truths, these, and seeing all that academics must endure, there is surely no such thing as too much paid leave, despite the professoriate’s fondness for having “dialogues.” Elsewhere in her column Agnes writes of “fishing for empathy,” which, like “the Leveling Game,” consists of pretending to be oppressed so as to tolerate fellow egotists, who, like children on the playground, don’t always think your toys are cool, too.

“What makes you valuable?” Callard asks. “One answer is: the fact that you are a person. This way of answering rests on the thought that all people are equally worthy: value is something you get for free, by being a certain kind of creature.”

Callard omits to mention that the view that “all people are equally worthy” derives from Christianity, namely, from the belief that everyone has intrinsic dignity. Nor is it obvious that this version of moral egalitarianism, albeit an article of faith among progressives (who generally seem content to overlook its historical origin), is valid outside of a Christian context. No wonder it’s been a challenge for modern philosophy to justify moral egalitarianism on a secular basis.

For Immanuel Kant, Callard notes, “being capable of rational agency gives you dignity—it makes you an incomparable source of moral worth, irrespective of anything else that might be true of you.” Yet Kant’s position may be problematic. There’s an ongoing debate as to whether rational, morally directed behavior is specific to human beings. It’s found, some think, in certain nonhuman animals as well. If rational agency is not uniquely human, Kant’s position would seem to be mere prejudice.

To be sure, though, a contemporary Kantian, convinced (pace the master) that his beloved dog is a rational moral agent, may wish to regard the creature as a member the “moral community.” After all, Kantians long ago welcomed feminists in like fashion, as I understand from some philosophic acquaintances. But what about people who are not capable of rational agency? Are they therefore devoid of moral worth? Do they have less of it than their morally rational counterparts? I can say, looking back on the last few weeks of my late mother’s life, that though she no longer seemed to be a rational moral agent, she was not for that reason any less valuable, to me. Rather, the closer she came to death, the more I was aware of her singular and irreplaceable status in my life.

Still another problem concerns children. As Jean Piaget’s work showed, children develop moral ideas in stages; they are not rational agents ab initio. What, then, of their worth?

The categorial imperative smells a bit cruel, said Nietzsche, and the Kantian conception of dignity, having failed the test of human experience itself, does as well. According to Schopenhauer, Kant’s philosophy is like a man who spends an evening at a ball dancing with a masked lady, whose identity is the Christian religion. Faced with religious skepticism and the limits of reason as he understood them, Kant sought a way to preserve some notion of moral egalitarianism, and being a philosopher, he unsurprisingly did so by assigning a special value to rationality. Like countless other liberals, Callard is essentially trying to carry on a Christian project, albeit not explicitly.

Callard explains another popular conception of what makes people valuable: “You have exercised your agency, choice and capacities in such a way as to make yourself (especially) valuable.” And she reflects:

These…[are] two very different conceptions of what it means to speak of the fundamental worth of a human being….

There is a philosophical conundrum at the root of all this: morality requires we maintain a safety net at the bottom that catches everyone—the alternative is simply inhumane—but we also need an aspirational target at the top, so as to inspire us to excellence, creativity and accomplishment. In other words, we need worth to come for free, and we also need it to be acquirable. And no philosopher—not Kant, not Aristotle, not Nietzsche, not I—has yet figured out how to construct a moral theory that allows us to say both of those things.

In general, in philosophical argumentation, one should be careful about using “we,” and it’s so here. As with the status anxieties that I quoted at the beginning of this essay, Callard has described “a philosophical conundrum” faced by liberals, not conservatives or libertarians, who are not ideologically committed to liberal confusion and its attendant psychological pains. Certainly, equality before the law is a desideratum. If it’s wrong, and therefore illegal, to rob, cheat, steal, and so forth, then that is so independent of your personal identity, valued characteristics, and anything else that makes you you.

But here a better concept than equality, it seems to me, would be legal fairness, which I touched on in my Feb. 14 column. Legal fairness is perfectly consistent with and indeed justified by natural right. Natural right—a negative concept, the antithesis of a positive presumption to rule one—itself is justified by the simple truth that no person can rightly rule another against his will. To maintain the converse is to imply that others have a positive right to rule a person against his will, as if it followed from the mere fact of one’s existence that others are one’s masters, and he, their slave. We should never forget that even with all the force in the world, government is still just other people, who are not ipso facto anyone’s masters.

Legal fairness does not depend on a theological idea of intrinsic worth, being, as it were, justifiable empirically. Legal fairness is to be distinguished from equality in the sense of equal worth, a sense that, outside of legal contexts, is a source of constant unnecessary leveling. Now, while legal fairness is necessary to social order, it doesn’t follow that all people are of equal worth in domains that have nothing to do with legal fairness. Callard, however, has accepted a binary that is not the case. She values “excellence,” but surely she wouldn’t say, in order to preserve a shared, underlying sense of moral worth, that her students are the philosophical equals of the great figures she references, for the claim would be incoherent, like saying that “everyone is equally valuable” at doing philosophy. (If value is not comparative, then it’s unintelligible.) Nor does distinguishing degrees of merit in doing philosophy require her to abandon a commitment to legal fairness.

What about the value judgment, accepted by Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and other “elitists,” that the life of a philosopher is superior to that of non-philosophers? Well, something like “free moral worth” would seem to be comprehended by legal fairness, a concept which presupposes that everyone merits equality before the law, something that is necessary for social order. And it’s not clear that this value is in opposition to “acquirable moral worth,” or to the value judgment that the life of a philosopher is superior to that of non-philosophers. If we accept the concept of legal fairness, it doesn’t follow that we can’t rightly make judgments about the comparative value of people in certain respects, or about their ultimate value as people (insofar as, say, living the philosophical life might define that value, for some). If we think that everyone has intrinsic worth, then that worth remains even if we want to make a judgment concerning his value in a certain respect, or a judgment concerning his ultimate value.

True, a Nietzschean might say that morality, and the state, and human life itself should all aim at the production of great men. But this position need not be taken so far as to undermine universal legal fairness, even though Nietzsche himself might have done so. One can believe that the lives of Beethoven and of Goethe—to take two of Nietzsche’s own examples of great men—were superior in value to those of most people without claiming that such men, because they were superior, should have been exempt from the requirements of legal fairness: not robbing, cheating, stealing, and so forth.

The truth, I think, is that for psychological reasons, liberals like Callard are simply anxious about value judgments as such. They are not comfortable, at least not all of the time, with some people being more worthy of honor in this or that domain than the non-excellent or the less excellent. So they confound legal fairness with the view that all people are equal in some vague ultimate sense (and it’s just here that we can detect their Christian ideological inheritance). As a result, it becomes wrong to say, for instance, “William Empson is a greater literary critic than Stephen Greenblatt.” Such confusion is unfortunate. To her credit, Callard, it seems, wants to protect a higher notion of value from the leveling to which she may feel motivated by sympathy for the weak and/or the less valued. That sympathy, however, can be realized by charity, leaving the noble aspiration to achieving excellence, which has never been so threatened in our society, happily intact.

According to Callard, “morality requires we maintain a safety net at the bottom that catches everyone—the alternative is simply inhumane.” She also rightly observes that although it may be ignored, the desire to matter in the eyes of others will assert itself in any event. Nevertheless, the desire for recognition is something different from Callard’s claim about the necessity of maintaining “a safety net,” and if, like Callard, you think a “safety net” is needed, then you needn’t reject hierarchy or value judgments about merit and worth. Nor do you have to be anxious concerning these things. And this is very good news since the current liberal conception of equality, which elevates the middling and even the base, has had its dismal day. It is time for a reaffirmation of hierarchy, for the right to advance its characteristic, illiberal virtue.