Guilty by Reason of Insanity

by David Limbaugh

  As we’ve observed, these theories on race and privilege are no longer the idle musings of academics but have entered the mainstream of progressive thought and now dominate much of the mainstream media. For example, at an August 2019 meeting of the New York Times staff, one staffer recommended that racism issues should be much more prominent in every realm of the paper’s reporting. “I just feel like racism is in everything,” the staffer said. “It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all the systems in the country.”10 Within days of that meeting, with great fanfare the Times introduced its 1619 Project. Times editorial board member Mara Gay explained the project’s concept in simple terms: “In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”11

  Critical race theory also prevails in the Democratic Party. Indeed, racial politics are everywhere, as we’ll examine in this chapter and the next.

  “WHAT INJUSTICE LOOKS LIKE”

  New York City’s progressives are determined to lower admission standards at New York’s top public high schools to promote “diversity,” with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leading the way. These super-competitive high schools use just one test score to determine admissions, and activists are concerned that too few black and Hispanic students are admitted because of the privileges of white students. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “68% of all NYC public school students are Black or Latino. To have only 7 Black students accepted into Stuyvesant (a *public* high school) tells us that this is a system failure. Education inequity is a major factor in the racial wealth gap. This is what injustice looks like.”

  AOC conveniently omitted that Asian kids, not white kids, are breaking the curve. Seventy-four percent of Stuyvesant students are Asian, although they constitute only 15 percent of all New York students, a statistic that disproves AOC’s claim of systemic racial inequity.12 By gaming the system to achieve a predetermined racial mix, progressives would punish high-achieving Asian students while ignoring the possible reasons that other minorities perform poorly on admissions tests. Engineering the admission of less qualified students could also harm those very students, who will likely struggle with the advanced curriculum. Instead of addressing the root causes, which are probably social and cultural—the Asian community in New York highly values education and has a high rate of two-parent homes—progressives seek to equalize outcomes through state decree, just as they do in our economic system. The left’s focus on alleged discrimination and privilege blinds it to other possible causes and any need to address them.

  As we’ve seen, the glorification of the “underprivileged” has created the ridiculous phenomenon of public figures inventing underprivileged backgrounds for themselves. Many well-known people have sought authenticity by separating themselves “from the assumed dominate and victimizing majority of white heterosexual and often Christian males,” writes Victor Davis Hanson.13 They have run from their allegedly privileged positions not to escape the advantages of privilege but to acquire them. Hanson notes that though Puerto Rican American AOC grew up in an upper middle-class family in an affluent suburb in Westchester County, New York, and attended an upscale high school, she passed herself off as a product of the Bronx working class, which is a better fit for Marxist activism.14

  While some of these charlatans have been publicly ridiculed, they haven’t been rejected by the left—because they’re still reliable progressives. Yet under the rules of intersectionality, many of them should be disfavored twofold, first for not being an actual member of a disadvantaged group (though AOC, as a Hispanic female, would still rank fairly high in the oppression hierarchy), and secondly for appropriating the disadvantaged identity for themselves. If it is this easy to appropriate an entirely new identity through sleight of hand, shouldn’t progressives be less focused on identity in our multiracial culture?

  “A SEGREGATION-ERA RACIST”

  It should come as little surprise that race-obsessed leftists tend to project their own race fixation on conservative whites. As noted, many Democrats and some Never-Trump Republicans attribute support for border enforcement to racism. The sinister insinuation is that border hawks are white supremacists who want to keep out people “who don’t look like them.” For them, that was the real message of Trump’s pro-American State of the Union address. “The tension between Trump’s State of the Union message and his actual record reveals the core of his administration’s thinking: Not populism, but ethno-nationalism,” writes Zack Beauchamp. “An ideal of a country whose politics center the interests of one ethnic group, the white majority. That is really what the State of the Union was about, and no amount of supposedly race-neutral populism can mask that.… Since people don’t want to say they’re uncomfortable around minorities, for somewhat obvious reasons, their concerns get articulated through race-neutral language.”15

  Furthermore, Trump offers “white America” the “psychological wage of whiteness,” which is a sense of cultural primacy and dominance having nothing to do with wealth. This, argues Beauchamp, is how Trump attracts middle-class workers even though his tax policies radically favor the rich—a favorite canard of the left. So white middle-class people forgo their own upper mobility just to satisfy their racism? When Trump concluded his speech with, “I am asking you to choose greatness,” says Beauchamp, we need to ask who the “you” is he was speaking to. “Because as much as Trump might wish us to believe it, he’s not speaking to everyone.”16 You have to wonder what inhabits the heart of a person who conjures such deplorable fantasies with zero evidence to support them.

  Another despicable example of leftist projection on race and privilege occurred in the confrontation between Covington Catholic High School teenagers in MAGA hats and Native American elder Nathan Phillips. According to initial media reports, Nicholas Sandmann and his classmates attended the 2019 March for Life in Washington, D.C., where they surrounded, ridiculed, and chanted at Phillips. A video of the event, showing Sandmann smiling passively while Phillips banged a drum in front of him, went viral on the internet. The Washington Post reported that Phillips felt threatened as the students swarmed around him when he and his group prepared to leave.

  The left leapt into outraged action against this bunch of young, white, Christian racists who mocked an elderly Native American, directing particular vituperation against “smirking” Sandmann. Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean tweeted, “#CovingtonCatholic High School seems like a hate factory to me. Why not just close it?”17 One liberal reporter called Sandmann a “segregation-era racist,” and another person tweeted that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.18 NewsBusters reported that CNN and MSNBC spent over fifty-three minutes denouncing the Covington students the weekend following the event.19 On Sunday’s Kasie DC, a one-sided panel compared the students to neo-Nazis and segregationists.20 The New York Times castigated the “racist” teens for having “mocked a native American veteran.”21 Commentators on MSNBC equated the students to the KKK, Nazis, and pro-segregationist police officers.22 HBO’s Bill Maher remarked, “I don’t blame the kid, the smirking kid. I blame lead poisoning and bad parenting.”23 Rosie O’Donnell posted a photo of Sandmann next to one of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to smear both. Actress Alyssa Milano denounced the students’ bigotry, and fellow celebrity Debra Messing tweeted, “Mocking, condescending, disrespecting A**HOLE,” with the hashtag #CovingtonShame.24 CNN contributor Bakari Sellers tweeted about Sandmann, “He is deplorable. Some ppl can also be punched in the face.” Though Sellers later deleted the tweet, he neither apologized nor explained the deletion.25

  Even the kids’ school and the Covington diocese joined the parade of condemnation, issuing a joint statement deploring the students’ actions, apol
ogizing to Phillips and Native Americans in general, and declaring that the students were under investigation.26 (Bishop Roger Foys later apologized for the statement, saying the diocese had been bullied into condemning the students.27)

  Amidst this universal damnation of the Covington kids, indications began to spread that the media’s account of the confrontation was false and that the viral video omitted crucial context. Sandmann issued a statement explaining that just before the confrontation with Phillips, the students were harassed by demonstrators from a fringe religious-activist group called the Black Hebrew Israelites. These protestors called the students “racists,” “bigots,” “white crackers,” “faggots,” and “incest kids,” and told one African-American student they would “harvest his organs.” One student asked a teacher chaperone for permission to begin school spirit chants to counter the loud, hateful taunts. Sandmann said the chants were positive and that no students chanted “build that wall,” as was widely reported, or said anything hateful or racist.

  Although the media widely reported that the Covington students accosted Phillips, a fuller video of the incident showed that it was Phillips who waded into the crowd of students, singled out Sandmann, and continually banged a drum in his face while Sandmann did nothing but stand silently and smile. Meanwhile, according to Sandmann, a member of Phillips’s group yelled at the students that they “stole our land” and should “go back to Europe.”28 Phillips himself told contradictory versions of the event, including a version to the Detroit Free Press in which he admitted having approached the students himself. He also falsely claimed that the students attacked the Black Hebrew Israelites.29

  The left seized on the false portrayals of the confrontation as proof of America’s systemic racism, white privilege, and the vileness of Trump supporters. CNN commentator Keith Boykin tweeted, “The MAGA-hat wearing Covington Catholic High School students mocking Elder Nathan Phillips at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington are direct descendants of the white privilege that empowered white kids to mock Elizabeth Eckford at Little Rock Central High School in 1957.” In another tweet he asked, “When are these people going to learn to stop vilifying the people of color whose suffering and oppression enabled their privilege?” James Fallows of The Atlantic compared the students to desegregation protestors. Shaun King said the students’ power was centered in their whiteness and that mocking others unlike them made them feel strong. “But it’s weak. And despicable.” BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen likened one student to the look of white patriarchy. Though some withdrew their derogatory tweets or statements after the full video surfaced, many didn’t.

  Fallows, for one, simply doubled down. “For a sustained period, a large group of young men, who had chosen by their apparel to identify themselves with a political movement (and a movement whose leader uses ‘Pocahontas’ as an epithet and recently made a joking reference to a massacre at Wounded Knee), act mockingly to a man their grandfathers’ age, who by his apparel and activities represents a racial-minority, indigenous-American group,” he declared. “Any such encounter has an implicit edge of menace, intended or not, which everyone understands when younger, bigger, stronger males come close to older, smaller, weaker people.” As the Daily Signal’s Katrina Trinko observed, “In other words, it is impossible to wear a Make America Great Again hat—a hat that shows solidarity with the president of the United States—without coming off as a racist and menacing.”30

  That is exactly the point. Leftists salivated over validating their heinous prejudice against Trump supporters. They so desperately wanted this to be true that they viewed the students’ actions through their biased lenses, and some rejected the truth even after the full story emerged. In categorically smearing the students as bigots, they committed the same type of sin they were condemning—judging people on the basis of their identities rather than their individual characters and conduct.

  In a bizarre display of projection, Salon’s Chauncey DeVega denounced conservatives’ outrage at the left’s slander of the students and took umbrage at those who defended the students against false charges of racism. In the conservatives’ view, said DeVega, “The mere accusation of racism against a white person is worse than the impact of racism on the safety, security, lives and literal existence of nonwhites. White people are the ‘real’ ‘victims’ of ‘racism’ in America. Donald Trump, with the help of Vladimir Putin and Russia, rode this lie to the White House. White people are somehow ‘oppressed’ by nonwhites, ‘political correctness,’ and ‘civil rights.’ ”31

  No one says the accusation of racism against whites is worse than the impact of racism against nonwhites. But why even pose this false choice? Can anyone deny there are few sins more uniformly and severely condemned in the United States today than racism? If so, then why is it so hard to understand how damaging it is to bear false witness against someone as a racist? Does intersectionality deprive white people of due process in the court of public opinion? Does defending innocent whites somehow diminish the legitimacy of racism’s impact on nonwhites? This is just one more example of the narrow, zero-sum thinking in which leftists traffic. Reasonable people considering these questions can’t avoid concluding that justice and fair play demand that people be judged on their conduct, not on unsupported allegations of bigotry from people with jaundiced predispositions. Individuals have a right to be judged individually and others have a duty to so judge them and to refrain from categorical condemnations.

  Hell-bent on villainizing the students, DeVega decries the very thought process he employs, saying, “ ‘Personal responsibility’ does not apply to white conservatives.” In his twisted perception, the students are being unjustly defended because white conservatives have now made themselves victims. And just a few paragraphs later he proves that he can’t stand outside his own biases. “Those who defend and protect the white teens from Covington feel no compassion for the thousands of black migrant and refugee children who have been put in concentration camps by the Trump administration and ‘disappeared’ into a system that has no intention of reuniting them with their families.” Additionally, “A group of white teenage boys donned their MAGA hats—which are overt and intentional symbols of bigotry, racism and ignorance—attended a right-wing Christian rally aimed at denying women their reproductive rights, then happened upon a group of ‘Black Israelite’ cartoon bigots, and in retaliation decided to harass and insult a Native American by yelling ‘war whoops’ and making ‘tomahawk chop’ gestures. They did so because white privilege had trained them from birth that they would likely be able to act in such a way without consequences.”32

  Every one of these pathetically false assertions is born of preconceived and erroneous ideas about groups of people, not individuals. Trump supporters are not bigots, they do not lack compassion for children, and MAGA hats represent to them everything that’s positive about America. They are not symbols of bigotry, racism, or ignorance, but those who say they are reveal their own bigotry and ignorance by falsely judging the people who wear them based on false assumptions about them.

  Thank God for Christian young men who stand up for the innocent unborn, not to deprive women of rights but to speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves. The students were not the wrongdoers in this ordeal and did not yell war whoops. So-called “white privilege” did not train them from birth to be able to misbehave without consequences. Nowhere is personal accountability taught more clearly than in biblical Christianity, and it was in that tradition that the students were raised. In this case, the students behaved in a manner they believed would demonstrate their respect and keep the peace.

  In the end, after suffering months of slander in the press and on social media and being ritually flogged nightly throughout cable TV, Sandmann and other Covington students sued a host of celebrities, activists, and media outlets for defamation, including CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, celebrity Kath
y Griffin, and others.33 Having become unwitting victims of the left’s perpetual culture war, and unable to get a modicum of fair coverage from the media, they’ve turned to the courts for redress. One can only wish them success.

  “THE DE FACTO CREED OF THE LEFT”

  Columbia University professor Mark Lilla addresses these issues from a different perspective in the New Statesman, arguing that the modern left’s “addiction to identity politics” fractured it and created the conditions for the rise of Donald Trump. It is a refreshing assessment of the culpability of liberal academics, written by a self-described “centrist liberal.” Lilla admits that academia has inadvertently mobilized the right by tolerating limits on speech and debate, stigmatizing and bullying conservatives, and encouraging “a culture of complaint that strikes people outside our privileged circles as comically trivial.” He believes his colleagues “have distorted the liberal message to such a degree that it has become unrecognizable.”34

  Lilla maintains that liberals have grown inwardly focused and squandered the opportunity to advance their agenda. Through identity politics, they’ve alienated Americans from one another and divided them into groups. He contrasts Roosevelt-era liberalism with today’s identity liberalism using two images: the former is represented by two hands shaking; the latter by “a prism refracting a single beam of light into its constituent colors, producing a rainbow.”35

  Identity politics, says Lilla, has become the de facto creed of the left, including politicians, professors, teachers, journalists, activists, and the Democratic Party, and has been disastrous for liberalism. He approves of the left’s focus on disenfranchised minorities but contends that you don’t help them by empty gestures of recognition. You have to win elections by appealing to broad swaths of people and bringing them together, but identity politics does the opposite.