Free Republic

If the United States manages to put down the woke revolution, it will be because a critical mass of liberals chooses to reject it. Conservatives, opposed to wokeness from the start, can make arguments and stand up for their principles individually. But they can’t stop the liberal-to-woke conversion process that turns mildly left-of-center Americans into cosplay Black Panthers overnight. The liberals themselves are the gatekeepers of their own movement and its institutions. Given that these institutions—news media, social media, entertainment, academia, and the current majority party in Washington—shape so many aspects of American life, it’s mostly up to liberals to...

'Real Time' host Bill Maher said Republicans would 'secretly love' to see Trump incarcerated over January 6 as much as Arab countries 'love when Israel would bomb Iraq.' Maher, 66, returned to his show Friday night after a month-long break and was joined by Politico's White House Editor Sam Stein and Columbia Associate Professor John McWhorter. The liberal host jumped into the roundtable discussion by calling former President Donald Trump the 'cloud hanging over this country,' but admitted the January 6 committee hearings were 'pretty impressive.'

As he delivered an otherwise unremarkable lecture on business communication, Professor Greg Patton tried to give his many Chinese students a helpful tip. To illustrate a point about padding out conversation with words such as 'um' or 'you know', Patton gave a common Mandarin example, roughly pronounced 'nay-guh'. The next thing he knew, he had been suspended from his job at the University of Southern California. Some black students in his class had formally complained that he had been racist. They had been made to feel 'less than' by a teacher who had deprived them of their 'peace and mental...

I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in. DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen. White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid...

As I’ve said before, academic John McWhorter is someone who has frequently strayed from ideological orthodoxy on the question of race and policing. For instance, last year he gave an interview on the 5 year anniversary of the death of Mike Brown which pointed out that a lot of what we initially heard about the case turned out not to be true. Over the weekend, McWhorter was interviewed by Bret Weinstein for his podcast show. The two discussed the current Black Lives Matter movement and the far-left ideology that seems to have migrated from college campuses to America’s city streets....

The religion of anti-racism proved itself the only force in American discourse powerful enough to end the lockdown.Every once in a while, something happens that is simultaneously absolutely amazing and perfectly predictable. This past week, one of those instances occurred as months of brutal lockdown meant to fight the Chinese virus melted away on the streets of our nation’s cities. In the wake of the brutal police killing of George Floyd, the only thing more powerful in the progressive mind than stopping the virus emerged. Racism. For many Americans, especially among the affluent, celebrity, and opinion-making portion of the population,...

VIDEO Columbia University professor John McWhorter absolutely can't stand listening to President Donald Trump speak. As you can see in this video, it causes him to make hilariously over-the-top vitriolic attacks upon Trump's vocabulary and the way he uses his words. I'm sure that Trump's down to earth Queens borough accent also adds to the professor's sputtering rage.

Professor John McWhorter of Columbia University appeared on Don Lemon’s CNN show to talk about Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax, claiming that Smollett saw the hate hoax as a path to greater fame than his acting alone could achieve. Appearing on the program to speak about a column he wrote for The Atlantic, Columbia University Professor John McWhorter explained the motivations behind Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax. McWhorter makes the case that Smollett took cues from the lessons learned from the Covington incident. Primarily, Smollett realized that America is quick to side with alleged victims, even with the facts don’t...

A professor recently claimed that the way President Donald Trump formulates his sentences raises concern that he may be unfit to fulfill his duties as president of the United States—all just months after he defended "Black English" as an "alternate form" of the language. John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, pointed out how Trump’s grammatical and spelling mistakes disqualify him from serving as commander-in-chief, in an op-ed for The Atlantic. McWhorter further stated that Trump’s informal style "betray[s] his lack of fitness for the presidency."

Is there anything inherently “doggy” about the word “dog”? Obviously not—to the French, a dog is a chien, to Russians a sobaka, to Mandarin Chinese-speakers a gǒu. These words have nothing in common, and none seem any more connected to the canine essence than any other. One runs up against that wall with pretty much any word.Except some. The word for “mother” seems often either to be mama or have a nasal sound similar to m, like nana. The word for “father” seems often either to be papa or have a sound similar to p, like b, in it—such that...

Yes, black lives taken by cops matter. But so do black lives taken by other blacks. BLM won’t win over America until it acknowledges this. It is considered the height of sophistication to declare that “America doesn’t want to talk about race.” I say it’s time to retire this phrase. Imagine being from a foreign country and hearing that phrase, watching a room full of earnest people nodding warmly, after just the first eight months of this year. Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sam Dubose, Sandra Bland, the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, the Charleston shootings, Rachel Dolezal, Bill Cosby, Ta-Nehisi...

Here’s how African-Americans can and will play the same game everyone else is, even if the rules are stacked against them. Demanding new rules or a new game is unrealistic and demeaning. After the race-related events of the past few weeks and months, it’s clear that the people who speak for black America Have a Dream, in the wake of the one Dr. King so resonantly expressed. The idea is that the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s wasn’t enough, that a shoe still has yet to drop. Today’s Dream is that white America will somehow wake up and understand...

Here’s a look at the future, and probably not that far into it. People will learn two things: 1) That an officer was not indicted for murdering Eric Garner—black, 43, and detained simply for selling single cigarettes—despite the fact that the killing was recorded from start to finish for all of America to see. 2) That an officer was not indicted for killing Michael Brown after Brown had stolen from a store, refused the officer’s request to step aside and perhaps tried to grab his gun, with the officer shooting when Brown repeatedly lunged toward him for some reason, with...

Research confirms that the “acting white” charge is a real problem that intimidates some black students. Our job is to confront it. As kids go back to school this week, when it comes to black ones, it’s time to do some myth-busting. This week’s topic: black teens calling their nerdy black peers “white” for liking school. It’s a problem, because too often, black kids who want to fit in end up letting their grades slip. The social scientists John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham first called attention to this phenomenon in the 1980s. But over the past 10 years, a myth...

It’s interesting that the director of the richest oeuvre of black films in the history of the medium doesn’t understand what the Civil Rights revolution was for. In his expletive-laced comments about the gentrification of Fort Greene during an interview at the Pratt Institute, Spike Lee seemed to think that what we Overcame for was to be grouchy bigots. Basically, black people are getting paid more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives for their houses, and a once sketchy neighborhood is now quiet and pleasant. And this is a bad thing… why? Lee seems to think it’s somehow...

You know our political discourse has lost its moorings when it’s the Republicans who play that famous race card in defending one of their own. The person in need of defense is Dr. Ben Carson, a renowned Johns Hopkins surgeon. Carson happens to be black, Yale-educated — and conservative. After his impassioned criticism of President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast, many in the GOP thought they’d found their 2016 standard-bearer. But however brilliant, Carson has raised eyebrows since coming into the spotlight. Last week, he told Sean Hannity, “Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be...

I am not now nor have I ever been Glenn Beck. Please, please believe me! I am NOT Glenn Beck! Such was the tone of the unintentionally hilarious article in The New Republic by contributing editor John McWhorter. Apparently his "thought crime" in the eyes of Jim Sleeper writing in Talking Points Memo was agreeing with Glenn Beck on the social toxicity of Frances Fox Piven:

National Discussion & Debates Series The Future of Affirmative Action Over the past several years, race-based opportunity policies have been on the defensive. In 2006, 58% of Michigan voters approved a statewide referendum ending affirmative action in public education. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court forced public school administrators to use socioeconomic status, not race, to integrate segregated public schools. In 2008, Nebraska voters approved a statewide ballot initiative banning all racial preferences, while voters in Colorado rejected a similar measure; future referendums are being prepared in other states. President Barack Obama injected energy into the race-versus-class debate when...

Very interesting and very civil discussion about race, Obama, Eric Holder, and the ape cartoon called: "Abominations, Cartoons, and Cowards" Detail: Glenn calls John’s NAACP piece an abomination (03:52) John’s ideas for reforming the NAACP (07:02) Glenn’s memories of attending the Million Man March (02:28) Was that NY Post cartoon racist? (07:45) Prince Harry and the policing of discourse (03:06) Are we really “a nation of cowards” on race? (08:41) ~~~~ John McWhorter, professor, best selling author and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the more conservative. He earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and...

If Barack Obama is the most admired black man in America right now, it may be no exaggeration to say that John McWhorter is a candidate for the unpopularity prize. Which is an odd thing to say about a courteous academic from the arcane realm of linguistics. Yet by venturing onto the mean streets of hiphop with a dispassionate critique of a multimillion-dollar industry, he risks becoming a target of drive-by shootings by enraged academics, book reviewers and bloggers. McWhorter is not all that surprised that critics have given him a pummelling. He lets out a sigh of resignation: “By...