Free Republic

America’s educational institutions used to adhere to objective standards of excellence. Students and faculty members had to strive and were rewarded (or not) according to their performance. What their background might be or where their ancestors lived didn’t matter. That was true until a corrosive idea called “disparate impact” began taking hold in the country some 50 years ago. What that meant was that objective standards were objectionable if they resulted in poorer performance by certain racial groups. The obsession with disparate impact was kick-started by the Supreme Court’s 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power decision and has been growing in...

I recently wrote about the mysterious killings of endangered white rhinos in South Africa’s Pilanesberg Park years ago. The killers turned out to be gangs of aggressive teen elephants who, raised without fathers or role models to “curb their youthful exuberance,” grew up to be troublemakers. The delinquents fell in line after park staff relocated adult male elephants to the park who “kicked butt” with the compassion of a father and established a new hierarchy. The violence and killings of white rhinos stopped. I compared the young elephants to young blacks in urban cities who were raised without fathers or...

... an old all-too-familiar thought popped into my mind: Please don’t let the perpetrator be Black. Alas, he was. And the beating was very disturbing. The perp, later identified as 38-year-old parolee Brandon Elliot, can be seen on the security camera video kicking 65-year-old Vilma Kari in the stomach and stomping repeatedly on her head.... She cites New York Police Department data to write, “a black New Yorker is over six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker.” “In 2020,” she writes, “blacks made up 50 percent of all suspects in...

An academic paper from 2019 defies the current progressive narrative about police targeting minorities. The paper has been cited by right leaning scholars, such as Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute. Now the authors of the paper are seeking to retract it. We’re now politicizing inconvenient facts and data. Retraction Watch reports: Authors of study on race and police killings ask for its retraction, citing “continued misuse” in the media The authors of a controversial paper on race and police shootings say they are retracting the article, which became a flashpoint in the debate over killings by police, and...

Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles. This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the...

The Democratic candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan promises that black parents will no longer have to fear when their children walk the streets — the threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. Pete Buttigieg has said police shootings of black men won’t be solved “until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that police shoot blacks “solely based on the color of their skin.” A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police...

The Obama-era policy of integrating women into ground combat units is a misguided social experiment that threatens military readiness and wastes resources in the service of a political agenda. The next defense secretary should end it. In September 2015 the Marine Corps released a study comparing the performance of gender-integrated and male-only infantry units in simulated combat. The all-male teams greatly outperformed the integrated teams, whether on shooting, surmounting obstacles or evacuating casualties. Female Marines were injured at more than six times the rate of men during preliminary training—unsurprising, since men’s higher testosterone levels produce stronger bones and muscles. Even...

Heather Mac Donald has written and spoken extensively about how identity politics is hampering America’s ability to maintain its dominance in STEM fields. Our main competitors, most notably China, are focused on making sure the best scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are doing the work. They care nothing about gender. And they spend virtually every dollar related to STEM on hard research and analysis. The U.S., by contrast, is preoccupied with the gender and (to a lesser extent) the race and ethnicity of who is in the lab. And we pour money into promoting identity politics in STEM. Indeed, Elizabeth Harrington...

... Since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men. Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist worldview. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests. If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields like engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism—whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit...

... When it comes to race, Ms. Mac Donald’s views are more conventionally conservative. She argues that minorities could overcome economic and educational disparities by embracing “bourgeois values.” She opposes all forms of affirmative action, and believes admissions and hiring should be based solely on aptitude tests and objective measures of performance. She even opposes the University of California’s guaranteed-admissions plan, which admits the top 9% of students from every California high school, regardless of the school’s overall performance. The mechanism is a covert way to reintroduce race into admissions, she says, in violation of Proposition 209, which prohibits race...

On November 7, 2006, Michigan voters passed Proposition 2, a measure that banned the use of racial preferences throughout state government and state universities. The next day, University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman issued a defiant statement. In it she pledged to fight in the courts against the voters’ decision to have a color-blind state, declaring, “I will not stand by while the heart and soul of this great university is threatened. We are Michigan and we are diversity.” Really? It’s the “heart and soul” of a great university to prefer some people over others on account of race?...

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 on Monday, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicides last year...

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes...

Liberal ideology conceives of “safe spaces” in the context of alleged white patriarchy, but there was a real need for a “safe space” in Britain’s Manchester Arena on May 22, when 22-year-old terrorist Salman Abedi detonated his nail- and screw-filled suicide bomb after a concert by teen idol Ariana Grande. What was the “progressive” answer to yet another instance of Islamic terrorism in the West? Feckless calls for resisting hate, pledges of renewed diversity, and little else. A rethinking of immigration policies is off the table. Nothing that an Islamic terrorist can do will ever shake the left-wing commitment to...

The most immediate goal of the Trump administration should be to change the elite-driven narrative about the criminal-justice system. That narrative, which holds that policing is lethally racist, has dominated public discourse since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. In response, officers are backing off of proactive policing, and violent crime is rising fast: 2015 saw the largest one-year spike in homicides nationwide in nearly 50 years. That violent-crime increase has continued unabated through 2016 and into the early months of 2017. A Trump administration official—perhaps Attorney General Sessions, or the president himself—should publicly...

Several black activists at Pomona College, associated with the Claremont Colleges, have sent a letter to the college president asking administrators to "take action" against conservative journalists from the student publication The Claremont Independent. The president, David Oxtoby, posted an email defending the right of Black Lives Matter critic Heather Mac Donald to speak.  Mac Donald was physically threatened and forced to cancel a lecture at Claremont following protests against her appearance. The activists claim that "free speech" is incompatible with "truth" and therefore should not be protected.

Campus protest in the 60’s has somehow morphed into “Shut It Down!” chantsThis is deeply disturbing: yet another campus incident of censorship, A throng of angry protesters converged at Claremont McKenna College on Thursday and effectively shut down a pro-police speech as they surrounded the building, forcing the speaker to give the talk via livestream to a near-empty room as they yelled “F*ck the police” and “Black Lives Matter” and banged on windows. – The College Fix This time the target was Heather MacDonald a Manhattan Institute scholar and author of the 2016 book The War on Cops. Some of...

Watching the debate between Heather Mac Donald and Edward Stringham was a fascinating experience for a number of reasons, foremost among them being that it presented two deeply contrasting visions of right wing thought. The former shaped by a deep reverence for social cohesion and ordered liberty, while the latter is influenced by a deeply-held anti-authoritarianism and faith in an unencumbered free market. The point of dispute was criminal justice reform, which was framed by the debate resolution, “There’s a war on cops, and it’s making us less safe.” Mac Donald, naturally, responded in the affirmative, asserting that the most...

Democrats and their media allies, joined by many Republicans, are calling on Donald Trump to withdraw from the presidential race after a newly released, decade-old tape of a frat-house-level conversation between Trump and television host Billy Bush in 2005, in which Trump boasted of his heavy-handed pursuit of females. Trump describes trying unsuccessfully to seduce a married woman by taking her furniture shopping, speaking in the crudest terms. He brags that because he was a star he could “grab [females] by the pussy” and claims to Bush that he starts kissing beautiful women “like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t...

See the article on the web. Excellent data. https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-danger-of-the-black-lives-matter-movement/ An excerpt doesn't begin to capture Heather MacDonald's excellent data.