Free Republic

The Hard Untruths of Ta-Nehisi Coates. A bestselling polemic riven with hatred thrills the liberal elite. [...] for harboring roughly the same level of suspicion, fear, mistrust, distaste, and unease about whites as Derbyshire does about blacks, the essayist and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates has found himself crowned America’s leading civic thinker. ... Coates repeatedly returns to an incident in which his son, at age four, was shoved on an escalator on the Upper West Side by a woman who said, “Come on.” Coates reacted angrily, which is understandable, but he also pushed another man who took the woman’s side, which...

I cannot believe this needs to be said in 2024, but there is no context in which killing innocent Jews becomes understandable. Everywhere one looks these days, people are ‘contextualising’ pogroms. Among the cranky online right there is a creepy new trend of excuse-making for the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews. And among the woke left, there’s a rush to provide context for Hamas’s butchery of 7 October. Gaza is hellish, they say. Its people are oppressed, they insist. As if any of that explains the rape of Jewish women or the hurling of hand grenades into Jewish children’s faces....

It was bad enough that professional woke author Ta-Nehisi Coates chose to go all in on antisemitism and Islamic terrorism with his new book of essays ‘The Message’ (which I reviewed today), but Random House, an ex-Nazi corporation that publishes all of his screeds, chose to release it in time for the Oct 7 anniversary of the Hamas attacks. Coates had signed a letter after Oct 7 which claimed that, “after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza.” CBS News then decided to schedule a featured morning interview with Coates to promote his hateful book which makes...

(Oct. 9, 2024 / JNS) There are times when terrible books can be useful. In the case of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ truly awful The Message, the author has not only demonstrated exactly how and why America’s chattering classes have not just turned on Israel and are supporting an ideological war against its existence. Coates has given us more than that. During his book tour of the mainstream media, he also helped illustrate how a mob mentality and woke bureaucratic structures have gutted a supposedly prestigious legacy outlet like CBS News. At virtually every other stop, Coates was treated as a hero,...

Some years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates was the hottest thing on the Left, viewed as an intellectual of world-historical importance. Scott performed the excruciating task of reading Coates’s Between the World and Me. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction, but Scott called it the worst book he had ever read.Coates made a lot of money from his racist grifting, and then disappeared from sight. He hasn’t been heard from for a while. Apparently he was writing comic books.But now Coates is back, with a new political cause: kill the Jews!His urgent cause, according to New York magazine, which just...

The military's equity chief once recommended a book to high school students that referred to 9/11 first responders as 'not human' and 'menaces.' This latest revelation comes as the Pentagon continued a probe into Kelisa Wing's tweets in which she used words such as 'Karen' and 'CAUdacity' to describe white people. According to Fox News, Wing recommended the 2015 book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates while she represented the Pentagon on two occasions.

The highlight, at least for some television watchers, of the first day of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, came when the young woman seated directly behind the nominee rested her right hand on her opposite elbow and pressed her index fingertip against her thumb, forming a kind of circle or OK sign. The meaning of this gesture was not lost on certain alert viewers. "Who is she? What's up with the white power sign?" tweeted one Keith R. Dumas, quoted by the Daily Caller. Elucidating tweets streamed in. From...

The first time Matt Hawn suspected that he might run into trouble for what he was teaching was last August. His contemporary-issues class was discussing the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where protesters had taken to the streets after a police officer was filmed shooting 29-year-old Jacob Blake in the back. Hawn showed his students a picture of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two people and injuring another during the protests, to demonstrate the concept of white privilege. “What are we going to do about racism in the U.S.?” he asked his students. The principal of Sullivan Central High...

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Forget about how we’d pay for reparations or who would be eligible. The point isn’t to make things right, but to re-make America. What do we mean by reparations? Writing recently in the Washington Post, Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University, argues that “reparations should repair what white supremacy still breaks. Atoning for the legacy of chattel slavery is simply not enough.” That is, reparations must be broad enough to encompass the many crimes and injustices perpetrated against black Americans throughout our history, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. The effects of these injustices, says Cashin,...

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday bashed Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden for citing a notoriously racist Southern senator while touting his ability to work with lawmakers he disagrees with. “It’s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility’ typified by James Eastland. Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal & that whites were entitled to ‘the pursuit of dead n—-rs,’” de Blasio wrote on Twitter, along with a photo of his African-American wife and their mixed-race son and daughter. “It’s past time for apologies or evolution from @JoeBiden. He repeatedly demonstrates that he is...

Sen. Cory Booker said in a panel that the U.S. needs to address "persistent inequalities" experienced by African Americans by discussing reparations, the idea that the descendants of slaves should be compensated for the injustices and cruelty their ancestors experienced. Booker said that the nation has "yet to truly acknowledge and grapple with the racism and white supremacy that tainted this country's founding and continues to cause persistent and deep racial disparities and inequality. These disparities don't just harm black communities, they harm all communities." A House Judiciary subcommittee debated H.R. 40, a bill that would study how the U.S....

Steps away from the U.S. Capitol – a building built by slaves – the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is holding its first hearing in more than a decade on the hot-button topic of reparations for the descendants of Africans brought to America, enslaved and impacted by discriminatory policies including segregation. The hearing, timed to coincide with "Juneteenth," a date when the last slaves in Texas learned they were free, brings to the forefront the centuries-old debate over what, if anything, is owed. At the end of the Civil War formerly enslaved families were...

Actor Danny Glover and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates are heading to Congress to testify about reparations for the ancestors of slaves. Glover, 72, is the star of the “Lethal Weapon” film series among other movies and shows. Coates, 43, is an author and journalist who penned the “The Case for Reparations,” a 2014 essay in The Atlantic. The piece became a touchstone for the cause and helped push the matter into the national discourse. The hearing will be held Wednesday in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The goal of the hearing is to “examine,...

Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler's latest "Zillion Lies" update on the president was headlined "President Trump made 8,158 false or misleading claims in his first two years." Nevertheless, leftists got extremely angry that Kessler would "obsess" over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mangling facts. Eric Alterman, who unintentionally wrote the Funniest Book of 2003 -- What Liberal Media? -- now complains that Kessler is obsessed in a romantic way with AOC. Er, when Kessler's written on her precisely once in 2019, and 12 times on Trump. The president is called out for 8,158 whoppers, and AOC is up, to what, three? (Salon...

In America today there is nothing worse than being called a racist. You can’t easily defend yourself against the life-changing, sometimes career-ending smear which evildoers can wield with impunity. “There is nothing worse for your career,”  New York State Assemblyman Kieran Lalor (R), said on Fox and Friends, “there’s nothing worse for you as a person. A lot ofpeople don’t want to speak up because they’re going to be accused of being a racist.” Yet outrageous, even genocidal, statements are issued every day now by hate-filled black supremacists and their radical allies. In a case of deviancy having been...

High-profile journalists are saying they might leave Twitter after tweets attacking them and family members. The latest controversy is underscoring how the popular social media platform has become toxic in the current political climate. CNN reporter and commentator Chris Cillizza tweeted on Sunday that he was “about done” with Twitter, after tweets mocking his child’s peanut allergy. “We are talking about a 9 year old. Feel free to hate me. But don’t mock my son’s peanut allergy. Classless and indefensible,” Cillizza wrote. MSNBC Anchor Chuck Todd also offered support to Cillizza and criticized the abuse. “Every time I think Twitter...

Kanye West wants freedom—white freedom. I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely seven years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like folk wisdom, because when I think of that era, I do not think of MTV, but of the futile attempt to stay awake and navigate the yawning whiteness of Friday Night Videos, and I remember that there were no VCRs...

Ta-Nehisi Coates was interested in taking on Marvel's Captain America in a new comic book series because of the character's idealism. "He's like Barack Obama," Coates told a packed house during a Saturday afternoon keynote at the SXSW festival in Austin. "I want to clarify that. I don't mean that as praise or criticism. He's somebody who believes in the ideal of America, really, really believes in it." The author announced the new comic endeavor on Feb. 28 via a column in The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. In the essay, he wrote that "what is exciting here...

IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the...