The DEI Language That’s Doing More Harm Than Good

By Conor Friedersdorf

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

Last week, Senator Edward Markey published a social-media post seeking interns for his Boston office. He wrote that “BIPOC, LGBTQ+, working class, veterans, and other underrepresented candidates with Massachusetts ties are encouraged to apply.” Outrage quickly followed: Critics treated the post not as a straightforward attempt to encourage diversity in job applications, but rather as a discriminatory signal that white men would be disadvantaged in hiring.

 

The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo called the help-wanted ad an open violation of civil-rights law and urged a federal probe. The former Trump Justice Department appointee Theo Wold wrote that a goal of Democrats is to ensure that young white men “have no opportunities to find gainful employment.” One response to Markey stated, “If you are a young White man struggling financially, I understand your frustration with the Iran conflict and gas prices, but you must understand that this is the official hiring policy of the entire corporate world if democrats return to power.”

 

Because X rewards inflammatory retorts more than intellectual rigor, these particular claims of racial grievance are easy for skeptics to dismiss as sensationalism. Urging certain groups to apply for a job is not proof of hiring discrimination against others. Some groups that Markey’s post mentioned, such as gay people, veterans, and the working class, include lots of white men. There is overwhelming evidence that the Democratic Party’s goal is not “no opportunities” for white men, and that corporations are not a left-identitarian monolith.

 

Still, setting all falsehoods and exaggerations aside, Democratic elected officials have long been more likely than Republicans to favor policies that consider race and sex in employment decisions. These policies sometimes result in credible claims of discrimination against white and/or male candidates: Large nonprofits, major cities, multinational corporations, and prestigious law firms have all lost court cases involving employment discrimination against white people or men, or altered their employment practices under pressure from federal or state agencies that enforce civil-rights laws. Republicans generally treat such discrimination as a bigger problem than Democrats, even as most Americans—including a majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents—reject preferential treatment in hiring and promotions for favored groups. Populist-right partisans are probably correct that they have a political opportunity in going after any left-leaning political, academic, or business elites who push such policies.

 

The issue may prove especially potent for men in Generation Z. As recently as 2019, just a third of young men perceived some discrimination against men in America. In 2025, 51 percent of young men perceived it. Those feeling aggrieved by Markey’s words should bear in mind that, at 80, his views about race were formed before the civil-rights era. For most of his life, identity politics in Congress favored straight white men. Perhaps he still perceives that all groups other than white men need reassurance, and would be surprised that young white men today have any such need. (His office did not respond to my request for comment.)

 

But older legislators need to grasp that efforts to diversify organizations, many of which focus on new hires, mean that Gen Z has a unique experience of the job market. Exposing white men in this cohort to language that seems to treat them differently from other groups is particularly unwise––they are especially primed to infer discriminatory intent whether or not it is being implied. Cheryl Kaiser, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, researches how “well-intentioned organizational diversity initiatives create unintended consequences.” She told me in an email that, although outreach to particular identity groups is distinct from restricting hiring to those groups, “the mere presence of a diversity signal, not the signal’s actual impact in hiring decisions, can increase White Americans’ concerns that they’ll face racism.” (In fact, several federal and state laws prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, or other protected characteristics—and these are laws that are intended to protect everyone, not just women or people of color.)

 

In scholarship published in 2021, Kaiser and her co-authors found that “simply exposing White Americans to organizational diversity signals” increased their perception of a bias in hiring against white men. That perception occurred “even with clear evidence of White advantage within the organization, a less-qualified White candidate, or abundant promotion opportunities for all employees. Nor was it limited to people predisposed toward biased beliefs: the effect did not depend on participants’ endorsement of group-based hierarchy or their level of racial ingroup identification.” In another research paper, from 2015, Kaiser and her co-authors found that the mere presence of pro-diversity signals “cause White male mock job applicants to experience cardiovascular stress as well as anticipate experiencing discrimination when applying for jobs at these companies.”

 

Of course, the fact that people perceive discrimination does not mean they are actually being discriminated against. And if diversity language were effective in contributing to more equitable hiring outcomes, even while upsetting a few overly sensitive sorts, there would be a strong case for retaining it. But Kaiser believes that “the types of diversity signals that cause backlash often do very little to effectively diversify the workplace.” Research she published in 2020 found that “racial minority employees sometimes see organizational diversity signals as overstating real commitment, which is linked to feeling less able to fit in or thrive.” Often, then, diversity signals confound all assumptions: “They don’t produce the hiring outcomes critics fear, they don’t produce the trust or inclusion benefits supporters are aiming for, and yet they still trigger the perceptual backlash described above,” Kaiser told me.

 

To meaningfully reduce resentment, grievance, and reactionary identitarianism among young white men, Democrats should adopt rhetoric that unambiguously clarifies a commitment to equal opportunity. Some may find this advice frustrating. For decades, the political right insisted that racial preferences were immoral and illegal, and that diversity efforts should be restricted to outreach. Now they’re treating mere outreach as proof of illegal discrimination. But as Kaiser’s research shows, diversity rhetoric can have unforeseen effects. White identitarians would exist even in a world without bias of any sort in recruitment or hiring––but using language that fuels white identity politics, as Markey’s language did, is political malpractice that’s bad for Americans of all races, no matter how well intentioned it might be.

 

Even if one argues that diversity advocates shouldn’t have to change how they communicate in order to avoid backlash, the reality seems to be that they do. As is often the case in politics, social progress requires forging broad coalitions of people who often disagree. That requires an understanding of psychology, attentiveness to possible sensitivities, and, yes, even compromise.

 

Outreach that values diversity and inclusion is still possible. In 2015, the social psychologist Wiebren Jansen and co-authors found that “including the cultural majority group in an organization’s diversity approach” can help white men with a high need to belong feel included, and can increase support within organizations for diversity efforts. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s approach to recruiting interns is a good example of inclusive language. Her call for applications uses familiar and simple language, describing her office as “an equal-opportunity employer” that does not discriminate based on “race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or uniformed service.” Warren “encourages all individuals from all backgrounds to apply.” Whether you’re Black or white or trans or gay or working-class or a veteran, if you are wondering whether people like you belong, that approach leaves no ambiguity: You’re encouraged to apply. “All individuals” are.

Macron’s ‘Turning Point’

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, October 24, 2026

 

There was a series of shootings on Friday in Trappes, France. One person was murdered and five others injured, including a twelve-year-old girl, who was hit eight times and is in a serious but reportedly stable condition.

 

The French interior minister said the (sole) suspect, who has been caught, used what appeared to be “a military-grade weapon, or at least an automatic weapon, on five people in different locations.” He also said that there was “a rather strong indication” that the crime was terror-related.

 

Reuters:

 

Nicolas Dainville, the mayor of nearby La Verriere, said the suspect was “of a European type.” Rabeh [the mayor of Trappes] said two of the victims were of African ⁠and North ​African origin, respectively, and did not provide details about the ​backgrounds of the other victims.

 

President Macron has rightly condemned this horrific attack, but the way in which he did so was far from reassuring.

 

Reuters:

 

“What happened today is, I am telling you, a turning point, because it is the first ​time we have had a terrorist act that was planned to kill our compatriots, our ​children, based on the colour of their skin or their religion,” Macron told ⁠reporters.

 

The first time?

 

As was quickly pointed out on X and elsewhere: Not exactly.

 

To take a couple of examples from many: What about the two Islamist terrorists, who in 2016 attacked those attending a Mass in a Catholic church? They took a number of those attending prisoner and killed the officiating priest, Jacques Hamel, by slitting his throat. Father Hamel was 85.

 

The next day a Mass was held in Father Hamel’s memory at Notre-Dame. Macron was among those in attendance.

 

But he didn’t seem to remember Hamel when he spoke on Friday.

 

And what about the attack in 2012 by Mohammed Merah, an Islamist gunman, on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse?

 

He murdered four people, three of them under ten years old.

 

Merah was killed in the aftermath of the attack, but he has been in the news recently. A rap song referencing (and named after) him was recently released (it also namechecks Hitler and the only survivor of the group responsible for the 2015 Paris attacks). It has been chanted by high schoolers during at least one demonstration and was being played by another group of teenagers as they filmed themselves riding scooters and skateboards inside a church.

 

Given the controversy the song has stirred up and the fact that it and the incident in the church have triggered a legal response by the authorities, it might have been thought that Merah’s crimes would have been on Macron’s mind when he spoke. But it seems not.

 

Later on Friday, Macron, clearly responding to criticism of his earlier comments, tweeted out an additional response to the Trappes shooting.

 

He still referred to the shootings as a turning point:

 

We are confronted with an act of extreme gravity, and one that, by its proven racist nature, marks a turning point for our country.

 

But, among other points, added this:

 

I also want to recall an essential truth and avoid any controversy: in recent years, our country has experienced attacks that targeted Christians because they were Christians and Jews because they were Jews. None of these victims must be forgotten. No pain must be ranked above another. And I want nothing tonight to add to the grief of the families, to the sorrow of the country, or to the nation’s solemn reflection.

 

But if antisemitism is racism (it is, of course), there has been no “turning point,” but rather a descent further along a path toward a very dark place.

 

To reverse course is going to take more skill than Macron showed yesterday.

Discrimination in the Name of Diversity

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

Nearly a decade ago, Maryland’s largest public school district decided it had a problem. It didn’t involve student safety or plummeting test scores. It was that too many Asian-American children were being accepted into its magnet program for exceptional middle-schoolers.

 

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted a case that will decide whether Montgomery County Public Schools’ plan to rebalance the racial makeup of the program violated the Constitution’s promise of equal protection under the law.

 

By the 2013–14 school year, half the students accepted to the county’s four magnet programs were Asian-American. To “correct” this “problem,” the district commissioned a study to see how it could begin to de-emphasize traditional criteria in an effort to grant more spots to black and Hispanic children.

 

Released in 2016, the report concluded that there were “significant racial and socioeconomic disparities in the enrollment and acceptance rates to academically selective programs, which suggest a need to revise the criteria and process used to select students for these programs.” The report suggested “broadening the definition of gifted” to include “non-cognitive measures such as motivation and persistence, using group-specific norms that benchmark student performance against school peers with comparable backgrounds,” and “offering automatic admissions for students in the top 5-10% of sending elementary or middle schools.”

 

The motivations in seeking these changes were not subtle. A board member expressed concern over the “substantial underrepresentation of students of color” in the magnet programs and expressed hope that “programs will become more diverse and be more reflective of our student population.”

 

As is the case with college admissions, concerns over the inclusion of “students of color” do not apply to Asian Americans, a group once largely barred from entering the United States by the federal government. And when the Montgomery County school district began running field tests using their new criteria, they got the result they wanted. At one magnet school, the percentage of Asian-American students in the program dropped from 45.6 percent to 31.5 percent, while the proportion of black, Hispanic, and white students all rose (by 5.3 percent, 8.3 percent, and 2.7 percent, respectively). At another school, the percentage of Asian-American participants dropped by 27.9 percent and at another by 15.4 percent.

 

Asian-American parents noticed. So did the school board, whose complaint was that the field test hadn’t gone far enough. One member had already warned colleagues that “if we expand blindly we are going to end up in the same place ten years from now,” because “privilege is not going to go away.” In Montgomery County, apparently, “privilege” is what you call a ten-year-old who aces a cognitive abilities test.

 

The mechanics were clever, in the way a pickpocket is clever. The new field test’s “peer grouping” rule made it harder for kids at high-performing elementary schools to win seats. A “local norming” provision scrapped the countywide yardstick and graded children on their own school’s curve. Asian-American families in the county are clustered in a handful of high-performing schools, so the district never had to write the word “Asian” anywhere. Geography did the sorting.

 

When a group of mostly Asian parents sued in 2020, the district swapped the field test for a lottery open to students scoring in the 85th percentile on a standardized assessment. Those percentiles were locally normed, too. Data the parents later obtained showed that kids at schools with the lowest rates of poverty among their school population needed to score in the 93rd percentile countywide to qualify for the STEM lottery. Kids at the county’s highest-poverty schools needed to score in the 60th percentile. This made it even harder for Asian-American students to qualify for the STEM programs than under the field test.

 

Yet the parents lost, and not because a court found that the district had done no wrong. The Fourth Circuit had adopted a rule in a similar case involving Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School. Under it, a plaintiff can’t even raise discriminatory intent unless the targeted group’s share of admissions falls below its share of the applicant pool. Asian-American kids didn’t fall below that line, so the case was tossed. Intent never entered the room.

 

The current legal standard is therefore that a school board can set out to shrink a racial group’s numbers, succeed, and still walk away clean, so long as the victims stubbornly keep outperforming everyone else. Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting when the court passed on the Thomas Jefferson case, said the rule “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.” The crime is excused because the victims were too good at surviving it.

 

The circuit courts have now split. The First and Fourth apply the Thomas Jefferson standard. The Second and Third, in cases from New York and Philadelphia, have rejected it. So a Maryland sixth-grader’s equal protection now depends on which side of the Mason-Dixon line her parents bought a house.

 

The Supreme Court’s own precedent says this can’t stand. In the 2023 case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” and that what cannot be done directly through racial quotas cannot be done indirectly through ostensibly race-neutral programs with disparate impacts. Sixteen years earlier, he put it more simply: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

 

G. K. Chesterton observed that America is the only nation founded on a creed. That creed’s first article is that government treats citizens as individuals, not as tokens of a group. Montgomery County wanted its magnet programs to “reflect the community.” The Constitution asks for something harder: that the community treat each child as a person. The justices now get to remind the district which one is the law.

Has Woke 2.0 Started?

By Abigail Anthony

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

Ever since AOC quoted a local city councilman as saying, “Woke 1 was crazy,” a troubling thought has been lurking in my mind: The phrase “Woke 1” means there must be a Woke 2 — and potentially a Woke 3, Woke 4, and so on. I never believed that “wokeness” died; it simply grew quieter because its loudest activists retreated to private rooms for off-the-record discussions. Still, I’ve been wondering when the second era of wokeness would emerge.

 

Now, I believe I’ve already seen it. This summer, I observed aggressive illiberal extremism in three particular cultural episodes that eerily resembled the fashions of 2020: the Cambridge cover-up, the Clancy trial, and the Cornell case.

 

For those who didn’t follow the story, Jason Arday was the youngest black professor ever at the University of Cambridge in England — except his entire scholarly career was replete with academic misconduct, including extensive plagiarism and research fraud. He also regularly fabricated personal feats, like saying he that he volunteered abroad with a charity that has a policy to not send volunteers abroad. (See my reporting in National Review for a more detailed summary of his fictitious biography and academic misconduct, including our discovery that he falsely claimed to be a visiting professor at Ohio State University.) Arday resigned as more of his lies were exposed in the press, and nine days later, he was found dead in his home.

 

Arday personified wokeness: His “research” (even if it had entirely lacked stolen data and language) was entirely bogus drivel designed to advance predetermined conclusions about “racism” that would justify increasing DEI, and he surely would not have been deemed qualified for an academic position anywhere (let alone at Cambridge) if he fell into the “straight white male” category. But since his publications and career ascent aren’t limited to this past year, he cannot be construed as marking a new chapter of wokeness. Rather, the relevant barometer is that academia and mainstream outlets reflexively supported him this summer, even as his claims and papers were being picked apart in some outlets. Cambridge University initially defended Arday, as did a large swath of academics within and outside the school. The mainstream media largely avoided discussing the incriminating evidence behind the accusations and further downplayed the extent to which he had exaggerated his life achievements.

 

Mainstream journalists and the Ivory Asylum’s inmates decided that Arday was the victim of racism and that the villain worthy of opprobrium was the whistleblower, Nathan Cofnas — not because Cofnas’s exposé on Arday was factually flawed, but because he had previously written about IQ differences and disparate outcomes across racial groups. Once Arday was discovered dead, the hostility to Cofnas only intensified. The New York Times reported in late September that Cambridge abandoned its previous plans to investigate the hiring of Arday, and the university will instead examine whether it offered sufficient support to Arday as the controversy gained traction. By contrast, Cofnas was suspended by his own institution in Belgium, Ghent University.

 

This affair only reaffirmed that even the most prestigious institutions, ostensibly dedicated to truth and research, were willing to ignore heaps of damning evidence for the sake of appearing sufficiently committed to social justice, DEI, anti-racism, and all that jazz. Rather than admit to wrongdoing and acknowledge the plain facts, the university’s leadership espoused a nonsense “racism!” narrative, condemned the people who defended meritocratic standards, and then rescinded its conciliatory institutional inquiry that had been offered solely because public criticism was mounting.

 

But worse than elevating Arday to innocent martyr status was the campaign against Cofnas, who did what an academic is supposed to do: present evidence and seek the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. A great, and significantly concerning, irony is that Cofnas himself had previously been dismissed as a fellow from Cambridge University’s Emmanuel College for the supposed crime of writing articles that offended minorities within the academy; he published a blog post that qualified as “a rejection of diversity, equality, and inclusion” and thereby violated the college’s “core values and mission.” In other words, the guy who did actual research was the one actually booted from his Cambridge office.

 

***

 

The second phenomenon of mass delusion was apparent in how left-leaning women responded to the Clancy trial. Former mother Lindsay Clancy faced three first-degree murder charges. Her defense team did not dispute that she strangled her three children — Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months) — to death with an exercise band in January 2023. The trial more narrowly focused on whether she was suffering from “postpartum psychosis” (potentially induced by medication) when she committed the murders; if she was in such an altered state when she committed the murders, then she could not be held criminally responsible. One lone juror, a black man, prompted the judge to declare a mistrial after six days of deliberation.

 

A lot of crazy progressive women who weren’t on the stand for insanity expressed their “solidarity” with Clancy. To support her, several hundred women dressed up in pink and rallied outside the courthouse when the trial was ongoing, insisting that the case represented how the medical system mistreats and dismisses female patients, particularly those with postpartum health issues. Of course, activism also occurred online. A woman (who claimed to be an ob-gyn) posted a video to social media where she explicitly thanked Clancy and attested that it is difficult to be a mother to three children. “I don’t know what else [Clancy] could have done,” she said. (The most charitable interpretation possible is that the ob-gyn was praising Clancy strictly for seeking medical help related to her mental health, though that isn’t obvious.) The New York Times ran the headline “I Study Women Who Kill Their Children. Lindsay Clancy Deserves Mercy.”

 

Elaborate explanations emerged to excuse the murderess’s actions. “Stop thinking about these kids as people and think about them as ceramic vases for just one second,” a woman and self-described “forensic scientist” said as she compared Clancy’s case to that of an epileptic person who involuntarily broke expensive pottery in a museum. Complex conspiracy theories attempt to argue that Clancy’s husband was somehow in on the murders, or even entirely to blame. Clancy’s lawyer has been praised as a “feminist icon” and hailed as “the voice of so many moms,” even though a fraction of a percent of new mothers have postpartum psychosis, and an even smaller subset kill their children. Mothers watched Clancy achieve something like sainthood, and now, there have been several reported instances of apparent copycat cases: As a CNN headline put it, “Illinois mother texted friends about Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial hours before killing her 2-year-old, prosecutors say.”

 

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that a society that celebrates the murder of children in utero naturally progressed to celebrating a woman who murders her children outside the womb. But an unanticipated outcome to the trial was the fervid witch hunt — not targeting Clancy, but rather the dissenting juror. “He had the hardest time getting over the fact that Lindsey viciously killed her children,” a female juror later said in an interview on NBC TV. Another female juror explained to the public that the man was “arrogant,” which just means he didn’t do exactly what they kept nagging him to do. Journalists decided to actually investigate for once; the public was informed of every infraction the male juror had ever committed, which is among the few instances of the left and the mainstream media discussing any wrongdoings committed by a black man. We know that he faced eviction due to unpaid rent and had been served a restraining order, yet the ugly facts about George Floyd’s multiple crimes were hardly ever mentioned during Woke 1.

 

***

 

Finally, there is the so-called Cornell 7 debacle. The publicly available information suggests that Jane Doe had enthusiastically consented verbally to a wide range of extreme sexual activity throughout the evening. (Just describing the escapades in detail would corrupt a virgin.) Afterward, she affirmed in writing that “non[e] of the sexual stuff was illegal” and “our body our choice.” She was so unbothered by the fraternity boys that she wanted to party with them again and had plans to do so. Later, Doe claimed she had been raped — after scandalous rumors were gaining traction on campus, after her sorority sisters construed the shame as evidence of sexual abuse, and after she was disinvited from a fraternity party.

 

Progressives have responded to the Cornell debauchery by displaying the same totalitarian impulse that was present in 2020: The men are presumed guilty, and everyone must condemn them. As was the case during BLM, leftists have resorted to social media to express their support for Jane Doe by sharing infographics with misleading statistics, posting “MeToo” style narratives, and demanding comprehensive reform. To advance their interpretation of that scandalous Cornell evening, the left-wing activists are pressuring higher-education institutions to support Doe and adopt policy changes — the same way that faculty and students issued statements urging their universities to implement “antiracist” measures. For example, the undergraduate senate at Princeton released a letter insisting that their school express “solidarity” with Doe, rework its Title IX policies, and much more. Cornell itself has responded with an iron fist, recently banning social events at all fraternities for the school year — even though the specific fraternity where the purported “sexual violence” occurred (as well as the accused individuals) had already been punished.

 

***

 

What do all these instances have in common with one another, and with 2020-era madness? First, facts are disregarded and suppressed in the media. Second, everything is construed in terms of an oppression hierarchy, while the victims are misidentified. In some instances, the condemned villain is actually the good guy. Third, important long-standing norms are abandoned with little regard for the long-term consequences. Extensive plagiarism and research fraud is somehow excusable, harassing a particular juror is encouraged, and consent is construed as something that can be retroactively repealed. Fourth, there are social demands for individuals and institutions to proactively affirm that they agree with the progressive stance du jour. Perhaps the most clearly shared trait, though, is the groupthink: In each of the three examples, and back in 2020, leftists instinctively arrived at the same conclusion and did not entertain any challenges, then they attempted to promote a consensus by punishing critics. But the worst thing is that the groupthink doesn’t involve reasonable ideas. Instead, it consists of absolutely absurd beliefs, seriously erroneous interpretations of facts, and extreme demands.

 

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of recent anecdotes about growing illiberalism: We could point to the popularity of Democratic Socialist candidates or the anti-ICE protests, along with other examples, as additional evidence. But these three episodes lead me to conclude that either Woke 1 never ended and is awakening from a brief hibernation, or we’re living through the earliest stage of Woke 2. Either way, illiberal sentiments are shared more openly, more widely, and more passionately — all of which is worrying. The good news, if there is any, is that I might be wrong: This is an observation of the culture, not a quantitative study supported by a rigorous methodology. In fact, I really hope that I am wrong. But I suspect that if the midterms elections wind up with Democrats in control, or even simply more heavily represented in Congress and elsewhere than they are now, then wokeness — whether a continuation of Woke 1 or a sequel with distinct characteristics — will erupt immediately thereafter.

California’s Peculiar ‘N-Word’ Case Against Tesla

By Will Swaim

Saturday, October 17, 2026

 

On September 21, I took a long tram ride through Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif. It was a marvel for a white-collar kid from the suburbs: helmeted men and women working in partnership amid a Jurassic Park of swinging robot arms inside 3.7 million square feet of industrial space — the equivalent, my notes show, of about 64 NFL football fields, including the end zones.

 

On that same trip, I accomplished something California’s state investigators never did in the course of an eight-year probe: I actually went to Tesla.

 

California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) says the factory is a “racially segregated workplace,” where black employees encounter racist graffiti, hear racial slurs with astonishing frequency, and work in areas known as the “plantation” and “slaveship.” The state’s case went to trial the very day of my visit. Yet the CRD had never set foot inside the factory. Its investigators met with Tesla officials just once, for two and a half hours, before filing their lawsuit the following day.

 

The state alleges a range of discriminatory practices. But much of the case’s force comes from one accusation: that Tesla tolerated the frequent use of a single terrible word, one capable of making an entire room of Americans seize up before anyone has finished pronouncing it: the N-word.

 

The state will have its experts. But Tesla has called its own, Hiram L. Smith. A sociolinguist at Bucknell University, Smith specializes in African-American English and has just published a book on this lexical minefield, Wassup, My Nigga: The Hidden History of a Controversial Word.

 

Unlike me, Smith is black and refuses to deploy the customary euphemism “N-word.” It’s not because he is trying to be provocative — though provocation is an unavoidable occupational hazard here — but because he thinks the euphemism muddies the very distinction he is trying to examine. In a recent academic presentation, he told his audience, “In this talk, I do not use the word ‘nigga’; I refer to it.”

 

More important for Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Tesla, Smith rejects the idea that the word is self-interpreting. Who said it? To whom? In what grammatical construction? With what pronunciation, intention, relationship, and social context? His research examines how the word has served different functions over time: insult, affiliation, masculine in-group marker, quotation, lyric, reference. Simply counting occurrences tells us remarkably little about what happened. Smith’s point is not that racial epithets are harmless. It’s that linguistics does not permit us to convert every utterance mechanically into a racial assault. A word that is unmistakably an insult in one setting may carry an entirely different meaning in another.

 

And there’s a related problem, one that the state doesn’t seem to account for, which sticks out from my own nonlawyer’s perspective: Many of Tesla’s factory workers are Latino and black. If Tesla executives had disciplined those workers for their use of The Word Which Cannot Be Uttered (TWWCU), California might be making a very different claim: that Elon Musk’s company was guilty of policing black language. You can imagine the headlines for that case.

 

Indeed, while my group of tourists and car buyers was ferried about Tesla’s “slave plantation” in a humming electric tram, the trial was beginning an hour’s drive north: in the Alameda County Superior Court, a 1960s brutalist admin building that includes the courtroom of Judge Peter Borkon. There, opening his defense of the carmaker, attorney Tyree P. Jones Jr., himself a black man, told the court that the state’s case against Tesla is, in fact, a case against black speech. “By this action, the state of California attacks the way many black people greet each other,” Jones said. “It’s offensive.”

 

This cannot mean that every invocation of TWWCU at Tesla was affectionate, harmless, or protected by some exemption from workplace rules. A black employee subjected to repeated racial insults by hostile co-workers has a serious complaint, and an employer that ignores it may be liable. Nor does Smith’s research answer the state’s separate allegations about pay and promotions.

 

But those distinctions make the circumstances of each alleged offense essential. Unfortunately, state law allows the state to make such allegations without what you and I — or anyone who grew up on a television diet of courtroom procedurals — would recognize as a named victim. In a pretrial hearing, one of the state’s attorneys explained that its expert witnesses would address Tesla’s human resources practices and their departures from professional standards, as well as the historical and sociological significance of the word. Smith’s presence this week makes that testimony considerably more interesting. The CRD appears prepared to establish that the word has a long, ugly history; Smith will ask Judge Borkon to consider what particular speakers meant by particular uses of it. One might suppose that an agency that has conducted an eight-year investigation would already have answered those questions.

 

***

 

The state’s case has a second peculiarity: the methods of its investigators.

 

From 2017 to 2022, Tesla claims, CRD (then called the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) investigated almost 50 claims of racism at the Fremont plant. “On every single occasion, when the DFEH closed an investigation, it did not find misconduct against Tesla. It therefore strains credibility for the agency to now allege, after a three-year investigation, that systematic racial discrimination and harassment somehow existed at Tesla.”

 

Tesla also claims that CRD officials never visited the factory and never interviewed the Tesla executives one might suppose were the architects of the Jim Crow system CRD says it has discovered. And although the department has a statutory responsibility to investigate discrimination complaints and attempt conciliation, its single encounter with Tesla consisted, the company says, of a single, two-and-a-half-hour meeting on the day before the state filed its 2022 lawsuit.

 

Despite all that, in May, Judge Borkon rejected Tesla’s effort to dismiss the case before trial. CRD Director Kevin Kish celebrated the ruling by declaring that Tesla’s employment practices were rooted in “some of the ugliest relics of the past.” Yet the judge himself seemed perplexed by one aspect of the department’s case. After years of investigation, the CRD had proceeded without identifying individual workers as plaintiffs in its lawsuit. In a let-me-get-this-straight moment, Borkon asked the CRD’s attorneys whether identifying an entire category of people but not a single named victim was, you know, sufficient.

 

“You don’t have to ever name the individual?” the judge asked.

 

A CRD attorney explained that the department brought the action in its own name to seek relief for affected workers. If Tesla wanted the names of every person potentially entitled to relief, she asked, “How would CRD have known that?”

 

“Why would you not have known that?” the judge replied with something like exasperation.

 

It’s a marvelous exchange, and not because the state necessarily lacks legal authority to sue on behalf of workers who aren’t individually named in the complaint. California law gives it that authority. Rather, the exchange raises an elementary question about an investigation that consumed years: How closely did the state investigate the experiences of the people it says were victimized?

 

The CRD’s answer may be that its evidence establishes a pattern of misconduct extending beyond the experiences of particular employees. But that raises the stakes of the evidence, not least because the agency is alleging something considerably more serious than bad behavior by a handful of employees. It is accusing one of the world’s best-known manufacturers of maintaining a workplace culture of racial discrimination. The distinction matters. A company that employs thousands of people can have racist employees without operating a racist employment system. Whether Tesla knew about particular instances of misconduct, tolerated them, punished them, or failed to prevent them is central to the case.

 

So are the meanings of the words the state has collected as evidence.

 

***

 

Tracking the evolution of California’s CRD over nearly 70 years is like examining the rings of an old tree. The agency’s changing names, expanding authority, and increasing appetite for litigation tell a larger story about California itself.

 

It dates to 1959, when California established the Fair Employment Practices Commission to enforce the state’s first broad workplace-discrimination protections. In 1980, the state’s employment and housing civil rights laws were consolidated, and the agency became the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Four decades later, in 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation renaming it the Civil Rights Department.

 

The changes weren’t merely cosmetic. The department’s jurisdiction now reaches well beyond employment and housing into other areas of public and private life. Its lawyers can pursue sweeping institutional claims, as they have in the Tesla case. It can retain outside counsel and seek substantial monetary relief — winnings that it can plow back into its budget for future investigations and additional staff. Painful litigation and eye-popping settlements are its business model.

 

There’s an essential place in American jurisprudence for civil rights enforcement. But there’s also a danger in an agency whose mission has expanded from investigating discrimination into pursuing massive legal actions against corporations — and whose success is increasingly measured in the size of the settlements and the changes it can compel employers to make.

 

Consider Activision Blizzard, the California video game maker. The CRD accused the company of maintaining a pervasive “frat boy” culture and pursued litigation that brought it into conflict with federal employment-discrimination investigators. In 2023, after more than two years of legal combat, the state announced that Activision would pay $54 million to settle. In exchange, the state admitted that no investigation, including its own, “has substantiated any allegations that there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard.” Nor is there any evidence, California now admits, “that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic, harassment, retaliation, or discrimination; or that Activision Blizzard’s Board of Directors including its Chief Executive Officer, Robert Kotick, acted improperly with regard to the handling of any instances of workplace misconduct.”

 

But the litigation demonstrated the old adage that the process is the punishment. It proved the extraordinary leverage available to a government agency that can threaten years of legal investigations and ruinous costs, reputational damage, and enormous potential judgments.

 

***

 

My tour of the Tesla plant was lovely, even though it recalled my early terror of industrial labor. As a ten-year-old, along with 25 or so kids in my fifth-grade class at the Old Mission School, the Catholic school on the grounds of the Mission San Juan Capistrano, I visited a lima bean canning factory in nearby Costa Mesa. Inside a rust-colored, barnlike facility, a speeding, clanging belt conveyed a river of unmarked cans. I saw a man with a kind of poking stick. He was, the guide explained, making sure that no dented cans were sent off to grocery stores. And as I watched, the man — who seemed old but was perhaps in his 40s — occasionally jabbed his short, wooden broomstick-like tool at the rare can with (to me) invisible defects. These landed in a box on the other side of the belt, a box that went to the poor, our guide said, shouting above the mayhem. During our debrief, we agreed that this appealed to our Catholic sense of charity. But in the moment, all I could see was a man in a state of constant, animal awareness, working in semidarkness and in claustrophobic noise. With God as my witness, I declared I would never work in a factory so long as I could do anything else to survive. Soon after, I determined that I’d become a priest. (I failed at that on first contact with the reality of celibacy.)

 

Tesla’s Fremont plant was nothing like that canning factory. Near the entrance stood something resembling an Apple Genius Bar, except that the sign above it read “HR Answer Bar.” Other signs told employees where to report workplace concerns, from vacation and insurance matters to safety problems and, presumably, allegations of racism.

 

We climbed aboard a kind of Disneyland tram and moved slowly into a vast, brightly lit space with red robotic arms and hard-hatted humans. Our guide, Salim, drove us through a maze of buildings devoted to motors, painting, aluminum-pressing, body panels, and interior finishing. He waved at workers moving between tasks, sometimes calling out their names. They responded with nods, waves, and the occasional fist bump.

 

Above and beside them, robots moved with alarming speed and inerrant precision. Salim pointed out “ro-bats,” machines suspended upside down above their floor-mounted brethren, all choreographed by software that seemed to possess a better understanding of factory traffic than most Californians will ever have of the 405.

 

The humans worked hard, it seemed. They wore helmets, neon vests, boots, rubberized gloves, and safety glasses. Their jobs appeared repetitive, demanding, and intense. My pleasant experience as a visitor proved nothing about their treatment by co-workers or managers. Whatever ugliness might exist in their intimate relationships would be largely invisible to someone passing through on a tram. But that is precisely why I would have expected the investigators to go there, talk to the workers and examine the circumstances in which the alleged misconduct occurred.

 

Near the end of the tour, Salim drove our tram past the quietest part of the facility. There, behind transparent sheets of plastic, engineers were building the assembly line for Tesla’s newest project, Optimus — athletic-looking wasp-waisted bipedal robots that can climb stairs, lift boxes, and manage tools. The Optimus robots use the same visual-perception tech that Tesla cars use to drive themselves. It’s easy to imagine that the CRD is unintentionally accelerating the development of Optimus, by launching legal assaults that may well incentivize the creation of human replacements. These robots would seem to herald the end of much of the factory work we saw that day. They would require neither lunch breaks nor overtime, and presumably they would be indifferent to the race, sex, or ancestry of the machines working beside them. And then (as Marx predicted in a different but related context) deprived of “victims,” the California Civil Rights Department would simply wither away.

What Happens When the Demand for Racism Exceeds the Supply

By Wilfred Reilly

Thursday, October 08, 2026

 

Over the past few weeks, we have heard a lot more about “lynching” than a normal person might have expected in 2026.

 

Left-wing “Squad” member and Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley recently used her website and the House.gov resource to demand “a thorough, transparent, and comprehensive federal investigation into the numerous incidents of Black people found hanging across the country.” Somewhat astonishingly, Pressley claims not only that there have been at least ten probable lynchings of black folks in 2026 but also that a recent think tank analysis “documented more than 70 modern-day lynchings in the United States.”

 

In response to what she calls a “national crisis,” she wrote to the Department of Justice demanding that every single black death involving a rope — one of the most common methods of suicide — receive an investigation including a second autopsy conducted by an out-of-area physician, federal auditing of any earlier investigation by regional or state police, “review of physical and testimonial evidence,” and a final DOJ report submitted directly “to Congress . . . explaining the agency’s findings.” This is not some quixotic lone crusade of Pressley’s: Her official letter on the topic, sent to the DOJ and the FBI, was signed by 59 of her congressional colleagues — including most black members of the House as well as Chuy García, Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Shri Thanedar, Rashida Tlaib, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

 

The prestige media also apparently cannot get enough of the claim that there is an epidemic of posse hangings. Per U.S. News & World Report, recent re-exposure to “the imagery of a rope and noose” has badly traumatized black Americans: “It invokes the legacy of lynching and vigilante violence against Black people . . . and brings with it deep pain.” Simply seeing a picture of a rope tied in a hangman’s knot can allegedly invoke this pain: Following the actual hanging death of a popular young Mississippi woman named Tasia Fortune, Brad Franklin, of Jackson, Miss., argued that “Black folks down here in 2026 — we are feeling and experiencing some of the same things we felt in 1956 and 1966, and that should not be happening.”

 

We heard similar sentiments expressed in Cobb County, Ga. Lisa Cupid, a Cobb County Commission chairwoman quoted by U.S. News, said that the recent death of a 21-year-old African-American male named Kyle Bassinga made “many . . . think of the days of slavery and of Jim Crow” — whether or not any foul play would ever be proven. Speaking from Congress, in the context of both of these cases and a few others, the previously mentioned Representative Pressley thundered: “In this moment of anti-Blackness and emboldened white supremacy, we cannot stand idly by — while the strange fruit of Black bodies hangs from the trees!”

 

Even the Gray Lady of U.S. journalism got involved, although New York Times reporter John McWhorter — a casual friend of this author — was clearly more than a little skeptical of the lynching narrative. McWhorter agreed that ten black or mulatto Americans have been found hanged in the U.S. in the recent past, but he also noted, “Eight of these cases have been officially ruled suicides or are being treated as such. In neither of the other two has a white suspect been named.” However, he also did politely point out that many minority citizens still “harbor suspicions” about each situation, and that “it is impossible to know for sure what happened in every case.”

 

The $64,000 question, after a few back-and-forth reads like the articles just discussed, is pretty simple: Is the United States actually facing a contemporary epidemic of lynchings? The answer is no, obviously not.

 

According to the best quantitative database that tracks historical rates of lynching and posse murder — which is maintained by a prominent historically black university — the last American lynching took place in 1968. Despite multiple requests, the list has not been updated since that year. As McWhorter points out, not one single white homicide suspect has been identified in any of the hanging cases that became nationally prominent this year. In the best-known case, that of Tasia Fortune, three suspects have already been identified and arrested. All are black men with extensive criminal histories.

 

The first black male felon — one, Eric Clark, aged 45 — surrendered himself to police in late September and was duly charged with homicide. Two additional men, Earnest Lloyd and Jarques Ratliff, have also been “arrested and charged with murder in connection with Tasia Fortune’s death,” NBC News reported. Perhaps most notably, on-record police sources have stated that “the scene and hanging were staged” — very probably to distract officers and Internet detectives from Fortune’s actual same-race killers.

 

Similar results obtained in the case of Nolan Wells, a genuinely tragic situation — which was racialized and made worse by all parties on the internet — involving a young athlete who appears to have died from drowning at a seaside party destination popular with older teenagers. Despite pervasive rumors that he had been attacked or even murdered by members of his mostly Caucasian friend group, the grand jury that was empaneled in the case found “no credible evidence” to support the widespread public claims that any of these people “engaged in any criminal conduct related to the death of Mr. Wells.”

 

Instead, the report from the unanimous jury stated that Wells’s cause of death was “consistent with drowning,” based on where his body was found and on multiple autopsies. After the panel delivered its decision, District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath publicly criticized the environment that had been allowed to develop around the case. “The family, the Crump [legal defense] team, and anyone close to Nolan,” she said in a video statement, “knew that his disappearance and death were not the result of racial hate or violence.”

 

To anyone familiar with United States crime data, none of this should be at all surprising. The 2024 Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey (the famous BJS-NCVS) records 5,934,570 Index-level violent crimes and almost 20 million total Index crimes as taking place during one typical year. Of the violent offenses, 117,900 were white-on-black violent assaults (14 percent of all attacks on blacks), while 385,400 were black-on-white attacks (11 percent of all attacks on whites). Interracial violent crime involving these two ethnicities makes up less than 2.6 percent of serious crime; further, more than 76 percent of interracial violent crime is black-initiated. Any double-digit wave of genuine lynchings by organized groups of whites would buck these trends to a degree that is almost statistically impossible.

 

In addition, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe — especially in the wake of the public frenzies we all witnessed during the past few years — that modern American police departments are populated with knuckle-dragging racists, eager to excuse or facilitate mob violence against helpless minorities. Per my AI scan of past survey data and the records of departmental demographics that are publicly available, policing is one of the most racially integrated professions in the U.S.

 

At the local level, the population of sworn officers is 66 to 69 percent white/Anglo Caucasian, 12 to 14 percent black, 12 to 18 percent Hispanic (all races), and 2 percent Asian/Native/etc. “Federal law enforcement agencies show a somewhat different distribution”: 61 percent white, 21 percent Hispanic, more than 10 percent black, and 8 percent or so “other.” Interestingly, most of the highest-profile “lynching” investigations so far have been led by black or otherwise non-white chiefs and sheriffs — RaShall Brackney, of Jackson, Miss.; Rico Boyce, of Raleigh, N.C.; Estella Patterson, of Charlotte, N.C.; Lawrence Wiggins of Roanoke Rapids, N.C.; Miami-Dade County’s Rosie Cordero-Stutz; and so on.

 

Essentially, we are being asked to believe that decorated black and Hispanic peace officers are working with the Ku Klux Klan (or some similar group) to hide nearly a dozen fatal lynchings in 2026. Occam’s ye olde Razor suggests an alternative possibility: Today, the demand for racism greatly exceeds the supply, and this has predictable economic consequences.

Check Your Palestine Privilege

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

There is a moment in the lifespan of every cause célèbre when the hard truth must be faced: The privileged place to be is in the shoes of the underprivileged.

 

Call it the Dolezal Moment.

 

Rachel Dolezal, you’ll remember, was the white woman who was exposed as having pretended to be black so she could run an NAACP chapter, work her way up the academic-administrative ladder, and benefit from minority hiring practices.

 

It was a cultural moment precisely because it brought to public attention the fact that in certain important institutional pipelines, it was better for white people to claim to be black.

 

Well, I give you Hannah Gann. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

 

A Philadelphia teacher is being called the ‘Palestinian Rachel Dolezal’ after being caught lying about her background — a deception that has stirred strong emotions in education and racial justice organizing circles.

 

Hannah Gann, a veteran Philadelphia School District educator, has claimed at times to be Palestinian and Black, and was so outspoken a mobile billboard once parked outside her school calling her ‘Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite.’

 

The problem: “Gann, it turns out, is white and Jewish, and lied about her identity for years.”

 

Palestinian identity is the golden ticket in the West at the moment. Palestine is the omnicause—the one issue everyone must dedicate themselves to at the expense of all others. In the Democratic Party, the Palestinian omnicause is the only litmus test for political participation.

 

Culturally, Palestinian clout is just as strong. Want relevance in the music world? Say “free Palestine” until you’re blue in the face while wrapped in a keffiyeh. Want more acting jobs? Javier Bardem says the answer is a single-minded public obsession with smearing Israel as a genocidal state and, of course, wearing the keffiyeh.

 

If you want a Pulitzer, write pro-Palestinian essays. If you want an Academy Award, make a pro-Palestinian film. Want the Special Jury Prize in Venice? Make a piece of easily debunked agitprop about Israelis killing Palestinians. Want a book deal? Write a novel about Being Palestinian Today. Want fame in the art world? You know the drill.

 

And, hey, want tenure? How quickly can you erase Israel from a map and a syllabus?

 

Plus, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card in many jurisdictions. Want those charges dropped? Say you did it “for Palestine.” In the U.S., you can still get away with a whole assortment of crimes, though if you kill a Jew in broad daylight while yelling about Palestine you might have to spend a year in the slammer.

 

It’s true, none of this actually frees Palestine. But in America, only when one is “for Palestine” can one be truly free.

 

And so Hannah Gann was living the new American dream:

 

Gann, who teaches at the Workshop School, a project-based Philadelphia School District high school, was front and center in education activism work after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

 

In 2024, for instance, Gann participated in a West Philadelphia ‘teach-in’ on ‘scholasticide’ — the destruction of educational infrastructure — in Gaza. Her biography for that event identified her as a Palestinian American…

 

According to a document compiled by the Philly Palestine Coalition and obtained by The Inquirer, Gann has made frequent references to Palestinian family, including a Palestinian-born grandfather whom the PPC found was actually born in Baltimore, citing historical draft records and her great-grandfather’s U.S. naturalization papers. Her family abroad live in Israel, according to the group’s extensive, footnoted research.

 

In fairness, who doesn’t have a Palestinian grandfather these days? Forget the coalminer grandfather or the mailman father, if you want to run for office get yourself a nakba backstory.

 

Just make sure you cover your tracks. Hannah Gann didn’t, and when her Palestinian and Palestinian-adjacent friends and colleagues investigated her, the story quickly unraveled. The Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine asked Gann to “publicly acknowledge that she is a white woman of Jewish heritage and an Israeli settler family,” which she promptly did on social media.

 

Now she must atone for her sins. But can you blame her for trying? She went to an Ivy League university, where presumably she learned the hard way that being “white and Jewish” is no way to go through life. She wanted a taste of real privilege. Such is what it means to be a victim in America today: Suddenly, all the doors are open to you.

 

 

What the ‘Anti-Woke’ Crowd Gets Wrong

By Abigail Anthony

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

I had the pleasure of attending a retreat last weekend for young conservative professionals. “Varieties of conservatism” was the organizing theme of the seminars, and National Review’s 1955 mission statement was included in the readings. Someone mentioned during the class that Buckley was opposing moral relativism. That’s true, but it misses the more important point.

 

The justification for establishing a forum like National Review was that a dangerous illiberalism, animated by hostility to truth and reason, had already conquered virtually every major institution. My verb tense matters: Buckley et al. were not worried that such a dubious philosophy might eventually capture a few prestigious establishments that failed to engage in an ideological battle. Rather, NR’s founders astutely detected that the radicals had already seized control everywhere it mattered. The publication’s purpose was not merely to argue against an existing ideology but to disrupt its monopolistic power, hence the mission statement’s phrases such as “liberal orthodoxy” and “liberal world” appearing in 1955. The diagnosis was explicit: “And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’.”

 

Such an assessment is so germane that it could have been written today; the founding editorial is one among many artifacts confirming Buckley’s prophetic wisdom. But the mission statement also identifies precisely the problems that supposedly “reasonable” liberals, allegedly friendly to the conservative movement, discovered only in 2016 or 2020 during the “Woke Era” — and those “dissidents” positioned themselves as insightful heretics for observing what NR described over 70 years ago.

 

The broadly “anti-woke” crowd, exempting self-described “conservatives” and “right-wing” individuals, suffers from the delusion that elite institutions were ideologically captured in roughly the past decade. Such liberals think that the New York Times was an exemplar of fair and rigorous journalism until 2016, but then, it was suddenly corrupted by a virulent opposition to MAGA; the ideological tilt was only obvious when an editor resigned in response to outrage over an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton. They’ll tell you that NPR was a fantastic source of insightful nonpartisan discourse until 2020, when the radio hosts and writers all suddenly suffered from Rapid Onset Wokeness. They’ll claim the media were neutral and accurate, then unpredictably shifted to call the BLM riots “peaceful.” They’ll say universities were environments for open discourse, deep learning, and character formation until there was some overblown debacle at Yale University over appropriately sensible Halloween costumes. Experts in government, doctors, and medical associations were entirely apolitical prior to Covid, or perhaps just until they endorsed performing “gender-affirming” surgeries on minors, per the devoted readers of The Atlantic. The people who own a New Yorker tote bag and wear lanyards at work think corporations never engaged in left-wing social activism until grocery stores issued statements endorsing Black Lives Matter.

 

But that is all wrong, and our mission statement proves it. National Review detected the intelligentsia’s hegemony, and further denounced their falsehoods, decades ago. “Conservatives in this country . . . are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars,” we attested in 1955. However, since we still live in “a Liberal world,” this statement was only considered potentially true once the former conformists — “intellectual dark web” members, former Times staffers, harassed professors — who are licensed by Ivy League diplomas said it in the past few years.

 

Make no mistake: The “canceled” class of podcasters acknowledge the “liberal orthodoxy,” but these “dissidents” of the 2020 era are not genuine allies to conservatives. The left’s expats today — the people who criticized “woke ideology” when fleeing their employer’s building without actually interrogating, let alone abandoning, their own views — only disapprove of which progressives are in charge. We see a problem with the ideas, whereas they have a problem with the personnel.

 

The woke movement’s rejected celebrities don’t actually have any defensible principles, despite claiming otherwise. Hillary-supporting liberals who attended cocktail parties weekly with embroidered fabric napkins wondered aloud in 2019 if maybe they should be able to say that not all men can suddenly become women just because, in theory, an unusually bad guy might take advantage of flexible bathroom policies — but in general, they assured everyone, “trans” adults are broadly acceptable, and we should honor their “preferred pronouns.” Dress however you like, engage in whatever consensual sex you want, and I’ll happily use whichever pronouns you like, but just don’t punish a woman for not doing so, said the supposedly reasonable feminists demanding female-only spaces after spending decades destroying male-only associations. The articles in mainstream media nervously suggesting “gender-inclusive” policies are potentially troublesome still deferred to a deluded subject’s wrong pronouns. Every columnist or podcast interviewee who suggested “gender-affirming care” is bad for minors danced around the central claim that “being trans” is a farce. “You see, children can’t consent to surgically removing their reproductive organs or receiving hormone injections,” argued the left-wing critics of gender nonsense. “But adults can . . . it’s a free society! Be sure to enforce policies for single-sex facilities, though.”

 

None of the “centrists” pushing against the extreme progressives were actually willing to state the true premises — and that’s because they refuse to believe those premises for the sake of continued social acceptance. The “anti-woke” subtle resistance to totalitarianism claimed, ever so cautiously, that democracy (or some other sacred value) means we should allow at least some widely held views a teeny bit of airtime occasionally. (These people were paid thousands, even tens of thousands, to declare this on the campuses where conservatives still may not tread.) Yet these Free-Thinking Liberals do not claim, let alone defend, that men can never be women, “transphobia” be damned. Why not? The “open-minded” lefties all have a gay best friend, or they are gay, or their distant cousin is in a polycule, or their nephew is going by “they/them” now, or their amazing hairdresser (who charges upwards of $500 for blonde highlights) is gay. Ideological trespassing subverts the left’s chief virtue of appearing polite, so anything more aggressive than tepid disagreement would mean losing friends, and more tragically, invites to soirees. (They eventually started their own parties for the outcasts who have “forbidden ideas,” and those dangerous thoughts were things like “don’t cut off a teenage girl’s breasts” or “maybe affirmative action results in less-qualified students.” Rather mysteriously, the invites for people like Charles Murray got lost in the mail.)

 

Worse than the “anti-tribal” leftists who retreated while wearing an “I’M SO BRAVE FOR LEAVING” shirt are those who remained within their elite institutions, caved, and are now doing minimal damage control. “Forget the woke things we sanctimoniously shouted even though we condemned you, ridiculed you, and fired you for not saying them” is the unsaid message. (An actual apology will never come.) Given the gaping wounds to the public reputation of progressivism in light of 2020-era absurdity, and the growing resentment confirmed by Trump’s 2024 popular vote victory, supposedly self-aware editors at mainstream publications reluctantly publish an opinion piece every few weeks that mildly suggests a particularly bad progressive policy might have some consequences; defending even modestly conservative or right-wing opinions would be too far. “Conservative columnists” who recently joined high-profile outlets obtained good enough social standing by signaling that Trump is a bad guy. The tolerable principled conservatives, according to the “canceled” progressives, are those whose most important principle is reflexively opposing Trump. Anything that any major institution has done in the past few years that vaguely resembles a concession to conservatives is nothing more than attempted image rehabilitation. There has not been a single instance of restructuring of an organization, publication, or university in the past decade or so that actually removed the left’s chokehold by introducing a critical mass of conservatives.

 

Everyone agrees with a modern application of National Review’s initial evaluation: Yes, there is a “liberal orthodoxy.” The problem, then, as now, is that all liberals want that orthodoxy. They reject NR’s 1955 declaration that “the largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques.” Today, there’s just an internal leftist Struggle Session at every institution with a recognizable acronym or logo. The unapologetically radical activists (usually identifiable by a keffiyeh, an N-95 mask, or an assortment of small tattooed doodles schizophrenically placed all over the arms depicting random household objects like buttons or toast) will actually admit as much and openly defend keeping out “fascists,” defined as “everyone we dislike.” The other liberals (distinguished from the others by decent outfits, sometimes tailored) are simply moderating their views and occasionally posing with an anti-Trump conservative to maintain, or regain, control. For the sake of optics, these cultural curators will proudly announce a new token staff member who voted Republican once. To regain credibility, a single event will be organized each year at universities with a panel featuring someone who doesn’t totally love abortion so that the leadership can claim, “Look at the intellectual diversity thriving in our culture of academic freedom!” when it is time to solicit donations. A publication will boast, “Yes, we have political disagreements on our editorial board. There are both Kamala and Bernie supporters. And there’s someone who wrote in a name last election who writes for us about why capitalism might be okay!”

 

In the mind of the supposed Self-Sacrificing Dissident Elite who participated in no fewer than ten interviews about their own “cancellation” and published an essay titled “WHY I LEFT THE LEFT,” desired reform is simply restoring the culture to its 2010ish norms — an environment that would let them sit again at a long table in a meeting room, but wouldn’t leave a chair for anyone actually conservative or right-wing. The aim of the “moderate” Democrat is not to cultivate the conditions where every view can be debated but, rather, to ensure their own views are restored to prominence. National Review has long fought against moral relativism and illiberalism, whereas the leftists who decried “groupthink” only whined after being booted out of the group; they could not even briefly endure the treatment that had previously been reserved for conservatives.

 

What’s the justification for refusing to seriously engage with conservative or right-wing thinkers, and continuing to ostracize us? Liberals with a Wikipedia page, who are usually now on their second marriage, think with absolute certainty that they are superior to us — politically, morally, spiritually, and so on ad infinitum. As proof that their views are better and therefore correct, they cite public polling figures that were cultivated through their own media outlets by strategically avoiding discussion of any alternative views to coerce a consensus. “Look, we really just can’t run an article presenting concerns about IVF technology because most people are totally fine with IVF,” is a slight paraphrase of what I was told by an editor at a left-leaning outlet. (Notably, the article also had pro-IVF perspectives.) Only occasionally does a conservative argument gain enough traction that it must be acknowledged, but in those cases, it must be “balanced” with the Democrat-approved alternative. When I contributed to a different left-leaning paper that masqueraded as “unbiased,” an opinion piece about the pro-life movement around the time of the March for Life had to be published adjacent to a pro-abortion article for the sake of “presenting both sides.” The standard disappeared when an article about a large pro-abortion rally occurred months later.

 

When introducing itself to the public in 1955, National Review explained that “we begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of the Liberals, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Communist, with his inside track to History.” As it was in the beginning, it is now. But through tireless work through National Review and other avenues, there’s no reason it ever shall be a liberal world without end.

What Nikole Hannah-Jones Doesn’t Say

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

‘My daughter,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2024, “is not worth more than any other child.”

 

This assessment was offered as part of a reflection on a New York Times essay that Hannah-Jones had written eight years earlier on the subject of choosing an appropriate school. In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

 

Two years later, she has changed her mind. Or, rather: Two years later, her daughter has changed her mind for her. Having eventually learned what her mother had done to her, her daughter “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal,” the writer admitted this week in the Times.

 

For penning this mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too.

 

To propose that one’s own child “is not worth more than any other” is an ugly — perhaps even an evil — sentiment. You may call me whatever names you wish in response to this assertion, but you must understand that it will not change a thing. My job as a parent is to prioritize my children. I owe it to them, and they rely upon me to follow through with that obligation. It is true that, in a detached, cosmic sense, my children are no more important than are any others. But for me? Yes, they are. They represent the primary purpose of my existence, and, insofar as it is in my power and is consistent with the law, I intend to advance their interests without apology, embarrassment, or regret. Far from representing a societal flaw or some selfish personal shortcoming, that instinct is the most natural thing in the world — which is why, historically, the only the thing that has ever been able to break it is the entrenchment of totalitarian ideology. The fanatics who “informed” on their family members during the worst days of the Soviet Union were not admirable for their commitment to the cause; they were anti-human freaks who upset the natural balance of the universe. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sin was far lesser than theirs, but it was still a sin. Outside of a waterboarding chamber, no parent should ever say, “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.”

 

Back in 2016, Hannah-Jones’s husband seems to have reflexively understood that what his wife was proposing was madness. And yet, having been guilt-tripped, he appears to have gone along with it anyway:

 

As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He wanted to look into parochial schools, or one of the “good” public schools, or even private schools. So we argued, pleading our cases from the living room, up the steps to our office lined with books on slavery and civil rights, and back down, before we came to an impasse and retreated to our respective corners. There is nothing harder than navigating our nation’s racial legacy in this country, and the problem was that we each knew the other was right and wrong at the same time. Faraji couldn’t believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the type of education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried that we would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty, all-black school. “Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?” he asked. “Are we putting her at a disadvantage?”

 

The answer, quite obviously, was yes.

 

Some readers have responded to Hannah-Jones’s admission by proposing that the fault lay not in her instinct, but in its execution. I do not think that such a clean distinction can reasonably be drawn, but I can certainly agree with the implication that this entire experiment was built on stuff and nonsense. In her original essay, she expressed a desire to avoid “segregation.” Yet she sent her daughter to a school that hosted more students of her daughter’s race than attended the ones she eschewed. Defending her decision, she explained her belief that a profitable educational environment involved sedulous parental involvement. Yet, by her own admission, she was so neglectful of her daughter’s progress that, for years, she remained unaware that she had fallen badly behind. Her New York Times biography notes that her “journalism has tended to focus on school.” Which makes it all the more shameful that she still has no idea why schools tend to fail. Like many of her colleagues, Nikole Hannah-Jones ignores the available data and instead pins the blame on funding gaps that don’t exist, racism that cannot be identified, and attitudes that nobody in our current era actually exhibits. Perhaps, going forward, she might “focus” a little harder?

 

What does Hannah-Jones believe now? She doesn’t say. By itself, this omission prevents her essay from being “brave” or “admirable” and relegates it to the status of a humblebrag. If she had right-of-center politics, the Times would undoubtedly have forced her to spell out her mistake. The confession would have been the overture; the rest of the performance would have been a detailed explanation of how exactly she was wrong, along with an exhaustive “therefore . . .” that included hard statistics, legible arguments, and the outlining of an alternative agenda. But, of course, the Times did no such thing, and Hannah-Jones has made no such effort under her own steam. Given that she has extremely strong views about what, how, and where other American children should be taught, it would be useful to know what, having watched her assumptions fail her own child, she now thinks America’s education system should look like. She isn’t going to tell us.

 

Which, I’m afraid, is entirely typical. I do not mean to be unduly waspish here, but it ought not to be a surprise that Nikole Hannah-Jones believed that her daughter was getting A’s despite doing no homework, given that getting A’s despite doing no homework is exactly how Nikole Hannah-Jones’s own career has played out thus far. Hannah-Jones is a writer who doesn’t write; a historian who knows little history; an advocate with no mastery of her brief — and for this, she has been rewarded with extravagant public-speaking fees, a cushy sinecure at the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize in commentary, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and at least ten years of the sort of detached, flighty, consequence-free existence that allows one to sacrifice the mind of one’s own child for a couple of mawkish newspaper pieces and the cheap mollification of one’s ego.