From DEI to DNA: "Heritage Americans" and the Rise of Right-Wing Identity Politics

For years, the concept of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, has merited a ton of ire. It is a pseudo-moral position that reduces people to skin color and gender while treating ancestry like a social credit score. I have no love for DEI. I analyzed a study showing how DEI increases racial tension, hostility, and authoritarian tendencies. In pursuit of DEI, much of the political Left has abandoned colorblindness, embraced the dubious Critical Race Theory, and obsessed over race to the point where "anti-racism" has become a form of racism that has set U.S. racial relations back at least 65 years. DEI is illiberal, racist, and fundamentally at odds with a democratic, pluralistic society that values freedom. On this point, those on the Right were correct, particularly Matt Walsh with his documentary Am I Racist? (see my two-parter on his documentary here and here).

In a twist of irony, those on the Far Right have decided that the issue with DEI was not identity politics itself, but the "wrong identities." They fell in love with the idea, rebranded it as "Heritage American," and declared themselves the most oppressed people in a society where they have historically dominated. For those who do not know, a "Heritage American" is someone on the Far Right that defines being "authentically American" based on ancestry (typically privileging older Anglo-Protestant lineages), rather than civic allegiance or shared political ideals. This term functions as a gatekeeping tool, signaling who "counts" as genuinely American while excluding immigrants, people of color, and others whose families arrived to the United States more recently. 

Tucker Carlson has engaged with guests on Heritage Americans on his show, thereby giving the idea more traction in mainstream conservative circles beyond the fringe. I saw political commentator Brad Polumbo broadcast an episode on Nick Fuentes deriding Vivek Ramaswamy for his ancestry (and doing so in light of Ramaswamy's gubernatorial race in Ohio), which is what prompted me to write this piece. As a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, whose ancestors actually fought in the American Revolution, I find the concept of "Heritage American" to be as ridiculous as it is un-American. 

Virtue Signaling: Gender & Race versus Genealogy 

As Cato Institute scholar Alex Nowrasteh pointed out in his piece on Heritage Americans, many political organizations on the Far Left tore themselves apart by arguing who had greater victimhood status. On the Far Left, status is measured by how much oppression you can cite, document, or perform. On the Far Right, the same obsession with identity politics plays out. Instead of who is more oppressed, the Far Right measures "authenticity" by ancestry, colonial participation, and military lineage. Much like the DEI crowd argued over whose experience is more valid, Heritage Americans argue over whose family tree lends them the most credibility. 

It gets at a delicious irony, and not simply because both the Heritage Americans and the DEI crowd have the same collectivist mindset in which special privileges are based on inherited characteristics. The same people who had been wagging their finger at transgender people or nonbinary people for "playing dress-up" now indulge in historical cosplay. Instead of gender-reassignment surgery or preferred pronouns, the Heritage American props are great-great-great-great grandfathers, colonial muskets, and Civil War enlistment records. Whether in victimhood points or ancestry points, they are both forms of virtue-signaling theatrics that try to prove who matters the most. 

American Identity Is Built on a Creed, Not Bloodline

In Europe, standing and socioeconomic status in society were based on one's family tree. Now some Far Right-wingers want to impose European-style ancestry tests into U.S. patriotism, one that would have the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves. The Founding Fathers envisioned a nation of ideas and individualism, not a lineage fan club.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." The American Dream is not mean for those who had a better pedigree, but all individuals. The Constitution says "We, the people," not "we, the people with older birth certificates." The American government is grounded in a universal political collective, not a bloodline group. The phrase E pluribus unum has been part of the U.S. seal since 1782. The phrase in Latin means "from many, one," not "from many, but we really only mean those whose ancestors have been here long enough." 

My ancestors enlisted in the Continental Army to do battle against the British Empire that was oppressing them. They fought and died for a country where citizens can be united by liberty, equality, and rule of law, where citizens are judged by the commitment to these principles instead of bloodline, genealogy, or ancestry. Apparently, the notion that American identity is civic (and not genealogical) has been conveniently overlooked in the Heritage Americans' version of "history."

Americans Speak: Principles Over Pedigree

It is not only the Founding Fathers who held the view that American identity is not based on heritage. As a recent YouGov poll asking about "what makes someone American," look at the results below to see what ranks at the top and what is at the bottom. Having many generations of American ancestors and having American parents are towards the bottom of the list. At the top of the ranking are obeying U.S. laws, supporting the U.S. Constitution, and believing in the principles of the Declaration of Independence. In other words, American identity for the vast majority of Americans is creedal. 

Postscript: Patriotism Is Not Hereditary

At its core, American identity was never meant to be a family tree competition. America is neither a race nor a bloodline. The fact that American identity is based on liberty, equality, and rule of law instead of the European notion of genealogy is one of the major facets that makes America exceptional. E pluribus unum was not a slogan for those with the proper pedigree. It was for any citizen willing to uphold those ideals. This creed is what allowed the United States to thrive, to welcome immigrants, and adapt across cultures over time, making it unique in human history. To quote Capitalism Magazine, "Those who don't understand this don't understand America, regardless of how many generations their families have been here."

Heritage Americans may have a fantasy about fighting in the American Revolution or a nostalgia for "a better time," but none of that changes the fact that the strength of the United States has been civic, not genealogical. Even if a small minority believes in this genealogical gatekeeping, it risks shaping public policy in ways that ignore the civic principles that define what the United States of America has been throughout its history. The fact that Ramaswamy had to repudiate the idea at a Turning Point USA's America Fest, an event full of conservative activists and leaders of all places, late last year says that the Right itself is at a turning point. Will the political Right head in a direction where being American is treated as an ethnic identity or one based on the ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? 

I want America to remain a nation of ideals and a creed, not a reenactment of a colonial family reunion. Patriotism is not inherited, and the notion that one can be an American either through being born in the United States or through a naturalization process helps make the United States a shining city on a hill. While some might clutch muskets in one hand and pearls in the other, the vast majority of Americans understand that being American is not about where your ancestors are from, but the principles you embrace. 

The Cost of Trump's Cashless Bail Crackdown: A Waste of Taxpayer Dollars and an Erosion of Justice

President Trump is at it again signing executive orders this week. One of them had to do with making flag burning unconstitutional. I do not need to cover that executive order today because I already covered it in 2016. There was another executive order that Trump signed this week about cashless bail, threatening to cut off funding for those jurisdictions that implement cashless bail. 

Cashless bail is a system that allows criminals accused of a crime to be released before trial without having to pay money. It is meant to be a system that is based on risk to public safety rather than ability to pay bail. Trump finds that cashless bail is a threat to order and public safety, not to mention a drain on public finances. That is why Trump's executive order will restrict the "Federal policies and resources" to jurisdictions with cashless bail policies. 

For some conservative policy groups who are for cash bail, cashless bail is a system that prioritizes the rights of violent offenders over the general public while releasing repeat offenders with impunity. Forgetting questionable constitutionality for a moment, disincentivizing cashless bail is an unwise move that does not help with reducing crime, has disparate impact on minorities, and is a waste of taxpayer dollars. 

Effects on Crime and Public Safety

Cashless bail is a relatively new policy concept. The earliest implementers were New Jersey in 2017, and New York started around 2019-2020. Even so, long-term data is starting to emerge. Jurisdictions who implemented cashless bail have been compared to those who did not in quasi-experimental studies. The Brennan Center for Justice (Craigie and Grawert, 2024) used a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method to compare 22 cities with bail reform to 11 cities that did not. While there are rare instances in which defendants commit serious crimes, this study found that there were no statistically significant differences in crime rates, whether violent crime or property crime. 

Furthermore, a study from the Journal of Criminal Justice shows that longer pretrial retention translates into quicker new arrests (Silver et al., 2024). What this means is that unnecessary jail time could increase public risk while harming the individuals and families that this policy is claiming to protect. A study from the University of Chicago puts that recidivism rate as increasing by 6 to 9 percent as a result of cash bail (Gupta et al., 2016).

Racial and Economic Disparities

Cash bail disproportionately harms the poor and minorities. As of mid-2023, the Department of Justice data shows that 70 percent of those in jail were not convicted and were awaiting trial. While not broken down by race, this finding strongly suggests that the racial proportions of the pretrial population closely mirror those of the overall jail population, i.e., 48% White, 35% Black, and 14% Hispanic. This would indicate that cash bail disproportionately affects Black suspects. For those who cannot pay, the jail experience is coercive and horrific enough to pressure them into pleading guilty to a lower charge to avoid jail time, regardless of innocence. 

Considering that the median bail is $10,000, those who get harmed by this experience are those who do not have the money to afford bail. This ends up creating a two-tier justice system: one for those with money and one for those who are not well off. Because pretrial detention increases the likelihood of guilty pleas, those held pretrial are four times more likely to be sentenced than those released before trial. It also undermines the legal concept that one is innocent until proven guilty.

Fiscal Costs

Beyond the moral concerns, having increased reliance on cash bail translates into greater fiscal costs. In 2017, the Prison Policy Initiative estimated that cash bail cost $13.6 billion, which would be $18.1 billion in 2025 dollars. In 2023, the American Bar Association estimated those costs to be $14 billion. This is phenomenal considering that the pretrial jail population increased by 433 percent between 1970 and 2011. 

Removing cash bail would go a long way in lowering the burden on corrections systems and the mass incarceration that I criticized back in 2015. Then there is the broader economic costs. Research from the Brookings Institution shows (Miller and Wolfers, 2021) that those experience pretrial detention face a reduction of employment probability of about 9.4 percent, which translates into an average income lifetime loss of $29,000. Brookings estimated that eliminating money bail could increase aggregate U.S. income by up to $80.9 billion per year.

Conclusion

As we can see, there is no compelling public safety justification for cash bail. It is fiscally irresponsible and an affront to the limited government that conservatives are supposed to support to have such high rates of unnecessary incarceration. Rather than punishing poverty and disproportionately harming minorities, we should move away from the outdated cash bail system and adopt evidence-based alternatives that assess flight risk and public safety more effectively. Cashless bail is not about being soft on crime. It is about being smart on justice, fair in process, and responsible with taxpayer dollars.

King Charles Shows Us That Land Acknowledgments Are Performative and Virtue-Signaling

Last week, King Charles III of England made a trip to Canada to deliver the speech from the throne, which set out the agenda for the new Liberal government of Canada. This is the third time in Canada's history in which the British monarch delivered Canada's throne speech, the other two which were during Queen Elizabeth II's reign. During this speech, King Charles began with the following:

I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. This land acknowledgment is a recognition of a shared history as a nation. While continuing to deepen my own understanding, it is my great hope that in each of your communities, and collectively as a country, a path is found toward truth and reconciliation, in both word and deed.

This sort of statement is known as a land acknowledgement. A land acknowledgment is a formal statement that recognizes and respects indigenous people as the traditional stewards of the land. It is supposed to be a way to honor the original inhabitants of the land while acknowledging the subsequent effects of displacement. While they are intended to show respect and promote reconciliation, they act as nothing more than a performative gesture. 

Let us start with the reality that for much of history, conquest was a widely accepted means of acquiring land. The modern day concept of property rights (e.g., John Locke, Adam Smith), as well as international law stating that conquest is not a legitimate means of acquiring land (e.g., UN Charter, Article 2(4)), is relatively new. As reprehensible as the actions of Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, and Francisco Pizarro were by modern standards, white people do not have a monopoly on violence, brutality, or colonization. 

The Iroquois partook in aggressive warfare, whether through the Beaver Wars or mourning wars. The Crow Creek Sioux tribe had the Crow Creek Massacre in the 1300s, which killed about 500 people. The Inca Empire was created by a combination of peaceful assimilation and conquest for those who did not accept Inca rule peacefully. The Aztecs fought large-scale wars to expand their empire, as well as partook in ritualized violence and human sacrifice. The Māori tribe of New Zealand committed mass murder, enslavement, and cannibalism of the Moriori people. Then there was Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Aurangzeb of the Mughal Empire, the creation of the Ottoman Empire, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and the Songhai Empire in western Africa, to name a few. 

If I were a betting man, I would say that everyone has at least one ancestor who partook in conquest of some sort or fashion. Why? Violence, colonization, and conquest made up much of pre-modern history, regardless of race or ethnicity. Some were simply more effective and brutal than others. Rather than acknowledge historical reality, it provides another opportunity for woke people to oversimplify racial relations into the racist and inaccurate claim of "White people = bad; minorities = good." History is more complicated than that and there are brutes across all races and ethnicities. 

For argument's sake, I will be a good sport about it and give the a benefit of a doubt. Let us assume for a New York minute that the indigenous people are unquestionably the rightful owners of the land. If so, there is another major issue that arises. The purpose of these land acknowledgements is reconciliation. Do land acknowledgments lead to genuine reconciliation? 

Ever since the beginning of modern-day land acknowledgments in the late 1970s, there has not been a single land acknowledgment that has resulted in the restoration of land ownership to indigenous nations or the establishment of indigenous governance over ancestral territories. What these land acknowledgements are in practice is being akin to someone stealing your possessions, writing a half-hearted, hand-written note admitting to the theft, and then doing nothing to either return the possessions or compensate you for the loss. How does that show respect for the aggrieved party? 

It is even more mind-boggling to do a land acknowledgment for a tribe that no longer exists as a distinct, unified entity, whether that is the Yamasee, Susquehannock, or the Massachusett tribe. To reconcile is to restore a sense of peace or harmony between both parties. Short of a Casper the Friendly Ghost situation, you cannot reconcile with a group of people that no longer exist.    

In the Canadian case cited at the beginning of this piece, it is not as if King Charles were a plebeian with zero clout. Although the monarch of England is largely a ceremonial role, he is still on the throne of one of the world's largest powers. If these land acknowledgments were meant to be about actual reconciliation and compensation, something of substance should have come about as a result of these land acknowledgements. 

The lack of outcomes as a result of land acknowledgements show how hollow and disingenuous land acknowledgments truly are. If you actually want to make a difference, put your money where your mouth is. Either give the aggrieved party their land back (or at least some form of compensation to help out indigenous people) or shut your hole. Otherwise, the moral exhibitionism that is land acknowledgement is as feel-good and useless as using plastic straws or recycling.

Meta Removing Fact-Checkers and Its DEI Initiative Are Welcomed Steps Towards Freedom and Sanity

As we approach the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term, the tech company Meta is making the news. Meta is famous for such products and services as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads. The reason for the hullabaloo around Meta is because last week, Meta made a major announcement about how it will approach content moderation. You can read analysis from the Cato Institute about what the changes entail.  

In response to the 2016 election, Zuckerberg hired fact-checkers to give users better information and combat misinformation. In reality, it ended up destroying more trust than it created because the fact-checkers were too politically biased, as Zuckerberg declared on The Joe Rogan Experience last week. In light of Meta's fact-checkers backfiring, Zuckerberg decided to replace fact-checkers with a Community Notes function similar to X (formerly Twitter). 

Barring extreme exceptions, the Community Notes option allows user to flag posts and add notes to it rather than downright censorship. While imperfect, studies examining Community Notes has been shown to mitigate the spread of misinformation while still preserving freedom of speech. It beats the inconsistency and frequent biases (typically those Left-of-center) that come with fact-checkers. 

I think this freedom of speech aspect of this policy change is important. Zuckerberg admitted that during the pandemic, the Biden administration would call to pressure Meta employees to suppress various COVID information that it deemed "misinformation." Given how off the mark the government was with providing accurate COVID-related information, a topic that I have covered extensively since the beginning of the pandemic, I can hardly blame people for feeling hoodwinked. 

While I think in part it was a decision to curry favor with President-Elect Donald Trump, it was also a good business move. Why? Because for-profit businesses care about their bottom line. They are not in business for charity, but to maximize the amount of business they conduct. When market demands shift, businesses need to change with those demands if they want to remain in business. As Zuckerberg recognized, there has been a shift in demanding reliability, transparency, and freedom of speech. 

Not only are they demanding greater freedom of speech, they are demanding an end to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) insanity. That market trend would explain why Meta announced last week, a few days after the announcement about content moderation, that it would discontinue its DEI program.

I would argue that the trend against DEI started when the Supreme Court rightfully affirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits racial discrimination except in the most narrow of circumstances, which would include affirmative action. Since then, a number of major companies have discontinued or scaled back considerably their DEI initiatives, including Ford, Walmart, McDonald's, John Deere, and Toyota. I hardly blame these companies. 

DEI perpetuates racism, not to mention that it is a narrow-minded worldview that harms people of all races. As a formidable study from Rutgers concluded last year, mainstream modern-day DEI initiatives unsurprisingly increase hostility, racial tensions, and left-winged authoritarianism. This sort of toxicity is bad for the workplace and bad for business, which is why I would surmise that Zuckerberg realized the extent to which people have had it with DEI, especially when he said that the election was a cultural tipping point for free expression.  

The ones that are upset with Zuckerberg's decision are the ones that were happy with the censorship and DEI reigning supreme, mainly those on the Far Left who have loved controlling the narrative. They are upset because it is a potent sign that the people are fed up with Left-wing, woke authoritarianism and yearn to be free. Between the results of the 2024 elections and the increasing anti-woke sentiments, the Left is losing both its political power and cultural clout. Regardless of the reason for Meta's policy changes or how the political Left reacts to these cultural and political changes, I hope that we continue to see greater freedom of speech on social media instead of treating freedom of speech as something optional and conditional that can be swept aside when the government declares an emergency, much like it did during the pandemic. 

"Islamophobia" Is a Guise to Silence Legitimate Criticism of Islam That a Free Society Cannot Afford

Last week was the ten-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical magazine. In the 2010s, Charlie Hebdo published a number of cartoons criticizing Islam. This included satirizing the Islamic prophet Mohammad in cartoon form. While not explicitly banned in the Quran, it is commonly considered verboten in Islamic society to make an image of Mohammad. Some even consider it blasphemy in Islamic law, and therefore punishable by death. On January 7, 2015, two French-born Algerian brothers thought precisely that and targeted Charlie Hebdo employees. They killed 12 people and injured an additional 11 people. 

Unfortunately, this was not the first nor the last Islamist attack in world history. More recently, there was the attack in New Orleans earlier this month and the attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany last month. This also is part of a much larger trend of increased Islamist attacks. As the French think tank Fondation pour l'innovation politique shows in its database, there were 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks between 1979 and April 2024, 84.4 percent of them having occurred within the last decade. 

I can imagine someone pointing out this reality and calling it "Islamophobic," much like those on the Woke Left like to call almost everything racist. The term "Islamophobia" is a confusing term. There are people who sadly discriminate based on the color of skin. We use such terms as "racism" or "xenophobia" to describe the problem. There is no race of Muslim people.  There are nearly two billion Muslims belonging to various ethnic groups across the planet.

Islam refers to a religion, a faith, a system of ideas. Criticizing Islam means criticizing various ideas, not a racial demographic. We do not use the term "Christophobia" or talk about anti-Christian sentiment in that way. Nor do we use such terms as "Marxophobia" or "Free-market-phobia" to describe antipathy towards given ideologies. To quote philosopher and author Sam Harris:

Honestly criticizing the doctrine of Islam does not entail bigotry against Arabs or any other group of people. It is not an expression of hatred to notice that specific Islamic ideas--in particular, beliefs about martyrdom, and jihad, and blasphemy, and apostasy--inspire terrible acts of violence. And it's not an expression of phobia--that is, irrational-fear--to notice that violent religious fanatics don't make good neighbors.

Per the suffix "-phobia," it implies that there is an irrational fear. Rational fears exist and the problem in this instance is that there are rational fears to be had. It is precisely the ideas and the implementation of said ideas that Islam's critics, myself included, have found to be so problematic. So what is there to fear? 

If you are gay, I would say there is plenty to legitimately fear. There are nine Muslim-majority countries in which a gay man can be executed for consensual gay sex, not to mention additional Muslim-majority countries that use the law to punish and incarcerate gay people.  What about women in Iran or Afghanistan who have to worry about the morality police, women in Sudan who can be punished for talking to a man who is not her husband, or the female genital mutilation that is all too common in Somalia? And what about a Muslim who loses their faith? Apostasy is punishable by death in Islamic law. I am sure that author Salman Rushdie felt (and very well might still do) when people threaten his life or try to kill him. Or how about those who kill those who mock Islam, as we saw with the Charlie Hebdo attack? 

While Islam could theoretically undergo a Reformation much like Christianity began its Reformation when Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church in 1517, there are no signs of Islam undergoing a Reformation or Enlightenment. That might have something to do with the fact that whatever faction of moderate Muslims exists is dealing with its own legitimate fear of being attacked or murdered by Islamists. What people in the Western world consider to be radical and authoritarian is normalized in the Muslim world. 

I know these survey data are dated, but I went back to 2013 survey data from Pew Research. Pew asked Muslims across the world about sharia law and what they consider to be immoral. It is not simply that most Muslims want sharia law implemented. Most Muslims also take issue with homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, and drinking alcohol while a significant minority support honor killings. If you look at the Freedom House rankings for the fifty-plus Muslim-majority nations, you will see that none of them are considered "Free" in terms of political freedom or civil liberties. They do not fare much better under the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom. 

Like with the Far Left's use of other "phobias," whether it is homophobia, xenophobia, or transphobia, Islamophobia is a linguistic shift to silent dissent by conflating race with belief. Media outlet Spiked Online explains that "Islamophobia" is used as a cudgel to stigmatize or criminalize any critique of Islam as racist. To show where things stand, the Islamic Human Rights Commission gave its "Islamophobe of the Year" to the editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo only a few weeks after terrorists massacred them for publishing cartoons of Islam's prophet Muhammad. And it is amazing how many in the West go along with the "Islamophobia" trope.  

Yes, there is legitimate fear that gay people, women, apostates, and non-Muslims can have for being punished under Islamic society. There is legitimate fear that Islam is not here to coexist with people of religious persuasions, but rather to dominate and subjugate, as Muslim polities have done since Muhammad became a warlord in the seventh century. 

Denmark banning Quran burning to shield Muslims from being offended is but one example of how they are shaping the Western world to be as oppressive and authoritarian as the Muslim-majority countries. But if you criticize how sharia law is implemented in Muslim-majority countries or what a significant faction of Muslims living in Europe and other parts of the Western world would like to implement, you are wrongfully branded an "Islamophobe." To quote Sam Harris again:

And while every religion has its fanatics, there is only one religion on Earth where even its mainstream members of the faith seek to impose their religious taboos on everyone else. There is only one religion that has made it unsafe for people to criticize it, or indeed, for its own members to leave it. Only Muslims routinely fear for their lives when they decide to leave their  religion--and this is true, even in the West. If you doubt this, just read some books or listen to podcasts by ex-Muslims. 

As I brought up ten years ago, criticizing Islam is not Islamophobic and practitioners of Islam are not entitled to a life free of offense, criticism, or downright mockery. Being in a free society means that we can criticize, and by extension, offend others with what we believe or say. Those who silence criticism of Islam are committing an egregious linguistic sleight of hand that is eroding democracy and pluralism. At the end of the day, mimicking the intolerance of Islamists with censorship is not the way to go if we want to ultimately avoid being subjugated under authoritarian rule. 

Study Unsurprisingly Shows DEI Initiatives Increase Hostility, Racial Tensions, and Authoritarian Tendencies

While diversity training has existed in some form since the 1960s, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) really took off in 2020 with the George Floyd protests and subsequent conversations about racial justice. Whether it was through the use of lectures, trainings, or educational materials, DEI was supposed to have such lofty goals as creating awareness of diversity, reducing bias, fostering a culture of respect, and empower individuals from historically underrepresented groups. 

It turns out that the theory behind DEI does not play out in practice. Earlier this month, a study released from the Network Contagion Research Institutes and Rutgers University (Jagdeep et al., 2024) found that DEI practices increased the likelihood of participants to be irrationally confrontational and antagonistic. This new study focused specifically on training that that emphasizes awareness of and opposition to "systemic oppression," which is a common topic from such lecturers as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The themes that run common in the anti-racist work that the researchers analyzed are as follows:

1. White supremacy and racism are a systemic and nearly universal norm, mindset, or worldview. 
2. Normal institutions and Western ideologies are secretly enforcing racist agendas. White people are the intended beneficiaries. 
3. The universality of white supremacy agonizes people of color by virtue of endless hostile encounters. 
4. Western countries are compromised by virtue of their racist ideology and past. 
5. Anti-racist discrimination is the only solution to racist discrimination. 

What did the authors find? Across all groupings, the researchers found that instead of reducing bias, it engendered a "hostile attribution bias." This bias amplifies perceptions of bias where none existed, particularly when there is no evidence whatsoever of racism or discrimination (see below). This makes sense when you are told that racism lurks around every corner and is baked into our institutions. It explains why woke people cannot distinguish between correlation and causation when it comes to disparity. 

Not only did participants experience increased hostility, but they were more likely to punish perceived perpetrators (see below), whether that came in the form of protesting people, demanding public apologies, or calling for people to relocate. 

DEI training does not provide enhanced interracial interactions or camaraderie. There are baseless suspicions that encouraged punitive attitudes. What is even more alarming is that participants' levels of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) predicted an increased willingness to punish and higher hostile attributions. 

As the authors point out, this left-wing authoritarianism "may further create a culture of fear and rigidity instead of constructive change." No kidding! The negative effects of DEI do not surprise me. I first pointed this out in 2018 when analyzing the empirical literature on diversity training and how diversity training frequently backfires because focusing on race that much reinforces stereotypes rather than mitigates them. 

When I recently praised Matt Walsh for exposing the DEI scam in his documentary Am I Racist? (see here and here), I pointed out how DEI uses identity politics to emphasize differences over similarities of our common humanity. Even worse, DEI focuses on assigning blame rather than constructive solutions, as is the case with reparations. 

The anti-oppressive themes, elements, frameworks commonly used in modern-day mainstream DEI training that focus on victimhood and oppression are a scourge on society. As co-author Joel Finkelstein pointed out, they are bad ideas because they hurt people. Not only that, but they are prevalent, thereby exacerbating the effects. They create an unwarranted suspicion on our institutions, as is the case with the criminal justice system when there in fact is no systemic racism in criminal sentencing. 

It keeps society obsessed with race rather than create a colorblind, post-racial society. It is divisive as can be with having people focused on race, gender, sexual orientation, or another aspect of identity politics rather than learning to get along with those who are different. Thankfully, such major companies as Wal-Mart, Lowes, and Boeing are realizing its negative effects and I hope more people wake up to its harms. Research on the effects of DEI is important and we need more research like it because DEI lacks empirical support. At that same time, it illustrates something so obvious that I do not need research to discern, which is that DEI is a plague on society that needs to be excised posthaste. 

"Islamophobia" Is Far From Being the "New Anti-Semitism": Stop Minimizing Anti-Semitism by Equating the Two (Pt. II)

Since Hamas carried out the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, I have been appalled as to how kidnappers, rapists, murders, and génocidaires could possibly get the sympathy of the world. I had to question how the Far Left became so anti-Semitic (read here, here, and here). I also wrote about how the entity known as Palestine needs to put the victim card back in the deck but probably will not (see here, here, and here). It is not only the Palestinians playing the victim card. It is Muslims throughout the Western world. I find the victimhood audacious enough where I started writing about how "Islamophobia" is nowhere near the bigotry that anti-Semitism is. You can read Part I here.

The first inconvenient truth I pointed out is that anti-Semitism has existed for three thousand years, whereas the concept of "Islamophobia" has only existed since 1997. This led to my second inconvenient truth, which is that "Islamophobia" is so new because Muslims spent much of their history oppressing, persecuting, and colonizing. Now I continue more inconvenient truths, including continued oppression, a lack of attempts to systematically wipe out all Muslims on the planet, and that Jews are significantly more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than Muslims. 

Muslim-majority nations continue to oppress. The non-profit Freedom House provides detailed analysis on political freedoms and civil liberties by country. The vast majority of Muslim-majority countries are ranked as "Not Free," whereas none of them are considered "Free." In the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom's 2024 annual report, you will see multiple Muslim-majority countries detailed as being problematic for religious freedom, including Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkey. If Islam were really a religion of peace, you would think at least one Muslim-majority country would be tolerant of non-Muslims, yet such a nation-state does not exist. On the other hand, there is only one Jewish-majority state, Israel. Guess what? Israel allows Muslims, Christians, and Druze to live peacefully and practice their respective religion within Israel's borders. 

People have not tried to systematically wipe out Muslims. The closest that there has been to systematic extermination is the Chinese government's persecution of the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority of about 11 million living in Western China. While a reprehensible violation of human rights, this repression of the Uyghurs has not been determined to be an act of genocide. As I pointed out when refuting the pro-Hamas' accusation of Israel being genocidal, genocide has a specific legal definition. To quote Spiked Online:

Muslims are not facing the intimidation that Jews now face daily on the streets. There are no demonstrations calling for the destruction on any Islamic nation or protests demonizing Palestinians as 'child murderers' or 'genociders.' Nor are there influential initiatives calling for a boycott of Arab institutions or individuals. 

There has not been a nut job like Hitler that wants to systematically exterminate all 1.9 billion Muslims with a "Final Solution" for all believers of Islam or has succeeded. Unfortunately, Jews have not been spared that fate. Hitler managed to wipe out a third of the world's Jewish population with his Final Solution. If only that genocide were a thing of the past for the Jews. It is 2024 and it is difficult to talk about a two-state solution when the government representing the Palestinian people is pushing for a Final Solution against its Jewish neighbors in Israel.

Furthermore, you do not see thousands of protestors across the globe calling for the extermination of Muslim people. It is thousands of people in the so-called "civilized world" denying the atrocities of October 7, cheering on raping, murdering, genocidal terrorists, all the while chanting for the extinction of Jewish people in the name of anti-Zionism and "freeing Palestine." Too bad these bigots cannot call for freeing Palestine from Hamas or denounce the atrocities of October 7.  

Jews are more likely to endure a hate crime than a Muslim. Harassing, threatening, or committing violence against Muslims is unacceptable because no one should undergo that sort of treatment. At the same time, there is a disparity between the dangers a Muslim faces versus what a Jew faces. 

In the United States, we can see those rates with the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics. According to the FBI Crime Data Explorer, there have been 821 anti-Muslim hate crimes while there have been 5,424 anti-Jewish hate crimes between 2019 and 2023. There are 4.45 million Muslims in the United States in contrast to 7.5 million Jews. When adjusting for population, a Jew in the United States is 3.9 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim. 

Outside of Israel and the United States, the countries with the largest Jewish populations are France, Canada, and the United Kingdom. I will start these non-U.S. countries with the United Kingdom. 

In London, anti-Semitic hate crimes have overtaken the number of anti-Muslim crimes since October 7, 2023. This does not even factor in that there are 1.32 million Muslims versus 145,466 Jews in London, or there are about 9 Muslims in London for every Jew. Merely by eyeballing the graph below (Telegraph), you can see that multiplying the blue bars by 9 to get a sense of the rates show that a Jew in London is much more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim, especially since October 7, 2023. In 2022-23, the likelihood is about five times as likely.  In 2023-24, that is about 12 times more likely. 

Canada does not fare better. B'nai Brith Canada has shown a doubling of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada from 2022 to 2023 in its annual report. Looking at hate crime figures from Statistics Canada, there were 1,496 police-reported hate crimes against Jews versus 576 against Muslims between 2018 and 2021. There are about 1.8 million Muslims in Canada versus the 393 thousand Jews, or about 4.6 Muslims for every Jew. When adjusting for population to understand rates, a Jew in Canada is 12 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim. To think that these figures were before October 7, 2023! 

And finally, there is France. First, I will show the number of anti-Muslim crimes recorded by the Central Territorial Intelligence Service [Service Central du Renseignement Territorial; SCRT] (per here and here).

Then there are the anti-Semitic crimes reported (see here and here). You can read the most recent report here from the French government's SCRT (in French). What we see with historical data is that there are more anti-Semitic hate crimes than anti-Muslim crimes. That is before October 7 when anti-Semitism nearly quadrupled in France. That is also not factoring in the fact there are 550,000 Jews versus 5.7 million Muslims in France, or more than 10 Muslims for every Jew in France. In 2022, that would mean that a Jew in France was 22 times more likely than a Muslim in France to be a victim of a hate crime. 

Moral of the story: what we see with government data from the countries with the largest Jewish populations (excluding Israel) is that Jews are significantly more likely to be harassed, terrorized, and victimized than Muslims are. The fact that there are more hate crimes against Jews than Muslims in these countries signals that anti-Semitism is a bigger scourge than "Islamophobia." 

Postscript. I hope to address one additional aspect of this debate in a future blog entry, mainly that "Islamophobia" is a cudgel to silence legitimate dissent against Islam or Islamists. In the meantime, I will say this. Treating "Islamophobia" and anti-Semitism as equals and lumping together is insulting to Jews because it diminishes what the Jewish people have endured not only since October 7, 2023, but over the centuries. It also ignores the fact that Muslims have oppressed and persecuted others for centuries and that those who run Muslim-majority countries still oppress to this day. 

Denunciations of anti-Semitism are diluted when lumped together with other forms of bigotry. When George Floyd was murdered, people did not denounce "racism, homophobia, transphobia" or scream "All Lives Matter;" the chant was "Black Lives Matter." Equating "Islamophobia" with anti-Semitism is giving Jews the "All Lives Matter" treatment, which apparently is an unacceptable mantra for the Woke Left except for when it used against Jews. "Islamophobia" is nowhere near the problem that anti-Semitism is. Anyone who does not treat anti-Semitism as a separate, legitimate form of bigotry is part of the problem. After all, anti-Semitism has been the canary in the coal mine far too many times in history. Let us hope that the Western world can learn that important lesson before it slips into decadence.  

"Islamophobia" Is Far From Being the "New Anti-Semitism": Stop Minimizing Anti-Semitism by Equating the Two (Pt. I)

One year ago today, Hamas terrorists snuck into Israel's borders and carried out the worst pogrom against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Israeli civilians were raped, kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and decapitated. The death toll from this horror was over 1,200 civilians. Some of those murdered that day were not even Israeli. They were young adults attending a music festival that were in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

What should have been a time for the world to rally in support of Israel ending up being a wave of global anti-Semitism. The innocent lives lost were barely cold in the grave and the anti-Semites were already protesting against Israel. The moral inversion in which "rape is resistance," kidnapping Holocaust survivors is social justice, or "the situation in the Middle East is complex" justifies parading unconscious women or decapitating babies is astonishing. Do not be at all surprised if there are protests across the globe today cheering on the murdering, raping, genocidal terrorists who carried out the atrocities on October 7, 2023. 

Another aspect that has been astonishing is lumping together anti-Semitism with "Islamophobia" in response to October 7. Any response given in October 2023 by the Biden White House about anti-Semitism included a caveat for "Islamophobia." The European Parliament has made a similar grouping, and Human Rights Watch did something similar in December 2023.

I imagine you have noticed my objection towards equating anti-Semitism with "Islamophobia." I do not deny that discrimination against Muslims simply for being Muslim exists. I will explore those data in Part II of this blog series. Abusing citizens for merely believing in Islam, vandalizing mosques, or attacking those who are visibly Muslim is morally wrong. Part of being in a tolerant, multicultural society means supporting their freedom of conscience and freedom of worship as long as it does not harm others vis-à-vis the non-aggression axiom. On the other hand, "Islamophobia" is nowhere being nearly as heinous as anti-Semitism for a number of reasons. 

How long has each form of bigotry existed? Anti-Semitism has existed since the Egyptians per the account in the Book of Exodus. The Jews were in exile from the year 69 to 1948 when the State of Israel was created. Whether it is the ancient Romans, the English Expulsion of 1290, the Spanish in 1492, the pogroms in the Russian Empire, rule under various Islamic polities, or the Nazis carrying out the Holocaust, the Jews have dealt with this universal hatred for a few millennia. 

If the past year has reminded me, anti-Semitism has not died. It simply evolved and skyrocketed in the past 365 days. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently released a report about anti-Semitism in the United States one year after October 7, 2023. Anti-Semitism was already at an all-time high before the 10/7 attacks. The anti-Semitism has only skyrocketed since 10/7, whether in the form of increased harassment, assaults, vandalism, threats, intimidation of Jews, or violent anti-Semitic posts on social media. 

While the United States has the largest Jewish diaspora population, European Jews have also been pressured to stop expressing their Jewishness in public. Do not be surprised if today, October 7, 2024, does not have pro-Hamas rallies across the planet celebrating this pogrom because Muslims do not feel the same pressure to hide their Muslim identity or their political opinions about the Middle East as Jews do. 

In contrast, let us ask when did Islamophobia begin. According to this publication from Cambridge University's Review of Middle East Studies, "Islamophobia" was developed as a concept in the late 1990s. While the term was first used over a century ago, the Runnymede Trust takes credit for inventing the term as used in its contemporary meaning...in 1997. That makes sense to me not only because hundreds of thousands of Muslims emigrate to the western world while many Muslims comfortably assert their Islamic identity in public. Why am I not surprised that "Islamophobia" is a new concept? 

Muslim polities have a history of colonization and oppression. Muslims have not been persecuted around the world for centuries like the Jews have. If anything, Muslims persecuting non-Muslims dates all the way back to Muhammad in the Qu'ran. Whether it was the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Almohads, or the other caliphates, non-Muslims living under Muslim rule were either relegated to a second-class status of dhimmi, forced to convert, or executed.  There were a number of other caliphates throughout history that illustrate my point regarding Islamic colonization.  Israel is the size of New Jersey. When you compare Israel's square mileage (8,469 square miles) to the Arabian Peninsula (1.2 million square miles), never mind the entire Arab-speaking world, the Middle East, or Muslim world, it makes you wonder who the real colonizers have been in the Middle East. 

There will be more to explore in Part II of this series.

Matt Walsh Documentary Exposes DEI for the Racism-Perpetuating Scam It Is (Part II)

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become trendy in multiple circles. DEI is meant to be an organizational framework aimed at promoting the fair and inclusive participation of all people, particularly those who have historically been underrepresented. At first glance, DEI sounds like an acronym filled with lofty goals to improve racial and interpersonal relations. Proponents present it as an asset allowing for multiple perspectives and a learning opportunity to grow from those who are different from us. That sounds peachy in theory. But when the Far Left, woke crowd applies DEI to its "anti-racist" efforts, DEI becomes synonymous with the word "discrimination." The DEI proponents teach that white people are evil racists, racial minorities are hapless victims, and racism should be treated as an "irreducible, essential characteristic of the human condition...rather than a prejudice we can and must overcome." 

In his documentary "Am I Racist?", Matt Walsh exposes the over-simplistic backwardness of DEI and reminds us that DEI is as counterproductive as it is racist. Not only was I intrigued enough to watch it at the movie theater, but I have now written two blog entries about it. You can read Part I of this blog series at the link here. The only other time I have blogged on a movie was when I saw Everything, Everywhere, All at Once because I thought it was that prolific. In Part I, I first highlighted the crazy "anti-racist" moments in the documentary. I then pointed out how DEI backfires and perpetuates racism, followed by providing some analysis on the logical fallacies involved in a DEI mindset. I now resume with my criticism of DEI and the so-called "anti-racists."

DEI is a narrow-minded view that results in lousy problem-solving and public policy. My criticism of DEI proponents is more than a group of so-called "anti-racists" denying their own racism, biases, and general small-mindedness or basing their assertions with zero empirical evidence. By erroneously thinking that disparity automatically means racism, it not only means inaccurately diagnosing the problem. They have reduced complex social issues into a grossly inaccurate, oversimplified view of the world. 

With a warped view on how the world works, it means that the public policy recommendations will also be warped. For the folks obsessed with equity, their stated goal is to eliminate racial disparities. I hate to break it to these people, but there is always going to be inequality in the world. The fact that those on the Left have a harder time accepting that inequality and unfairness are an inherent part of reality is a reason why they are less happy than everyone else. In order to chase this fantasy, the DEI crowd uses puritanical and authoritarian measures in the hopes to expunge what they deem as impurities. In many ways, the adherents of DEI and "anti-racism" have significant parallels to fundamentalist religion.

DEI not only hurts white people and Asians, but also racial minorities. When I criticized Critical Race Theory (CRT), I pointed out that CRT also hurts students of racial minorities in addition to white students. Why? Because CRT propagates a toxic victimhood that patronizingly teaches that racial minorities are hapless victims stuck in their circumstances. This sort of victimhood keeps racial minorities trapped. Conservatives being more likely to reject victimhood and value resilience, personal control, and responsibility helps explain why they are on average happier than their liberal counterparts. 

As someone who used to work in K-12 education policy, I cannot help but notice how DEI and CRT have harmed minority students. I have written on two examples on how the DEI folk have used equity as a guise to dumb down education to make minorities feel better: removing honors classes and removing basic skills requirements in the name of equity. Not only is it insulting to insinuate that racial minorities are incapable of educational achievement and attainment, but DEI does nothing to help lift minority students up and succeed. What I find rich is when the woke Left blames the amorphous "system," especially when it comes to education. That irony tickles my funny bone because K-12 education is dominated by the woke Left, which means they are "the system" and, as previously mentioned, they are the problem that they do not want to have to look at in the mirror.  

If minorities overcome hardship and adversity, it means that DEI, and by extension, woke ideology, is a sham. This explains why the Left is willing to throw Asian-Americans under the bus when it comes to affirmative action, disparage those who exercise as right-wing extremists, or show disdain for the State of Israel while supporting Palestine. For minorities to use personal agency and responsibility while subsequently becoming stronger, more resilient, and happier human beings in spite of what they underwent is a smack in the face for a group of people for which the political is the personal. The cognitive dissonance for those who succumb to this sort of groupthink is too much for them to bear.

Postscript

With a brilliant use of humor, narrative, and straightforward questions, Walsh shows that DEI is not about diversity, equity, or inclusion; it is about conformity. DEI does not heal; it stirs up hate. DEI does not unite; it divides us further. The only winners from DEI are the grifters and those who feel a sense of moral superiority by adhering to this fundamentalism. Ultimately, the documentary is a comedic endeavor to expose the "anti-racism" consultants and DEI professionals for the grifters that they are, which is rich given how anti-capitalist and anti-profit the Far Left is. In that respect, Matt Walsh succeeded with flying colors. 

Walsh emphasizes the importance of us needing to stand up to the "anti-racism" grifters and stop obsessing over race. The fact that university faculty and best-selling authors have exploited racial shame and sowed racial disharmony to make a ton of cash for this long is unacceptable. Making assumptions about the entirety of an individual based on the superficial assessment of their skin color, gender, or sexual orientation is truly dehumanizing, yet that is a major underpinning of DEI. When the "anti-racists" argue that "colorblindness is racist", their statement that the color of skin is more important than content of character seeks to re-racialize this country and indeed the world.  

Something that I have noticed is that universities and corporations are beginning to abandon DEI initiatives. People are fed up with the counterproductive divisiveness, myself included. What I hope is that Matt Walsh's documentary provides more momentum to leave DEI in the ash heap of history where it belongs. Martin Luther King once taught us that we should judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Ultimately, we need to ditch the identity politics and this toxic Age of Grievance so we can embrace colorblindness once more if we stand a chance at living in a tolerant, post-racial world. 

Matt Walsh Documentary Exposes DEI for the Racism-Perpetuating Scam It Is (Part I)

I rarely have gone to the movie theater since the COVID pandemic. Last week, I went to see Matt Walsh's documentary "Am I Racist?", which has already ranked as the highest-grossing documentary this year at $9 million. I was both surprised and amused--surprised that people buy into white guilt and amused at the genius of how Walsh gave just enough rope to the anti-activists to hang themselves and expose their extremism, thereby discrediting themselves. I cannot remember the last time I laughed that hard. I really appreciated this comical take on the "anti-racist" crowd. Even Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle seemed to enjoy it enough. In the style of Borat, Walsh goes undercover to pretend he is a Diversity Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) specialist and sets up ruses to expose the DEI movement. A few gems from the documentary (Spoilers Contained):  

• So-called "progressive" white women pay $2,500 to attend a dinner hosted by anti-racist activists Saira Rao and Regina Jackson so they can be chided about how racist and privileged white women are. In the documentary, Rao and Jackson called Republicans Nazis and essentially called the United States an irredeemably racist hellhole that needs to be scorched.
• During the documentary, Walsh was interviewing Robin DiAngelo. In the middle of the interview, Walsh gives his black producer, Ben, some money as a form of reparations. Looking stunned and confused, DiAngelo goes to her purse and grabs $30 to give to Ben, although her honorarium for doing the interview was $15,000. She later was mad because she felt duped. She stated that solving reparations needed to be done on a systemic level. Maybe she was mad because it is not good for her business to be caught in her hypocrisy of not putting her money where her mouth is or exposing how much of a racket DEI really is. 
• In 2021, DiAngelo earned $728,000 from speaking gigs and workshops, nothing to say of book royalties (see DiAngelo's accountability statement here). It is not normal for someone to get paid for an interview, DiAngelo would not have taken $15,000. The fact that she does not openly take interviews to spread "the good word" suggests that DiAngelo's motive is financial. 
• Anti-racist activist and co-director for Black Lives Matter in Phoenix Sarra Tekola harassed two white male students in a multicultural center and accosted them trying to get them to leave. In the documentary, she ironically stated that all white people are racist and that we should abolish whiteness.  
• At the end of the documentary, Walsh hosted his own DEI training in which he earned $3,000. The training reached its apex of absurdity when Walsh pulled out whips so the attendees could engage in self-flagellation. What is even crazier is that some of the attendants were considering it. 

One of the features that Walsh illustrates is that with these DEI and anti-racism workshops, the demand for racism exceeds the supply. Pathological, white liberals and self-identifying "progressives" pay to be berated about de-centering whiteness, de-colonizing oneself, and not "tone policing" people. This level of gullibility means that DEI specialists can make money off of white guilt, which is illustrated by a global DEI 2022 market size of $9.4 billion. 

DEI makes racism and racial tensions worse.  As I brought up in 2018, there have been a plethora of studies done showing how diversity training and "implicit bias" training backfires (also read this article from Harvard Business Review here). Diversity training or dealing with "implicit bias" do not help with reducing prejudice. Apparently, the more you obsess over racial differences or publicly shame people for perceived "implicit bias," there ends up being more prejudice and less diversity. That makes sense given the obsession over race results in woke people being racist against white people in a way that eerily parallels Klan members. 

Even Mahzarin Banaji, who pioneered the research on implicit bias, wrote that "the typical DEI training doesn't educate people about bias and may even do harm" and that "people often leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity towards other groups." Is it a surprise that Gallup polling shows a decline in race relations as DEI became more popular? No, because DEI is not about genuine reconciliation or moving past racism, but rather wallowing in racism. 

Not only is DEI discriminatory, but it perpetuates racism. Blaming everything on the nebulous, unfalsifiable concept of "systemic racism" means that the only solution in the woke mind is reverse discrimination. That is not merely my opinion. Anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi says that the only way to mitigate racist discrimination, and that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. This traps us in a perpetual state of racism that does nothing to create a post-racial world. 

DEI tries to prop itself up using faulty reasoning.  For the DEI folk, they believe in collective guilt. This logical fallacy of guilt by association drives the inanity of the support for reparations. In addition to believing in collective guilt, it is not a question of whether racism took place in a given situation, but how it took place, which is a logical fallacy known as begging the question because the premise assumes the truth of the conclusion without any evidence. There is no room for alternative explanations in a given situation. As I will discuss further in Part II, not everything is caused by "systemic racism," whatever that unfalsifiable term means.

To solidify their moral high ground on their unfalsifiable accusations, the "anti-racist" grifters implement a logical fallacy known as a Kafka trap. What this logical fallacy entails is that someone who is accused of something and denies it is taken as evidence that they are the thing of which they are being accused. 

In this case, if you are a white person and you deny that you are racist, that denial is inaccurately taken as evidence that you are indeed racist. An example of "damned if you do, damned if you don't." No actual evidence of racism is required. Woke people claiming that all white people are racist is a) an example of the racism that they purport to be against, b) a way to trivialize actual racism, c) a rejection of such things as the scientific method and "innocent until proven guilty," and d) helps "anti-racists" avoid the counterfactuals and the massive amount of cognitive dissonance that comes with being "anti-racist." 

In Part II, I will discuss how DEI is problematic beyond perpetuating racism and how DEI does not mitigate racial tensions. 

Meta-Analysis Shows That "Systemic Racism" Does Not Really Exist In U.S. Criminal Sentencing

Today is Martin Luther King Day. It is hard not to think about the man and the legend. MLK had to face Jim Crow laws, which de jure forced racial segregation between black and white people. MLK was arrested 29 times, including the so-called "crime" of  sitting at a lunch counter with white people. Even after the Civil War, the justice system treated African-Americans unfairly in more ways than one. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a turning point for civil liberties, which included overturning the Jim Crow laws. I would not expect changes for racial attitudes to happen overnight, but it has been about six decades since the Civil Rights Act. I have to wonder if the criminal justice system has improved since then. 

If you listen to the Far Left, the answer to that question is a resounding "No!" Their thesis is that systemic racism is epidemic in the criminal justice system, and as such, is rotten to its core because of how it treats racial minorities. For advocates of this theory, the fact that the overtly racist laws by and large no longer existing does not matter. Those arguing that systemic racism exists either argue that it comes in form of there being implicit bias within the system or that institutional factors result in systemic racial disparities in the judicial system. In spite of removing de jure racism, proponents argue that the system de facto remains racist and White supremacist.

Part of my issue of the "systemic racism" argument is with the framing. Racism depends too much on intent and belief, which is an issue because the vast majority of criminal justice laws being scrutinized are not de jure or explicitly racist. It assumes that any disparity is prima facie discrimination or racism, a concept that I refuted last year. The other issue with framing is that "systemic" is too vague of a term to describe anything meaningful. As African-American linguist and Columbia University professor John McWhorter points out, "this usage of 'systemic racism' is more rhetorical bludgeon than a simple term of reference."

My bigger contention is the fact that the argument violates the logical fallacy of begging the question, which is an argument in which the premise assumes the truth of the conclusion. In the context of critical race theory and the "systemic racism" argument, it means that those who question the theory are "systematically deceived" because they are not "in the know":

If someone begs the question and foreswears any counter-evidence, then the idea becomes unfalsifiable. This is irrational. Every challenge to one's viewpoint can then be dismissed a priori...When a claim is taken to be impervious to criticism, it loses rationality given its irrefutable dogmatism. 

I know that people on the Far Left like to argue that logic or objective, linear thinking are part of "white culture" or "white supremacy." It means that their arguments about systemic discrimination cannot be criticized.....or so they think. I value logic, facts, and rationale over emotion grasping towards one's preconceived notions, especially when talking about public policy. That means I am going to scrutinize the theory, especially when it has major implications for criminal justice policy. 

We should be asking ourselves here whether the facts line up with a story about systemic racism or not. This is exactly what two scholars from Stetson University did when they published their meta-analysis last month on the topic of race, class, and criminal adjudication (Ferguson and Smith, 2023). These scholars examined 51 studies that have been published on the topic since 2005. Their main finding was that "neither class nor race biases for criminal adjudications for either violent or property crimes could be reliably detected." The exception noted in the meta-analysis was drug crimes, which is significant because drug crimes often have strict sentencing. Even then, the effect sizes were very small (i.e., 1.6-1.8% of the variance in criminal adjudication).  

I am not here to say that discrimination is nonexistent in the criminal justice system. There are other aspects to consider, such as arrest rates, innocence rates, or rates at which certain people are stopped by police officers. Conversely, sentencing is a major aspect of the criminal justice system because it determines how badly one is ultimately punished for committing a crime. 

The near absence of sentencing bias in terms of class and race are surprising given what "conventional wisdom" is on the topic. Yet it makes sense why I have not seen people clamoring to laud these findings. Much like with climate change or COVID, it would not make for good news if something is not in crisis mode. For the Far Left, it means losing control over the political narrative. I talked about this concept a couple of weeks ago when covering how growing income inequality has not really been a thing in the past six decades.  

If the criminal justice system is not in the disarray that the "systemic racism" crowd is purporting, it means they have less political power. This is more than having an arguably cynical view about political power, although I honestly would call it "being realistic." As the authors of the study also point out, such a view is detrimental to society because reduces public confidence, creates more social discord, and reduces community cooperation with criminal justice authorities, all of which erode the criminal justice system and have the potential to increase crime. Plus, it perpetuates our post-truth world when political narratives matter than reality.

This is not to say that reforms could be made, a topic which I have written in past pieces. On the whole, I am frankly relieved at the finding in these studies. Mitigating and ultimately eliminating racial bias should be something every free, democratic society should aspire towards. For me, it is marvelous that the United States is, in at least one aspect, becoming a more perfect union. I hope that we as a society can continue towards this trend in a more neutral, impartial criminal justice system.