ICYMI: Honoring “America First” Willmoore Kendall: The New “Plot Against America,” Featuring DEATH SENTENCE, Christopher Rufo, and Rebbitzin Bengelsdorf
David Shasha
Honoring “America First” Willmoore Kendall: The New “Plot Against America,” Featuring DEATH SENTENCE, Christopher Rufo, and Rebbitzin Bengelsdorf
Some day the patience of Americans may at last be exhausted, and we will strike out at the Liberals. Not because they are treacherous like the Communists, but because … we conclude that they are mistaken in their predictions, false in their analyses, wrong in their advice, and through the results of their actions injurious to the interests of the nation.
William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, Jr., McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), cited in Nicholas Buccola, The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America (2019)
Just as preparations were being made to bury lynch victim Tyre Nichols, another Black “Blue Lives Matter” casualty, we were once again reminded that Florida has become home to the New “Plot Against America” and White Nationalist Christian Supremacy.
Again, for those still not familiar with Philip Roth’s counter-historical masterpiece, and the role of Rabbi and Rebbitzin Bengelsdorf in the Jewish self-hatred that provided the fictional Intersectionality linking Charles Lindbergh, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Henry Ford, and the “Jews,” I have provided a set of resources to understand the process and how it links to The Tikvah Fund:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i4sw4tiGwIz_DWeOjNo_PNFlYFd0YeXH/edit
Our current Rebbitzin Bengelsdorf is Bari Weiss.
Weiss has firmly upheld “America First” White Christian Supremacy in the face of the New Racial Consciousness, as she attacks The 1619 Project and Anti-Racism:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/RtVNokk4Ork
Her record of supporting Trumpscum Fascism and the racist police has become legendary:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/XbIXRmY8z5Y/m/o0wgTvanCAAJ
Her pal DEATH SENTENCE has joined with her other pal Christopher Rufo to turn Florida into a Fascist book burning state:
https://www.thebulwark.com/ron-desantis-chris-rufo-and-the-college-anti-woke-makeover-florida/
The complete article follows this note.
Cancel A.P. African-American History just in time for Black History Month!
Just to make it that much worse, it now appears that the College Board is being run by followers of DEATH SENTENCE and Rufo, as it caves in to the Florida Fascism on the AP course:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/us/college-board-advanced-placement-african-american-studies.html
The complete article follows this note.
Maybe Merrick Garland is also running the College Board!
It is all part of a larger Trumptrend to put the Black people back in their place.
The “Jews” are All In:
https://thejewishvoice.com/2023/02/desantis-stands-up-against-educational-racism/
We have seen Weiss’ mentor David Project Bernstein attack WOKE in the name of Anti-Semitism:
The Trumpists have praised his vile book as part of their New “Plot Against America”:
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/ideological-antisemitism-on-the-left/
Indeed, the very inaptly-named Law and Liberty is all about America First, as we see in the following article praising White Christian Supremacist Willmoore Kendall, mentor to William F. Buckley, Jr.:
The complete article follows this note.
For those of have never heard of Kendall and his racist ways, Jacob Heilbrunn’s article will bring you up to speed:
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-willmoore-kendall-invented-trumpism-198739
The complete article follows this note.
Walking in Kendall’s fetid Confederate footsteps, Buckley became the Northeast point man for Jim Crow in the 1950s, as we saw in his racist classic “Why the South Must Prevail”:
https://adamgomez.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/whythesouthmustprevail-1957.pdf
Much has been made of Buckley’s purported volte-face on Civil Rights, which is discussed in the following articles:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/13/william-f-buckley-civil-rights-215129/
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/05/national-review-william-buckley-racism/
I have currently been reading Nicholas Buccola’s excellent study of James Baldwin and Buckley’s 1965 Cambridge debate The Fire is Upon Us, which I recommend highly:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691181547/the-fire-is-upon-us
https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/product/9780691210773
Buccola does an excellent job in providing both men’s views in great depth prior to looking at the debate itself; allowing the reader to understand the tumultuous Civil Rights era and Buckley’s truly deplorable views as he supported Segregation and White Supremacy.
The Baldwin-Buckley situation should remind us of the Trump Alt-Right, as Heilbrunn notes of Kendall, which is driven by an attack on the New Racial Consciousness, redolent of the Confederate ethos and its racism.
Which brings us right back to Rebbitzin Bengelsdorf.
Affirming the New “Plot Against America,” Weiss just posted a Rufo-style item against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion by FIRE’s Rikki Schlott:
Ms. Schlott has, as would be expected from Weiss, an immaculate Trumpscum CV:
https://www.rikkischlott.com/resume
Her articles reflect her “America First” bona fides:
https://www.rikkischlott.com/publications
Her new article is all very BAKKE in its Reverse Racism whining:
Brent Morden is one of them. Morden is a white, 25-year-old music and choir director in New York City. Though he’s only at the beginning of his career, he said he’s already felt the crunch of funding and lost opportunities because he doesn’t tick any diversity boxes.
“When I see commissions or opportunities that are specifically looking for females or LGBTQ or BIPOC people to apply, I just sigh, wonder what this achieves, and move on,” he said. “Artistic institutions are adopting mission statements that sound nice and virtuous, but if you dig deeper under the surface, they’re promoting an agenda that doesn’t promote true and fair diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
His feelings are echoed by renowned Broadway theater producer Rocco Landesman. From 2009 to 2012, Landesman served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under the Obama administration. He told me he started noticing DEI creeping into the arts world around 2013 and has “no doubt” that “we’re seeing increasingly coercive guidelines.”
The names change, but the White Privilege remains.
I have written extensively on the Neo-Con Jewish obsession with Affirmative Action as it relates to The Tikvah Fund:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19UwJlS-aKpFCfCt0ZIcUbPNnuQE8h596/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19UwJlS-aKpFCfCt0ZIcUbPNnuQE8h596/edit
In her ever-expanding Bengelsdorf empire, Weiss only hires those who pass her own Ideological tests, and then tells us that Ideology is the provenance of the Left!
https://www.rikkischlott.com/publications
The New “America Firsters” are all about Trumpscum WOKE Intersectionality, as they fight those who reject White Christian Supremacy and the racism that has been central to the current Republican Party.
We will recall that the real danger of violent racism and Anti-Semitism continues to come from the TrumpNazis:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/FZrwxzgod58/m/R-CvKeehBAAJ
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/extremists-react-trump-dinner-ye-and-nick-fuentes
The most recent manifestation of this danger came in New York’s Central Park, where a Trumpscum Fascist attacked a Jew, as he screamed “KANYE 2024!”:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/us/man-assaulted-central-park/index.html
But do not expect any attacks on the Trumpscum from Weiss and her Tikvah Fund allies.
Tellingly, Rebbitzin Bengeldorf has thrown in with the BUILD THE WALL movement:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/i4YPAEIJTbs/m/0JJWolPLBQAJ
This is indeed the true WOKE Intersectionality, which has carried the Trumpscum water as it works to ban books, arrest teachers, and threaten ethnic and religious minorities who are not considered to be REAL AMERICANS.
To better understand what is going on in Florida, The Nation’s Joan Walsh has written an excellent article on the matter, with the spot-on title “Florida Teachers Hide Their Books to Avoid Felonies”:
The complete article follows this note.
But do not expect to read about any of it in The “Free” Press!
We can thus give a very balaboosta tip of the hat to Rebbitzin Bengelsdorf as she fights the good Zalman Bernstein fight alongside the White Christian Nationalists who she proudly calls her friends.
David Shasha
Ron DeSantis, Chris Rufo, and the College Anti-Woke Makeover
By: Cathy Young
The latest battle in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s ongoing crusade against “wokeness”—or, if you prefer, the latest maneuver in his march toward the 2024 Republican presidential nomination—is getting a lot of attention. After earlier attempts to clamp down on progressive left ideologies in schools, colleges, and other institutions via legislation, DeSantis is moving to reshape a state college in a more conservative image by overhauling its leadership. On January 6, he announced the appointment of six people to vacant seats on the thirteen-member board of trustees of the New College of Florida, a small but highly rated and politically progressive liberal arts school in Sarasota, Florida.
The most prominent among the new trustees is also the youngest: Manhattan Institute fellow and anti-woke culture warrior Christopher Rufo, who told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg that he plans to conduct a “a top-down restructuring” of the college—and that he sees it as the first step in a broader plan for conservatives to “reconquer public institutions all over the United States.” Most of the other DeSantis appointees are in the same ideological mold. Once approved by the GOP-dominated state senate, they will likely form a solid conservative majority on the board, with two allies who are already on it and with the filling of another vacancy by the heavily pro-DeSantis Florida Board of Governors.
DeSantis’s move has been met with alarm by progressive media and by many New College students who see the school as a haven for social justice-friendly values. But harsh rebukes have also come from some people who are themselves strongly critical of the progressive academy and its illiberal bent—such as New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait, who has been writing about “social justice” zealotry and its baneful effects on public discourse for the past eight years (and has taken his share of lumps for it). Indeed, in his column slamming DeSantis’s power grab, Chait wrote:
It is important to understand that there is a critique of the academic left rooted in free-speech norms that posits that many schools have had an atmosphere of ideological pressure that discourages or punishes professors who violate left-wing taboos. This is not the belief system animating DeSantis’s academic mission. He is not seeking to protect or restore free speech, but to impose controls of his own liking.
The DeSantis brand of “anti-wokeism” is classic right-wing illiberalism. (Chait rightly compares it to the conservative institutional takeover in Hungary under the stewardship of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who proudly embraces the “illiberal” label—and who was cited as a model by a DeSantis spokesperson at the National Conservatism Conference in Miami last September.) But that brand is also bad news for those of us who oppose left-wing illiberalism from a liberal, libertarian, or classical conservative perspective favoring the values of free expression, individual rights, and intellectual openness.
To start with: It’s not at all clear that New College of Florida is an egregious example of progressivism run amok. (As one example of its alleged leftist excess, a National Review writer cites the school having an institutional webpage dedicated to Black History Month—and, even worse, celebrating it by hosting events.) In a column on the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal website, Rufo calls New College “a notoriously left-wing campus, similar to that of Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington.” But Evergreen gained its notoriety in 2017 due to a viral video in which a professor who had questioned a racially exclusionary social justice initiative—Bret Weinstein, who later emerged as a core member of the “intellectual dark web”—was verbally abused and intimidated by a mob of protesters. In another viral video, the president and other administrators of Evergreen were apparently held in a meeting room pending their acceptance of students’ demands, with the president at one point forced to tolerate having an escort accompany him to the bathroom. By contrast, New College of Florida hasn’t been implicated in any “cancellation” scandals, or even in any particularly blatant “woke” silliness like the recent decision to purge the word “field” from USC’s social work program because of purported negative connotations of “field work” for those descended from enslaved or migrant laborers.
New College of Florida was founded in 1960 as a progressive private college—progressive not only in having enlightened policies on racial and sexual equality, but also for its innovative teaching methods. It was folded into the University of South Florida in 1975 and became an independent public liberal arts college in 2001. Today, it is an honors college that preserves a distinctive system in which written evaluations are used instead of grades, a complicated pass/fail system is used for college credit, majors are individualized, and independent study projects are an essential part of the curriculum. While Rufo’s City Journal article paints New College as a failing school, it actually seems to have a pretty good record of academic achievement: A 2020 guest column in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune by Republican State Senator Joe Gruters hailed it as a “top producer of students who earn prestigious fellowships,” including a large number of Fulbright Awards for research projects in everything from musicology to animal behavior to teaching English abroad.
Yes, New College has a fair amount of woke-coded aspects, like its prominent gender studies program and gender identity activism, and its website features now-standard “diversity, equity and inclusion” language. But its defenders say that the school, for all its unorthodox ways, extensively teaches the classics, Western history, and other material that woke academe is supposed to have swapped for Genderfluid Dance Therapy and The Evils of Whiteness 101. A look at the publicly posted list of courses and syllabi for the fall 2022 and spring 2023 semesters tends to support these claims.
The course list includes, for instance, an advanced Latin class focused on the satires of Horace and an intermediate Greek class focused on Homer’s Iliad, literature classes in ancient and medieval epics, and a class called “To the Revolution!” which, it turns out, is not an Antifa workshop but a course on Enlightenment-era French literature featuring Voltaire’s Candide and other classics. An art class on the history of museums includes modern-day controversies on “decolonialization” and diversity but also provides solid coverage of historical material. Even a history class on the First Crusade sounds like regular history, not an ideologically tendentious reframing. Of the nearly 300 independent study projects listed for this semester, only a handful are on identity-related subjects (such as “Queer female musicians and their impact”); the vast majority are in science, and a good number deal with fairly traditional topics from the humanities.
That doesn’t mean New College does not have a problem with progressive groupthink, whether in the curriculum or in the campus atmosphere. For instance, a Spring 2023 anthropology course on “Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective” appears to build its section on North America entirely around Ibram X. Kendi’s 2017 book, Stamped from the Beginning: A History of Racist Ideas in America, which has been criticized as reductive and dogmatic by people who are neither conservative nor reflexively “anti-woke.” Moreover, at times New College officials have candidly acknowledged that left-wing intolerance on campus could be a problem, particularly on the school’s students-only electronic forum where dissenters—not only conservatives but moderates—could find themselves “called out” by name and shunned. In a 2019 interview with the Herald Tribune, then-New College outgoing president Donal O’Shea (who retired in October 2020 and was replaced by current president Patricia Okker) mentioned a campus study which found that “some students were leaving New College because the political atmosphere had become too hostile.” O’Shea thought that there was a need for more intellectual diversity and tolerance at the school and that the political “echo chamber” might be one of the reasons for its flagging enrollment. (New College is currently some 500 short of its 2018 goal of 1,200 students by the fall of 2023; on the other hand, the incoming class last fall was the largest since 2016, with a 30 percent increase over the fall of 2021, so reports of the school’s near-death from too much woke are greatly exaggerated.)
But what does the DeSantis model have to offer in place of the current one?
Rufo, who unironically tweeted about coming to the Sarasota campus with a “landing team,” formulated the “agenda for transforming the New College of Florida” as follows:
- Shift the university to a classical liberal arts model
- Restructure the administration and mission statement
- Create a new core curriculum and academic master plan
- Abolish “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and replace it with “equality, merit, and colorblindness”
- Restructure the academic departments to reflect the new pedagogical approach
- Hire new faculty with expertise in constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles
- Establish a graduate school for training teachers in classical education
Some of this may sound unobjectionable. Equality, merit, and race neutrality are fine principles, and further, they’re ones that need not contradict diversity or equity if all those concepts are properly understood. I think a classical liberal arts model is good—although discarding all literary or historical analysis that focuses on issues of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity amounts to throwing out the baby with the bathwater; the same goes for New College’s extensive independent study projects. But Rufo’s next-to-last bullet point above strongly suggests that the hiring process will select scholars with conservative views. (Additional proposals posted by Rufo since then include a plan to “rebrand New College in a neoclassical visual style”—which sounds like a pricey exercise in traditionalist fantasy, especially given that New College’s current look is very far from being an ultra-modernist eyesore.)
Meanwhile, DeSantis’s chief of staff, James Uthmeier, had told the Daily Caller that the administration hopes to remake New College into “Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.” Rufo, in turn, mentions a “new core curriculum and academic master plan following the Hillsdale model” in his additional proposals for the New College overhaul. The idea of Hillsdale, a private, nondenominational Christian college in Michigan, as a model for the new New College is further reinforced by the fact that one of the DeSantis-appointed trustees is Hillsdale dean Matthew Spalding.
Hillsdale does have a strong classical curriculum. But it is also quite explicitly a religious school whose website stresses “learning, character, faith, and freedom” as “the inseparable purposes of Hillsdale College”; obviously, this could not be replicated at a state college without running afoul of the First Amendment. No less relevant is the fact that Hillsdale is distinctly politically conservative—and, in recent years, solidly on the MAGA train.
During the Trump presidency, Hillsdale developed strong ties to the administration, to the dismay of people like Atlantic columnist Conor Friedersdorf who had earlier admired the college’s commitment to classical education and moral values. Hillsdale President Larry Arnn chaired Trump’s Advisory 1776 Commission, created in September 2020 to promote “patriotic education” and fend off radical assaults on American history such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project; its sole output was the “1776 Report,” which even most critics of the 1619 Project decried as simplistic, polemical and badly flawed. (Among other things, its roster of “challenges to America’s principles” listed twentieth-century American progressivism on a par with slavery, fascism, and communism.) Hillsdale’s politics, and its level of politicization, can also be gleaned from its list of recent campus speakers, whose talks are printed in the school’s Imprimis newsletter. Among them: include Roger Kimball on “The January 6 Insurrection Hoax,” the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway on how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rigged the 2020 election, right-wing lawyer Harmeet Dhillon on the alleged persecution of law-abiding patriots by the Justice Department, a slew of COVID cranks, and—I could go on, but you get the picture. Oh, and DeSantis himself appears in the Hillsdale archive as the keynote speaker at the college’s National Leadership Seminar last September. So, too, does Christopher Rufo, who delivered a speech titled “Laying Siege to the Institutions.”
Now, Rufo is celebrating the New College Board of Trustees takeover as a success in this “siege,” seeing as he and his team are now “over the walls.”
Last year, I outlined my theory of action in a speech at Hillsdale College entitled “Laying Siege to the Institutions.”https://t.co/PtSIasEdCN
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 6, 2023
We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within.
Under the leadership of Gov. DeSantis, our all-star board will demonstrate that the public universities, which have been corrupted by woke nihilism, can be recaptured, restructured, and reformed. pic.twitter.com/0qWAExAQBj
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 6, 2023
Rufo is also fairly unabashed about the political nature of his intended remake of New College, telling Goldberg, “We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values” (italics in the original). On Twitter, Rufo was plainspoken about the fact that he agrees with progressives on one thing: institutional neutrality is a myth.
It's amusing that liberal writers will say "conservatives take over a progressive college and will harm institutional neutrality," without realizing that, by saying "progressive college," they are betraying the fact that institutional neutrality is a myth. They don't even see it.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 11, 2023
Rufo’s blatant political hackery—which compromises the value of his sometimes-worthwhile investigative work on progressive excesses in schools, the public sector, and the corporate world—is something I have noted before. On this occasion, he was spotted on Twitter tangling with New York magazine’s Chait, whose column on the DeSantis appointment to the New College board mentioned in passing that Rufo had attacked DeSantis critics as “groomers.”
Hi Jonathan, what’s the best contact for your editor? You’ve included a significant factual error in your recent piece. I have never called any person a “groomer”; in fact, I have explicitly counseled *against* doing so.
You should issue a correction. pic.twitter.com/iGGuH6x4eT
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 9, 2023
The gist of Rufo’s complaint was that he had used the verb “grooming,” not the noun “groomer,” when attacking DeSantis critics (specifically, Disney and teachers’ unions). No, seriously:
Mr. Rufo wishes to emphasize that he accuses DeSantis's targets of groomING, not being groomERS, and we have accordingly taken pains to ensure there is no confusion on this point. https://t.co/GlxStMUY0q https://t.co/f1Nc7cfkHr
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) January 10, 2023
Chait had the text of his column tweaked accordingly. He also posted evidence that Rufo had not only accused DeSantis opponents and other progressives of “grooming”—via teaching kids about transgender and gay identities—but used the “g-word” as a noun when he bragged about getting “Disney groomer” to trend on social media. In fact, it’s worse than that: As Chait himself chronicled last summer, Rufo had insinuated, aiming to score a cheap point and marshaling junk statistics to support his case, that public schools are infested with actual child molesters.
In any case, except to his hardcore supporters, Rufo did not come out of this looking well.
A few words are in order about the other DeSantis appointees to the New College board. Charles Kesler, a professor of government at California’s Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books, is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, which styles itself as the intellectual center of the MAGA movement. (Kesler was also a member of Trump’s 1776 Commission.) Mark Bauerlein, an Emory University English professor emeritus, is a senior editor at First Things, the Catholic magazine with strong “national conservative” leanings. Among his recent oeuvre: a hagiographic essay on “The Historical Meaning of Donald Trump” for the conspiracy-peddling Epoch Times and a tweet bemoaning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appearance in the U.S. Congress with a Ukrainian flag (a gift from Ukrainian frontline soldiers) as an assault on America’s civic integrity:
It takes a whole lot of ignorance of American history and civics not to recoil at this photo, but given NAEP US History scores for the last decades, along with the teaching of US history at the college level, no problem. https://t.co/8OXgIamxpB
— Mark Bauerlein (@mark_bauerlein) December 23, 2022
The two Florida-based nominees, securities attorney Debra Jenks and educator Eddie Speir, are fairly low-profile people. Jenks, a top-rated lawyer in Palm Beach, is the only New College graduate in the bunch; she seems to have no record of political or ideological activism, and even her political donations appear more or less evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Speir, the cofounder of Inspiration Academy, a Christian school in Bradenton, Florida, is another story. For one thing, Inspiration Academy’s website indicates that its curriculum is based primarily on textbooks from Bob Jones University Press (which apply a “Biblical worldview” to history and are explicitly Creationist). The Sarasota Herald-Tribune also reports that Speir’s Twitter feed is full of COVID-19 conspiracy theory, including, most recently, the baseless claim that football player Damar Hamlin’s near-fatal cardiac arrest during a game was vaccine-related:
Perhaps, to really round it out, the still-existing vacancy on the board could be filled with Candace Owens, the MAGA flamethrower who suggested the other day that she would unhesitatingly kill Dr. Anthony Fauci if he “came at [her] kid with a vaccine.”
To give credit where it’s due: For all his Trumpiness, Bauerlein is a man who, by all appearances, genuinely cares about the humanities and the classical curriculum. This has brought him into apparent contradiction with Rufo. In an interview last week with the Herald-Tribune, Bauerlein said that drastic changes at the college are unlikely, that the existing students and tenured faculty would complicate any plans for a complete overhaul, and that a public university should have “a certain measure of pluralism” rather than a narrow political orientation. (Earlier this month, he also argued on Twitter that a classical education cannot be “right wing conservative” since it must include thinkers associated with the left, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.) Bauerlein told the Herald-Tribune he is not even sure that New College can be entirely reinvented as a school of classical education, let alone a conservative one. He also wants to acquaint himself with the actual situation at the school before making conclusions about what changes are needed (what a concept!).
In the same interview, Bauerlein stressed that no one from DeSantis’s office told him how he was expected to vote and concluded that DeSantis and his team “want independent minds, they really do.”
Which is presumably why every single DeSantis pick for the board of trustees, with the possible exception of Jenks, is a Trump fan and a DeSantis ally.
If DeSantis’s objective had been simply to appoint board members who would counteract excessive “woke” influence at New College, he could have picked plenty of people who weren’t in that mold. For instance, Columbia University professor and author John McWhorter, a self-identified black liberal whose book Woke Racism is scathingly critical of Kendi-style “anti-racism” even as McWhorter has been no less scathing about Trump. Or, say, Christina Hoff Sommers, a former academic who is sufficiently “anti-woke” to have been classed among the earlier-mentioned “intellectual dark web” and to have been targeted for deplatforming at several progressive universities, but has said that she regards Trump as an example of “amoral masculinity” rather than positive masculinity. Or social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, who has strongly criticized academia’s move toward prioritizing “social justice” over truth and who recently resigned from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology over a new rule requiring presenters at the society’s annual conference to submit a statement on equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.
Then again, those critics of left-wing zealotry in academia might not have been on board with the DeSantis and Rufo bid for a right-wing power grab. In an email to me last week, Haidt had this to say about DeSantis’s latest sortie against the Woke Peril:
People who think the ends justify the means are dangerous, especially when they are leaders of institutions, or political leaders. If they violate longstanding norms to achieve their current goals, they set a precedent. They remove norms and bring us closer to a country of chaos where all that matters is power. This is what DeSantis is now doing with New College. I am horrified that a governor has simply decided, on his own, to radically change a college. Even if this is legal, it is unethical, and it is a very bad precedent and omen for our country.
Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which deals extensively with academic freedom issues in our universities, refrained from overt criticism of the new board but also sounded a cautionary note:
Trustees of public universities must work toward expanding and protecting academic freedom for all, consistent with their obligations under the First Amendment. Students, faculty, alumni, and the general public benefit when trustees foster a campus environment where academic freedom and free expression flourish, and FIRE will praise them when they do so. Conversely, FIRE is concerned whenever public universities depart from their obligations under the First Amendment. If that happens at New College of Florida, we encourage students and faculty to contact FIRE.
Obviously, it’s too early to tell what will happen at New College of Florida. If the board does choose the thoughtful and moderate approach Bauerlein advocates in his Herald-Sun interview, it could conceivably redound to the benefit of the school. But culture warriors like DeSantis (for whom, again, the anti-woke crusade is a key part of his expected presidential bid) and Rufo are unlikely to be interested in a thoughtful and moderate approach.
Are they interested in effectively rolling back the excesses of “social justice” zealotry? If they are, they’re going about it in the worst possible way: To associate such a pushback with a right-wing brand is to lose centrists and liberals who also dislike those excesses; in many cases, it will make those centrist critics more reluctant to criticize the illiberal left because they know that to do so is to play into the hands of the illiberal right. Stoking the culture wars, rallying the Trumpist base, and using the power of the state to defeat bad ideas is not the road back to sanity.
From The Bulwark, January 16, 2023
Willmoore Kendall’s American Affirmation
By: Richard M. Reinsch II
Many conservatives behave as if their job is merely to slow the advance of progressivism, or—at best—block it from gaining more ground. But according to Willmoore Kendall, this isn’t enough. They must work to extirpate progressive advances on the American constitutional order and replace them with sound political and moral principles.
Achieving this unmet feat will require building and moving on what Kendall termed “a battle line” across the entire field. But this battle line is hardly a call for the politics of war or friend versus enemy, as advocated by post-liberal conservatives and certain voices from the so-called New Right.
Kendall’s affirmation is a constitutional morality rooted in both the procedure of constitutional power and in the unwritten mores that must guide a people who bind themselves to a limited charter of government, while also entrusting to themselves an even greater amount of self-governing authority than provided to the national government. This morality is deeply political and finds its explication in the Federalist Papers, where we see how Americans must be a constitutional people. How can conservatives maintain this virtuous republic?
In his 1963 book, The Conservative Affirmation, republished in 2022 by Regnery Books, Kendall sought to define an American conservatism rooted in our major documents and debates. He looked to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and “above all” the Federalist Papers. Daniel McCarthy’s illuminating Foreword in the new edition argues that Kendall meant for the book to challenge both Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1952) and Frank Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom (1962) and serve as the authentic statement of conservatism in America.
Per Kendall, Kirk’s conservatism was too aristocratic, too Burkean, and too rooted in the European experience to be of real service to American conservatives. Meyer had made a god out of liberty, losing the balance of goods that the Constitution was committed to protect, as announced in the Constitution’s Preamble, which listed the classic five-fold ends of government, including liberty. In contrast to both, Kendall stated where his book stands:
With Madison and Hamilton, and with the subsequent American political tradition as a whole, it shares the conviction that the United States, because of the qualities of its people, must and should be governed by the “deliberate sense of the community.” Indeed, its objection to Liberal proposals for the “reform” of our political system is precisely this: Those proposals would (by eliminating deliberation) render impossible the expression of that deliberate sense—or, for that matter, any sense that would be, properly speaking, that of the community…. Its highest political loyalty, in fine, is to the institutions and way of life bequeathed to us by the Philadelphia Convention.
A cursory read of Kendall’s paragraph might leave many uninspired by its understanding of the conservative project. Do we really need a lesson in how a bill becomes a law? More seriously, what exactly is there to deliberate with progressives? They have become in many respects the source of American decline, many conservatives argue. Kendall made this same observation also about progressives. His fear was that if conservatives did not make his prescription the foundation of their ideas and politics, then the progressive advance would instill itself as a revolution, imposing “new modes and orders.”
Kendall always understood the Liberal project as a revolutionary one. Its goal was and remains to carve egalitarianism into our public institutions and to redefine the market and civil society by sameness of result. To this, we can add identity politics, which wants to use government to impose racial socialism. In congressional government, this revolution needed politics by electoral mandate (as opposed to deliberation), the repudiation of seniority in the committee system, the end of the filibuster, and the elimination of rural overrepresentation.
The overthrow of the Electoral College was another aspect. Finally, the long-sought goal was the replacement of congressional majorities with presidential majorities in the use of federal power, with the latter governing on top of actual communities not through them and with them.
Kendall’s list attempted to provide a marker to conservatives of what must be defended if a progressive egalitarian revolution was to be forestalled. Yet, many of its items have either been achieved by progressives or are currently in motion, facing only weak conservative resistance.
We might observe that Kendall’s intellectual struggles with progressives have now become something close to our impending ruin. Many conservatives would dispute Kendall’s list of progressive revolutionary aims or fail to understand the importance of them. If anything, conservatives—in a manner like progressives—yearn for presidential majorities now. We, too, embrace the rhetoric of electoral mandate for change, seeing Congress as a scrum to push into place policies that receive inadequate deliberation because of both congressional polarization and a committee system in decline.
We still defend the Electoral College and the legislative filibuster. Both institutions, however, seem increasingly strange to the broader electorate. The democratic will to power has now become so embedded in our thinking about government that many Americans are unaware of why delay, deliberation, and filtration of voting are positive methods for insuring the republican principle best serves our common good.
Much of Kendall’s book unpacks and defends the statements quoted above by providing a foundation for what Deliberation, Community, and Constitution actually require for their maintenance and successful operation. If William F. Buckley gave National Review the mission to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so,” Kendall’s conservatism did not oppose change outright, but only “change in certain directions” that contradicts our “inherited principle.” Such principle is not good “merely or even primarily because it is inherited, but because it is the product of rational deliberation moving from sound political and moral premises.”
The American Majority
In his book Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970), co-authored with George Carey, Kendall contended that the symbol Americans made to represent the truth of their political order was a virtuous people deliberating under God and natural law in order to create laws that would lead to their liberty and good order as a people. Kendall and Carey expressed very little concern over the various and sundry rights of minorities being protected by a gifted and chosen elite acting through the judicial branch or another organ of government. In a review of the constitutional history of the colonists and Americans from the Mayflower Compact through the Constitution of 1787, Kendall and Carey found that the key principle was deliberation of the people’s representatives to build a civilization worthy of a largely Christian people who believed that there was reason, order, and purpose within creation that they could draw on as a lawful and constitutional people.
Kendall’s Conservative Affirmation stands firmly for the proposition that for any republican constitutional order, the people must be the final arbiter of power, or else we would have a fraudulent government. As Daniel McCarthy notes in his Foreword, “should the Supreme Court be trusted more than the American people and their representatives?” If so, have we just upended our bedrock commitment to self-government? And the answer, according to Kendall, is yes, because elites have used rights-talk to enlist their conceptions of truth over and against popular government. There is nothing necessarily more virtuous about minority government than the rule of majorities through the constitutional process that Publius outlines in the Federalist Papers.
Kendall’s chapter “The Two Majorities”—meaning the clashing representations of the two political branches of the federal government—discusses core political truths with direct application to our situation today. In short, the two majorities are reflected in a congressional majority and a presidential majority and the types of ideas, interests, and members of those different majorities. Kendall contested the position advanced by scholar Robert Dahl whose 1956 book, Preface to Democratic Theory, argues that the presidential majority is the only legitimate majority that should govern. Kendall questioned if there was such a thing as a presidential or really a national majority, somehow above or at least apart from the “structured communities” of legislative districts and states represented in Congress.
A presidential majority seemingly rises above the parochialism found within many congressional districts on spending, immigration, foreign policy, trade, entitlements, and a host of other issues. Presidential majorities, because they understand themselves to represent the will of the whole already, do not point in the direction of deliberation and therefore of compromise and moderation. We are left with a politics of executive rule and administrative fiat.
Kendall’s position was that a presidential majority is one in favor of elites. A national majority does not exist and is really an abstraction made on behalf of elites as to how things should be ideally. The arguments made on its behalf are necessarily composed of ideals formulated by academics, the chattering classes, and then repeated endlessly by media organs that are also run by elites. The ideals of this majority find embodiment in the federal regulators and bureaucracy that serve the president. Contrast this with those representatives who compose congressional majorities. Kendall described how they are much more likely to be beset with arguments, interests, and prejudices of particular people and places.
But congressional majorities are often understood merely as a counterpoint to presidential politics. Political districts, localities, and states, though, offer arguments about national policy with something concrete that comes from real communities with interests. Kendall reminded us that congressional elections are the path we have to the Founders’ Constitution. Thus, congressional elections sometimes still turn not only on policies or vague promises but on character and the virtue of the representative, which was one of Publius’ arguments about how deliberation could build durable and just majorities. That is, the voters of bounded and structured communities send good men and women to deliberate on their behalf and give their judgment on how best to defend and reflect their community in the national councils.
This isn’t to say there won’t be the occasional (or even not so occasional) nincompoop or political opportunist, a problem surely evident in early Congresses, too, but that they will be overwhelmingly canceled by more reflective representatives. In the process, these representatives form governing majorities that are reflective of citizens and the communities they live in as opposed to the glowing and always unfulfilled ideals of presidential majorities.
The Open Society
In defense of political communities, Kendall aggressively rejected the open society thinking of philosopher Karl Popper and the related absolutist skepticism of John Stuart Mill regarding truth and legal coercion. Mill famously argued that because no one has the truth in any argument, the state itself must surely refrain from imposing one set of beliefs on other persons. In this manner, society should in reality be an ongoing and iterative discussion process whose highest good is absolute freedom of speech and expression. Mill, we can cheekily say, did hold to that truth.
Kendall rejected in his day what has become the overall philosophy of public opinion and politics in our country for the last 70 years or so. This public philosophy has been composed of a regnant relativism, which has enthroned a vapid individualism, a secularist society, and now a spurning of American patriotism. Moreover, Kendall did this in the face of a then-emerging judicial belief that these commitments of Popper and Mill were constitutionally required by the First Amendment and its incorporation against the states, which neutered their capacity to be authentically self-governing about the things they loved and rejected.
Our tradition, stressed Kendall, does not mandate an absolutist position on individual liberty and speech; nor does it require that we adopt Mill’s On Liberty as American civic gospel. Kendall flatly stated that Mill’s skepticism about any claim to truth, his requirement of unending discussion, and a very limited justification for censorship is a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies operate and perpetuate themselves. The open society of Mill falls apart because it is inseparable from an assault on truth, he concluded. No society can actually defend itself when it makes liberty of speech and expression its absolutes.
Existing societies, Kendall observed, are built on public goods, truths, and embodiments of a way of life that its members who enjoy its existence will naturally, if not unconsciously, defend. Mill and the progressive elite tell them to stand down because truth doesn’t really exist and their provincial beliefs are wrong, in any event. So, the communist whose beliefs would destroy American civilization has the same right to speak as the American patriot who seeks to defend a constitutional government of limited powers. And, Kendall noted, if we are serious about Mill’s argument, then we have to be open to the possibility that the communist position might prevail.
Kendall is unsparing when he observed, “The Open Society confers freedom upon its members, but it does so at the cost of its own freedom as a society.” The Open Society, in rejecting that human beings can know truth, finally can’t be tolerant. If all opinions are equal, then any opinion can also be rejected as a greater utility undergirds the probability of society moving in one direction rather than another: the ends will justify the means.
A republic, Kendall said, cannot long thrive and succeed if it’s not prepared to defend and maintain its conception of justice, of the good, and of how its citizens should live together in what they affirm and in what they reject. Such a society will slowly come apart at the seams as its citizens increasingly look at one another and realize they have no core beliefs and principles that they hold in common. The result will be apathy, anger, and aggression as civilized argument becomes impossible to sustain because the public square is no longer upheld by a consensus about who the “We the people” really are.
This, ultimately, was the issue involved in the Joseph McCarthy hearings, Kendall reasoned. He detailed a series of arguments the McCarthy hearings engaged and the reasons why Americans favored and opposed him, but the key question, Kendall highlighted, that McCarthy raised was if an American could espouse communist beliefs regardless of whether those beliefs were capable of actually being implemented in American government. Senator McCarthy answered “no” to this question, and his opponents could not abide that answer. Communism was illegal in word and deed, McCarthy and his followers held. And that inaugurated the nearly warlike drama that unfolded around him.
This is a hard teaching and many struggle even to consider it, but it should not be casually dismissed. The constitutional morality of Publius, exemplified by deliberation, depends on Americans believing in and loving their country. We find ourselves increasingly adrift as a people and yet dominated by an ontological relativism that constantly leaves us unsure of who we are and of what we should do.
Kendall told us to make a patriotic decision in defense of our country because it is built on sound moral and political premises found in our American inheritance of the great Western tradition. Neither Mill nor Progressive elites should get the last word on what it means to be an American.
Richard M. Reinsch II is Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. He is coauthor with Peter Augustine Lawler of A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty (Kansas Press, May 2019). You can follow him @Reinsch84
From Law and Liberty, February 1, 2023
The College Board Strips Down Its A.P. Curriculum for African American Studies
By: Anemona Hartocollis and Eliza Fawcett
After heavy criticism from Gov. Ron DeSantis, the College Board released on Wednesday an official curriculum for its new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies — stripped of much of the subject matter that had angered the governor and other conservatives.
The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum.
And it added something new: “Black conservatism” is now offered as an idea for a research project.
When it announced the A.P. course in August, the College Board clearly believed it was providing a class whose time had come, and it was celebrated by eminent scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard as an affirmation of the importance of African American studies. But the course, which is meant to be for all students of diverse backgrounds, quickly ran into a political buzz saw after an early draft leaked to conservative publications like The Florida Standard and National Review.
In January, Governor DeSantis of Florida, who is expected to run for president, announced he would ban the curriculum, citing the draft version. State education officials said it was not historically accurate and violated state law that regulates how race-related issues are taught in public schools.
The attack on the A.P. course turned out to be the prelude to a much larger agenda. On Tuesday, Governor DeSantis unveiled a proposal to overhaul higher education that would eliminate what he called “ideological conformity” by among other things, mandating courses in Western civilization.
In another red flag, the College Board faced the possibility of other opposition: more than two dozen states have adopted some sort of measure against critical race theory, according to a tracking project by the University of California, Los Angeles, law school.
David Coleman, the head of the College Board, said in an interview that the changes were all made for pedagogical reasons, not to bow to political pressure. “At the College Board, we can’t look to statements of political leaders,” he said. The changes, he said, came from “the input of professors” and “longstanding A.P. principles.”
He said that during the initial test of the course this school year, the board received feedback that the secondary, more theoretical sources were “quite dense” and that students connected more with primary sources, which he said have always been the foundation of A.P. courses.
“We experimented with a lot of things including assigning secondary sources, and we found a lot of issues arose as we did,” Mr. Coleman said. “I think what is most surprising and powerful for most people is looking directly at people’s experience.”
The dispute over the A.P. course is about more than just the content of a high school class. Education is the center of much vitriolic partisan debate, and the College Board’s decision to try to build a curriculum covering one of the most charged subjects in the country — the history of race in America — may have all but guaranteed controversy. If anything, the arguments over the curriculum underscore the fact that the United States is a country that cannot agree on its own story, especially the complex history of Black Americans.
In light of the politics, the College Board seemed to opt out of the politics. In its revised 234-page curriculum framework, the content on Africa, slavery, reconstruction and the civil rights movement remains largely the same. But the study of contemporary topics — including Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, queer life and the debate over reparations — is downgraded. The subjects are no longer part of the exam, and are simply offered on a list of options for a required research project.
And even that list, in a nod to local laws, “can be refined by local states and districts.”
The expunged writers and scholars include Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia, which touts her work as “foundational in critical race theory”; Roderick Ferguson, a Yale professor who has written about queer social movements; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author who has made the case for reparations for slavery. Gone, too, is bell hooks, the writer who shaped discussions about race, feminism and class.
A.P. exams are deeply embedded in the American education system. Students take the courses and exams to show their academic prowess when applying to college. Most four-year colleges and universities grant college credit for students who score high enough on an A.P. exam. And more than a million public high school students graduating in 2021 took at least one A.P. exam.
But the fracas over the exam raises questions about whether the African American Studies course, as modified, fulfills its mission of mimicking a college-level course, which usually expects students to analyze secondary sources and take on contentious topics.
Chester E. Finn, Jr., a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said the College Board had come up with a smart strategy by not eradicating the “touchy parts,” but rather making them optional.
“DeSantis likes to make noise and he’s running for president,” Mr. Finn said. “But they’ve been getting feedback from all over the place in the 60 schools they’ve been piloting this in. I think it’s a way of dealing with the United States at this point, not just DeSantis. Some of these things they might want to teach in New York, but not Dallas. Or San Francisco but not St. Petersburg.”
But Professor Crenshaw, the critical race theory scholar, suggested that those theoretical elements were essential to the course work.
The A.P. course “is a corrective, it is an intervention, it is an expansion,” she said. “And for it to be true to the mission of telling the true history, it cannot exclude intersectionality, it cannot exclude critical thinking about race.”
She spoke in an interview before the final curriculum was released, but had seen an early draft, which included a now-omitted reference to her widely cited journal article “Mapping the Margins.” In the late 1980s, Ms. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” which refers to the way various forms of inequality often work together, and was a word to which Florida objected, saying it is foundational to critical race theory.
Ms. Crenshaw said she was stunned when she saw that the Florida Department of Education had targeted topics related to intersectionality, Black feminism and queer theory. “African American history is not just male. It’s not just straight. It’s not just middle class,” she said. “It has to tell the story of all of us.”
More than 200 faculty members in African American studies condemned Governor DeSantis’s interference in the A.P. course in a letter published in Medium on Tuesday. They accused him of censorship and of trying “to intimidate the College Board into appeasement.”
A.P. exams have incited conflict before. A U.S. History curriculum guide in 2014 had to be revised after it was attacked for calling Ronald Reagan “bellicose” toward the Soviet Union and giving more prominence to a Native American chief than to Ben Franklin.
Ilya Shapiro, director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute, said he did not object to topics like the Black Panthers and the Black is Beautiful movement being included because “that’s certainly part of what was America.”
But if the curriculum was going to embrace theory, he said, the draft curriculum should have named conservative or independent Black thinkers like John McWhorter, Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell.
There are hints that the College Board is embedding some of the disputed material, without being explicit about it. “Intersectionality” is cited eight times in the draft curriculum, but only once in the new version, as an optional topic for a project.
But the concept seems to sneak into required course content, under the heading of essential knowledge, referencing the writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Mari Evans, who “explore the lived experience of Black women and men and show how their race, gender and social class can affect how they are perceived, their roles and their economic opportunities.”
Acceptance for the new curriculum is important to the College Board, a nonprofit, because A.P. courses are a major source of revenue. The Board took in more than $1 billion in program service revenue in 2019, of which more than $490 million came from “AP and Instruction,” according to its tax-exempt filing.
Teachers who are trying out the draft curriculum said it has been popular.
“I had an interest meeting during lunch and my room was full, standing room only,” said Nelva Wiliamson, a teacher at Young Women’s College Preparatory Academy, a public all-girls school in Houston which is majority Black and Hispanic.
Sharon Courtney, a high school teacher piloting the course in New York State, said the backlash frustrated her, as every teacher tweaks and refines a new curriculum.
“You’re critiquing something that isn’t finished,” she said. “Wait until I cook the meal.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
From The New York Times, February 1, 2023
How Willmoore Kendall Invented Trumpism
By: Jacob Heilbrunn
Christopher H. Owen, Heaven Can Indeed Fall: The Life of Willmoore Kendall. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). 256 pp., $105.00.
IN 1994, the year that Newt Gingrich formulated the “Contract with America” and Republicans went on to capture the House of Representatives in the midterm elections for the first time in four decades, Alan Brinkley, a professor at Columbia University, published an influential essay in the American Historical Review. It was called “The Problem of American Conservatism.” The problem that Brinkley sought to diagnose was not the rise of conservatism, but what he described as the lack of imagination of American historians who had failed to acknowledge, let alone comprehend, the vitality of the Republican Right. Their implicit endorsement of a kind of Whig interpretation about the inexorable rise of liberalism had occluded the study of conservatism, rendering it “something of an orphan in historical scholarship.” Brinkley concluded that “a recognition of many traditions, including those of the Right” was overdue.
That recognition has taken place in recent decades. Historians such as Geoffrey Kabaservice have explored the ideological transformation of the GOP since the 1950s, from a bastion of establishment Republicans to an insurgent movement. Others have examined the influence of conservative media over the decades, including Eric Alterman in What Liberal Media? and Nicole Hemmer in Messengers of the Right. And in 2020, the Library of America published an anthology of conservative thought in the past century that was edited by Andrew J. Bacevich. But perhaps the most notable development over the past several decades has been the appearance of biographies of charter members of the conservative intelligentsia, including Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, L. Brent Bozell, William A. Rusher, and Ayn Rand.
CHRISTOPHER H. Owen’s Heaven Can Indeed Fall is the latest entrant to this burgeoning field. Owen, who is a professor of history at Northeastern State University, meticulously chronicles the turbulent life of Willmoore Kendall. Kendall was a Trotskyist in the 1930s who went on to become a staunch conservative, embracing Senator Joseph McCarthy and advising Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. At Yale, where he taught political theory for a number of years, his mission was to topple liberal elites by creating a conservative vanguard. Kendall, you could say, was the original polarizer. A gifted political theorist and slashing orator, Kendall championed the fusion of conservatism with populism, contending that liberals possessed an “instinctive dislike for the American way of life and for the basic political and social principles presupposed in it.” No one did more to forge the intellectual arsenal of the modern Right than Kendall.
The temerity of this Hephaestus at Yale won him a number of admirers. The political philosopher Leo Strauss, who oversaw the creation of his own Bruderbund at the University of Chicago that was dedicated to returning to the timeless wisdom of the ancients, corresponded for several decades with Kendall, lauding him as “the only man who vindicates the honor of our profession.” But Kendall’s volatility—his philandering, his heavy drinking, his flashy suits, and, above all, his sheer cussedness—also meant that he was as notorious for his temperament as his ideas. As Garry Wills observed, “Willmoore was the one man with the depth, training, and style of presentation to lead a conservative revival; but that his prickliness always got in the way of his abilities as a proselytizer.”
Both William F. Buckley, Jr., who met Kendall as a sophomore at Yale and mimicked his elaborate syntax, and Saul Bellow, who befriended Kendall in Chicago, found him fascinating. In his 1999 novel Redhunter, a defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Buckley, whom Kendall recruited into the CIA in 1950, portrays his old professor as Willmoore Sherrill of Columbia University, a mentor to a young aide to McCarthy. Sherrill enjoys nothing more than baiting his liberal colleagues at faculty meetings:
There’s an old colored gentleman who looks after my Fellows suite. He said to me this morning, “Professor, is it true there’s people who want to overthrow the government by force and violence?” I said, “Yes, that’s true Jamieson.” He said, “Well, professor, why don’t we just run them out of town?” Sherrill turned to his distinguished colleagues. “I think Jamieson has a more sophisticated understanding of democratic theory than any of you gentlemen.”
In his short story “Mosby’s Memoirs,” Bellow follows along similar, if more elegant, lines, evoking the consternation that Kendall created among his academic brethren who wanted, in contemporary parlance, to cancel him:
The real, the original Mosby approach brought Mosby hatred, got Mosby fired. Princeton University had offered Mosby a lump sum to retire seven years early. One hundred and forty thousand dollars. Because his mode of discourse was so upsetting to the academic community. Mosby was invited to no television programs. He was like the Guerrilla Mosby of the Civil War. When he galloped in, all were slaughtered.
Indeed, Kendall was a warrior intellectual par excellence who maintained a steady bead on the liberal class enemy—the unelected, unaccountable, and unholy trinity of academics, journalists, and bureaucrats who sought, as far as possible, to distend American democracy for their own elitist ends.
KENDALL, WHO was born on March 5, 1909, grew up in Oklahoma. His Sooner state origins instilled in him a lifelong suspicion of an eastern establishment that he viewed as inimical to the virtues incarnated by the American heartland. Kendall, who was the eldest son of a blind Methodist minister, experienced intense pressure at home to succeed. A child prodigy, he read Hawthorne’s short stories as a four-year-old and entered high school at age nine. Upon graduation at age fourteen, he was already working as a cub reporter for the Tulsa Tribune, a newspaper that had helped to spark the ghastly 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre with the inflammatory headline, “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.”
Kendall liked to engage in intense debates with his father, a gifted public speaker who traveled widely around Oklahoma and espoused interracial and interreligious harmony, defended Jewish rights, and denounced the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan threatened his father. But in March 1923, on his fourteenth birthday, Willmoore boasted to a friend about his plans to resuscitate a state chapter of the Junior KKK with himself as Grand Wizard. A year later, however, he condemned a Klan offshoot at the University of Oklahoma for bullying students. At age seventeen Kendall, who was fluent in Spanish and French, graduated from Oklahoma with a degree in Romance languages.
In 1931, Kendall won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Pembroke College. There he sat at the feet of the political theorist R. G. Collingwood whom he described as “the most superior dialectician I have ever known.” Kendall’s father was less impressed. He wrote to apprise Willmoore of his apprehensions that he would end up a “pedantic donkey besotted with excess of philosophical learning.” Actually, it was worse than that. At Oxford, Kendall became the proud convert of his own scholarship, embracing Trotskyism after reading Marx’s Capital, a work that fortified his previous conviction that Franklin D. Roosevelt was much too timorous in combating the twin evils of unemployment and big business. Indeed, by 1935 Kendall regarded the existence of private property itself as tantamount to “an enslaving convention” whose biggest stronghold was in supposedly democratic America. The Pembrokian’s new faith did not go unnoticed back home. “When Willmoore visited Oklahoma in 1935,” Owen writes, “his father expressed dismay that his son had accepted communist dogma.”
After graduating from Oxford, Kendall worked as a journalist for United Press International in Spain. His sympathy for the Left began to diminish as Spain lurched into civil war and anarchy, instilling in Kendall a permanent fear of the violent consequences of sudden social collapse. He returned forthwith to America to occupy a position as an instructor at Louisiana State University and to earn a Ph.D. in political theory at the University of Illinois. At Louisiana, he quickly became friends with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, both of whom were former Rhodes scholars, as well as Katherine Anne Porter. Amid what he dubbed a “comfortable pluralism,” Kendall shucked off his Trotskyist views but remained a leftist and an isolationist. His early scholarly essays hailed the wisdom of the common man, attacked judicial review, and castigated efforts to “equate democracy with a particular set of ‘natural rights.’” At bottom, the Bill of Rights, he stated, functioned as a mechanism to perpetuate elite power. As an admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he advocated majoritarianism. He would end up transferring his populist toolkit from Left to Right. For the rest of his career, he would preach that Congress, not the presidency or the judiciary, came closest to embodying the Rousseauian general will.
According to Owen, “when read closely … these early articles reveal flashes of Kendall’s brilliance, heralding his later intricately construction and inquisitorial style of scholarship.” Exhibit A was his audacious 1940 dissertation, “John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule,” which would later help him land a position at Yale. He divined in Locke’s political theory an escape hatch—a “latent premise”—that permitted Locke to “argue both for individual right and for a right of the majority to define individual rights” because he believed the people “rational and just” enough “never to withdraw a right which the individual ought to have.” “Call me Rabbi,” he telegrammed home after it passed muster.
Kendall had passionately opposed American entry into World War II, but in 1942 he landed a post at the new Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, which was headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller. Kendall’s mandate was to oversee the production of propaganda for Latin America. He told friends that he was “spreading myself like the green bay tree,” a reference to a verse from Psalm 37:35. “Intelligence work,” Owen writes, “pushed him away from the Left, for it was as an intelligence officer that Kendall made his rightward turn.” In 1946, he was appointed chief of the Latin American Division of the Office of Reports and Estimates for the Central Intelligence Group, a precursor of the CIA. Owen explains that Kendall now “found himself near the center of the burgeoning postwar American intelligence community.”
His main task was to purge communists from that community. “I’m the guy who ‘busted’ the Maurice Halperin operation at OSS and State,” he bragged to the ex-communist Nathaniel Weyl in 1960, “and because of that was named his successor.” Kendall had more than just communists in his gunsights. He also despised liberals in the CIA and State Department, presaging the Right’s antipathy toward both outfits. Bellow captures his loathing for them in “Mosby’s Memoirs”:
He said that the Foreign Service was staffed by rejects of the power structure. Young gentleman from good Eastern colleges who couldn’t make it as Wall Street lawyers were allowed to interpret the alleged interests of their class in the State Department bureaucracy.
Kendall’s hostility toward this mandarin class created a stir in 1949 when he denounced in the journal World Politics the prominent Yale professor and CIA official Sherman Kent who had published a new book, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy. Kent argued that CIA analysts should seek to provide policymakers with objective information. Kendall would have none of this. In his view, Kent’s book was neither strategic nor intelligent. It was of paramount importance not simply to collect information but to scrutinize and interpret it in light of ruthless Soviet ideological aims. Liberals shrank from acknowledging this truth. They were blind to the true gravity of the threat facing America. As controversy swirled around his critique, Kendall told the conservative scholar Francis Graham Wilson, “We’ve had a common enemy (though of course not a common quarrel for many years)—the Liberals.”
In 1947, Yale, on the basis of his book on Locke and his government service, appointed Kendall a fellow at Pierson College. It got more than it bargained for. After he unsuccessfully battled his senior colleagues to hire Eric Voegelin and Herman Finer, Kendall became a pariah in the Government department. “From now on I teach my classes and don’t get close enough to my senior colleagues,” Kendall remarked, “to see the whites of their eyes.”
Not quite. With Buckley and Bozell as his sidekicks, he continually courted public controversy. New Haven became Kendall’s proving ground for successive assaults on liberal orthodoxies. In April 1948, in a debate with supporters of Henry Wallace’s campaign for the presidency, Kendall stated over the radio station WAVZ that they had “in effect transferred their loyalty to the Soviet Union.” There can be no doubting that Wallace, who visited a Soviet labor camp in 1944, only to praise it for its enlightened practices, was naïve about the Soviet threat, but this was putting it starkly indeed. After the broadcast, Kendall told Nathaniel S. Colley, a Black law student who had defended Wallace, that the accusation had “specific reference to and included him.” After Colley threatened a lawsuit, Kendall recanted.
“For Kendall,” Owen rather blandly notes, “the sovereign right of the American people to protect itself from all enemies took precedence over individual liberties.” In 1950, he publicly supported the “Mundt Bill,” which called for deporting communists. They were, Kendall decreed, “incapable of participating in democratic government.” With William F. Buckley, Jr. or L. Brent Bozell serving as a partner in debates about censorship, civil liberties, and civil rights legislation, Kendall acquired an insalubrious reputation among the wider Yale faculty. In 1950, the political scientist V.O. Key told Kendall he would never receive a promotion and could either resign or stay on as an associate professor. Matters were not improved by the publication in 1954, on the eve of the Army-McCarthy hearings, of Buckley and Bozell’s book, McCarthy and His Enemies, which Kendall closely edited. Buckley and Bozell stated that McCarthy’s great challenge was “how to get by our disintegrated ruling elite, which had no stomach for battle, and get down to the business of fighting the enemy in our midst.”
It amounted to a popularization of Kendall’s teachings about majoritarian rule and social consensus. McCarthy was a formative figure for Kendall and Buckley, a populist tribune who could mobilize Americans against the threat of internal subversion that had been fostered by naïve New Deal liberals. Like Buckley, Kendall always remained a McCarthy votary. In 1963, he published an essay titled “McCarthyism: The Pons Asinorum of Contemporary Conservatism,” which pleaded for social orthodoxy and maintained that liberals were acting in a revolutionary fashion to undermine it.
At the heart of Kendall’s sallies was a sweeping claim: majority rule meant that Americans need not be squeamish about excising the social “cancer” of communism from the body politic. So wedded was Kendall to his stance about the limits of liberty, including free expression, that in one essay he declared that the Athenian Assembly had been well within its rights to execute Socrates as a public enemy. Kendall also denounced a bipartisan foreign policy as inherently elitist and alien to American traditions. Instead, foreign policy should consist of the “native good sense of the American electorate.”
WHEN NATIONAL Review first appeared in 1955, it offered Kendall a wider ambit for his strictures. The inaugural editorial warned of a vast liberal propaganda machine “engaged in a major, sustained assault upon the sanity, and upon the prudence and the morality of the American people.” But how sane and prudent and moral were the fledgling magazine’s own stands? It was a vociferous opponent of civil rights at home and a reliable apologist for nasty right-wing regimes abroad. In 1960, Kendall reviewed Nathaniel Weyl’s book The Negro in American Civilization for National Review, a racist tract that argued for the innate biological inferiority of Blacks. Kendall asked,
Could it be we shall never do justice to the Negroes in our midst, or the Negroes to themselves, save as we all recognize that as a group they may have a lesser capacity than the rest of us for civilizational achievement?” When we impose upon them equal responsibility for civilizational achievement we may be doing them not justice but injustice.
Kendall, who visited Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, wrote Leo Strauss in a 1957 letter that the military strongman had gotten a bum rap: El Jefe’s bloody and corrupt rule actually exemplified “Hobbes’ ‘public-spirited philosophy,’ in your own phrase, translated into palpitating reality; wherefore to call it, as men commonly do, a dictatorship based on something called force, is to miss all in it that is most interesting.”
As the awestruck tone of his correspondence with Strauss, which was published in 2002 in Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives, reveals, Kendall had a man-crush on him. In one letter, Kendall described himself as “always in statu pupillari with you...” The two bonded over their mutual interest in philosophy and politics as well as their contempt for the intellectual aridity of the behavioral political scientists who dominated the profession. Under Strauss’ influence, Kendall performed a volte-face on his original views about Locke’s “latent premise.” “‘Locke the liberal,’” Strauss told Kendall, “is the chief or perhaps the sole idol in the temple of liberalism and whoever questions that idol is guilty of what the liberals themselves call ‘orthodoxy.’”
Kendall echoed Strauss’ contention that Locke had deliberately concealed his true views about private property and individual rights for fear of riling up his countrymen. Kendall, who had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1952, wrote that Locke’s praise for Christian morals was humbug, a smokescreen for hedonism, or what Strauss, in a memorable phrase, deemed “the joyless pursuit of joy.” Modern liberal society, Kendall averred, had gone badly astray in elevating individual rights above social duties. “The Lockeans in America,” Kendall wrote, “are the Liberals,” while “Conservatives ... must learn to understand themselves as the anti-Lockeans.” Strauss was elated. He expressed his admiration for Kendall’s “forceful and noble” work, declaring that he was “the only man who, without being my student, understood marvelously what I thought and intended.” It’s a pity that Owen never grapples with the unresolved tension between Kendall’s attraction to the elitism propounded by Strauss and his own advocacy of populism, not to mention the discrepancy between his personal life and ostentatious avowal of the need for a public morality. Like not a few conservatives over the years, he was wont to preach water and drink wine. If Kendall remained on the warpath against liberals, he also went on to battle Buckley in 1963 after he made Kendall a contributing rather than a senior editor at National Review. Kendall, who was teaching at the University of Dallas, demanded that Buckley remove his name from the masthead before going on to declare that he felt “about NR, much as I would about an ex-wife of mine who’d become a call-girl.” Kendall’s quondam protege gave as good as he got, responding that when it came to “wives and call-girls,” he could “only welcome the news that you have finally learned to distinguish between the two.” Decades later, when I met Buckley for lunch at the New York Yacht Club, he bemusedly recounted that he had instituted the change at Kendall’s own suggestion, only to be denounced by him for following through on it.
WHEN KENDALL died in June 1967, his old friend Charles Hyneman spoke of his “raging compulsion to expose error and force recognition of sound principles.” His former student at Yale Charles M. Lichenstein declared, “here is one sometime disciple of his who—however he messed up our border treaties—never will forget, never will reject, and never will apologize for his influence.” A posthumous collection of his essays was aptly titled Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum. Kendall had tried to live what Diana Trilling referred to as a life of significant contention but regularly got tangled up in insignificant ones. Equal parts visionary and crank, he didn’t suffer fools gladly but often acted foolishly. He knew he was right. In his generous and absorbing biography, Owen treads lightly around Kendall’s foibles and mishaps but ends up underscoring that his true credo wasn’t conservatism. It was radicalism.
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest.
From National Interest, January 2, 2022
How Ideologues Infiltrated the Arts
By: Rikki Schlott
Last month, we brought you John Sailer’s investigation into how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are supplanting the core mission of our nation’s universities—putting social justice ahead of the search for the truth. Today, The Free Press brings you our second story in this series, showing how these same DEI demands are transforming fine arts institutions and foundations across the country.
The trouble began for Lincoln Jones, as it did for so many in the summer of 2020, with the black square.
Jones, 47, is a longtime and celebrated Los Angeles–based choreographer. For 11 years he has run the American Contemporary Ballet company. His work has been featured regularly in The New York Times and Los Angeles Magazine, which called his 2012 ballet Serenade in A “a multifaceted snapshot of beautiful choreography crisply integrated with music.”
By any measure, his career has been hugely successful.
But Jones noticed things starting to change after May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by Minnesota police. “All of a sudden, it felt like you had to make your practices, discussion, everything, not only about race but about diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
He became increasingly unsettled by what he saw as coercive demands on speech and behavior. “I specifically don’t make art political, but the arts were becoming a tool of an ideology,” Jones, who is white, recalled. “It felt like something sacred was being violated by crossing politics and art—almost like crossing church and state.”
Suddenly, in the summer of 2020, questions swirled over whether his company ought to post the black square, which signified support for Black Lives Matter, on their company’s official Instagram.
“Our dancers were free to post whatever they wanted on their own social media, but I knew I wasn’t going to do it on the company account,” he said. “That’s not part of our mission.”
But backlash erupted on social media from both acquaintances and strangers. One Instagram message from a former employee stated, “Art is inherently political so your messaging seems to be spiteful of a crucial movement.” A former dancer from Jones’s company posted a message on their Instagram Story: “If this doesn’t drip with cowardice and blind misunderstanding of privilege and accountability to your community, I don’t know what does.”
Meanwhile, some of Jones’s dancers started questioning his refusal to post the symbol after they, too, became the target of social media backlash.
In the face of mounting pressure from the dance world, Jones sent an email to his employees clarifying his position. “American Contemporary Ballet is not a political organization,” he wrote. “Our mission is great dance. It is not our prerogative to represent each other politically.”
That’s when his work started to take a hit. His plans to turn his company’s adaptation of The Nutcracker into a film fell through, even though his proposal was under consideration by “some of the most renowned directors in Hollywood,” he said.
When an agent he hired to find funding and get a director for the project told him he needed to hire dancers of color from outside his company to get the film made, Jones objected.
“One of the things I will not do is hire by race or give preference by race,” he said. “Ballet does discriminate, just not by race. This is a highly athletic art form that discriminates by body, talent, and artistic sensitivity. You have to have a certain kind of feet and proportions. It’s not just a convention. It’s like an opera singer having a loud voice.”
So Jones pushed back against the agent’s advice. “I told him I don’t hire by race, and he said, ‘If you say that, you’ll never work again.’”
Meanwhile, Jones said he faced an uphill battle for funding, as many grant-giving institutions started to insist that applicants abide by new diversity requirements. Even as far back as 2018, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture demanded all applicants for Organizational Grant Programs submit “board-adopted statements, policies or plans that outline their commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and access.”
And now others were following suit.
Jones said several funders told him they were no longer going to support the American Contemporary Ballet—a devastating blow for the company, which depends heavily on outside largesse to keep afloat.
Other lines of funding, Jones recalled, “just disappeared.”
“Fundraising felt impossible,” he added. “The requirement on grants comes down to this: If you don’t agree with this very particular and recently adopted approach to social justice, we won’t fund your art. Behind the scenes, so many people in the arts world told me just to say the words.”
“Every time I spoke to funders, the first conversation was about diversity. It just felt like, okay, this is how you get funding now. Honestly, it felt like somebody was holding a gun to my head and saying, ‘Your integrity or your life’s work.’”
That bargain—pledge allegiance to the new orthodoxy or stick to your mission and risk your career—is one now faced by many in the world of American fine arts.
I spoke to more than a dozen people working in dance, music, theater, and the visual arts. Some have won Pulitzer prizes. Others are just at the beginning of their careers. What they all have in common is a concern that DEI—short for diversity, equity, and inclusion, a catchall term for racial equity initiatives—is creeping into the arts and politicizing artistic expression.
But only a tiny number of those people have blown the whistle.
Kevin Ray is one of them. Ray, who is white, is a theater director with 25 years of experience in the industry. In 2014, he took a part-time gig offering educational outreach for New 42, a performing arts nonprofit in Manhattan. Among its work, New 42 operates New Victory Theater, which offers a program giving stipends directly to artists and requires that every applying artist “identify as Black, Indigenous or a Person of Color.”
In June 2022, Ray sued New 42, claiming the institution forced him and other employees to take DEI instruction and read “racially-discriminatory propaganda.”
He said staffers were sent a document called “White Supremacy Culture—Still Here” by Tema Okun, asserting that whiteness divides “each and all of us from the earth, the sun, the wind, the water, the stars, the animals that roam the earth.”
The suit says staff members were given a link to Okun’s website, which claims that individualism, perfectionism, objectivity, denial, defensiveness, and power-hoarding are characteristics of white supremacy culture.
In his legal complaint, Ray said he was segregated by skin color at workplace meetings because, according to material circulated by the company to staff, “mixed-race dialogues are often inappropriate for White people” and “placing White folks in interracial dialogue is like placing pre-algebra students in a calculus class.”
“White people,” it stated, “need something akin to a remedial course.”
The lawsuit is still pending, but in a recent filing, lawyers for New 42 argued that Ray “suffered no damage” and denied that New 42 ever acted in a “malicious manner,” adding that “the alleged conduct... [was] not objectively severe or pervasive to support a hostile work environment claim,” and Ray “was not treated less well because of his race.” David Lichtenberg, who represents New 42, told The Free Press he was not authorized to comment. A representative of New 42 also declined to comment.
But Ray’s case is not an isolated one.
Following the death of George Floyd, a petition drafted by black actors and playwrights called “We See You, White American Theater” was circulated, dubbing the theater community “a house of cards built on white fragility and supremacy.” The petition garnered more than 100,000 signatures, including those of acclaimed black playwrights Lynn Nottage and Dominique Morisseau.
Accompanying the letter is a 31-page list of demands for theaters, urging them to implement quotas that result in the “majority of writers, directors, and designers on stage for the foreseeable future [being] BIPOC”—an acronym for black and indigenous people of color—and establish “exclusive affinity spaces for the protection of BIPOC bodies inside of all institutions.”
The ripples of revolution trickled all the way up to Broadway. In November 2022, Keith Wann, a sign language interpreter who worked on a production of The Lion King, alleged that he was removed from the production because he is white.
Wann sued the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, which connects Broadway shows with sign language interpreters, after the group said it was “no longer appropriate to have white interpreters represent black characters for [American Sign Language] Broadway shows.” He also claimed the fund’s director asked him to “back out” of the show because he is “not a black person and therefore should not be representing Lion King.”
The lawsuit was settled in just two weeks. Wann, who is the child of deaf parents, declined to comment on the terms of the settlement, but said of his complaint: “My stance was, you can’t say this. You can’t say, ‘Hey, because you’re deaf we’re getting rid of you, or because you’re old we’re getting rid of you, or because you’re an amputee we’re getting rid of you.’ It was wrong.”
Wann, 54, said that after interpreting around twenty Broadway plays, he’s given up on the Great White Way. “I’m at the end of my career. I’m not going to pursue this anymore. I’m not going to fight that fight.”
David LeShay, Director of Marketing and Public Relations at the Theater Development Fund, told The Free Press, “The matter between Keith Wann and TDF has been settled to the satisfaction of both parties. We will have no further comment.”
Any theater attempting to implement DEI demands could find itself at the other end of a lawsuit, said civil rights lawyer Michael Thad Allen of Allen Harris Law, who is representing Ray in his suit.
“Many people have the misconception that anti-discrimination laws only apply to historically disadvantaged communities,” Allen said. “I think these civil rights cases are pretty straightforward: Don’t discriminate on the basis of race.”
“There’s nothing wrong” with signing a petition saying you want a majority of staff to be BIPOC, Allen said. “That’s perfectly acceptable.”
But Title VII federal law—part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin—means hiring people purely on the basis of race could be deemed “a potential violation,” he said.
“It would be different if you were a private foundation,” he added, because they are “permitted to promote their private agenda.” But organizations that receive federal funding (like New 42, according to Ray’s suit) “are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race.”
Even some artists who are far in their career are too scared to comment about the new DEI demands.
“Artists already have enough challenges, and now we have all these layers of bureaucracy and mandates,” said one Pulitzer Prize–winning creative, who asked me not to print his name or even his field because he fears reprisals. “Artists are just too vulnerable to the vagaries of funding and cultural trends. Even those who are successful just can’t risk it. A freelance artist’s career could be over tomorrow if they make a fuss.”
He said he worries about America’s new generation of artists. “I’m established. I’m far enough along in my career that it doesn’t affect me as much as it does artists in [the younger] generation.”
Brent Morden is one of them. Morden is a white, 25-year-old music and choir director in New York City. Though he’s only at the beginning of his career, he said he’s already felt the crunch of funding and lost opportunities because he doesn’t tick any diversity boxes.
“When I see commissions or opportunities that are specifically looking for females or LGBTQ or BIPOC people to apply, I just sigh, wonder what this achieves, and move on,” he said. “Artistic institutions are adopting mission statements that sound nice and virtuous, but if you dig deeper under the surface, they’re promoting an agenda that doesn’t promote true and fair diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
His feelings are echoed by renowned Broadway theater producer Rocco Landesman. From 2009 to 2012, Landesman served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under the Obama administration. He told me he started noticing DEI creeping into the arts world around 2013 and has “no doubt” that “we’re seeing increasingly coercive guidelines.”
Landesman said he was shocked when, in 2019, a San Francisco school board voted to paint over a mural at George Washington High School that depicted the life of America’s first president, because it was deemed offensive to black and Native Americans.
“When you have art actually being destroyed because it doesn’t fit into a certain view of the world, that’s extremely alarming,” Landesman said.
Though the board reversed its decision last year, the controversy shows how the left has turned its back on the arts in the name of pursuing diversity, Landesman said.
“It’s shocking to see that proposed by progressives. I never thought we’d come to that point—it’s an amazing turn to see liberals be literally anti-art.”
Today, many of America’s arts funders have made social justice the criteria for grants. Of the two dozen foundations I surveyed that are based in New York and California and fund the arts, fifteen either professed allegiance to DEI principles on their websites or explicitly stated they strive for racial equity via philanthropic endeavors. Of the handful of actual grant applications I could get my hands on, several required DEI statements or demographic data from applicants.
The S. Mark Taper Foundation, for instance, which doles out roughly $6 million in grants a year focused on arts, education, and social causes, has committed itself to “a continuing examination of privilege” ensuring “grantmaking that aligns with the values of diversity, equity and inclusion.” As part of their application, each organization must provide a list of their board members’ titles, length of service, and racial and ethnic profiles.
And the Ford Foundation, one of the most influential charitable organizations in the country, boasting a $16 billion endowment, has led a group of fifteen major donors in dedicating $160 million specifically to BIPOC arts organizations.
Now, DEI initiatives for the arts are spreading at the national level. On September 30, President Biden signed his Executive Order on Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and the Museum and Library Services, with the goal of advancing “the cause of equity” through “[f]ederal support for the arts.” The administration’s policies sparked the National Endowment for the Arts’ Equity Action Plan as well as its establishment of a Racial Equity and Access Working Group.
Two and a half years after the black square controversy, Jones said he is still trying to keep the American Contemporary Ballet afloat without giving in to DEI demands.
“We were financially strangled,” he said. “I tried to keep the dancers out of it, but I think most people thought we weren’t going to make it. I just hung on by my fingernails, but we’re still in financial danger.”
Landesman, 75, who has produced multiple Tony-winning shows including Angels in America and The Producers, said he worries about what is happening to the world where he has dedicated his entire life and career.
“We’re taking first-rate artists and making them into third-rate political activists,” he said.
“Art is supposed to unsettle us; art challenges what we feel about ourselves,” he continued. “But most of the art today affirms commonly held views of our society. You either fit in or you perish.”
From The “Free” Press, February 1, 2023
Florida Teachers Hide Their Books to Avoid Felonies
By: Joan Walsh
It’s not just the ridiculous “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” or restrictions on discussing issues of gender and sexuality in early grades or last week’s decision not to allow an Advanced Placement African American Studies course to be taught in Florida high schools. Governor Ron DeSantis’s crusade against independent thought is leading to bare bookshelves in classrooms as teachers panic about whether their own classroom libraries violate state law.
Last year DeSantis signed HB 1467, which barred pornography and “age inappropriate” books and required that all reading materials “be suited to student needs.” But school district administrators haven’t been clear about how they’re going to ascertain that. This month school officials instructed teachers in Manatee and Duval counties to either remove books from classrooms or cover them up with paper sheeting until the districts come up with a way to ensure that none of the reading material ran afoul of the new law. Teachers who don’t make sure their books pass DeSantis’s muster are risking up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine for displaying a forbidden book, which is a third-degree felony.
Some school districts, including Manatee and Duval, seemed unprepared to create a process whereby all books displayed in classrooms are “reviewed by a media specialist using the Florida Department of Education guidelines.” They then have to be “presented and approved” at a special school meeting and finally “signed off by the principal.” In Duval County, which comprises Jacksonville, PEN America found that 176 titles had already been banned, including at least one Berenstain Bears book; biographies of Henry Aaron, Harriet Tubman, Celia Cruz, Rosa Parks, and Malala; a preponderance of books about non-white children and families; as well as those dealing with sexual themes. Weirdly, many focus on stories centered around ethnic foods: Dim Sum, Dim Sum For Everyone!, Dumpling Soup, and Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story are all verboten in Duval.
Across the nation, PEN America counts found 2,532 instances of individual books’ being banned, affecting 1,648 book titles. Florida ranks third among all 50 states in book bans, according to PEN, behind Texas and Pennsylvania.
Administrators at Broward and Miami-Dade County schools told local reporters this week that they are not currently restricting what’s available in classroom libraries. But Moms for Liberty, a right-wing education pressure group also active in crusading against masks, critical race theory, and sex education in schools, is pressuring both districts to ban several books, including The Kite Runner and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, supposedly because they include rape scenes. Both books are a staple of Advance Placement literature courses, school board members say, which could mean that high-achieving Florida students are less well-educated when they get to college than peers in other states. The group is also demanding the removal of LGBT-themed books in the lower grades—and Broward County has complied with some of the requests.
Media Matters reported that Moms for Liberty is also creating chapter positions of “Books/Library Director” to help its members target individual school districts and ferret out books they deem offensive. Gathering in Florida last summer, Moms for Liberty claimed that it had 195 chapters in 37 states and nearly 100,000 members. Its goal is to have a presence in every school district.
One administrator in Pinellas County told CNN that his district is going “beyond what the state requires,” implementing its own process to weed out books with “adult-themed” material.
But some teachers are trying to rebel. A Manatee High School teacher in Bradenton said he’s choosing to cover up his books rather than remove them. “I think it’s a stronger statement to cover them up. My students have asked me what’s going on, and while I did not go into a lot of details, I let them know about the restrictions that have been placed on the books that have come from the district by way of the state,” said Don Falls, a 38-year teaching veteran. “I don’t have the time or feel like I should have to go through all these books and put them in the system. It’s fundamentally wrong to me and my students’ First Amendment rights.” National Review terms such teachers’ moves “stunts” designed to make DeSantis look bad, not that he needs any help.
Not to be outdone by the man he calls “Ron DeSanctimonious,” Donald Trump flung out his own culture-war red meat in a video last week, calling on schools to certify only “patriotic teachers,” crusading against critical race theory, and proposing that principals be elected by the parents of their students. What could go wrong?
Listening to DeSantis and Trump, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, and the Moms For Liberty, it’s hard not to feel that if they have their way with education policy, your child will be educated according to the knowledge and values of the stupidest, most bigoted, and close-minded people in your school community. A CBS News poll last year found that upwards of 80 percent of people oppose book bans having to do with race, history, or politics.
Besides, what “liberty” are those right-wing Moms for Liberty demanding? Certainly not the liberty of free thought and inquiry or the liberty to raise your child with your own values. In recent years, there’s been a trend I don’t personally love, where parents can opt their kids out of coursework—sex ed is common—or reading materials they find objectionable. But I guess that’s better than having a majority of children’s education governed by a close-minded, bigoted minority. These kinds of education policies are going to accelerate the sorting of red and blue states and further erode the notion of any kind of common culture—which is a funny project for a group of people that blames the left for dividing us and deriding what exists as a shared American culture.
From The Nation, February 1, 2023