Both Sides Threaten Democracy—It’s Time Leftist Professors Admit It

On the September 27^th edition of PBS’s Washington Week, reporters expressed barely controlled outrage about the Trump campaign’s slanderous attacks on Haitian immigrants. Why don’t seemingly racist—not to mention sexist—statements crater Mr. Trump’s support? Chiefly because when, in the eyes of professors and reporters, everyone is racist, then no one is.

Normal American voters reflexively discount charges of prejudice even when, as in Mr. Trump’s case, they seem true. Desensitization to accusations of racism is common even among minority voters, especially when statements about border security and support for the police are perceived less as racist or white supremacist and more as straightforward common sense.

This exemplifies the impacts of what Democratic commentator James Carville derides as ivory tower “faculty lounge politics,” which will intensify under a Harris/Walz administration and a Democratic Congress.

One of the few things I have in common with Donald Trump is that we have each faced accusations of racism. I’ve been called racist for being a white person, referring to Venezuela, a country led by people of color, as a dictatorship. I’ve been called racist for writing that Black Lives Matter’s attacks on policing ended up taking black lives through higher homicide rates. Most troublingly, white critical theorists called me racist for supporting President Obama’s education reforms aimed at closing achievement gaps. To critical race theorists, blacks who excel academically suffer internalized whiteness.

At my university, the grownups are in charge, so other than a few sleepless nights, I never suffered for alleged racism. Others are not so lucky.

As Eric Kaufmann shows, over a third of conservative professors report facing discipline for their views; so do one in ten liberals, often attacked by those farther left, typically for alleged racism or sexism. According to large-scale surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, most college students self-censor to avoid punishment. Faculty lounge politics have spread off campus: 48 percent of Americans fear to say what they think in the workplace, three times more than during the 1950s red scare.

Some incidents are disturbing in states like Minnesota and California, where governments back critical theorists.

Just a few miles from Governor Tim Walz’s statehouse, his fellow Minnesota public employee, Harvard-educated physician Tara Gustilo, was demoted from leading the county hospital’s OB/GYN Department for arguing that it is not racist for white doctors to treat minority patients. Superiors considered Gustilo, a Filipina, guilty of internalized whiteness for her colorblind views, even though, as Jake Mackey and Dave Gilbert detail in Unsafe Science, scientifically speaking, Gustilo is right.

This is no one-off for Minnesota’s weird public sector. As Stanley Kurtz writes in National Review, to write Minnesota’s ethnic studies course standards, Governor Walz appointed a critical race theorist who calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government. (Consider the parallels to January 6^th). Ignoring two promised deadlines, the Walz administration is delaying the release of course standards until after the election. Mainstream media are ignoring the story.

In Harris’s California, eight of ten University of California campuses required candidates for faculty jobs to issue de facto pledges supporting racial and ethnic quotas. Woke bureaucrats drove out award-winning San Jose State University Anthropology Professor Elizabeth Weiss for her allegedly bigoted research showing that Native Americans have not always occupied their homelands and that, like most humans, they practiced unsavory behaviors like enslaving others. Weiss documents this in her recent book, On the Warpath: My Battles With Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors, but don’t expect your library to buy it or the media to cover it.

I agree with my Democratic friends that Mr. Trump threatens democracy. Yet supported by a Democratic Congress and media, a Harris/Walz administration would pose equivalent threats via bureaucracy. Consider the Biden administration’s new Title IX rules, which allow a single university bureaucrat to investigate and punish students and faculty for subjective offenses. This will enable unaccountable bureaucrats to sanction anyone arguing that biological sex is real. In contrast, the Biden education bureaucracy has slow-walked Jewish students’ complaints of civil rights violations, such as being harassed and even barred from public spaces on campus.

In short, both parties threaten democracy, but Republican threats like the January 6^th insurrection are relatively episodic and transparent, easy for well-prepared police to subdue. Democratic threats are bureaucratic, routine, and ignored by reporters. If President Harris can pack the courts with friendly judges who view free speech as racist—remember critical race theory arose in law schools—it could mark the end of free speech in the U.S.

Given that both parties threaten democracy and freedom, America—particularly academia—may be safest with a Harris administration and a Republican congress holding hearings—say, on Tara Gustilo and Elizabeth Weiss—and passing laws to limit bureaucratic excesses. A good start would be a bipartisan commission to protect our First Amendment rights just as the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and its 50 state-level committees—I serve on the Arkansas one—protect our 14^th Amendment rights.

To paraphrase the—alas, largely ignored—father of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, when leaders are not angels, a divided government is our best protection against tyranny.

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