Critical Race Theory rewrites history

Posted on by Joel Kotkin

National Socialism, Maoism and Marxism-Leninism all have one thing in common: they boil down human experience to one aspect, such as race or class, and diminish the struggles and achievements of much of humanity.

In some respects, as an approach to understanding history, CRT has a certain credibility. Ibram X. Kendi’s retelling of American history in Stamped from the Beginning is lucid, well-crafted and internally consistent in its description of racism as both a motivating force and by-product of the American tale. He uses it to rationalise and support his claim that African Americans have failed to attain the fruits of American life in the same way as whites — higher education, corporate leadership, home ownership and intergenerational wealth — but suggests this is due almost entirely to racist policies embedded in American institutions and law. ...  Continue reading

How the Left will lose the culture wars

Posted on by Kat Rosenfield

There’s a running joke on the Left about people who claim to have been silenced for their conservative views — while standing atop the platform of a podcast, TV show, or newspaper column that has an audience of millions. You can’t have been silenced, goes the punchline, if someone can hear your scream.

This argument gets big applause on Twitter, but it is also, generally speaking, a cheap shot. For every commentator who has achieved too-big-to-cancel status, there are five who’ve found themselves sidelined, de-platformed or otherwise shut out of a public discourse in which the range of acceptable views seems to be ever-narrowing and strictly enforced. J.K. Rowling may be safe from ruination, but plenty of ordinary people who run afoul of the new norms aren’t so lucky. ...  Continue reading

Chinese censorship comes to the West

Posted on by Jamie Bartlett

Be honest — did you read UnHerd’s “cookie policy” just now, before you clicked “accept and close”? Have you ever read one of those notices? Or do you, like me, agree to anything and everything so long as you can get to the good stuff more quickly?

The reason these annoying little pop-ups exist at all is thanks to a recent-ish law which helps you understand what’s being collected about you online. It’s something that probably deserves a moment of your attention. But we’re spending more and more time online; who wants to waste it checking 20 tedious Ts&Cs a day?

The future of the internet will come down to tiny things like this: subtle decisions made at the engineering or regulatory level — stuff which most of us ignore because we can’t be bothered to find out what it’s all about. Are you curious about “digital object architecture”? Do you want to know who’s behind the “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers”? A colleague of mine once spent weeks tracking this stuff — only to conclude that internet protocols are “simply too impenetrable and boring to feel angry about”. Nobody cares. Nobody, except the autocrats of the world, who are quietly trying to wrestle control over various working groups and technical decisions — to make sure they can tame the digital beast. ...  Continue reading

Lessons from a psych ward

Posted on by Frances Wilson

In the winter of 1968, a young woman called Bette Howland swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Instantly regretting it, she called the doctor before her mind fused like a blown bulb. She was brought back to life on a ventilator in Chicago’s university hospital, and then admitted to the psychiatric ward which was called, like the US Government tax form, W-3. Here she received a letter from her former lover, Saul Bellow, in which he encouraged her to write. “One should cook and eat one’s misery,” he counselled. “Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.” ...  Continue reading

My fight for free speech

Posted on by Paul Embery

The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) is a brilliant organisation, served loyally by hundreds of representatives who strive every day to improve the lot of their members and to defend the fire and rescue service against the constant threat of cuts and downgrading.

The union has a proud and illustrious history. Since 1918 — the year of its founding as the “Firemen’s Trade Union” — it has played a hugely significant role in delivering better conditions of service for the nation’s firefighters and improving public safety. It is in no small measure thanks to the FBU that firefighters have been able to enjoy decent pay and pensions, collective bargaining rights and enhanced health and safety standards, while the public has benefitted from the union’s tireless campaigning for robust fire cover provision in local communities. ...  Continue reading

Does Owen Jones have a woman problem?

Posted on by Douglas Murray

Does male privilege really exist? I did not used to think so. But in recent years, I’ve come to realise that not only might it exist, but that, at least in one respect, I may also benefit from it. That is, I have the privilege of being able to write about certain contentious issues without being singled out and demonised for doing so.

In no area has this become more apparent than in our perpetual “gender wars”. My own views on the issue are fairly well-known: I believe human beings have chromosomes. I believe gametes exist. I don’t think homo sapiens are a hermaphroditic species. And I don’t think that the existence of creatures like the clownfish mean that humans are hermaphroditic. ...  Continue reading

Being fat isn’t feminist

Posted on by Sarah Ditum

The last time I wrote about the body positivity movement, it was 2018. The plus-size model Tess Holliday had just appeared, sensationally, on the cover of Cosmopolitan. It triggered a debate on Good Morning Britain: Piers Morgan accused the then editor Farrah Storr of “celebrating morbid obesity”; she accused him of conspiring in the mental health crisis and perpetuating the culture of thin-privilege. Of course, the video went viral. That spat marked the two poles of the body image conversation: “you can’t show this,” versus “you can’t say that”.

Was a more humane approach possible? It was horrific to treat fatness as something shameful, I wrote, but also wrong to pretend that being fat doesn’t lead to serious health complications: “As an archetype of beauty, Holliday is no more and no less dangerous than a size-0 waif.” Somehow, a line had to be tracked between compassion and truth. ...  Continue reading

Macron’s vaccine passport gamble

Posted on by John Lichfield

Le virus c’est l’état (“The virus is the state”) — so reads a freshly-painted slogan on a motorway bridge on the Norman-Breton border.

This may be the work of the anarchist far-left. It may be the work of the libertarian Right. It may — though less plausibly — have been painted by ordinary apolitical people infuriated by President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to ban all fun and long-distance travel for unvaccinated citizens from Monday.

All three of these groups, along with many other angry citizens, were represented in the protests against the “passe sanitaire” (health pass) on Saturday, which attracted over 200,000 people to 150 demonstrations in French towns and cities last Saturday. ...  Continue reading

Will Trump bring down DeSantis?

Posted on by Oliver Wiseman

Ron DeSantis was supposed to be one of the pandemic’s few political winners. His reputation as Florida’s Republican governor has soared thanks to his laissez-faire approach to Covid-19 — so much so that many consider him an early frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination in 2024.

But DeSantis’s victory lap has been rudely interrupted. Thanks to the Delta variant, the Sunshine State is now the epicentre of the pandemic in the US. In the last week, Florida has broken its records for the number of daily cases and hospitalisations. Last month, it was responsible for one in five of the country’s new cases, despite being home to 6% of Americans. ...  Continue reading

Sturgeon’s drugs shame

Posted on by Ruth Davidson

It is hard to explain just how bad Scotland’s drug deaths epidemic is. In 2020 there were 1,339 in a country of just five and a half million people. Comparison helps: in Holland, the death rate is 18 per million; in Ireland it is 43 per million; in the whole of the UK it is 76 per million; in Scotland, it is 295 per million. Scotland’s drug deaths have more than doubled since Nicola Sturgeon became First Minister seven years ago and nearly tripled since her party took office — when the health minister in charge of the issue was, it’s worth noting, a certain Ms Sturgeon.

This week, the roll call of substance abuse fatalities during the SNP’s period of government is set to hit 10,000. That’s more than the number of people killed in Hurricane Katrina, or who perished as the Titanic went down. More than those killed at Pearl Harbor, in 9/11 or during the 7/7 London or Manchester arena attacks — more than British troops killed at the charge of the Light Brigade. It is more than the number of people killed in the Blantyre mining disaster or the Dunblane Massacre or the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, it is more than all ten of these events combined. And yet, while each of these losses of life have been faithfully recorded in our history books, there has been no equivalent recognition or examination of the current unfolding tragedy. ...  Continue reading

Latin is the language of the enemy

Posted on by Giles Fraser

Having been a dyslexic child with slap happy teachers, I learnt to despise Latin. I can still remember the lick of that long ruler far more clearly than I can the apparently sweet taste of Horace or Livy. Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Amant, ad nauseam. Love had nothing to do with it. Whack if you got it wrong. Whack if you weren’t concentrating. From the age of seven onwards, Latin was the reason my prep school marked us with red lines on the back of our legs — in order, socially, to mark us out as different from the plebs.

Now Boris – who was learning his Latin at a prep school just up the road from mine — has decided that everyone should know what the word pleb means. He has earmarked £4 million for Latin teaching in state schools. Levelling up, Boris calls it. Cynics, however, might question whether this is little more than some culture war distraction from a general asset stripping of the humanities, with university arts subjects, for instance, facing a devastating 50% cut in funding. A paltry £4 million hardly disguises the continual shift in education away from cultural subjects towards market-useful STEM subjects. Arachis hypogaea is the Latin for peanuts. ...  Continue reading

The Ramones didn’t want to grow up

Posted on by Dorian Lynskey

The Ramones played their final show 25 years ago, at the Los Angeles Palace on 6 August 1996, which was probably at least 15 years too late. The Ramones had one idea that was brilliant enough to change the course of rock music and they never sought another. When their record label asked guitarist Johnny Ramone to hear some of the songs intended for their eighth album, he told them “to listen to the last five albums, and that’s what these were going to sound like, but different”.

That one idea was at once reactionary and revolutionary. The Ramones reduced rock’n’roll to its core values (loud, fast, catchy, fun) and spiked it with the stink and danger of 1970s New York, thus inventing punk rock. Recorded in just a few days, their 1976 debut album squeezed 14 songs into 29 minutes, none of them grazing the three-minute mark. What’s more, these four men from Forest Hills, Queens — 1, 2, 3, 4! — styled themselves as a tight-knit street gang. They were the Beatles for people who thought the Beatles peaked in Hamburg in 1962, when they wore black leather, chomped amphetamines and got into punch-ups. ...  Continue reading