Dave Rubin on the left: "Everyone wants to be oppressed"

It's an oppression Olympics.  It's a hierarchy of oppressions.  So you've got to figure out how you are oppressed.  If you have a limp, you're this much oppressed or if you're a Jew this much oppressed or a Muslim this much oppressed.  Everyone wants to be oppressed.

~ Dave Rubin, "Leaving the Left," John Stossel, 4:10 mark, September 25, 2018

Amity Shlaes on the perversion of the humanities in higher education

What has happened in the past is that we neglected the humanities. Or we added humanities into cirricula in token fashion, and gave humanities instructors too much license.  Those responsible focused on the hard stuff and said - oh, humanities are subjective, let the teachers do what they like, or the textbook authors do what they like.  Scientists tend to abdicate when it comes to humanities.  If a teacher told us he or she was teaching US history, the scientists or other stakeholders said, That sounds fine, and did not scrutinize the actual syllabus.  Had they done so, they would have been shocked in the dramatic shift of what books and what ideas are being taught.  Most Americans, my guess is, have little understanding of the extent to which identity politics have come to supplant standard history in instruction, whether college or high school.  That's why the Woke Revolution is proving such a rude shock.

~ Amity Shlaes, "2020: The 1960s Redux?," The Austrian, July-August 2020

Paul Craig Roberts: "Universities are unsafe places for white males"

Universities are unsafe places for white males. Faculty and staff live in fear of baseless accusations that can destroy their careers and their financial lives. White male students are routinely graded down by feminist and black professors and cannot complain as all complaints are regarded as proof that the white male is a misogynist and a racist. Identity politics is the ideology that prevails in universities, the media, Democrat Party, and increasingly in the corporate work place. Identity politics deprives the white male of any basis for complaint because it identifies the white male as everyone else’s victimizer. Everyone is his victim. As he is the oppressor, he can never be supported, only denounced.

~ Paul Craig Roberts, "White Professors Live in Fear," LewRockwell.com, July 17, 2020

Samuel Mitcham on when "all about slavery" became the official narrative of the Civil War

From the 1870s to the late 1950s, there was an unofficial truce between the North and South.  Each side recognized and saluted the courage of the other; it was conceded that the North fought to preserve the Union and because Old Glory had been fired on, and the Southerner fought for liberty and to defend his home; the two great heroes of the war were Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee; and the South admitted that slavery was wrong but never conceded that it was cruel.

Around 1960, the Democratic Party—led by Lyndon B. Johnson—advanced the modern incarnation of identity politics.  It worked very well for them.  In the election of 1956, 75% of African-Americans voted Republican.  By 1964, more than 90% of them voted Democrat, and they have been doing so until 2020.  As part of their effort to control and manipulate the black vote, the Leftists and their myrmidons advanced the myth that the Civil War was all about slavery.  It wasn’t.  It was, in my opinion, about money, more than anything else.

~ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., "Why the Civil War Wasn't About Slavery," LewRockwell.com, July 15, 2020

Samuel Bowles on why people act politically

People act politically both to get things and to be someone.

~ Samuel Bowles



(Cited by Robert Higgs in Crisis and Leviathan, p. 43.)