Fr. Pierre-Jean DeSmet SJ
Born in 1801 in Belgium, Fr. DeSmet began his life’s work among the Indian tribes of the American Frontier after responding to requests for “black robes” from the Flatheads and Nez Perces in the late 1830s. From 1840 until his death in St. Louis in 1873, he became a singularly trusted presence among the many tribes of the North and Northwest.
Library
Shelby Steele
”Wherever and whenever there is white guilt, a terrible illusion prevails: that social justice is not a condition but an agent…(and) procures an entirely better life for people apart from their own efforts.”
“In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.”
Shelby Steele
The aim of what Steele calls poetic truth (which is distinct from actual truth) is “to supplant the actual reality of American life with the view of America as a nation still surreptitiously devoted to its past sins.” The “enforcement arm of poetic truth” is “political correctness.”
Shelby Steele
“One of the least noted facts in this era when racial, ethnic, and gender differences are often embraced as sacred is that being black in no way spares one from being human.”
Jason Reilly
“One lesson of the Obama presidency—maybe the most important for blacks—is that having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home.”
Thomas Sowell
“The idea that the world would be a level playing field, if it were not for either genes or discrimination, is a preconception in defiance of both logic and the facts. Nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings, but to automatically make those sins the sole, or even primary cause, of different outcomes among different peoples is to ignore many other reasons for those disparities.”
Thomas Sowell
“Alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination. Equally important, such external explanations require no painful internal changes in the black population but leave all changes to whites, who are seen as needing to be harangued, threatened, or otherwise forced to change.”
Thomas Sowell
“The key word among advocates of multiculturalism became ‘diversity.’ Sweeping claims for the benefits of demographic and cultural diversity in innumerable institutions and circumstances have prevailed without a speck of evidence being asked for or given. It is one of the purest examples of arguments without arguments, and of the force of sheer repetition, insistence and intimidation.”
Thomas Sowell
“The purpose of this book…is to demonstrate the reality, persistence, and consequences of cultural differences—contrary to many of today’s grand theories, based on the supposedly dominant role of ‘objective conditions,’ ‘economic forces,’ or ‘social structures.’”
Peter Wood
“The catch-22 of white privilege is that, once a white person is humbled into accepting how unfair his privilege is, all he can really do is commit to a life of abject apology to his moral betters.”
Heather MacDonald
“A naive observer of the Berkeley campus would think that lots of people ‘other than himself’ exist there, and would think that Berkeley welcomes those ‘other’ people with overflowing intellectual and material riches. Such a misperception, however, is precisely why Berkeley funds the Division of Equity and Inclusion with a cool $20 million annually and staffs it with 150 full-time functionaries: it take that much money and personnel to drum into students’ heads how horribly Berkeley treats its ‘othered’ students.”
Ryan T. Anderson
“Gender identity policies can quickly generate politically correct speech codes in schools and workplaces. ‘Antibullying’ programs can turn into antidisagreement programs. Dissent is equated with bigotry and hate, so no dissent will be tolerated. All students must accept gender ideology, and their parents will have no say in the matter.”
Robert L. Woodson, Sr., Editor
“We acknowledge that racial discrimination exists and work towards diminishing it. But we dissent from contemporary groupthink and rhetoric about race, class, and American history that defames our national heritage, divides our people, and instills helplessness among those who already hold within themselves the grit and resilience to better their lot in life. 1776 Unites maintains a special focus on voices in the black community who celebrate black excellence and reject victimhood culture, and showcases the millions of black Americans who have prospered by embracing the founding ideals of America.”
Anthony Esolen
“Feminists have persuaded us to consider patriarchy to be evil and brutish, but wherever men retreat from leadership of their families and of their communities, things begin to fall apart. Once the boy sees that he is much stronger than his mother, once he sees that he can shrug when she shouts and nothing will happen to him, all bets are off; he needs the strength of the father to command his respect for his mother. What is the single condition of a boy’s life that correlates most strongly with whether he will turn criminal? Not income, not by a long shot. It is whether he grew up in the same home with his father.”
Abigail Shrier
“Gender dysphoria…is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex. … Historically, it afflicted a tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01%) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all. In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as ‘transgender.’ For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying—they constitute the majority.”
Mike Gonzalez
“…BLM activism rests on a body of thought that has a certain internal consistency because it works around contradictions, and the thinking behind it takes place at universities. … To say that BLM is backed up by an academic theory does not mean that the thinking is based on facts; no, America does not have a “mass incarceration” problem, nor is it “structurally racist,” no matter how many university professors say so. Nor does it mean that such theory is based on the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, all of which are opposed in some measure by BLM.”
Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay
Postmodernism, which rejects “the foundations upon which today’s advanced civilizations are built,” has “become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapses of white supremacy and colonialism.” The various postmodernist critical theories have produced a Social Justice Movement with a “very specific doctrinal interpretation of the meaning of ‘social justice.'” Its adherents “interpret the world through a lens that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact…,” a worldview forming a “zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and many others.”
Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild, editors
“When it began, affirmative action seemed so modest and circumscribed , so limited in scope and so well-intentioned, that it was impossible to imagine the damage it would do.” … “Identity politics are now altering the standards for scientific competence and the way future scientists are trained. ‘Diversity’ is now often an explicit job qualification in the STEM fields.” … “A student whose entering academic credentials are well below those of the average student in a particular school will likely earn grades to match. And the reason is simple: Entering academic credentials matter.”
Thomas Sowell
“A vision is our sense of how the world works,” and serves as a “foundation on which theories are built.” Sowell contrasts two broad categories of visions — the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. “In the constrained vision, where trade-offs are all that we can hope for, prudence is among the highest duties. … In the unconstrained vision, where moral improvement has no fixed limit, prudence is of a lower order of importance. … In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved…. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills…, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.”
Thomas Sowell
“The focus here will be on one particular vision — the vision prevailing among the intellectual and political elite of our time. What is important about that vision are not only its particular assumptions and their conditions, but also the fact that it is a prevailing vision — which means that its assumptions are so much taken for granted by so many people,…neither these assumptions nor their corollaries” require “empirical evidence. Indeed empirical evidence itself may be viewed as suspect, insofar as it is inconsistent with that vision.” This prevailing vision offers “a special state of grace for those who believe in it. …those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin.”