Have Yourself a Very Boostered Christmas

My younger son sent a photo: "Just got my chip implanted!" My older one got his a while back, my daughter needs one but can't get it because she'd not yet eighteen, and there there's ancient me: I'm boostered. I'm jonesing for a fourth . . . or a cure. The holidays are here, those awkward phone calls: "And you got your third shot when? Oh, you didn't? And, uh, shall we all get rapid tests before we come to your house? Oh, you don't think we need to do that? How about we take a walk? Please don't get offended . .  ."

We're doing the right thing, but the right thing feels so wrong. We would rather deck the halls and down the drinks with all our relatives and friends. Instead, the kids and I enjoyed potato dumplings, red cabbage with apple, and duck (for me and the other carnivore) but vegan cordon bleu for the family vegans. It all went down well with a little Prosecco and some red wine. We watched about half of Jurassic Park before falling asleep in front of the TV. I'm just trying to get up the energy to brush my teeth.

Here's my favorite holiday music:

The Hundred-Year-Old Covid Patient

My 100-year-old mother has been dosed, kicking and screaming, with both vaccinations and, five weeks ago, her booster. She doesn't gad about--she can barely walk, and her walks take place between her bedroom and the communal dining area in her extremely well-run, COVID-safe, assisted living community.

But Mom's favorite indoor sport--also her favorite outdoor sport--is ripping off her mask. You should have seen her at her 99th birthday party, which took place on Zoom for me, since no flying was allowed at the time. "Come sit by me!" she kept yelling at various visitors, patting the bench on the outdoor porch beside her, mask dangling by one ear lobe.

"You need to put on your mask!" said the chorus of friendly people administering cake and champagne. I waved, urged the same, and she smiled and said she couldn't hear me. (Nothing new there! That situation has been ongoing since I was born.)

I've been FaceTiming her, thanks to the lovely ladies who care for her, one of whom is now a lot sicker than she is. Mom's coughing and sneezing.

 "Don't open that window! I'm cold!" she yelled at the endlessly patient administrator in full PPE. 

"No, I don't have what's that, COVIS," she calls it, "Just a cold." She's eating well and enjoying the almond butter, hummus and other goodies I send. It's her tenacity that keeps her going. Right now, I'm not feeling at all bad about not visiting.

 P.S. She'd be yelling, "it's a hundred and a half!" and you know what? She'd be absolutely correct. Her absolutely favorite thing to be. 

John McWhorter's Woke Racism: A Rave Review

Ironically, reading this shrewd exposé of woke as a religion tempts me to shout, "Manna from Heaven!" Taking aim at Ta-Nahisi Coates urging "the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage," (p. 131) McWhorter observes: "this is the divorcé who can't stand seeing his ex have a good time. To tar today's America as insufficiently aware of slavery is more about smugness and noble victimhood than forging something new and needed." Bullseye! Pragmatic as always, McWhorter outlines a three-point platform for attacking racism in his final chapter: (1) End the war on drugs (2) Teach reading with phonics (3) get rid of the notion that everyone has to go to college; respect and implement vocational training for poor people.

Hooray for the last one. Over a teaching career that started in 1985 and took me to good, bad, and ugly universities and colleges, I can say I wish some of my students, of all ethnicities, had chosen vocational training. Here in Germany, more than one student has confessed to wanting vocational training (but their mother insisted on university) or not liking reading much (but the family said a teaching degree is better than running a small fast food joint.)

John McWhorter's book diagnoses fundamentalism and fraudulence in so-called anti-racists, the school of Kendi and DiAngelo. Those who dare to disagree with such preachers are blasphemers, crucified on Twitter and banished from polite society. You can lose your job for pointing out that not all inequality is caused by racism.

But here I am waving around Woke Racism as if it were the Bible. Why? I could say because it's good news, and therefore like a gospel: Rendered inarticulate by the foolishness of questions like, "how have you experienced your white privilege?" I appreciate--actually, adore--McWhorter's precise, witty takedown of what's become an industry--as he's pointed out, DiAngelo and Kendi will never have to work again. 

A loner in the midst of old friends riddled with what I see as misplaced guilt and what they see as a righteous reflection on the wounds of enslaved peoples, I meditate on the need of so many highly educated people--so many smart women!--to be insulted. I've lost count of friends who confide--as if divulging a sexual indiscretion--that some great-great-great ancestor owned slaves. So did Toussaint L'Overture, the liberator of Haiti. Whiteness is an accidental quality, not a sign of guilt. That haunted look, that "I've learned an awful lot about myself in the past few years" from educated middle-class white women isn't justified by what these women think of as America's original sin--slavery. Or their supposed racism because they thought of "flesh-colored" bandaids as "normal." Or even (gasp!) once mistook a Black store patron for a Black store clerk. Or, worse, actually used to harbor a racist notion or two, which they've vanquished but feel terrible about. 

Puritanism's rearing its ugly head, the kind defined by that sublime satirist H.L. Mencken as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

Until I read Woke Racism, I'd been inclined to think of current race pieties as mass hysteria. The Salem witch trials, the McCarthy years, the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two, the post-9/11 backlash against Arab-Americans: "wokeness" seems of a piece. But the religious element--yes! I'm hardly the first to see Robin DiAngelo as a direct descendent of Jonathan Edwards--my hat's off to the blogger who quipped "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Broad." Yes, she's the leader of the Elect--as Calvinist as they come: you're marked by original sin. You better suffer, white person, and you better spend your life repenting for a stain so deep it will never be washed out.

And Kendi--the smiling preacher in dreadlocks. John Milton knew his type when he criticized "blind mouths," clergy feeding on their flock, consuming them, instead of offering love, consolation, guidance. Kendi's a wolf in sheep's clothing; DiAngelo's marginally more obvious: she looks like she sucks lemons. 

But dear Professor McWhorter, the Elect aren't just a religion. They're a cult. Let's de-program them! Here's the ticket:

 

My favorite lines in McWhorter's delightfully logical latest include: 

For the Elect, "actual progress on race is not something to celebrate but to talk around. This is because, with progress, the Elect lose their sense of purpose. Note: What they are after is not money or power, but sheer purpose, in the basic sense of feeling like you matter and that your life has a meaningful agenda." (p. 40)

"The failure of so many thinkers to understand the difference between the effects of racism in the past and racism in the present has strangled discussions about race for decades" (p. 125)

"Ask whether microaggressions merit the same response as physical assault and the Elect do not receive this as a challenging query. To them, it is splitting hairs to taxonomize assault in this way." (p. 159)

Reading McWhorter's work, I'm struck by the uncommonness of common sense. His every line radiates common sense. But common sense remains so rare I was almost afraid, until he came along, that it was extinct. The Elect (or the mass hysterics) don't acknowledge his common sense. The lure of guilt--the seductive lure of being a flagellant--has such a hold on so many otherwise bright, productive people that common sense goes out the window. 

Scratch a flagellant and you get a sadist--the folks beating themselves up for their whiteness are the same folks who Twitter-bully people out of careers.

Two days ago I tried to bring up Woke Racism with a friend--who, predictably, exploded: "Racism is real!" Followed by her certainty that the outcome of the Rittenhouse trial would have been different had the seventeen-year-old fool who never should have been allowed in the same room as a gun been Black. Followed by the notion that since the teenager got off, white supremacist vigilantes will run wild. Coleman Hughes just pointed out that Kenneth Walker, Breonna Taylor's boyfriend, shot a cop in self-defense and was cleared of all charges--rightly so. Justice worked in the Rittenhouse case, and the kid wasn't a white supremacist either. 

Nobody said racism isn't real. It's getting realer every day, fueled by folks who follow Kendi, DiAngelo, Coates, Hannah-Jones. Generalizing about whites and "whiteness"--I fail to see how this differs from the Nuremberg laws. Defunding the police? I can't think of a better way to destroy already-embattled crime-ridden impoverished neighborhoods.

The reality remains that U.S. gun laws allow teenagers and other lunatics access to weapons that go off by accident, Mommy. The faux vikings who stormed the U.S. Capitol aren't leading the pack--they're going to prison. The real racism that's still out there isn't an excuse to ignore what's happening in schools: that children shouldn't be separated by race in ways that--McWhorter points out--would have pleased that arch-racist, Strom Thurmond; that children shouldn't be asked to draw "their white skin" or listen to teachers reading them Not My Idea or Antiracist Baby. Followed by Ta-Nehisi Coates' heartless declaration of "no sympathy" for the white cops and firemen who died at the World Trade Center.

This isn't social or racial or any kind of justice, Coates and co. 

Reason and wit are a balm. Thank you, John McWhorter. 

P.S. May I touch the hem of your garment?

P.P.S. I wanna start a John McWhorter fan club. With T-shirts and everything. With autographs. With friendly tea parties and wine tastings (Covid-safe). Who wants to join?

 

Halloween Thoughts on Americans and Racism

I wouldn't be surprised if Robin di Angelo (bestselling author of White Fragility) and Ibram X. Kendi (likewise, How to Be an Anti-Racist) turned out to be employed by Donald Trump. 

The three belong to different sects, but sing the same satanic hymn: divide and conquer. The first two want inner division: self-doubt, self-criticism, misplaced guilt. The last goes big time, ambitiously splitting whole populations.

If there's a true religion, it's love and unity. That's the message of the world's major religions, of John Milton, of Dr. Martin Luther King, of anyone seeking the common ground that is somehow still there under our feet, if we but looked for it. Comedians are trying but it's getting harder. Thank you, Dave Chapelle. Thank you, Sacha Baron Cohen.

Here come Ten Commandments!

I'm starting my own religion, even if the only one listening is the Great Pumpkin:

(1) Thou shalt not mistake empathy for "cultural appropriation." You can, if you're Thomas Mann, write a story in the voice of a woman past menopause ("Black Swans.") You can, if you're white and not an immigrant, write a story in the voice of a Mexican woman fleeing to the United States with her young son. That's what Jeanine Cummins did in her wonderful novel, American Dirt. You can, if you're Mark Twain,  become both Huck and Jim.*

(2) Thou art not thine ancestors. If your great grandfather was a lyncher or a Nazi, it doesn't mean you're tarred with the same brush. 

(3) Thou shalt know "Tarred with the  same brush" isn't a racist phrase.

(4) Thou shalt not think being on time is"white."

(5) Thou shalt not pretend individualism is "white."

(6) Thou shalt understand slavery as America's original sin, but not as America's founding idea.

The slave-owning founding fathers were promoting a political reality in which slavery would not exist.

P.S. Toussaint L'Overture owned slaves.

(7) Thou shalt honor common sense. In other words, it's okay to feel you "don't see color."

(8) Thou shalt have a sense of humor:

(9) Thou shalt "take responsibility" for the content of your character, not the color of your skin.

(10) Thou shalt remain down to earth--not swamped in the mystical notion of an all-engulfing white supremacy. 

 

*If you haven't read Zadie Smith's marvellous essay on the topic of who gets to write what, torpedoing that stay-in-your-own-lane philosophy, then read! Her essay appeared in November 2019 in the New York Review of Books. 

Why Squid Game isn't a Takedown of Capitalism

Because it's a takedown of narcissism. The players might be deemed narcissists--I could make a case for their narcissism--but it's desperation and denial that propel their eyes toward that golden piggy dangling from the ceiling. The game architects aren't desperate, unless you count their boredom as desperation. 

Spoilers ahead! 

Yes, the narcissists are swimming in money--so much that they don't know what to do with it, but to assume capitalism is what makes them so evil is to assume that all rich people are the same, that their money transforms them into doltish sadists who enjoy donning sparkling animal heads straight out of Suetonious to watch their version of gladiatorial combat--which is even more cruel than actual gladiatorial combats. The ancient Romans got a kick out of throwing a Christian to the lions or pitting two handsome young men against each other, but  they didn't go for the kind of mind games devised by the malignant narcissist architects of Squid Game. The sweet old man and his pals in golden animal head masks force friends to trick each other in order to survive. 

A you-tuber suggested Capitalism turns each player into a "mere number" but that's a false definition of capitalism. Capitalism creates individual success and under the right circumstances the success of a group. Capitalism promotes creativity and effort. Capitalism is what kept the Puritans and Calvinists from offing themselves; they believed in working so hard they'd get a sign from God they were saved--maybe they'd get rich, become a CEO, and feel safe from the fires of hell. 

Squid Games succeeds in making us feel sorry for the dying old man who started it all even as he reveals his horrifying inability to feel anything but a child's delight in a game. Gi Hun roars, "How could you do that to people!" and the old man--sounding like a four-year-old ignoring Mommy--asks him to play one more game. He smiles in anticipation; he seems not to remember or ever to have noticed the suffering except to be amused by it, as a child might be, not understanding the permanence of suffering and of death. 

There's no reason to assume the old man's self-centered world is the result of capitalism, or of his being so rich he doesn't know what to do with his money. To assume capitalism as the primum mobile of his sadism is to assume all rich people are all alike. F. Scott Fitzgerald had a point when he wrote in "The Rich Boy" (1926), paragraph 3: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand." Maybe. He wasn't born rich and had a natural envy of those who were, who have a natural envy of those who weren't. Even those born rich can't be assumed to be all alike. Rich people may not have to worry about how to pay the rent or buy food, but like most people they find things to worry about. Many never know who their friends are. 

If Squid Game isn't a takedown of capitalism, but a portrait of corrupt narcissists subsisting on sadistic seductions and murders, why are we all watching it? Probably to see how it ends--but also to feel, as we shiver with the players crossing the glass plates from which many tumble to their deaths, or the marble-rolling during which friends cheat friends, or any of the other horrible tricks, that "I lived through this but none of it was real! I killed with the worst and died with the best, and then I woke up, discovering my life, with all its petty frustrations, is so much better than that of either the perps or the players."

The actors are great, too. 

Character Revealed: Why Olaf Scholz Will Win

My respect for the man's public relations competence has been growing, combined with my sadness that Annalena Baerbock has so little chance that CNN doesn't bother mentioning her. Shame on CNN! She'd do something about climate change, but the unstated view here is, "Well, she has small children . . ." and then they shake their heads. Germans still employ an epithet for women who have children and careers: "Rabenmutter," the Duden 2020 dictionary will tell you, means "raven mother" denoting "a bad mother, who does not take sufficient care of her children, often because she is combining family with work. This derogatory term is used for a 'loveless, hard-hearted mother who neglects her children' or for an egoistic woman who refuses to have children due to economic or emotional circumstances." When a young German stockbroker told me nobody would vote for Baerbock because that's how people see her, I wondered how she saw herself--she with her several small children and her demanding job. What about New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern, giving birth in office?

"Not in Germany," said the stockbroker.

That's where Olaf Scholz comes in. He's marketed himself perfectly as Angela Merkel's clone. It's just that he's male, but he's trying to make  that not count by having himself photographed doing Merkel's  trademark "triangle of power" hand gesture. His posters are all red-and-white-tried-and-true-been-here-since-the-Hanseatic-League-so-what-if they're-kind-of-like-CDU-colors. The message is what counts, and Scholz's messages have a brilliant simplicity:

(1) Kompetenz für Deutschland

(2) Kanzler für Deutschland

Competence defines chancellor--that's the message. You don't get one without the other. That logic appeals especially to a third of voters who are over sixty, and seem to think it's not quite right for a young woman to have such big ambitions, to say, "together we will change politics!" while she, they think, ought to spend more time with those babies because before you know it, they'll be grown. 

She's the real deal--she could walk in and Greta Thunberg the nation, but the folks my age won't give her a chance. Maybe she should have tried the hand gesture and the competence line. Instead, she said exactly what she thought. I like that. But  Oscar Wilde's observation about politics comes to mind: "a man who can’t talk morality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician." The moral compass here turns to competence. You can innovate, experiment, even spontaneously speak, but you must first reveal your competence, which is both a character trait and a skill.

On Getting a Booster Shot when You're Sixty-Something and Sick in Deutschland

My Venus Fly Trap, Elizabite, was inert all summer. Her companion, another carnivorous plant whom I call "Sticky Fingers," traps tiny flies--and recently, a gigantic water-fly--with amazing regularity. If Sticky Fingers, with her long tendrils glistening with dewy, fatal, glue, is the Olympiad of fly-trapping, Elizabite is a lazybones--not a fly to her name (and all those lovely red interiors in her cozy-looking traps!)

When she finally trapped a fly, a big one, I felt astonished. And proud. I told her how very proud I was, and took her success as a sign that I should take my health in my hands and trap a booster. 

The attentive reader will see Elizabite's prey on the left. Worried by CDC reports and the earnest face of Anthony Fauci trying, as usual, to do the right thing, I considered my options. I could wait and follow the rules. I've never been particularly good at that, though I've usually done so. But now I felt my life was at stake. I could wait until mid-to-late October, in other words after I'm likely to face students who are probably but not one hundred percent safe, plus a co-worker who doesn't believe in vaccinations. I wandered over to the area known as Vaccination Street and cased the joint. Would they recognize me? What a paranoid thought. I lined up among those without appointments, requested a third shot, offering my history of metastatic cancer. I got the answer I expected. They're not giving third shots. No exceptions. I went back home, called my internist, my gynecologist, my oncologist again. They're also not giving third shots. I looked at myself in the mirror. Was I really going to do this? 

After waiting a few days, I pulled my hair into a pony tail, put on dark glasses, walked back to Vaccination Street and got in line. 

"Is this your first vaccination?" asked the yellow-jacketed guard.

"Mmmm-hmm!" I squeaked. As usual, I expected to be sent home at every step of the way. When I showed my ID card. When I "forgot" my vaccination book. When I filled out the form wrong. When the doctor, needle poised over my arm, told me to expect a hematoma and I said, "Oh, I know--I mean, my friend told me that's what would happen!" I even expected, as I sat among the vaccinated for the required fifteen-minute wait, either to plotz on the floor for my sins--Zeus would zap me with a thunderbolt--or be arrested. The police would march in and announce: "You Did Not Follow The Procedures Or The Rules." 

I swung my arm around vigorously right after the shot. I'm told the notion that this helps with pain is an urban legend, but this time around I did not wake up moaning in pain when I turned over on my vaccinated arm. I pressed it, as the doctor told me to do, and I put on an ice pack as soon as I got home. Body aches and chills came; my temperature rose to 37.1 and 37.3. I lay in bed, took paracetamol, ate ice cream and read Peter Pan.

I recovered.

The German Elections: Business as Usual

Posters are everywhere--in front of my building there's one my teenager and I longed to rip down from the "Basis" party--the anti-maskers who think their civil rights are being trampled upon. They'd love Marjorie Taylor Greene. We restrained ourselves.

Germany has seven main political parties--there are creepy racist fringe ones like the AfD, the so-called "alternative" for Germany, the one that doesn't like migrants or non-cisgender persons or basically anyone of a non-Aryan appearance, and there's "Die Partei," the joke party that wasn't such a joke when one of its leaders decided to vote randomly yes to one vote and no to the next, alternatively, and ended up giving a yes vote to an AfD proposal. Then there are versions of Right, Center-Right, Left, and Center-Left. It's all very complicated. A mirror of the German mind.

I admire Annalena Baerbock, the Green party candidate, for her efforts to protect the climate, but I can see that Olaf Scholz, whom I initially dismissed as a Peter Principle type, will win. He knows his audience. He never says a word unless it's absolutely necessary to do so, and he avoids controversy with a deftness bordering on the acrobatic. Then there's his campaign slogan: "Kompetenz für Deutschland." He's offering Germans their very favorite thing: competence. To be fair, you can translate "Kompetenz" as "expertise," but what's the diff? To keep order, to follow the rules, is to be competent, in fact, an expert! I can just see him placing his competent head on the pillow, holding hands with his wife, smiling a "yes," when she asks if he had a competent day, and then, as he turns out the competent light, reaches competently for her and offers a competent act, God is in his German Competence, and all's right with the world. Meanwhile, fossils fuels are burning. Does he secretly know he can competently halt climate crisis even better than the feisty Madame Baerbock? I wish I knew. I have to admit, the man's eyes reveal the wheels turning behind them. He can't always suppress a slight rise of an eyebrow. I withdraw the Peter Principle theory and hope he has some genuine expertise with which to tackle the climate emergency and the migrant crisis. I hope he's Herr Very, Very Shrewdly Gets Things Done, not just Herr Competent.

The Courage of Peter Boghossian

Peter Boghossian is one of my heroes. The brilliant philosopher, whose teaching and scholarship range far beyond ivory towers and woke factories, tendered his resignation from Portland State University. His letter may be read in full on Bari Weiss's substack, Common Sense. Over the last few years, I have enjoyed watching him combat what I first thought of as the excesses of academe--the pomposity, the jargon, the language circling gracefully around some obscure point but rarely with clarity.  

That language has taken a more sinister turn, becoming a series of ideologies, especially about race and gender, that are harmful, especially in the form of critical race theory as it currently appears in many American classrooms--from kindergartens to doctoral programs.  Boghossian is hardly the first to resign, but he's one of the most prominent.  American education, especially in the most expensive private schools and universities, is in a crisis at a time when the country needs to train future leaders the most. I hope Bogossian's statement will be taken seriously by other institutions. I hope that freedom of speech and a commitment to teaching how--rather than what-- to think will return. 

Here is Bogossian in 2018 with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose during a moment of triumph, when the three exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of several prominent academic journals:

Lemon-Parmesan Polenta with Stir-Fried Veggies

An easy, delicious meal. You will need:

Olive oil

A red onion

Two small zucchini (you can use bell peppers or any other vegetable)

Herbal salt

A small mug full of dry Polenta

A water cooker filled with boiling water

A heaping tablespoon of veggie broth

A lemon or two

A few ounces of Parmesan (to taste)

Pepper (to taste)

Put about two tablespoons of olive oil in a teflon frying pan on moderate heat. Slice into smallish pieces the red onion and put it in the pan; add the sliced zucchini. Stir and add herbal salt.  Cover with a spatter guard.

In a pot put about a mugful of dry Polenta (more for three big eaters). Squeeze one or two onions and add the juice. Put a tablespoon of veggie broth in the mug and add a cup of boiling water; stir into the Polenta-lemon mix. Add four more mugs of water, stirring often. Turn heat down while you grate the Parmesan. When the Polenta's thickening, put a ladle-full onto your plate, add a scoop of the veggie-onion mix, a handful of grated Parmesan and a turn or two from the pepper grinder:

The Perfect Meal for an Upper West Side Boomer Expatriate in Munich

Why didn't somebody tell me about Pho before? Very near my hotel, the Mercure near the Olympiapark, there's a little place I went to because there were plenty of tables in front--more tables outside than inside, and obviously in COVID times I'd prefer eating outside. The restaurant had the uninspiring name ASIA, as far as I could tell, but the best Vietnamese food in the neighborhood. I tried a red curry at another place touting itself as "vegan" and it was fine, but twice as expensive and without the delicate subtleties of spice in same dish at the ASIA.

We landed at ASIA, on Leonradstraße, on our first day in Munich; I ordered the Pak Choy with tofu and fell in love with the place. Yum. You can't get this stuff back in Essen, home of the Chinese restaurants with canned veggies in brown sauce. I can buy ingredients at my local Asian store, but I can't work the magic. The food here is satisfying and quite inexpensive, especially for overpriced Munich. Here's the lovely Pho, swimming in star-anise, scallions, basil ginger, lime, and a perfect broth:

A Super Vegan Stir-Fry

A wok is a good idea for this one, but not absolutely necessary. And feel free to vary the veggies, as long as you have some. The basic idea is tofu, veggies, rice, and black bean sauce. 

Ingredients:

Tofu

Steamed rice straight from the rice cooker (jasmine or basmati)

Cornstarch

Sliced scallions

Sliced or crushed garlic (lots!)

Grated fresh ginger (use a piece at least half the size of your thumb)

Sliced carrots, either the purple kind or the orange kind

Mini corn cobs (you'll find fresh ones at your local Asian grocery)

Spicy black bean sauce (I prefer Laoganma brand)

Sesame oil (the dark roasted kind)

Peanut oil

Black rice vinegar

Shao Hsing Rice wine

Soy sauce

A chili pepper or two, depending on how hot you like your food

Instructions:

Tofu: slice, drain, arrange on towel until the towel is soaked, move to another dry towel and repeat process until the tofu is reasonably try.

Place on plate and dust with corn starch

In a pan sizzling with peanut oil (vegetable oil will do) place the tofu. Let brown on both sides. Remove to paper towel, drain and set aside.

In the same pan add the scallions, garlic, ginger. While they're being stir-fried on medium heat, pour boiling water and salt into a small pot and add the corn and sliced carrots.  Let these boil for a few minutes (3-5, depending on how crunchy you like your veggies). Drain and add to pan; keep stirring. Add the tofu and stir.

While the veggies are cooking, assemble your sauce:  About half a cup or more of the rice wine, a chopped chili, two tablespoons or less of the black rice vinegar, a heaping tablespoon or two of the black bean sauce, a shake or three of sesame oil, around a third of a cup of soy sauce, and a heaping handful of sugar. Let boil, stir, and turn heat way down or off. Add sauce to veggie mix and stir.

Put a scoop of rice on your plate, add the veggie mix, and enjoy with a glass of wine.

A New Take on Spicy: A Green Version of Sambal

 If you're fond of various versions of Sambal Olek dishes, you'll like this alternative.

What's that green stuff next to the salad? Coriander chutney--spicy and smooth. You could always go the traditional route with Sambal Olek, the spicy red sauce, but this is a flavorful alternative. 

Ingredients:

Jasmine or Basmati rice, straight from the rice cooker

Sliced cucumbers

Salad: this one is made with a balsamic vinaigrette containing a dash of sugar and olive oil, plus a little more olive oil and a salt containing green herbs (parsley, basil, dill, rosemary). But you can use another kind of salt if you. Go wild!

Two fresh eggs (I got a free-ranging we-don't-kill-the-baby-boy-chicks brand).

Fry your eggs on high heat so they get crispy around the edges. There's nothing like a mouthful of warm rice and crunchy edge of egg zinged by that coriander chutney:

Wash it all down with a glass of red wine.

 

So You Want to be an Anti-Racist

The good news is you already are!  You're reading this post. A racist wouldn't.

Don't let mean old Madame DiAngelo (who reminds me of Madame Defarge) chop off your common sense. And don't let Preacher Kendi persuade you all inequality springs from racism. Don't let either make you feel you have to "learn a  great deal about" yourself because of your skin color. The content of your character remains the thing to think about.

A good friend had the sense to throw the DiAngelo book across the room, but still admitted, "I just want to be a better ally." That made me want to yell, "But sweetie, you've been a good ally your whole life!"  Words and phrases to brush off your shoulders: "microaggressions," "structures of oppression/white supremacy/power," "white privilege." When they're tossed your way, remind yourself--and the person tossing them--that we're people, not victims and oppressors.  That racism does not define America; it is one of America's problems. That we share a common humanity. Skin color is not what must define us.

Except: When you witness racism or bullying. The kind of thing Isabel Wilkerson describes in Caste: a black historian seated in first class, she has to contend with a white man refusing to move his bag. He's put where he's not allowed to put it--and loudly complains about how "they let in anybody" even though, he bellows, he's paid to be where he is. If you want to be a better ally, do the right thing, whatever the right thing is in the moment. If it's to yell at the white guy, do it. If it's to give your seat to the woman being bullied, do that. When you see a non-white friend being attacked--as all too many Asians are in the wake of the morally bankrupt former president--step in and make your presence felt. You'll figure out in the moment what's best; you'll be aware that being passive is wrong.

If you want to transform a racist into a reasonable human being, that's harder. That takes persuasion, maybe even preaching. Preaching's been exploited all too effectively by DiAngelo, who's channeling Jonathan Edwards (A blogger quipped: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Broad") and Kendi, whose line when any inequality crops up is "what else could it be?" His sermon, "it's always racism" is misguided. It was racism on Isabel Wilkerson's plane. It isn't racism in my home or my classroom.

Preaching might even work with a very few racists, but I prefer the Socratic method, even when it doesn't get you very far. "Why do you feel that way?" is my favorite question. They might just get angry, but you've at least raised the question they haven't raised for themselves. The answer is usually, "I've always thought that way and I'm not gonna change." Maybe they won't. But maybe they will. Don't give up on them completely. Not even on the ones who want a white history month. Talk to them. The white guy yelling at Wilkerson in first class because he doesn't think black people belong there? Yell back. Or find a way to make him feel he's absurd.

For yourself, one thing to do besides continuing being the decent person you've always been is to read and learn the histories you didn't know. Another good friend said, "I didn't even know about the Tulsa race massacre until two years ago!" She said it as if she'd lived next door to a crematorium, smelled the smoke, and pretended the stench was roses. But she really just hadn't known, and now she does. 

If you're on the fence regarding free speech versus allowing critical race theory to be taught in schools, read this: 

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGkZQTBNHxwFSQTFNRLfmhKhtdF 

Cards on the table: try not teaching that anywhere, least of all in a university.  Here's Thomas Sowell's take on current black culture and why white liberals are making things worse: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtyoNSmOYzo

A brief, incisive take on the term "white privilege": 

https://cathy.arcdigital.media/p/the-problem-with-white-privilege 

 If you're a parent or employee of a large corporation who's read Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist, you should know the following:

(1) Calling racism and capitalism "conjoined twins," Kendi charges $20,000 per speaking engagement.

(2) In September, 2020, he tweeted about Amy Coney Barrett's adopted Haitian children, suggesting she was a colonizer: 

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/26/anticapitalist-sponsored-by-twitter-ceo-accuses-amy-coney-barrett-of-colonialism-for-adopting-from-haiti/

Attacking someone's family is low. I'm no fan of the latest Supreme Court Justice appointee, but as a mother can imagine and sympathize with her agony at facing this gratuitous, disingenuous attack. Character shows in actions, and this one reveals who Kendi is.

(3) He's proposing a constitutional amendment to end racism: his guiding principle, that all inequality is the result of racism, would result in discrimination against any high-achiever perceived as creating inequality or profiting from an ill-defined inequality. His language, below, is again stirring, but entirely vague:

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/

An interesting discussion of ways in which systemic racism does exist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD6aoUCQ21w 

See this fabulous young artist on how she escaped wokeness: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Ak5uEcDUQ&t=193s

Summarizing what's misleading in Kendi's argument: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/why-ibram-kendis-antiracism-is-so-flawed/ 

Why Robin diAngelo's book is good for keeping table legs from wobbling (but nothing else): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/

On so-called critical race theory in schools: Here's a recent discussion of versions of what's called "CRT" in schools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wplt3RpyKoc&t=1465s 

Read. Here are some recommendations, a very partial list, in alphabetical order:

Fay Botham, Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, & American Law (University of North Carolina, 2009). Botham focuses on the ways in which Catholic and Protestant theologies influenced race law in America. The appropriately-named Lovings, the couple whose marriage was not rendered legal until the Supreme Court decision of 1967, are pictured on the cover.

Sarah L. Delaney and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years (Delta, 1993). Sisters born to enslaved parents combat racism.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) 

http://mrbecker9.weebly.com/uploads/4/8/5/7/4857123/frederickdouglassfulltext.pdf 

This is a portrait of what slavery does to identity-- to the feeling of manhood and of self-determination.

James Forman, Jr. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. (Abacus, 2017). 

Drew Gilpin Faust, ed. The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860. (Louisiana State University Press, 1981). Unabridged selections from the works of the proslavery apologists. Why read racists? It's a good idea to keep your enemies closer than your friends. Understand what the bad guys thought and why they thought it--why some still think it. Understand the intellectual similarities between these old-fashioned racists and the current crop of "anti-racist" or neo-racist ideologies. Curious similarities to the thinking of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin di Angelo may be found.

James Henry Hammond, Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder, ed. Carol Bleser (Oxford UP, 1988) The "Cotton is King" defender of slavery, he raped his own nieces as well as his slaves. It's unnerving to read these diaries in which he recounts his misdeeds with no embarrassment and no regret, but doing so will inform you about the way one highly influential racist thought. And about beliefs that sustained, and sustain, those who think like Hammond.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; Amistad, 2006) A coming-of-age novel. Richard Wright and several male members of the Harlem Renaissance hated it for telling too much--for showing rural African-Americans, their beliefs, their accents, their way of life.

______________, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave, ed. Debra G. Plant (HQ, 2018). Too controversial to be published in Hurston's lifetime, this is her ethnographic work on one man's life, revealing forms of slavery that existed within Africa between various tribes.

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) 

https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html

Jacobs wanted to show what slavery did to women; her account reveals the destruction of the family, both white and black, the attack on motherhood, rape and sexual exploitation.

Margo Jefferson, Negroland (Vintage, 2016) Jefferson's memoir about growing up in a community of professional, well-educated African-Americans. It wasn't a picnic. Here's a review: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/books/review-negroland-by-margo-jefferson-on-growing-up-black-and-privileged.html

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). 

https://www.uek12.org/Downloads/TKAM_Full_Text.pdf

Yes, read this endlessly controversial novel. It's a realistic portrait of the South in the nineteen-thirties and long after. Because Atticus Finch is often seen as a "white savior" is no reason not to know that only a white lawyer could have halted persecution of a black defendant in the pre-civil rights era and long after. This novel is a portrait of the Jim Crow world. But here are some of (many) alternate points of view:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-are-we-still-teaching-kill-mockingbird-schools-ncna812281

and

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2091589-6-reasons-to-not-teach-it

Here's a rebuttal of that line of thought: 

https://www.cram.com/essay/The-Role-Of-The-White-Savior-In/FJE36JBGPR

Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (Norton, 2018) Direct, comprehensive, balanced. Incisive on the inspiration for the American revolution in rebellions of enslaved peoples.

Heather Mac Donald, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (St. Martins Griffin, 2018).

John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Then, Now and Forever. (Avery, 2021). Yes, one of them in the "n-word," the one that tortures academics. Just when I think of something I want to tell students about Allen Ginsberg, it's there--or its cognate--and I've already read it. There are those who say nuance and intention don't matter. But nuance and intention are among the most important aspects of friendly, civilized conversation.

McWhorter is brilliant; his substack, "It Bears Mentioning," 

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/

and his podcasts with Glenn Loury are terrific. Loury just did an interview with the unfairly reviled Charles Murray, who is not the "white supremacist" the Southern Poverty Law Center deems him, but a thoughtful, scholarly, witty man:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqgUclg7-Lk

Margaret Mead, James Baldwin, A Rap on Race (Delta, 1971) If you can get it--and it appears to be out of print--this conversation between the anthropologist and the writer reveals much about Americans and race in the sixties and earlier.

Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968; Dell, 1976). A sharecropper's daughter, Moody risked her life on many occasions for the civil rights movement. This is her very moving story.

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage, 1970, 1999) Morrison's first novel, about a young girl made to feel ugly because of her dark skin.

Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (Norton, 2010) Comprehensive, brilliant.

____________, Creating Black Americans (Oxford, 2005) 

Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford UP, 2009). An all-encompassing study of miscegenation law in America. The cover photo, of Harry Bridges begging a clerk to allow marriage between himself and Noriko Sawada, his Japanese fiancée, is heartbreaking.  

Adam Rutherford, How to Argue with a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020). Facts are delicious when they let you tell your racist relative he's descended from the ethnic group he reviles. Read this book and feel ready to do so.

James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America (Faber&Faber, 2020). Especially the chapter on miscegenation.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Race (Basic Books, 2013) 

Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (Harper Perennial, 2007)

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The classic anti-slavery text.

With the original illustrations:

 https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/huckfinn/huckpix/huckpix.html

It's worth getting The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, by
Michael Patrick Hearn. (Norton, 2001). On the controversial use of the word appearing more than 200 times in the text, see Michiko Kakutani: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html

Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medial Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Anchor, 2006) You may have only heard of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Read this.

Gloria Wade-Gayles, Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman's Journey Home (Beacon, 1993). Growing up black and female in the Jim Crow South.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Vintage, 2010) The History of African-Americans moving to the north. National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

____________ Caste: The Lies that Divide Us (Allen Lane, 2020) See her great Ted Talk, too. The book itself starts with a great idea--that American racism is a caste system like the Indian one--but devolves into anecdote, assertion, and oversimplification. Wilkerson is a very good writer, but this book should have been shorter.

Peter W. Wood, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (Encounter, 2020). An incisive, witty response to the ideological excess and scholarly failures of the 1619 project. There are others, I hasten to say, but this one's particularly well-written.

Howard Zinn, On Race (Intro. by Cornel West) (Seven Stories, 2011)

_________, A People's History of the United States (Harper Collins, 1980) This one's been accused of extreme bias--in some quarters seen as a "Marxist" reckoning with American history, omitting important events in order to present the nation as being founded in exploitation. But you might also see it as a history of the underdog, of those whose stories haven't been told, of the people whose names only mattered to themselves (as Edwidge Danticat once said of Haitian boat people trying to survive).

 

All Hands on Deck: Eliminating the New Racism and Anti-Intellectualism

I am an American citizen living and working in Germany, concerned about anti-racism programs in the United States and their effect on the rest of the world. "Anti-Racism" is a misnomer: it's not what it sounds like. The vast majority of those forced into these programs were never racists to begin with. There's a difference between a dumb mistake (the still-cringing guy who thought Obama was the butler) and malice: the racist telling an American of Japanese descent  to "go home: you don't speak our language." The harassed person--just trying to buy a baguette--doesn't even speak Japanese; he was born in the USA.

"Structural" racism is a perspective, useful in law, but it's not the original sin of "whiteness."  Changing hearts and minds is still the way--not the perfect way, but like democracy, the better method. We are not victims and oppressors: we are people who can tell each other our stories. I just listened to a white teacher married to a black teacher discussing how unhappy they both felt when required by their employer to complete an "anti-racism" workshop. The white husband was made to join the white group of oppressors, the black wife the black group of victims. Both find this contrived notion of identity based on race is a new, terrible form of racism.

Incidents at Smith College, the Juilliard School, The New School, The Brearley School, The Dwight-Englewood school, and many others, indicate the following problems:

(1) These programs preach to the choir, stirring up misguided guilt. They also seem inadvertently designed to inflame racism in persons already inclined to be racist. Some studies suggest such programs actually create racist feeling where none existed before.

(2) They create a new form of racism. Participants are asked to define themselves by their ethnicity rather than their humanity or their interests. 

(3) They are anti-intellectual. Two of the most popular versions of "Anti-Racism," Ibram X. Kendi's bestselling How to Be an Anti-Racist and Robin di Angelo's White Fragility are methodologically flawed, creating a false impression of the extent of racism, defining the term in misleading ways. (John McWhorter remarked that diAngelo's book is good for one thing: keeping table legs from wobbling.)

(4) The effects of anti-racism programs have been to inspire fear and to spawn hysterical reactions. Young people who are used to identifying by ethnicity and sorting ethnicities into victim and oppressor fall all too easily into the victim role.

(5) They foster censorship and self-censorship; they restrict freedom of speech. Poets have been censored both for using a race-related word (Matthew Dickman, writing about his grandmother, used the word "negress") and for writing about attitudes toward race. Reading aloud Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" to my class the other day, I wondered whether I'd get nailed for having spoken his line "through the negro streets." I worry more when I'm teaching Maya Angelou, Faulkner, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison or Harper Lee.

(6) The only thing I ever agreed with President Trump about was his ban on teaching anti-racism and critical race theory. In this single instance, he was all too correct. I am in favor of dissolving current anti-racism programs and returning to the liberal ideal of shared humanity. 

For a recent summary of the dangers of critical race theory, see Christopher Rufo's film: 

Also very useful is Helen Pluckrose's and Ilana Redstone's critique of power, knowledge and language in postmodern thought:

And for the light touch:

100% Vegan Boomer Meal: Celery Root de Luxe with Bulgur

It's about time, some may say. My daughter and I have been ordering organic deformed vegetables--the kind that are too small or too eccentrically shaped to be sold to the picky seekers of perfect, but we like them because they present culinary challenges. Never made rhubarb stew before, but it's good. This time around we got celery root, pictured here sliced and fried.

Ingredients:

One celery root, washed and sliced thinly

Red onions (white will do)

Garlic

Carrots

Small can of chick peas 

Vegetable broth 

Juice of half a lemon

Bulgur (about a cup)

Peanut or Olive oil

You'll need two frying pans, one large, for the celery root. Heat peanut or olive oil in the pan, add in the celery root, let fry on high heat (but check) for about two minutes. Flip when brown or turn heat down. Should be crispy, not burned. 

In the other frying pan: olive oil, sliced red onions, thinly sliced carrot, thinly sliced or pressed garlic. Allow the onions to get transparent, the carrots a little brown and softer, the garlic aromatic. Rinse about a cup of bulgur in a sieve and add to the mix, adding a little extra olive oil. Squeeze in the lemon juice. Stir and let the bulgur get that toasted look. Pour in about two cups of vegetable broth (dried with boiling water is fine). Allow to cook, stirring, until liquid is absorbed. Drain a can of chick peas and stir in (adds protein!) Serve with the celery root. Yum.

Beautiful Boomer Pasta

 What's Boomer about this recipe? Yes, the meat. But the meat is just an accent, not the whole shebang.

You will need:

Olive oil

Garlic

Red onions

Lemon 

Any good Fusilli or bow-tie pasta

Fresh asparagus

Bacon-wrapped goat cheese (I got mine at Rewe)

Parmesan

Pepper

 (1) Pour about a tablespoon of olive oil into a frying pan and put the frying pan on low heat. Chop a red onion or two and some garlic. Put in pan; turn heat up slightly, stirring. The onions should become transparent and the garlic should slightly brown. Put these sautéed onions and garlic into a Pyrex baking dish. Put the washed, trimmed asparagus on top. In a bowl, mix the juice of half a lemon with olive oil. Brush this mixture on top of the asparagus. Add a little salt if you wish. Put in pre-heated oven at about 170º Celsius (around 340º Fahrenheit).

(2) Slide the goat cheese/bacon into a separate backing dish--put in oven ten-to-fifteen minutes before you want to add them to the pasta.

(3) Put the pasta in boiling water--it will take between ten and twelve minutes to be done. Drain, rinse. Place the goat-cheese-bacon on top; add the asparagus-onion-garlic mix; sprinkle on Parmesan and ground pepper. Enjoy! A glass of red wine goes well with this--or white.

 

 

The Critical Mom and the Postmodernists (a Glance at Critical Race Theory)

As a rule, I can't stand 'em, but announcing that baldly puts me in the rank of the curmudgeons, the boomers, the illiterates, so I'll try again: the one I like especially is Oscar Wilde, not officially in the "postmodern" category, though any reader of his essays--of remarks like truth being "one's last mood"--will see how he does fit in with Lyotard (has been compared to him) and others.

One difference between the raft of postmodernist and poststructuralists who tend to run too far down the aporia rabbithole and Oscar Wilde--who went far down that rabbithole himself--is that he emerged laughing. Not always happily, but his strong sense of the absurd sustained him. In a prisoner's striped uniform on a train platform, he asked to read the newspaper and the guards turned him down. He asked to read it upside down. That they  allowed, and he remarked that it made a great deal more sense that way. Noting that criticism reveals more of the critic than the art work, he felt anything but disturbed. He laughed. We gauge almost nothing of the artist's or the culture's intentions, perhaps, but criticism is still the best method we've got for understanding art and culture. I'd compare Wilde's remark about truth to Churchill's statement on democracy, the one in which he lists all the ways it's terrible but reminds us it's the best we've got.

Democracy is taking hits now, and postmodernism, in the form of popular ideas of forms of critical race theory, is assaulting it. But here are some things that help:

https://www.fairforall.org/

and https://www.thefire.org/

The notion that all inequality descends from racism makes about as much sense to me as the accusation that "The Jews killed Christ"--a belief that got a former professor of mine routinely chased up (and once, tied to) a tree by the Irish Catholic kids in his neighborhood, whose nun teachers had sicced the kids on their Jewish friends, the ones with whom, the rest of the year, they played stickball. The tree incidents were confined to Christian holidays, Easter being the more dangerous. 

Hate crimes aren't waning, but they won't be reduced by critical race theory. But before carrying on, here's what Wilde said about history, and I think he'd say the same about the current climate: "As one reads history  . . . one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime." How I wish Robin DiAngelo and co. would absorb that.

But rather than type out a lengthy rebuttal to her and her pals, I'll paste in some of my recent favorites:

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Chapter-2_Ali_The-Flawed-Premises.pdf

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bill+maher+and+john+mcwhorter&t=newext&atb=v225-1&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-tjgXQDyqno

https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/richard_delgado_jean_stefancic_critical_race_thbookfi-org-1.pdf (background)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html?referringSource=articleShare 

https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-be-an-antiracist

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

https://quillette.com/2020/06/11/racist-police-violence-reconsidered/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/black-lives-matter-loury-mcwhorter/409117/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/opinion/race-theory-us-racism.html?showTranscript=1

https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2021/3/2/22309605/the-silenced-majority-bari-weiss-new-york-times-cancel-culture-free-speech-democrat-republican

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/reasons-critical-race-theory-terrible-dealing-racism/

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/15/what-to-read-instead-of-white-fragility/

https://newdiscourses.com/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/the-truth-about-critical-race-theory

Christopher Rufo on critical race theory:

https://christopherrufo.com/the-truth-about-critical-race-theory/

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/critical-race-theory-fight/

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/rufo-versus-disney-an-update.php

https://cynicaltheories.com/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/

John Riley on Hate Crime Hoax: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1SXcdNSy9Y

 

P.S. Glenn Loury. John McWhorter. Read their substacks. Listen to them.