Bye Bye Biles

 

Simone Biles is being lionized for her withdrawal from the Olympics, citing “mental health issues” and that her “mind and body weren’t in synch.”  In her press conference, she bemoaned that she “wasn’t having fun.” Biles is to Olympic gymnastics what Tiger Woods is to golf and Tom Brady is to football.  She is the face of the sport and was expected to wow us all with a gold medal performance.   Her performance was much needed after the belly flops of the women’s soccer teams and the men’s basketball teams.

I have decidedly mixed views of her withdrawal, particularly since the MSM is gushing over her courage and “taking ownership of her mental health.”

Yes, there is a certain amount of bodily risk involved in gymnastics.  Slip ups have caused devastating, paralyzing injuries.   While some sports present more risks than others, gymnastics is not alone in presenting risks to athletes.  Hockey, downhill skiing, luge, ski jumping, among others present dangers to athletes. 

And Biles is not the first top level performer to take a pass.  Temperamental Bobby Fischer, it will be recalled, showed up late to the first game and lost and, after making ridiculous demands on the match organizers forfeited the second game with Boris Spassky before turning the match around and finally defeating Spassky.

Sure, it’s her body, her choice.  And, of course, I have a great deal of empathy toward her after she was victimized by the dastardly Dr. Nasser.  She made the best decision for her.

The media is all ablaze with support for her and her decision to withdraw.  “Thank you for finding your voice and staying true to yourself,” proclaimed one.  WaPo, of course, was compelled to racialize and genderize the whole affair, “Black women are apparently still expected to sacrifice themselves for a country that refuses to see them as fully human.”  Another opinion piece read, “Men could learn a thing or two about what it means to be truly strong.” 

But there’s another perspective.  Competitors compete.  Real competitors can’t be held back.  The sports world is replete with stories of athletes refusing to be held back by physical or emotional issues.  Many athletes have competed immediately following the death of a parent.  Michael Jordan famously turned in a stellar performance in the NBA finals despite having the flu.  Duncan Keith was smashed in the mouth with a puck, and despite losing several teeth, returned to play the same night.  Nolan Ryan continued to pitch even after being hit in the face with a line drive, blood splattered all over his jersey.  Ronnie Lott of the San Francisco 49ers had a part of his little finger amputated after it was severely dislocated so he could continue to play.  Of course, there were the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys who played in the famous Ice Bowl on the frozen tundra in Green Bay with a wind chill of minus 36 degrees.  Many players suffered frostbite.  Tiger Woods overcame age and personal issues to win the Masters two years ago.  Plenty of other athletes have competed when battling internal demons.  That’s what it’s all about.

It is in the overcoming and prevailing that makes the best sports stories.

Perhaps the greatest display of grit and will was by Babe Dietrich Zaharias.   Incredibly Babe won the 1954 U.S. Women’s Open Championship in golf a month after colon cancer surgery and while wearing a colostomy bag. 

Biles is a superb athlete and it’s a shame that she chose to duck out.   But the media shouldn’t be fawning over her decision.   If she didn’t wish to compete, she should have pulled out a long time ago and let someone else take her spot.   

Biles was the face of our team at the Olympics.  She let her team down and her country down.  When it was time to step up, she stepped aside.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

 

For those of you waiting patiently for life to go back to the way it was pre-COVID, I have some bad news for you.  It’s not.  Sure, we’re inching back.  Facemasks are not required everywhere.  People are drifting back into their offices.  Large gatherings like concerts are happening again.   But Europe and Australia are still imposing brutal restrictions and the specter of the Delta Variance is being held over our heads like the Sword of Damocles.  COVID ignited or uncovered other currents and, in my view, life will never quite be the same again.  It remains to be seen exactly how all this will play out, but our society has been changed permanently, and most of the effects are not positive.   Still, there are some changes that will turn out to be beneficial, although they will be vastly outweighed by the deleterious outcomes that will occur as a consequence of COVID and the drive for Wokeness.  Over the next three posts, I will outline what I think are the good, the bad and the ugly that will be permanent changes to our lives.

The Good

At first, I was disillusioned by the apparent suicide attempt by pro sports, beginning with Colin Kaepernick.  Why would a sport seem to go out of its way to offend a large part of its fan base?  It is all the more perplexing because all professional sports is, essentially, is brand management and the anti-American and anti-patriotic symbols and gestures seemed to tarnish to brand.  Yet, the NFL, NBA and MLB seemed quite willing to absorb a huge dent in their viewership to prove sufficient Wokeness.

Except for the NHL, UFC and PGA, major pro sports seem to be outdoing themselves to demonstrate their commitment to Wokeness, rather than their fan base.

The NBA went all out in its BLM messaging last year and showed more fealty to the Chinese Communist Party than  to ordinary Americans.  The NFL announced that it will play the Black National Anthem before games.   MLB moved its All-Star game out of Atlanta and changed the name of the Cleveland Indians to the bland Guardians.

All three leagues are seeing a bleed off in ratings with the NBA suffering the biggest loss.

This is all good in the long run.

Because of the anti-trust exemptions granted these leagues, the salaries of these Woke players have gone into the stratosphere.   In contrast, the retired pro athletes that I had gotten to know – Bob Asher and George Seals of the Bears, Cliff Koroll, Grant Mulvey and Reggie Fleming of the Blackhawks all played for modest salaries and had to get real jobs after their playing careers ended.

I hope the downward trend in ratings continues.

I, for one, have turned my attention to other activities such as hiking, chess, and live music.

Who needs to watch LeBron shoot free throws at the end of a basketball game?  Why watch 300 pound linemen give each other CTE?  Or watch an interminably dull baseball game with your team 8 games out in July?

Our Olympic team was even worse.  After tripping over themselves to show how much contempt they have for the nation they supposedly represent, the women’s soccer team got pasted by Sweden 3-0 and the men’s basketball team got horsewhipped by….France.  I guess this is what global “equity” is all about.

Why do I think this is good?  Because we have become a nation of spectators, rather than doers.  We have turned athletes into members of the elite, as distant from us as the political elite, and every bit as contemptuous and disdainful of the rest of us. 

The other good development is working remotely.  The progressives have made urban living unlivable.   There was always a bit of an implicit deal—you would put up with the traffic and congestion, or being herded into commuter trains like cattle.  But the city offered a robust cultural life—restaurants, music, theater and such.  But now most cities are dangerous places since the defund police movement.  My own Chicago has 50-100 shootings a weekend, carjackings and robberies galore.  Downtown looks like a scene out of The Walking Dead.   So the implicit deal is dead.  The cultural benefits of the city are no longer available as a practical matter.  

Working remotely means you can minimize your time in the city, do away with the grinding commute and have more time for yourself and your family.  We have learned how to conference via Zoom and close transactions via Docusign.

I believe this trend will continue and that we can start drifting back to small town and rural life without too much difficulty and that is a good thing for families and communities.

Finally, another positive development is Podcasts.  While Mollie Hemmingway is undoubtedly correct—that the mainstream media has been irredeemably corrupted and social media is divisive and tyrannical (more on this later), podcasting has emerged as a wonderful and engaging development that enables lengthier, more thoughtful and nuanced discussions about complex ideas than merely a 180 character tweet. The recent interview of Bari Weiss by Jordan Peterson on his podcast  ran about 2 hours and the New Discourses podcasts by James Lindsay can run nearly as long.  Podcasting is a great vehicle with which to explore ideas more fully and (assuming deplatforming doesn’t occur) are a welcome development in an era starved for civil discourse.

Despite all the social and political turmoil, there have been some very positive developments since the onset of COVID19.  That is the good.  My next post will deal with The Bad and The Ugly.

Women and Children First

 Like most sane Americans, at this 245^th birthday, I worry a lot about the state of the union now.  A substantial minority has decided to displace Independence Day with Juneteenth (and don’t disingenuously tell me it’s not meant to be a displacement) and bump off 1776 and put 1619 in its stead.  Faux hyphenated historian Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded tenure at UNC just for that work of revisionist and false narrative.

But the pathology that most concerns me is the obliteration of our society’s longstanding protections for women and children.   “Women and children first” was the cry on the Titanic and, ironically, is the name of the uber progressive bookstore in Chicago.   Sadly, the progressive movement has steamrolled those protections.  The gender-disoriented now come first.

With women, permitting biological males to compete with them in sports is simply absurd.  There are perhaps 300 high school boys that would eclipse Florence Griffith Joyner’s world record.  And now the Olympics are going to permit a biological male to compete with women in weightlifting.  In New Jersey, the family of a high school girl is suing the state because two athletes that were male just last year defeated her in her sprint event.  Girls and women fought hard under Title IX to have athletic opportunities and now they are being stripped away.

The Woke gender movement not only is destroying athletic opportunities, it’s flat out dangerous.  In athletics, the disparity in speed, strength and muscle mass in sports where there is contact will mean a greater likelihood of injury.    In other contexts, the risks are even greater.  In California, biological men can self-identify as women and get placed in women’s prisons.  A society that would put these vulnerable and already at-risk women at greater risk of sexual assault is one that is on the road to pathological breakdown.   The push to allow biological men in women’s restrooms is likewise wrong-headed and dangerous.   As a society, we have always offered special protections around womens’ privacy issues.  In addition, a restroom is an enclosed space in which an assault on a lone women is easier to perpetrate.   For adolescent girls that are self-conscious about their bodies anyway, permitting boys in their locker rooms and bathrooms is permitting a minority to tyrannize the majority.

With children, things are even worse.

With COVID19, the government is now pushing vaccination for children and adolescents despite the absence of any long term studies about its effects.  Bret Weinsten and Heather Heying have been lone voices raising alarm about this.  COVID19 carries very little risk for young people and the incidents of myocarditis that have popped up are enough to put the brakes on for young people.  We should not be exposing young people to unknown risks to protect old people.   In a healthy society, older people take risks so young people don’t have to.

Similarly, in Illinois, and many other places, kids lost an entire year of in person school, mostly due to stubborn teachers’ unions that adamantly refused to go back to work, even as COVID19 receded.  Many of these students will never make up the lost year.  In Illinois, it was even worse.   Governor Pritzker shut down high school sports in the fall, even though all adjacent states played a full season with no outbreaks.  Most obscenely, I saw soccer and lacrosse teams out practicing while fully masked.  These were the healthiest, lowest risk people in the population pool, yet were sentenced to be deprived of a full education, socialization and, in the case of athletes, entire seasons of play with no science behind it whatsoever.

We have made a policy choice to push risks on to young people and deprive young people of intellectual, emotional and physical development to protect older people.  That’s immoral, wrong, and a sign of a society in decline.  But it’s even worse.  Since February 2020, the national debt has increased by nearly $5 trillion.  Yes, government wonks all have rationales behind the gargantuan increase--- “stimulus” and all that.  But the fact remains that the economic slowdown was caused by deliberate government action which many believe was completely unnecessary.   And this debt burden will need to be borne by guess who? Young people.   It is a complete inversion of the American dream.  We work to secure a better future for the next generation.  Our policymakers have reversed it all.  We are stealing from them for current consumption.

The most egregious example of the failure to protect women was the breakdown at Michigan State that allowed the monster Larry Nasser to abuse so many women athletes.  Now we learn that the F.B.I. failed to alert law enforcement or take action against Nasser, thereby enabling him to continue to sexually abuse these girls.

So the university AND the F.B.I. both failed to protect them—two large bureaucracies whose primary mission is nurturing and protecting.   After reading the inspector general’s report, I wanted to scream out loud, “YOU HAD ONE JOB.”   This was done under the sanctimonious Jim Comey, whose book carries the obscenely title “A Higher Loyalty” and who now teaches a course in ethical leadership at William and Mary.   He should have been banished and shamed for allowing the catastrophe at Michigan State under his aegis.

Our society is tearing down basic protections for women and children.   Civilized societies put them first. 

Outdoor Spaces

 

It was quite a revealing juxtaposition of events that occurred over the past week.  I visited upon the website of the Chicago Botanic Garden to check on their summer hours and happened upon the institution’s statement “Our commitment to racial justice and equity,” which I found a bit odd for a garden.

The statement included the following sentences:

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement catalyzed a process of self-examination and learning at the Garden.   We recognize that people of color often feel unwelcome in gardens, forest preserves, and parks, a direct result of historical oppression and violence in outdoor spaces.

I have questions and some observations about this remarkable assertion.

The statement chose to recognize BLM in all caps.  I wonder if it occurred to them that one of its founders, Patrice Cullors, leveraged her position to build a nice little real estate portfolio and that BLM while raising millions has, to my knowledge, while provided absolutely zero support for the expansion of outdoor spaces and outdoor programs for urban black youths.  Go figure. 

I’m not sure how the Garden came to the conclusion that people of color feel unwelcome in gardens, forest, preserves, and parks.  Did they do a survey?  How do they know this?  Every time I have visited the Chicago Botanic Garden, I have observed quite a panoply of people “of color” and not “of color” – whites,  African Americans, Indians (are they “of color”?), Asians, Middle Easterners both in hijabs and kippas, and actual Africans.  Once last summer, I saw a small trio of Africans playing African music with a group gathered around them, enjoying a balmy summer evening.  I saw no hint that any of them felt unwelcome.

There is tremendous irony in the last phrase of this absurd statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden.  In Chicago last 4^th of July weekend, nearly 100 people were shot, 17 were killed, 8 of them children.  Many of these incidents of violence are taking place in parks and outdoor spaces.  In my own old neighborhood, a 13 year old was shot in the head riding his bike on a Sunday morning.  Shootings routinely take place in and around Washington Park and Garfield Park. 

The statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden echoes the purported complicity in the normalization of violence against people of color by literature in the original faculty statement by the English Department at the University of Chicago. 

So, universities and gardens are unsafe places for people of color.

The hard truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that the violence of which these institutions decry is perpetrated by people of color, with people of color most often being the victims.  At the University of Chicago, two students have been violently killed… by people of color.  Last weekend, young Max Solomon was shot and killed on the “L” on his way to his summer internship.   The Woke organizations are beating their breasts about historical violence, yet ignore the violence that is going on each and every weekend…. and won’t discuss the perpetrators, and, in an era where even tulip bulbs and ferns are racialized, adeptly sidestep talking about their race.

As if to put an exclamation mark on things, a Chicago police officer and 2 ATF agents were shot directly in front of a police station on the South Side. 

Overlayed on this bloody weekend was the visit of our addled president, Joe Biden, to Illinois.  Biden, famously stated, “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black” and “[Republicans] want to put y’all back in chains.”  Yet, visiting Illinois a few days after the black community suffered one of the bloodiest weekends in Chicago history, Biden stayed far enough away from the South and West sides of the city that radiation from a nuclear blast wouldn’t reach him.  He assiduously avoided any contact with any black person that didn’t hold political office.

As more institutions like the Chicago Botanic Garden and the American Writers Museum go Woke, they, like their president, remain a safe distance from the actual, relentless violence that is occurring every week in Chicago.

Erasing Naivete

 

Somehow, I have gotten behind in everything.  I’m behind at work.  I’m behind in blogging.  And I’m woefully behind in summer reading… and it’s not even July 4^th yet (Is July 4^th still a thing?).  I just picked up Lawrence Wright’s new book, The Plague Year.  Wright is a talented writer who, like Lionel Shriver, never disappoints.  I like The End of October and God Save Texas and I’ll be interested to read his take on this past year.

But before I set sail on Wright’s journey, I’m going to spin out a few of my own observations—more like surprises, I’d say, as we weathered pandemic and the social unrest of the past year.  Listening to one of Bret Weinstein’s podcasts a few weeks ago, I was struck by one of Weinstein’s quotes, “No matter how cynical I get, I find that I am still naïve.”   I’m with you on this one, Bret.  I suppose the first big surprise has been my own naivete. I mistakenly thought of myself as prudent and appropriately skeptical, but the past year showed that I fell far short.   Here are a few of the areas in which I was taken by surprise.

 

·        I wholly underestimated the number of tyrannical politicians and government officials.  As a bit of an amateur U.S. history buff, I have been fascinated by the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, the writing and thinking of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Hamilton.  I understood the need to constrain government and the propensity of people to abuse power.  But I mistakenly thought that people raised in America with American ideals and values would exercise some restraint.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  With the COVID19 as their pretext,  the Governors Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, and J.B. Pritzker steamrolled the individual liberties of their citizens.  Under the rubric of “flatten the curve,” religious liberty, freedom of association, freedom to travel all got flattened.   As I write this, J.B. Pritzker just extended yet again the 30 day “emergency” with no input from the legislature as COVID19 is receding.   Even worse, was the power grab of the Administrative State—the CDC putting a halt to evictions and Anthony Fauci basking in unelected and unaccountable power.

 

·        The reciprocal of the power grab has been the submissiveness of the American people.  This was a nation founded on rebellion and disobedience.  Yet, we witnessed a great deal of blind obedience to dictates that were not founded on empirical evidence or actual science.  Early on, we learned that there was very little risk of transmission out of doors.  Gyms and restaurants stayed shut with no evidence that they were incubators.  Still, people yelled at other people across the street and admonished them to mask up.   And I still see people walking around downtown Chicago alone, with masks on.  Even more ludicrous are people biking or driving alone with masks on.   I was astonished at how many citizens meekly submitted to their government… and how many turned into willing enforcers.   One day, I was at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop, and inadvertently stepped about a foot over the spacing line that was taped on the floor.  A rather rotund, 260 lb. woman immediately gave me the death stare and wagged her finger at me.  She promptly ordered 3 doughnuts and a coffee with cream and sugar.  I could not resist, “If you’re serious about the risk to your health, you might want to rethink those doughnuts.”  Needless to say, I was hit with a barrage of expletives.

 

·        The third surprise was the collapse of higher education.  It was merely a dozen years ago that I read Jonathan Cole’s book The Great American University in which Cole made a wonderful case, extolling the excellence of America’s university system.  The American university system was the one area in which public and private institutions ran in parallel and made each other better.   He cited Columbia University and The University of Chicago as the best of the best because of their core curriculum requirements.   But fast forward a dozen years and the university system has quickly devolved into a network bloated wokeness indoctrination camps.  Even at the University of Chicago, wokeness has overtaken the school.  The heralded Booth School of Business is now running “white privilege” and “unconscious bias” workshops (with no empirical evidence that such a thing exists).  The English Department announced that it would only admit students interested in Black Studies in its graduate program next year.   The university launched an investigation into economist Harald Uhlig for evidence of “racism” because he had the temerity to assert that BLM was wrongheaded in its demand to defund the police.  And the university is contemplating establishing an entire department devoted to Critical Race Theory.   This is happening all over the country.  Harvard admitted activist David Hogg, who couldn’t get into a number of 3^rd rate schools.  Princeton just deleted its Greek or Latin language requirement for classics majors because it’s not “inclusive” enough.  Yale stopped offering its Western music class for the same reason.  The university system is now leading the way in the illiberal push.  Schools that once taught critical thinking are now purveyors of doctrinal orthodoxy… and overly expensive ones at that.

 

·        Finally, there is the corruption of media.  Media outlets always had a tilt, but now they are engaged in propagating straight falsehoods and distortions.   Donald Trump did not refer to the white supremacists at Charlottesville as “fine people.”   Nicholas Sandmann was portrayed as harassing the old Native American when it was actually the reverse.  Officer Sicknick was not killed by a fire extinguisher during the January 6 protests.  The summer of rioting, looting and burning was ludicrously referred to as peaceful protesting following the death of George Floyd.  The New York Times ran off Bari Weiss with her resignation letter becoming a sort of modern day Declaration of Independence.

 

(https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter)

From the false assertion that Trump urged people to drink fish tank cleaner to its failure to follow up and ask incisive questions about the Nashville bombing or the Las Vegas shooter, or what the mayor of Moscow’s wife was paying for when she wired $3.5 million into Hunter Biden’s account, the media as become corrupt beyond repair.

 

These developments and the depth of the corruption and decline in higher education caught me by surprise.

Maybe they shouldn’t have.

FAIR enough

 

As the Woke ideology consumes more and more of our formerly venerable institutions and corporations, those of us that value a liberal society are seeking refuge and camaraderie with like-minded individuals.

I think I have found one such organization—The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism or FAIR (www.fairforall.org).  I was initially attracted to it via a tweet from exiled journalist Bari Weiss and another tweet that called it a “non-woke ACLU.”  And it has an interesting and diverse array of public intellectuals as supporters and contributors—Bari herself, Columbia’s John McWhorter, Brown’s Glenn Loury, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Melissa Chen, among others.

I attended the FAIR Loving Day Celebration, marking the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia that knocked down miscegenation laws.  The event was organized by Chicago Chapter co-leader Takyrica Kokoszka (an African American) and her husband, Larry (white), both teachers in the Chicago Public School System.

Here are some of the highlights:

·        Several people talked about the loss of friends over Wokeness and feeling alone.

·        One person alikened FAIR to a “secret society” which I echoed, referring to similar secret societies in the writings of Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Benda in Community Czechoslovakia.

·        A born Brit that expressed his shock and dismay that free speech was under assault in the U.S.

·        Another University of Chicago educated woman that talked about her devotion to principles of free inquiry that she adopted at U of C that are now being threatened.

·        A woman physician that talked about her family’s experience as Holocaust survivors and her revulsion at the fact that she now is considered “privileged.”   She also talked about CRT invading her profession and interfering with her ability to take patients as they are.

·        Another gentlemen talked about his desire to “defund the universities, not the police.”

·        When one gentleman introduced himself as a U.S. history teacher, someone joked, “Which one?” (reference to 1619 Project.)

·        There was a woman from the old Soviet Union and a woman from Poland that were able to talk about what life in those societies were like.

·        A highlight for me was actually getting to spend some time getting to know Takyrica, a bright, enthusiastic, optimistic woman with a winning smile.

But here is the real punchline:   I did not detect any real partisanship in the room.  Of approximately 50 people in the room, I could not reliably predict the party affiliation of any of them.  Most spoke about free speech and the indoctrination going on in our educational system.  There was not a single mention by anyone of Trump or Biden.  That fact alone filled me with hope.

The next day, I listened to the full interview of Bari Weiss, one of the founders of FAIR, with Jordan Peterson.  Weiss, a self-proclaimed left of center journalist, said “I really believe that the fight for liberalism (I don’t mean that in the partisan sense but I mean that in terms of the values we’ve been describing in this conversation), that is more important than any amount of popularity, any amount of accolades on Twitter, than anything  else, and so I had to leave the institution in order to fight for liberalism, and that I see as the mission of my life.”

Conservatives and libertarians like me need to join hands with “liberals” like Bari Weiss, just as blacks must join hands with whites if we are to defeat the forces of illiberalism.   We cannot remain on the sidelines as our institutions fall one by one.  FAIR, I think, is a great step in the right direction.

I urge you to join and to listen to Weiss’s entire interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFTA9MJZ4KY)

 

Another Institution Falls to CRT

 I am stunned at the speed with which Wokeism has taken control of many of our institutions.   On the national level, it has inserted itself into the N.B.A., MLB, and the N.F.L.  Many major corporations have allowed it to infect its operating system—Bank of America, United Airlines, Coca-Cola, Gillette, to name a few. 

But locally, too, the movement has swept through our not-for-profits and educational institutions like wildfire.   The new American Writer’s Museum went from a special exhibit featuring Laura Ingalls Wilder and a live performance of readers of Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to featuring an obscure transgender author alongside Kathy Griffin in just a few months.  The Newberry Library went from a celebration of Herman Melville to sponsoring Drag Queen Story Hour and launching a vigorous campaign to rid the city of Columbus Day.  The University of Chicago, the originator of its laudable Free Speech Principles, shut down admissions to its graduate English Department to all but Black Studies scholars. 

Most troubling is the grip it is now asserting over our primary and secondary school system, threatening to indoctrinate young minds with its pernicious creed.  James Lindsay has brought to light its overt strategy, comparing it to a virus that hijacks its system to self-replicate.  In The Parasitic Mind, author Gad Saad similarly asserts that Wokeness and CRT acts as a parasite, infecting its host and sucking the life out of it.  

And now it has infected the local Jesuit High School, Loyola Academy.   Imagine the horror and revulsion of the caring, devout Catholic parents that sacrifice to scrape up the $16,000 per year to ensure that their son or daughter receives an education aimed at forming the whole person as a responsible, family and community oriented citizen, only to wake up and find that he or she is being shamed for the color of their skin and subjected to a large BLM sign (whose stated objectives are the destruction of the nuclear family) now proudly displayed in the school.   A large group of parents, dismayed and angry, has formed an opposition group to oppose the teaching of CRT in the school, has put up a website and is organizing a campaign to attempt to put a stop to it. 

While I share their dismay and anger and I am very sympathetic to their cause, the parent group  faces an uphill battle to expunge CRT from the school.   The Loyola administration has turned itself into a hardened target.  The parents opposing CRT are trying to persuade the administration to hearing them out—they are playing the Persuasion Game.  The school’s administration has already foreclosed that—it is now playing the Power Game,  not the Persuasion Game.     It is not persuadable.

In order to stand any chance of successfully dislodging the poison of CRT, the parent group will need to decide how close to the Buzzsaw they wish to get (See Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s Dark Horse Podcast #82 5/29/21 – Avoiding the Buzzsaw)—being maligned as “racists,”  otherwise smeared in social media or canceled.   The propagators of CRT know this.  Parents do not want to put their kids in the crosshairs of controversy during their high school years.

To start with, they will need to do two things: recognize and acknowledge that outgoing Father McGrath was a terrible steward of the school, and they must be willing to litigate.

McGrath cannot be seen as a reasonable or positive actor in this drama.  His primary job as leader of this institution is to educate and train young men and women to become critical thinkers, to lead a Christian life as “men and women for others,” to foster a “Loyola community” and to be cognizant of, and prepare against, the threats that institutions like Loyola will face in the future.

McGrath has failed miserably in his most essential tasks.  Under his aegis, the school has been torn apart.  There is no Loyola community anymore. 

By permitting CRT to take root in the school, McGrath allowing intellectual and emotional abuse of these young men and women.  This is substantively no different than the sexual abuse that was endemic in Catholic institutions and he is responding in the same fashion—stonewalling and setting up impenetrable defenses.

McGrath has manipulated the board of trustees, shrunk it to rid itself of dissenters (apparently using some “emergency” bylaw provision.  He has engaged PR firms to deal with this.   The sympathetic column written by Clarence Page was clearly arranged, with Page declaring it a “tempest in a teapot.”  It is not that.  It is a fundamental battle over whether Loyola students are going to be intellectually abused.  McGrath’s quote in Clarence Page’s column is revealing, stating that he seeks critical thinking about race.  CRT does NOT welcome critical thinking about race.  It does not tolerate dissent from its views.  Already, other Woke parents are labelling those that oppose CRT as “racist.”  No apology for this has been forthcoming from those parents or McGrath.

McGrath correctly identifies racism is a sin.  But McGrath does not offer any evidence at all that racism has been an issue at the school.  Specific incidents of racism should be dealt with on an individual basis, just as Rocky Wirtz, president of the Blackhawks did when 2 fans made racist comments at a black player.  They were summarily removed and permanently banished from the United Center.   Loyola, it appears, is and has been a very welcoming place, a place where black, Hispanic, Asian and white kids can all thrive. 

I would advise the parent group to watch the film Spotlight to see what they’re up against with respect to the Catholic Establishment.  In that case, it was the sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese.  Here, it is emotional and intellectual abuse that McGrath is welcoming into the school.  In addition to the documented “white shaming” that he has permitted to go on, he has permitted a large Black Lives Matter banner to be prominently displayed in the school.  In addition to be led by avowed Marxists, BLM is anti-law enforcement (“What do we want? Dead cops.  When do we want it? Now.”),  antisemitic, and its mission is explicitly anti-family and has no inhibitions of using violence to achieve its ends.  It belongs nowhere near an educational institution, much less a Catholic one.  Moreover, he ignores its real aims—to displace a free and liberal society borne out of the Enlightenment with a Marxist one.  McGrath has demonstrated that he has not followed Ibraham Kendi very closely, nor has he become acquainted with the writings of CRT’s progenitors—Michel Foucoult, Antonio Gramsci, or Herbert Marcuse. 

Further, McGrath fails to understand that Wokeism and CRT are antithetical to Catholicism.  Intellectual leaders such as Douglas Murray, Bret Weinstein, John McWhorter and others have correctly identified it as a new religion, complete with its own scripture and clergy.   It is a religion that will compete with Catholicism.  By embracing CRT, Loyola is no longer a Catholic school.   It is a Woke school.  Over time, they cannot coexist.  The Kairos retreats, which dealt with the development of the individual and spiritual growth will now focus on race—and the oppressed and the oppressors. 

McGrath (and the board of trustees) needs to be called out for what he is and what he has done to this once fine school.

What to do?   I don’t have a dog in this fight.  My children are long gone.  My interest only is in pushing back against this insidious intellectual abuse of children.

I know what won’t work.

Withholding donations won’t matter much.  While Mr. Purcell’s loud withdrawal of support is laudable, organizations that have been taken over by Woke and CRT have shown that they really don’t care as long as they can hijack the organization for their purposes.  Even if half the funds dried up, and Loyola reduced its enrollment by half, the CRT crowd consider it a victory—a North Shore school pumping out Woke teens. 

Letter writing won’t work.  One writes to persuade and this administration is well beyond that.

The only path to satisfaction---and there is only one that I see—is through litigation, carefully orchestrated with a skilled PR firm.  This administration will do nothing until costs are imposed on it.   I have identified at least four potential claims that could be made against the school and there may be more.   The litigation needs to be coordinated with a PR firm.   McGrath has apparently employed one.  The parents need one to even the playing field.  The parent group has done a good job of documenting the abuse on their website (kidswinloyola.com) but they will continue to get stiff armed and outflanked by an administration that is determined to shut them out, and treat them with contempt.

The parent group should take a cue from one of the New Jersey girls that lost in the state finals to a transgender athlete.  She is suing, making it very public and has launched a very public campaign on social media to promote her cause.  A girl is Oklahoma likewise has filed claims because she was dropped from her volleyball team because of her political beliefs.  And we all know that Nick Sandman of Covington would have languished after being demonized by the media until he filed claims against the media giants. 

In addition to filing claims and engaging in a public PR battle, they should demand access to classrooms, especially those classes of teachers that they know are teaching and promoting CRT.  Knowing they are being policed may help curtail the indoctrination.

The Catholic Establishment knows how to defeat dissent and deflect charges of abuse.   It is very skilled and has a great deal of resources at its disposal.  The parents group will need to re-think its strategy if it does not wish to be ground down.

Another institution has fallen.  If it can be restored at all, it will take a tough, bruising, and expensive fight to restore it.