How do the beliefs of 18th-century Puritans and Quakers still shape our culture today? What did Nietzsche get right? What's the truth about the term "Christian nationalism"? How is theology linked to politics? Read my new essay in American Affairs here:
🧵: NYT published a long article today about detransitioners and how the “always affirm” model has destroyed the bodies and lives of many confused children.
Some notable details below.
🧵Thread: The New Yorker publishes the wild tale of how an affluent liberal town’s school district imploded after numerous intersectional pile-ups over race and gender identity.
Details below. 1/
The MLB is about 30% Latino (including many Afro-Latinos) and has the most Asian players of any major sport in America. It seems that Latinos and Asians aren’t seen as “real” diversity.
The number of Black American players in Major League Baseball has plummeted to just 6%, offering a warning about what can happen when institutions de-emphasize diversity. More on our
#ReidOutBlog
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NYTimes reports that colleges have been dropping standardized tests simply because the results produce disparities some are uncomfortable with. But lowered standards actually make things worse for everyone.
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It’s tough to swallow, but for those that doubted the ideological takeover of the sciences, the chickens have come home to roost. This didn’t happen on a lark: top science orgs all have parroted the same woke ideology for years. Grouse about it all you want, but if actual
The piece begins with a common example of an ROGD teen: bullied, felt out of place, and immediately gravitated towards transitioning as a way to alleviate her problems. No one during the transition suggested that she may not be trans.
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Primary care staff are told to affirm a patient’s gender identity no matter what, despite the fact they would never do this with any other diagnosis.
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Clinicians regularly blackmail parents by saying their kids will commit suicide if they don’t get hormones/surgery. But there’s no proof of increased suicide risk.
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The article ends with a profile of a man who thought he was trans for 15 years. In reality, he was just struggling with being gay, and is now warning others about the callousness of the affirmative model.
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NPR tried to attract more black and Hispanic listeners by running endless segments centering black and Hispanic voices. Turns out that it was actually white liberals that liked the stories.
Many parents see that their children have other comorbid issues, especially autism. But people who run support groups tell parents to just transition their kids anyway.
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A $55,000-a-year private school in NYC spent its curriculum promoting divisive identity politics, to the point where kids had to wear name badges with their ethnic backgrounds on them. Now the school has to manage the tensions created from its own teachings.
Went to a reunion at my old high school. It was shocking to see a school known for its world-class science programs be completely captured by an ideology 🏳️⚧️ that denies basic biology.
Other countries are all backing off on child transitions. But American clinicians are refusing to change their policies despite them being based on erroneous research.
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Trans activists often say ROGD is a right-wing myth. Never mind that the scientist who coined the term, Dr. Lisa Littman, is a liberal. And the condition is very real.
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The black and Latino counselors stuck to their Christian beliefs on gender and sexuality, which proved very distressing for the white liberal parents. 5/
Trans-identifying kids reported being bullied for their identity to staffers… but the bullies often didn’t receive punishment because they were usually black or Latino. 7/
The article ends by noting that there is still much infighting between issues of race versus gender identity. One wonders which side will prevail. /End
Amherst is a very liberal town, with the stereotypical In This House… signs everywhere. The local high school newspaper published an article about the “life or death” nature of “the failure to protect trans kids.” 2/
Two kids that identified as trans, Jo and Casey, often had to leave classes due to not being able to handle teachers not using the pronouns they chose. 6/
NYT publishes a new article about how a shortage of air traffic controllers is leading to dangerous mistakes. Meanwhile, some in the Federal Aviation Administration are pushing to lower standards for new controllers, like decreasing the importance of the AT-SAT standardized test
There were even accusations of witchcraft being thrown. The school district is near where the Salem Witch Trials took place, so perhaps it’s fitting. 8/
New York is planning on scrapping Regents exams, which traditionally all students have to take to graduate. We are watching the deterioration of academic standards at a rapid rate, much of it due to the need for “equity”. This policy will just make all kids worse off.
This may prove to be the canary in the coal mine for the life sciences in general. Don't let others henpeck you into complying with their demands, and always call out fowl play when you see it.
The planned removal of a William Penn statue shows the way progressivism relies on the belief that history is always moving towards utopia, that there is a "right side of History" and a wrong one. Penn and the Quakers' religious tolerance, pacifism, anti-death-penalty stance,
Hasan Minhaj’s show’s very first episode was all about how Asians opposed to affirmative action were the “worst kind of Americans”. Minhaj is now alleged to be someone who faked oppression to appeal to progressive elites. Why am I not surprised?
another example of how oppression stories -- in this case fabricated oppression porn -- gets leveraged by upwardly mobile immigrants to mostly advance their careers. Cannot think of a better evocation of the stuff I wrote about in my last book.
This is the Innocent Prisoner's Dilemma at work. Because Thao maintains his innocence, he gets more time in prison for "not showing remorse", while guilty defendants with fake remorse will actually get less time.
A Minneapolis judge has sentenced Tou Thao, a former police officer who held back bystanders as other officers pinned George Floyd to the ground, to four years and nine months in state prison.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was ethnically German. Yet when it came time to fight the Germans during WWII, Eisenhower led the U.S. Army in defeating the country his ancestors came from. That’s how it’s supposed to work: people come here, assimilate, and become and think American.
So
@SheluyangPeng
Some foolish optimists thought those who predicted this kind of thing would have to eat crow, but the opposition didn't have all their ducks in a row, and now their goose is cooked. Neutrality in the sciences has sung its swan song.
One thing articles like this NYT review never address is what “finding yourself” even means. Does every human being have a “true self” that is just hidden away, waiting to be unlocked by some new experience? Or is this just terminal boredom in an age without purpose?
An interesting phenomenon I’ve seen with left-wing atheists is that they’ll use evolution to dunk on Christian creationists, like “haha you believe the world is 6000 years old!”, but if you actually mention the implications of evolutionary psychology, like differences between the
@primalpoly
@ryanburge
I'm frequently shocked at how poorly atheists actually understand evolution. And many who do understand it seem to have a love-hate relationship with it. They like it for explaining our bodies but not our minds.
In light of the current Robert E. Lee hysteria, never forget that ESPN once took an announcer off the air just for sharing a first and last name with the general.
Pro-affirmative action activists claim that the civil rights movement led to support for Asian immigration. Except that this narrative, popularized by the 1619 Project, is completely false. I debunk this claim in my new article.
The idea that there is even a monolithic “Asian” identity is deeply Western at its core. Sushi is Japanese. Most sushi restaurants in America are run by Chinese and Korean immigrants. Anyone should be able to open any kind of restaurant.
@RichardHanania
I’m a Stuyvesant grad. Can’t believe NYT is still running the same hit piece every single year about this. We all got in because we scored high enough. Also, high-performing Black and Latino students get scholarships to elite private schools (Dalton, Saint Ann’s, etc) that poor
Perry makes a good point here: white people who support leftist causes usually do it for leftist reasons, but nonwhite people may support certain leftist causes not necessarily because they have a leftist frame of mind, but out of ethnic loyalty, unmoored by Western ideas of
The Muslims tearing down the posters are doing so for ethnonarcissistic reasons, obviously.
Wokeness actually consists of two quite different things: white elite psychological pathology, and non-white ethnonarcissism. Sometimes they overlap.
Test scores are much better than high school grades at predicting future success. By not using these scores, colleges are setting unprepared students up for failure.
Today is my birthday. I'm now 24. And the best birthday present I've ever received is
@TheFP
giving the story of my parents and their church a voice. Christianity is far from dying in America. You just need to know where to look.
@Empty_America
It's simple. People who like apartments can live in apartments, people who like the suburbs can live in suburbs, people who like rural areas can live in rural areas.
My old high school (70%+ Asian) emailed me about a DEI program and a youth summit for “BIPOC”. Even though Asians are people of color, we are excluded in these events. They should stop lying and just say “Black and Latino only, you Asians do too well and are thus White now”.
As DEI initiatives make it harder for white and Asian men in tech, I have a feeling that we’ll see a lot more white+Asian “trans women” and “non-binaries” that will be placed above “cis women” on the oppressed stack. Anyone who questions them will be called a transphobic bigot.
🧵: NYT writes an article about how a lack of funds will cause more educational inequality in the school system. The photo they use below is of a staircase leading to Stuyvesant High School, my alma mater, which has one of the lowest budgets per capita, yet continues to the home
The shortlist for the National Book Award this year is book after book of what I call “marginalized group torture porn”. Note that the biggest buyers of these books are actually affluent white liberals. They want to hear about suffering because it makes them feel virtuous.
@SheluyangPeng
It’s an albatross that they are robin us of bird name history and acting like a monarch. Thanks to your eagle eye for pointing out a cardinal science sin, hopefully they pigeon hole the idea.
@RichardHanania
Bush got 71% of the Muslim vote in 2000. Then 9/11 happened and the next election Muslims voted 90% for Kerry. Muslims can easily be won by Republicans again, and form an alliance with Evangelicals.
The MLB is the only major sports league in America where Latino and Asian players have any presence at all. There are almost no Latino/Asian players in the NBA, NFL, and NHL, while the MLB regularly promotes Latino players like Guerrero Jr. and Asian players like Ohtani.
Remember when schools were just expected to teach reading, math, and science? Now every institution feels like they have to put out an official statement for every outside-world issue.
While left-wing atheists may get their rocks off now by mocking conservative Christians, they are not going to be prepared for the coming wave of right-wing atheists. I wrote about this a few months ago, link in pinned tweet:
The Nation keeps pretending affirmative action doesn’t hurt Asian Americans. I read the whole article, and the author never refutes this fact! Instead we get sleight-of-hand statistics and anecdotes trying to make it seem like most Asians are pro-AA.
@RichardHanania
Also, pretty much every student was an immigrant or child of immigrants. Even the Black students. They were usually from Nigeria, Kenya, the West Indies, etc. That’s the way it’s always been.
@RichardHanania
None of us ever thought that the Black and Latino students at Stuyvesant were less capable than the White and Asian students. Because we all knew that there was no affirmative action.
🚨Alert to NYCers: Over the past decade, the DEI mob has been working all over the country to eliminate quality public education for the gifted kids of low-income parents. They succeeded everywhere (Lowell, TJ, etc.) except in NYC. Now they’re trying again to dismantle merit.
Gen Z can’t make small talk because of screen culture, the valorization of mental illness, and self-induced infantilization. In today’s therapeutic culture, it’s cool to be depressed. It’s cool to have a therapist. It’s cool to act like you can’t grow up and that “adulting” is
Three phenomena have all appeared in large numbers among autistic teenage girls over the past few years: transracial identity, Tourette's syndrome, and transgender identity. All are written off by "experts" as social contagions—except for one.
Phillips Exeter was founded to train Puritan elites: erudite people that saw themselves as an elect class destined for salvation, obsessed over rooting out witches/heretics, and forced others to follow their morality.
Their morals changed, but their attitudes never did.
EXCLUSIVE: Philips Exeter Academy has been consumed by left-wing ideology. According to a recent graduate, the school enforces a strict intersectional hierarchy and up to 40 percent of female students identify as "trans," "queer," or "non-binary."
Keep in mind that this is the school that produced Thomas Sowell, Samuel Huntington, James Cagney, Thelonius Monk, Lucy Liu, and four Nobel Prize winners. Wokeness spares no one.
Polls of young men and women's political views show a massive gender gap developing. This phenomenon explains a lot of what we've been seeing in the past decade: why Jordan Peterson resonates with boys and Taylor Swift resonates with girls, why poster-rippers tend to be women,
To put things a bit differently:
Gen Z women are the most liberal, most feminist, and most LGBTQ-identifying generation ever—while Gen Z men are less liberal and feminist than Millennials and perhaps even show a significant decline in support for gay marriage
@aesthdistance1
There’s a lot of colorism among black Americans as well, just see the discourse on lightskins vs. darkskins. And then Latinos with “mejorar la raza”. And whites with Italians being called “ethnic whites”. It’s not something unique to Asians.
Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction: most social unrest comes not from “the masses” but from people who are elite-aspirant and are angry they aren’t able to make it to the top.
"welfare states of Europe as a whole have been adapted to provide a new form of welfare for the college-educated, aspirational managerial classes...provide make-work jobs for university graduates who would otherwise become potential social agitators."
The irony of this tweet is that the very idea of postcolonial studies is something that can only exist within the confines of Western liberalism and morality. Those words and DEI workshops operate under the same principles.
@IDoTheThinking
The "model minority" pecking order is an abomination and needs to stop. Anti-blackness in the asian community is so severe, they just took affirmative action to the supreme court to kill it.
I'm not saying these kids' behavior is OK, but the resentment is justifiable.