Guilty by Reason of Insanity

by David Limbaugh

  “The woman should be given the benefit of the doubt and not be, you know, abused again, by the system,” said Biden. “My biggest regret was I didn’t know how I could shut you off if you were a senator and you were attacking Anita Hill’s character. Under the Senate rules, I can’t gavel you down and say you can’t ask that question, although I tried.” Biden groveled further, insisting that Hill, an African American, shouldn’t have been forced to face a panel of “a bunch of white guys.”1

  Biden knows that in the #MeToo era he must get in front of any criticisms of his treatment of women, especially since he has a history of awkwardly touching women and sniffing their hair. But he also knows, in reality, he bent over backward to help Hill smear Justice Thomas. If he owes anyone an apology, it’s Thomas. Instead, he pretends he’s sorry that he couldn’t conduct a kangaroo court hearing against Thomas and muzzle Republican senators, insulate Hill from cross-examination, and deny Thomas his right to confront witnesses against him.

  The left has done a masterful job of reeducating the old warhorses of the Democratic Party. Biden now understands that he—an old white guy—should have gagged the other white guys. But does he really expect us to swallow that he is sorry he didn’t issue a lawless edict to reconstitute the Judiciary Committee on the spot, replacing the old white senators with black ones? This is what passes for seriousness from today’s Democratic presidential hopefuls.

  Anita Hill wasn’t a victim—she was a witness making damning allegations against a Supreme Court nominee. Her race and gender don’t entitle her to exemption from rigorous cross-examination. These white male liberals are appallingly patronizing. Anita Hill was an accomplished law professor at the time. Why should Biden have treated her as some vulnerable wallflower? Another contradiction in the women’s movement is exposed.

  Finding this self-flagellation insufficient, Biden denounced the overall impact of “white man’s culture” in America while discussing Anita Hill in March 2019. “We all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture in this country,” he said. “It’s an English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.”2 Well, if Democrats have their way, American culture will change—identity politics will reign supreme. Biden’s capitulation shows that people like him are just puppets of the party’s radicals. The old guard isn’t reining in AOC; she’s shaming them leftward into her cultural Marxist hellhole.

  Quintessential socialist Bernie Sanders tried to buck the identity politics trend and stick with pure economic Marxism, but it didn’t sit well with leftist thought ministers. When a radio host asked Sanders how he could lead a diverse Democratic Party, he said we shouldn’t judge candidates by their skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or age. “I think we have got to try to move us toward a nondiscriminatory society, which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.”3 Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress responded on Twitter, “At a time where folks feel under attack because of who they are, saying race or gender or sexual orientation or identity doesn’t matter is not off, it’s simply wrong.”4 “This is usually an argument made by people who don’t enjoy outsized respect and credibility because of their race, gender, age and sexual orientation,” quipped Democratic strategist Jess McIntosh.

  Imagine publicly admitting that people should be denied respect and credibility because they don’t have a protected identity. And I thought ageism was verboten under intersectionality. But there’s the identity politics contradiction rearing its head again. Even if you are a member of a protected group, you forfeit your protection if you challenge leftist orthodoxy. Stephen Colbert revealingly commented about Sanders, “Yes, like Dr. King, I have a dream—a dream where this diverse nation can come together and be led by an old white guy.”5

  CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

  Another manifestation of the modern race and privilege ideologies is the concept of “cultural appropriation.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines cultural appropriation as “the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.”6 It can involve a hairstyle, an item of clothing, a certain way of speaking, or a type of exercise. Sometimes cultural appropriation can clearly be disrespectful. People criticized Gucci, for example, when its models wore white turbans, because many Sikhs objected to their faith symbol being transformed into fashion. Likewise, in 2017 critics denounced Victoria’s Secret for placing Native American headdresses on a model.7

  Predictably, however, the left took this concept to a ridiculous extreme, essentially banning white people from adopting, displaying, or even celebrating any element of a nonwhite culture. For example, two comedy shows banned white comedian Zack Poitras because he wears dreadlocks, a hairstyle associated with black culture. One of the venues, Montreal’s Coop les Récoltes, explained on Facebook that its mission is to be “a safe space, free of any link to oppression,” and it equated cultural appropriation to violence. “We will not tolerate any discrimination or harassment within our spaces,” they wrote.8 “Privilege” apparently precludes white people from wearing dreadlocks. Though the group admitted Poitras had no racist intent, it insisted his hairstyle “conveys racism.” “[C]ultural appropriation is not a debate or an opinion,” the group declared, but “a form of passive oppression, a deconstructive privilege and, above all, a manifestation of ordinary racism.”9

  Similarly, Utah teenager Keziah Daum was skewered on Twitter for wearing a Chinese-style dress to her prom. Daum explained she chose the gown because she thought it was “gorgeous” and wanted to show her appreciation for Chinese culture. But this innocent act resulted in a torrent of leftist abuse. “My culture is not your goddamn prom dress,” wrote one critic, while another accused Daum of perpetuating “colonial ideology.”10

  Most people would laugh at such bizarre sensitivity unless they were intensely indoctrinated into it, which is why essays on cultural appropriation not only have to explain what the manufactured concept is but why it’s wrong. People don’t ordinarily think this way. To encourage people to be so easily offended, when no offense or racism is intended, is destructive to society and race relations. It fuels the notion of a never-ending power struggle between alleged oppressors and their victims while doing nothing to ameliorate actual racism.

  AN EMBARRASSING SAMPLING

  The cultural left is so focused on race that examples of this depressing obsession are too numerous to cover exhaustively. Nevertheless, let me provide a sampling without extended exposition. Race shaming, race-baiting, and utterly spurious accusations of racism are ubiquitous—from professional athletes, to Hollywood, to our Democratic politicians in Washington—and they are taking a toll on our society.

  Nancy Pelosi alleges President Trump wanted to add a citizenship status question to the census because he wants to “make America white again”11—even though some form of citizenship or naturalization question has been included on most censuses since 1820.12

  Lebron James likened the NFL to slavery. “In the NFL, they got a bunch of old white men owning teams, and they got that slave mentality,” said James. “And it’s like, ‘This is my team. You do what the f*** I tell y’all to do or we get rid of y’all.’ ”13 Because players are complaining that certain terminology cultivates a “slave-to-master” relationship between the team owners and the players, the NBA is considering replacing the word “owner.”14

  In response to a tweet by Senator Marco Rubio, Democratic senator Chris Murphy implied that pushing for a border wall with Mexico and not Canada is driven by racism. “You and Trump are advocating putting up a wall on only one border. No wall for the country filled with mostly white people,” Murphy tweeted. Murphy’s statement is as specious as it is ugly. Illegal crossings at the southern border dwarf those at the northern border. The Department of Homeland Security reports that more than 500,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended at the souther
n border in each of the fiscal years 2014, 2016, and 2018. In both fiscal years 2015 and 2017 more than 400,000 were apprehended.15 By contrast, the number of apprehensions at the northern border in 2017 was around 3,000.16

  Addressing immigration with MSNBC host Chris Hayes, Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal asserted, “This has never been about a wall. [Trump] actually could have gotten funding a couple of years ago, or a year ago, for a wall.… He turned it down because his ultimate goal is, as you said, to make America pure in the sense of not having immigrants, not having folks of color here and shutting down every form of legal immigration, all to throw a bone to those people.”17

  Congresswoman Ilhan Omar blamed a migrant caravan’s arrival in El Paso at the end of March 2019 on white nationalism. She tweeted, “This is abhorrent and inhumane. It’s without a doubt a reflection of what white nationalism is doing to our country. As a country, we have to acknowledge that this is how people are being treated and decide that we are better and we must do better.”18

  Freshman Democratic congresswoman Katie Hill admitted that her Democratic colleagues are refusing to fund a new southern border barrier because it would require them to backpedal on their claim that the wall is racist.19

  The View cohost Meghan McCain, who supports stronger border security but not a southern border wall, took umbrage at her fellow hosts implying that Republican support for the wall is racist. “When you broad-stroke everyone—all black people think one thing, all Hispanic people think one thing, all Republicans think one thing, that’s how we got ourselves into this mess,” said McCain. “Please don’t paint me, just because I’m for border security, that I’m somehow racist in one way or another, because I don’t think that’s fair.”20

  In decrying alleged racism on the right, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace said, “Part of the problem is we think—this does not have a parallel on the left. There just—it doesn’t. There isn’t a strain of racism on the left.” So, without “anywhere else to go, [white racists].… attach to the Republican Party. The Republican Party doesn’t have to let them.… How do Republicans sort of get back to doing something decent?” As RedState’s Brandon Morse points out, Democrats can’t credibly claim they reject racists considering their embrace of Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semites among the Women’s March leadership, and CNN’s Don Lemon calling white men the biggest threat in our country.21

  The left, the media, and the Democratic Party uniformly accused Trump of racism when he criticized Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings for failing to clean up the “rat and rodent infested mess” in his Baltimore district. Many of Trump’s critics, however, had themselves noted the glaring problems facing the city. Bernie Sanders, who denounced Trump as “a racist President who attacks people because they are African Americans,” had previously likened a Baltimore neighborhood to a “third world country.”22 The Baltimore Sun, which condemned Trump for making “bigoted” arguments and appealing to white supremacists, had published an op-ed bemoaning the city’s high crime rate, political scandals, and especially its chronic trash problem—which, the paper noted, “contributes to a rodent problem.”23 And amidst the fulminations against Trump, video emerged of Rep. Cummings himself calling part of his community a “drug-infested area” with people “walking around like zombies.”24 Yet mysteriously, only Trump was accused of racism for pointing out the obvious.

  White leftists patronizingly dumb down their speech when talking to minorities, according to a study from Cydney Dupree, a Yale assistant professor of organizational behavior.25 A good example is Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing attempt to imitate a black accent at the First Baptist Church of Selma, Alabama, where she exclaimed, “I don’t feel no ways tired. I come too far from where I started from…”26

  UCLA professor Corinne Bendersky, a gender bias researcher, argues in the Harvard Business Review that there are too many white male firefighters in America. “I find that, when evaluating fit[ness] and competence, firefighters tend to default to a reductive set of traits (physical strength evaluated through strict fitness tests, for example) that serve to maintain white men’s dominance in the fire service,” writes Bendersky. She argues that because 64 percent of fire department responses are medical emergencies, “stereotypically masculine traits like brawn and courage are simply not enough. Firefighters also need the intellectual, social, and emotional skills required to deliver medical emergency aid, support each other through traumatic experiences, and engage intimately with the communities they serve.”27 She also bizarrely asserts that we must take into account that African Americans are more cheerful than whites: “Joviality—defined as ‘markedly good humor’ and one that helps process emotional trauma—is a positive trait associated with black Americans somewhat more than with white Americans, so explaining that a jovial culture can increase crew effectiveness may reduce some of the skepticism about and exclusion of black firefighters.”28

  After a derisive comment by MSNBC leftist Rachel Maddow, Rockefeller University decided to redesign a university wall featuring portraits of Rockefeller scientists who’d won a Nobel Prize or a Lasker Award—because there were too many white men. NPR reports this is part of a trend at universities to redesign such displays or hide them in less conspicuous places.29

  Prior to becoming a New York Times editorial board member in 2018, Sarah Jeong had posted these tweets: “Dumbass f***ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”

  It’s “kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”

  I’m “just imagining being white and waking up every morning with a terrible existential dread about how I have no culture.”

  “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically only being fit to live underground like groveling bilious goblins?”

  “Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing.”

  “The world could get by just fine with zero white people.”30

  Columnist and professor Walter Williams correctly notes that similar statements about black people would provoke outrage, widespread denunciations of Jeong’s employer, and demands that she be fired. “Leftists have been taught utter nonsense by their college professors,” notes Williams. “The most insidious lesson taught is who can and who cannot be a racist.… According to the thinking of academia’s intellectual elite, a minority person cannot be a racist. The reason is that minorities don’t have the political, economic and institutional power to adversely affect the lives of whites.”31 Williams thus captures the essence of intersectionality thinking.

  Some leftists are offended that Democratic presidential candidates include old white men. When Ohio senator Sherrod Brown was considering running, CNN contributor Harry Enten remarked, “This is an interesting guy for Democrats. Another white male, I am very suspect of that going into a Democratic primary with women doing well, I am not sure it’s the time to nominate a white man.”32

  A nine-year-old black girl in Linden, Alabama, committed suicide, allegedly because classmates had persistently bullied her for being friends with a white boy.33

  Seventy-nine teaching assistants and instructors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill threatened to withhold more than two thousand students’ final grades unless the university agreed not to house Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier that activists pulled down a few months before, in its history center. The group demanded that the university keep the statue off campus and that the university’s board of governors hold “listening sessions in good faith with the campus community.”34

  University of Oregon students and faculty demanded removal of an American pioneer statue on its one-hundred-year anniversary because many “students feel oppressed” by it. “I know when I walk under it I feel very inferior,” said Bret Gilbert, co-leader of the University’s Native American Student Union. �
�I don’t feel that way when I’m at other places on campus. I don’t think that’s what the university community wants us to feel like when we’re here.”35

  The University of Texas at San Antonio removed white biology instructor Anita Moss from class for a semester for warning her students to “be respectful in class” by keeping their feet off chairs, putting away their phones, and not talking, and for having one student, who was black, removed from class for putting her feet up. Though two university investigations revealed that Moss was not motivated by racial bias, the university president issued a statement, according to the College Fix, “drawing explicit racial connections to the incident.”36 President Eighmy pronounced, “The reactions expressed through social media, emails, phone calls and group meetings I’ve attended confirm that feelings of marginalization on the part of some students—especially our African American students—are real and profound. The bottom line: regardless of the final outcomes regarding yesterday’s incident, we have an obligation as an institution to take a hard look at our campus climate—especially for students of color—and enact a system change to make UTSA a more inclusive campus.”37 Why do they have to reform the system when the investigations revealed no racial bias? Conceding unsubstantiated claims of racism does more to perpetuate racial issues than alleviate them. Such race pandering trivializes actual racism.

  A Dartmouth student complained in the university newspaper, The Dartmouth, that students of color are victimized by the system of student–faculty office hours, partly because upperclassmen urge freshmen to attend without telling them how to go about it. Because of their backgrounds some students lack confidence to raise questions and exchange ideas with professors. “Minoritarian subjects may feel undeserving of space because of an inherent lack of self-confidence, victim complex or innate helplessness,” writes Clara Chin. “It is because institutions, such as academia, can send an implicit message that ideas out of the white, normative mainstream are unimportant by erasing these other narratives. One form of this is the lack of faculty of color at elite institutions like Dartmouth.”38