450 Comments

I am happy to be a subscriber. Bari, do whatever you damn please. That's what I'm paying you for.

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Re the comment from a reader that "if you still worked for the New York Times, they never would have printed such a thing without fact-checking it." Some of your readers may take it for granted that most know that is NOT true, but maybe it is best for you as a former writer at that paper to be explicit in pointing out how many times that has proven to be not true.

Please start, possibly, with the infamous front page story about Officer Brian Sicknick and what is now known after the NY Times' much delayed retraction: 1) Sicknick was not hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. He was not hit anywhere on his body with a fire extinguisher and he was not hit in the head with any blunt object. 2) Sicknick was not bleeding from the head and he was not taken from the scene in an ambulance. 3) Sicknick did not suffer a blunt trauma injury and he did not die from a blunt trauma injury to the brain. 4) The US Capitol Police were not the source for the NYT's story. In sum, the story was fabricated by the NYT for its front page and not corrected until many weeks later, or after the second Trump impeachment trial and until after the fabricated "attack" had been cited in the articles of impeachment.

You will be doing us all a great public service if you could help explain - with specific reference to the many particular instances - how the New York Times has transitioned from being a reporter of news to an advocacy journal.

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Dear God, thank you. I hope I never agree with you and your writers on everything, but can trust you to be an honest broker for all sides.

It seems so little to ask, but it has been obliterated from the corporate media landscape. Please keep taking my money in this noble pursuit of intellectual honesty.

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For me at least, one of the best and most self-evident pieces of evidence for the view that there is not now systemic racism in America--racism supported by convention--is the overwhelming power of the racist slur. It is slung about wildly--used as a weapon--because it cuts so deep. A society that really was racist wouldn't care. They might even wear the label as a badge.

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Apr 19, 2021Liked by Bari Weiss

Bari- you don’t need to justify yourself. We are adults here.

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Bari, I'm an old-fashioned, Ira Glasser liberal. I'm thrilled by the important work you're doing and the platform you're providing for others who also want the United States to survive as a democracy governed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For too long, the illiberal left has corralled all the mainstream journalistic spaces for itself through ideological bullying and ad hominem attacks. But I don't have to tell you. That's why you're here, on Substack, and not there, at the NY Times, where your enlightened anti-racist colleagues called you a nazi.

The bullies have become boring. There's work to do! You have my full support.

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I actually think discussions like this around phrases like "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" could do us some good. Legacy outlets throw around the term without giving meaning, which Guttman at least attempted to do in his letter. If you want to say racial disparities result are from "systemic racism", that's fine - but you have to bring receipts or make a strong point as to why. The point of these discussions should be to listen and see what the other side is saying. You don't have to change hearts to contribute meaningfully in an important dialogue.

I'm glad Bari is bringing different ideas and points of view to consumers of viewpoints who no longer see diversity in most of our legacy media. If you can't read an opposing viewpoint without calling people 'racist' or immediately try to shout down an opinion that seems foreign to you with ad hominens, twitter's just a quick few steps away. This place should encourage reasonable disagreement and we should celebrate that - regardless of whether you leave with a changed mind.

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Isn’t systemic racism evident in the admissions policies of universities? The Asian community continues to fight this battle. A deeply curious question, when did Asians get lumped in with Pacific Islanders? Isn’t this half the globe’s population? Do they have shared experiences?

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I subscribed to you on Substack because in your book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, you addressed this topic from the right, the left and from political Islam. You had integrity and were not interested in a particular narrative. You addressed all of it. Your resignation letter from the NYT was the icing on the cake. Please keep telling the truth.

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Have you any idea how amazing it is to read your work? I refuse to even glance at a copy of the NYT or the WP or the LAT. Even our local tiny Montana paper is woke! Disgustingly so. I relish your newsletter/editorials. Thank you!

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Under pressure from parents, the head of the Dalton school, home of the “diversity manifesto” -- has stepped down.

What does systemic racism mean? “Systemic” means of or relating to a system, especially when affecting the entirety of a thing. Reasonable minds will disagree. What matters is how the radical racialists, some would say racket, overtaking schools and media interpret “systemic” racism. Broadly is an understatement. The answer is Western society, every square inch of it. Ad of course, entire groups of people in it guilty by birth. I included a partial listing in my original post. I’m reposting rather than re-listing.

First, a few commenters tried to redirect the discussion away from the fanaticism and attendant abuses abroad in education back to the omnipresent obsession with “race." Andrew Gutmann didn’t deny racism, he called out obsession and abuse. There’s a difference. We of all races will continue to work together, as one, to fix bigotry, all types, without upending the guarantor of the free world, turning the U.S. into a dumpster fire and our children into cultists.

Second, it is Homerically disingenuous for the head of Brearley, which with great fervor points the finger at pre-pubescent and parent “oppressors," to claim that some of its students are “intimidated” by "at home" receipt of what is, and will be ever thus, “The Guttman Letter.”

Let’s do keep the focus on the kids and adults, the human beings, on the receiving end of “anti-racist” indoctrination, shaming, censorship, and discrimination. Where is Tom Wolfe when we need him? It’s uncanny --heads of schools who summer in Nantucket or Italy -surely realize that “private property” itself is “systemic racism.” That's right. Property, it is, it seems, evanescent, depending on “equity,” which is “paramount.” Maybe they've a second home in New Zealand.

Here's an excerpt from Steve Jobs’ graduation speech in 2005:

” Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Our kids are being cheated of this.

First post list

No one is denying racism; Andrew Gutmann has stepped away from bullied crowd to challenge the misuse of the term “structural” or “systemic” racism, and claims that American blacks have no agency. The CRT grift has broadened racism to encompass and condemn every aspect of Western society. Language. Grammar. Math. Whiteness. Tests. Grades. Merit. Gifted students. Government. Capitalism. Reason. Law enforcement. Actions have consequences. Objectivity. Dolls. Standards. Manners. Science. History. Rule of law. Checks and balances. Hair. Punctuality. Voter ID. Animal charities. Clothes. Cartoons. Mothers. Fathers. Families. Heterosexuality. The word, "citizen." Toys. Books—lots of books. Lincoln. Grant. Churchill. Plato. Seneca. Old movies. Shakespeare. Seuss. Mr. Potato Head. It must all come crashing down in a cloud of white supremacy dust. Speaking of “re-imagining,” imagine the hell on earth that would replace it. Orwell used FREEDOM IS SLAVERY to demonstrate how the indoctrinated can be railroaded into denying reality. Absent a scintilla of awareness or irony, “speech is oppression” is a core tenet of CRT. Children and adults are to instantly parrot jargon imposed by poseurs and tricksters who do not, as evidenced by the black writers and intellectuals battling CRT, represent all blacks. Teaching children, or adults, that “positive discrimination” against whites, bullying, intimidation, and snitching are virtues; that white children or adults are oppressors who must remain silent and “listen”; that they and their parents have arrived at their station in life through iniquity is, in fact, a rock solid example of “systemic” racism, a "structural" violation of human rights, the exact stuff of which ethnic cleansing is made. CRT is a very big, steaming pile of hooey. Liberal democracy cannot survive it.

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The problem is that race hustlers and their ilk, the religious left, keep expanding the meaning of the term systemic racism without examining ways to really improve the lives of disadvantaged minorities. I guarantee you that burning cities to the ground do more harm to black communities for decades than microaggressions like the terms "Master bedroom". It's astounding how no one talks about this. Try pointing this out to the zealots and you're called a racist. So nobody is allowed to come up with a rational plan to confront real issues of generational poverty and crime that plague many black communities. In my eyes it is clear that the left is not the good guys. It's probably wise to stop engaging because the only ones with the power right now to enact genuine change are the voices of the left, who clearly do not want to. They care about themselves and their false reality only, the perpetual war on society. This keeps them in power, whether they realize it or not. I think this is evil. Many others do not, they think people who state the obvious are evil, and because the people with cultural power are of a religious and punishing caliber, the opposition is silenced completely. I ask those who are fixating on Gutmann's claims that systemic racism in the legal sense isn't the only systemic racism that black people face: who gives a damn? Who are you helping? Does CRT help anyone who isn't already in a position of power? Have you studied history? Do you understand that you are living a lie? These questions are pointless and for this generation at least, they are questions that will endure because no one is willing to answer it.

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Bari - just one vote here but you are succeeding wildly in your stated goal. Not only that, your readers have caught on and the comments and reactions extend the conversation thoughtfully, for the most part. There are some trolls from Twitter-land but they are debunked quickly. Keep it up - it’s the best spend for $5 a month.

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It is odd that proponents of systemic racism also usually claim to “follow the science”, because the theory of “systemic racism”, like most of critical race theory, is profoundly unscientific. The crux of the scientific method is that you propose a hypothesis and then seek to prove it false. If there is no way a hypothesis can be falsified even in principle, it is a matter of faith, not science. As I cannot think of any falsifiable hypothesis associated with the theory of “systemic racism”, let alone one that has convincing evidence in its favor, I consider it to fall into the realm of religion and not science.

Further, even disregarding its unfalsifiability, the alleged "evidence" for systemic racism that I have seen falls into two categories, neither of which are actually evidence of anything at all.

First, people say that systemic racism is evidenced by their "lived experience". However, "lived experience" is just the woke way to say "unfalsifiable anecdotes". In reality, “lived experience”, like all unfalsifiable claims, means jack shit when it comes to finding the truth about anything other than than the state of mind of the person in question. If my “lived experience” is that the sky is purple, that isn’t valid evidence that the sky is actually purple, because my experience is purely subjective to me and as such unfalsifiable. During WWII, the German people’s “lived experience” was that they were winning the war based on Goebbels’ proclamations. Didn’t mean a thing. Would you take a Covid treatment based on people’s “lived experience” of its effectiveness or would you want clinical trials to find out the truth? Etc.

Second, people argue that "systemic racism" is evidenced by unequal outcomes for black people in various metrics like education, income and incarceration. But these arguments are all causal fallacies. If you are going to argue that the fact that black Americans earn less on average than white Americans must be because of “systemic racism against black people”, you will have to explain why the fact that Indian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Indonesian-Americans and a number of other nonwhite ethnic groups earn more on average than white Americans is not likewise explained by “systemic racism against white people”. If you are going to argue that black people are incarcerated at a higher rate than white people is because of “systemic racism”, then you will have to explain why the fact that men are incarcerated at a higher rate than women is not explained by “systemic sexism” — or else acknowledge the causal fallacy in claiming that disparate outcomes must result from some kind of systemic discrimination as opposed to other factors.

Further, even empirically there seems to be data that contradicts the theory of systemic racism. Why is it that, at least as of 2015, black immigrants, who are basically visually indistinguishable from African-Americans, earn 30% more on average than African-Americans (see, e.g., https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-immigrants-in-u-s-earning-30-more-than-u-s-born-blacks/)? Does systemic racism not apply to them for some reason?

Finally, positing "systemic racism" violates Occam's Razor (which of course is not a hard and fast rule, but is a good general heuristic). I believe the phenomena I described above can all be explained without reference to systemic racism, so bringing in systemic racism just unnecessarily multiplies entities, in violation of Occam’s Razor.

In sum, based on all of this, I see no more reason to believe in the existence of “systemic racism” than I do in the existence of “the Flying Spaghetti Monster” -- i.e., it could be true, but there's no particular reason to believe it.

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I bet you are getting more exposure than anyone at the NYT, and more power to you. Corporate media is finished. The NYT reads more like a gossip/cultural rag, sprinkled with pop psychology, by the day. I have stopped reading it a while ago. From a person who religiously read the NYT - as if the Bible.

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I believe that the outcomes disparities cited as proof of “systemic” racism most likely do indicate some endemic race-based disparities embedded in society. Studies on homophily and networking elucidate the stickiness of the phenomenon.

The problem is that the Critical Race Theory folks somehow think they have a special insight into this problem that gives them a moral high ground from which to judge and decree. In truth, humans have been struggling with ethnic, racial, religious, political differences forever. By far, the greatest progress has come through hard-learned enlightenment values, such as individual human value, individual autonomy, individual rights, equality before the law and rule of law. It’s not that the CRT people are so wrong about racism, it’s their historically-regressive division-based approach. There is no wisdom there. This is where Common Sense needs to prevail.

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