School Teachers vs. Restaurant Workers

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Two groups that have been spoken about often during the 2020 pandemic have been school teachers and restaurant workers. Though both groups have a large number currently not working, the two groups are dramatically different in how they have been treated by our governments. Let’s take a look at the difference and compare/contrast their realities.

School teachers are largely public employees and they principally belong to public employee unions. It is estimated there are more than four million teachers in our country. They are principally represented by two unions – National Education Association (NEA) with 2.2 million members and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) with 1.7 million members. In the well-known ruling (Janus), the Supreme Court made it illegal for these unions to command membership. The unions (in cahoots with state governments and local school districts) have placed significant obstacles in front of anyone wanting to opt out. Teachers have their money taken out of their paychecks beginning the very first day on the job. Those funds are used to buy political influence at the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Some say the teachers’ unions are the largest contributors to Democrats with only meager amounts going to Republicans.

The teacher’s unions have largely stated their members will not work during the pandemic. Initially the California division of the unions stated not only would they stay home but wanted certain public policies to be changed before returning to the classroom. They demanded single-payer, government-provided healthcare; full funding for housing California’s homeless; a shutdown to publicly funded, privately operated charter schools; and a new set of programs to address systemic racism. To pay for all this, they want a 1% wealth tax, a 3% income surtax on millionaires, and increased property taxes on businesses. They also want $250 million from the federal government unions. At least the people of California voted down the property tax increases.

The remainder of policies are in the hands of their hand-picked California legislature and the federal government. At the federal level they have possibly the biggest political harlot in American history, Speaker Pelosi, on their side. She has told the world that it is dangerous for teachers to return to the classroom. She knows that is a lie, but she stands in front of a mic and states it anyway because she is owned by the national unions.

We now have the science that it is harmful for the kids staying home. They have little chance of exposing their teachers to COVID and their teachers have little chance of getting the disease from the kids. Once again the party of science uses it when it is convenient.

The teachers still refuse to return for a couple reasons. The unions are socialist organizations. They insist on treating every teacher the same in compensation despite the variance in their skills. STEM teachers are paid the same as others despite the higher demand and specialized knowledge. The thing that is honored by the unions is seniority. Thus, they refuse to return to the classroom because the teachers who are over 50 years old have a higher level of risk from the disease even though the risk is still extremely low until you reach the age of 70. There are few, if any, teachers at that age because they have retired to receive their government funded pension and rich health care plans.

The second reason they have not returned to the classrooms is the teachers are receiving full pay, health insurance and pension while on this prolonged self-imposed vacation. Some are trying to teach remotely, but that has proven to be an abject failure. The “mask” of the teachers caring about the students has been fully ripped off for everyone to see. They belong to a union that is racist and cares only about its members.

The Los Angeles School system has now been closed down without any science behind it.

Then there are the restaurant workers. There are an estimated 13.5 million of them. The life of many of these workers since March has been go home, stay home, hope your employer gets a PPP loan, wait for a call back, get a call back, shut down again, wait for a call back, try to look for another job, can’t find another job, get a call back, feel fortunate you are one of the few, have to work outside where the seats are far away from the kitchen, customers complain their food is cold because you had to bring it from the kitchen a long distance away, sweat to death because it is 100 degrees outside and you are walking back and forth, then the weather turns and you are delivering the food in 45 degrees. Then you are shut down again. You ask why. Your employer asks why. You get nothing but orders from the health department. You cannot understand. Your employer and you have taken every precaution, but you are sitting at home again hoping to get unemployment benefits that take forever to arrive. Then you find out your restaurant has closed for good. It could not survive the constant turmoil brought on by government edicts and excessive costs to comply.

Small business in America has extremely high favorability rating ranging to near 90%. Despite that elected officials crap on them all the time. A lot of them mouth platitudes about small business during their campaigns then do everything to stall them, harm them and put them out of business.

Two national health officials validated what we knew already — There is no science that outdoor dining is a risk for COVID contraction. Yet California and officials of other states shut down restaurants and their workers.

There were 660,700 restaurants in America in 2018. The National Restaurant Association has estimated that 110,000 restaurants have closed permanently. It has been estimated that 50% of full service restaurants will permanently close. Drive down the street and see the “for sale” and “for lease” signs on restaurant after restaurant. Another shutdown, with no science behind it, will kill off an even greater number as body blow after body blow cannot be endured. They will cause the permanent loss of millions of jobs and people scrambling to figure out how they will support themselves. The workers will not be receiving paychecks nor will they be receiving health insurance and pension contributions like the public-school teachers.

Though people love small businesses and the workers at their restaurants and similar businesses, they keep electing these politicians who make it challenging on a normal day to start and run their businesses and have done so much during the pandemic to harm them. Hundreds of people can walk around a Costco while restaurants cannot even have 25% capacity with significant safeguards for customers and workers. Why is that? Simply a function of money lining elected officials’ pockets.

Public school teachers’ unions have been a blight upon our society for years. In previous columns, we have delineated how racist these unions have become. The problem is largely generated because parents like their kid’s teacher while not acknowledging they enable these racists unions to exist. The parents think their kid’s teacher cares when it has become quite clear they only care about themselves. If you belong to these despotic unions, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Stop coddling them. They are not your friend nor your kid’s friend.

Instead, start giving your local busser, server, cook, chef, restaurant owner the love they deserve and demand that your elected officials do as well. If anything, this pandemic has shown they are the people who are there for you, care about you and take the personal risks to make your life better.


Bruce Bialosky is a nationally  known columnist. He was appointed by President Bush to the U.S. Holocaust Commission and is the Founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition of California. This article first appeared 11/13/20 in Flash Report  and is reproduced herein by the permission of the author. Comments can be directed to

Diversity’s Huge Double Standard: Why Walloons aren’t counted as a minority in diversity initiatives

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Nasdaq recently announced that it was going to require companies listed on its stock exchange to have a set number of racial minorities, women, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals on their boards of directors.

Parroting the official government lingua on race, Nasdaq’s quotas for minorities were in reference to African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans. Other minority groups with far fewer people in the U.S. population and on boards of directors were excluded, just as they are excluded in all diversity initiatives.

As a general diversity rule, the smaller the minority group, the less it is counted in diversity initiatives.

Nasdaq is the same outfit that was founded and headed by Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme defrauded investors out of $50 billion. His buddies at Nasdaq didn’t have enough judgment to recognize that he was a scoundrel but now see themselves as experts in social engineering.

Like so many American institutions nowadays—especially big media, big corporations, big academia, and the big diversity industrial complex—Nasdaq doesn’t even have an objective, science-based definition of “minority.” It simply and thoughtlessly parrots the word willy-nilly and thus doesn’t know what it is measuring. It’s akin to the stock exchange not having a definition of “earnings per share” or “price/earnings ratio.”What is a minority? Is a minority a member of a racial or ethnocultural group that comprises less than 50% of the U.S. population, or that is economically disadvantaged compared to other groups, or that doesn’t have political power, or that has faced discrimination, or that has descended from slaves, or that has descended from natives who were conquered, persecuted and placed on reservations?

African Americans and Native Americans meet most of the above criteria (as groups, but not necessarily as individuals). But things get squishy after that.

Consider all of the diverse groups that are seen as part of the so-called white majority but individually comprise a tiny segment of the U.S. population. There are about 100 such groups, including Walloons, Bosnians, Tatars, Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, Karakalpaks, Persians, Egyptians, Kashubians, Greeks, Cypriots, Italians, Albanians, Abkhazians, Yakuts, Slavs, Occitans, Lezgins, Kumyks, Turks, Galicians and Moravians.

Although all of those named above are officially classified as white, none are Anglo-Saxon. The same for many other minority groups classified as white. Scores of them have faced discrimination or worse at the hands of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, including being victims in the early 20th century of the Progressive eugenics movement and of anti-immigration laws and nativist hostility. For example, Italians were considered an inferior race in the North and equated to blacks in the South, especially those from southern Italy and Sicily. Eleven of them were lynched in New Orleans.

The economic status of Walloons and the other above-named minorities is largely unknown today. The same for their political power and their representation on boards of directors.

That’s because they aren’t deemed important enough to be separately tracked by those who track such things. By government policy, they are aggregated with all other whites, as if they are homogenous in values, beliefs, ideology, history, religion, experiences, socioeconomic class, and skin shade. Then, due to their assigned race, they are stereotyped by the woke mob as having the same advantages, privileges and political power as blue-blooded, porcelain-white Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose lineage goes back to the nation’s founding, or whose forebears might have passed down wealth from dealing in cotton, tobacco, and sugar during slavery.

The aggregation of these diverse minority groups results in them being treated as if they are in the majority. By contrast, the aggregation of favored racial/ethnic groups into the contrived categories of Asian and Hispanic results in them being treated as minorities. As a consequence, to take two examples, Walloon Americans are not seen as minorities, but Mexican Americans are seen as such, although they vastly outnumber Walloons.

What explains this insulting and insensitive double standard and the associated bad math?

First, Asians and Hispanics had enough political and media clout to be added to the equal rights movement and legislation that had been originally intended for African Americans. This clout has carried over to the diversity movement.

Second, the diversity movement is based on the false premise that only non-whites are deserving of diversity initiatives, because they lack the privileges, power and wealth that have accrued to all whites, including white Walloons.

Never mind that East Indians, Han Chinese, and other racial/ethnic groups classified as “Asian” exceed whites, on average, in income and education. Never mind that many Hispanics are white and wealthy descendants of Spanish aristocrats. And never mind that plenty of whites are impoverished descendants of indentured servants and tenant farmers.

Another false premise is that an Asian or Hispanic on a board of directors, or in the executive suite, or in a college classroom, is representative of all Asians and Hispanics and thus can speak for everyone else. Under this convoluted thinking, a Japanese is the same as a Korean, is the same as a Cambodian, is the same as an East Indian, is the same as a Filipino, and so on. Likewise, a Mexican is the same as a Columbian, is the same as a Guatemalan, is the same as a Nicaraguan, is the same as a Cuban, and so on. And a Boston Brahmin is the same as a Walloon, is the same as a Kashubian, is the same as an Armenian, is the same as an Abkhazian, and so on.

Universities have not only bought into this gross corruption of sociology, anthropology, history, and math but have led the descent into the scientific malpractice.

Too bad for male Walloons. Because they are classified as white they won’t be counted as a racial minority in Nasdaq’s quotas. But at least they have other ways to be counted: They can change their gender or claim that they are gay, bisexual or transsexual.

“People of Color” is a Brainless Term

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

The Democrats are always coming up with snappy new terms to describe their political antics. “Medicare for All,” “Public Option,” “Democratic Socialism” and “Progressives” are samples of current nomenclature. The terms typically replace a prior term that has failed to capture public acceptance. The press simply follows suit, never questioning the new terms and phrases as they become commonly used by the press. Soon the rest of us are forced to use terms du jour or we are scorned. It is not clear who came up with the term “People of Color,” but there is not a more deceitful and manipulative term than this.

The term basically divides everyone into two groups – White people and everyone else. It treats each group as if it were homogenized. The usage of “people of color” has been traced back as far as 1796. That was really when there were two non-white groups: Blacks and Native Americans. Today that has radically changed.

It is foolish to state that all Whites are just that – people of the same ilk. There are many White Americans with whom I have zero in common. There are many Jewish White Americans I believe live on another planet which Is not part of this solar system. In addition, the fact that there are European Jews (Ashkenazi) and Sephardic Jews who are non-white doesn’t even put all Jews in the same place, but the people who use these terms group all Jews as White.

While Hispanics are often grouped with Blacks politically, they seem to have different political leanings. Hispanic men voted for Trump twice as frequently as Black men and Hispanic women voted for Trump four times as often as Black women. These groups have little in common. While many Black (and some Whites too) were out looting and rioting this past summer, you did not see a lot of Hispanics jumping on board. Part of it is so many Hispanics have a European (White) heritage. Recently a large population of Colombians relocated to Miami as their country was riddled with drug wars. This group has little in common with people here from Central America. Likewise, Cubans have little to do with the Puerto Ricans. Then there are the Dominicans. While they arrived from Spanish speaking countries, these groups have as much in common as the English do with Bulgarians. And they have little in common with Blacks and Asians.

Then there are the Asians. People of Asian extraction gravely dislike being grouped with everyone else that might have a similar look. My friend Michelle Steel, who recently was elected to Congress, told of how some members of the press addressed her as if she were Chinese despite being of Korean heritage and also speaking Japanese. The Koreans do not like the Chinese and certainly the Taiwanese have no affection for mainland Chinese. Then there are the Asians from Thailand, Vietnam, India, Laos and Singapore. Gosh knows the people of Hong Kong who are Chinese do not like the mainland Chinese. They are all “People of Color” who are supposed to all think alike. Not even close.

Not even all Blacks think alike. American-born Blacks are distinctly different from Blacks who have immigrated from Africa in recent generations. It became well known recently that Nigerian Americans are a particularly successful group. Why would they relate to a Black American who thinks the country really started in 1619? In fact, African American immigrants act just like every other immigrant group. They want to succeed in America and not be grouped by “well-meaning liberals” as people of color.

These groups realize this hoopla about “people of color” is nothing more than an attempt by white liberals to appease their self-imposed feelings of guilt or “privilege.” These groups want the government out of their way so they can earn a living, get ahead, raise their children and make sure the next generation is more successful than they are. That is why as a whole immigrants are more successful than native-born Americans and have a higher home ownership rate.

The supposed “people of color” realize that the average American does not really care about their skin shade or native country. They realize we ask they only do two things: Learn to speak English and become an American citizen. Experience shows that these people appreciate this country at a higher level than native-born Americans. They have seen what life is like elsewhere and how fortunate we are here.

People of Color do not exist. It is a stupid and insulting term. There are only two kinds of Americans: ones who love this country and understand what a gift it is to live here, and those who do not.


This entry by Bruce Bialosky at Flash Report was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2020 at 2:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.

Are You Surprised They Think You Are Stupid?

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

There is a lot of talk about how we don’t have enough civility in our public discourse. Mr. Biden has called for unity and reaching across the aisle. Many people would like to blame President Trump. Though he adds to this situation, this has been going on for years. Previously, I have delineated that Democrats think Republicans are evil. I have also delineated that every Republican President since Eisenhower has been called stupid except Nixon who was called evil. Democrats (not all) think most Republican supporters are just beyond understanding societal concepts.

Recently, I had a discussion with a gay friend. Over dinner he said he did not want to engage in political discourse because it just leads to bad feelings. Even though we have different political beliefs I always want to listen to what others say so I can learn how others are thinking.

At a further time, I told him he was wrong to have that thought. I then told him a story. I had been on the forefront of accepting gays; the Best Man at my wedding in 1986 was and is gay. I could not give a hoot about whether someone is gay.

When gay marriage became a hot topic before any court ruling, I told my gay friend I heard arguments in support of gay marriage and found them lacking substance. Then one night while the Beautiful Wife and I were having dinner with a gay couple, one made an argument that stuck with me. He said he wanted to have a wedding. He wanted to experience that. You know — when one person commits to love, honor and cherish the other for the rest of their lives. That argument made sense to me. That made me reconsider my position on the subject. Because of honest discourse between parties with different opinions, sometimes opinions change.

After conveying the story of how my opinion had changed, I switched topics. I told my friend that I still believe the ideal situation for children is to be raised by a female and male couple. We had a back and forth where he made the typical arguments such as a child raised in a household by a loving gay couple is better than a dysfunctional straight couple. We went around and round as I batted back every argument, he made and stuck to the fact I believe a child having a male and female parent is best for both a female and male child. That does not mean that single parents or gay couples are not sometimes better, and significantly better than a child with no parents at all.

Then he offered his last point. While he could accept my rationale, he believes my argument is “dangerous” because some people would not understand like “those folks in Mississippi.” Stating others who you don’t know may not have the mental capacity to comprehend an argument is never a convincing position. He had accepted me as a mental peer, but thought the rest of people who might hear what I said were heathens who would twist my arguments in a vulgar way.

This is not a new experience for me. I hear this regularly. I believe the ordinary American can intelligently come to conclusions — especially made to them in plain English. They can make up their own minds. When I argued for parental notice for minors having abortions, I was told the reason to not have parental notice was not about me. Of course, I would treat my daughter properly. It is the other guy who would act irresponsibly because so many parents would act tragically with a teenage daughter who is pregnant. Thus, we must step in and protect that daughter from her parents because ‘we’ know better.

Reflecting on this, does it surprise you at all that the now infamous interlude happened on CNN’s The Don Lemon show? Three talking heads disparaging people who would deem to think Donald Trump was a responsible president, one being the host laughing uproariously. Afterward, he attempted to explain that he was not really laughing at a large portion of the American public, but at a joke line. We know who he was laughing at. Us.

There is a great divide. There are as many smart people who do not want to control people’s lives as there are that want to micromanage our lives because they believe we cannot manage on our own. Many people have fallen into this mode of thinking. They take decisions out of the hands of others and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that people can no longer make decisions for themselves by reason of they have not made any decisions and thus lost that ability. The COVID period has validated that.

People attempt to define the divide in America. The divide is simply this. The people who believe Americans can and should make decisions for themselves and those who think others are incapable, i.e., because ‘they’ are smarter and wiser, decisions should be made by them. Pick your side. I believe in Americans. They don’t.

P.S. If Mr. Biden wanted to show some leadership and bring us together, he could give a speech and tell his supporters who have suggested retribution against Trump supporters to stop it. He should make clear their behavior is atrocious and un-American. That speech would go a long way toward legitimizing his desire to reach across the aisle.


This entry by Bruce Bialosky was originally posted at Flash Report on Sunday, November 29th, 2020 at 2:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.

The Trump Loss and the Role of Libertarians

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

As the after-action reports filter in for the most recent Presidential election, for those who lost (which at this writing is still undetermined), high on the list must be the treachery of the mainstream media, the big tech companies and voter fraud.

Not getting sufficient attention yet is the role played by the Libertarian Party and its associated think tanks and publications.

Although final numbers are not yet available in all key swing states, it would appear that the Libertarians have delivered to the nation, the most pro-socialist, big government group of Democrats, ever to walk the earth. It would appear that Trump lost PA, GA, WI, and perhaps AZ because of the Libertarian vote.

Critically, it also likely forced the run-off race for the Senate in Georgia (the Purdue race.) It is the U.S. Senate that must prevent the loudly declared leftist agenda of the Democrats with a Biden Presidency.

It stretches the word irony that a small party that proclaims its dedication to liberty and limited government would willingly deliver such a result. It should cause these merry mischief makers to reflect carefully on what they have done.

And who was the Libertarian candidate? Can you name her? Did you know it was a her? Was she even on your political radar?

Libertarians are supposedly socially liberal and fiscal conservatives. They are supposed to believe in liberty and advance its prospects. But they have been drifting to the left for some time. Libertarians of recent vintage believe in open borders, drug legalization, personal sexual liberty and generally are agnostic or atheists as it relates to the function and role of religion. We say “recent vintage” because many earlier Libertarians endorsed more traditional, religious based morality. If not, they tended to be followers of Ayn Rand, who developed a fairly strong morality based on reason. Neither type of earlier Libertarian endorsed situational ethics.

To have a limited government, people must largely control themselves via some internalized moral system. They must be responsible for their own lives and their own support, except in the gravest failures. And even then, private charity and local support should come before federal intervention and largess. Thus, the attack on morality and the family must necessarily make big government more likely. Do Libertarians understand that?

In theory, open borders promoting the free flow of capital and people, would be ideal. However, when you have that coupled with the welfare state and identity politics which destroys the functioning of the “melting pot”, it falls dangerously short of ideal in terms of sustaining and protecting liberty.

But most Libertarians oppose constant foreign wars, excessive paper money creation, judges that legislate from the bench and the Administrative State. They favor school choice, believe in religious liberty, oppose national healthcare, believe in capitalism usually to an extreme and oppose identity politics because they believe in treating people as individuals as opposed to racial categories. The also strongly support the Second Amendment and federalism with its dispersion of power so important to the American founding. In most ways, they share common ground with Conservatives.

Personally, I like Libertarians. They often produce stimulating arguments and challenging views that make one think and reflect on first principles, like non-aggression, peaceful commerce and social harmony. But when if comes to practical politics, Libertarians are unrealistic and naïve to the point of foolishness. Also, they tend to see little connection between cultural trends and those of politics (it is often said that “politics is downstream from culture”.)

It is hard to see why a Libertarian could vote for a Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

You might say, they did not and they might believe that. But in a close election, not voting for the Republican means Democrat victory. Get it?

Some might argue it is a sophisticated way of creating divided government. We doubt such careful calculation is in the equation. More likely, it is their own sense of self-importance and their joy in teasing the major parties that pay insufficient attention to them. But the record of Libertarians often electing Democrats is pretty clear. Besides divided government is paralyzed government, which does not work well in crisis. If you want the government to shrink, would you not want to elect or influence the party mostly likely to shrink it?

Likewise, dealing with the Chinese threat to liberty requires greater unification of the parties.

It would seem electing Libertarian leaning candidates within an existing party would be time better spent than sabotaging the party pushing for a smaller, less intrusive government.  The Republican party is often a leaking vessel carrying the ideas of liberty. Isn’t that good enough reason for Libertarians to be within the Republican party, fighting to hold the party of less government accountable for failing the cause rather than helping elect the party of massive government and decreased liberty?

Instead, Libertarians may be responsible for costing Trump the election and put the forces of limited government in a position where recovery could be difficult if not impossible. Trump after all, was NOT an establishment Republican.

While Trump no doubt rankled them for his positions on immigration, abortion, his personality quirks and lack of fiscal conservatism, he was the candidate that started to deregulate, nominated strict constructionist judges, defended the Second Amendment, the First Amendment, promoted school choice, opposed national healthcare, attempted to scale down our endless foreign wars and protected religious liberty. He also endorsed prison reform, enterprise zones, cut tremendous amounts of regulation and cut taxes. He even attempted to appoint Judy Shelton, a pro-gold standard economist to the Federal Reserve.

He was moving his party in a more limited government direction, not perfectly, but substantially.

Whatever his failings, he clearly was better than the weak and confused Biden who already is being besieged by left-wing elements demanding payback for their loyalty.

Trump himself, is the victim of “deep state” machinations that should be opposed by all friends of limited government. Do Libertarians really like the CIA and FBI interfering in elections?

Do Libertarians think the Democrats will deliver fiscal conservatism and sound money?

On some key Libertarian social issues, Trump was largely silent on pot. He largely respected federalism through the Covid pandemic and let the states do their thing, giving us at least a range of public policy choices valuable to future research for what works.

But is pot legalization really more important than the Bill of Rights?  Even if one supports legalization, the priorities are all wrong.

In terms of sexual issues, Trump moved to decriminalize homosexual behavior in foreign countries.

On abortion, Trump is pro-life. Libertarians themselves differ on abortion but all would agree it should not be subsidized by the state. If Roe is overturned, the states will determine abortion policy which should not be offensive to Libertarians.

Neither candidate ran on fiscal conservatism, but the Democrats have openly embraced socialism, free college education, the Green New Deal, racial reparations, Modern Monetary Theory, climate change regulation, harsh Covid lockdown – all of which would make Trump the relative fiscal conservative.

So, if our calculations are right, Trump supported due process for males on college campus, opposed the violence of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, opposed the teaching of critical race theory, reduced foreign wars, reduced our dependence on international organizations, reduced the regulatory state, defended the Bill of Rights. And Libertarians voted against him because of WHAT?  Immigration policy? Marijuana legalization? Failure to balance the budget? His tweets?

With a huge expensive state, how can you balance the budget?  Smaller government means smaller budgets. By defeating Trump, now what are the chances of balancing the budget?

If our analysis of Libertarians is correct, they will rightfully go down as one of the most foolish political movements ever to pretend they support liberty.

In politics, you never get all that you want. The choices are basically who on balance moves the country in the direction you seek. Perfection is not part of the political equation and, frankly, is not part of the human condition. This advice is applicable to Conservatives as well, who often find the Republican Party just as frustrating.

If Libertarians felt their “independence” of either major party signals their moral purity on key issues, they have succeeded in putting in power the least likely party to advance liberty.

That, my friends, is a poor calculation. It is virtue signaling of the worst kind. It is making a moral statement that not just has little meaning. Rather, it actually succeeds in getting the opposite of what your supposed virtue supports.

It goes beyond being childish and ventures into the self-destructive. Pay attention to me, it seems to say, or I will burn down the house.

What is the solution?

Perhaps serious self-examination by Libertarians is in order. As far as Republicans are concerned, the GOP needs to reach out to fellow liberty lovers and make them feel more welcome within the party.


Purple People Without a Political Party: A purple person recounts a lifetime of living among the red and blue

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

TUCSON – As the nation has divided into red and blue (Republican and Democrat), purple people like myself no longer have a political party.

Most of us are classical liberals or distant cousins to today’s libertarians.

Purple had become our color because we had preferred a blend of red and blue policies at the national level. But we no longer prefer the blend because of what the two parties have become.

A long time ago, the Democrat Party was attractive to purple people because it stood for civil liberties, working stiffs, the poor and balanced budgets. And the Republican Party was attractive because it stood for prosperity, low taxes and balanced budgets.

Both parties then proceeded to tarnish themselves with foolish wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Drugs), huge deficits, a big government isolated in the out-of-touch Imperial City of Washington, the financialization of the economy, the screwing of working stiffs, and a failure to address the root problems among the black underclass, choosing instead to pander to middle- and upper-class blacks, who were doing well without the paternalism and tokenism of half-baked diversity programs.

Democrats went on to embrace globalism, racial and identity politics and socialism while taking money from Wall Street and Silicon Valley and snookering poor minorities. Republicans went on to embrace globalism and corporatism while forgetting Main Street.

Trump saw a political opening and stepped in with his nationalism and his populist appeals to working stiffs. In some ways he was like Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party. Unlike the old Bull Moose Party, however, Trump succeeded in winning the presidency; but like the Bull Moose Party, his movement could end in the dustbin of history, due to demographic trends and corresponding changes in American values, especially among miseducated millennials and their offspring.

Democrats and Republicans have become eaters of purple people, in the political sense. They should adopt the hit song of 1958, “The Purple People Eater,” as their theme song.

Although Democrats and Republicans have forsaken purple people at the national level, many reddish cities and states are better for them at the local level, including those run by Democrats who govern with a reddish tint. Reddish locales are also better for people of all political colors, skin colors and socioeconomic classes.

To that point, two respected demographic researchers have developed an Upward Mobility Index for the nation’s 107 largest metropolitan areas—those with populations of 500,000 or more in 2018. The index weighs the factors that lead to upward mobility and entry into the middle class for the three largest ethnic and racial minorities: African-Americans, Latinos and Asians.

The Upward Mobility Index shows that cities with bluish policies—affirmative action, programs for racial redress, strict labor and environmental laws—help nonwhites far less than reddish cities with low housing costs, friendly business conditions and reasonable tax rates.

That finding matches my own research and my own experience in living in red and blue locales.

I began life in the working-class neighborhood of my hometown of blue St. Louis, then later moved to the blue barrio of San Antonio, then served in the blue/red Army, then moved to blue Chicago to start my business career, then moved to the red metropolis of Phoenix, then moved to blue New Jersey, then moved back to the red metropolis of Phoenix, and finally, for family reasons, then moved in retirement to the deep blue of the Tucson metropolis, where Democrats have had a political monopoly for decades in the City of Tucson and the surrounding Pima County.

Now I find myself living in a blue state, due to Arizona turning from red to blue in the 2020 election and voting in favor of a class-resentment proposition that will increase taxes on the so-called wealthy and cause the state to lose its primary competitive advantage. As a result, fewer Californians escaping the Golden State will move to Arizona. They will keep driving until they reach Texas, where they will try to turn that state blue.

To see what life is like among the blue and red, below is a synopsis of life in each of the places I’ve lived.

City of St. Louis

The Democrat machine of the City of St. Louis brought corruption, bloated government, decline and crime to what had been one of the nation’s largest and most prosperous cities in the early twentieth century. During its heyday, the city wanted nothing to do with the surrounding reddish county, even to the extent of establishing its own county-level courts and services. Now it’s dependent on the county for life support.

Personal anecdote: When the city was well into its decline, one of my college jobs was working for a former city mayor whose shady company specialized in helping taverns in renewing their liquor license. The job required getting the signatures of a majority of property owners within a 200-foot radius of a drinking establishment, which was often in a slum. I quit after seeing the sordidness of the process and learning that most slumlords lived in leafy liberal enclaves.

San Antonio

This city was an impoverished, crime-ridden economic backwater when I lived there. It later became wealthier by means of reddish economic policies and the annexation of much of the surrounding reddish Bexar County. It also had the benefit of being located in reddish, low-tax Texas.

Personal anecdote: I would be awakened in the barrio to the sound of gunfire, got caught in the middle of a gunfight one night and had my car stolen once and my wheels stolen twice.


It’s difficult to top Chicago and Cook County in corruption, high taxes, crime, and bloated government. This is such common knowledge that nothing else needs to be said.

Personal anecdote: Chicago was so corrupt that when I was buying a house there, my real estate attorney asked for $200 to bribe a county clerk to expedite the title recording.

New Jersey

On second thought, the Garden State may top Chicago in corruption, taxes and bloated government.

Life in the Garden State came with potholed county and state roads, piles of trash and litter along roadsides, and sleazy Italian mobsters who gave Italians a bad name by controlling the garbage industry, other industries and politicians. The state was so disgusting and misgoverned that an overpass on the major east-west artery of Interstate 78 burned down and was closed for months when a 40-foot-tall pile of illegally-dumped trash started on fire.

Personal anecdote: Taxes in New Jersey were so high that my wife and I paid annual property taxes of $14,000 (in today’s dollars) on our 2,200 sq. ft. house in the suburb of Basking Ridge. By contrast, we paid $3,500 in property taxes on our former 3,700 sq. ft. house in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale.

Metro Phoenix

When my wife and I first moved decades ago to a blue-collar neighborhood in bluish Phoenix, the city was still somewhat of a cowboy town, with a smattering of resorts and retirement communities. It was not unusual to see guys in cowboy hats and boots with six-shooters and holsters on their hips. But the metropolis was clean, well-managed, had visionary leadership and bipartisan elections and oozed optimism and promise.

When we moved to Scottsdale years later, that suburb had grown from a sleepy bedroom community to a thriving, hip place to live, work and play, thanks to the visionary leadership of former mayor Herb Drinkwater, whose party affiliation was unknown to residents and didn’t matter to them.

Anecdote: Scottsdale government was so forward-looking and efficient that the city invented and implemented a new way of picking up trash, a way that reduced the number of employees per truck to one: the driver. Under the system, homeowners rolled a trash bin to the curb on pickup days, where the bin was picked up and emptied by a lift operated by the driver of the trash truck. The system is now widespread, but at the time it was the opposite of the prevailing union featherbedding in Chicago and New Jersey.


The dark-blue City of Tucson and surrounding blue Pima County are examples of what decades of one-party government and partisan elections can do to a city and county.

The city has a poverty rate twice the national average, a rate of property crimes near the top nationally, below-average test scores, poorly maintained roads and parks and widespread shabbiness.

The surrounding unincorporated county is wealthier, but streets are in such disrepair that if I were to describe them accurately, you’d think I was lying. Parks are in similar condition and too many commercial and public properties are poorly maintained. Roads are so littered that my wife and I come home from our daily walks with bags that we’ve filled with the detritus from residents who have become accepting of bad government and desensitized to the consequences.

In spite of being the home of the University of Arizona, which is a major research university, the metropolis as a whole is an economic backwater shunned by large corporations as a headquarters location. As such, ambitious college graduates tend to move elsewhere for opportunities, especially to such cities as Phoenix, Denver and Dallas. And even though big companies are now letting their headquarters’ employees work from anywhere due to the coronavirus, Tucson doesn’t seem to be on their radar, in spite of its favorable climate, pretty natural setting and nearby outdoor attractions.

Meanwhile, local politicians engage in hollow virtue-signaling about the poor, climate change, and other progressive pieties. For instance, the mayor of Tucson wants to plant thousands of trees to counteract global warming – this in a city without abundant water that already does a lousy job of maintaining existing vegetation.

Personal anecdote: When my wife and I moved from well-run Scottsdale to badly-run metro Tucson, we ended up paying 50% more for the combined total of property taxes, water, sewer, trash pick-up, and fire service – although our house here has the same assessed value as our former house.

In conclusion, regardless of what color they are, people generally do better in reddish cities, including purple people.

Bloomberg and Rosenwald: Compare & Contrast

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Michael Bloomberg, a Jewish billionaire who built his fortune on a computerized data base and computer terminal used by Wall Street firms, put in $100 million in Florida to try to swing the election for Democrats.

Numerous other billionaire tech moguls, are pumping millions of dollars into Black Lives Matter, a Marxist organization dividing America.

No doubt both think their actions will help black people.  Or perhaps they think they can buy off the mob by aiding those that want to destroy the free enterprise system that made these moguls wealthy. It is hard to know.

Contrast this tendency among today’s ultra-rich with the story of Julius Rosenwald.

In the 1870s through the 1890s, the revolution in retailing was the mail order business. Montgomery Ward became the Amazon of the era, servicing customers in the underserved rural market with low prices, variety and quality.

Around the turn of the 20th century, a new competitor was launched by two watch salesmen, Alvah Roebuck and Richard Sears.  The firm they founded expanded rapidly under the leadership of a Jewish clothing salesman, Julius Rosenwald.

The firm did very well but as demographics shifted from farm to city, Sears Roebuck kept its mail order business but also pivoted with a major emphasis on retail stores in urban areas.  The company did even better.

The firm sold just about anything, including kits for the construction of homes.  A good collection of these can be found still occupied in Bisbee, Arizona.

Rosenwald pumped his own money into the firm to support it during the Great Depression.

While running this very successful company, Rosenwald developed a deep concern about the plight of blacks in the Democrat ruled South. Democrats had imposed a series of legal restrictions based on race, that parade under the name of Jim Crow laws.  Educational funding for blacks was minimal.

After meeting with Booker T. Washington, the outstanding black leader of the Tuskegee Institute (later the source of courageous black fighter pilots known as the ‘Red Tails’), Rosenwald began building schools for poor blacks in rural areas.

Eventually, he built over 5,300 schools that educated about 36% of the southern black population.

The schools were simple and successful.  Many studies suggest these schools helped black income climb over a third in relation to white incomes at the time, raised scores for military entry, increased both the odds and success of migration out of the South, and even raised IQ scores. They functioned until the 1954 school desegregation decision.

Contrast this program with what we see today, millions of dollars poured into Marxist oriented organizations that have been involved in promoting racism with reverse discrimination and civil disturbance.

Millions more are poured into the Democratic Party, that has blacks trapped in horrible inner-city schools in cities like Baltimore where students can graduate barely knowing how to read.  In 2019, only 13% of Baltimore 4th graders could read at their grade level.  Another study showed that of city of 700,000, about 200,000 people in Baltimore are functionally illiterate.

Many of these cities have been dominated by the Democratic Party and its largest contributor, the teacher’s union, for a half century or more.  The platform of the Democratic Party has come out foursquare against school choice. They will not tolerate competition for the educational establishment.

Today’s billionaires apparently either want to double down on failure or to double down on cowardice.

Rosenwald always treated blacks with respect. He required parents to have a stake in the game by contributing something towards their children’s education, even if it was labor to construct a school. Rosenwald took a different direction in philanthropy wherein he made large grants to various causes on the condition that recipients also raise funds to “cure the things that seem to be wrong.”

He did not give grants for political lobbying. He did not give grants without self-help. He did not give money to buy off violent protestors. He did not give money for racial isolation. White groups were often required to “buy in” to get a project done.

Rosenwald put his money where his mouth is out of religious conviction while today’s billionaires put their money where their political interest is.

Questions for Starbucks About Its New Diversity Policy

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Starbucks recently announced that it is tying pay to the accomplishment of diversity goals. Specifically, its goals are to have at least 30% of its U.S. corporate employees and 40% of its U.S. retail and manufacturing employees to be people of color defined as black people, other people of color and indigenous people. It will track them across 14 job levels.

The company reported that its workforce is currently 53.5% white, 10.5% Hispanic/Latino, 8% black, 5.5% Asian, 4.7% multiracial, and 1.3% other.

Starbucks is following the corporate herd. Other big corporations have announced similar goals, and some have even gone so far as to pledge that 40% of their management positions will be filled by selected races/ethnicities. In some cases, companies have used the catchall term “minorities” in stating their diversity goals.

Although I don’t patronize Starbucks, I have no doubt that the chain knows more about the coffee business than I do. But I doubt that it knows as much as I do about equal opportunity, affirmative action, diversity, and racial sensitivity training. Over my career I was at the leading edge of such initiatives and also had expertise in federal and state anti-discrimination laws and in designing compensation programs. I’ve also had a lifetime interest in the history of race in America and the reasons why there are socioeconomic differences between races and ethnic groups.

Based on that experience, I have the following questions for Starbucks and the rest of the herd:

  1. How do you define white, black, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian?  Do you define them based on physical traits, surnames, ancestral country, or something else?
  2. In what category do you put Egyptians? Palestinians? Turks? Persians? Arabs? Sicilians? Afghans? Pakistanis? Mongolians?
  3. Do you believe that all Asians think alike, see the world the same way, and have identical cultures, whether they’re Japanese, Korean, Han Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Cambodians, Thais, Indonesians, or Malays?  If not, why do you lump them together in the name of diversity?  Do you see the contradiction in this?
  4. Do you have a similar belief about the 100 or so ethnicities/nationalities on the European continent and the Middle East? Do you believe that all of these peoples think alike, see the world the same way, have the same culture, and come from privilege?
  5. How do you determine whether someone is a person of color? Since my Italian skin is darker than the skin of many Hispanics and certainly darker than my Swedish/Scots-Irish wife, am I a person of color? What about the offspring of a Greek and a Korean?  Is that individual a person of color or an Asian or both?
  6. What is your definition of “minority?” Does it include Iranian Americans, who comprise less than one percent of the population?
  7. If you define minority in terms of people lacking in political and economic power, do you consider East Indians to be minorities? How about the fact that most emigrants from India are from an upper caste, or the fact that the Patel clan is the largest owner of independent motels and hotels in America, or the fact that a disproportionate percent of Indians hold high-paid jobs in Silicon Valley, or the fact that 70% of Indian immigrants have college degrees (versus about 7% of Mexican immigrants)?
  8. Does it cross your mind – your mind of pigeon-holes – that it might be demotivating for an employee of yours who is a poor Scots-Irish descendant of coal miners in West Virginia to be told that his opportunities are now limited because of being in the wrong pigeonhole? And do you understand how divisive this is corporately and nationally?
  9. If your objective relative to African Americans is to make up for past injustices and address the horrible problems in many black communities, do you realize how complex those problems are, what the root causes of the problems are, and how little the problems will improve by what you are doing?
  10. Why are you not sued for brazenly violating Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids making hiring and promotion decisions based on race and ethnicity, among other provisions?  Are you aware that courts and the EEOC have determined that affirmative action is legal in terms of reaching out to historically overlooked communities and increasing the applicant pool; but that it is not legal to set numerical targets for favoring some races/ethnicities and discriminating against others in hiring and promotions?

In closing, you might be interested to know why this Italian doesn’t patronize Starbucks.

First, Starbucks’ founder got the idea for the business on a visit to Italy and watching Italians stop for a quick shot of expresso on their way to work but the high-calorie milkshakes masquerading as coffee at Starbucks are unlike what is consumed in Italy.

Second, being the son of a tile setter and the grandson of an Italian immigrant who worked as a coal miner, I learned that the way to make it to the middle-class was to save money, live below one’s means, and invest in one’s future.  By making coffee at home and not buying a coffee and pastry at Starbucks, I’ve saved at least five dollars a day. If invested, that comes to about $145,000 in 30 years.


Diversity Lands on Mars

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The diversity movement has broken free of all earthly bounds

It was recently announced that 40% of management positions on Mars will be filled by minorities.

No, not the red planet, but my former employer, the privately-held Mars, Inc., a conglomerate with an estimated $37 billion in revenue and 130,000 employees.

The announcement is an example of how the diversity movement has become untethered from reality and is now being propelled across the ether by platitudes, virtue-signaling, group-think, double standards, and racial stereotypes.

The announcement was made almost simultaneously with the company changing the name of its Uncle Ben’s Rice to Ben’s Rice, after the Houston-based rice division had been accused of racial insensitivity for the former name and the accompanying caricature of a black man as venerable Uncle Ben. The accusation must’ve shocked the family owners, because they had always avoided politics and prided themselves on their progressive employment practices, high pay for plant workers, and concerns for all stakeholders.

No good deed goes unpunished in today’s hypersensitive America.

To digress for a moment, here’s why I’m qualified to speak about diversity and Mars:

In 1992, the Wall Street Journal published a long commentary of mine that touted the management philosophy of Mars, based on my experience working there as an executive in the 1980s. The article was subsequently used as a case study in business schools.

One of my responsibilities at the company was diversity, although it wasn’t called that at the time, because this was prior to the term being coined in 1990 by R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., in his landmark article in the Harvard Business Review. It was called equal employment opportunity or affirmative action and was often accompanied with sensitivity training and with the firing of managers and workers for prejudicial behavior—all of which I oversaw.

Mars was known for its marketing prowess and for high productivity and efficiency, a deserved reputation that was due in large part to its recruiting at some of the best business schools and engineering schools around the world, as well as its practice of rotating managers between divisions and countries in order to spread best practices across the organization. For example, when I worked at the headquarters of its U.S. confectionery division, the vice president of manufacturing was Dutch, the vice president of R&D was British, the division president was British, and the vice president of human resources had come from Mars’ pet food division.

The company’s divisional offices were always connected to a plant. Although one of the company’s first U.S. plants/offices was in Chicago, and although one of its first European plants/offices was in Slough, the working-class part of metro London, it preferred to locate its newer plants/offices in semi-rural locations in the States and Europe. The thinking was that the work ethic was better than in cities, and that cities had too many constraints in terms of limited space, poor truck access, and neighbors who might object to the noise and odors of 24/7 operations.

This is why, a half-century ago, the company moved the headquarters of its U.S. confectionery business, as well as the adjoining plant that made M&Ms, from Newark, NJ, to Hackettstown, NJ, in the northwestern part of the state near the Pennsylvania border.

It was of course more difficult to attract blacks and Hispanics in Hackettstown than in Newark. The same for semi-rural locations in the Netherlands and Germany. But these limitations were more than compensated for by its operations in diverse parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas.

Cultural dynamics changed within the company when the family retired from day-to-day operations. The dynamics further changed with Mars’ purchase of Chicago-based Wrigley in 2008 for $23 billion. It became more “professionally” managed, which is a euphemism for being managed in accord with conventional American business practices—practices that have resulted in manufacturing workers in other industries being treated like widgets and seeing their jobs shipped to Mexico and China.

It is Mars’ prerogative to change its longstanding management development policies and plant/office locations to advance diversity—and to send a potentially divisive message to its workforce that preferences will be given to some employees over others until 40% of managers are minorities. But there are two troubling societal aspects to this.

The first is legal. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act unequivocally states that employment decisions should not be based on race or ethnicity. Although it’s legal to eliminate racial and ethnic barriers to employment and promotion and to reach out to previously overlooked groups, it is legally questionable to favor some groups over others in order to meet some arbitrary racial mix—not that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cares about discrimination masquerading as diversity.

The second troubling aspect is the ambiguous meaning of “minority.” Most people would say they know what it means, but do they really?

They would say that in the context of diversity, “minority” refers to those races that are in the minority in America in terms of numbers, such as African Americans, Asians and non-white Latinos. Not only are there business benefits to this racial form of diversity, the thinking goes, but it’s a way of redressing past discrimination and achieving social justice for historically disadvantaged people.


A PhD dissertation could be written on the fallacies in this thinking, but since PhD dissertations put people to sleep, let’s look at the biggest fallacy.

The biggest fallacy of the current zeitgeist on diversity is that it is based on stereotypes. The underlying assumption is that all individuals within an official governmental racial category are the same in terms values, beliefs, outlooks, and socioeconomic circumstance. As such, all whites are seen as coming from privilege, even though many are impoverished, unlike, let’s say, college-educated emigrants from an upper-caste in India, or Latinos from the Spanish aristocracy of Mexico. Moreover, all whites are seen as being in the majority, even though there are over 100 unique ethnic minority groups within the so-called white race, such as Italian Americans, who are only six percent of the population, or Iranian Americans, who are only a tenth of a percent of the population.

Memo to stereotypers: A coal miner’s daughter in West Virginia didn’t grow up with the privileges and perspectives of a Mars daughter. Likewise, this grandson of a coal miner didn’t grow up with the privileges and perspectives of a descendant of a Boston blueblood family that became wealthy from the cotton trade. For you to believe otherwise suggests a political agenda or reflects appalling ignorance.

Japan, South Korea and China are manufacturing powerhouses and big markets for Mars and other American companies. But, ironically, they are not very diverse in terms of race, although China has some degree of ethnic diversity. Time will tell if diversity will prove to be a competitive advantage for U.S.-based companies. But even if it doesn’t, diversity should be pursued for other reasons, as long as it’s done legally and includes ethnic and socioeconomic diversity.

The only group that should be excluded from diversity considerations are aliens from the planet Mars.

‘1619 Project’ Founder Melts Down After Criticism Of Her Fake History

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

This article was originally published by  the Federalist on October 16, 2020.

The lead writer of The New York Times’ anti-American “1619 Project” suffered a meltdown last week when a colleague at her paper offered fair criticism of its revisionist and inaccurate account of history.

On Oct. 9, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens published a more than 3,000-word essay outlining the project’s blunders that have led the academics with the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke its award to the project’s chief essayist, Nikole Hannah-Jones.

“Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it,” Stephens wrote. “We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political issues of the day, not become the issue itself.”

Under this model, Stephens writes, “for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize – the 1619 Project has failed.

At the heart of his criticism is the project’s central thesis to revise the date of America’s “true founding” to the year 1619, when the first African slaves found their way to the colonies (Native American tribes had kept slaves on the continent for centuries by then). Several months after the campaign’s launch, now that it is infecting some 4,500 K-12 classrooms, the legacy newspaper stealth-edited the project to remove the language of its “true founding” to when the “moment [America] began.”

“These were not minor points,” Stephen wrote. “The deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, ‘to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regards 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

The criticism sent the architect of the project into a rage, according to the Washington Post, predictably calling the fair-minded critiques of her deceptive scholarship racist.

“Hannah-Jones, though, was livid, and let Kingsbury and Stephens know it in emails ahead of publication,” the Post reported. “One the day the NAS called for the revocation of her Pulitzer, she tweeted that efforts to discredit her work ‘put me in a long tradition of [Black women] who failed to know their places.’ She changed her Twitter bio to ‘slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress’ – a tribute to the trailblazing journalist Ida B. Wells, whom the Times slurred with those same words in 1894.”

The revisionist project, which has attracted sharp scrutiny since its publication last year, has since maintained full editorial support from the newspaper despite major corrections to its essays and leagues of historians debunking its primary claims.

After a group of leading historians objected to the Times’ project’s false information, the magazine’s Editor in Chief Jake Silverstein wrote back that “historical understanding is not fixed.” In other words, the Times doesn’t care what historians with decades of experience think if it counters the religious narrative that critical race theory demands.

Several months later, the Times finally did issue a two-word correction to its lead essay authored by none other than Hannah-Jones clarifying that keeping slavery was only a primary motivation for some of the colonists rather than all of the colonists to seek independence from Great Britain. While it might seem a minor change, it’s actually a significant one provided that the project has been adopted widely into curriculum teaching children the United States was built for the sole purpose to oppress, a key tenet of the left’s critical race theory driving the nation’s 21st century woke revolution.

It’s worth noting this correction was made before the Pulitzer committee awarded Hannah-Jones its prestigious prize based on an essay that the Times admitted was historically inaccurate.

Despite the corrections, the inaccuracies, the controversies, and the criticisms of the project, Dean Baquet, the executive director of the Times, rejected Stephens’ arguments.

“Our readers, and I believe our country, have benefited immensely from the principles, rigorous and groundbreaking journalism of Nikole,” Baquet wrote, celebrating the work of the same writer who said “it would be an honor” for the nation’s explosion of deadly unrest which tore through the cities this summer to be named”the 1619 Riots.”


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