Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Alex Tresniowski, author of The Rope. Before we begin, though, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, February 11th at 5 p.m., Paul and Stephen Kendrick will be here to tell us about their new book, Nine Days, which chronicles the arrest of Martin Luther King, in Georgia, just weeks before the 1960 presidential election, and how the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns dealt with it. And on Tuesday, February 16th at noon, Robert Watson will be here to discuss his new book, George Washington's Final Battle, which describes Washington's active role in choosing the location of the new capital on the shores of the Potomac. In recounting the true crime story of the investigation into a 1910 murder of a child in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Alex Tresniowski also introduces the reader to the tireless work of anti-lynching crusader, Ida B. Wells Barnett. She began her campaign in the early 1890s, writing articles, pamphlets, letters, and petitions to bring attention to this horrific practice and lobbying for its end. In the National Archives, her words are preserved in writing sent to Congress and the president calling for anti-lynching laws and aid for the families of victims. At the end of the first decade of the 20th century, lynching was still a real threat for African Americans, especially those suspected of crimes like the accused man in the Asbury Park murder. But at the same time, Wells Barnett and other black leaders founded the NAACP to advance justice for African Americans. Today, Alex Tresniowski will share with us the parallel stories of the historical murder investigation and the activism of Ida B. Wells Barnett and the NAACP. Alex Tresniowski is the author or co-author of more than 20 books, including six New York Times bestsellers. His 2011 book An Invisible Thread spent more than 40 weeks on the Times bestseller list and won a prestigious Christopher Award for works that affirm the highest values of the human spirit. In 2005, Alex co-authored The Vendetta, the story of the FBI Special Agent Melvin Purvis, the G-Man who caught John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Babyface Nelson. One of his most recent books, 2017's The Founding, is the basis of a CNN films documentary called The Lost Sons, which is currently in production. Now let's hear from Alex Tresniowski. Thank you for joining us today. This is Alex. Thank you, sir, for hosting me today. I appreciate that. My name is Alex Tresniowski, and I'm the author of The Rope, and I'm very pleased to be able to share a couple of stories from it with you today. It's a book that I really care about and a book that, while I was working on it, became even more relevant than when I started. Just to fill you in on what it is a little bit, it takes place in Asbury Park, New Jersey in 1910, and Asbury Park was a little resort town built from scrubgrass as a haven for very godly white people, essentially, where they could go and engage in pure activities and things like even kissing on the board weren't allowed, certainly no liquor or anything like that. And as the turn of the century rolled by, Asbury Park began to get more attractions, more people, more hotels, and then, of course, the idea of this pure city, this angelic godly city sort of started to fall apart because human nature is what it is and everybody gathered there and things happened that were beyond the control of James Bradley, who was the founder of the town. So the story starts with a murder. It's the murder of a young child, a young girl named Marie Smith. She got up at 8 o'clock one morning and went to school with her younger brother, got to school, and was supposed to come home at 12.30 for lunch and never made it home. And that resulted in a five-day manhunt with hundreds and hundreds of people scouring every square inch of Asbury Park for any sign of her, and nothing turned up until five days later. In the dark woods, somebody did find a body, and this was Marie Smith's body. She had been beaten, she had been abused, and was just left there of a florist from a local town founder, and of course that sets off a murder investigation that is sort of the propellant of this book. Right after the murder, the first thing that happened was that a black handyman named Tom Williams, he was an Xboxer who fought under the name Black Diamond, was rounded up, and he had painted a house near where the girl lived, and he sort of vaguely knew the parents, and very quickly they were able to put him in jail and sort of set him up as the likely killer of Marie Smith, without any really process or anything. In fact, his second day in jail, white mob stormed the jail and did their best to break him out and lynch him, and he narrowly escaped that by car with the help of a sergeant at the station. So Tom Williams was in a position that a lot of black Americans found themselves in back at the turn of the century, and that sort of becomes the backdrop of my story, which is lynching. It was a scourge in the country, a five year study published in 2015 by the Equal Justice Initiative found that almost 4,000 black women men and children were lynched in the 12 southern states in just 70 years. And the thing with lynching was we were in a part of the our history where the civil war was over and black people were trying to integrate into society. And what happened was every step of progress that they made was met by resistance. People who wanted the old order, and one of the tools that they used was lynching, extrajudicial killing. They would find black people who were prominent and basically eliminate them and destroy them. And under the pretense of what was believed to be they are savages and they can only be dealt with this way. When in fact the real reason behind a lot of the lynchings was economic suppression. But that wasn't really accepted in the country at that time. So lynchings were perfectly acceptable in a way. They were never prosecuted. They might have an inquest but usually the decision would be that the black person was killed by persons unknown even though most people in white mobs were known to everyone. They were fathers, judges, lawyers, barbers, people from the town. But it was seen as a way of policing society. So it was okay that they didn't get their due process but this was just the way it was handled at the turn of the century. And that's one of the parts of our history that we've never really confronted fully. I found as I did this book that there's a lot of parts of our history that we've never really sat down and looked at in a sufficient way so that we all agree on what happened. For instance even civil war there's not really an agreement on what really caused the war and not a national agreement. So there's issues in our history that sort of haunt us. And I'm lynching as one of them. As I was working on this book George Freud was killed by a police officer. And we all saw that and that led to outrage and black lives matter movement. And I was reminded how relevant this story is that I'm working on. It's not old history. It's current history. You know the events of 110 years ago are the same as the events now. Extra judicial killings. Black rights. The search for justice. Giving voice to the voiceless. And that's what I was writing about back then and it sort of came to life in a way where it just made it more imminent and urgent that we remember our past so that we can deal with the present and the future. And hopefully this book plays any part in that dialogue. But getting back to the story now that we have Tom Williams in trouble and in a real threat of being lynched for a murder which he may or may not have committed a second story comes into play. And this involves Ida B. Wells and she is a well known journalist, activist public speaker and at one point the most famous black woman in the world basically. And her story appealed to me because the Tom Williams case was the third legal case ever handled by the NLBACP the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That was a brand new organization started in 1909 that was still trying to get its footing at the time that the murder happened in Asbury Park and this became their third legal case ever. And I wanted to sort of see how that happened and how the NLBACP played a part in this case while at the same time looking at the case and the incredible efforts that were made to solve the case. That's a whole other story. But on the Ida Wells side I really wanted to sort of look at her life and take five or six moments and events from her life that led her to become Moshe became a pioneer and crusader against lynching for civil rights for black rights and possibly the most courageous woman I've ever read about or written about. She was a solitary force at her time. She fell into situations and rose to them. She didn't want to be a public speaker. She became a public speaker. She didn't necessarily want to be an outspoken journalist but she became one because she was forced to. She didn't always want to leave her home and for children to go out and defend somebody who was under the threat of lynching but she did and often saved them and made a huge difference on a granular level but also in a way that moved history. She is one of the founders of the NLBACP so I really wanted to chart how she got there and then how the NLBACP was able to step in the Tom Williams case. I'll go back to the detective story in a bit. It's really a detective story and then the story of the NLBACP and how they converge in 1910 but I also wanted to just tell one little story now about how to be well strong in the book that I felt really showed how individuals are moved and into action and how you face a moment where you have to make a decision of what kind of America you want to live in and what role you want to play in that America and Ida Wells faced such a moment in her life at the age of 30 by then she'd been born into slavery she'd been born during civil war her parents died when she was very young from Yellow Fever she had to stay with her young family and siblings to keep them together she had a very hard life she took a job as a teacher she was a hero for several miles back and forth she'd been kicked off trains and stood up to the train companies she'd had her share of of activism that just came naturally to her and defiance but at 30 she was a journalist she was working and writing about the black issues of the day but under a pen name and not quite as forcefully as history would require her to do at some point so then an event happened and that's the event I'd like to tell you a little bit about so Ida Wells at that time had an office where she worked at the Free Speech Newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee in a neighborhood called The Curve which was named after a railroad track that sort of went through the town it was a mixed neighborhood, whites, blacks and the mail carrier in that neighborhood was a man named Thomas Moss young man ambitious guy he knew everybody in town because he was a mail carrier and he also knew all the good gossip in town so when he would stop by the office of the Free Press Free Speech inside the newspaper on Beale Street he would spend time with Ida and they became really good friends and Ida even became a godmother to his young daughter Maureen who was one year old and they became just friendly they called him a finer cleaner man never walked the streets of Memphis she was incredibly impressed by him because he was future oriented he got together with 10 other prominent African Americans and they started something called the People's Grocery and this was a collective owned by 11 black people which became a very competitive grocery in The Curve they actually presented a very strong competition to a grocery store nearby that was light owned which was called Barrett's Grocery and it was owned by William Russell Barrett a white man in town so this was an example of black progress in a rough neighborhood but a progressing neighborhood and Thomas Moss was right at the heart of that he was trying to make a better life for himself for his family, for his wife Patty for his daughter and for every other black in The Curve and Ida Wells was a part of that she was part of that group and then came a terrible event it began with two children playing marbles on a front lawn and a fight happened and an argument happened and then a scrabble happened and suddenly the kids were fighting suddenly adults joined in and the parents took sides and before long there was a full blown melee in the town whites against blacks and it went on for more than a day it lingered for days after the fight itself and there were some injuries during the fight one of the people injured was Barrett the grocery store owner who said he was clubbed in the head by one of the black workers a man named Will Stewart so we have an angry grocery store owner who wants to prosecute Will Stewart we have black people in town who are hearing rumors of white mobs coming to get them and arrest them and in fact 100 white citizens do get deputized overnight and armed and do confront the workers at the people's grocery and then they shoot out there and some officers are injured and that results in the arrest of three people including Tommy Moss and Will Stewart and one other man they are arrested and taken to a jail and Patty immediately tried Thomas says we'll have to bring some food over they told her to go away it's too dangerous come back in a couple of days white mob is just constantly gathered around the prison comes and goes it's a very sort of fluid active event that these people are in jail now and it's sort of a great fear for everybody in the town and of course I didn't know about this and it's hoping it comes out okay so what happens is at 2 a.m. one morning 75 men in black masks surrounded the jail they broke out Tommy Moss and Will Stewart and the third man they dragged them about a mile to an empty railroad yard and then they shot them the newspapers called it a wholesale lynching the curse of the Southland the next day white looters went into the people's grocery and stripped the shelves of all the food what remained of the inventory which was very little was sold to William Russell Barrett for 18 cents on the dollar and so Thomas was gone the people's grocery was gone in an instant in a couple of days and there was nothing anybody can do about it there was an inquest and it was found to be persons unknown who committed this extra judicial killing and that's just the way things went there so when I found that out she was crushed she decided she had to leave the south leave Memphis her homeland she was born in Mississippi and find another place to live and urged other blacks to leave Memphis as well so they could find a place where they could find peace and justice and they decided it couldn't be in the south and that's how hostile they found it there and then she had to make another decision because as soon as she left the offices of the Free Speech were burned down she was threatened with lynching should she ever come back she had to set foot in Memphis she had to buy a gun for the first time to protect herself and she left for Brooklyn and there she got another job as a newspaper writer but had to decide what kind of writer what kind of reaction she would have to this existential threat of lynching in America and she chose to become a full blown activist and really make a difference and so between 1982 and the 1892 and 1895 just one year after the killing of Tommy Moss she put all her efforts into producing two incredible pamphlets, Southern Hars and a red record which were meticulously recorded recordings of all the lynchings in the south at the time including the grisly details of the lynchings and the reasons for the lynchings and through that reportage this incredible reportage this weight of her reportage she was able to prove in her way that these people were not lynched because they were savages who attacked white women or whistled at white women or any other offense like that most of the time it was economic suppression it was a way to eliminate competition like a grocery store or clear out of town the motives behind the lynchings were much more complicated, much more devious than just simply reacting to some kind of crime and of course that caused an outrage that was not what was accepted to be true about lynching at the time but Ida had chosen her path and she was on her way and she went around and started giving speeches about lynching and one of her first speeches at the Lyric Hall in 42nd Street, New York City the heart of New York City she talked about Thomas Laws and it was obvious that she was doing something else she was not only talking about lynching but she was humanizing the people who were gone she was giving them a humanity that had never been given she was giving them a name, a voice describing what they did describing their families and standing up for them and saying they shouldn't be forgotten and there should be justice for them and in her first speech which she didn't want to give but gave anyway through tears she remembered Thomas Laws and she recounted the story of going to the widow's house Betty Laws and seeing two young children Maureen and then also Thomas Laws Jr who had been born just a few weeks after his father was killed and Ida wrote about seeing the young daughter go over to the closet she wrote daughter of Thomas Laws too young to express how she misses her father toddlers over to the wardrobe seizes the legs of her father's letter carrier uniform and hugs and kisses them with evident delight and then she stretches up her little hands to be taken up in the arms that will never more clasp her this was the kind of story that had never been told about lynching victims the crowd at Liverpool was in tears it was one of the most powerful speeches that were given at the time about lynching and it sort of set Ida on the course that would lead her to be instrumental in the founding of the NAACP at the end of the speech she said do we ask for a remedy for lynching where she had one she said a public sentiment strong against lawlessness must be aroused every individual can contribute to this awakening when a sentiment against lynch law strong deep and mighty as that against slavery prevails I have no fear of the result the voice of the people is the voice of God and in this story which is one of a few about Ida I'm just hoping to convey how individuals like Ida made decisions faced crossroads that ended up playing a huge part in history and always with the motivation of giving voice to the voiceless this is the theme that recurs in the story and of course the other line of the story is this incredible detective thriller where a detective from New York Raymond Schindler is hired to come in and find the actual killer of Marie Smith and I've given short trip to that side of the story today but it really it's a very exciting resolution to that case because this is a first time it's his first murder case he's a very young detective he doesn't have any set ways so he sets an enormous psychological trap for his main suspect in New York City and pursues him for months and uses an infiltrator called The Rope to sort of rope him in and gain his confidence and gain a confession and it's sort of incredible how that case plays out and then in 1911 the two cases sort of converge because the NCAA gets involved with the Tom Williams case as it's third case ever handled so initial time I just hope to convey that The Rope is about individual courage granular courage how it takes individual quiet heroism from people at certain moments in life to advance a cause you know I do well was pushing a big cause but with the other hand she was helping people she was putting people on trains to avoid lynchings she was raising 50 bucks to set up a reward whatever it might be individual heroism quiet heroism conviction perseverance this is what shine through in her story and the story of Raymond Schindler and it's sort of what I hope comes through today if you read it and why it's relevant today because I think we all face that choice we haven't decided yet what America this is and what America we all want to live in as a country that's not been decided I mean certainly now more than ever it's not decided it's something that has to be confronted every day who do we want to be as Americans who do we want to help what matters to us what are our values what is America I had to answer that question in the heat of battle so did Raymond Schindler and what happened with them and the resolution of the murder case I hope is a kind of a thrilling story that also has historical relevance and resonance and I appreciate you just let me tell you this one little story from it and I really hope you enjoy it so thank you so much for listening I should also tell you that just in fact I used to be the true crime writer at People Magazine for a long time and I've always had a fascination with true crime stories and I found that a lot of other people do as well in fact those were always the most popular stories at People Magazine no matter what we had human interest stories, celebrities it was the true crime that sort of compelled readers to sink in and I think we all sort of have that or at least a lot of us do in terms of the dark side of nature and want to see from a distance what it's like to live in that world and these are people in the world that do live in that world certainly the detective and that's one of the reasons I was drawn to the book because it just seemed to me to be a thrilling, thrilling story and that's always what I'm looking for yes, was the murder ever solved it was solved I don't want to give away too much of the book but it is solved by the end of the book by Raymond Schindler in an unusual way and it's fully adjudicated and we take you through the full resolution of that and today Maurice Smith is buried in a little well a big cemetery in Brooklyn which I visited and found her plot which was bare and I went back and put a little plaque there to honor her and sort of remember her so that she had a little place in the world still and that's another reason why I wanted to do this story to sort of give Maurice Smith a moment today in Asbury Park this crime is not really commemorated in any way I've went there it's a ghost of its own self Asbury Park, some of the houses that people lived in like Maurice Haupt is still there the path she walked to school is still there about the place where she was killed is not and most of the city is different from what it was and there's really no commemoration of it other than in historical societies and newspaper accounts certainly no plaque or anything like that like I said that's why I felt like I wanted to put a physical thing at her grave side to sort of commemorate her it's kind of a forgotten case hopefully until now some surviving relatives in terms of getting a proper headstone from Marie I will tell you it's a bureaucratic nightmare if you're not related to her it's almost impossible the family fell out of paying for the plot so there's some back monies owed in terms of keeping up the maintenance of the plot of everything else and I'm trying to get in touch with some surviving family members to see if that's something we could do I think it would be a beautiful thing and market with the ceremony and certainly I'll update readers on my website alextrez.com if that ever happens but it's quite not as easy as it looks certainly if you're not a family member but I think it's a great idea I do want to thank everybody for the opportunity to talk about this story I think it's a great story and meaningful so and I want to thank the administration for hosting this in this virtual time the Americans and pretty soon we'll be out there again having fun enjoying each other so thanks again I really appreciate it


I'm very honored to introduce our Murray and Rothbard Memorial lecturer, Paul E. Gottfried. He'll be addressing us today on why political correctness is political. And I would really like to thank the generous sponsor of his lecture, Elio Beltrao. So Paul, if you'll grace us with your presence. For those who have been noticing that I'm hobbling around, about six weeks ago I fell on a tarp and have an inflamed sacroiliac, which remains inflamed. Fortunately, I can stand, walk. As I was telling Don, unfortunately I can't sleep and sitting is difficult. So being able to stand at this point is a pleasure compared to having to sit for the rest of the program. As the person who has been asked to deliver this year's Murray and Rothbard address, it seems appropriate to relate my remark to the person being honored. Although the observations that follow may not have come directly from Murray, he and my speech do have some connection. My pleasurable, often edifying conversations with this remarkable polymath, the letters we exchanged, his book America's Great Depression, and not least of all, his study of American intervention in the First World War strengthened for me beliefs that I continue to hold. I never fully grasped where we were headed as a country until my encounters with Murray, nor did I fully assess the worthlessness of the American conservative movement up until that point. Those realizations took place despite the fact that Murray and I did not always agree on all issues. We often debated political theoretical questions as a mental exercise without expecting to come to full agreement. But we did hold the same views about the present age. While I defer to Murray on all economic matters, because unlike me, he was the proven expert. Most importantly, I finally accepted his arguments about the damage inflicted on our freedoms by America's runaway administrative state. Well, into my 40s, I was going through a learning experience about the modern American government. In 1980, I was appointed as an alternate delegate for Ronald Reagan to the Republican Nominating Convention. A few months earlier, I spent primary night in my state, which was then Illinois, with Mrs. Reagan waiting for her husband to achieve his by then predicted electoral victory. After Reagan's election as president, I served briefly as an advisor to the Department of Education and urged its immediate abolition, in accordance with the campaign promise made by candidate Reagan. Instead of being doomed to eradication, this department, the Jimmy Carter, had created as a favor to the teacher's unions continue to flourish. Meanwhile, Washington was flooded with, quote, conservative office seekers, unquote, claiming to have come to the swamp on the Potomac in order, quote, to dismantle the federal behemoth, unquote. Needless to say, these supplicants and psychophants had come through jobs, and most of them stayed on as part of the problem. As late as the early 1980s, I believe that the GOP was committed to loosening the government's grip on our lives and earnings. I also nursed the childish illusion that something called the conservative movement would help in this process. The ease with which the neoconservative masterclass took over and proceeded to purge the old right, or that part of the right that resisted them removed any lingering sympathy I had felt for the movement. Almost overnight, I noticed a list of conservative heroes changed from such figures as John C. Calhoun, Robert A. Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Thomas Jefferson, to Martin Luther King, Sidney Hook, and even Leon Trotsky. Well, I had once wanted to believe that the American right, like John Randolph, loved liberty but hated equality. Conservatives were now urged to view equality as the essential conservative principle. I also perceived how the Reagan administration went from talking about containing Soviet imperialism to launching crusade, for quote, our democratic values, unquote. This imperialist mission sounded nothing like what the traditional American right, and certainly not what the interwar American right understood as a realistic or defensive foreign policy. It resembled the world's revolutionary vision that I associated with Marxist-Leninist expansionists. It was upsetting that the American right together with our Republican president dutifully followed these positions, and even more regrettably, that they had become standard Republican ideas. Murray's understanding of the American state influenced my book After Liberalism, which was the work of a recovering Republican. The state that he analyzed with scalpel-like precision was the American regime as it had grown since the 19th century. It was a structure of power that advanced economic resources expanded at the expense of local and regional authority and engaged in war measures when the governing class thought they were advantageous. According to Murray, quoting Randolph, born the United States had become a welfare warfare state. Although this was not intended by America's founders, it happened nonetheless for reasons that Murray explained. After Murray's untimely death, I accorded him an honored place in my studies about the managerial state. His examination of the alliance of American public administration with crony capitalism and military expansionists infused my work on multiculturalism and political correctness. Murray's perception also helped explain the rise of cultural Marxism as the new civil religion in both the US and Western Europe. In these societies, the administrative state furthers its control by enforcing ideological orthodoxies. And the state in question is not the relatively restrained bourgeois Victorian state of the 19th century, but something the tentacles of which reach into every social, educational and commercial activity. This brings me to the core of my argument. The most publicized critics of multiculturalism, whether neoconservatives or cultural conservatives, ignore with equal disregard the contemporary state's role in generating and sustaining the object of their criticisms. Allow me to list some of the standard explanations given for the spread of political correctness. First on my list, because it may come closest to the truth, is the cultural conservative lament, which stresses that our long-established values are in free fall. Political correctness substitutes for ethics because of our ignorance and moral blindness. We reject the great teachers of the past and those inherited religious teachings that remain relevant for our collective existence, and this has resulted in social and cultural chaos. Another explanation for the rise of political correctness treats academic culture as a uniquely corrupted part of an otherwise exemplary America. Perhaps most conspicuously, it has been David Horowitz of neocon fame who has popularized this argument. According to Horowitz, our democratic government is sound and our country in every way exceptionally good, but universities have become, quote, totalitarian islands in a sea of freedom, unquote. The government must therefore intervene and make universities conform to the standard of freedom that exists elsewhere. We also hear complaints about the spoiled generation that is now taken over, pampered little monsters are running wild or this variation on the same theme of the young carry with them popular culture and they're corrupting our entire society. Presumably the self-indulgent young and their transmission of popular cultural values are the principal reasons that PC is thriving. There's also this anti-egalitarian critique that I myself have been known to belabor, namely political correctness is the latest variation on the ideal of universal equality. Although once integrated into orthodox Christianity and a benign form, this poisonous obsession is now running wild. But since some of you have already heard me ranting against equality, I won't rehash my peeves, at least not this afternoon. Finally, we come to this off-herd assessment of political correctness that issues from its least concerned critics. Here attention is drawn to the essential decency of those impulses from which the ideology comes. Neoconservatives and their dependents maintain that we've simply gone a bit too far trying to be just. But we can easily address this by adopting a new government policy. For example, it's possible to help victims of past discrimination without engaging in reverse discrimination. Or we can practice equity feminism, not gender feminism, or affirmative recruitment instead of affirmative action. Curiously those who minimize the social effects of political correctness at home often rage against it when the subject turns to foreign policy. Thus the failure to be more confrontational in dealing with foreign leaders is described as an example of the epidemic of political correctness. The same people, of course, are blind to many of its manifestations at home. Some of these observations do have merit. We dismiss at our peril the great minds of the past, civilizations which are intergenerational in human creation decay unless we protect them. Kids are watching too much mindless TV and are not sufficiently under parental supervision although their parents may be just as poisoned by cultural toxicity. Moreover, popular culture, as far as I can tell from occasional channel surfing, has nothing cultural about it. It features uninterrupted vulgarity. Despite these insights and just censures, none of these critical observations I've listed engage what is specifically political about political correctness. One might ask why so many people are paying at least lip service to something that anyone with half a mind should find laughable. Although most reported criminal violence against American blacks has been caused by other blacks, the true culprits we are supposed to believe are the police, whether white or black police. If only the racist police recognized black lives matter then the contagion of violence would end. Gender and racial differences are judged to be social constructs and only tangentially related to what is biologically rooted. And let's not forget that there are multiple genders and the same person can experience more than one gender identity within a single day. The media would also have us believe that most domestic terrorism results from white male nativists. And as Ann Coulter recently observed, our journalist academics and most TV commentators are delighted if reality occasionally confirms their superstition. Evidence is no longer required for any of these daring assertions providing the appropriate feeling is present. Nor does evidence have to be furnished that a statue of Robert E. Lee in downtown New Orleans that has stood there 131 years has to be removed because its presence is causing mental hardship to local blacks. Here is elsewhere the PC Taliban are assumed to hold the moral high ground. Princeton is about to remove plaques with the name of a former university president, Woodrow Wilson, who defended segregation. Yale's administrators and student body are renaming Calhoun College, which for the last 75 years has carried the name of a Southern slave owner. Little does it matter to the South Carolina Senator who is now in disgrace, may have been America's most brilliant political theorist and as late as the 1960s was considered by John F. Kennedy and most professional historians to have ranked among our greatest senators. A growing body of protesters, including New York's mayor, Bill de Blasio, are working to rename Yale University, which commemorates an 18th century London merchant. Yale's early benefactor, Eli Yale, funded the infant educational institution as a way of fostering Christian learning in the new world. But this merchant may have pocketed money that he obtained however circuitously through the slave trade. At Lebanon Valley College, a few miles down the road from my house, nationally publicized demonstrations broke out against the name of a particular building. This edifice bears the moniker of a long dead, munificent college benefactor Clyde Lynch. But his name also bears a phonetic association with a practice once linked to racial oppression. Suitable replacement names have also been provided by the demonstrators, but I shall spare this audience the pain of having to listen to them.  In the same issue, a post columnist proposed that a tile in the New York City subway that depicts a Confederate battle flag be torn out. The tile which shocks Neo-Conservative sensibilities was the gift of a German Jewish owner of the Times, Adolf Ochs. This man's family, which was idled in Chattanooga, had fought for the Confederacy and the tile in the subway was intended to honor a cause to which Ochs' parents had been especially devoted. Little did the newspaper owner know how vigilantly our Neo-Conservatives more than 100 years later would expose this vile act. Since the audience should get my drift by now, there may be no reason to multiply examples. All such illustrations feature claimants to a fictitious moral high ground who revel in bullying others. And since the others offer no resistance, the bullies feel free to go on making trouble. Political correctness advocates appeal relentlessly to equality, but there's only the white Christian world that is attacked for breaching this ideal. Although all identities would appear to be sacred and practice only those identities that please designated victims or their self-styled advocates need to be accommodated. If, for example, I chose to advocate for a Neo-Confederate or secessionist position, neither the state nor its subject institutions would have to honor my choice. A university employer might even be morally or legally impelled to discipline me for being hateful. If one compares student and faculty protests, these student protests to those of the 1960s, certain differences become apparent. In the 1960s, students were protesting a sometimes life and death issue.  In the 1960s, student protestors opposed institutions that often resisted the protestors and sometimes even sent in police to arrest them. Now the kids and their instructors manufacture grievances as the action unfolds. Protesters are for against the wearing of Halloween costumes on campus depending on which side can be used to humiliate administrators. They take offense at the name of any dead white man or denounce any form of look-ism or microaggression, providing the resulting protest permits them to express outrage. In the early 1960s, such things did not happen and for self-evident reason. 60 years ago, we did not have a vast state apparatus fighting discrimination, judging hate crimes and by implication hate speech and monitoring the treatment of protected minorities. It's no surprise that establishment Republicans and so-called conservatives tiptoe around this fact. Those who live off government patronage from devising government policies are not likely to bite the hand that feeds. And the last thing I would expect them to do is notice the most powerful institution promoting political correctness. I know the response these arguments are likely to engender from the political and verbalizing class. If they spoke to me, which they don't. I'm oversimplifying a complex problem that has to be addressed in various ways. Such ways would include a new batch of government policies preferably drafted through heritage or AI and then implemented by non-extremist Republican president, say John Kasich. I'm also blaming the state for what the culture has done. The state only reflects cultural forces that operate independently of politicians. It supposedly responds to conditions that the culture, the state responds to conditions that culture brings about. Finally, I've no decent respect for all the good things the American liberal democratic state has already done. For example, combating racism, sexism, homophobia in more recently popular revulsion for cross-dressers and transsexuals. Without the modern administrative state, women would still be chattel slaves. Our electorate restricted to white male property holders and women's health services would not be readily available to those who wanted to dispose of their fetuses. Such speakers and I would discover we had irreconcilable differences. Unlike them, I don't particularly care about pursuing social justice or ending discrimination. But I am interested in restricting the scope of the modern mass democratic state. It's overreach concerns me far more than creating larger electorates or empowering the federal and state bureaucracies to go after insensitive speakers and micro aggressors. I am terrified by a public administration that engages in massive social engineering without effective restraint. Thus, I'm disgusted when conservatism incorporated tries to have it both ways. As for example, when I read a commentary by Republican columnist Betsy McCowey in the New York Post slamming the Obama administration for forcing employers to hire and promote underqualified women. But this justified complaints comes after the qualifying remark and race and gender discrimination is already against the law exactly as it should be. Given that McCowey and others of our ilk happily concede vast power to anti-discrimination enforcers, why are we surprised that the government exercises that power to the Hill? Does McCowey expect the EOC to ask her to decide what does or does not constitute discrimination? As usual government administrators make such decisions. If you accept living under a highly centralized administrative state that is already aided by unelected judges, then don't complain about diminished freedom. After all, it is not Disney Studio or Beyonce or Jay-Z who exercises coercive power over our lives, nor is it Oprah Winfrey or Martin Sheen who can destroy my business as soon as a black female homosexual or some other designated minority member issues a formal complaint. Women's students on our campuses are encouraged by the state to accuse male students of rape.  Although felony laws protect women who have been physically assaulted in colleges and elsewhere, the Department of Education or other government agencies insist on more stringent guidelines. They mandate sensitivity training for faculty and staff and demand that universities' authorities give concentrated attention to well-rehearsed grievances. And the government under both political parties, both parties has created this inquisition. The EOC and the Department of Education, no matter which recent presidential administration, have pushed universities into embracing affirmative action programs and at least implicitly minority studies programs. And let's keep in mind that the admission of a single student by a private educational facility that is receiving government funds renders that facility subject to a slew of anti-discrimination requirement. The feds have the additional power to withdraw schools' taxes and status, as happened at Bob Jones University in the 1980s, when this institution was considered insufficiently receptive to interracial dating. I think that was the complaint at the time. The government can also and change the IRS attack dog as Obama has done to force its subjects into compliance with whatever it wants. To ask Lenin's highly relevant question, what can be done for starters? Those who fear the present political order should work to drive public administration out of education and social affairs. This power-hungry intruder monopolizes anything it touches. If government influence on education and other cultural affairs cannot be contained, it should at least be limited to the local level. It is easier for taxpayers to deal with government at that level than it is for them to move out of the country in order to avoid being bullied. But Mayor de Blasio's fans needn't worry if despite my caveat, New York City wishes to accord special rights to polysexual acclaimants to government favors, then let the Big Apple be left to its own pleasure. In conclusion, I would note that unlike Murray and many in this room, I have never presented myself as someone who regards the state in a categorical sense as the enemy. In historical perspective, I can appreciate the state as a Western invention pulling medieval Europe out of feudal anarchy, promoting safety for its subjects, providing a political framework for the growth of historic nations. At times the state has been a generous benefactor to humanistic learning. And one can cite as an example the Hapsburg rulers of Austria-Hungary who generously patronized the early exponents of the Austrian School of Economics. I would further note that public support of American education has not always led to its present unspeakable evil. There was a time when government did not make war on the traditional family, gender roles, intellectual freedom, religious liberty. But that was in the past. And it seems unlikely that we can reign in this regime by electing a Fox News Republican president or by teaching in our public schools prepackage human rights and democratic values. A GOP website that I recently scanned praises the restrained fashion in which the administration of George W. Bush handled the grievances of female students. Supposedly this was light years away from what happened under Obama. The difference to my knowledge is exceedingly slight. 10 years ago those males who were charged with misconduct by accusatory females had minimally more opportunity to defend themselves before they were publicly humiliated. Unless there was evidence that assault and battery has occurred, legal recourse should not be available to women making accusations of harassment or sexual misconduct. Let alone should the government be tyrannizing male students because of their nonviolent interaction with coeds. I've no doubt that political correctness would still be around even if our managerial sensitizing regime vanish through some act of divine benevolence. My point is not that every attack on freedom of thought or the traditional right or pay the libertarians or any libertarians originates with the state. It is rather that every cultural threat is made much, much worse because of state intervention. What is more, the state does not contribute to this problem in a half-hearted fashion. Concerned administrators and progressive judges are morally committed to their mission of fighting discrimination and freedom. Although the state sponsorship of political correctness may not be the only reason for its existence, it should be the starting point for those seeking to understand it. And one may suspect something less than a disinterested perspective when the analyst disregards what in this case should be clear for all to see. Thank you.