One day later:

2021.03.16 (Niger)
Jihadists machine-gun sixty villagers in cold blood.

Fox news reports:

The State Department’s former lead investigator, David Asher, who oversaw the Task Force into the COVID-19 virus origin, says that he not only believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but that it may have been the result of research that the Chinese military was doing on a bioweapon. The Chinese, he says, stopped talking publicly about the research into coronavirus disease vectors which could be used for weapons in 2017, at the same time its military began funding the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “I doubt that that’s a coincidence,” Asher said. The virus has taken out 15 to 20 percent of global GDP. It has killed millions of people. But the Chinese population has been barely affected. Their economies roared back to being number one of the G20.

There is no bottom.

John Hinderaker of  PowerLine reports:

U.K. sources say that Meghan Markle wants to run for President of the United States. Markle’s political ambitions seem to be in tune with the times. She is playing the victim card as a “black” woman, although she is paler than many “whites”. Common sense suggests that it is hard to be a victim when you are a multimillionaire Duchess and your child is the great-grandson of the Queen of England. But then, Michelle Obama absurdly claimed to be a victim, as have countless college professors, intellectuals, students, and even business people. So why not Meghan? Joe Biden obviously won’t be the Democratic Party candidate for president in 2024. So a skeptic might ask: why is Kamala Harris any better suited to be president than the Duchess of Sussex, and is there any reason to think that Harris would do better in the general election than the Duchess? Further, the dominant quality of our age is whininess, and the Duchess of Sussex is perhaps the whiniest person in the world. So maybe the woman and the hour have met. In the degraded state to which our politics have sunk, it is hard to rule anything out.

As we have been silenced on Facebook, we will post here – in addition to our own articles – extracts and abstracts of articles we consider worth noting in the manner we posted them there.

We do not always quote directly, but when making an abstract we try to use the words of the original as much as possible. If needing to change the wording to sum up an idea, we take care not to change the author’s intention. And we always provide a link to the original article.

Discussion of all posts is invited in the comments section, pending eventual adjustments of the site to make discussion as easy as it is on Facebook.

Today we select a passage from an article on the bewildering experience of living in a country which has a senile president put there to seem responsible for executing an anti-American agenda .

Drew Allen writes at Townhall:

It is no secret that Joe Biden is not in charge of the executive branch. Nor does it come as a surprise. … What is surprising, however, is how effective and advantageous his non-presidency has been for the Democratic Party. His mental incapacitation has not hindered the left’s agenda to transform the United States from a Constitutional republic to a totalitarian state, but has helped facilitate it.  … Joe Biden is unfit for the office he nominally holds. But so long as Joe remains the “president,” even if this is understood as merely a figurative role, the Democrats will continue to have wild success in their diabolical and unconstitutional efforts to destroy America. … We are living in a nightmare scenario. … The American people and our country have been plunged into darkness. We have largely no idea what is going on. While we can speculate as to who is actually running the country — Obama? Susan Rice? — we have no access to the one individual “responsible” for the destruction of our economy, our safety, and our freedom. America is being run by a shadow government. … So long as [Biden]  remains in office, those Americans who religiously watch CNN and get their propaganda from the Washington Post will never be exposed to anything remotely resembling reality. Joe Biden is a strategy for the Democratic Party at this point, not a hindrance or frustration. As the rag known as the Washington Post declares, “Democracy dies in darkness”. We are living in darkness. I regret to say that we would be better off with [Vice President] Kamala Harris. At least if she was president, there would be no unspoken excuse either understood or accepted for this un-American and totalitarian regime. But if the Democrats are smart, they’ll keep Joe around as long as they can.

We cannot agree that “we would be better off with Kamala Harris”. We think it would be unimaginably worse if she were president. But otherwise we concur with Drew Allen’s description of the current US administration.

It is a nightmare. And a farce and a horror.

We have have been informed today that we are banned from posting anything on our Facebook page for 60 days because of a joke we posted more than two months ago that hurt the feelings of the sensitive Fb anti-free-speech rulers.  

Here’s the punishment order:  

This draconian measure is probably in preparation for banning our page permanently.    

The 60 days ban takes us past the date (end of March) when we warned that we would be abandoning our Facebook page because our reach is being continually reduced and we have been contradicted, rebuked, corrected, forbidden to boost our posts, stripped of hundreds of our “likes” and followers, frequently censored, and sometimes banned for days.

We promised to give our Fb readers another warning about when the abandonment would happen, and now we are unable to do so.  

We have asked a few of our regular FB followers to try making a comment under one or several of our latest posts along these lines, or to this effect, to explain what has happened:

ON BEHALF OF TAC, AND AT THEIR REQUEST, I AM NOTIFYING ALL READERS THAT FACEBOOOK HAS IMPOSED A BAN ON TAC POSTS FOR 60 DAYS. THIS MEANS THAT FURTHER WARNING OF TAC’S INTENDED ABANDONMENT OF FACEBOOK BY THE END OF MARCH HAS NOW BEEN MADE IMPOSSIBLE. 

TAC HOPES ITS FACEBOOK READERS WILL GO INSTEAD TO THE ATHEIST CONSERVATIVE WEBSITE, WHICH IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WILL BE REDESIGNED TO INCLUDE A DISCUSSION FORUM.   

If that is already up (we cannot find out for ourselves by looking there), we would be grateful to any website reader for adding an endorsing comment under it. 

Prince Harry and his wife Meghan may have deliberately harmed the institution of the British monarchy by slandering it in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in a broadcast to tens of millions, and  that is the only thing about them that is of any interest.

The Queen’s reaction to their complaints of being ill-used by the royal family because Meghan is non-white, was – as her reactions always are – pitch-perfect: she spoke as Harry’s grandmother of her regret that he and his wife had been unhappy, and said simply that “Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members”.  She did not allude to them by their titles; she wants the scandal that Markle has made to be treated as a family affair. She may thus have prevented Meghan’s vindictive ploy of smearing the institution from succeeding.

The monarchy has little power other than to symbolize the pride of the nation. To defame it is to traduce the nation. But now it is not fashionable for any citizen in the West to care about his nation, if it is Western and mostly white. President Trump and his tens of millions of American followers, the workers of America and the self-reliant middle class – consisting of many ethnicities and colors – have pride in their nation; so the priesthood of correct speech declare him and them to be unfit to live.

The worst moral offense, the worst sin according to the dogma of the predominant political religion, is to cast a slur on “non-whiteness”. “Whiteness” can be insulted, despised, slandered, shamed. condemned, yet thou shalt not call it “racism”. But touch, even obliquely, on the subject of non-whiteness, and – whether you are white or not – you are reveling in your power, you are gloatingly oppressing your eternal black victims, you are a “racist” and a “white supremacist”.

In this era of our Western decay, you cannot say or imply anything more harmful, more destructive, more indefensible, more indelibly smearing, than that he or she, or a commercial company, or an institution, is “racist”. And that is what Prince Harry and his wife have chosen to do to the British monarchy. 

In truth, no one could be less race-prejudiced than Queen Elizabeth II. The pride she takes in the British Commonwealth of Nations over which she presides, her genuine affection for its peoples of many cultures and colors, have been manifest throughout her reign. (The issue of race which the complaining couple raised was “concerning”, the Queen said, and would be “addressed by the family privately”.)

John Nolte writes at Breitbart:

Harry and Meghan appear to be appealing to the worst people in the world. You know, now that I think about it, in the end, the interview might be a success of sorts. The duo’s goal wasn’t so much to appeal to the masses but to appeal to the world’s wretched elites who consider self-confession, narcissism, race-baiting, and playing the victim the coin of their appalling realm. By behaving in such an appalling way, Harry and Meghan were signaling to the corporate media, Big Tech, and left-wing Hollywood — Hey, we are one of you. Let us in. These days, if you successfully do get in, it doesn’t matter if we the people loathe you — you are in and the game will be rigged inside the velvet bubble to ensure an endless supply of unearned riches, awards, and boot-licking.

Harry and Meghan are powerless except as pieces in the class of “the world’s wretched elites”, now all-powerful having captured the American republic.

It is a thing to wonder at: that the very wealthy who have the most real power – over the financial institutions, the biggest corporations, the mass news media, the means of communication, the entertainment industry, the curricula of schools and universities – have persuaded the poor, the illiterate, the homeless, the displaced, the criminal, the demented, the unemployed and unemployable to vote their party into government.

So this is not Marxism. Though it is as bad as Marxism.

China is Marxist: in theory, the workers govern China. In the West, the New Left abandoned faith in the proletariat as the ” revolutionary class”, and substituted the Lumpenproletariat – the underclass that Marx despised, the Third Worlders, the non-white nations, the “wretched of the Earth” as Frantz Fanon called them.

It could be called Neo-Marxism, except that no revolution is actually expected. The wretched are to be kept wretched.

But how, in the long run, will it profit the rulers to destroy the workers and the productive middle-class?

So the Democrats have acquired total power. They used every method of cheating in the elections that their criminal minds could think of, and they encouraged their supporters to use terrorism.

It all worked for them. So they won the presidency, and hold a majority in both houses of Congress. And the Supreme Court was complaisant about it, a majority of the justices refusing to hear cases challenging the constitutionality of the proceedings. (See also here and here.)

The anti-American terrorism movement, aka the New Left, has been working to this end – the securing of total power – since 1968.

Michael Anton writes at Law & Liberty:

The biological son of one of the villains of [the Weather Underground terrorist organization] Kathy Boudin [jailed for life for murder], and the adopted son of two others, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn [both now academics “in good standing”], is now the elected District Attorney of San Francisco County. …

Chesa Boudin differs from his parents, biological and adoptive, in one respect only: rather than fighting the system to inflict harm, create chaos, and do evil, he puts the system to work toward those ends. It’s not just that Boudin works to make everyday life more awful by refusing to enforce what he dismisses as mere “quality of life” (e.g., open drug use and public defecation) and “victimless” (e.g., burglary and auto theft) crimes, so that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rates and arguably the worst quality of life of any big city in the nation. Boudin is also against using the powers of his office to go after what even he is forced to admit are non-trivial offenses.

On his second day in office, the brand new radical-chic DA fired his seven most-experienced prosecutors because they were too good at their jobs. Two weeks later, he ordered his office never again to request cash bail for any offense, guaranteeing that dangerous criminals would roam the streets and that many would never face trial for their crimes. Earlier this year, a parolee plowed a stolen car into two pedestrians, killing both. The “driver”—Troy Ramon McAllister—had been arrested by the SFPD five times in the prior eight months, only to be released without charges on Boudin’s orders every single time.

As Boudin has redefined his role, it is no longer to convict criminals but to further “social justice”. He favors babying the violent with so-called “restorative justice”. It’s unclear what, exactly, “restorative justice” entails; it’s easier to say what it’s not: punishment or deterrence. Early in Boudin’s tenure, after two (nonwhite) young men assaulted an elderly man (also nonwhite) who was collecting cans to recycle, the SFPD did its job and arrested the assailants. The DA, though, declined to press charges. This pattern has since been repeated enough times—including, most recently, the homicide of an 84-year-old—that local media and the intelligentsia realize they can no longer ignore it. And so, to cope, they blame … “white supremacy” and Trump.

Boudin is hardly alone in his anti-anti-crime fervor. Indeed, we may say that the full consolidation and institutionalization of “The Sixties” is happening only now, as “prosecutors” all over America, elected with Soros money, eliminate bail, empty jails, refuse to prosecute nonviolent offenses, undercharge violent ones, replace punishment with “counseling,” and racialize enforcement (and non-enforcement), all the while vindictively hectoring the law-abiding over trivialities. In most American big cities, and in an increasing number of Blue precincts, government does not effectively protect life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. It rather works—from the same ideological zeal that inspired the Weathermen—to make people vulnerable, afraid, and miserable. …

When before has an entire ruling class sided with the forces of evil, ponying up billions to fuel the fire, all the while preening over its superior morality for supporting death and destruction? …

The answer, so far as I know, is never. The very idea is unthinkable without the mainstreaming of the Weather ideology. …  On September 11th, 2001—the very day of an event another Weather Underground terrorist could finally see clearly as “kindred” to her own activities—Ayers, close pal of a future president, was quoted in the New York Times saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

That “feeling” has infused subsequent generations—not least because of the extent to which Weather ideology was allowed to take over not just elite academia but, more sinisterly, schools of education, through which it has taught and continues to teach generations of high school students to hate their country. …

Violence helped the left assert or consolidate power over institutions throughout the land. Violence defanged law enforcement from coast to coast (“defund the police”), yielded an avalanche of public and private money (corporate America pledged more than $1.6 billion to BLM in 2020 alone), and an outpouring of official sympathy to organizations and individuals fomenting violence (the future vice president of the United States intoned last September that it was “critically important” that the riots “protests” continue). …

Most disturbing of all, 2020 may have been the first election in American history—certainly the first national one—in which violence attracted rather than repelled votes. It used to be taken as axiomatic in American politics that law-and-order issues favor Republicans. This is, apparently, no longer the case. Millions have become so convinced of their own and/or the surrounding society’s inexpungable guilt that, to assuage their consciences, must vote against order and life as a way to expiate sin.

Perhaps the supreme moment of 2020 was the sight, in Washington, D.C.’s richest and most liberal suburb, of a mass of overclass winners bowing and begging forgiveness from a group of people none of them had ever harmed. The clear—and only—visible distinction between the penitent and the righteous was demographic. Both groups fervently believe in Manichean wokeness; the only difference is that the righteous feel not guilty but aggrieved. They want revenge. This, let’s call it, Dom-Sub coalition is the heart of the modern Democratic Party, and is a direct legacy of the Weather Underground and New Left insistence that America and Americans (or to be more precise, a certainly part thereof) are irredeemably evil. …

In today’s America, capital—economic no less than political and social—is openly aligned with the hard left. It used to be wary of the left’s more radical elements, muttering empty dodges about “not condoning but understanding” violence. Now capital doesn’t merely understand violence; it underwrites it. Elite opinion, power, and money are on the side of—downright encourage—rioting, looting, arson and death, insisting that the resultant turmoil is necessary redress for past and present grievance. …

The urgent practical questions for statesman and citizen alike are: how much political violence is being committed right now? And by whom? …

The answer is obvious enough: a lot, and the left.

It is Donald Trump’s Republican Party (not the Republican Party that consistently undermined and sabotaged him) that is now the party of the American worker, has been since 2016, and continues to be. And Donald Trump’s Republican Party is the party of genuinely peaceful protest. And, of course, of freedom. His party’s peaceful protests will be called “terrorism” by the Left.

Leftism is the enemy of freedom, the destroyer of humankind. The Left will continue to call its violent “protests” – actually terrorist attacks – “peaceful”.

Leftism is terrorism.

Romans had at least made a serious attempt to construct a civilization founded on reason, not myth. Then came Christianity, profiting, vulturelike, from decay, preserving ideas that deserved to perish, and stamping out ideas that deserved to survive. In its early history, its very origins, there was something unsavory about Christianity. Significantly, it flourished in an age of decadence and among the lower orders, among men and women sunk in ignorance, vice, and despair. Significantly, too, it hammered out its doctrine, its discipline and organization, amidst undignified wranglings, inane debates in endless assemblies, angry conflicts over trivial matters, mutual slanders and persecutions. Christianity claimed to bring light, hope, and truth, but its central myth was incredible, its dogma a conflation of rustic superstitions, its sacred book an incoherent collection of primitive tales, its church a cohort of servile fanatics as long as they were out of power and of despotic fanatics once they had seized control. With its triumph in the fourth century, Christianity secured the victory of infantile credulity; one by one the lamps of learning were put out, and for centuries darkness covered the earth. – Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, Chapter Four.

With the teaching of critical race theory, the anathematizing of mathematics, the banning of books, the attack on free speech, Christianity’s offspring, Leftism, is now putting out the lamps of learning again.

Darkness is descending again on the West, where despotic fanatics have seized control.

Under the new humanitarian, antiracist, diversity-equity-inclusion administration, certain people who committed crimes are not criminals.

They would be criminals if they’d committed the crimes in the day time. But they committed them at night, so there are no charges against them.

Merrick Garland, nominated by the Biden regime to be Attorney General, was answering questions at his confirmation hearing in the Senate when he explained this novel principle of law.

Daniel Greenfield recorded the exchange:

“Let me ask you about assaults on federal property in places other than Washington, D.C. Portland, for instance,” Missouri Senator Josh Hawley said. “Do you regard assaults on federal courthouses or other federal properties as acts of domestic extremism, domestic terrorism?”

Garland said his personal view on the matter lined up with the statutory definition of terrorism.

“My own definition, which is about the same as the statutory definition, is the use of violence or threats of violence in an attempt to disrupt democratic processes,” Garland replied. “So an attack on a courthouse while in operation, trying to prevent judges from actually deciding cases, that plainly is domestic extremism, domestic terrorism.”

But Garland drew a distinction between an attack on a government property at night and the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“Both are criminal but one is a core attack on our democratic institutions,” Garland added.

Greenfield goes on to quote a description of an attack on a government property at night. Because it occurred at night, it was not, according to Merrick Garland, extremist or terroristic, or a “core attack on our democratic institutions”:

“It’s scary. You open those doors out, when the crowd is shaking the fence, and … on the other side of that fence are people that want to kill you because of the job we chose to do and what we represent,” said a Deputy U.S. Marshal who has been protecting the courthouse for weeks. …

“I can’t walk outside without being in fear for my life,” he said. “I am worried for my life, every time I walk outside of the building.”

Small pods of three to four protesters dressed in black circulated in the crowd, stopping every few minutes to point green laser beams in the eyes of agents posted as lookouts on porticoes on the courthouse’s upper stories. The agents above were silhouetted against the dark sky as dozens of green laser dots and a large spotlight played on the courthouse walls, projected from the back of the crowd.

Thirty minutes later, someone fired a commercial-grade firework inside the fence. Next came a flare and then protesters began using an angle grinder to eat away at the fence. A barrage of items came whizzing into the courthouse: rocks, cans of beans, water bottles, potatoes and rubber bouncy balls that cause the agents to slip and fall.

The firework came whizzing over the fence so fast that the agent didn’t have time to move.

It exploded with a boom, leaving his hearing deadened and bloody gashes on both forearms. Stunned, with help from his cohorts, he stripped to his boxer shorts and a black T-shirt so his wounds could be examined and photographed for evidence.

He told his fellow agents he was more worried about his hearing than about the gouges and burns on his arms.

By the end of the night, five other federal agents would be injured, including another who got a concussion when he was hit in the head with a commercial-grade firework. One agent was hospitalized. Several agents have lingering vision problems from the lasers.

But the memo is in. Give these guys a pass. …

Some of the most serious charges dropped include four defendants charged with assaulting a federal officer, which is a felony. More than half of the dropped charges were “dismissed with prejudice,” which several former federal prosecutors described as extremely rare. “Dismissed with prejudice” means the case can’t be brought back to court.

Much like handing out immunity agreements to Hillary Clinton’s associates and then destroying their data, in a case in which no charges were brought.

There’s a new regime and it stands with its terrorist allies in Portland, in New York, and everywhere else. Prosecutors and law enforcement officers who stand up to them, know that they’ll be targeted by the new Biden regime. So it’s over. Just like it was with the Weathermen. The molotov cocktail lawyers will get a plea deal in New York. And slaps on the wrist or dismissals will be handed out to all the boys and girls, who will go on to academic positions and to political careers.

And also under the new humanitarian, antiracist, diversity-equity-inclusion administration, a man who committed no crime is a criminal:

Julie Kelly gives this example at American Greatness:

[Eighteen year old] Bruno Joseph Cua … sits in jail in Washington, D.C. awaiting trial for his involvement in the January 6 Capitol breach, the youngest of the nearly 300 people so far arrested under the U.S. Justice Department’s “unprecedented” investigation into the events of that day. Unlike tens of thousands of protestors who occupied the nation’s capital for months … Cua will be given no mercy. …

 For the first three weeks following his arrest, Cua languished in solitary confinement before being transported to a jail in Oklahoma City where he shared a cell with 30 other inmates. His family, like the families of dozens of January 6 defendants, has been denied the opportunity to post bail.

And there’s a chance the teen will remain behind bars until at least May when his trial is scheduled to begin. …

According to federal prosecutors, his rants on Parler make Bruno a national menace. “This small sample of public social media posts on the platform Parler by the defendant in this case evinces a full picture of who this defendant really is: a radicalized man with violent tendencies and no remorse for his participation in the violent insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol,” assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Paschall wrote in objection to Bruno’s pretrial release.

Further, Bruno’s refusal to accept that Joe Biden fairly won the presidency is more proof he should stay in jail, prosecutors say. “The offenses committed by the defendant illuminate characteristics inconsistent with a person who could follow orders given by this Court, or indeed, any branch of the federal government. The defendant has espoused disbelief in the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election, and violently acted on that world view.” (The government, both judges and lawyers, routinely cite a defendant’s doubt about last year’s election as evidence of wrongdoing.)

The criminal case against Bruno, however, is weak.

What did he actually do? After attending the Trump rally, he walked to the Capitol among hundreds of others,  and there …

He climbed on scaffolding outside the Capitol building and went into areas he should not have entered. 

Does his conduct merit the necessity of a first-time offender spending months in jail even before he has a chance to defend himself?

Absolutely not. …

The Cua case has nothing to do with seeking justice for the melee on January 6 or appropriately prosecuting one of the participants. It has nothing to do with making sure the nation’s capital or Cua’s hometown remains safe.

It has everything to do with punishing a family who dared to show up in support of Donald Trump and dared to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

And that is why we do not believe that Bruno Cua would be treated any differently by the new humanitarian, antiracist, diversity-equity-inclusion administration if he had climbed on scaffolding outside the Capitol building and went into areas he should not have entered at night rather than in the daytime.

Nor do we believe that the rioters, arsonists, and murderers who attacked government buildings, law enforcement officers and fellow citizens at night would be treated the way Bruno Cua is being treated if they had committed their crimes in the daytime.

Merrick Garland’s real unspoken definition of terrorism is “supporting President Trump”. And it “lines up” with the definition of the new humanitarian, antiracist, diversity-equity-inclusion administration. 

The vile people now governing America long to do to Donald Trump what they are doing to Bruno Cua.

This boy is being maltreated not because of anything he has done but because they have chosen to make him a proxy for the great man he admired and supported, and they hate.

We do not believe in gods and no one here in the United States of America expects us to.

But we are expected to believe that some 80,000,000 Americans voted for a frail, unintelligent, corrupt, demented old career politician who has never done anything good for them, never could and never will, to be their president.

And we are expected to believe that 2+2=any number according to taste.

It’s a matter of ideology. Leftism. The ideology that put up the senile old man as its presidential candidate.

One of its doctrines is that “people of color” cannot do math. So math is a failure. A blot on the intellectual history of humankind. Racially discriminating.

It can be reformed, however. Ideologically cleaned up. Purged of its racism. Transmuted into something more pliable, more adaptable to non-white people’s sensibilities, more indulgent of human emotion. Rendered less European, less colonialist, less accurate, less formidable.

Sergiu Klainerman, Romanian born professor of math at Princeton, writes at Bari Weiss’s website Clubhouse:

The woke ideology … treats both science and mathematics as social constructs and condemns the way they are practiced, in research and teaching, as manifestations of white supremacy, Euro-centrism, and post-colonialism.

Take for example the recent educational program called “a pathway to equitable math instruction”. The program is backed financially by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; it counts among its partners the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, the California Math project, the Association of California School Administrators, and the Los Angeles County Office of Education, among others; and it was recently sent to Oregon teachers by the state’s Department of Education.

The program argues that “white supremacy culture shows up in the classroom when the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer” or when students are required to show their work, while stipulating that “the very concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false”. The main goal of the program is “to dismantle racism in mathematics instruction” with the expressly political aim of engaging “the sociopolitical turn in all aspects of education, including mathematics”. 

In the past, I would have said that such statements should be ignored as too radical and absurd to merit refutation. But recent trends across the country suggest that we no longer have that luxury.

So let me state the following for the record: Nothing in the history and current practice of mathematics justifies the notion that it is in any way different or dependent on the particular race or ethnic group engaged in it.

For historical reasons, we often discuss contributions to the field of mathematics from the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians and Arabs and refer to them as distinct entities. They have all contributed through a unique cultural dialogue to the creation of a truly magnificent edifice accessible today to every man and woman on the planet. Though we pay tribute to great historical figures who inform the practice of mathematics, the subject can be taught — and often is — with no reference to the individuals who have contributed to it. In that sense it is uniquely universal. 

Schools throughout the world teach the same basic body of mathematics. They differ only by the methodology and intensity with which they instruct students. 

It is precisely this universality of math — together with the extraordinary ability of American universities to reward hard work and talent — that allowed me, and so many other young scientists and mathematicians, to come to this country and achieve success beyond our wildest dreams. 

The idea that focusing on getting the “right answer” is now considered among some self-described progressives a form of bias or racism is offensive and extraordinarily dangerous.

The entire study of mathematics is based on clearly formulated definitions and statements of fact. If this were not so, bridges would collapse, planes would fall from the sky, and bank transactions would be impossible.

The ability of mathematics to provide right answers to well-formulated problems is not something specific to one culture or another; it is really the essence of mathematics. To claim otherwise is to argue that somehow the math taught in places like Iran, China, India or Nigeria is not genuinely theirs but borrowed or forged from “white supremacy culture”. It is hard to imagine a more ignorant and offensive statement. 

Finally, and most importantly, the woke approach to mathematics is particularly poisonous to those it pretends to want to help. Let’s start with the reasonable assumption that mathematical talent is equally distributed at birth to children from all socio-economic backgrounds, independent of ethnicity, sex and race. Those born in poor, uneducated families have clear educational disadvantages relative to others. But mathematics can act as a powerful equalizer. Through its set of well-defined, culturally unbiased, unambiguous set of rules, mathematics gives smart kids the potential to be, at least in this respect, on equal footing with all others. They can stand out by simply finding the right answers to questions with objective results. 

There is no such thing as “white” mathematics. There is no reason to assume, as the [Leftist racist] activists do, that minority kids are not capable of mathematics or of finding the “right answers”.  And there can be no justification for, in the name of “equity” or anything else, depriving students of the rigorous education that they need to succeed.

The real antiracists will stand up and oppose this nonsense.

And John McWhorter, black American linguist and associate professor of English at Columbia, writes:

There is a document getting around called Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction, a guide put together by a group of educators. It has a black boy on the cover.

… This is in essence a document that could be called Math For Black Kids.

… This lovely pamphlet is teaching us that it is racist to expect black kids to master the precision of math. …

Of course the authors have it that “The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visualizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture.” But translated, this means that math as we have always known it is racism. That’s a rich claim … But is it correct? Let’s see how it holds up. …

This entire document is focused on an idea that making black kids be precise is immoral.

The document pays lip service otherwise, claiming at one point to seek to “teach rich, thoughtful, complex mathematics”.  … But the thrust of this pamphlet is that:

1. 1. a focus on getting the “right” answer is “perfectionism” or “either/or thinking”;
   2. the idea that teachers are teachers and students are learners is wrong;
   3. to think of it as a problem that the expectations you have of students are not met is racist;
   4. to teach math in a linear fashion with skills taught in sequence is racist;
   5. to value “procedural fluency” – i.e. knowing how to do the fractions, long division … — over “conceptual knowledge” is racist. That is, black kids are brilliant to know what math is trying to do, to know “what it’s all about”, rather than to actually do the math, just as many of us read about what physics or astrophysics accomplishes without ever intending to master the math that led to the conclusions;
   6. to require students to “show their work” is racist;
   7. requiring students to raise their hand before speaking “can reinforce paternalism and powerhoarding, in addition to breaking the process of thinking, learning, and communicating”.

(All italicized emphasis is in the original.)

You may wonder if this is a cartoon but no, this is real! This is actually what this document tells us, again and again. This, folks, is the Critical Race Theory that so many of us are resisting, not a simple program for “social justice”. To distrust this document is not to be against social justice, but against racism. …

The main thing is that those who see that this document is a racist screed must resist it if it pops up in your school district. Know that it may not be instantly aired that this specific document is being pored over by the people entrusted with the education of your children. However, sniff out the basic tenets I numbered above, and then ask if this thing has been shared by the school board members.

Many will dislike the general flavor of it but, amidst so much we all have to pay attention to, may question just what we must object to specifically about Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.

There are two things. Racism and religion. Just those.

As in, first it is racism propounded as antiracism. Black kids shouldn’t be expected to master the precision of math and should be celebrated for talking around it, gamely approximating its answers and saying why it can be dangerous? This is bigotry right out of Reconstruction, Tulsa, Selma, and Charlottesville.

Second, it is not science but scripture. It claims to be about teaching math while founded on shielding students from the requirement to actually do it. … It does so with an implication that only a moral transgressor numb to some larger point would question the contradiction. This is, as such, a religious document, telling you to accept that Jesus walked on water. …

This is not pedagogy; it is preaching.

Thank you, Professor Klainerman and Professor McWhorter, for giving the right answer.