Equal treatment makes a comeback



There is something almost touching about the astonishment with which American universities are discovering that racial discrimination is illegal.

The Justice Department announced Monday that it is investigating the College of William & Mary over scholarships and student benefits that allegedly discriminate according to race. The Civil Rights Division says it is examining whether those programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination by recipients of federal funding.

Universities spent years teaching America that racial discrimination could cure racial discrimination. They may now receive an expensive lesson in return.

One might have supposed that this was not a particularly difficult statute for universities to understand. These are, after all, institutions populated by people who pride themselves on detecting racism in places where ordinary mortals see friendship and community.

And yet when discrimination appears in their own programs, their racial acuity suddenly fails them. Universities have spent years building programs around concepts such as “whiteness,” “decolonizing,” privilege, and equity. The problem is not that administrators forgot the Civil Rights Act. It is that many convinced themselves they had discovered a morally superior exception to its basic rule.

The old civil-rights principle was admirably simple: Do not discriminate on the basis of race.

The newer DEI principle often works differently: Unequal treatment may be justified if it is meant to correct an earlier inequality.

The distinction is the whole game.

Under the older understanding, the injustice consisted in treating an individual differently because of his race. If a university told an applicant, “You cannot have this opportunity because you are black,” we knew what to call it. If it told another applicant, “You cannot have this opportunity because you are white,” we also knew what to call it.

The genius of DEI was to make the second sentence sound morally different from the first.

This required an impressive amount of academic labor. Entire vocabularies were constructed to explain why unequal treatment could become virtuous when practiced by the right institutions, against the right groups, for the right reasons. We learned about privilege, power, positionality, systemic racism, dominant identities, marginalized identities, intersectionality, and the rest of the lexicon.

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Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

The result was an ethical system of remarkable convenience. It condemned racial discrimination while supplying a vocabulary for practicing it.

The trick was accomplished by shifting the unit of moral judgment from the individual to the group.

Once people are sorted into historical categories of oppressor and oppressed, equal treatment begins to look suspicious. If Group A has enjoyed advantages and Group B has suffered disadvantages, treating individual members of A and B according to the same rules can be recast as perpetuating injustice. “Equity” then becomes a justification for unequal treatment today in the name of unequal treatment yesterday.

There is only one troublesome detail: The person standing before you today is an individual human being, not an installment payment on a historical debt.

A white 18-year-old applying for a scholarship did not write the Jim Crow laws. An Asian student applying to medical school did not build the transcontinental railroad with exploited labor. A black student is not the personal embodiment of several centuries of American suffering.

The civil rights tradition understood this. That is why the law speaks in the language of persons rather than assigning inherited moral credits and debits to racial castes.

The DEI worldview has spent years trying to reverse that achievement.

And now comes the awkward part.

The law is still there.

The Civil Rights Act does not contain an asterisk reading, “Discrimination permitted when performed in the service of social justice.” Title VI does not say recipients of federal money may discriminate according to race provided that a diversity consultant has explained why it is virtuous.

Last year, the Justice Department expressly warned recipients of federal funding that antidiscrimination laws apply regardless of whether discriminatory practices are packaged under the label of DEI. Now William & Mary is discovering what that warning means.

Nor is William & Mary alone. The Justice Department has been examining race-conscious practices across higher education. My own university, Arizona State, is under investigation. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions should already have alerted universities that the legal ground beneath racial preferences had shifted dramatically.

But something deeper than law is involved here. Universities are supposed to teach students how to reason. So let us try an elementary syllogism.

Racial discrimination is wrong. Denying someone a benefit because of his race is racial discrimination. Therefore, denying someone a benefit because of his race is wrong.

You don’t need a doctorate in critical theory to follow the argument. Indeed, a doctorate in critical theory may be an impediment.

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Andi Purnomo/Getty Images

The great moral achievement of the civil rights movement was not to rearrange the racial hierarchy so different people could enjoy their turn at discrimination. It was to attack the hierarchy itself. The principle was equality before the law — not equality before the law except when our preferred theory of historical oppression recommends otherwise.

There is a useful lesson here for universities accustomed to believing that noble intentions confer immunity from ordinary moral rules.

They do not.

You may call discrimination “equity.” You may put it in a strategic plan. You may hire a vice president to administer it. You may surround it with the soothing language of “belonging” and “inclusion.” You may even persuade yourself that treating students differently according to ancestry is the latest advance in American civil rights.

But eventually somebody will ask the embarrassingly primitive question: Did you treat this person differently because of his race?

If the answer is yes, all the fashionable vocabulary in the world cannot make the question go away.

Universities spent years teaching America that racial discrimination could cure racial discrimination. They may now receive an expensive lesson in return.

The Civil Rights Act never learned DEI.

And the next shoe may be even more expensive: lawsuits from students who say they were denied scholarships, admissions advantages, or other benefits because of race. Once universities concede that race determined access to an opportunity, the legal question becomes much harder to explain away with the language of equity.

Josh Howerton reacts to Ross Douthat’s VIRAL interview with Yale professor over ‘demonic’ voting idea for kids



On a recent episode of his “Interesting Times” podcast, New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat interviewed Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn.

One particular clip from the episode has gone wildly viral. In it, Moyn suggests that minors should have some stake in elections because decisions about the future impact them. But since the law prohibits their casting votes, another eligible class should be charged with casting those votes on their behalf.

But his most shocking claim came next.

When Douthat inquired about the parents of children being the ones to cast those additional votes, Moyn argued against the idea.

His reasoning? Parents aren’t the best ones to determine what’s in their kids’ best interest.

“Because there’s a divergence of interests between parents and children. And I think it’s likelier that young people — not people who are raising families — will have the best insight into the interests of children,” Moyn said.

“I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children. Part of our goal, I think, as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents,” he added.

On this episode of “Live Free,” BlazeTV host and Lakepointe Church Pastor Josh Howerton exposes not only what he sees as the spiritual danger behind Moyn’s words but also how popular this toxic ideology has become in our current culture.

Moyn’s belief that what’s in children’s best interest cannot be determined by their parents, Howerton says, is “emblematic of thinking that is far more prevalent and far more influential in our culture than people realize.”

Moyn, he explains, is not some “fringe” thinker. “This is the person that’s training the most prominent legal minds in our nation,” he points out.

Moyn’s proposal to shift the proxy voting power for children away from parents and give it to young adults is the “demonic reverse image of Malachi 4:6,” says Howerton.

“Malachi 4:6 says that what the Spirit of God does ... is He turns the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to the children. What unholy spirits do is they turn the hearts of the fathers against the children and the hearts of the children against the fathers,” he explains.

The three main “streams of progressivism” push this spiritually toxic ideology, says Howerton.

He then explains how each goes about poisoning the minds of kids against their parents:

Critical theory teaches children to “see their parents as racist oppressors that they have to oppose in order to stand on the side of justice”; queer theory “disciples kids to see their parents’ views on gender, marriage, and sexuality as bigoted and repressive, so they have to rebel against their parents to ‘be themselves”’; and hyper-therapy culture “disciples children to see their family of origin ... as the source of every problem that they ever have, so they have to go no-contact or separate from their parents to be happy.”

All three of these streams are specifically “designed to reverse-disciple children to turn the hearts of children against the fathers,” says Howerton.

Moyn’s proposal is simply “a fourth way” to do this, he argues.

Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH40 to get $40 off your subscription.

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‘Queer is God’s design’? Allie Beth Stuckey calls pastor’s sermon on LGBTQ ‘blasphemy’



Patrick Preacher is the “pastor for queer ministry” at Trinity Lutheran Church (ELCA) — and what he preaches is as bad as his title sounds.

“This particular pastor says that hell doesn’t really exist as a physical place except for the manifestation of anti-LGBTQ discrimination here in America. That that is actually what makes hell,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says, before playing a clip of the pastor.

“Who had the nerve to tell you, or any of us, or this world for that matter, that being queer makes for an awful person?” Preacher asked during a sermon.

“[What] was he thinking when he told you this?” he asked again. “And I assume that it was a man because in most cases it always is. Why has Christianity — the religion of a humble, brown-skinned immigrant from Nazareth — become the religion of bigotry? Who had the nerve to tell any of us that we would be going to hell for the way God created us to be?”


“Here’s the answer,” Stuckey comments.

“Jesus did.”

“And it’s not just people who are gay. As Romans 3:23 tells us, 'All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,'” she says, before honing in on his claim that Christianity is “the religion of bigotry.”

“He says, ‘Why has Christianity — the religion of a humble, brown-skinned immigrant from Nazareth — become the religion of bigotry?’ So here we see the intersectionality. If someone is brown-skinned, if someone is an immigrant, that they must also be accepting of homosexuality and transgenderism and all of these things,” Stuckey says.

“This is critical theory, queer theory being projected onto the Bible. This is not Christianity. This is not someone who loves God and His authority and wants to read the Bible asking, ‘How can I glorify God?’ This is someone who wants to use a religious text to justify sin, to justify and to downplay what God calls an abomination,” she continues, adding, “That is blasphemy.”

The pastor also claimed that “queer is God’s design.”

He said, “Who had the nerve to tell any of you that you’re too queer, that you’re too masculine, too gay, too feminine, or simply too much? Don’t they know? Look at your bulletin cover. Queer is God’s design.”

“God’s design from the beginning was marriage as a union between a man and a woman,” Stuckey comments.

“Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh,’” she reads from Matthew 19:4-6.

Stuckey explains that like this preacher, “Satan tries to twist God’s word the way that this pastor does.”

But that doesn’t change the true word of God.

“Homosexuality is by definition against God’s design. Scripture describes it as an abomination, unnatural, explains the penalty for persisting in this sin just as persisting in other sins in rebellion to God is hell,” she says, adding, “That is the result.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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How to fix the woke teacher problem



It’s time to dismantle one of the most degraded sectors in American higher education: schools of education. The colleges responsible for training and certifying the majority of our nation’s teachers have become factories for mediocrity and indoctrination.

States have both the authority and obligation to replace these monolithic institutions by promoting better teacher-prep pathways that are already proving their worth across the nation.

As recent graduates of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, we believe that teachers must be more than competent technicians — they must deliberately form American citizens.

The declining value of schools of education is an opportunity for states to look elsewhere for teacher preparation.

Today, however, schools of education are the chief culprits in the growing disquiet among pundits and everyday Americans about the value of the traditional four-year college experience. Graduates with bachelor’s degrees in education are among the lowest earners of any college major. Even more alarmingly, recent research shows their degrees aren’t worth what they paid and are often financed with loans.

These schools are also failing to live up to their own promises. The National Council on Teacher Quality found in its most recent study that only one in eight teacher-prep programs dedicate “sufficient time” to covering fundamental math content; 28% of elementary programs “adequately address” all core components of reading instruction; and 3% require candidates to take courses in necessary science and social studies content.

Other research has further exposed education schools’ century-old dismissal of, and contempt for, rigorous academic content.

What are these institutions of higher learning teaching instead? American schools of education have long been infiltrated by the left’s “long march through the institutions” and serve as havens for neo-Marxist ideas.

At Stanford, we weren’t taught about the science of reading or what knowledge children should learn. Rather, we read Paulo Freire’s "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," a radical polemic that rejects the teaching of received knowledge as oppressive and envisions schools as drivers of political activism.

This intellectual lineage explains why critical theory and its offshoots such as the 1619 Project, which is riddled with historical inaccuracies yet was taught in 4,500 classrooms in a single year, have become so dominant in American public education.

At our alma mater, the influential education professor Jo Boaler has led efforts, backed by debunked research, to remove algebra from California middle schools while simultaneously building a consulting enterprise that charges schools thousands of dollars to implement these same “reforms.”

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Angela Lewis/Bloomberg/Getty Images

All of this points to a simple conclusion: Education schools will not be reformed from within. A machine built on a flawed foundation cannot be repaired by replacing a few parts. We should not expect universities to solve the problem. They are the problem. The declining value of schools of education is an opportunity for states to look elsewhere for teacher preparation.

States can improve the quality of teacher preparation and boost teacher effectiveness by promoting alternative teacher training programs that are already proving their worth. Prospective teachers should first earn a bachelor’s degree in the subject they will teach — history, biology, math, or literature — then enter a focused, apprenticeship-style training under veteran classroom teachers.

Across the country, a growing ecosystem of alternative programs is allowing individuals without education degrees to enter the teaching profession. To be most effective, such programs should emphasize clinical practice, a proven predictor of teacher effectiveness that is often missing from university teacher preparation. This approach also enables new educators to earn their credentials while working and earning a good wage.

Clinical practice means educators are trained not in the ideological vacuum of schools of education, but inside real classrooms, learning from real teachers, and working with real students. In this way, teachers are grounded in the practical knowledge and skills that impact students’ academic outcomes, not ideology.

Studies show that in the first few years of teaching, demonstrated effectiveness is a far better predictor of long-term quality than the pathway through which a teacher was certified — and that greater differences exist among teachers who trained in the same program than those who bypassed such programs entirely.

Teach for America corps members, who are generally young, non-education majors, on average produce stronger gains for students than their traditional counterparts. At worst, they are no less effective than those who spent four years in a typical teacher prep program. Even earning a master’s degree in education does not reliably produce better educators.

Florida, for example, has developed a teacher certification program for professionals with non-education bachelor’s degrees and an apprenticeship program for those with associate’s degrees. These programs feature high-quality, self-paced curriculum modules for participants.

Tennessee offers the Job-Embedded Practitioner Licensure Program, enabling new educators to bypass the traditional credentialing bureaucracy entirely and earn their license while serving as teachers of record.

Arizona provides an Alternate Teaching certificate that similarly emphasizes real-world preparation, including a requirement that candidates demonstrate proficiency in both the U.S. Constitution and the Arizona Constitution, ensuring that even non-traditional entrants receive a grounding in civics free from ideological overlay.

Any replacement for the failed ed-school model must form educators capable of passing along the blessings of liberty to future generations. It’s time to recover the true purpose of public education: pursuing truth, cultivating virtue, and forming citizens who are morally capable of sustaining a free republic.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

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Teaching kids to hate America will have real-world consequences



Although it received scant media attention, the FBI foiled a plot by members of the pro-Palestinian Turtle Island Liberation Front to bomb Southern California businesses on New Year’s Eve.

Most Americans have probably never heard of the term “Turtle Island,” a name said to be used by some indigenous communities to describe North America. “Turtle Island” proponents view the United States as a nation founded on stolen land and express solidarity with a host of anti-American positions and groups — most notably pro-Palestinian activists who support dismantling “colonizing” and “oppressive” power structures.

These ideas are being promoted by organizations that pressure school administrators to implement anti-American educational material.

TILF’s attempted terror attack shows the natural ends of the group's subversive ideology: hatred, division, and violence. And unfortunately, teachers who view their role as agents of social change are now disseminating these ideas through the country’s K-12 schools in an effort to turn America’s students into child soldiers on the front lines of the country’s culture war.

Curricula such as liberated ethnic studies — a benign-sounding program that encourages students to view the world through an oppressor/oppressed lens and to treat their peers accordingly — is one such vector. Turtle Island is frequently cited in school curricula in the form of land acknowledgements, as well as in school meetings and school board notices on how to “support teachers of color.” The phrase also appears in lesson plans on “the social construction of race” that seek the “inclusion of Black and Latino studies in the public school curriculum.”

In 2021, a whistleblower provided Defending Education with photographs of a classroom at Los Angeles Unified School District’s Alexander Hamilton High School, where posters included “in 2020, make Israel Palestine again and make America Turtle Island again,” "F**k the Police,” and “F**k Amerikka, this is native land.” While those responsible ultimately removed the material under pressure, it is certain that those materials would have remained if not for withering public pressure.

Unsurprisingly, professors promote these ideas in college courses nationwide.

At the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, students can take a course called “Critical Indigenous Theory,” in which “indigenous” is described as a “comparative, interdisciplinary, and global project that exceeds the material conditions of Turtle Island ...” One of the required readings for that class is “Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine.”

The University of Texas offers at least five courses with explicit land acknowledgements to Turtle Island, while at the University of California, Irvine, a doctoral candidate wrote a 300-page dissertation on the development of liberation schools on Turtle Island.

While examples abound of academics forcing radical ideas on impressionable university students, it is particularly galling for this to take place in the nation’s taxpayer-funded universities.

It is important to recognize that these ideas aren’t occurring organically. They are being promoted by organizations that pressure school administrators to implement anti-American educational material.

Consider the Great Schools Partnership, which provides professional development to K-12 school districts. The GSP’s self-proclaimed goal is “redesigning” public education with anti-American propaganda, including a 2020 blog post that preached about the need to “Decolonize Education” on “Turtle Island” while smearing Christopher Columbus.

There’s also the Zinn Education Project, a so-called history program coordinated by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, which refers to Turtle Island in its abortion advocacy.

One of the most concerning examples of Turtle Island’s negative influence is through its connection to Teach Palestine, an organization corrupting K-12 education with anti-Israel propaganda. Teach Palestine’s sixth-grade lesson plans emphasize the need to “talk about Palestine and Turtle Island in the same breath.”

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Photo by Joshua Lott/Washington Post via Getty Images

Through incendiary rhetoric about the perceived injustices indigenous people suffer, Teach Palestine actively encourages students to believe that their country and its history are inherently evil. While the organization doesn’t explicitly endorse violence, its partisan framing, one-sided view of history, and portrayal of Israel and the United States as oppressive colonizers could lead some, like the suspected TILF bombers, to justify violent resistance.

We’re already seeing the effects of this brainwashing destabilizing America.

Anti-Israel protests erupted on college campuses in the wake of the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, resulting in Jewish students across the country being violently attacked by their peers. Many of the 18- to 21-year-olds complicit in these riots seemed to genuinely believe they had the moral high ground and that they were “liberating” their campuses from “oppressive” power structures.

Their skewed logic and hatred are the inevitable result of forcing anti-American ideological frameworks on young students, rather than encouraging pupils to think critically for themselves or teaching the basics of history, science, and mathematics — areas where American students are increasingly falling behind.

Without critical thinking and basic education, future leaders and voters become frighteningly easy to pressure into despising their country — and into treating violence as a legitimate answer.

The fact that 2026 nearly started with a Turtle Island-inspired bombing should be a wake-up call for our leaders to address this crisis in the months ahead.

Flipping cars for ‘justice’ — then back to poli-sci class



Some images linger like bad philosophy. One such image: a masked individual standing triumphantly on a vandalized car, waving a giant Mexican flag, at a protest against mass deportations. It’s not a political cartoon. It’s the radical left’s icon. And it perfectly captures the confused moral universe behind the Los Angeles riots and the so-called “indigenous land” movement.

— (@)

As a professor at a secular university, I can assure you this isn’t fringe lunacy. It’s the tip of the philosophical iceberg. Beneath that smoldering car is a massive ideological structure that has been meticulously constructed over decades — paid for, ironically, by federal and state tax dollars.

These rioters don’t actually want to return the land. They want the luxury of moral superiority minus the inconvenience of coherent thought.

If it were possible, I’d love to survey the people flipping cars and heaving concrete blocks at police cruisers. I strongly suspect many of the ringleaders hold degrees in the liberal arts — more specifically, degrees in identity activism. You know the type: gender studies, black studies, Latinx studies, queer theory, or some intersectional combination thereof.

Don’t worry — they went to college

If you visit the department websites of these programs at any given university, you’ll often find “activist” listed as the No. 1 career path. No need to wonder what you can do with a $120,000 degree — you can become the ideological arsonist who trains the next generation to believe the United States is irredeemably Christian, unjust, and colonial — and maybe even get in some looting of the capitalist luxury stores.

So when you see a rioter in Los Angeles shouting on CNN about how the land was “stolen from Mexico,” just know: That’s the university curriculum talking. In one now-viral clip, a young woman (yes, I just assumed her gender) yells at a police officer, “As long as you feel OK with capitalism, racist, imperialist state.” Asked if she even knows what she’s saying, her reply is priceless: “Yes, b***h, I'm in college.”

Exactly.

These students have never been taught about the establishment of land ownership in world history or even the basic historical facts of the American Southwest. They don’t know that Mexico owned it for only 27 years, yet they think it is their ancestral homeland. If anything, Spain should be in the mix, asking for it back from Mexico.

And remember: We’re all paying for that education through state funding — drawn from taxes paid by ... wait for it ... capitalists. No gratitude. No irony. Just tuition-funded tantrums.

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Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

A modest glance at history will remind you that the United States conquered large parts of Mexico in 1848. But here’s the twist: The U.S. didn’t just grab the land and walk away whistling. No, it gave back a substantial portion, paid Mexico $15 million (a princely sum at the time) for the remaining territory — including what is now California — and forgave the Mexican government’s outstanding debts.

But the student activists aren’t interested in political history. And they don’t really want to live in Mexico. Even if they did, Mexico's immigration laws are strict, its economy is difficult, and it most certainly doesn’t tolerate foreigners burning down public property in the name of “revolution against the government.”

Marxism underwritten by capitalists

These rioters don't actually want to return the land. They want the luxury of moral superiority minus the inconvenience of coherent thought. They want their air conditioning, DoorDash, TikTok, and virtue signaling ... on stolen land. Any one of them could sell the assets they acquired within the capitalist system and donate the proceeds to an indigenous cause. But they want to make other people do this with their money.

At their campus protests and university-sponsored events, they perform ritualized “land acknowledgments,” reciting that their college stands on “unceded indigenous territory,” as if confessing to a metaphysical sin. But the penance never includes selling their house and giving it to a tribe. And why?

Because the first tribes are lost to history — conquered by later tribes, who were themselves conquered, until eventually the Spanish brought law and order to warring tribes. The cycle of conquest is not new; it is one of the oldest stories in human civilization. What’s different now is the selective outrage.

Here lies the real problem: Modern activist ideology seeks to appeal to justice but lacks a standard by which to define it. This is why all of this activist nonsense we are paying gender studies professors to teach is so empty. It appeals to justice without any standard by which to adjudicate the question.

If the land was stolen, then: Who stole it? From whom? And what court now has jurisdiction?

Even if you could answer the first two — and in most cases, you can’t — the third is impossible under their belief system. If you begin playing “we were here firsties,” you have to go all the way back.

Theirs is a godless appeal to justice, and godless justice is just another word for mob rule. It is ultimately just mob rule stirred up by malcontents to motivate masses of discontents — which is why they are simply called Marxists. Not because they’ve read “Das Kapital” but because they’re looking for a framework that legitimizes their rage and offers power without accountability. And in Marx, they find a convenient excuse to tear down everything that came before — especially anything remotely Christian.

All of their disappointment in life is aimed at the outward object called “the United States.” No reflection on their own condition — just rage against the machine.

God has the last word

But for those who believe that God is the final judge, the phrase "Let God judge between us” is not a cliché. It’s a fearful thing. It means a moral order lies beyond human manipulation. It means that even if we don’t see civil justice now, true justice is ontological, everlasting, and inescapable.

Marxist rioters cannot make this appeal. They live in a world of only immanent causes and material grievances. No final judge and no moral standard above power awaits to hold their actions accountable — therefore, no peace. They rage because they must. Their rage is at existence itself. And when they finish one protest, they must invent another. Their revolution has no eschaton — only exhaustion.

So they flip over cars and set fires. Some loot — not just because they're angry at injustice or need a new pair of shoes, but because they have no vision of the good, only a fixation on the bad. And in seeking a purely material form of justice, they have lost their souls.

They complained about the one who supposedly stole land while forgetting about the one who can cast their soul into hell. The prospect of God’s justice should make all of us repent.

It is time to stop funding this madness. It is time to restore an education grounded in truth — not truth as a tool of power but truth that judges us all.

Until then, don’t be surprised when your car is flipped by someone with a $100,000 degree in “decolonial eco-poetics.” And don’t be shocked when they scream “justice!” without the ability to define what it is.

After all, they went to college.

Twisting the truth: Wikipedia’s ongoing misinformation war



For over a decade, I have argued with Wikipedia curators about the biographical sketch covering my life and work. Each time a surrogate or I correct false or slanderous details, the misinformation reappears within weeks — often with even greater distortions. Friends who have helped me in this thankless effort suggest giving up, believing that no matter how many corrections we make, the falsehoods will always reappear.

Christopher Rufo has assured me that anyone paying attention knows Wikipedia leans left and misrepresents those with views deemed unacceptable. However, after decades of acquiring unfriendly critics, I doubt most readers will dismiss Wikipedia’s misrepresentations in my case.

One position I will never conceal is my contempt for peddlers of what George Orwell called 'smelly little orthodoxies.' One can’t despise such people enough.

I have also observed Wikipedia’s double standard in editing biographical sketches. Friends with technical expertise have spent weeks trying to correct inaccurate statements about me. Each time, they must provide excessive documentation and navigate endless disputes before even minor corrections are approved. No matter how often they succeed, new distortions inevitably replace the old ones.

When left-leaning contributors make unsubstantiated claims about figures they associate with the political “dark side,” those assertions often go unchecked. The most recent version of my Wikipedia entry falsely states that I oppose Israel’s existence. I have never expressed any sentiment remotely resembling that.

While I have criticized AIPAC for unfairly attacking Israel’s critics, I have consistently defended Israel’s right to protect itself. Yet my biographer offers flimsy evidence to suggest otherwise. One supposed indicator is my past friendship with the late Murray Rothbard, who was explicitly anti-Zionist. But why assume I shared all his views, including his stance on Israel?

Another so-called proof is that I once wrote a review essay for the American Conservative about Elmer Berger, a Reform rabbi critical of Israel’s founding as a Jewish state. Although I described Berger’s position as unrealistic, I apparently didn’t denounce him strongly enough to satisfy those eager to paint me as anti-Israel.

Guilt by association

Wikipedia contributors also attempt to discredit me by linking me to white nationalism. They note that I spoke at an American Renaissance conference in the 1990s but fail to mention that my remarks focused solely on my research on American conservatism — without endorsing white nationalism in any form.

The entry also highlights my past acquaintance with Richard Spencer, though that relationship largely predated his public embrace of white nationalism. Even more tenuously, it refers to an attack from the ADF against an organization I once led, claiming it was “friendly” to white racists. However, even the Wikipedia entry admits that our group was never identified as inherently racist.

These misrepresentations follow a familiar pattern. When leftist editors shape a narrative, they demand exhaustive proof to correct errors. Meanwhile, baseless smears against those they oppose remain unchallenged.

The Wikipedia entry omits that I spent years writing for leftist magazines and that members of the conservative establishment once attacked me as a “right-wing Marxist.” Over decades, I have engaged with a wide range of political groups — both right and left — but rarely with establishments. My work does not focus on race, as it is not my field of study. Instead, my scholarship examines European and American political movements.

Despite this, Wikipedia and Tablet's Jacob Siegel claim that I have written extensively on Latin fascism and seek to create a “post-fascist” imitation of it for the present age. Nothing in my research on changing concepts of fascism supports that bizarre conclusion. I have consistently argued that fascism belonged to a past historical era and should be viewed as an archaic, failed political model.

Opposite of reality

One of the weirdest, most glaring errors about my work appears not in Wikipedia’s biography but in its discussion of “cultural Marxism” as a supposed Jewish conspiracy. There, I am falsely listed as a major source of this ugly, pervasive, anti-Semitic accusation — an assertion that conveniently aligns with the misleading portrayal of me in my biographical sketch.

This charge is entirely baseless. Not only have I never held the views Wikipedia attributes to me, but my books explicitly reject them. The reality is the opposite of what my critics claim.

I have argued that critical theory’s success in the United States stems from its compatibility with the country’s evolution into a managerial state engaged in social engineering. I have also repeatedly noted that today’s woke ideology — promoted by the media, educators, and public administrators — is far more radical and far less insightful than anything the Frankfurt School theorists proposed. Compared to modern woke activists and even some so-called conservatives, early Frankfurt School thinkers could be considered homophobic and sexist.

Wikipedia also claims that Telos, originally a defender of critical theory, was a legitimate leftist magazine until I supposedly took control and transformed it into a “far-right” publication. The entry falsely states, “Under Gottfried’s tenure, Telos became far-right in its outlook.” In reality, I never served as the magazine’s editor in chief; Paul Piccone held that role. I was one of many contributors on the editorial board and played only a minor role in the publication’s engagement with European right-wing thought.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Telos began exploring critiques of centralized managerial regimes, including perspectives from “decentralist” thinkers on the right. This shift was not the result of my supposed influence but rather part of a broader intellectual evolution within the publication.

Of course, I have no expectation that Wikipedia will ever portray me fairly, but I hope others won’t judge me based on its fabrications. One position I will never conceal is my contempt for those who defame me and others like them — peddlers of what George Orwell aptly called “smelly little orthodoxies.” One can’t despise such people enough.

Christianity Is The Cure For Critical Theory

Carl Trueman's latest book, 'To Change All Worlds,' examines how critical theory became the dominant ideology and what can be done about it.