Black diversity director who was fired had created an incredible Jewish Heritage Month for her college

Tabia Lee was the Director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, CA, and was recently fired from that position because she didn't adhere to the standard DEI orthodoxy. She describes her experiences in Compact:

What made me persona non grata? On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.

My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions.

One section of her essay is relevant for this site:

The conflicts were not limited to my tenure-review process. At every turn, I experienced strident opposition when I deviated from the accepted line. When I brought Jewish speakers to campus to address anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, some of my critics branded me a “dirty Zionist” and a “right-wing extremist.” When I formed the Heritage Month Workgroup, bringing together community members to create a multifaith holiday and heritage month calendar, the De Anza student government voted to support this effort. However, my officemates and dean explained to me that such a project was unacceptable, because it didn’t focus on “decentering whiteness.”

When I later sought the support of our academic senate for the Heritage Month project, one opponent asked me if it was “about all the Jewish-inclusion stuff you have been pushing here,” and argued that the senate shouldn’t support the Heritage Month Workgroup efforts, because I was attempting to “turn our school into a religious school.” The senate president deferred to this claim, and the workgroup was denied support.

I looked up what she did for Jewish Heritage Month, and from what I can see, it was incredible. 

The first event in 2022, I believe, was this one on defining antisemitism, with panelists Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder, Esq. from the National Jewish Advocacy Center and  Alyza Lewin from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.  They both explain the logic behind the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and explain why the "3D" test is an accurate description of when criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism. Rabbi Goldfeder spoke specifically about why labeling Israel as an apartheid state, as the then-recent Amnesty report did, is in fact antisemitism.

Dr. Lee even went through a breakout room exercise where students could take real world examples of "anti-Israel" slanders and identify whether and why they were antisemitic.

No wonder the hard Left on campus was upset about this! 

This video is nearly two hours long, but it includes not only excellent presentations by Goldfeder and Lewin, but also a video by the later Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explaining why anti-Zionism is often antisemitism. 

I don't know how many people attended this, but it is astonishing that this was shown on any campus today.

 

There are many other videos of different events celebrating Jewishness, moderated by Dr. Lee,  that interview Jews who are unabashedly woke but also often unabashedly Zionist. One example: This one interviews Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, a Black Jewish social worker who disagrees with critical social justice and intersectionality theory, and features rap videos by her quite proudly Jewish son "Westside Gravy."

I am fairly certain that De Anza will not have another Jewish Heritage Month. 

Tabia Lee appears to be a principled warrior against all kinds of racism and bigotry, and as such she couldn't survive on that campus. I hope that there might be a larger university that actually cares about real equality and anti-racism that hires her and gives her the resources she needs to lead the students, not be led by the extremists. 

Her dismissal is a huge loss for the De Anza community.  I hope some other campus can gain her expertise.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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01/16 Links Pt2: How identity politics fuels anti-Semitism; Ken Roth’s Main Contribution is to Antisemitism, not Human Rights; MSNBC Claims Ilhan Omar’s Antisemitism the Fault of ‘Right Wing Hatemongers’

From Ian:

How identity politics fuels anti-Semitism

For several decades, the NUS has been closely wedded to the cultural politics of identity. As an institution, it works as a kind of coalition of identity groups that are all governed by an ideology of victimhood. Within the ranks of the NUS, identities perceived as ‘victims’ enjoy formidable authority.

But the NUS has apparently made an exception in recent years when it comes to Jews. In this, the NUS follows the identitarian mindset now widespread in our culture, which positions each identity within a hierarchy of victimhood – and which inexplicably places Jews near or at the top of that hierarchy.

Among devotees of identity politics, the Jewish identity has lost much of its claim to moral authority. The status held by Jews since the Holocaust has been revised. Jews are once again being portrayed as powerful, privileged and as aggressors. They are equated with the state of Israel and presented as the oppressors of a highly acclaimed victim group – the Palestinians.

In a world in which victim status trumps all others, this shift has had significant consequences for Jews. It is not that identitarians set out to cultivate anti-Semitism. But identity politics has helped to create a cultural and political climate in which Jewishness is increasingly perceived with hostility, as a negative identity. The validation of some identities always implies a devaluation of others – it is a zero-sum game. Today, the Jewish identity is on the losing side of that game.

Jewish identity is gradually becoming what sociologist Erving Goffman, in his classic 1963 study Stigma, characterised as a ‘spoiled identity’. A spoiled identity is one that lacks any redeeming moral qualities. It is an identity that invites stigma and scorn. Today, this is demonstrated by campaigns against the age-old Jewish practice of male circumcision, implying that Jews are perpetuating a barbaric custom. In a similar vein, attempts to ban kosher meat in parts of Europe signal an air of condescension toward Jewish culture, which is viewed as inhumane.

Bigotry has returned through the seemingly innocuous medium of identity politics. Back in March 2021, Politics Live, the BBC’s flagship politics programme, featured a bizarre debate on whether or not Jews are an ethnic minority. Apparently, this was open to question because some Jews have now reached positions of power and influence in British society. For identitarians, Jews have joined the ranks of the oppressors. Jewish privilege is seen as another version of ‘white privilege’.

This identitarian mindset has fuelled the new anti-Semitism. It must be confronted – not just within the NUS, but across British society.

The Baffling Appeal of "Jews Don’t Count"

Though Jews Don’t Count may be a weak and frivolous exercise in moaning, it has nevertheless struck a chord with that section of UK Jewry who, by virtue of their acculturation and success, are best positioned to make their voice heard. Of course, no one is completely immune to the kind of narcissistic self-pity that Baddiel and his guests have to offer, but this popularity is still, at first sight, surprising. Surprising, that is, until we understand its subtext, which contains an attempt to answer the central question of what Shaul Maggid has called “post-Judaism”: what does it mean to be a post-ethnic and post-religious Jew?

In Jews Don’t Count, Baddiel interviews over a dozen Jews, but there are few Israelis, religiously observant Jews, or Zionists among them. He thus deemphasizes or excludes something like 80 percent of the Jewish people from his analysis. The only time we see a yarmulke is in the background when Baddiel visits a New York deli and observes that Jews like pickles. Jews Don’t Count is, in other words, very clear about what Judaism isn’t (religion, Israel, and, of course, being white), but it is silent on the question of what positive content being Jewish has. Baddiel has stated elsewhere that “I’m really interested in and connected to the culture, the comedy, and obviously the identity, which is core to my being.” (Baddiel is, of course, a vocal atheist, and someone who doesn’t even care enough about Israel to oppose it, though he makes no bones about not liking it very much.) But what does that identity, which is the core of his being, consist of? What exactly is Baddiel identifying with?

In lieu of any indication that there is something other than anti-Semitism that Baddiel finds interesting about Judaism, the alarming answer to that question appears to be that Baddiel’s Jewish identity consists precisely of being a member of a persecuted group. The otherwise baffling popularity of Jews Don’t Count indicates he is far from alone. While, historically, many Jews have abandoned their faith and people in order to shed the burdens of being a loathed minority, the post-Jew does the opposite: clinging desperately to that legacy of persecution as the essence of being as a Jew. For some Jews, a denial of God’s existence, the divine authorship of the Torah, or their eternal connection to the Land of Israel is more than just an argument they disagree with: it’s an attack on their fundamental being. For post-Jews, the same blow is received when someone tries to gently point out that they are not a victim of anything but their own inability to quit while they are ahead.

The undeniable link between Anti-Antisemitism and America’s decline - Opinion

The New Antisemitism
The modern rise of antisemitism also known as the New Antisemitism kicked off at the start of the 21st century with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. With the Islamo Leftist alliance behind it, BDS, with its agenda to demonize the Jewish people and destroy the State of Israel, quickly moved from the fringes of our society and into the mainstream. Civil society organizations, American universities, and far-left politicians would come to endorse the BDS ideology.

Behind BDS, there has always stood a burning hatred of America, its exceptional liberal democratic and capitalist character, and worldwide influence, which is why it has been embraced by the far left and radical Muslims.

With American Jews unable to mount an effective defense against BDS due to our small numbers, division, and aversion to conflict, a door was opened for BDS to get incorporated into the Left’s radical ideologies as they have gained popularity over the past twenty years, normalizing antisemitism as an integral part of anti-Americanism.

Antisemism is now part of the Left Radical Ideologies
BDS and CRT are now intimately intertwined through the left-wing theory of “intersectionality”, and are being aggressively implemented in the workplace and school through CRT-adjacent policies like DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and Ethnic Studies Curriculums. Americans from an increasingly early age are being indoctrinated to view America as intrinsically evil that must be totally remade according to racialized and socialist ‘Woke’ standards.

Although Jews are a major target of these groups, the struggle is not really about us—the ultimate target has always been America.

American Jews need to create alliances with other Americans focused on helping the public to understand that anti-Semitism spreading BDS, CRT, Ethnic Studies and DEI are first and foremost a threat to our core American values. Nothing less than the future of America – and the Jewish American community – is at stake.

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11/01 Links Pt2: Hatred of Israel drags us back to the Middle Ages; Radical social justice ideology is fueling US antisemitism; Edward Said’s Jews

From Ian:

Hatred of Israel drags us back to the Middle Ages

Since it was established in 1948, Israel has endured numerous wars and hundreds of bloody terrorist attacks. It has been forced to defend itself against continual attempted invasions by its neighbors.

Most importantly, it has sought a peace agreement with the Palestinians many times. Each time, it has been rejected by the Palestinians, who hope Israel will simply disappear.

But there is an even more important reason for Magni to consult with history: Today, there is a large alliance of forces that former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer has called “medievalist.” They are autocratic, confessional and terroristic. Many of them have Iran has a primary sponsor. They persecute women, homosexuals, ethnic and religious minorities and others. They almost uniformly back Russia’s violently anti-Western policies.

Aligned against this unholy alliance are the forces of modernity. Today, they are united more than ever in the need to defend democracy, the rule of law and coexistence in the face of brutal aggression, whether by Iranian terrorism or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At the U.N. last week, however, many nations—including Italy—defended Israel from the anti-Semitic U.N. Commission of Inquiry into the May 2021 Israel-Hamas conflict, which is dedicated solely to condemning Israel.

In other words, times are changing. Those members of the Italian parliament who hate Israel should realize they are on the wrong side of history. Indeed, when will the left understand that, especially since the signing of the Abraham Accords, embracing hatred of the Jewish state only drags us back to the Middle Ages?

Radical social justice ideology is fueling US antisemitism

Even while many Jews back social justice movements calling attention to police abuse and mass incarceration, some worry that rhetoric characterizing America as a white supremacist society and demonizing whiteness has and will continue to spill over into hostility toward Jews. As proponents of this ideology tend to view Jews as white, how could it not?

We worry that supposedly white adjacent groups with higher average incomes and educational achievements, such as Jews and Asians, are being implicated in white supremacy for allegedly succeeding on the backs of marginalized communities.

Moreover, it strikes us that the new social justice activism is not just a call for a much-needed shift in policy priorities but a fundamental challenge to the liberal order, which would render everyone, Jews especially, more vulnerable. The ideologues in the movement often don’t seek to fix institutions but to tear them down, as was evident in the campaign to defund the police. Those of us who have studied the history of antisemitism know that when illiberalism sets in, whether on the political right or the left, resurgent antisemitism is never far behind.

The hypothesis that radical social justice ideology foments antisemitic sentiment on the Left is supported by a new survey of 1,600 likely voters. The survey shows that self-described progressives and very liberal Americans who believe that America is a structurally racist nation also tend to see Jews and Asians as white adjacent to the tune of 80%. That same subset views Jews as having too much power and privilege by nearly 2-1 over comparable groups, such as Black, Asian or LGBT Americans. These percentages on both questions steeply decline among moderates and conservatives.

The survey also indicates that on the far Left of the American political spectrum, Israel is being increasingly viewed as a colonizer, which calls into question the country’s very right to exist. A plurality of progressives now views Israel in these very extreme terms. While the new data is not a smoking gun that the spread of radical social justice ideology is driving antisemitic sentiment on the left, it comports with what many of us have observed with our own eyes.

Adam Levick's London talk on Critical Race Theory and antisemitism

The inevitable course of the CRT understanding of the West also includes a likely antisemitic outcome:

Ibram X Kendi’s “How to be an anti-racist” (a dumbed down version of CRT) promotes the ideology’s belief that racial disparities in outcomes are, by definition, evidence of systemic racism – bigotry that, in his rejection of liberalism, must be combated by “anti-racist discrimination” against ‘whites’ (including, it follows, against Jews) – that is, the institutionalisation of preferential practices based on overtly racial and (per such racial essential-ism) antisemitic criteria.

Equality under the law and colour-blind admission standards in education, for Kendi, insofar as such traditional liberal expressions of anti-racism don’t produce equal results, is in fact racist.

While liberalism seeks traditional justice, CRT proponents seek what Thomas Sowell calls “Cosmic Justice”, a Utopian concept that, by demanding not just a fair and transparent process, but the desired result, is irreconcilable with personal freedom based on the rule of law.

CRT turns the Greek saying “character is destiny” on its head, and posits instead that “colour is destiny”.

CRT embraces fatalism and cynicism over liberalism’s agency and optimism.

CRT is obsessed with identity, while liberalism’s project has always sought to transcend identitarianism and the obsession with who we are as the result of mere accidents of birth.

The CRT inspired myth of the white-adjacent, white or even hyper-white Jew helps explain why some anti-Zionists obscenely characterize Israel as a “white supremacist state”, which brings us to a powerful observation by the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi:
Anti-Semites have typically “turned Jews into the symbol of whatever it is a given civilization finds as its most loathsome quality.
Under early Christianity, the Jew was the Christ killer. Under communism, the Jew was the capitalist. Under Nazism, the Jew was the ultimate race polluter.
Now we live in a civilization where the most loathsome qualities are racism, and, lo and behold, Jews have become “white people” oppressing “people of colour”.

This represents, Halevi concludes, a “classical continuity of thousands of years of symbolising the Jew”.

Moreover, the message of Jewish tradition is that none of us are at the mercy of qualities or characteristics that can never change. Our message has always been one of action and hope—each one of us is a work in progress, even kings and great leaders.

CRT nullifies this powerful and liberal idea—that we are individuals with the power to make a difference in our own lives.

Equality before the law, regardless of class, colour, or creed, is not just the only answer that has worked for Jews, and the greater good, over the long run, it’s also the only solution with any moral authority – the only idea that has proven itself to be most likely to result in human flourishing.

It is not by chance that Jews in particular tend to thrive in societies in which liberalism is enshrined in law and civic culture:
The veneration and codification of individual as opposed to group rights, which are protected via the neutral application of laws.
The idea that we should judge each person not by their station or their family lineage, but by their decisions, actions and achievements.
The sacredness of the individual over the group.
Human agency over fatalism.

It is the idea that all men are created in the image of God, that freedom is a natural self-evident right which precedes the state, and is shared by all individuals—revolutionary ideas originating in the Torah, but ushered into the West by Locke, Mill, Montesquieu and the drafters of the US Constitution – which offer the only real protection against increasing threats to Jewish freedom and the liberal values that serve as a bulwark against racism and tyranny throughout the world.

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06/15 Links Pt2: Gazan aid worker convicted of embezzling millions for Hamas; We must stop sweeping woke antisemitism under the rug

From Ian:

We must stop sweeping woke antisemitism under the rug

How effectively is the Jewish establishment confronting intolerance?
In a recent editorial, Morton Klein and Elizabeth Berney of the Zionist Organization of America criticized the ADL’s latest report on radical violence, “Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2021,” arguing that it focused on white supremacism but downplayed threats from minority extremists.

Similarly, critics of the secular liberal establishment lament its tendency to understate progressive bigotry and excess. Indeed, politics seems to set the tone for those communal leaders who appear restrained when social justice warriors target Jews and their institutions, leftist professors malign Israel on college campuses, or progressives promote global conspiracy theories on their social media platforms.

This begs the question of whether cultural survival is possible when Jewish identity is conflated with partisan politics. Or whether invoking tradition in name while equating it with modern progressive values – many of which contravene traditional Judaism – will instead facilitate assimilation.

Those who believe political progressivism is synonymous with Jewish prophetic tradition are just as misinformed as evangelicals who claim Jews can only be “completed” by accepting Christianity. Neither view has any foundation in Jewish Scripture or tradition.
The more confounding question is whether activists who equate Jewish advocacy with jingoism or ethnocentricity can honestly claim concern for Jewish continuity. While many liberals pay lip service to heritage, they also support organizations hostile to traditional Jewish priorities. Can they be effective guardians against antisemitism if they ignore Jew-hatred from the left? Is it chauvinistic to rebuke antisemitism in minority communities?

Incredibly, some progressives claim Jews are part of the power structure and that, accordingly, anti-Jewish bias in minority communities is understandable or even justified. The insidiousness of such woke drivel, however, has finally alarmed some within the liberal mainstream and spurred protest resignations from radical synagogues where anti-Israel activists are validated.

Jonathan Tobin: Cancel culture isn't just for academics anymore

For a lot of people, the phrase "cancel culture" is still a theoretical concept. They know it refers to people being punished in various ways for saying things others don't want to hear, but they have little personal experience of it. Indeed, up until not all that long ago, the idea of being "canceled" was something that was largely limited to the rarified world of academia.

College campuses were the beachheads for those seeking to spread toxic ideologies about intersectionality and critical race theory. Inevitably, that meant that they were also the places where intolerance for differing opinions incubated from an outlier position into mainstream practice.

We have gotten used to seeing stories about colleges canceling appearances from guest speakers whose views on a variety of subjects might offend someone. The offended parties were almost always left-wing students, often egged on by leftist professors, who considered the enunciation of opinions they deemed beyond the pale unacceptable. We were told that hearing ideas that challenged these students' pre-existing opinions and prejudices would "trigger" them, causing them to feel "harm" or to be "endangered."

H.L. Mencken, the great skeptic and cynic of American journalism, once defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." The woke left has embraced its own brand of rigid orthodoxy in which they are haunted by the idea that someone, somewhere may be questioning their ideas about race, gender, government power, and above all, whether open debate about these issues should be tolerated.

But dust-ups about guest speakers at colleges have now morphed into ongoing controversies about whether institutions of higher learning ought to allow those guilty of wrong-think about affirmative action or the notion that America is an irredeemably racist nation to continue teaching. Social media, which was once believed to be the method by which free speech would proliferate even in repressive nations and cultures, became the vehicle for detecting and then enforcing violations of the new orthodoxies.

Gazan aid worker convicted of embezzling millions for Hamas

An Israeli court on Wednesday convicted Mohammad el-Halabi, a Gazan aid worker, of transferring millions in funds to the Hamas terror group, on all but one of the counts against him.

Israeli forces arrested Halabi, who worked at World Vision — a highly respected Christian humanitarian organization that operates around the world — in 2016 and charged him with transferring millions of the nonprofit’s funds to Hamas. Since then, he has been held under arrest.

The aid worker’s extended detention, combined with little publicly released evidence of his guilt, saw Israel’s justice system draw international condemnation

Halabi intends to appeal the ruling to Israel’s Supreme Court, according to his attorney. His sentencing has been set for July 10.

The 254-page ruling, like much of the evidence against Halabi, is classified. In a condensed version released to the press, the Beersheba District Court leaned heavily on Halabi’s confession to Shin Bet security agents, which he has since withdrawn.

“The defendant’s confession, given in various ways, is detailed, coherent, with signs of truthfulness,” Justice Natan Zlotchover wrote in the decision, adding that it was corroborated by additional confidential evidence.

Halabi and World Vision have both emphatically rejected the charges against him. The aid worker, who hails from Jabaliya Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip, is a member of the Fatah group, Hamas’s enemy, according to his family.

According to the ruling, Israeli authorities determined Halabi had been recruited in 2004 by Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. His handlers later sent him to World Vision in order to “gain influence at an international organization.”

At which point will @hrw cease shilling for Hamas and more dead Jews? #AlHalabi https://t.co/X9gMZ8ffka

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) June 15, 2022

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Book review: Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

I've had my share of disagreements with Batya Ungar-Sargon, most notably when she was Opinion Editor of The Forward. But she has been outspoken about the dangers of the current far-Left "woke" movement, and I've had some reasonable private discussions with her, so I bought her brand new book to see what she has to say.

Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy is centered around two themes. The primary one is that the media has swallowed the woke narrative, specifically that everything must be viewed through the prism of race. 

Ungar-Sargon traces the history of modern journalism through the lens of the New York media world since the 1820s, noting the divide between the media that catered to the upper classes and the newspapers that were aimed at the working class, derided by the traditional media as "sensationalistic." She contrasts the New York World and the New York Sun with the founding of the New York Times, which was explicitly aimed at the rich. She shows that the NYT continues with that mission today, using even digital media to aim at the most wealthy people and those who aspire to join them. Local news and stories about ordinary working class Americans are given short shrift.

Ungar-Sargon demonstrates that while the news business was a trade, with most reporters not having attended college until five decades ago and in touch with the working people, now the journalists are nearly all from a small number of exclusive universities and are in the top tier of what is now known as privilege. Even though journalism pays very little for entry level jobs, the New York media world is filled with young people who could only afford to live in the city because of their wealthy parents who subsidize them. More recently, these privileged young journalists - who have remarkably little experience with actual, on the ground reporting and instead concentrate on doing their jobs using the Internet - have been pushing out the older, experienced journalists by canceling or threatening to cancel them. The result is a remarkably homogeneous, ultra liberal, mostly white class of know-nothings. 

Batya brings much evidence that the current fashion of claiming that everything is centered on race is nonsense. Americans are less racist than at any time in our history yet the number of articles about race have skyrocketed. Intersectionality theory is equally shown to be nonsense - African women immigrants, who should according to that theory be on the very bottom of the heap, have no economic disadvantage when seeking employment in the US. She does a great job at taking apart the hypocrisy behind the NYT's treatment of the Tom Cotton op-ed and the aftermath. 

Her argument falters when it intersects with her second theme, a more implicit one that pervades the book. This theme is that while the racial problems in the US are exaggerated, there is a serious class problem that is not being addressed, especially not by the media.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide up everyone into two types of people and everyone else. Looking at the world as though everything is a class problem is just as simplistic as looking at everything through the lens of race. There are certainly class issues, but they don't explain everything, and Batya's class arguments are not convincing. While she demonstrates very well that journalists are overwhelmingly in the super liberal upper class, she does not show that the upper class itself buys into the woke narrative. In fact, she doesn't define what she means by upper class - her most consistent definition seems to be "college educated." What about Wall Street professionals - it seems unlikely that they buy into the woke/intersectional narrative even though they are clearly upper class (and college graduates.)  The American middle class is treated as being effectively part of the upper class if they are "aspirational." But how many college-educated middle class Americans really want to be part of the rarified world of the New York Times Style section? And the huge middle class who live between the two coasts don't fit into her upper vs. working class worldview in this book at all. 

As with race, this is not to say that there isn't a problem with the divide between the professional class and the working class, or with the working class not being represented by the media. The author shows that it is this very feeling of being disenfranchised that caused so many working class Americans of all races to vote for Donald Trump, who instinctively spoke to their concerns about keeping their jobs- and he even gained non-white voters in the 2020 election. (Ungar-Sargon somehow manages to say that the Republicans don't care about the working class after showing that Trump's policies were geared exactly to them.)   

Because of her conviction that class is the defining feature of American life, one of Ungar-Sargon's core  arguments does not hold up well. She claims that the young writers at the major newspapers support the idea of wokeness because they feel guilty about their white, upper class privilege, so they choose to focus on race because it is immutable - if the problem is one of race, then they don't have to examine their own privileged lives because they cannot solve the problem. There might be some truth to that, but it seems to me more likely that they learned this ideology in their universities and never questioned it as they moved from the college bubble to the media bubble. 

If there was any consistent formula that Ungar-Sargon's data indicates, it is not the importance of class, but of money, power and influence. The reason that the New York Sun succeeded wasn't because of a principled coverage of the working class but because the larger market was lucrative. The reason Bernie Sanders flipped his stances on topics like immigration between 2016 and 2020 was because his desire to be elected was more important than his interest in consistency with his principles and agreeing with Trump was not a good look for a Democrat in 2020. The reason that the liberal media is obsessed over race stories is because they get ratings. 

Bad News is an excellent book for members of  the Left. If they have any intellectual honesty, it could convince them that their philosophy is not only wrong but a danger to democracy and the nation. For people who already know that critical race theory is ahistorical and wrong, this book gives more ammunition. There is plenty of interesting history and statistics (such as data that indicates that people on the Left are more racist than those on the Right)  that make it a worthwhile read for anyone. 

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