Goodbye, MIT

As the university increasingly caves to “wokeness,” two alumni explain why they are withdrawing their financial support. 

Tom Hafer Henry I. Miller November 5, 2021 @ City Journal 

We graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology more than 50 years ago. MIT was academically rigorous, and it taught us our crafts and the essence of problem-solving, enabling us to thrive in our careers. We owe much to our alma mater and have donated to it regularly.

No more.

The current MIT administration has caved repeatedly to the demands of “wokeness,” treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.

We object to MIT’s politically correct measures, including the firing of its Catholic chaplain. In the early days of the George Floyd protests, before the details of Floyd’s death were clear, Father Daniel Moloney sent a letter outlining his thoughts on the event to the university’s Catholic community. It was a sincere examination of conscience from a person whose job it was to examine conscience, yet it prompted his immediate dismissal. MIT’s leadership apparently took umbrage at his statement of these simple facts: that George Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” (based on his multiple criminal convictions) and that “most people in the country have framed [Floyd’s death] as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that.”

Moloney did not present these statements as justification for Floyd’s death; to the contrary, his letter begins, “George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been.” But MIT found the letter intolerable and fired the chaplain. (We are not Catholic, by the way, but believe fairness transcends religion.)

We also deplore MIT’s new mandatory diversity training. In the autumn of 2020, MIT sent an email to new and current students informing them that they would be unable to register for spring classes if they failed to undergo wokeness instruction. In the email, MIT outlined two required trainings: one on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and the other entitled “Sexual Assault Prevention Ongoing: Healthy Relationships.” Portions of the training materials are available here. The compulsory videos contain deftly worded but fatuous questions implying that straight white males are at the “intersection” of all oppressive behaviors. Everyone else is an oppressed victim, with extra points for being a member of multiple minority groups. Thus, the concept of “intersectionality” is a kind of conspiracy theory of victimization.

The most vivid illustration of how far the university has sunk is the disgraceful cancellation of University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot. When MIT invited the distinguished geophysicist to give a public lecture, he seemed a natural choice, “a scientific star who studies climate change and whether planets in distant solar systems might harbor atmospheres conducive to life,” in the words of the New York Times.

But Abbot had committed the mortal sin of arguing, in Newsweek, that the implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on college campuses “violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment” and “treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.” He proposed instead “an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.”

Instead of championing Abbot’s presentation on earth’s climate and the identification of planets in other solar systems, MIT pandered to a Twitter mob and canceled the lecture. Princeton’s James Madison Program in Ideals and Institutions invited Abbot to deliver the lecture, which he did (marvelously, we hasten to add) on the day his MIT lecture had been scheduled. The fiasco has, deservedly, received worldwide attention.

Pointing out MIT’s lapses and withdrawing our financial support of the offending institution is insufficient. We would like to suggest a way for MIT to return to our good graces and hope it will consider adopting the following principles of fairness.

First, facts are not racist, and stating facts is not racism. Second, a person’s ethnicity or skin color does not define him or her as a racist, oppressor, or victim. Third, intellectual ability and achievement are the principal requirements for admission as a student or faculty member to any university. Fourth, diversity of opinions is desired and supported. Fifth, a just, democratic society requires equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal responsibility; it does not require equal outcomes. And finally, adherence to the statements above must not be sacrificed for political, social, or public relations considerations.

These truths used to be self-evident; now they are apparently controversial. MIT and other universities must make a choice: Will they redeem themselves by standing for merit and truth, or will they forfeit the support of countless alumni and donors by surrendering to wokeness?

Tom Hafer developed systems for neutralizing rockets and drones. He currently coaches teenage robotics teams. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, was a Research Associate at the NIH and the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. They were undergraduates together at MIT.

Chicago Police Department v. Kim Foxx

When prosecutors won’t prosecute, what can cops do?  

Thomas Hogan October 5, 2021 @ City Journal

Yet again, the Chicago Police Department finds itself at loggerheads with State’s Attorney Kim Foxx about charging a criminal with a crime. First, it was low-level crimes that Foxx declined to prosecute. Then it was celebrity nonsense, with the Jussie Smollett hate-crime hoax. Next, it was the murder of a little girl. And now, it’s a deadly gang shootout. The larger issue is whether the police (and the public) have any options when a prosecutor refuses to prosecute, even when the evidence for guilt seems overwhelming.

On August 15, seven-year-old Serenity Broughton was sitting in the backseat of a car with her six-year-old sister. A gunman blasted away at someone near the car, killing Serenity and critically wounding her sister. Even in a city as violent as Chicago, the death of a little girl hit home. Chicago PD detectives worked around the clock and built a case against a suspect. But Foxx’s office declined to arrest the suspect and attempted instead to cast blame on police by implying that their investigation was deficient. Meantime, five participants in a gunfight that killed one person were released from custody this week, with Foxx reportedly citing “mutual combat” as the reason for dropping the case.

What can police do when a prosecutor won’t prosecute?

Most major felony charges require the approval of prosecutors. In Broughton’s case, the Chicago PD used an “emergency override” procedure to arrest and charge the suspect without prosecutor approval. But Foxx would not let that stand. She called the police chief, and the arrested suspect was un-arrested. Even if Foxx had not succeeded in freeing the suspect at that point, she would have done so at the first official hearing. That rules out one option for the police to make charging decisions in defiance of Foxx.

The next option for police is to find another prosecutor. This approach worked in the Jussie Smollett debacle. After Foxx’s office dismissed the charges, an outraged judge appointed a special prosecutor to take over the case. The special prosecutor recharged Smollett with felony offenses for making false reports to the police. Those charges remain pending.

But unless you find a supportive judge and the case is as notorious as Smollett’s, then the appointment of such a special prosecutor is extremely unlikely. The police still can take cases to state attorneys general or federal prosecutors, but both have limited jurisdiction over cases involving murder and lack the capacity to handle all the cases that a politician like Foxx fails to prosecute. Another dead-end for the police.

A time-honored approach for police dealing with a recalcitrant prosecutor is to take the case to the media and the public. In 2017, an outraged police union publicly attacked Philadelphia’s then-district attorney Seth Williams for failing to charge a teenage girl who punched a cop in a scuffle. The local press ran with this story and others critical of Williams, but now the media tide has turned. Philadelphia police would love to use the media to attack progressive district attorney Larry Krasner, who has presided over a soaring murder rate, rising public disorder, and general disrespect for the police. But the local newspaper of record, the Philadelphia Inquirer, has endorsed Krasner twice. Nor do police tend to get good press in other cities with progressive prosecutors. Cross another option off the list.

Formal legal remedies offer an intriguing possibility. In some states, citizens can bring private criminal complaints to force a district attorney to file substantiated charges. In Georgia’s Ahmaud Arbery murder case, the state attorney general charged the local district attorney for not bringing charges against all three defendants initially. If an attorney general can charge a local district attorney for failure to indict in one homicide case, then the Illinois attorney general might be able to charge Foxx for not doing so in the Broughton or the Smollett cases, though politics will surely come into play. Perhaps Broughton’s family or another private citizen could bring an action in equity, demanding an injunction to force Foxx to follow the law and uphold her oath. Prosecutorial discretion is a core principle for prosecutors, but it doesn’t confer unlimited power.

Ironically, by the terms of 42 U.S.C.A. § 1983, prosecutors would be liable via a civil rights suit for their de-prosecution decisions if such choices were based on race, but prosecutors have absolute immunity under that statute, so they can’t be liable. However, under the language of 34 U.S.C.A. § 12601—the federal provisions that empower the Department of Justice to investigate and impose sanctions or consent decrees on police departments for a “pattern or practice” of misconduct—the DOJ could do the same thing to prosecutors who systematically fail to uphold the law.

Is there any chance that the Biden Justice Department would be willing to wade into this political thicket? Don’t count on it. But some state attorneys general now have similar authority, so a law-and-order attorney general could attempt this strategy with a progressive urban prosecutor.

A darker and more depressing option for the police is simply to stop policing. If prosecutors like Foxx, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, and a growing cast of others won’t prosecute crimes, then maybe the police shouldn’t bother trying to arrest people. Just stay in your patrol car and drive around, cleaning up the shell casings and the bodies after the shooting stops. Debate has persisted about de-policing linked to civil protests, as in the so-called Ferguson Effect triggered by the protests after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. There may be a similar de-policing movement taking place in cities like Chicago—call it the Foxx Effect.

The nuclear option is simply to quit. The police can put up with being attacked by criminals; that’s part of the job. They can live with media coverage claiming that they are racist thugs. They can laugh at law school professors who criticize law enforcement tactics; that’s like having toddlers throw feathers at you. But when the police work day and night to bring charges against violent and clearly guilty offenders, trying to achieve closure for victims’ families, only to see those arrests thwarted at every turn by prosecutors like Foxx, it may be time to find another job. Increasingly, police seem to be doing just that.

In short, police don’t have many options if prosecutors won’t prosecute. They can’t charge offenders themselves. Not enough law-and-order minded prosecutors have jurisdiction. Depending on the media is a dead end if the media shields progressive prosecutors from criticism. Some novel legal theories could yield promising results, but taking that path depends on someone having the political will and moral courage to bring the first case. De-policing or quitting entirely may become the only viable alternatives for police. The big losers in the case of CPD v. Kim Foxx will be the people of Chicago, who will be left with no police, a non-prosecuting prosecutor, and more dead children.

Tom Hogan has served as a federal prosecutor, local prosecutor, and elected district attorney. He currently is in private practice.

Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski/Getty Images

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

Denying the Crime Spike

A new report from Third Way downplays concerns about the rising tide of violence.

Charles Fain Lehman September 27, 2021 @ City Journal

A robust debate has broken out over the underlying causes of the surge in violence across the country that began last summer. Was the pandemic to blame, or the riots after George Floyd’s death? That debate has been healthy, but an indefensible position occasionally crops up: partisans who insist, against all evidence, that rising crime is nothing to worry about. That was the view taken by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who labeled such concerns “hysteria” this past June. And it’s the view propounded in a new report from the think tank Third Way, whose policy chief, Jim Kessler, similarly suggests that “hysteria” about crime has gripped the nation.

Third Way’s brief has attracted the attention of commentators eager to downplay rising violence. NBC’s writeup on the report has been widely shared. But the report’s claims that the crime wave is made up don’t withstand scrutiny. Even Third Way’s own statistics confirm the surge in violent crime that serious analysts have been warning about.

To reach their conclusions, Third Way analysts Kylie Murdock and Nathan Kasai collected data on the frequency of seven crimes—murder, aggravated assault, rape, robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor-vehicle theft—in 2020 from 22 states and Washington, D.C., and compared them with 2019 rates of the same offenses in the same states. They conclude that crime fell by about 4.9 percent between 2019 and 2020—but this figure is essentially meaningless because it combines all the major categories. In 2019, police reported about 8 million crimes to the FBI, of which the majority (5 million) were larcenies. By comparison, there were about 16,000 homicides. If the overall crime rate is a rough proxy for the larceny rate, then one must examine the numbers by offense type to get a sense of actual trends. Third Way’s analysts do so, finding in the 23 jurisdictions covered that rapes, robberies, burglaries, and larcenies fell—but that aggravated assaults rose 11 percent, automobile theft rose 15 percent, and murder rose a shocking 31 percent.

These results are exactly what anyone following crime statistics since last year would expect: a decline in most property crime (as well as rape, which is infamously difficult to track), and an increase in homicide, assault (a proxy for shootings), and grand theft auto.

Explaining that trend is simple. Most property crimes fell as lockdowns and Covid restrictions sent people home and shuttered businesses, reducing the opportunity for offending. Simultaneously, grand theft auto rose as cars and streets became less attended. Violence, meantime, spiked last summer, a trend likely driven by anti-police protests and ensuing de-policing. Property crime might have risen, too, except that concurrent policy pressures kept opportunities for offending low while funneling trillions of dollars in relief to individuals who might otherwise have turned to theft amid the recession.

Inexplicably, Third Way’s analysts do not consider this explanation. Instead, they reduce any increase in crime to the murder spike, waving away the aggravated-assault increase (and the ample evidence of surging gun violence). Murder may be up 30 percent, they argue, but property crime is down; nothing to see here.

The report makes two other weak arguments. First, it assesses whether Democratic governance had an effect on crime rates, but only by looking at the partisan affiliation of governors. This approach not only results in the amusing classification of Massachusetts as a red state but also ignores the fact that most criminal-justice policy is set at the local level.

Second, having ostensibly dispensed with any role played by last summer’s protests in the violence surge, the authors insist that the problem is likely attributable to some combination of Covid and gun sales. They don’t provide evidence for this thesis; as my colleague Robert VerBruggen has noted, the best available evidence suggests that spiking gun sales were not related to the homicide surge.

Does evidence even matter to Third Way? Rising crime is a political inconvenience to the center-left think tank. Thousands of people were murdered last year. Thousands more were irretrievably wounded, physically and mentally, by the scourge of gun violence. It’s worth debating what caused the problem and how we can address it—but denying that the problem exists, especially under the cover of weak statistics and analysis, isn’t helpful.

Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

The Linguistic Equivalent of War

Today’s progressives are heirs to a long tradition of abusing words to advance their policy goals. 

Tim Rice September 27, 2021 @ City Journal 

A day before an ISIS attack killed 13 Marines in Kabul, President Joe Biden declared cybersecurity “the core national security challenge we are facing.” Cybersecurity is critical. But with the Taliban retaking Afghanistan after being routed by the U.S. military two decades ago, calling it the “core” national security challenge of our time was bizarre. Still, Biden’s August comments were an improvement from June, when the president declared climate change the greatest threat to American security.

You would think that the commander in chief responsible for one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in decades would choose his words more carefully. But that’s not how his party tends to operate these days. George Orwell warned of the dangers of imprecise political speech in his seminal essay “Politics and the English Language.” The problem, in Orwell’s telling, is that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Political speakers reach for muddled, vague language to sell the public on their indefensible policies. This is bad enough, but it presents a broader issue because “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Orwell’s diagnosis is as true in America today as it was when he wrote those words 75 years ago. And while both political parties are guilty of indulging in bad rhetoric that corrupts policy, Democrats are the more frequent and more serious offenders, largely because linguistic manipulation is central to so many progressive political ideas.

Twentieth-century progressives, for example, were enamored with philosopher William James’s idea of “the moral equivalent of war.” In his 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson declared “an unconditional war on poverty,” inaugurating an era of U.S. leaders declaring war on concepts. More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter directly quoted James in a speech calling the energy crisis the “moral equivalent of war.” By now, we’ve seen the fallout of the twentieth century social policy’s moral crusades. As Charles Murray shows in Losing Ground, poverty rates began climbing in the 1970s, despite the expansion of government power and spending inaugurated by Great Society antipoverty programs. Medicare, another campaign in the War on Poverty, is projected to run out of money by 2026.

Democrats today don’t speak in such martial terms as their mid-century predecessors, but the broadness of their vision and goals—and the language they use to describe them—is a contributing factor in spreading already-ineffective federal agencies even thinner. In addition to a resurgent Taliban and the global challenge presented by an increasingly aggressive China, the Department of Defense must tackle climate change. With inflation rising, members of the congressional Squad want the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to focus “on eliminating climate risk and advancing racial and economic justice.” And the Centers for Disease Control, whose botched coronavirus response shows that it can barely handle its core mandate, was temporarily given power over rent and evictions nationwide.

Orwell was right to point out that language can corrupt thought. Since thinking and speaking are the central tasks of politics, language can also corrupt governance. When all hot-button issues become the purview of every facet of government, pesky considerations like specialization or separation of powers fall by the wayside.

Intentionally or not, Democrats’ political rhetoric is moving us closer to rule by total bureaucracy. Congress will soon vote on a $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill, Biden’s plan to launch Great Society 2.0. Lumping together everything from free college to electric-vehicle subsidies and tax hikes under the “infrastructure” label, the package exemplifies the blurring of crucial distinctions.

We needn’t proceed down this path. Rather than blend all our priorities together into an expensive, unaccountable policy monolith, politicians should get specific. Let the Defense Department work on national security and leave climate change to the EPA. Let the CDC focus on infectious diseases and leave rental-assistance matters to the Department of Housing and Urban Development—or, better yet, to state governments. Our leaders won’t solve all the country’s problems by speaking more clearly about policy issues. But they won’t make much headway until they do.

Tim Rice is the associate editor of the Washington Free Beacon.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

 

A War on Excellence

Asra Q. Nomani Daniel Kennelly September 27, 2021 @ City Journal

A former Wall Street Journal correspondent, Asra Q. Nomani is an author, codirector of the Pearl Project, cofounder of the Muslim Reform Movement, and vice president of strategy and investigations at Parents Defending Education. She spoke with City Journal associate editor Daniel Kennelly.

Could you tell us about Thomas Jefferson High School, Fairfax County Public Schools’ changes to the admissions process, and what the Coalition for TJ is trying to accomplish?

The battle over admissions to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, ranked the number one school in the United States, is a battle for the American Dream. It’s a struggle to protect the ideas of merit, hard work, and educational excellence. A year ago, in summer 2020, a brave group of mostly immigrant parents, with names like Yuyan Zhou, Suparna Dutta, and Himanshu Verma, formed Coalition for TJ to defend not only our children’s school but also America against ideologues and activists intent on destroying the core of education and excellence in this nation.

Like the parents of many other students and alumni of TJ, I came to the United States as an immigrant. My family arrived from India in the 1960s, with dollars to our name. About seven of ten TJ students are of Asian descent, about two of ten are white, and about one of ten is black, Hispanic, or multiracial. We all agree that that last number is too low, but we disagree about how to increase it. At Coalition for TJ, we believe that the school system must address its decades of failure and fix the pipeline to TJ, one that our families also struggled to traverse.

Unfortunately, in the name of “social justice,” bureaucrats and activists decided, in December 2020, to replace TJ’s merit-based, race-blind admissions with a “holistic” process that is essentially a subjective popularity contest and a zip-code quota system.

What effect has the elimination of the merit-based admissions test had on the makeup of this year’s class? Who are its beneficiaries?

School district officials announced that, as a result of their new admissions system, they had slashed the percentage of Asian students admitted to TJ to 54 percent this year, from 73 percent last year. The percentage of blacks and Hispanics increased—as it also did for white students.

This is a purge against Asian-American students by Fairfax County Public Schools. The school district illegally made race a factor in the decisions.

This spring, the Pacific Legal Foundation filed a federal lawsuit against the Fairfax County School Board, arguing that the new admission standards violate our children’s constitutional right to equal protection. We go to court on Friday, September 17, for initial proceedings. This past May, U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton rejected the school district’s request to dismiss the case. “Everybody knows the policy is not race-neutral,” he declared, “and that it’s designed to affect the racial composition of the school.”

Our battle in northern Virginia is happening elsewhere, too—in San Francisco, New York City, and Boston. Under the cover of fighting against discrimination and injustice, activists are launching a new era of discrimination and injustice. It’s up to parents to stand up against this abuse of power.

You’re involved with another group, Parents Defending Education, aimed at combating political indoctrination in the classroom. Could you tell us about that work?

The fight at my son’s school made an accidental educational activist out of me. It connected me with amazing parents around the country. Earlier this year, I joined forces with Nicole Neilly, Erika Sanzi, Marissa Fallon, and other mothers and fathers to launch Parents Defending Education to help empower other parents, expose the indoctrination that is happening in schools, and engage with leaders to restore education. This puts us in the crosshairs of a well-funded, well-organized network of activists, ideologues, and academics who are hell-bent on “disrupting” education by infusing schools with their political and ideological agendas. These activists are pitting students against each other by dividing them into categories of “oppressed” and “oppressor,” separating students based on race, and creating a new hierarchy of human value that is bigoted, cruel, and racist.

What’s at stake in this battle?

We are in an existential struggle for the future of our country’s children—and the future of America. On the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, let me give you an example of how this threat plays out.

On August 27, the Virginia Department of Education posted a webinar on its official YouTube channel, in which a local educator, Amaarah DeCuir, a lecturer at American University, instructed teachers not to call the 9/11 hijackers “terrorists” but instead to call them “extremists,” without any discussion of Islamic extremism. She also advised them to avoid any discussion of “American exceptionalism,” instructing them instead to focus on “anti-Muslim racism.” As a Muslim reformer, I call this woke-washing.

She said, “We’re also not going to reproduce what’s understood as American exceptionalism—this understanding that America is a land at the top of a beautiful mountain and that all other countries, nations, and people are less than America.”

Parents in Virginia shared the video with us at Parents Defending Education, expressing deep concern about the historical revisionism in the lesson guidelines and the insensitivity of the speaker and the state agency to the history of the 9/11 attacks. After we pushed back, the Virginia Department of Education removed the webinar from its official YouTube channel. But the agency is still sharing DeCuir’s PowerPoint presentation as part of its “EdEquity VA” webinar series. And at a recent Fairfax County school board meeting, board member Abrar Omeish recommended that the school district’s chief diversity officer use DeCuir’s recommendations to guide lessons about 9/11. Omeish then voted against a resolution honoring the victims of 9/11. Her father is a leader at the local mosque, called the “9/11 mosque,” where the hijackers prayed. Parents, including me, watched these remarks, horrified.

In the hall, a mother stood up and yelled, away from the microphone, “It’s a sham!”

On this issue, too, we sounded the alarm, sharing the video of the board member’s disturbing arguments. And we shared the voice of the parent. We must give parents not just the microphone but a bullhorn. This is a fight for America itself. We all need to stand up and raise our voices.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

What Progressives Wrought

A concise new volume will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us. 

Mike Sabo September 16, 2021 @ City Journal

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, by Ronald J. Pestritto (Encounter Books, 288 pp., $28.99)

It is no secret that American public life is fracturing. The fissures can be seen in our gladiatorial-like Supreme Court nomination hearings, the collapse of confidence in our institutions, and the mounting sense that many have that elections won’t change the country’s fundamental trajectory. These disputes are merely symptoms, however, of a broader problem, the roots of which extend back decades.

As Ronald J. Pestritto, graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College, argues in America Transformed, our present-day clashes reflect a fundamental “divide over first principles,” which he traces to the rise of the Progressive Movement in the late nineteenth century. Pestritto makes a convincing case that the Progressives—including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey—sought to “revolutionize both the theory and practice of American government.”

The Progressives had their differences and factions: consider the fierce 1912 presidential campaign between Wilson and Roosevelt. Yet they adhered to a “coherent set of principles, with a common purpose.” They unleashed a “direct assault on the core ideas of the American founding,” openly rejecting the natural rights teachings of the Declaration of Independence. Wilson once told an audience that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface”—the same preface that contains the most concise articulation of the Founders’ political theory.

Pestritto argues that, for progressives like education reformer Dewey, the Founders’ “great sin” was to think that principles such as a natural human equality in rights and government by consent transcended “the particular circumstances of that day.” Influenced by Hegel’s philosophical idealism, they argued that historical progress had shown that what the Founders thought were universal truths were in fact simply ideas of their time. In fact, the principles of the American Founding, and the Constitution built to reflect them, actively prevented government from taking the swift action that the public now demanded.

Pestritto suggests that “native influences” had already compromised the American immune system by the time the Progressive Movement emerged. A toxic mix of Social Darwinism, pragmatism, and the rejection of social compact theory in New England and the antebellum South prepared American intellectuals and politicians to accept an alternative account of politics that seemed better able to meet the challenges of modern society. The Progressives claimed that historical progress necessitated a dynamic and perfectible human nature, an idea that the Founders rejected. James Madison’s claim in Federalist 10 that the prevention of majority tyranny would always be a problem in political life was simply false, they believed. Thus Woodrow Wilson and political scientist Frank Goodnow sharply criticized the Constitution’s separation of powers and the slow, methodical lawmaking process the Framers had put in place, which they saw as hopelessly out of step with the public will and too often stymied by a combination of political machines, big business, and other special interests.

Pestritto maintains that the progressives worked toward “democratizing and unifying national political institutions,” though they sometimes differed on the means to achieve this end. Ever the radical, Theodore Roosevelt proposed policies such as overturning judicial decisions and the recall of recalcitrant judges who resisted heavy regulation of business. Herbert Croly, a cofounder of The New Republic, wanted to eliminate political parties altogether.

To make politics fully democratic, the Progressives insisted that political leaders accountable to the people needed to find means of breaking the constitutional logjam—think of Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit.” Roosevelt and Wilson frequently enlisted (and refashioned) the memory of American statesmen such as Abraham Lincoln, John Marshall, and Daniel Webster, men who, in their rendering, had supposedly discerned history’s centralizing trends.

Pestritto argues that as the Progressives seemingly brought politics closer to the people, they simultaneously moved “policymaking power away from popular institutions,” handing it to “educated elites.” They essentially established a fourth branch of government, a vast bureaucracy that wields legislative, executive, and judicial powers—what Madison considered the very definition of tyranny—that would fully bloom during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. What we know today as the administrative state (a phrase coined by the political scientist Dwight Waldo in the 1950s) had its genesis in the Supreme Court’s ruling in J.W. Hampton v. United States, which granted broad powers to supposedly nonideological experts insulated from the corrupting effects of electoral politics.

Pestritto notes that this new conception of government—the sharp split between politics and administration—originated in the “laboratories of democracy” of state and local governments. There, Progressive governors such as California’s Hiram Johnson and Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette pushed direct democracy: the ballot initiative, recall, referendum, the direct election of senators, and electoral primaries. Through the establishment of government by unelected commission and the rise of nonpartisan city managers, the notion of expert administration permeated state governments in Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Illinois, as well as cities such as Galveston, Cincinnati, Des Moines, and Cleveland.

The Progressives’ strong belief in the notion of historical progress also guided their foreign policy. History had demonstrated that modern democracy was the “permanent and most advanced form of government,” Wilson once wrote. To make the world safe for democracy, the Progressives’ idealistic foreign policy necessitated an aggressive series of interventions in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippines.

History had chosen the United States to lead the “children” (as Wilson described other sovereign nations) so that they could someday reach the heights of democratic governance. And should certain “barbaric races” fail to do what they were told, Progressive historian Charles Merriam wrote in a particularly appalling passage, they “may be swept away.”

Some Progressives saw historical progress as the will of God Himself. Marshaling rhetoric that today would be regarded as extreme Christian nationalism, Roosevelt told the Progressive Party convention in 1912, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

Adherents of the Social Gospel, the Progressive Movement’s religious wing, were liberal Protestants who worked to reconcile life “on earth as it is in heaven.” They turned away from concerns over individual salvation and other orthodox theological concerns and instead inculcated a social ethic that sought to use the modern state to equalize economic conditions. Pestritto observes that in one of his more moderate moments Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch called for the “public ownership of essential industries.” By following God’s unfolding plan, which history was revealing to mankind, human beings would someday experience the Eden that our ancestors had failed to maintain.

Pestritto concludes America Transformed by noting that, thanks to the Progressives’ handiwork, “citizens of two different regimes [are] occupying the same country.” The regime that today opposes that of the Founders is far different from what the original Progressives intended, but by uncoupling America from its natural rights foundations, they can justly be credited (or rather, blamed) for inaugurating our current crisis. Pestritto’s concise volume, the best available overview of progressive political thought and practice, will help Americans make sense of the stark divisions that confront us.

Mike Sabo is the editor of RealClear’s American Civics portal.

Photo: Lingbeek/iStock

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529).

 

Main Line Madness

Schools in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, adopt critical pedagogy—and face a parental backlash.

Michael Torres September 1, 2021 @ City Journal

Lower Merion Township’s beauty and wealth belie its proximity to the impoverished neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, which borders the township just east on Route 30. Being the first suburb on the Main Line, Lower Merion is home to many of the region’s wealthy residents. With a median income of nearly $140,000 per year has come an extraordinarily well-funded, high-achieving public school district.

The 83-percent-white township is also unabashedly progressive. The town has about 2.8 times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. The school board is run exclusively by Democrats. Local church lawns are filled with colorful T-shirts emblazoned with the names of black people killed by police. And shoppers at Suburban Square, a high-end local shopping center, are enveloped in the pride flags that decorate shops and sidewalks every few steps in the month of June.

But despite the town’s progressive vibe, a battle over local schools’ embrace of critical pedagogy is burgeoning. To try and understand this cultural conflict in a place where “wokeness” is part of the atmosphere, I spoke with public and private school parents and a person with experience on the school board, and I attended a meeting of local residents and Republican Party officials. All involved requested anonymity.

When local Republicans hosted a meeting in late June at a home not far from Lower Merion High School, about two dozen people stood in the living room, Rolls-Royces and Honda Civics alike parked along the ornate stone curb. Following a brief overview of local budget issues and political polling came the main issue of the evening: the school district’s left turn. Such terms as “race essentialism” and “transgenderism” were tossed around. Still, agreement on the origins and shape of the ideology that these people found themselves contending with remained elusive.

Finally, the last speaker picked up a children’s book that had been sitting on the coffee table: Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness. Its final page is “a contract binding you to whiteness,” telling white children that they’ve been permitted to “get stolen land, stolen riches, special favors” and to “mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of COLOR for the purpose of profit $.” The book then asks the child to sign on a red line, below which a note says: “Land, riches, and favors may be revoked at any time, for any reason.”

The book, the speaker explained, was taught to fourth- and fifth-graders. The attendees were taken aback.

Yet it became clear that despite universal agreement that something terrible was happening to local kids, this group of parents and residents—including an academic, a reverend, activists, lawyers, and party officials—remained divided, even dazed. Many had only recently heard of “critical race theory.” The proposed courses of action ranged from robust confrontation to “finding the good and removing the bad.”

But one small group of parents, some of whom attended the meeting of Republicans, have taken an organized approach—and cite incidents that pushed them in such a direction. A parent of an elementary student in the Lower Merion School District described one such incident that allegedly happened last fall. “We heard him sitting in the other room and he just kept saying ‘peach,’ ‘peach’,” the parent said. “I walked over to his desk, and they seemed to be on a Zoom class where there were circles with different colors on the screen, and the kids were announcing to the entire class what color they were. I just thought that was completely inappropriate, no matter what color my child is.” The parent showed me his note from the incident, which was partially drawn from Not My Idea.

A Lower Merion middle-school parent of devout Jewish faith detailed another event that allegedly happened this June. “When the kids got to school, they were given a questionnaire,” the parent said, and told to answer what race they associate with and what their sexual orientation is. The parent, discussing the same incident, recalls hearing that a student later made an announcement over the school PA system about the “goodness of being gay, transgender, or queer.” Incidents like these have created a sense of urgency among some parents, who have started to request curricula from the district and are discussing the path forward with peers.

But the school district is deeply invested in educating children through the lens of racial and gender identity, and its response to questions about its agenda has been defiant. On June 14, a man stood up during a largely empty Lower Merion school board meeting to ask “if critical race theory is part of the curriculum.” The school board’s vice president, Melissa Gilbert, responded, “I just want to say, I’m a professor at Temple University. I’m a critical race theorist as well as a feminist theorist. . . . While critical race theory as legal theory, and what subsequently came after that, is not being taught in our school per se as critical race theory, I do think we have an anti-racist curriculum . . . we certainly do not want to be teaching a racist curriculum.”

The man seemed frustrated and reiterated his question. “What I’m asking is, is it a required course in order to graduate here?” Gilbert said no, and her answer was echoed by director of school and community relations Amy Buckman in response to a request for comment. “CRT is neither academically nor developmentally appropriate or understandable for young learners,” Buckman said. “LMSD’s curriculum does teach cultural proficiency and strives to be culturally responsive.” The school district declined to comment on any of the specific incidents alleged in this article, calling them “hearsay.”

Gilbert and Buckman may be correct that the legal-academic writings of Derrick Bell or Gary Peller aren’t being taught in elementary schools, but their answers are an evasion. Consider that at the same school board meeting, the district’s new diversity, equity and inclusion policy was enacted—a document shot through with extreme concepts that began in twentieth-century academia and have trickled into the school district in recent years. A closer look at the history of Lower Merion schools shows the parents’ concerns to be well-founded.

According to a person with administration experience in the Lower Merion school district, the racial achievement gap had been an issue of discussion and concern for decades. The board was constantly troubled with the question of why, in a place with so much money, an achievement gap still remained.

At first, efforts to reduce the gap sought to improve academic achievement. In the 1990s, the district started a Committee to Address Race in Education. In 2004, it began working with the Delaware Valley Consortium for Excellence & Equity, a project run out of the University of Pennsylvania School of Education. While both programs distinguished students by race, each attempted to fix the problem by instilling “higher cognitive expectations for all students.”

That began to change around 2011, two years after Gilbert was elected to the school board. One bullet point in the district’s 2010 strategic plan began to overwhelm all others: “Conducted training on issues of student identity.” “Around 2011, they started cultural proficiency training for teachers,” said the person with district administration experience. By 2013, “Cultural Proficiency Action Plans” for elementary, middle, and high school were created—antecedents to today’s material. Teachers began meeting “once a month to discuss various topics related to socio-cultural identity,” an action plan reads; the high school plan instructed teachers to read the book Multiplication is for White People.

The goal of bringing lower-achieving students up to meet “higher cognitive expectations” was eventually shelved for racially distinguished expectations. A 2014 training called “Why Race and Culture Matter” discussed the work of University of California Riverside critical race theorist Tara J. Yosso, who argues that U.S. schooling merely attempts to “fill up” nonwhites with white culture and that education should conform to identity. Academic opportunities—like those for gifted Lower Merion math students to attend Villanova University—slowly disappeared, according to the person with district experience. And programs such as Welsh Valley Middle School’s “Points of View” program transformed from an effort to make interdisciplinary connections among subjects to teaching all subjects through “the lens of social justice.” This move earned one of the school’s social studies teachers an award from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, parents say, the district experienced a moral panic, and the infusion of education with identity politics accelerated. The administration created “affinity groups,” segregating students by race and other identities. High school elective courses have been themed by affinity. Books such as Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped have moved from an intra-faculty book club to “systemic integration” into the eighth-grade curriculum.

Teachers and administrators presided over the push. The district’s director of elementary education, Jennifer Gaudioso, helped to implement hyper-racial curricula with a goal of getting students to say, “I know that race is one important part of my identity, and talking about race is important.” She is also implementing a “Gender Expansive and Transgender Curriculum” with lessons for fifth- and sixth-graders.

The schools also took cues from political figures. Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf signed, and the state Department of Education implemented, an “equity and inclusion” policy, which Lower Merion’s policy resembles. The district’s equity policy uses resources provided by the Pennsylvania School Board Association, which now also provides an equity-themed podcast, webinars, and online forum for district discussions statewide. And lessons on “cultural competence” that underscore the fetishization of “difference” in terms of personal identity enjoy support from the National Education Association.

All this has culminated in Lower Merion teaching a contradictory hodgepodge of identity politics to young children. As relayed by a parent who reviewed and transcribed portions of the elementary-level cultural-competency curriculum (under the watchful eye of the assistant to the superintendent), proclamations such as the following are formulated for third-graders: “Race is an idea that is created by people to divide people into groups based upon physical and cultural differences. Racism is a part of our country’s history that we must learn to recognize so that we can stamp it out.” Lessons for students as young as kindergarten through sixth grade, on the other hand, teach that “we all have skin/race and our skin is all a different shade of brown,” and that “skin color is one way we are all different and special.” Kindergarteners present on the book Skin Again by Bell Hooks. Students throughout elementary school are made to profess the district’s version of empathy by talking about race and its personal and public importance.

Accompanying this top-down inculcation of identity politics is a mass reshaping of culture within the district. Teachers and students alike now police each other. One parent alleged that his son’s fourth-grade teacher asked each student to reveal whom their parents voted for after the 2016 election. “My son asked twice not to say, but the teacher forced him to.” When Trump sought to halt immigration from some Muslim-majority countries, the Lower Merion High School basketball team wore T-Shirts saying, in part, “I am a Muslim.” As one parent explained: “The regime of social pressure, that’s the new game.”

Three other parents alleged a recent incident in a history class in Lower Merion High School, having heard about it from their children. “The teacher, a white, female teacher, was discussing a new program on African American History,” one of the parents said. “A student interrupted and told her that she shouldn’t be discussing such the subject, a black person should.” The teacher, perhaps suddenly nervous about her value and authority due to her race, “broke down in tears,” the parent said.

A common theme emerged in my discussions with these parents. While each expressed a desire for their children to treat others with dignity, all felt that their sense of autonomy as parents had been violated, that their trust in public schools has been betrayed, and that their children are being used as pawns in a cultural revolution. Yet they feel surrounded by a web of organizations, from teachers’ unions to political parties, that are passively going along with—or actively supporting—that revolution.

Not wanting to jeopardize one’s social position can discourage action. The head of the local Republican committee, a parent pointed out, also serves as a trustee at the Baldwin School—an all-girls private school that has trumpeted its diversity, equity, and inclusion policy. “If you’re a lawyer with business in Philadelphia, you’re not going to fight for curriculum changes because you’d risk your business,” the parent said. “If you’re a trustee at a school that started teaching critical race theory and you’re more interested in that status, then you aren’t going to stir up trouble. And that same situation holds true all over Lower Merion.”

Surrounded by an unfavorable political environment and state education bureaucracy, parents have found that their only allies are one another. A local Chinese-American mom shared a survey of Chinese-American parents in Lower Merion, finding that most respondents did not support the Penn Wynne School’s Cultural Proficiency Plan and opposed the district’s holding events like BLM rallies without parents’ prior knowledge. She is now organizing local Chinese-American parents, hoping to explain to them what their kids are learning. Another group is sharing what it has learned about requesting curricula, questioning administrators, and potentially taking legal action.

Private school parents in similar environments have shared notes with these groups. “I grew up in a country that was very tribalized,” one private school parent said. “When my brother, who lives in New York City, called during the riots last year saying he was going to defend his store, I realized the time for sitting on the sidelines had ended and I volunteered to be on the DEI board at my kid’s school. . . . Just by being there and asking questions, it gave school leaders a bit more fortitude to say, ‘Hey that may be a bit too far,’” he said. “Then parents started hearing about us standing up and they started to say ‘thank you’ and even send their own letters to the school. Now, we feel like we are steering our way out of chaos and keeping the school from being sucked into what is truly insane.”

Parents across the country are engaging with their schools’ embrace of critical racial pedagogy, but in progressive locales like Lower Merion, pushback requires organization and cooperation among those who want the best for their kids. The move to insert divisive racial politics into American schools might inadvertently give Americans something to unite over.

The Jewish parent who had related the PA system incident concluded our conversation with another story. The parent’s child saw a student wearing a BLM shirt while being dropped off for school.

“Can I wear a t-shirt that says Jewish Lives Matter?” the child asked.

“No,” the parent replied.

When the child asked why, the parent replied, “Because I know what will happen.”

Michael Torres is the director of media at the Commonwealth Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @MindofTorres. Todd Shepherd, chief investigative reporter at Broad + Liberty, contributed to the research for this article.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

The Moralistic Corporation

Vivek Ramaswamy Daniel Kennelly August 26, 2021 @ City Journal

Vivek Ramaswamy is a biotech entrepreneur, founder, and executive chairman of Roviant Sciences, and author of Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. He recently spoke with City Journal associate editor Daniel Kennelly about the origins of the corporate embrace of “social justice” and why he believes there’s no place for politics in business.

How do you define “wokeism” in the book?

Wokeism is a belief system which holds that the social universe is governed by invisible power structures based on genetically inherited characteristics. This belief system makes a moral claim on those “empowered” to wake up to these invisible power structures and to correct injustices arising from them.

Critics often allege that wokeism is a form of Marxism. They have a point, but they’re off the mark. Like wokeism, Marxism was also based on the idea of invisible power structures governing social relationships, but Marxism posits that these power structures are based on economic relationships. By contrast, wokeism replaces economic power structures with genetically inherited ones.

So that’s the long version. In short, being “woke” means obsessing over race, gender, and sexual orientation. Maybe climate change, too. That’s probably the best definition I can give.

When (and why) did corporations begin to adopt this quasi-religion?

The fountainhead was the 2008 financial crisis. After that, corporations were viewed as the “bad guys,” and the old Left wanted to redistribute money from corporate fat cats to poor people. Agree or not, that’s what the old Left had to say.

But a newly ascendant wing of the Left—the new woke Left—had a different theory. To them, the real problem wasn’t economic injustice. It wasn’t poverty. Rather, it was racial injustice—and misogyny, bigotry, and so on.

That presented the opportunity of a generation for Wall Street and big business. If you’re Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street is a tough pill to swallow. But the new woke demands were easy: applaud “diversity and inclusion,” put some token minorities on your boards, and muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change after flying on a private jet to Davos.

They jumped at the opportunity. But they didn’t do it for free: their implicit demand was that the new Left look the other way when it came to leaving their power intact. And it worked for both sides. So in a nutshell, after 2008, a bunch of big banks got in bed with a bunch of woke millennials. Together, they birthed woke capitalism. And they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.

Soon, Silicon Valley did the same thing—censoring or “moderating” content that the woke Left didn’t want to see on the Internet. But in return, they expected the woke Left to demur when it came to leaving their monopoly power intact. The rest of corporate America then followed suit.

What is “stakeholder capitalism,” and what role does it play in the corporate embrace of woke politics?

“Stakeholder capitalism” is the idea that corporations should not only serve their shareholders but also advance other social causes. It used to be a challenge to the system. Today, it is the system. Milton Friedman might have worried that the expansion of politics to infect business would make businesses less efficient. I share that concern, but my principal concern is the inverse: that the expansion of business into politics represents a threat to the integrity of American democracy itself. Why? Because it demands that a small group of business elites use their economic power to settle political and moral questions that ought to be settled through the open exchange of ideas in our democracy. That might be how Old World Europe worked, but America represents the rejection of that elitist worldview.

“Stakeholder capitalism” is the intellectual progenitor of corporate wokeism. It was the response to Occupy Wall Street and the old Left: instead of taking the risk that the old Left would defang capitalism through the political process, stakeholder capitalism and corporate wokeism offered to address the concerns of the new Left not as an alternative to capitalism, but through capitalism itself.

The consequences are staggering, and I think we are only beginning to understand some of them. For example, once a corporation becomes a vector for advancing a social agenda, progressives don’t have a monopoly on pulling the strings. Sovereign nations—China, above all—have learned that they, too, can wield power as a nebulous “stakeholder” of a business under the new “stakeholder-centric” model. That’s one of the untold stories that I lay out in the book, and the details are downright frightening.

You write that the corporate dedication to social-justice causes is, for some, cynical and opportunistic—a modern form of “capitalist excess.” Yet you also regard it as one of today’s “defining challenges.” How does it threaten American democracy?

The idea that a small group of elites should settle normative questions behind closed doors is a cultural rejection of democracy. Capitalism works according to a one-dollar, one-vote system. That determines which products get voted to the top of Amazon’s bestseller lists, or which directors are selected to serve on the board of a corporation—and that’s okay. But democracy is supposed to work on a one-person, one-vote system, where each person’s voice and vote is unadjusted by the number of dollars that he or she controls in the marketplace. Stakeholder capitalism violates that principle by conflating market power with power properly exercised in the marketplace of ideas.

And democracy loses in another way. We live in a divided polity right now, and we depend on an apolitical private sector to bridge those divisions—whether we’re Democrat or Republican, black or white. Major League Baseball used to provide one of those apolitical sanctuaries. The NFL used to provide one of those sanctuaries. The workplace used to provide one of those sanctuaries. But as the private sector becomes politicized, we lose the solidarity that is itself a precondition for a thriving democracy.

How can we roll back the tide of corporate wokeism?

There’s no silver bullet. The solution requires a combination of legal solutions, policy solutions, and—most important of all—cultural solutions. In my book, I discuss solutions in all three categories. I view legal and policy solutions as symptomatic therapies, but what we really need in our country is a cultural cure—a revival of a shared American identity that runs so deep that it dilutes wokeism to irrelevance. What does it mean to be an American in the year 2021? I can’t remember a time when we more badly needed an answer to that question. The absence of an answer is the black hole at the center of our nation’s soul, and when you have a void that runs that deep, that’s when bad things start to fill it.

Today, corporations prey on our hunger for purpose and our moral insecurities to make an extra buck, much as a Virginia Slims manufacturer may have preyed on the adolescent insecurities of teenage girls in the 1990s. Banning corporate behaviors isn’t the answer. The real solution is to fill our moral hunger with more substantial fare. That’s really what the book is about.

Photo: akinbostanci/iStock

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

Do Masks Work?

A review of the evidence

 

Jeffrey H. Anderson August 11, 2021 @ City Journal

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then–surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.”

Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” 

About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials’ advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding. Then, on April 3, 2020, Adams announced that the CDC was changing its guidance and that the general public should hereafter wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.

Fast-forward 15 months. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work.” Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance handed down amid a spike in cases nationally caused by the Delta variant, are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status. The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.

The CDC asserts this even though its own statistics show that Covid-19 is not much of a threat to schoolchildren. Its numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related. Yet the CDC declares that schoolchildren, who learn in part from communication conveyed through facial expressions, should nevertheless hide their faces—and so should their teachers.

How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?

Since we are constantly told that the CDC and other public-health entities are basing their recommendations on science, it’s crucial to know what, specifically, has been found in various medical studies. Significant choices about how our republic should function cannot be made on the basis of science alone—they require judgment and the weighing of countless considerations—but they must be informed by knowledge of it.

In truth, the CDC’s, U.K.’s, and WHO’s earlier guidance was much more consistent with the best medical research on masks’ effectiveness in preventing the spread of viruses. That research suggests that Americans’ many months of mask-wearing has likely provided little to no health benefit and might even have been counterproductive in preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus.

It’s striking how much the CDC, in marshalling evidence to justify its revised mask guidance, studiously avoids mentioning randomized controlled trials. RCTs are uniformly regarded as the gold standard in medical research, yet the CDC basically ignores them apart from disparaging certain ones that particularly contradict the agency’s position. 

In a “Science Brief” highlighting studies that “demonstrate that mask wearing reduces new infections” and serving as the main public justification for its mask guidance, the CDC provides a helpful matrix of 15 studies—none RCTs. The CDC instead focuses strictly on observational studies completed after Covid-19 began. In general, observational studies are not only of lower quality than RCTs but also are more likely to be politicized, as they can inject the researcher’s judgment more prominently into the inquiry and lend themselves, far more than RCTs, to finding what one wants to find.

A particular favorite of the CDC’s, so much so that the agency put out a glowing press release on it and continues to give it pride of placement in its brief, is an observational (specifically, cohort) study focused on two Covid-positive hairstylists at a beauty salon in Missouri. The two stylists, who were masked, provided services for 139 people, who were mostly masked, for several days after developing Covid-19 symptoms. The 67 customers who subsequently chose to get tested for the coronavirus tested negative, and none of the 72 others reported symptoms.

This study has major limitations. For starters, any number of the 72 untested customers could have had Covid-19 but been asymptomatic, or else had symptoms that they chose not to report to the Greene County Health Department, the entity doing the asking. The apparent lack of spread of Covid-19 could have been a result of good ventilation, good hand hygiene, minimal coughing by the stylists, or the fact that stylists generally, as the researchers note, “cut hair while clients are facing away from them.” The researchers also observe that “viral shedding” of the coronavirus “is at its highest during the 2 to 3 days before symptom onset.” Yet no customers who saw the stylists when they were at their most contagious were tested for Covid-19 or asked about symptoms. Most importantly, this study does not have a control group. Nobody has any idea how many people, if any, would have been infected had no masks been worn in the salon. Late last year, at a gym in Virginia in which people apparently did not wear masks most of the time, a trainer tested positive for the coronavirus. As CNN reported, the gym contacted everyone whom the trainer had coached before getting sick—50 members in all—“but not one member developed symptoms.” Clearly, this doesn’t prove that not wearing masks prevents transmission.

Another CDC-highlighted study, by Rader et al., invited people across the country to answer a survey. The low (11 percent) response rate—including about twice as many women as men—indicated that the mix of respondents was hardly random. The study found that “a high percentage of self-reported face mask-wearing is associated with a higher probability of transmission control,” and “the highest percentage of reported mask wearers” are found, unsurprisingly, “along the coasts and southern border, and in large urban areas.” However, as the researchers note, “It is difficult to disentangle individuals’ engagement in mask-wearing from their adoption of other preventive hygiene practices, and mask-wearing might serve as a proxy for other risk avoidance behaviors not queried.” Moreover, achieving greater “transmission control” is not remotely the same thing as ensuring fewer deaths. For example, per capita, Utah is in the top ten in the nation in Covid-19 cases and the bottom ten in Covid-19 deaths, while Massachusetts is in the bottom half in cases and the top five in deaths.

An additional observational study, but one that the CDC does not reference in its brief, is a large, international Bayesian study by Leech, et al. It finds that mask-wearing by 100 percent of the population “corresponds to” a 24.6 percent reduction in transmission of the novel coronavirus. Mask mandates correspond to no decrease in transmission: “For mandates we see no reduction: 0.0 percent.” Like all observational studies, however, this study is ill-equipped to show causation, to separate out the effects of just one variable from among other, frequently related, ones.

Mask supporters often claim that we have no choice but to rely on observational studies instead of RCTs, because RCTs cannot tell us whether masks work or not. But what they really mean is that they don’t like what the RCTs show.

The randomized controlled trial dates, in a sense, to 1747, when Royal Navy surgeon James Lind divided seamen suffering from similar cases of scurvy into six pairs and tried different methods of treatment on each. Lind writes, “The consequence was, that the most sudden and visible good effects were perceived from the use of oranges and lemons.”

The RCT eventually became firmly established as the most reliable way to test medical interventions. The following passage, from Abdelhamid Attia, an M.D. and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Cairo University in Egypt, conveys its dominance:

The importance of RCTs for clinical practice can be illustrated by its impact on the shift of practice in hormone replacement therapy (HRT). For decades HRT was considered the standard care for all postmenopausal, symptomatic and asymptomatic women. Evidence for the effectiveness of HRT relied always on observational studies[,] mostly cohort studies. But a single RCT that was published in 2002 . . . has changed clinical practice all over the world from the liberal use of HRT to the conservative use in selected symptomatic cases and for the shortest period of time. In other words, one well conducted RCT has changed the practice that relied on tens, and probably hundreds, of observational studies for decades.

A randomized controlled trial divides participants into different groups on a randomized basis. At least one group receives an “intervention,” or treatment, that is generally tested against a control group not receiving the intervention. The twofold strength of an RCT is that it allows researchers to isolate one variable—to test whether a given intervention causes an intended effect—while at the same time making it very hard for researchers to produce their own preferred outcomes.

This is true at least so long as an RCT’s findings are based on “intention-to-treat” analysis, whereby all participants are kept in the treatment group to which they were originally assigned and none are excluded from the analysis, regardless of whether they actually received the intended treatment. Eric McCoy, an M.D. at the University of California, Irvine, explains that intention-to-treat analysis avoids bias and “preserves the benefits of randomization, which cannot be assumed when using other methods of analysis.”

Such other methods of analysis include subgroup, multivariable, and per-protocol analysis. Subgroup analysis is susceptible to “cherry-picking”—as researchers hunt for anything showing statistical significance—or to being swayed by random chance. In one famous example, aspirin was found to help prevent fatal heart attacks, but not in the subgroups where patients’ astrological signs were Gemini or Libra.

“Multivariable analysis,” writes Marlies Wakkee, an M.D. and Ph.D. at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, “only adjusts for measured confounding”—that which a researcher decides is worth examining. (Confounders are extra variables that affect the analysis; for example, eating ice cream may be found to correlate with sunburns, but heat is a confounding variable influencing both.) She adds, “This is a significant difference compared to randomized controlled trials, where the randomization process results in an equal distribution of all potential confounders, known and unknown.”

Per-protocol analysis departs from randomization by basically allowing participants to self-select into, or out of, an intervention group. McCoy writes, “Empirical evidence suggests that participants who adhere [to research protocols] tend to do better than those who do not adhere, regardless of assignment to active treatment or placebo.” In other words, per-protocol analysis is more likely to suggest that an intervention, even a fake one, worked. Of these three departures from intention-to-treat analysis, per-protocol analysis is perhaps the most extreme.

With these different methods of analysis in mind, it becomes easier to evaluate the 14 RCTs, conducted around the world, that have tested the effectiveness of masks in reducing the transmission of respiratory viruses. Of these 14, the two that have directly tested “source control”—the oft-repeated claim that wearing a mask benefits others—are a good place to start.

A 2016 study in Beijing by MacIntyre, et al. that claimed to find a possible benefit of masks did not prove very informative, as only one person in the control group—and one in the mask group—developed a laboratory-confirmed infection. Much more illuminating was a 2010 study in France by Canini, et al., which randomly placed sick people, or “index patients,” and their household contacts together into either a mask group or a no-mask control group. The authors “observed a good adherence to the intervention,” meaning that the index patients generally wore the furnished three-ply masks as intended. (No one else was asked to wear them.) Within a week, 15.8 percent of household contacts in the no-mask control group and 16.2 percent in the mask group developed an “influenza-like illness” (ILI). So, the two groups were essentially dead even, with the sliver of an advantage observed in the control group not being statistically significant. The authors write that the study “should be interpreted with caution since the lack of statistical power prevents us to draw formal conclusion regarding effectiveness of facemasks in the context of a seasonal epidemic.” However, they state unequivocally, “In various sensitivity analyses, we did not identify any trend in the results suggesting effectiveness of facemasks.”

With the two RCTs that directly tested source control providing essentially no support for the claim that wearing a mask benefits others, what about RCTs that test the combination of source control and wearer protection? By dividing participants into a hand-hygiene group, a hand-hygiene group that also wore masks, and a control group, three RCTs allow us to see whether the addition of masks (worn both by the sick person and others) provided any benefit over hand hygiene alone.

A 2010 study by Larson, et al. in New York found that those in the hand-hygiene group were less likely to develop any symptoms of an upper respiratory infection (42 percent experienced symptoms) than those in the mask-plus-hand-hygiene group (61 percent). This statistically significant finding suggests that wearing a mask actually undermines the benefits of hand hygiene.

A multivariable analysis of this same study found a significant difference in secondary attack rates (the rate of transmission to others) between the mask-plus-hands group and the control group. On this basis, the authors maintain that mask-wearing “should be encouraged during outbreak situations.” However, this multivariable analysis also found significantly lower rates in crowded homes—“i.e., more crowded households had less transmission”—which tested at a higher confidence level. Thus, to the extent that this multivariable analysis provided any support for masks, it provided at least as much support for crowding.

Two other studies found no statistically significant differences between their mask-plus-hands and hands-only groups. A 2011 study in Bangkok by Simmerman, et al. observed very similar results for both groups. A CDC-funded 2009 study in Hong Kong by Cowling, et al. observed that the hands-only group generally did better than the mask-plus-hands group, but not to a statistically significant degree. Subgroup analysis by Cowling, et al., limited to interventions started within 36 hours of the onset of symptoms, found that the mask-plus-hands group beat the control group to a statistically significant degree in one measure, while the hands-only group beat the control group to a statistically significant degree in two measures. Summarizing this study, Canini writes that “no additional benefit was observed when facemask [use] was added to hand hygiene by comparison with hand hygiene alone.”

So, if masks don’t improve on hand hygiene alone, what about masks versus nothing?

Various RCTs have studied this question, with evidence of masks’ effectiveness proving sparse at best. Aside from a 2009 study in Japan by Jacobs, et al.—which found that those in the mask group were significantly more likely to experience headaches and that “face mask use in health care workers has not been demonstrated to provide benefit”—only two RCTs have produced statistically significant findings in intention-to-treat analysis, and one of those studies contradicted itself.

The previously mentioned 2011 study in Bangkok by Simmerman, et al. found that the secondary attack rate of ILI was twice as high in the mask-plus-hand-hygiene group (18 percent) as in the control group (9 percent), a statistically significant difference. (The ILI rate was 17 percent in the hand-hygiene-only group.) Finding essentially the same thing in multivariable analysis, the researchers wrote that, relative to the control group, the odds ratios for both the mask-plus-hands group and the hands-only group “were twofold in the opposite direction from the hypothesized protective effect.”

Subsequently, a small 2014 study—with 164 participants—by Barasheed, et al. of Australian pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, staying in close quarters in tents, found that significantly fewer people in the mask group developed an ILI than in the control group (31 percent to 53 percent). Unlike the exact fever specifications utilized in other RCTs, however, this study accepted self-reporting of “subjective” fever in determining whether someone had an ILI. Lab tests revealed opposite results, with twice as many participants having developed respiratory viruses in the mask group as in the control group. These lab-test findings were not statistically significant; still, the lab tests’ greater reliability makes it far from clear that the masks in this study provided any genuine benefit.

Other RCTs found no statistically significant benefit from masks in intention-to-treat analysis. A 2008 pilot study by Cowling et al. in Hong Kong observed that secondary attack rates, using the CDC’s definition of ILI, were twice as high in the mask group (8 percent) as in the hand hygiene (4 percent) or control (4 percent) groups, but these observed differences were not statistically significant.

Other methods of analysis, deviating from intention-to-treat analysis, found the following.

A per-protocol analysis of a 2009 study in Sydney by MacIntyre, et al. found a significant effect when combining the surgical-mask group with a group wearing N95 hospital respirators. However, the authors write, a “causal link cannot be demonstrated because adherence was not randomized.”

In subgroup analysis of 2010 and 2012 studies in Michigan by Aiello, et al., limited to the final several weeks of the respective studies, each study’s mask-plus-hands group had significantly lower rates of ILI than its control group, while its mask-only group did not. In 2010, the results for the mask-only group also hinted at a slight benefit, reducing ILI by an observed (but not statistically significant) 8 percent to 10 percent. In 2012, the authors concluded, “Masks alone did not provide a benefit.” They nevertheless recommended the combination of mask use and hand hygiene, despite not having tested whether that combination works better than hand hygiene alone.

A multivariable analysis of a smallish (218 participants) 2012 study in Germany by Suess, et al. found that combining the mask group and mask-plus-hands group, while limiting analysis to interventions begun within 48 hours, produced a finding of significantly lower levels of lab-confirmed influenza (but not of ILI) in that combined group (but not in either group separately). The authors, from Berlin, recommended masking and hand hygiene, while opining, “Concerns about acceptability and tolerability of the interventions should not be a reason against their recommendation.”

The only RCT to test mask-wearing’s specific effectiveness against Covid-19 was a 2020 study by Bundgaard, et al. in Denmark. This large (4,862 participants) RCT divided people between a mask-wearing group (providing “high-quality” three-layer surgical masks) and a control group. It took place at a time (spring 2020) when Denmark was encouraging social distancing but not mask use, and 93 percent of those in the mask group wore the masks at least “predominately as recommended.” The study found that 1.8 percent of those in the mask group and 2.1 percent of those in the control group became infected with Covid-19 within a month, with this 0.3-point difference not being statistically significant.

This study—the first RCT on Covid-19 transmission—apparently had difficulty getting published. After the study’s eventual publication, Vinay Prasad, an M.D. at the University of California, San Francisco, described it as “thoughtful,” “useful,” and “well done,” but noted (with criticism), “Some have turned to social media to ask why a trial that may diminish enthusiasm for masks and may be misinterpreted was published in a top medical journal.”

Meanwhile, the CDC website portrays the Danish RCT (with its 4,800 participants) as being far less relevant or important than the observational study of Missouri hairdressers with no control group, dismissing the former as “inconclusive” and “too small” while praising the latter, amazingly, as “showing that wearing a mask prevented the spread of infection”—when it showed nothing of the sort.

Each of the RCTs discussed so far, 13 in all, examined the effectiveness of surgical masks, finding little to no evidence of their effectiveness and some evidence that they might actually increase viral transmission. None of these 13 RCTs examined the effectiveness of cloth masks. “Cloth face coverings,” according to former CDC director Robert Redfield, “are one of the most powerful weapons we have.”

One RCT tested these masks that so many high-profile public-health officials have touted. This “first RCT of cloth masks,” in the trial’s own words (it is apparently still the only one), was a 2015 study by MacIntyre, et al. in Hanoi, Vietnam. A relatively large study, with over 1,100 participants, it tested cloth masks against surgical masks and did not feature a no-mask control group. The trial tested the protection of health-care workers, instructing them to wear a two-layer cloth mask at all times on every shift (“except in the toilet or during tea or lunch breaks”) across four weeks.

The study found that those in the cloth-mask group were 13 times more likely (2.28 percent to 0.17 percent) to develop an influenza-like illness than those in the surgical-mask group—a statistically significant difference. The trial also lab-tested penetration rates and found that while surgical masks were “poor” at preventing the penetration of particles—letting 44 percent through—cloth masks were “extremely poor,” letting 97 percent through. (N95 hospital respirators let 0.1 percent through.)

The authors write that wearing a cloth mask “may potentially increase the infection risk” for health-care workers. “The virus may survive on the surface of the facemasks,” they explain, while “a contaminated cloth mask may transfer pathogen from the mask to the bare hands of the wearer,” which could lead to hand hygiene being “compromised.” As for double-masking, the authors write, “Observations during SARS suggested double-masking . . . increased the risk of infection because of moisture, liquid diffusion and pathogen retention.” Absent further research, they conclude, “cloth masks should not be recommended.”

MacIntyre and several other authors of this study, perhaps under pressure from the CDC or other entities with similar agendas, released what the CDC calls a “follow up study,” in September 2020. This follow-up isn’t really a study at all, certainly not a new RCT, yet the CDC cites it favorably while disparaging the original study, which, the CDC asserts, “had a number of limitations.” This 2020 follow-up pretty much amounts to publishing the finding that when hospitals washed the cloth masks, health-care workers were only about half as likely to get infected as when they washed the cloth masks themselves. Still, the 2020 publication says, “We do not recommend cloth masks for health workers,” much as the 2015 one said.

Other reviews of the evidence have been mixed but generally have come to similar conclusions. Certain masking advocates admit that the RCT evidence is “inconclusive” but cite other forms of evidence that have held up poorly. A study for Cochrane Reviews by Jefferson, et al. that examines 13 of the 14 RCTs discussed herein (all but the Denmark Covid-19 study) notes “uncertainty about the effects of face masks” and writes that “the pooled results of randomised trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks during seasonal influenza.” Meantime, a study by Perski, et al., which performed a Bayesian analysis on 11 of the 14 RCTs discussed herein, concluded that when it comes to “the benefits or harms of wearing face masks . . . the scientific evidence should be considered equivocal.” They write, “Available evidence from RCTs is equivocal as to whether or not wearing face masks in community settings results in a reduction in clinically- or laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections.”

In sum, of the 14 RCTs that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless—whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.

Hiram Powers, the nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptor, keenly observed, “The eye is the window to the soul, the mouth the door. The intellect, the will, are seen in the eye; the emotions, sensibilities, and affections, in the mouth.” The best available scientific evidence suggests that the American people, credulously trusting their public-health officials, have been blocking the door to the soul without blocking the transmission of the novel coronavirus.

Jeffrey H. Anderson served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021, and is co-creator of the Anderson & Hester Rankings, part of college football’s Bowl Championship Series formula from 1998 to 2014.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

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