William A. Donohue

Mohammad Anwar, 66, was recently driving his Uber Eats car in Washington, D.C. when two young black girls, 13 and 15, took out a stun gun and tased him. The carjackers took command and drove away, leaving the immigrant from Pakistan hanging on, wedged between the door and the driver’s seat. After he was flung from the car, the automobile rolled over and crashed into two other cars. CNN called it an “accident.” The cops called it murder. They copped a plea.

This story is bad enough without adding anything to it, but my reason for mentioning it has to do with something less important, though nonetheless disturbing. After the car crashed, one of the girls was upset, but not about what she and her friend just did. She was upset because she thought she lost her phone. There are pictures of her literally walking nonchalantly past the victim’s body looking for her phone.

We are a nation obsessed with our phones. This is especially true of young people. When I was a kid, phones served one purpose: they were vehicles of conversation. Now they are used for entertainment as well. This is a desire that can never be satisfied.

It’s a mania. What else can we call it?

There are news stories of people walking into trains because they are staring at their phone. They have fallen off of cliffs because of this plague. Many more have caused car accidents.

When exiting an elevator, it often happens that some phone maniac walks directly into me. This also happens when I walk across the street in New York City. I’m not a small guy—I’m 6’2″ with broad shoulders. Yet people keep walking into me. Most of the time they’re young women looking down at their phone. Many are also wearing earphones, compounding their distraction. They just have to be entertained.

I even saved some fool’s life a few years ago. He was walking across a busy intersection, looking down at his phone, when a car came right at him. Lucky for him, I have a loud voice and he heard me scream. He stopped on a dime. Think he thanked me? Not a chance. He just kept on walking (with phone in hand, of course).

When I go to Washington, D.C., I take the train. Our office is across the street from Penn Station so it makes sense to take Amtrak instead of flying out of La Guardia. I always get there early so I can get a seat in the “Quiet Car”; no phones or loud talking are allowed. Otherwise I would go mad.

The same is true of the Long Island Rail Road. I take it to and from work every day. However, there is only one “Quiet Car,” and unlike Amtrak, it is always the last car, making it a less attractive alternative. At least once a week, I have to get up and move to another car because of someone speaking loudly. On more than one occasion I have resorted to yelling at them. Others on the train are appreciative.

I like pubs and restaurants. Pubs are short for “public houses,” or places where people congregate to enjoy alcoholic beverages. Ideally, they are places where people go to laugh and partake in conversation. In short, they are forums where sociability excels. Back in the day, that is.

Now it is commonplace to see young men and women sit at the bar, or at a table, and never speak. They are on their phone. It never ceases to amaze me. They make a point of meeting their friends at a specific pub at a specific time, and as soon as they get there they start talking to someone on their phone who isn’t there. And when they meet with that person, he or she gets the same treatment. The game is ongoing.

Seeing family members sitting at a table in a restaurant and not speaking to each other is also commonplace. Father, mother and children are all on their phone, oblivious to one another. What was the point of going out for dinner? Just to eat? The only time they speak is when they need the salt and pepper.

As a sociologist, I find this to be troubling. We are so self-absorbed that we have lost what it means to be a social animal. Social animals interact, they engage, they dialogue—they don’t ignore their family and friends.

As noted, the self-absorption often takes the form of being entertained. Phones feed this desire—it functions as a need for many—making us more and more dependent on technology to fill our emptiness. In extreme cases, this qualifies as an addiction, leaving the individual socially retarded.

Social media and video games only make our insularity worse. The anonymity they afford is a national problem, one that can only be cured by insisting on something novel: We need to start talking to each other. And we need to do it live and without dependence on contraptions of any kind.

William A. Donohue

Last December, I told staff members that I don’t think Larry King or Rush Limbaugh will be with us much longer. From what I had been reading, their days were numbered. Regrettably, my concerns were validated. Larry died in January and Rush passed away the next month.

I dealt with both of these men for many years, and regard them as media titans.

They had a few things in common: Larry was the greatest TV interviewer of all time and Rush was the greatest radio commentator of all time. They also had a few things in common in their personal lives: Larry had seven wives; Rush had four. But Larry was liberal, and Rush was conservative. Neither was Catholic, however that didn’t matter to me: what mattered was their kindness and support.

When I was interviewed for this job in April 1993, I was in competition with three other persons, all of whom had better experience in running organizations than I had. But I was a professor, an author and a TV personality. The search committee saw tapes of my TV interviews and were impressed. Among the interviews they previewed were some that Larry hosted. So in an indirect way, Larry was instrumental in getting me this job.

Why was Larry the best interviewer of all time? Because he did something that almost no one does today on TV: he listened. His show was never about him—it was about his guests. He actually held a conversation and allowed his guests to talk. His next line of questions were based on something his guests just said; they were not based on questions prepared by his producer. That’s why he was never seen reading from index cards.

When the show was over, I occasionally spent time with Larry, usually talking about the subjects we had just discussed. While we were of two different minds, he was never acerbic or condescending, the way too many in this business are today. He was a gentleman who appreciated honesty and an informed opinion.

While Rush played no role in helping me land this job, once I took over, he got the word out about the Catholic League; he reached an audience I could never reach. On many occasions throughout the years, someone would call our office saying Rush just gave us a rousing endorsement. Unfortunately, I was almost always working when he was on the air and did not have a chance to hear him. But I sure appreciated his support.

I knew there was something special about Rush before he made it really big. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, while driving from Pittsburgh, where I lived, back home to New York City, where my mom and sister lived, I listened to Bob Grant on WABC radio. He was the kingpin of radio at the time. Following him was Rush. I said to family and friends, “Watch this guy—he is going to be bigger than Grant.”

Rush and I never met, though when he interviewed me at length in 2014, it felt as though we had. He featured the interview in the April edition of The Limbaugh Letter. He was easy going and was quite humble.

“I wanted to talk to you for the longest time,” he said, “and I’m really appreciative that you’ve been able to make this time here. You intrigue me. I’ve been watching you for years on TV. I don’t think there’s an advocate who does it better, and does it in a way that’s not overtly devout or religious.” I was blown away by what he said.

Larry and Rush were refreshingly unscripted. Of course, they came mentally prepared and knew exactly what they wanted to convey. But unlike so many members of the chattering class today, they didn’t repeat themselves endlessly, and they never lost their spontaneity.

The rap on Larry was that he threw softball questions. It would be more accurate to say that he never felt it necessary to insult his guests. This explains why he could secure some blue chip guests who were known to turn down TV interviews. That’s why his competitors were jealous.

The rap on Rush was that he was too judgmental. Typically, those who made this accusation had no problem listening to the most judgmental commentators in the world, provided they were on the same side. In other words, they objected to his conservative listeners. What really drove them mad—and this was part of his genius—was his ability to reach an enormous audience of men and women who did not necessarily think of themselves as conservative, but realized they were after listening to him.

If I had to name one quality that Larry and Rush had in common that explains their greatness it would be their education: they were both high school graduates (Larry never attended college and Rush dropped out after two semesters).

To be sure, college has its merits, but it can also stifle creativity. No institution breeds more cognitive conformity than higher education, and this is especially true of the humanities and social sciences. Fortunately, Larry and Rush were never held hostage.

William A. Donohue

In the December edition of “President’s Desk,” I wrote a piece titled, “Buckle Your Seat Belts—Again.” I referenced a “President’s Desk” essay I wrote in December 2008 wherein I noted that we were smack right in the middle of a culture war. I added, “the culture war is about to explode.”

My point was that the victory by Barack Obama and Joe Biden would embolden the left, and that would not bode well for Catholics. Whenever progressives take command of Washington, their influence is felt way beyond the Beltway. This time around, with Biden in the White House, I predicted matters would get worse.

Looks like I was right. Just read this issue of Catalyst for evidence.

North Dakota lawmakers wasted no time sponsoring a bill that would break the seal of the Confessional. We wasted no time marshalling our resources, asking our base of email supporters to jam their email accounts. We pushed back hard and they eventually capitulated. But the fact that in 2021 we are still fighting to protect the sacraments of the Catholic Church from government bullies is not a good sign.

Similarly, it was not a good sign when pro-abortion protesters crashed St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio during a pro-life Mass. Columbus Bishop Robert Brennan, who was the celebrant, acted responsibly, as did the local police; the church-busters were quickly removed. But again, why are we faced with such a Nazi-like event in 2021?

Twitter has a reputation of censoring conservative voices on the internet. Over the winter, it censored Catholic World Report (CWR), a reputable Catholic publication, for the crime of noting that Biden appointed “a biological man” who identifies as a transgender woman to a senior health post in his administration. That was true. Moreover, there was nothing hateful, as Twitter charged, about the article. But its description of the sex of the official was apparently too much for the tolerant ones at Twitter.

Ironically, our defense of the publication did not lead Twitter to cancel us. Maybe that is because I quoted the pope saying gender ideology is “demonic.” Do they really want to take on the Holy Father?

We were the only Catholic organization to come to the defense of CWR. We did more than that—we won. Literally three hours after we asked our email subscribers to contact Twitter, CWR had its account unlocked.

Catholics get blamed for everything. When a Oklahoma Protestant Christian school expelled an eight-year-old for telling another student that she had a crush on her, a gay media outlet from the United Kingdom reported that it was a Catholic school. False. It was just assumed that if there was something that homosexual activists did not like, the culprit was probably Catholic. We forced them to correct the record.

It would help if Catholics in public office spoke up about these issues. But we don’t have much in the way of leadership.

As noted in this issue of Catalyst, almost all Catholic Democrats in the Congress are pro-abortion. President Biden, as everyone knows, is rabidly pro-abortion, and he, too, claims a Catholic status. Where does this leave Catholics? How can we depend on Catholics in the House, the Senate, and the White House to defend Catholics when they won’t defend the right to life?

I am happy to note that many bishops have spoken up. Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, president of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, expressed his dismay with President Biden for his executive orders on abortion. Kansas City Archbishop Joseph Naumann and Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the New York Archdiocese have also been outspoken; many others have as well.

For their courage, these bishops were attacked by the National Catholic Reporter, a rogue media outlet that is about as Catholic as the Mafia. Regrettably, this publication is popular with dissident Catholic faculty on college campuses, and is a favorite among some staffers at the bishops’ conference. This is one more reason why otherwise good Catholics in the public eye are reluctant to speak out: they have been intimidated by delinquent members of the Catholic media.

The assault on free speech, duly cited in this issue, is at an all-time high. We are dealing with a phenomenon much more invidious than McCarthyism. To prove this point, consider that in 1996, Nicholas von Hoffman, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, examined recently released archival information about the McCarthy era and, despite misgivings about the Wisconsin senator, concluded that he was “still closer to the truth [about Communist infiltration in Washington] than those who ridiculed him.”

We don’t need to be lectured today about blacklisting during the McCarthy era. That was child’s play when compared to the censorial powers of Apple, Amazon, Google and Twitter. These Big Tech companies, which are strongly tied to the Biden administration, have censored many of those who hold to traditional moral values, and that certainly includes Catholic organizations.

We at the Catholic League have no options. We either fight back or we close up shop. But if Covid didn’t kill us, nothing will.

It is a myth to maintain that the First Amendment guarantees the right of the people to assemble. It does not. It guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” The adverb was penned by Madison to disavow claims that the aggrieved have a right to express themselves any way they want. Unfortunately, his admonition is rejected in many quarters these days. Indeed, thuggery is chic.

The year 2020 will be remembered for many things, most of which are not worth celebrating. Of all the ugly events that happened, the non-stop protests that were anything but peaceful are among the worst.

Unlike the Catholic League, which always obtains a permit for its demonstrations (we even had a permit for the display of our nativity scene in Central Park), the Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters simply took to the streets, ignoring social distancing norms. They were masters of violence: they killed innocent people, assaulted police officers, burned buildings, ransacked churches, and stole everything in sight. Worse, the mayors and governors allowed them to do so with impunity.

Last spring BLM supporters spray-painted obscenities on the exterior wall of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Statues of St. Junípero Serra were toppled by left-wing activists in many places, especially in California. This went on for several months.

In June, the Catholic Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis was set on fire. Catholic churches near the University of Mississippi were vandalized. The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver was trashed. Windows were smashed in Dallas at St. Jude Chapel and at the Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville. Swastikas and anti-Catholic scribbling was found on the graves of several Dominican friars on the campus of Providence College.

In July, a statue of Our Blessed Mother was set on fire in Boston and another statue of the Virgin Mary was vandalized in Queens. In Ocala, Florida, a man crashed his minivan into a Catholic church while parishioners gathered for Mass; he then poured gasoline in the church’s foyer and set the church ablaze. San Gabriel Mission Church in Los Angeles County was set on fire, destroying parts of the 249-year-old iconic structure. Vandals were charged with a hate crime after they partially disfigured Mission San Jose, a church in Fremont, California.

Also in July, Sacred Heart Catholic school in Gallup, New Mexico was broken into and a statue of Jesus was vandalized. A statue of Jesus was beheaded at Good Shepherd Catholic church in South Florida. “Satanic” and “anarchist” symbols were found on the church door at St. Joseph’s Church in New Haven. In August, Bibles were burned in Portland.

Even worse are those who justify the violence.

Two left-wing geniuses, Robin D.G. Kelley, an historian at UCLA, and R.H. Lossin, whose Ph.D. in Communications is from Columbia, both wrote lengthy defenses last June about the violent Antifa and BLM mobs.

Kelley wrote in the New York Times that because “we are in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, looting should not surprise anyone.” But the looters stole toasters, not bread. They also helped themselves to pricey sneakers and jewelry, neither of which is edible. No matter, he chided the public for “obsessing over looting.”

Lossin wrote her screed in the pages of the Nation, a Stalinist media outlet. “Property destruction is not synonymous with the violence that is being protested,” she opines. “Plateglass windows don’t bleed.” Neither does her laptop. But it’s a sure bet she would object if a sledgehammer were taken to it. She is also no fan of non-violence. “The notion that nonviolence is tactically more effective…has not only been proven wrong over the past week by sheer numbers; it cannot be historically supported.”

It is not just Antifa and BLM who are a menace. Pro-abortion protesters are just as vicious.

The New York Times did a news story in December on those who demonstrate outside abortion clinics. The difference between our side and theirs was stark. A film clip of what happened outside an abortion clinic (euphemistically called a “women’s health center”) in Charlotte, North Carolina showed a pro-abortion contingent reciting “the lyrics of Cardi B and Thee Stallion’s bawdy hit ‘WAP,’ while an opponent of abortion read the Bible outside the clinic.”

I will not print the lyrics to “WAP.” Trust me, it is the most filthy song ever written. Singing it while celebrating the killing of innocent unborn babies, however, makes perfect sense: The nature of the protest, after all, is unspeakably obscene.

Our side prays. Their side taunts. That about sums it up.

Left-wing activists could not get away with taunting pro-life protesters, or with smashing Catholic edifices and symbols, if the authorities did their job.

The average American is a good person. Regrettably, too many of our political, economic and cultural elites are not. If they acted more like average Americans, thuggery would not be so chic.

Here is a portion of how I began my “President’s Desk” essay in the December 2008 edition of Catalyst.

“We have been in the throes of a culture war for the past half-century, but never has it been more imperative to buckle your seat belts until now. Quite frankly, the culture war is about to explode.

“The culture war pits traditionalists against modernists. To be more specific, it pits those who ascribe to the timeless values that inhere in faith, family and country against those who reject faith and family—traditionally understood—and who equate patriotism with jingoism.

“Who are these people who comprise the ranks of the modernists? They are people so thoroughly secularist that they literally loathe religion.

“Where do we find such persons? Many work in Hollywood, the media, the universities, the arts and in the non-profit sectors of the economy.

“We’re in for it. Why? Because the modernists feel emboldened after the November election. Please don’t misunderstand me—I am not blaming Barack Obama for all of what is about to happen. I am blaming many of those in the occupations I cited who see in his victory a golden opportunity to wage war on traditionalists. They are already revving it up; just wait until they kick it into high gear.”

Substitute Joe Biden for Barack Obama, and it’s déjà vu all over again. Only worse.

How could it be worse? Because those who are coming to work for Biden are coming in a fit of rage. This was not true of Obama’s supporters. To be sure, Biden may not be filled with hate, but many of those drawn to him certainly are. Inspired by the “Squad,” these AOC-America haters are coming to revolutionize, not reform.

We at the Catholic League will keep our eyes on three cabinet posts: the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Look for school choice reforms to die a quick death. Look for religious liberty to come under attack. Look for Catholic hospitals and non-profits to be weighed down under aggressive litigation.

It is what Biden symbolizes, and galvanizes, beyond the Beltway that should also concern people of faith. The most bigoted anti-Catholics in the nation are about to go on a tear.

Just consider what we are dealing with now, at a time when the current administration is staffed largely by traditionalists.

As this issue of Catalyst notes, the education establishment denied the Catholic League the opportunity to pay for a pro-Christmas message. Cartoon shows like “Family Guy” treat Catholics like dirt. The Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to the right of Catholic foster care programs to abide by Catholic strictures. Watch for issues like these to escalate.

The hatred that we saw spill into the streets this past spring, summer and fall is not going away. If anything, the thugs are emboldened. They started with tearing down statues of iconic Americans, and now they will try to tear down our institutions. For all the talk about unity, left-wing activists are masters of sowing distrust and disharmony. It’s who they are.

Crippling the family has always been the dream of those who have set their sights on our Judeo-Christian heritage. Why? Those on the left live for one reason: power. They want to control our thinking and our behavior. They cannot do so if we pay homage to our family, not the state. For the same reason, they go after religion, and in this country, the bulls eye is the Catholic Church.

How bad will it get? Under Obama-Biden, they attacked the Little Sisters of the Poor and other Catholic non-profits. Now the goal will be the Equality Act. If enacted, it would gut religious autonomy, making religious institutions subservient to the state. In effect, it would complete the secularization of society, allowing us to pray in church, and not much more.

Regarding this last point, the masters of intolerance, who always finger people of faith as the intolerant ones, like to brag how magnanimous they are in allowing us to pray. They say they will not interfere with this right. Of course, they are giving us nothing. Our rights are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence: they come from God, not politicians. Besides, how would they stop us from praying anyway?

I am not a pessimist, although these days it is a struggle to be optimistic. Yes, the country is deeply divided, but there are signs from the election results that many Americans are just as fed up as you and I are. They’ve had it with the violence, the hatred, the lies, the political correctness, and the assaults on our customs and traditions.

The good news is that there are no iron laws of history: the status quo is reversible. We are not impotent. Moreover, our side, that of the traditionalists, is as big and as energized as the other side.

The Catholic League will not disappoint you. We’re in it for keeps. So buckle your seat belts—again.

Merry Christmas!

William A. Donohue

To prove his own existence, Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” To prove their own identity, we now have people saying, “I identify as X, therefore I am X.”

In my lifetime, never have I seen more intellectual dishonesty than exists today. Many live in a world of fiction. Adult men and women, especially those drugged by higher education—they are overwhelmingly white—are playing a child’s game of pretend. They pretend to be someone they manifestly are not.

Males claim to be female and females claim to be males. Not too long ago, they would be placed in an asylum. Now they are running diversity programs on Wall Street.

I recently had to fill out a form before I underwent a routine medical procedure. Most of the questions were unexceptional. But there was one page—an entire page—that asked questions about my gender. [This was factually incorrect: gender refers to socially learned roles deemed appropriate for men and women. I should have been asked about my sex.]

One of the options I was given was “non-binary,” meaning neither male nor female. Another option I had was to check off “intersex, genderqueer or gender non-conforming.”

At least the guy who pretends he is a woman may get a beer at half price on ladies night. What do these poor folks qualify for?

After answering that I am male, one of the questions asked whether I identify as a male. Another asked what pronouns I would like the medical staff to use when speaking to me. I was given choices such as “she/her, he/him/they/them.” I have never met a “them” and would not care to meet such a creature in a restroom.

At this point, I refused to cooperate. I put a big X across the page, adding that this is all nonsense. Two healthcare persons saw this and just smiled. They knew it was nonsense too. But they did not want to lose their job by admitting that those who insist on this form are certifiably insane.

If only they were certified as insane. Then we could get them committed. Unfortunately, those responsible for this madness have graduate degrees. They are mind-control freaks. They want us to affirm their sick politics. Moreover, they have infested the vast majority of professions throughout the nation. The corporate boys and the government bureaucrats—taking their cues from screwed-up educators—are attempting to shove down our throats this preposterous self-identity scam.

It’s not just male-female identity that is a victim of subjectivism. Race is as well. Remember Rachel Dolezal? She was the white gal who said she was black. Her parents are white. She later admitted she was a liar. She is not alone.

Jessica A. Krug, who is white, changed her name to Jessica La Bombalera and claimed to be black. She is a real gem. She actually got the prestigious Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to award her financial support so she could write a book about slavery. One day she came clean.

She admitted that she lied about “my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City.” One of her other lies was to say she was from Spanish Harlem, where I used to work. Funny, I recall a lot of my students’ names, but I never met a La Bombalera. That one I would remember. Oh, I forgot to say that Jessica was recently forced to retire from George Washington University: it was learned that she is white. She was a professor of African American history.

There are men who have sex with men and claim they are not homosexuals; many social scientists believe them. We have Catholic women, many of whom are ex-nuns, who call themselves a priest, claiming they were “ordained” by feminist ex-Catholics. Indians, who came to America from Asia, consider themselves to be Native Americans (our elites agree). And so on.

It is important not to lose our sense of humor over this scam. I loved what happened over the summer when a male cop had to conduct a body search of a female rioter on the street. Her fellow rioters screamed at him, “You can’t search her, you’re a man.” To which he replied, “No I am not—I self-identify as a woman.”

I myself have said on TV that some people think I am a big Irishman. “I am not,” I say. “I identify as a Chinese dwarf.”

Not sure just how far the elites will push these delusional ideas, but it is clear that it all stems from the postmodern assault on truth. Once truth doesn’t matter—the law allowing two men to marry—everything is possible.

This has happened before. In the last century, Jews were identified as less than human. We know what happened. In fact, Hitler is on record saying there is no such thing as truth. Now he is in good company—legions of professors in the arts and sciences agree with this assessment. Are they so drunk with ideology that they can’t connect the dots? You got it.

William A. Donohue

Where does all the hatred come from? Beginning in the spring, we have seen violent thugs take to the streets from Lancaster to Los Angeles. They have killed cops, murdered innocent bystanders, burned buildings and looted stores. Some of the violence has been coordinated; some of it has not been.

There are several contributing factors that account for the carnage, but there is only one reason why it continues, month after month: It continues because there is little or no pushback. Our elites in government, particularly governors and mayors, have allowed the mayhem to continue, and in some cases have actually promoted it.

I live on Long Island and work in New York City. Never has New York crashed so quickly, and so catastrophically, as it has in 2020. The homeless and the criminals are everywhere, relieving themselves in public and assaulting innocent persons. When I get to work at 7:15 a.m., a man who works for the building where our offices are is hosing down the sidewalk. That’s to keep the crazies from sleeping there. Or worse.

The criminals know it. There are also more criminals on the street—the mayor released as many as he could from prison. Moreover, bail reform (there is no bail for most crimes) has meant “catch and release,” the result being that the thugs are back on the street before the cops have completed the paper work.

It took Rudy Giuliani to turn New York around in the 1990s after the disastrous years of Mayor David Dinkins. Now there is no Giuliani on deck. Mayor Bill de Blasio is term-limited and cannot succeed himself; his time is up at the end of 2021. Waiting to take his place are more losers like him, at least at this juncture.

On the west coast, Portland looks like it was destroyed by the Taliban, but that honor goes to Antifa and Black Lives Matter, our own home-grown terrorists. In Los Angeles, after two young police officers were shot, simply because they were cops (they were sitting in their patrol car), rioters blocked ambulances from the hospital screaming, “We Hope They Die.”

So where does all the hatred come from? It comes from many places, but none is more prominent than education, especially higher education.

The lead story in this issue of Catalyst is about a hate-filled anti-Catholic professor who teaches at Texas A&M University. The middle part of this issue, pp. 8-9, is a story about a hate-filled anti-American curriculum, sponsored by the New York Times; it is working its way into our schools.

It is a lot easier to teach hatred than it is to teach love. Love is caught—it is not taught—meaning it is a residual, a byproduct of human interactions that touch us in a special way. To be sure, we can learn to love, but the learning is a function of experience, not tutoring. Hatred is different. Unlike love, it can be learned in the classroom.

The Texas A&M professor teaches his students to hate Catholics. But he does not stop there: he teaches them to hate Catholicism. His goal is to punish Catholics and proscribe Catholicism.

The “1619 Project,” initiated by the New York Times, does not aim to challenge students to think about racial injustice. No, it aims to indoctrinate them into thinking the worst about their country. To do this it distorts history, skewing the facts to feed its hate-filled propaganda.

Those who have taken to the streets, many of them members of the white pampered class, are seething with rage. They have been taught to hate America. They excel. It is a pity they know nothing of the true story of American greatness.

Those who won the American Revolution could have grabbed more power for themselves and established a comfortable dictatorship. That’s what those who have emerged victorious have always done in history. Instead, the Founders crafted a constitution that limited their own powers. But this verity is no longer taught to students.

Why go after Catholics? Those who hate America have no other choice. If the goal is to crush the Republic, then those responsible for our Judeo-Christian heritage must be singled out. That means Jews and Christians. But Jews are too few, and Catholics are an easy target.

It all begins in the academy, in the colleges and universities. How many professors hate America? I would estimate that the Left commands around 20 percent of the faculty; 10 percent are moderates or conservatives; 70 percent are liberals. So why does the Left prevail? Because the Left is ruthless and liberals are intimidated by them. Also, the ranks of the administrators are at least as left-wing as the faculty.

There you have it. Mind-control savants in education are poisoning young minds, and spineless mayors and governors are failing to stop them from rioting. The corporate world—from Nike to the NFL and from Big Tech to Wall Street—has also played a shameful role. Ditto for the media.

Can conditions turn around? Certainly. But for that to happen, our elites need to exercise clear thinking, unaffected by political correctness. And fortitude. They can’t get enough of it.

William A. Donohue

Over the summer, Raymond Arroyo interviewed me a couple of times on his EWTN show, “The World Over.” On one occasion he asked me what I thought about Black Lives Matter.

“There are people out there who say, ‘Well, I like the idea of black lives matter,’ and if they mean it in the innocent sense that black lives should matter to white people, I have no problem with that. If, however—and people need to get educated—you’re talking about the organization of Black Lives Matter, people should know that Black Lives Matter has the same policy agenda as the Ku Klux Klan.”

One person who needs to get educated is Gregg Popovich, the coach of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. “People who don’t understand Black Lives Matter, or are offended by it, are just ignorant.” Really? It would be more accurate to say he has been duped. And that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 by three left-wing black women who previously worked for communist front groups. Patrisse Cullors is perhaps its most outspoken activist. She describes herself as a “working class, queer, black woman.” No wonder the organization boasts, “We are a queer-affirming network” bent on “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.”

Cullors has admitted that she, and co-founder Alicia Garza, are “trained Marxists.” The person who most influenced Cullors is Eric Mann, a former activist of the Weather Underground, the urban terrorist organization from the late 1960s and 1970s. He introduced her to an extremist left-wing outfit he once ran, one that openly endorsed the “pro-communist resistance to the U.S. empire.”

My comparison of Black Lives Matter to the Klan was no exaggeration. Here is a thought experiment. What if you were hired to devise a plan to keep blacks down, if not destroy them altogether? For starters, you might want to adopt the Klan’s mindset.

The most effective way to destroy any racial or ethnic group is to kill them. This explains why the Klan liked to lynch blacks. A more modern way would be to abort their babies. On the website of Black Lives Matter it says, “we demand reproductive justice that gives us autonomy over our bodies and identities.”

Another way to kill a demographic group would be to aid and abet the criminal element within its ranks. There is no surer way to do this than by getting rid of the cops. “We call for a national defunding of police.” That is also taken from the website of Black Lives Matter.

There are non-violent ways to keep blacks down, too, and one of them is to force black kids to attend public schools, denying them the opportunity to go to private schools. This is what the Klan did a century ago in Oregon, though their target was Roman Catholics, not blacks. In 1922, it succeeded in pushing for a state law that forced every child to attend a public school. Fortunately, it lost in the U.S. Supreme Court three years later in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters.

In 2016, Rashad Anthony Turner, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter in St. Paul, Minnesota, quit the organization. “Being that I am all for charter schools and ed reform, and as someone who is seeking educational justice for students and families, I could no longer be under that banner of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter has been co-opted. The movement’s been hijacked.”

No racial or ethnic group is going to advance if the family crumbles. Every study on educational achievement and upward mobility confirms that children from one-parent families do not perform as well in school, or in the workplace, as children from two-parent families. This is as true of white families as it is black families.

Unfortunately, one-parent families are the rule in the black community. Why is that? It has nothing to do with slavery or discrimination. The black family was far more intact in the first 100 years after slavery than it has been since the 1960s. The welfare state and the dependency it created—inviting the father to leave so his family could do better economically—is at the root of the problem.

Black Lives Matter wants to destroy the family, proudly saying, it strives to “disrupt” what it calls the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” In other words, it wants to finish the job started by the Great Society’s welfare state. The Klan would be proud.

John McWhorter is a black professor at Columbia University. Here is what he recently said about what’s going on. “In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise.” He hastens to add that his experience is hardly unique.

Beware of the propaganda about Black Lives Matter. Its motives may be different from the KKK, but its policies ensure the same results.

William A. Donohue

“Confident of one’s own righteousness, especially when smugly moralistic and intolerant of the opinions and behavior of others.” That dictionary definition of self-righteousness aptly describes the way so many people have behaved in response to the protests that recently exploded across the nation. The moralizing, the grandstanding, the arrogance—it was appalling and never ending.

White guilt over “white privilege” is the height of self-righteousness. Those who apologize for their race, or feel guilty about their economic status, should tell us what they are going to do about these alleged problems.

Are they going to ask a dermatologist to darken their skin? (John Howard Griffin did that in 1959 so he could see what it would be like to live as a black person in the South—he wrote about his experience in Black Like Me.) Are they going to part with their money, giving their stash to the poor? If not, what purpose does their public display of white guilt serve?

There are many constructive things that these people could do. To begin with, they could help minority business owners whose stores were destroyed by white protesters: they could start a fund to raise money for them. They could set up tutorials for inner-city kids after school, volunteering to do the work. There are plenty of things that could be done, but all are predicated on self-giving, an attribute that is the very opposite of self-congratulatory exercises.

Take the business owners who have been wiped out. I recently purchased wine from a liquor store, and the Chinese owner whom I know told me a story about the man who was in front of me and just left. He said the man, who was elderly, had his Long Island store ransacked by looters: they broke in and stole $700,000 worth of merchandise. The owner managed to stay afloat through the shutdown and was ready to reopen when the “protesters” destroyed his store. Now he, and his 12 employees, are finished.

In the 1970s, when I was going for my Ph.D. in sociology at New York University, there was one particular class I will never forget. The subject of discussion was poor minorities. All of the students bashed our society for not doing anything to help them. I raised my hand and said that I work during the day in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood (Spanish Harlem), and was glad to hear of their interest in the subject. I asked if they would volunteer to tutor my students on a Saturday. There was dead silence.

You may have heard about Charlie Palmer, the former ESPN reporter who now covers professional basketball. When protesters set a Minneapolis building on fire, he cheered them on, tweeting, “Burn it all down.” But a few days later when a mob tried to storm his California community—gated, of course—he went mad. He called them “animals,” screaming, “Tear up your own ****.”

Then we have the president of the Minneapolis City Council, Lisa Bender, who fought to eliminate the police force altogether. She was asked on CNN, “What if in the middle of night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?” She smugly told the woman reporter that her complaint “comes from a place of privilege.” Now if someone were to storm her house, is there anyone who thinks her response would be any different than that of Palmer’s?

Why are these white people considered the allies of blacks? If some racist mapped out a strategy to kill black people, he could do no better than to shut down the police. Every weekend in Chicago, dozens of black men are killed by black men. Does anyone think conditions would improve by banning the police (most of whom are black)?

It’s so nutty that liberal journalists are now being silenced by radicals from within their ranks. The editorial page editor of the New York Times, as well as the deputy editorial page editor, were forced to resign on June 7. Their offense? They allowed an article to be published by Sen. Tom Cotton. He called for law and order, allowing for the military to intervene, if necessary. After an uproar by the free speech mavens at the newspaper, the top editor said he was wrong to run the piece. But that wasn’t good enough.

Similarly, when the executive editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer published a news story titled, “Buildings Matter, Too,” it was deemed a racist play on “Black Lives Matter,” so he was forced to resign. Andrew Sullivan, the liberal writer for New York magazine, was barred from writing about the protests because it was decided he might criticize the violence.

This is quite a development. Four men, all with sterling liberal credentials, were bludgeoned by left-wing extremists who don’t believe in freedom of speech. The censors are now the ruling class.

We all have our hot buttons. Mine is rank hypocrisy. I have no patience listening to white people sitting on their moral perch calling for justice while doing nothing constructive about it. Worse is when they actually create more injustice in the name of promoting justice. Madness is in the air.

William A. Donohue

For almost four decades, I have given countless interviews to reporters and have appeared on thousands of television and radio shows. Most of the people I have met have been wonderful; others less so. Many have been fair, but increasingly many are not.

Those who work in the electronic media—radio and TV—and those who, like me (activists or academics) have had their career shaped in large part by it, are what constitute the chattering class. They make their living, directly or indirectly, by talking.

The chattering class is cracking up. Many have gone off the deep end, driven by ideology. They lie with abandon. They spin stories. They craft dishonest headlines. They deny the obvious. They distort. They sin by omission, failing to report newsworthy events. They are partisans posing as non-partisan observers. They are not to be trusted.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when, allowing for important exceptions, most of those in the chattering class were professionals, content to offer a sober analysis of current events. They were honest. Today there are too many dishonest men and women in this line of work.

Technology has something to do with the change. When I was growing up, there were only a few broadcast TV channels and no cable shows. There was no internet. There was no social media. No one knew what a blogger was. The news cycle was not 24/7, as it is now. In other words, the competition today to get into the news, either as a host or a guest, is severe. It is this milieu that invites sensationalism.

Our culture has changed, too, and not for the better. The second book I wrote (while at The Heritage Foundation), The New Freedom: Individualism and Collectivism in the Social Lives of Americans, was an analysis of how radical individualism was disfiguring our society. This problem has only gotten worse. It is so much harder for Americans to come to a consensus today than ever before, so divided have we become.

The chattering class is more than a reflection of this environment: they helped to create it.

Social media has allowed everyone who has a half-baked opinion to sound off. The same is true of bloggers, those whose essays are posted on the internet. These people, who typically have no credentials and no expertise—in any field—are quick to lecture us on what should be done about every problem in society. (They love to bash me.)

There is a huge difference between an uninformed opinion and an informed one. It is the difference between rookies and pros. Yet social media and the blogosphere are dotted not only with uninformed opinions, they are loaded with advice that is downright dangerous.

These charlatans who opine have no background in their subject matter. Worse, they pass off their uninformed opinion as if it were factual. As the late Harvard professor and New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said, we are all entitled to our own opinion, but not to our own facts.

Then there are those who have credentials and expertise, such as reporters, but are unwilling to abide by the norms of their profession, traditionally understood. A reporter is not supposed to be a commentator: he is supposed to tell us the news, not interpret it. But today reporters can’t seem to resist editorializing, telling us what to think.

In times past, when a reporter interviewed a politician who said something that may have been untrue, he would seek out someone to interview who would offer a totally different perspective. Now the reporter quotes the politician, and then he immediately informs us that what he said was false. That is not his job. And it is particularly odious when only some politicians—this happens to Trump daily—are subjected to this kind of scrutiny while others get off scot-free.

We also have professional commentators, both conservative and liberal, who are quick to tell us how wrong some decision makers are, and how they would handle matters if they were in charge.

Typically, these members of the chattering class—late night talk-show hosts, cable-TV talk-show hosts, and college professors—have never run anything. They have never run an organization and have no idea what it is like to be pressured from both above and below, and from the right as well as the left. To top it off, they are increasingly arrogant and judgmental about matters they know nothing about.

Regarding this last point, a good example would be those who recently piled on Cardinal Dolan. He has to work laterally with Democrats and Republicans. He has to deal with those from below, parishioners, and with those from above, the pope. He must cooperate with his fellow bishops, make appointments, balance budgets, address tough issues, and meet with people he’d rather not meet with at all. This is the kind of balancing act that the chattering class never experience.

Be wary of those who have never run anything. Talk is cheap. Getting things done is exacting.