Bill Donohue

When I did the chapter on transgenderism for my new book, Cultural Meltdown, I was struck by the fact that blacks are the least likely to believe in the fiction that the sexes are interchangeable. The biggest dopes are white people. Not just any white persons—those with post-graduate degrees are the dumbest.

Why are white well-educated people so stupid? To begin with, the ability to stay in school is not a good index of how bright someone is. Some of the brightest people I have ever met never went to college, and some of the biggest air heads I have ever met are college professors. This explains why I was not surprised to learn that those with post-graduate degrees are the most likely to believe that we can change our sex.

Does education corrupt? Depending on the course of study, and who the professors are, it may. For example, it can corrupt our cognitive faculties when we put common sense aside and allow ideology to run riot. Add to this the tendency of those with alphabets after their name to look down on the masses—it gives them a mantle of moral superiority—and the scene is set to ride off a cliff. Here’s a real-life example.

A recent Rasmussen poll asked respondents if they agreed with Disney official Karey Burke when she bragged how good it is for the company to have “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters.” Those who were the most likely to say this is appropriate for children under 12 were those in the highest income bracket—earning more than $200,000 a year. They are among the most “well educated” in the country, having graduated from elite schools.

Are the rich morally corrupt? Some are. To be specific, they are more likely to be secularists, and this matters greatly: their distrust in God allows them to put their trust in themselves. And given their insular existence—they love gated communities, chauffeurs, and their own security—they can rest assured knowing that whatever the masses believe in is probably wrong.

Rich well-schooled young people have dominated the domestic news lately. From Berkeley to Columbia, they rioted, vandalized, burned American flags, camped out on campus property, attacked Jews, barricaded themselves in college offices, blocked traffic, assaulted the police and cheered for Hamas. According to the NYPD, most of those arrested at Columbia were students.

No one doubts, however, that outsiders played a key role, especially in organizing and strategizing how to win. Where did they get their money and training? From well-schooled rich people, of course.

It was hardly a shocker to learn that George Soros was involved. He loves to create anarchy, and uses his Open Society Foundations to great effect. David Rockefeller is another big player. Susan and Nick Pritzker are awash with left-wing money (Nick is the uncle of J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire governor of Illinois).

One of the most generous donors to left-wing causes is the Tides Foundation. According to Capital Research Center, which does yeoman work tracking how the rich undermine America, “If the Left does it, Tides funds it.” It is one of the masters of “dark money,” funds that are hard to trace. It specializes in “pass-through funding,” a mechanism that shuffles money to communist-inspired organizations such as the Working Family Party.

Not only has Soros lavishly funded Tides, so has the Ford Foundation,  Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, William and Flora Hewett Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation and K. Kellogg Foundation.

The Tides Foundation managed to grease two of the most pro-Hamas organizations responsible for the campus riots, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Another source of money for this crusade is Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s behemoth financial organization.

Here’s how the game is played.

Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund funnels money to The People’s Forum, a radical left-wing entity with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. It is backed by American businessman Neville Roy Singham. He uses Goldman Sachs’ charity arm as a pass-through to The People’s Forum. Though Goldman Sachs maintains it has no direct ties to this group, in a circuitous way it does.

Singham is a filthy rich socialist whose father was Sri Lankan and mother was Cuban. He is proud that The People’s Forum is “a movement  incubator” of extremist causes.

The protesting students on our campuses have much in common with their well-heeled donors. The rich live a secure pristine lifestyle, unaffected by the consequences of their ideas. Meanwhile, their student stooges take over university buildings with impunity, having food delivered to them by Uber drivers.

All of them have much in common with Mao (Singham adores him). The Chinese monster may have identified with the oppressed, but in reality he managed to kill 77 million of them. He also lived large—he had 50 villas to live in.

The elites live a pampered existence. What they learned, and what they are teaching, in the colleges and universities is more often than not subversive of the very institutions they govern. They are as vindictive as they are irrational.

Bill Donohue

Harvard University’s decision to officially refrain from taking public policy positions is not only commendable, it is a model for virtually every institution of higher learning. Indeed, it should be adopted by every entity not specifically founded as an advocacy organization. This would include corporations as well as umbrella groups representing such professionals as actors, athletes, doctors, nurses, teachers, and all those whose line of work has nothing to do with advocating for one cause or another.

In short, if a company sells shoes, it should sell shoes and refrain from making partisan public statements.

“The purpose of a university is to pursue truth.” That is the first sentence in the “Report on Institutional Voice in the University.” It is so basic as to be uncontroversial, yet from my experience in the academy it has long been subject to criticism, if not condemnation.

The Harvard report rightly notes that “if the university and its leaders become accustomed to issuing official statements about matters beyond the core function of the university, they will inevitably come under pressure to do so from multiple, competing sides on nearly every imaginable issue of the day.” When this happens, it notes, it “runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others.”

It further explains its reasoning by saying, “the reason for its silence is the belief that the purpose of the university is best served by speaking only on matters directly relevant to its function and not by issuing declarations on other matters, however important in themselves.”

The same could be said about most organizations.

For example, when the NFL takes sides in the cultural wars it is not only straying from its mission, it is unnecessarily alienating football fans. Ditto for the National Education Association—it should not be telling teachers and students what to think but how to think. Disney should be entertaining children, not promoting a politically skewed agenda that many parents find objectionable.

The same is true of products like Bud Light and retail outlets like Target. Beer drinkers and shoppers want to know more about the items they are selling and not about the predilections of the corporate elite. Moreover, it makes no difference what the content of the communication is. Keep politics and sexual messaging out of it.

In the fall, the board of trustees, administrators and faculty of every college and university have an opportunity to discuss the Harvard model. Hopefully, they will adopt it. It is also important that this policy be considered by most other institutions as well. There is too much polarization in the nation without having prestigious organizations weighing in on matters that have no direct bearing on their raison d’être.

Note: We are sending this news release to a wide number of professional institutions, in and out of education.

Bill Donohue

Moral relativism is the belief that there are no moral absolutes and that right and wrong vary from one individual to another. Accordingly, disagreements about morality are nothing more than expressions of opinion.

This may sound appealing to some, but in practice it is one of the most dangerous ideas ever entertained by man.

If John believes in slavery and Jane does not, by what right does Jane have to outlaw it? If she doesn’t want to own a slave, that’s her business. But she has no right to impose her morality on the rest of us.

What if there were a resolution on a ballot saying that left-handed persons should be the slaves of right-handed persons? Everyone would be given an equal right to vote. What if the left-handers lose? So what? This is a democracy, isn’t it? What right does anyone have to overturn the express will of the majority?

We fought a civil war over slavery. Lincoln’s side prevailed because he appealed to the wisdom ingrained in the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson wrote that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the heart of natural rights, a concept pioneered by the Catholic Church.

Jefferson spoke of truths, not opinions, that are evident to every sentient human being. Right away the moral relativists lose. They lose because they deny that there are moral absolutes, or truths, about the human condition.

Truth is not a whim or fancy. It is not an opinion. If most voted that gold is really silver, it would have no bearing on the truth. The truth is independent of feelings and preferences.

Every person, Jefferson said, independent of his ascribed or achieved statuses, is created equal. Again the moral relativists lose. They envision a society where it is possible—even if they personally feel otherwise—for some to be masters and some to be slaves. But if everyone was created equal, then master-slave relationships cannot be justified.

Our rights come from God, our Creator. More bad news for the moral relativists. They reject God and believe that our rights come from government. But what the government giveth the government can taketh away. That’s not a happy prospect. However, if God is the source of our rights, then government is obliged to respect them. The government is subordinate to God.

Our rights are unalienable. Once again, moral relativists are on the losing side. If our rights are unalienable, invitations to alienate them cannot be countenanced, which is precisely what slavery would do.

A democracy is a government by, for, and of the people. It is based on majority rule. But in the United States, the minority does not lose its rights because it is outnumbered. That’s why we have a Bill of Rights, ten individual rights that the majority must respect. Following the logic of the Declaration, slavery cannot be justified, and that is because it violates our unalienable right to Liberty. It is not open to a vote.

To be sure, when the nation was founded, with all of these rights secured in law, slavery existed nonetheless. The Founders were realists—they knew that slavery could not be abolished overnight (at that time in history Europe was the only place on earth to ban it)—but they did not walk away from this issue. They gave us the Declaration and the Bill of Rights—the philosophical principles and the constitutional means—to make possible its ultimate demise.

That is what Lincoln leaned on to make his case against slavery. On the other side were the moral relativists like Stephen Douglas, arguing it should be up to the people to decide.

Moral relativism was morally bankrupt then, and it still is. It’s a losing proposition.

Bill Donohue

Not a Fourth of July goes by without some sage telling us how slavery is as American as apple pie. They have no idea what they are talking about.

As Harvard sociologist Orlando Paterson has shown, there is not a place on the globe that has not known slavery. Aristotle thought it was so much a part of the human condition that he justified it on the basis of the natural law. It took the Catholic Church to proclaim that slavery violated the natural law.

The New York Times’ “1619 Project” tells readers that America was founded in slavery. Wrong. It was founded in a revolution in 1776. Just as wrongheaded is Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Biden. She told reporters in 2021 that “the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.” This is a bastardization of history.

Those who accept the ambassador’s view claim that the Constitution justified slavery and that it regarded blacks as three-fifths human. This is false.

The Constitution makes no mention of the words “slave,” “slavery,” “race,” “white,” “black,” or “color.” And nowhere does it say that blacks are three-fifths human. The three-fifths language is in Article I, Section 2, which speaks to the issue of apportionment. To determine the number of representatives each state should have, the total was to be determined by “adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons.” In other words, count free persons, do not count those Indians not taxed, and add three-fifths of the slaves. This last part has been grossly distorted.

The Northern delegates did not want to count slaves at all, and the Southern delegates wanted them counted as equal to free persons. According to the twisted logic offered by left-wing ideologues, this would suggest that the North was more pro-slavery than the South. This is absurd.

If blacks weren’t counted at all, it would weaken the Southern base: the slave states would have only 41 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives. If they were counted as equal to whites, the slave states would have 50 percent of the House seats. The compromise—counting slaves as three-fifths—meant that the slave states wound up with 47 percent of the seats. That is the truth of the story.

The Constitution, without mentioning slavery directly, provided that the international slave trade would end on January 1, 1808. The president who made good on that pledge was Thomas Jefferson.

When the United States was founded, the only place in the world that had banned slavery was Great Britain. It was abolished in the United States in 1865. Africa banned it in 1981, yet it still exists there today in Mauritania and Somalia.

The Europeans did not kidnap African slaves. They bought them. Moreover, the African slavemasters facilitated the transfer by bundling the slaves in cages for the white boys. Common sense should tell us that if a handful of white boys showed up in Africa looking for slaves, why didn’t the Africans say to them—they vastly outnumbered the Europeans—yes, there is going to be slavery, but you are going to be the slaves and we are going to be the masters?

Defending slavery were white “progressives.” George Fitzhugh was America’s first sociologist. He railed against capitalism but defended slavery.

In his work, “The Universal Law of Slavery,” written in 1850, Fitzhugh explained that “the Negro is but a grown up child and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian.” He said slavery had a positive effect. “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world.”

Blacks, he said, could not compete with the white man under capitalism, so it was better to keep them in slavery.

“The negro is improvident [and] would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has a right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery. In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race….”

During the Progressive Era, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Richard T. Ely was one of the most prominent leaders in the social-justice crusade. He was considered sympathetic to blacks, yet he expressed the same views as Fitzhugh. “Negroes, are for the most part grown up children, and should be treated as such.”

It must be said that not much has changed. Today’s “progressives” have low expectations for blacks, which is why they are bent on lowering the bar for black students—they should instead be helping them to clear it! White liberal racism is endemic.

America bashers love to ruin our Fourth of July. They are as ignorant as they are malicious.