A professor at Texas A&M University posted several vicious anti-Catholic comments on social media, and apparently was going to get away with it. Bill Donohue wrote to the school’s president, Michael K. Young, on September 14 asking for sanctions.

Some of the remarks posted by the professor, Filipe Castro, were new; others were from a few years ago. To read a sample of what he said, see pp. 4-6. Notice that his invective includes physical threats.

Castro is a tenured full professor of anthropology, and as such is afforded maximum free speech protection. Donohue told President Young that he was a tenured full professor of sociology, and that while Castro “is entitled to academic freedom, no freedom is boundless.” He then made clear what is at stake.

“When a professor intentionally insults people of faith, in this instance Catholics, it cannot seriously be maintained that he is engaged in rational discourse. Indeed, some of what he [Castro] said is so serious, he could easily be sued.” Donohue took special offense to Castro’s decision to go “for the jugular by speaking in a vile way about the Eucharist, the centerpiece of our faith.”

He concluded by saying, “Quite frankly, Castro does not belong in the classroom.”

To entice President Young to act, many officials from education and government were contacted (Texas A&M is a state-funded institution).

We contacted the Texas A&M Board of Regents; the campus newspaper; the Senior VP & Chief Marketing and Communications Director; the Chancellor; the Vice Chancellor for Marketing and Communications; Texas Gov. Greg Abbott; Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick; the head of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges; Sen. Ted Cruz; Sen. John Cornyn; Rep. Bill Flores; and eight members of the state legislature. We also blanketed the Texas media, as well as our national media list.

Donohue told each of these parties that he knows and respects “the wide latitude given to professors to challenge students.” He hastened to add that Castro had no such intention. “He does not seek to challenge, but to bully.” To resolve this issue, Donohue said, it is up to President Young to take “the right steps.”

If this were happening at a time of relative peace, the stakes would not be so high. But Castro’s hate speech is occurring at a time of civil unrest, and the last thing we need is for a professor to demonize Catholics and trash their religion.

We are getting some interesting feedback. More on this in the next issue of Catalyst.

We have asked the Department of Justice to launch an investigation of Netflix. At issue is the possible violation of federal law governing the production of child pornography. The French movie Cuties is the object of our concern.

The film is soft-core child porn masquerading as a coming-of-age story. According to Bernadette Brady-Egan, the Catholic League’s vp who reviewed the movie, there is “no redeemable reason to watch it.” She added that “at no point could I laugh at this film. I wanted to cry a number of times for these girls.”

Netflix bills Cuties as a sex-comedy movie, but in reality it is more tragic than anything else. The content is outrageously graphic. According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which prepared a guide for parents, Cuties is intended for mature audiences. That is why it branded the “sex and nudity” elements “severe.”

Cuties seeks to normalize the eroticization of girls. It obviously appeals to some very disturbed men. Moreover, it sends a message to teenage males that it is okay to prey on subteens.

Those “open-minded” reviewers who like Cuties are either plain stupid or malicious. They complain about the sexual harassment of women and the like. They claim to be horrified by pedophilia. Yet they feed the appetites of these very sick men.

Sen. Ted Cruz was right to call for a probe of Netflix by the Department of Justice. We are only too happy to support him.

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.

Bill Donohue

Coming on the heels of a bloody summer, much of it driven by racially charged rhetoric and behavior, the new school year has begun. But not without calls to address racism. Elementary and secondary students are being primed to learn about America’s irredeemably racist past, present, and future.

The favorite resource for educators is the “1619 Project.” It is a proposed curriculum being disseminated by the New York Times that seeks to revise American history. According to this version, America was not founded in a revolution in 1776; it was founded in slavery in 1619.

This vision of the Founding is now working its way into school curricula across the nation. It has been formally adopted in Chicago, D.C., Buffalo, Newark, Wilmington, and Winston-Salem. Thousands of classrooms around the nation will implement this radical interpretation of American history.

The “1619 Project” is the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her contribution is not the result of her training: She is neither a historian or a professor. She is a journalist. And while she complains about systemic racism, Hannah-Jones, whose mother is white and father is black, insisted that no white people work with her on the Project.

Prominent historians of America’s founding have panned her work. In a letter that these leading scholars signed, they charged the “1619 Project” with “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Pulitzer Prize winning historian Gordon Wood accused this initiative of being “so wrong in many ways.” Another winner of this prize, James McPherson, said that it “left most of the history out.”

Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn succinctly summed up the problem with Hannah-Jones’ creative enterprise. The “1619 Project,” he said, is “an ideological campaign to undermine Americans’ attachment to our founding principles and to the Constitution by making slavery—rather than the principles of liberty that ended slavery and preserved our liberties for nearly 250 years—the principal focus of American history.”

Students will be taught that Africans were forcibly taken from their homeland and brought to the New World as slaves. They will not be taught that slavery has existed in every part of the globe, and that Africans were bought by Europeans from their African slavemasters; they were not captured. Nor will students learn that slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, but it took until 1981 for Africa to make it illegal (it still exists in parts of Africa today).

Most important, students will not learn that the Founders could have decided to justify slavery, making no overtures toward liberty. That is what virtually every other nation has done. Instead, they crafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the net effect of which was to lay the philosophical and legal foundation for the eventual demise of slavery. The Civil War was fought precisely to realize the Founders’ vision of liberty.

No nation has made more progress in realizing equal opportunity than the United States. We recently twice elected a black president and have done more to end systemic racism than any other nation. One of the reasons why so many people want to come to our shores—often illegally—is because we are the envy of the world. It is our unparalleled freedom and prosperity that draws so many minorities to come here. But none of this will be taught to students subjected to the “1619 Project.”

To make matters worse, the New York Times has no moral leg to stand on. The following report was sent to all schools in the six cities listed above that have adopted the “1619 Project.” The version that the schools received included an introductory note.

“1619 PROJECT”:
PROPOSED REVISION

The New York Times rolled out its “1619 Project” on the alleged racist origins of the United States with great fanfare. It would be inexcusably hypocritical not to include the newspaper’s own contribution to racism in classroom instructions.

The family that owned the New York Times were slaveholders. To wit: Bertha Levy Ochs, the mother of the paper’s patriarch, Adolph S. Ochs, was a rabid advocate of slavery, continuing a tradition set by her slave-owning uncle. She lived with her father’s brother, John Mayer (he dropped the surname Levy), for several years in Natchez, Mississippi before the Civil War. He owned at least five slaves.

Ochs’ parents, Julius and Bertha Levy, were German Jewish immigrants who met in the South before moving to Ohio (where Adolph was born). When the Civil War broke out, Bertha wanted to be actively engaged in her pro-slavery efforts and moved to Memphis to support her Confederate-fighting brother (Julius was on the Union side).

When Bertha died, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, to which she belonged, draped a Confederate flag over her coffin. Adolph even donated $1,000 to have her name engraved on the founders’ roll of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial. He sent a note saying, “Robert E. Lee was her idol.”

Adolph was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and at age 20 he became the publisher of the Chattanooga Times. In 1900, the paper ran an editorial saying that the Democratic Party, which he supported, “may justly insist that the evils of negro suffrage were wantonly inflicted on them.” After he purchased the New York Times in 1896, he moved to New York. When he died in 1935, the United Daughters of the Confederacy sent a gift to be placed in his coffin.

Most Americans are mature enough not to blame the New York Times today for the racist beliefs and practices of its ancestry. In doing so, they show prudence. But are they too generous in their assessment? According to the wisdom of the “1619 Project,” they are absolutely too forgiving.

If this were all there was to the racist history of the New York Times, we could give it a pass. But we cannot. Its racist record runs deep.

In 1910, the Times covered a heavyweight boxing match between the black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, and Jim Jeffries, the former heavyweight champion who came out of retirement for the fight. Jeffries, dubbed the “Great White Hope,” was expected to win. He lost.

The sports writers for the Times put their money on Johnson, but not before issuing a dire warning. “If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors.” In other words, stupid blacks might want political, economic and social rights as well, and that would not be auspicious.

In the 1920s, after a race riot in Washington, a Times editorial waxed nostalgic, speaking about conditions prior to the Great War (World War I.) “The majority of Negroes in Washington before the Great War were well behaved,” adding that in those happy days, “most of them admitted the superiority of the white race and troubles between the two races were unheard of.” They wanted more than “mere physical equality.”

Also in the 1920s, Adolph Ochs invited a black singer, Roland Hayes, to lunch at the New York Times. His father, Julius, was so angry he left the building. According to Iphigene, Adolph’s progressive daughter, Julius believed that while “we love the Negroes,” it is important to “keep them in their place; they are fine as long as they stay in the kitchen.”

In 1931, in one of the most infamous racist events in the 20th century, two white woman accused nine black teens of rape. It turned out to be totally false. Adolph’s Chattanooga Times was quick to condemn the alleged rapists. An editorial read, “Death Penalty Properly Demanded in Fiendish Crime of Nine Burly Negroes.” The trial reporter for the paper called the defendants “beasts unfit to be called human.”

Matters did not change throughout the 1940s. The NAACP, while noting that this southern arm of the New York Times was somewhat better than its competitors, it was still “anti-Negro.” That is because the papers were in the hands of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. While on a Red Cross tour of England during World War II, he expressed horror at the sight of black American soldiers “fraternizing” with white women. “Rape by Negroes is just one degree worse than by whites, and black illegitimate children just one degree more unfortunate than white ones.” That is what he told General Dwight Eisenhower.

Arthur’s workplace policies were also tinged with racism. A Newspaper Guild survey taken in the 1950s found that of the 75,000 newsroom employees he commanded, just 38 were black. Bad as he was, he was still better than other family members. He fought, successfully, to end the practice by the Chattanooga Times of publishing racially segregated obituaries.

Even though those who ran the New York Times made progress with racial relations in the 1960s and 1970s, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. said in the 1980s that the paper was “just miserable to women, miserable to blacks.”

It was miserable to blacks in another way. By championing the life of Margaret Sanger, a notorious racist, it shows, and continues to show, how much further it needs to go before its racist past is behind it.

Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, referred to blacks as “weeds” and “human waste” in need of “extinction.” But to the august New York Times, she was known in 1980 as a “modern heroine.” At the end of the decade, she was cited as a “legendary pioneer.” In 1992, she was labeled a “strong-willed woman.” In 2006, the eugenicist was branded “courageous,” and in 2014 was noted as a “pioneering feminist.”

Never once did the New York Times call Margaret Sanger out for what she was—a white racist who lied to the public about her real motives. “We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” She had little to worry about—the “newspaper of record” kept the truth from the public. It still does.

It’s not just the defense of notorious racists that bedevils the newspaper—it has been accused of promoting racism in its workplace.

In 2016 two black female employees in their sixties filed a class-action lawsuit against Mark Thompson, the CEO of the New York Times Company. They argued that “deplorable discrimination” exists in the workplace. “Unbeknownst to the world at large,” their deposition says, “not only does the Times have an ideal customer (young, white, wealthy), but also an ideal staffer (young, white, unencumbered with a family) to draw that purported ideal customer.”

For all of these reasons, any school that adopts the “1619 Project” as a model to discuss the history of racism in the United States has a moral obligation to inform students of the racist legacy of the New York Times. Not to do so would be intellectually dishonest. If we are to have a national conversation about race, we must tell the truth about the role that this newspaper has played in contributing to racism in the United States.

Pro-life Democrats tried to persuade Joe Biden and the leadership of the Democratic Party to soften their language on abortion rights. But the 2020 Democratic Party Platform that passed on August 19 shows they lost. Indeed, they lost on every recommendation they made.

On May 12, Kirsten Day, executive director of Democrats For Life of America (DFLA), wrote a letter to the members of the Platform Committee. She made four recommendations, three of which were very specific.

• “Remove the language opposing the Hyde Amendment and Helms Amendment.” These amendments bar taxpayer-funded abortions.
• “Insert the following language committing to making abortion rare.” The paragraph begins by saying, “As Democrats, we support efforts to make abortions rare.” It then goes on to make the case for adoption.
• “Insert the following language on the diversity of opinion on abortion.” This calls on the Platform to “respect the conscience of each American” on issues like abortion.

The DFLA lost on all three.

There was a time, not too long ago, when Biden would have had no problem accepting all three recommendations. Indeed, he was never an extremist on abortion, until recently. Now he is.

On September 16, Newt Gingrich was cut off the air on a Fox News show, “Outnumbered,” for merely mentioning the role that George Soros is playing in fomenting the anti-cop agenda of the left. Here is what he said.

• “The number one problem in almost all these cities [where riots have taken place] is George Soros-elected left-wing anti-police pro-criminal district attorneys who refuse to keep people locked up.”
• “Progressive district attorneys are anti-police, pro-criminal, and [are] overwhelmingly elected with George Soros’ money.”

Gingrich was interrupted by one of the show’s regulars, Melissa Francis, who said, “I’m not sure we need to bring George Soros into this.” The former Speaker of the House replied, “He paid for it. Why can’t we discuss the fact that millions of dollars ….” Gingrich was then cut off again, this time by Marie Harf who took Francis’ side.

Why is Fox News protecting George Soros? Is there anyone who doubts that he is one of the biggest contributors to left-wing causes in the nation, if not the biggest? We at the Catholic League know the atheist billionaire as the nation’s most generous donor to anti-Catholic causes and organizations.

It seems plain that Francis was told by the show’s producers (in her earpiece) to cut Gingrich off at the knees. She dutifully obliged.

It didn’t take long before left-wing media outlets celebrated what happened. The Daily Beast explained that Soros is “often the focus of anti-Semitic tropes.” HuffPost said, “In some cases, his name has been used to evoke anti-Semitic tropes.”

Maybe Soros has been used this way, and if so, that would be despicable. But neither left-wing website provided any examples. Are we to assume, then, that because some bigots have attacked Soros that no one is allowed to cite his role in promoting the left-wing agenda without being called an anti-Semite? Does this justify trying to censor Newt Gingrich?

Where did Fox News, the Daily Beast, and HuffPost pick up on the talking point that negative comments about Soros can legitimately be construed as anti-Semitic? From the New York Times.

On October 30, 2018, in a front-page story in the New York Times, reporters noted that “baseless claims” that Soros financed illegal border crossings “carry a strong whiff of anti-Semitism.” Two days later, November 1, 2018, another front-page story commented that critics of Soros employ “barely coded anti-Semitism.” On March 11, 2019, reporters commented that critics of Soros have “skated up to the edge of racism and anti-Semitism with no consequences.”

Is it anti-Semitic to criticize George Soros? If so, then the ADL, which was founded to combat anti-Semitism, is anti-Semitic.

On December 5, 2003, ADL national director Abraham Foxman wrote that Soros blamed the current “upsurge of hatred” directed at Jews on Jews. “Not surprisingly,” he wrote, “many Jews are distressed by this tendency, now spilling over to our own community, of blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. That is why I have called Mr. Soros’ comments obscene.”

Would Fox News consider Foxman’s remarks anti-Semitic?

Last year, Fox News host Neil Cavuto interviewed Bill Donohue about the fire that engulfed Notre Dame Cathedral in France. Here is what he said. “Well, Neil, if it is an accident, it’s a monumental tragedy. But forgive me for being suspicious. Just last month, a 17th-century church was set on fire in Paris. We’ve seen tabernacles knocked down, crosses have been torn down, statues.”

That was it—Cavuto had a meltdown and cut Donohue off. “We don’t know that. So if we can avoid what your suspicions might be.”

In short, even speculating about the guilty—even though Donohue did not say a word about religious fanatics—was enough to set off the censors in the control room. So much for his free speech.

It is not just Big Tech that is stifling the free speech of conservatives. It’s executives at Fox News.

Anyone who follows the Catholic Left knows that it rejects the Church’s teachings on abortion, contraception, marriage, ordination and other issues. Some are quite open about it; others less so. The National Catholic Reporter is mostly in the former camp.

Recently, the Reporter published a slew of articles that in one way or another support abortion rights.

Over the summer it ran a piece titled, “Catholic Discourse on Black Lives Matter Must Amplify Women Founders.” Black Lives Matter is an enthusiastic supporter of abortion, despite the fact that a disproportionate number of black babies are aborted.

It also posted a piece by Sister Simone Campbell, who heads a dissident Catholic group, NETWORK. The “nuns on the bus” leader (only a few were ever along for the ride on her luxury bus) is encouraging Catholics not to vote for President Trump. In her article, she offered a rousing endorsement of Kamala Harris, despite the senator’s anti-Catholic track record and her radical support for abortion rights. The good sister believes that abortion should be legal (unlike, for example, racial discrimination).

There was another article the Reporter published on how dissident Catholic groups, which are abortion-rights activists, are urging Catholics to “vote their conscience.” That’s code for rejecting the teachings of the “male hierarchy” (as the author put it), also known as the Magisterium, or the pope in communion with the bishops.

On the same day the media outlet ran a positive article on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the pro-abortion congresswoman from New York. This was its second piece on her. The earlier one announced that “AOC is the Future of the Catholic Church.” No one believes this to be true, including the Reporter, but it made them feel good to say it. AOC has a 100% NARAL rating, meaning she has never found a pro-abortion bill she couldn’t support.

There was one article that was different from the others in one way: the author, lesbian activist Jamie Manson (she is a regular columnist), wrote an article called, “AOC Embraces Reproductive Justice, and Other Catholics Should, Too.” This was a full-throated endorsement of abortion.

The editors, however, knowing that there was nothing unequivocal about Manson’s lust for abortion rights, felt compelled to provide an introductory note.

“NCR does not expect its columnists to share completely the views of our editorial page, and this column is a case in point. NCR has for decades supported a nuanced view of the ‘seamless garment’ approach to abortion and other life issues, as spelled out in this editorial and others over the years.”

Other than Michael Sean Winters, and possibly one or two more, it is not clear who at the Reporter might not be in the abortion-rights camp. No matter, the real issue is why any publication which assumes a Catholic identity would print a column that is flagrantly pro-abortion. It sure wouldn’t publish an article that belittled climate change.

There is nothing nuanced about abortion: It kills. Trying to fudge a reason to support it—by relabeling it “reproductive justice”—is a sham. But this is where the Catholic Left is these days.

In 1973, in the year that abortion was legalized, an anti-Catholic group was founded to promote abortion rights. But it was not the usual anti-Catholic outfit. This one falsely assumed a Catholic identity. Initially called Catholics for a Free Choice, it would later shorten its name to Catholics for Choice. Having been around for almost a half century, it now looks like it is in disarray.

When it was founded in New York City, it did not set up shop in the New York Archdiocese (as did the Catholic League when it moved to the Big Apple in 1992). No, this “Catholic” pro-abortion outfit rented space from Planned Parenthood. Its first president was Father Joseph O’Rourke; he was expelled from the Jesuits in 1974. It now appears that its time is up: It has been curiously without a president this entire year.

Jon O’Brien was president of Catholics for Choice for 12 years, having succeeded Frances Kissling, the long-time champion of abortion-on-demand. On December 2, 2019, this well-funded letterhead (it has no members) announced that he resigned. In his place was named an acting president, Sara Hutchinson Ratcliffe. She is still acting president.

Ratcliffe honed her abortion-rights skills at Planned Parenthood. Under her tutelage, almost nothing has been done. Its quarterly magazine, “Conscience,” stopped publishing in the fall of 2019. In 2020, Catholics for Choice issued a mere seven press releases, and the last time it was cited in the news was March 31, 2020 (before that it was August 16, 2019). By contrast, the Catholic League generates news releases on a steady basis and is cited in the news almost daily.

Every presidential-election year, Catholics for Choice tries to convince the public that it is entirely acceptable for Catholics to be pro-abortion. It is not. From the Vatican to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, directives have repeatedly been issued making it clear there are not two legitimate Catholic positions on abortion. There is only one: pro-life.

The time has come for this phony Catholic group to fold. It was built on lies from the get-go.

Aside from pro-abortion activists, everyone who has taken a serious look at the writings and speeches of Margaret Sanger admits that she was a racist. Indeed, she was as big a racist as any Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan ever was. The evidence is overwhelming. Yet there are those who are still trying to rescue her legacy. Worse, some are in total denial about her racism.

On July 21, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced it would remove Sanger’s name from its Manhattan clinic. It cited her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement,” as if that were breaking news; it has been known for a century. But it stopped short of calling her out for her racist agenda.

It is impossible to separate eugenics from racism: it was built on it. Angela Franks, who authored Margaret Sanger’s Eugenics Legacy, said “she believed that if you eliminated the poor, then there would be no more poverty. Instead of eliminating the problem, she would eliminate the people who had the problem.” That was the purpose of her birth control crusade.

The organization she launched continues to serve her goal of eliminating the poor, albeit with greater certainty: it facilitates killing them in utero. This means, of course, that a disproportionate number of black babies are killed every year. Even today, almost 8 in 10 Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are in minority neighborhoods.

Sanger opened her first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. After officials at the abortion giant recently admitted that her record was tainted, they adjusted the section on their website titled, “100 Years Strong.” In their concluding statement on “Margaret Sanger—Our Founder,” they said, “Like all leaders—Sanger had many flaws.”

In other words, Sanger’s targeting of African Americans for extinction was merely a “flaw.” This is the best Planned Parenthood can admit to today. If a white supremacist had her legacy, he would be condemned.

Sanger’s friends in Marxist circles continue to defend her. “People’s World,” which is the successor of the Communist Party USA organ, the “Daily Worker,” published a piece on August 6 saying, “While Sanger did have ideas we find intolerable today, bigotry and contempt for workers were not among them (our italic).”

Lying about Sanger’s racist past is commonplace.

Ellen Chesler wrote the most celebrated volume on Sanger, Women of Valor. After carefully documenting all of Sanger’s work that served racist causes, she concludes that while her subject was “rabidly anti-Catholic,” she was not a racist. This is what happens when feminist ideology discolors the mind. It poisons the ability to reason.

Edwin Black wrote an influential book about Sanger’s contribution to the eugenics movement, War Against the Weak. He admitted that “Sanger surrounded herself with some of the eugenics movement’s most outspoken racists and white supremacists.” He also wrote that “she openly welcomed” racists and anti-Semites into “the birth control movement.” Yet, like Chesler, he still concludes that she “was not a racist.”

The most recent defender of Sanger’s racist history is Katha Pollitt, a pro-abortion extremist who writes for the Nation, a publication that defended Joseph Stalin. “For the record,” she says, “Margaret Sanger was not a racist.” Why not? Because prominent blacks supported her. The “exoneration by association” gambit fails: They may have supported her birth control policies, but they certainly did not support abortion. As late as 1963, Planned Parenthood admitted that “An abortion kills the life of the baby after it has begun.”

It does not help Pollitt’s case to cite H.G. Wells’ support for Sanger (Planned Parenthood also notes that he was her ally). He made clear his goal. “We want fewer and better children…and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.”

In case Pollitt doubts who Wells was referring to, consider what Sanger said in her book, Women, Morality, and Birth Control. “We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” Moreover, Sanger constantly called those in the lower class “weeds” and “human waste” that must be “exterminated.”

While Sanger did not campaign to make abortion legal, it is intellectually dishonest to say she was viscerally opposed to abortion. Indeed, she supported infanticide. “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” Her honesty was commendable, even if her goal was evil.

Racism is what animated Planned Parenthood from its inception, and it is what motivates it today.

Two months ago, 300 of its staffers signed a letter condemning the organization’s “climate of systemic racism.” That is an understatement. The workers were only referring to conditions in the workplace—they were not referring to the racist outcomes of their work.