Last week’s installment began with a bomb exploding in front of the Roosevelts’ home. Three more installments of that story are dying to be told, but will have to wait just a bit. I was excited, and jumped the gun, running that in front of two present-day stories that you need to see first. They show things are as crazy now as then, just different. It’s all of a piece.
In this installment you’ll see how a Black man at a Madison high school was fired for a minor infraction of a useless rule, because his 15 accusers agreed he was guilty “regardless of intent.” A year later, in February 2021, The Times fired its prized COVID reporter for the same useless infraction because its 150 news reporters said he was guilty “regardless of intent.” What unseen force could have the power to control so many minds in two places?
Chapter 1
Anderson vs. the N-Word Taboo
We do not tolerate racist language — regardless of intent.
—The Times’ executive editor
In late 2019, Marlon Anderson, a 40-year-old playground security guard at Madison West High School, was being repeatedly smeared as a “bitch-ass nigga” by a Black student who’d swiped a smartphone. Eventually, Anderson said, “Don’t call me nigga.”
Who could doubt that a Black man has the right to ask someone to stop slurring him with the n-word? Yet Anderson was promptly put on leave. After a hearing and a week of tense deliberations, the school district did what “had to be done” and fired Anderson.
That made the national news and even the BBC; Cher offered to pay his legal expenses if he sued the school board, and the students went on strike and marched around the board’s offices. In the blink of an eye, everyone figured out this far-left dogma was wrong—everyone except the superintendent, seven school district experts in racial matters, and all seven school board members. Likely, they were all Democrats.
They’d already thought about their “zero tolerance” principle for a couple of years and used it to fire seven others. And they thought hard about Marlon’s case for a week. At the hearing, a Black man explained to them that if they just looked up “slur” in the dictionary, they would realize that Anderson had not racially slurred the student, so he had not violated their rule. Only the thief, who must have been amused by this outcome, had used a racial slur.
(If you say “I’m not stupid,” or “don’t call me stupid,” everyone agrees you did not slur anyone, even though “stupid” is most often used to slur people.)
The 15 public school leaders were tripped up by far-left ideology. It had gotten inside their heads and, without their knowledge, replaced the universal dictionary definition of “slur,” which they’d known since 8th grade, with a crazy one. This definition made Anderson’s modest self-defense appear to them as just as bad as the thief’s vicious racial slur. Under this ideology, justice is impossible. Far-left ideology had replaced moral thinking with a childish rule that erases the difference between right and wrong.
If this weren’t enough, consider the contrast between the far left’s concern for real criminals and how they treated Anderson. The far left wants to “defund the police” and “abolish prisons” with the goal of preventing crime and rehabilitating criminals. Everyone agrees with that goal, not with their policies.
If thieves and vandals deserve rehabilitation and second chances, how could 15 smart, kind, progressive school officials, during a week of deliberations, fail to consider that it might be possible to rehabilitate Anderson (which I am not suggesting he needed)? Apparently, he did not deserve a second chance. His crime was breaking the ideology’s taboo, something this social-justice ideology apparently counted as worse than mugging someone.
Firing someone, with no second chance, because the accusers don’t understand the word slur is so unbelievably extreme that you may be wondering if this isn’t the product of some Madison-only cult. But such behavior had already spread across the country and was still expanding. The reach and power of this ideology is revealed by an identifying marker that it implants along with its n-word taboo—the phrase “regardless of intent.” By 2021 it was embedded in the NY Times’ HR policies.
In early February 2021, more than 150 New York Times reporters wrote to Dean Baquet, the Times’ Executive Editor, demanding the firing of Donald McNeil, their prized COVID reporter. He had committed the same innocuous n-word violation as Marlon Anderson. But this was orders of magnitude more dangerous — not because McNeil deserved more protection than Anderson, but because the New York Times newsroom is vastly more important to America than one school’s playground.
Baquet had defended McNeil as having no ill intent, until the 150 reporters pointed out that the Times’ own HR policies state that what matters is how an act makes victims feel—”victims” like NY Times reporters, who read about it in The Daily Beast two years after the incident. Knowing that he couldn’t fight HR policy, and afraid for his job, and his reputation, Baquet flipped and fired McNeil “regardless of intent.” Bret Stephens, a Times columnist, called it precisely: “A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. It is the difference between murder and manslaughter.” Baquet almost immediately admitted he had “oversimplified.” But how did he happen to oversimplify into the exact slogan deployed in Madison?
The answer is that the same ideology that captured the Madison School District had also captured the newsroom of the Democrats’ most trusted source of information. An ideology with that reach is a threat to every institution the Democrats rely on. And the most frightening part: with all the outcry over the unfairness of what The Times did, no one asked what ideology was calling the shots. Hardly anyone even suspected there was one. That invisibility is its greatest weapon. Exposing this invisible ideology is the most basic task of this book.
The strategy of invisibility did not come easily to the far left with its roots in guillotining the French King and Queen and Marx’s manifesto proclaiming a revolution by the workers of the world. American anarchism culminated with 100 pounds of dynamite targeting the lunchtime crowds on Wall St. in September 1920, killing 38. Their ideology, part of the first radical setback damaging Democrats, was easy to spot. And easy to get rid of.
The spies of the 1930s and 40s were harder to spot — some operated for over a decade before anyone knew. But once exposed, their Stalinist allegiance was obvious, and the damage to Democrats was severe. The final step toward invisibility is to hide the ideology in plain sight—by convincing everyone it’s the progressism they’ve been dreaming of. That’s what fooled the Madison 15.
Today’s radical ideology has become so good at this that it can walk into your neighborhood soup kitchen, proclaim itself loudly and walk out with its pockets stuffed with cash. Only the old-timers noticed that something wasn’t quite right. But they signed the check anyway, because they weren’t quite sure.
There have been thousands of n-word incidents (having nothing to do with racial slurs) that do needless harm, cost the Democrats credibility, and never make the news. In late 2024, at a soup kitchen not far from where I live, two volunteers were discussing their participation in the Civil Rights demonstrations of the early 1960s. Both remembered being called “nigger lovers.” A young Black woman overheard this, became angry, and excoriated them for saying the word. She also pressured the soup kitchen into hiring a DEI-ideology consultant to educate the staff, at a cost of $13,000. That could have fed a lot of homeless people using the kitchen’s volunteer labor.
From what I can tell—and I’ve read dozens of such accounts—this n-word taboo is the most widespread and enduring achievement of the social justice movement known as wokeness. What frightens me is that it doesn’t just miss the target, it harms good Democrats. The n-word taboo is not about improving society, its goal is enforcing compliance with woke ideology. And it’s far more difficult to get rid of than anarchists.
Anderson’s school officials would all have wanted to do the right thing if they had not been partially controlled by this ideology. It’s a self-sustaining heartless collection of ideas that controls the people who buy into it.
This book shows many other parts of far-left ideology, which, although perhaps not as widespread, are even more damaging. They are damaging to Democrats, the Democratic Party itself and to the nation. Firing Anderson and McNeil simply confirms, for these cases, the worst of the right-wing complaints against us — that our social justice can’t tell good from bad when it comes to individuals.
No one asked what ideology was calling the shots. Was it “social justice” that reached into both Madison West High School and the Times’ newsroom — injecting guilt “regardless of intent”? Not exactly, and I’m not ready to name it yet. But I’ll tell you this: that ideology was launched less than two miles from Madison West, on July 7, 1989.
Stay tuned for installment #5:
Scores of colleagues quietly told Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, “Thank you for saying that, because I really can’t.” Moulton estimates that the majority of US Democratic Representatives are being silenced on this one issue. Who's doing that?