The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: Candace Owens' New Documentary

 

The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM
Every Adult American Should Watch Candace Owens' New Documentary

 

Candace Owens' October, 2022, 80-minute documentary, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM, a Daily Wire production, is an agonizing watch. Beginning in spring, 2020, destructive and deadly riots broke out across the United States. These riots self-advertised as being all about a "racial reckoning."

 

If you were a leftist living in a comfortable suburb far from the arson, looting, and public torture, you could look on and cheer the apparent downfall of the country and the value system you benefit from, and that you irrationally and hypocritically hate. If you were, like me and millions of others, living in a majority-minority, low-income city already burdened with high murder rates, 2020's riots felt like a terrifying, demoralizing death spiral. We never knew when our homes would burn, when our grocers would be looted and permanently closed, when our fragile economies of immigrant-run mom-and-pop shops would be cut off at the knees, when our banks would shrug, give up, and leave town, when our cars would be incinerated, when our property values, already low, would plummet, when our black and Latino police officers would be shot dead, and when we would be the bystanders whose random death would add to the body count. In addition to those killed in the riots, 2,457 more black Americans were murdered in 2020 than in 2019, "marking the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes." Anti-policing policies and attitudes and increasing lawlessness are to blame for these deaths and thousands more, research has shown.

 

Money is less of a concern for rich leftists than it is for those of us who are living on the edge. The poor know that poverty can be a death sentence. As we watched looters empty stores, especially stores in neighborhoods like ours, majority minority, economically weak urban enclaves, we knew: everything is about to start costing a lot more. Someone has to pay for the CVS, the Walgreens, and Walmarts being emptied out. The looters aren't paying, so we will. The over-the-counter medications we rely on for chronic illnesses, drugs not covered by insurance, will take income away from our food budgets. Insurance rates will skyrocket, as will inflation. The little money we have will be worth less.

 

No, if you were a comfortable leftist living in a safe suburb you didn't have to confront the consequences of your support for BLM. I just had a quick look at the pages of Facebook friends who posted wall-to-wall BLM support during 2020's riots. One is now posting updates on the performance of her thoroughbred horses in various show competitions. One, who sobbed over the death of Queen Elizabeth, is now visiting Buckingham Palace. One has gone back to posting her scores in online word games. Another posts stunning photos of her expansive gardens. Their BLM passion was as short-lived as it was shallow.

 

Clearly, rich leftists have moved on to the next fad. We in blighted urban neighborhoods will never move on. Riots scar a city for generations. Capital, jobs, and safety depart and move to greener pastures. Newark has yet to recover from the riots of the 1960s. One estimate of the total cost of the George Floyd riots is $2 billion. That number is too low, for a few reasons. The Foundation for Economic Education explains. "Seventy-five percent of US businesses are under-insured and about forty percent of small businesses have no insurance at all. Their untold millions in losses don’t show up in the $2 billion figure …  riots leave a lasting shadow on a city that haunts its economy for decades. The afflicted areas face higher insurance rates, lower property values, higher prices, reduced tax revenue, and decreased economic opportunity." Finally, the damage done to human bodies and souls is not factored in to the $2 billion tab. An elderly man attempted to defend a property. Rioters broke his jaw. His pain and suffering, and subsequent sense of isolation and insecurity, and that of thousands of others, inevitably produces an economic drag, one it is difficult to estimate, but is no less real.

 

And all for nothing. Every last looting spree, every last rock thrown at the head of a beaten, bleeding white man lying helplessly in the street, every defaced synagogue, every not just ignorant but insane tearing down of a statue of a martyr to abolition like Hans Christian Heg or Abraham Lincoln, was for absolutely nothing. As Heather MacDonald, Roland G. Fryer, John McWhorter and others struggled to communicate, America is not racist, and there is no statistical support for the claim that there is an epidemic of white cops shooting unarmed black men to death for no reason. Officer Derek Chauvin was arrested four days after the death of George Floyd. He was rapidly charged, convicted, and imprisoned. In mainstream and social media, Chauvin was universally condemned, by both the left and the right. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, beloved by police officers, famous as a tough-on-crime icon, roundly and repeatedly condemned Chauvin on his WABC radio show.

 

Owens' The Greatest Lie Ever Sold adds to the agony with simple truths. I want every American to watch this documentary, even though I know that watching it may well hurt.

 

The film opens with a quote from Malcolm X. "The Media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the make the guilty innocent." I differ from Owens on this point. The media includes Candace Owens, and the media includes this review. The media is vast and consumers can select what media they support.

 

Next we see video of Floyd purchasing cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. The employees in the store are clearly minorities themselves. Cup foods employee Mike Abumayyaleh explains that they only call the police if the person using a counterfeit bill refuses to pay with other tender. George Floyd, apparently, when confronted, refused to pay with a real bill. In his refusal to use real money, even when confronted, Floyd made one of many choices that preceded his death. Officer Thomas Lane's bodycam shows Floyd in a car with his drug dealer, not cooperating with the police. A caption reports that he resisted being placed in a squad car for eight minutes. Derek Chauvin was called in as backup. Had Floyd not resisted arrest, Derek Chauvin would never have been on the scene.

 

The film cuts to Candace Owens' June 3 video. Owens, a black woman, rejected worldwide hysteria turning George Floyd into a Messianic figure. "I do not support George Floyd and the media depiction of him as a martyr for black America." She cited Shelby Steele, paraphrasing him as saying that blacks are unique in that they "cater to the bottom denominator in our society." Jews, whites, and Latinos, she said, would not hold up a felon as a culture hero. Owens made clear that she was not defending Derek Chauvin and she hoped to see Chauvin receive appropriate justice. She said also that the family of George Floyd deserves justice for the "way that he died." "But I'm not going to accept the narrative that this is the best that the black community has to offer.' "It has become fashionable for us to turn criminals into heroes." "The only way you can be black is to say that this person was amazing. I'm not going to do that. George Floyd was not amazing." "Everyone agrees that the police officer was wrong and the police officer has been arrested. That's not something that has been misconstrued in the media." Any black person who does not go along with the celebration of criminals is labeled a "coon." Condoleezza Rice, Dr. Ben Carson, Larry Elder are all, in this understanding, "coons," because they are educated high achievers.

 

Any fair minded person watching Owens' June 3 video immediately realizes two things. The first thing a fair-minded person realizes is that Candace Owens is a straight-shooter and a person of depth and conscience. She is struggling to be as fair as possible in a very difficult situation. She never says that Floyd deserved to die as he did; she says quite the opposite. She never defends Chauvin; she says he deserves "justice." No matter how hard Owens works to state a simple truth – she does not believe that black people benefit from making criminals their heroes – the viewer knows that Candace Owens will be vilified, threatened, and damned for what she had the courage and decency to say.

 

Dave Chappelle exhibited his signature cruelty, bullying, cowardice, misogyny, and, most important, his complete dishonesty. "Candace Owens tried to convince white America, 'Don't worry about it. He's a criminal anyway.'" Chappelle is lying. Candace Owens said no such thing, and she clearly wasn't talking to "white America."  In his pot-and-tobacco ruined voice, his eyes bugging out of his bald head, Chapelle gurgled out that Candace Owens is a "rotten bitch" and he mentioned kicking Owens in her "stinky pussy."

 

Owens said that such attacks made everything "personal" for her. "I am going to scream the truth" more loudly than others "can scream the lies." Candace Owens has more courage and integrity in her little finger than Dave Chappelle has in his six foot frame.

 

Owens visits George Floyd's housemates, Alvin Manago and Theresa Scott. Their previously shared home looks lovely; his roommates, a man and a woman, come across as nice people. Both are kind and respectful in their comments about Floyd. They acknowledge that Floyd was an addict, but say that he kept that out of the house. The man they knew was a valued friend, they insist.

 

Manago says that at memorials people would circulate metal boxes and ask for money. "I don't know who you are or where this is going." Clips show the Floyd family acknowledging trips to the White House and crying. The documentary reports that none of them ever went to Floyd's house to pick up his things. His car was still in the driveway. Neither Manago nor Scott had the paperwork necessary to address the car. Owens herself arranged to have it removed, and she gave Manago and Scott money to cover the rent they lost after Floyd's death.

 

In the film, Scott emphasizes how surprised she was that no family members ever came to Floyd's home for the final years of his life, the home where his belongings were still to be found. Manago says that he would like to meet Floyd's daughter, as that daughter is "an extension of him." Manago and Scott chat about people coming forward and claiming to be Floyd's children, but proven wrong through DNA checks. Evidently there were rumors that some tried to capitalize on worldwide sympathy for Floyd by claiming false relationships. The documentary does not make clear if these rumors are accurate.

 

Owens lays bare George Floyd's extensive criminal history. In 2007, Floyd and his accomplices forced entry into the home of Aracely Henriquez, pistol-whipped her, and ransacked her home. Henriquez's seven-year-old son identified Floyd. "How absolutely traumatized that child was," Owens remarks. "Just a few years later, children are wearing his shirt, and referring to him as hero and savior. That's wrong … Two things can be true at once. George Floyd didn't deserve to die. And this person was not a saint," she says.

 

In a 2019 arrest video, "I want my momma, man," Floyd moans. Who exactly was George Floyd's "momma"? On the witness stand, Courtney Ross, Floyd's girlfriend, with whom he sometimes used opioids, testifies that Floyd called her "momma," and indeed his listed her phone number on his phone as "momma." "Calling out for his mother was a nice victim narrative," Owens observes.

 

Owens is shown speaking on her phone to an interlocutor we cannot hear. This, we learn, is Derek Chauvin's mother. For understandable reasons, she is afraid to speak to Owens. Unable to gain access to Chauvin or his mother, Owens turns to people who knew him. Sargent Joey Sandberg says that "Derek is quiet, somewhat quirky, very dependable. Derek is the kind of guy you want to show up on your calls with you. He's very level headed." Sandberg says that Chauvin is allowed no reading material, no TV, no computer, and he is alone in his cell twenty-three hours a day. Since the documentary was filmed, Chauvin has been moved to another prison.

 

Lieutenant Kim Voss insists that Chauvin never revealed any racist tendencies. Indeed, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Muslim and a black man, said, "I wouldn't call [Floyd's death a hate crime] because hate crimes are crimes where there's an explicit motive and bias. We don't have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd's race as he did what he did."

 

In the "widely circulated video taken by a bystander" "the camera angle suggests" that Chauvin "kneeled on George Floyd's neck the whole time." But Officer Alexander Kueng's camera showed Chauvin's knee on Floyd's shoulder blade. How long Chauvin's knee was on Floyd's shoulder has been debated. In other video, Floyd also says "I can't breathe" before he is put on the ground, at his own request.

 

Dr. Ron Martinelli is a forensic criminologist and Certified Medical Investigator. Martinelli tells Owens that there was evidence that Floyd had consumed a lethal cocktail of fentanyl and methamphetamine. In video from the trial, Dr. Andrew Baker, Chief Medical Examiner of Hennepin County, testifies that the level of fentanyl found in Floyd's system, had he been found dead absent any interaction with police, would have been assessed as enough to have killed him. "I would certify his death as fentanyl toxicity."

 

Martinelli says that Floyd's heart suffered from cardiomegaly, that is, an enlarged heart, a sign of ill health. "That is significant." "There is zero evidence," he says, to prove that Floyd was unable to intake sufficient oxygen. The suggestion is that Floyd did not die of asphyxiation. This conclusion is controversial and debated. On October 17, for example, the Washington Post accused Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, of lying when he said that Floyd died from a drug overdose. The reason that the asphyxiation v. drug overdose battle is so hot is clear. If Floyd died of a drug overdose, he was responsible for his own death and the larger narrative becomes an anti-drug-abuse narrative. If Derek Chauvin asphyxiated Floyd, Chauvin is responsible for his death, and the larger narrative is one of black innocence, white racism, and police brutality.

 

Owens interviews a few people whose lives where damaged by Floyd protestors. Liz Collin is a former news anchor. She is married to former Minneapolis police chief Bob Kroll. "Within minutes" of Floyd's death, Collin reports, tweets appeared saying, paraphrase, Bob Kroll and Liz Collin will be dead by the time the year ends. The mob also threatened to murder their seven-year-old son. Protestors made pinatas of Collin and Kroll dressed as Klansmen. and Representative John Thompson, spewing obscenities, beat these effigies in Collin's and Kroll's home driveway. Collin lost her job, and was unable to get any other job.

 

Kitson is a boutique in LA where celebrities sometimes shop. Fraser Ross is the owner. He called Kitson "a general store for the rich." Looters stole over $400 thousand dollars of merchandise. Chrissy Teigen posted that she would donate hundreds of thousands of dollars in bail money for rioters. "They all live in gated communities and it's not their stuff being destroyed," Ross observes.

 

Ross posted a looting photo and said "Thanks Chrissy." She replied, "I'm gonna not shop at your store so hard." Influencers Jen Atkin and Dana Omari inevitably accused Ross of being a racist. Omari sent Ross a lengthy private message detailing how he must grovel in public to avoid further wrath. During a phone call, Omari extorted a ten thousand dollar donation to Black Lives Matter. Without that donation, she said, she would ruin his business through her internet posts.

 

Not just individual lives, but the lives of communities were destroyed by the Floyd riots. These were largely non-white, low-income communities. Pastor Charles Karuku grew up in Kenya. He is president of Unity Movement Institute. Of the Floyd riots, Pastor Karuku says, "I'm used to this in Third World countries, but not in America, and not in Minnesota … This is not 'Minnesota Nice.'" Karuku and Owens walk past a sign reading, "You are now entering the Free State of George Floyd."

 

Karuku explains, "This is an autonomous zone that operates outside the laws of the United States … They do whatever they want … We've seen a woman who was pregnant shot right in front of us."

 

Shops are boarded up. Insurance would never cover all the losses. Owens and Karuku pass an open-air altar to George Floyd. There is a drawing in the street representing his body. Flowers and artwork surround it. A cardboard sign reads, "Sacred space."  

 

"We have better people to follow," the pastor says. "Like Jesus Christ, who epitomized what we would like to emulate."

 

"BLM raised ninety million dollars on the back of George Floyd. Where is that money?" Owens asks.

 

"I don't know. It's not here … Everything looks worse than it was… Some of these organizations can only get money if they propagate hatred. They are not helping the community. They are helping themselves," Karuku says.

 

George Floyd's former housemates say that they have not seen a dime of BLM money, though they are carrying the expenses Floyd used to carry.

 

Silicone Valley entrepreneur and bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy says that during the Floyd riots, his business milieu insisted on "a pledge of allegiance to this one man into some type of new modern messiah figure. The religious quality was odd. The bending the knee … I didn't recite the same ritual incantation that every other CEO was pledging allegiance to across the country."

 

A BLM front person bought a mansion for three million, and then sold it to BLM for six million within days, creating a personal profit of three million. "That's a self-dealing transaction."

 

BLM founder Patrisse Cullors hired her mother and her brother to work at the property. The brother is a graffiti artist. He was hired to handle security. His salary is $840 thousand for one year. Cullors' baby daddy received $969 thousand. Cullors also channeled money to her wife, Jenaya Khan, who appears to have had surgery to appear as a male. Even so, a photo of Khan can receive this kind of caption from Vogue, "Louis Vuitton vest and pants. Mejuri pendant necklace. Hair, Marcia Hamilton; makeup, Tasha Reiko Brown. Fashion Editor: Yashua Simmons. Produced by: GE Projects. Photographed by Melodie McDaniel." A bit different from "Arise ye prisoners of starvation. Arise ye wretched of the earth."

 

BLM has poured over two million dollars into trans groups, including groups for trans sex workers. Owens attempts to investigate Living through Giving, an organization that received $2.3 million from BLM. Photos reveal that Cullors knew the recipient, AJ Vreeland, at least as early as 2019. Living through Giving purports to distribute free lunches. Owens was unable to find any such distribution.

 

$32 million of Marxist, anti-Western, anti-American BLM's assets went into the stock market.

 

Owens goes to "celebrity enclave" Laurel Canyon. In this segment, petite Candace Owens is very obviously pregnant. She is dressed, as ever, impeccably. She merely approaches the gate of Cullors' mansion, a mansion purchased with the blood of innocents like David Dorn.

 

Intercut with Owens' inoffensive approach to Cullors' mansion is video of Cullors herself, whining online that Candace Owens is threatening her. It would be comical were it not so disgusting. Owens is a petite woman; she is carrying a child; she is speaking in soft, polite tones. All she wants is to speak to someone. Cullors labels Owens' visit a veritable terrorist assault. "She was demanding that I come outside," Cullors lies into her video camera. "It's unacceptable and it's dangerous to come outside of my house." One thinks of the houses burned to the ground by Cullors' followers. "What happened this morning is not safety. It's not what I deserve. It's not what any of us deserve. They're trying to destroy me." No, Cullors. Owens was just trying to tell the truth.

 

It goes without saying that Cullors' security team is, as Owens reports, a white male and a German shepherd.

 

"What could be more emblematic of BLM than that?" Owens asks. "Playing the victim, to the public, hoping that you can get sympathy and that sympathy will transform into dollars." "The real story" of George Floyd's death, Owens insists, "is a story of addiction. That could have brought people together globally. This was a man who was high on drugs … it is a story of a man who overdosed." Instead, BLM uses "black emotion and black pain to extort dollars from white America."  

 

In 2020, Minneapolis saw a 58% increase in murder. In 2021, the city recorded the highest number of homicides in over 20 years.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

 

 

"Bros" Gay Rom-Com Bomb versus "It Happened One Night" Rom-Com Classic

 

Bros: A Saturation-Marketed, Gay Rom-Com
Does Billy Eichner's Box Office Bomb Prove that America Is Homophobic?

 

Bros is advertised as groundbreaking. Universal, a major studio, produced it. It cost $22 million, and its advertising budget is estimated at $40 million. The film opened "wide," that is on 3,350 nationwide screens. Judd Apatow, a big name in comedy, co-produced. Bros was a spectacular flop. It took in only about $5 million in its opening weekend.

 

On Sunday, October 2, before the weekend had even concluded, Billy Eichner, who stars and co-wrote Bros' script, went public to accuse the audiences who refused to pay to see his movie. They are homophobes. "Even with glowing reviews and great Rotten Tomatoes scores … straight people … just didn’t show up for Bros." Eichner singled out the South and the Midwest as benighted regions that could not accept the film.

 

Bros is marketed as a romantic comedy. Romantic comedy is often dismissed as a silly, unimportant genre. That's at least partly because romantic comedy is a genre associated with women, and also because, in recent years, the quality of films in this genre has dramatically deteriorated. That decay of the genre says much about sexual confusion in the wider culture. Done right, romantic comedy is as worthy a cultural product as any other genre, including the "serious" ones like war, spy, epic, courtroom, and crime movies. The place romantic comedy used to occupy in American culture, and the abysmal quality of recent efforts like Bros, says much, none of it encouraging, about the trajectory of relationships, maturity levels, and sex roles in America.

What We Worship Now: A Celebrity Death and Post-Christian America

 

What We Worship Now
A Celebrity Death and Post-Christian America

 

On September 27, 2022, The New York Times published a preview of Down and Out in Paradise, a new biography of Anthony Bourdain, famous as a charismatic, globetrotting bon vivant and humanitarian. On June 8, 2018, at age 61, Bourdain was in picturesque Kaysersberg, France, working on a TV project. In the bathroom of his quarters at the Hotel Chambard, Bourdain hung himself with the belt from his hotel bathrobe. Bourdain's friend Eric Ripert discovered the body. Bourdain fans around the world – and no doubt Ripert – were devastated.

Are You Racist? "Little Mermaid" and "Woman King" Are Used as Litmus Tests

 

Are You Racist?
The Woman King and The Little Mermaid Are Used as Litmus Tests

 

The Disney conglomerate's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is expected to be released on May 26, 2023. Disney's previous Little Mermaid was a 1989 animated feature film. It is based on a literary fairy tale by prolific and beloved, nineteenth-century Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. A statue of the Little Mermaid graces Copenhagen's shore and is emblematic of that city.

 

Disney's 1989 Little Mermaid was a "resplendent" film that ushered in the "great Disney animation Renaissance," a period of "aesthetic and industrial growth." The Little Mermaid "established a pattern" for excellence in animation that would restore a floundering Disney to its throne as a major aesthetic and economic force in American culture. The Little Mermaid holds the record for the most money made in the initial run of an animated film. Critics award it a 93% positive score at Rotten Tomatoes. At the Internet Movie Database, fans young and old, male and female, gush about seeing the film for the first time, and then introducing it to their own children. In short, the 1989 Little Mermaid matters a great deal to many people's cultures, tastes, bank accounts, and hearts.

 

Disney posted a trailer for its new Little Mermaid on YouTube on September 9, 2022. In this live-action remake, Ariel is played by Halle Bailey, an African American singer. As night follows day, the media was flooded with criticism of alleged white supremacist response.

A Student Writes a Good Paper. Fearing the Consequences, She Hides

 

A Student Writes a Good Paper
Fearing the Consequences, She Hides

 

Professor Josephine K knew what she was hired to teach. She was hired to teach Jonathan Kozol. Kozol is a recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, and multiple fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Field, and Ford Foundations. Kozol's website identifies him as "one of the nation's most eloquent and outspoken advocates for equality and racial justice in our nation's schools." According to Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Thernstrom, Kozol is a "guru" in university education departments. A survey of departmental reading lists shows Kozol's name on every one. Chances are that anyone studying to be a teacher in the United States will be required to read Kozol. Indeed, Amazon reviewers of Kozol's books sometimes mention that his books were required reading for a university class.

 

Education students reading Kozol's works learn that America is an "apartheid" country. They learn that "there are expensive children and there are cheap children." They learn that children are cheap because of "governmentally administered diminishment in the value of children." Poor children are "locked out of opportunity … for no reason but … the budgetary choices of the government." Kozol's readers learn that there are two flavors of human in the US: rich, greedy, racist white victimizers, and poor, disenfranchised, powerless black victims. Rich whites send their kids to early education programs beginning at age two or three. "Low income children" "are denied opportunities" and thus "come into their kindergarten year without the minimal social skills that children need in order to participate in class activities." Poor children "spend years at home in front of a TV" or in "a slum apartment gazing down into the street." These deprived childhoods are caused by "high officials of our government" who "rob" black children "of what they gave their own kids."

 

Black students, on average consistently perform less well than whites, East-Asian Americans, and Hispanics, on average. Teachers, administrators, and politicians want to solve this achievement gap. A new proposed solution appeared: performance-based learning. Performance-based learning is defined as "emphasizing students being able to do, or perform, specific skills as a result of  instruction." That is, students learn something, and then demonstrate their mastery through action. Kozol describes this method as having been devised by racist whites to "humiliate" black children who cannot possibly learn anything in America's schools as they are currently constituted. "There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education."

 

Prof. Josephine K's students learned from Kozol's National-Book-Award-winning publications that the achievement gap between blacks and other ethnic groups exists because of malicious whites working to hurt blacks.

 

Kozol offers readers a solution to the crisis he describes. Americans must "storm their state legislatures, then do it to Congress, and absolutely demand in passionate, angry language the end of the present system of school finance in this nation." American citizens should exercise "direct civil disobedience" and stop "unspeakably selfish racial steering."

 

Americans must use their taxpayer dollars to "create a utopian children's village in every inner-city neighborhood." These villages would follow Montessori and Eriksonian educational guidelines. Americans must defeat "the right-wing voucher movement" advanced by "insidiously clever propaganda." America must be like "more enlightened nations such as France." There should be no more than sixteen students per class. Taxpayers should fund "three years of full-day preschool." Taxpayers should also fund psychiatrists, ophthalmologists, lawyers, and HVAC consultants for every child. The HVAC consultants will ensure that every child's home is kept at a comfortable temperature. Parents of school children should be guaranteed never to be evicted from their apartments.

 

Prof. K's students accepted Kozol's pronouncements passively. They understood their job as memorization of what Kozol said, not disagreeing with or interrogating Kozol's assumed-to-be holy writ. Many of Prof. K's students would go on to become teachers themselves. They might someday pass on unquestioning acceptance. America is racist. Blacks are doomed. Massive taxpayer spending on social engineering is the only solution. Resistance to such spending is evil. Forever and ever amen.

 

By the time students reached Prof. K's university classroom, they had been trained like Pavlov's dogs. They didn't salivate when a bell rang. They cried "racism" whenever they encountered anything that the teacher or the assigned reading might suggest was unjust. One day Prof. K mentioned Jack Phillips. Phillips had declined to accept a commission to create a custom-made cake for a same-sex wedding. The students accused Phillips of "racism." Both Phillips and the gay couple were white, but "racism," in their previous education, and also in the wider culture, had become a synonym for "injustice," and the only injustice that mattered at all was white supremacy.

 

Prof. K. assigned the reading she was supposed to assign. The students took the notes and made the facial expressions they were supposed to make. Then Prof. K did something that the students did not expect.

 

"There are facts and there are opinions. Let's separate the two." Students gave no sign of discomfort. They put down their pens and leaned back in their chairs. This would be easy. Of course they all knew the difference between facts and opinions.

 

Prof. K worked to retain her poker face. She didn't want to force any belief on anyone. She didn't want a smile or a nod to tell the students what they should be thinking. But, damnit, she wanted her students to be able to differentiate between a fact and an opinion. She said, "Tell me what Jonathan Kozol thinks is true."

 

The students looked confused. Prof. K had learned, in previous semesters, that this exercise would be very difficult for students, and the next few hours of instruction would grind by slowly, with much frustration.

 

Students raised their hands and began to speak. Prof. K cut them off. "No. I don't want to hear your opinion of this assignment. I want you to tell me what Jonathan Kozol thinks is true. I want you to point out exactly where in the text you learned that Jonathan Kozol thinks something is true."

 

Facial expressions telegraphed anger and distrust. Geez, this teacher is stupid. Or maybe just mean. Many students, though told to do so, did not bring hard copies of the assigned readings with them. They had accessed the materials on the internet, and skimmed them off of a phone screen. They picked up the themes of racism and injustice, and figured that they were safe. They assumed it would be their job to arrive in class and express outrage at racism. But Prof. K was not accepting that. She wanted something else and they weren't sure what it was, how to deliver it, or why she wanted it, whatever it was.

 

"American schools are racist! It's so unfair! We've really got to change it!" a student cried out, in his most aggrieved voice. Prof. K ignored him. Well, he thought, she's a rude bitch. He was doing what he was supposed to be doing and she wasn't giving him any positive feedback at all. Not even smiling!

 

"I want to see your hard copies of the reading assignment on your desks. I want to you tell me what Kozol thinks is true, and I want you to support your assertion with a direct quote from what you read."

 

Getting the students to understand that request, and actually to do it, took the relentless forward push of a military campaign. To retain a hard copy of something that they had accessed via the internet and skimmed from their phone screens, and to peruse it carefully, not just once but several times, to check facts, to weigh opinions against facts, accurately and thoroughly to recognize the product an author was selling, from Romeo and Juliet's love to Marx's communism to Kozol's accusations of racism, was utterly alien to anything they'd experienced before.

 

Fatima, an ambitious, older, married student, raised her hand. The reading assignment was in her other hand. "Kozol thinks that America is an apartheid country. It says that right here, this page, this paragraph."

 

"Excellent, thank you." The professor finally offered some positive feedback! Low-key, but still positive. Students looked at each other. So that was what she wanted? Just to recognize and report words on a page? Huh.

 

Fatima had a follow-up question. "What does apartheid mean?"

 

Prof. K asked the class. No one raised a hand. "So. You read the assignment. A key point in the assignment is Kozol's accusation that America is an apartheid country. And you never looked up the word 'apartheid.'"

 

Prof. K met every student's eyes. "One of these days, someone is going to ask you to sign something, and that something is going to contain a word you don't understand, like 'collateral,' or 'escrow,' or 'compound interest,' or 'do not resuscitate,' and you are not going to understand that word. Will you still sign? Did you sign a student loan agreement that contained words you don't understand?" she stared at every student. "Look up words, people. Writing is power. To read is to submit to someone else's power. How submissive are you going to be? How much of your power are you giving away by your refusal to do the work of understanding what you read?"

 

Prof. K gave the students a brief explanation of apartheid. Then she wrote on the blackboard, "Kozol thinks:" and she began a numbered list.

 

After Kozol's positions were enumerated, Prof. K asked another question that was absolutely new to the students.

 

"How is Kozol talking to you?"

 

The students were completely confused.

 

"How?" Jamal asked. "By his writing."

 

"Yes. And what kind of language is he using?"

 

The students who had the reading material with them began to look at them again. Their looking, at least for the second time, at something they'd already read once, assuming that reading, or even just skimming something once was enough, thrilled and delighted her.

 

Fatima raised her hand. "He says here, 'storm the legislature.' Then he says we should make demands. We should be passionate and angry. This is very emotional language."

 

"Correct," said Prof. K, practically elevating out of her shoes. "Can anyone show me anywhere else in this text where Kozol uses emotional language?" Students found "insidiously clever" and "enlightened nations."

 

"What did you feel," Prof. K asked, "when you read about the little black children who don't have social skills, who spend all their time looking out of slum windows? And right after he talks about that, Kozol talks about super rich white people in Manhattan spending tens of thousands of dollars a year sending their kids to private schools. Kozol is juxtaposing two pictures in your head. Juxtapose means to put next to each other. An author or an artist puts those two things next to each other in order to get a reaction out of you. What reaction did Kozol get out of you?"

 

Students talked about imagining a a poor black kid staring out a slum window unable to play, juxtaposed with an image of a rich white kid going to an exclusive private school.

 

"How did you feel when you read those passages?"

 

"Angry!"

 

"Sad!"

 

"We need to do something!"

 

"When you were feeling so strongly," Prof. K asked, "were you doing any thinking? Were you questioning Kozol's logic? Were you asking yourself if it is plausible to provide every two year old in America with a psychiatrist and an HVAC consultant?

 

"Lahoma, I've seen you working the cash register in the book store. Working a cash register is hard. Customers are rude, it's hard to stand in one spot all day, and mistakes come out of your earnings. Have you looked at your paycheck, at how much is taken out in taxes? Multiply that amount by however much it would cost to supply every American kid with an HVAC consultant. Does that feel good to you?"

 

"I'm not paying it," announced Steve, a golf course caddy.

 

"I think New Jersey has the highest property taxes," said Amir.

 

When the blackboard was covered with a complete list of Kozol's assertions, and the emotional language he used to support his assertions, Prof. K asked the students, "In your opinion, is any of this true? Let's start at the top. Is America comparable to South Africa during apartheid? What facts can you adduce to support your opinion?"

 

And that was the question that changed the class. Facial expressions changed. Postures changed. Note-taking changed. Energy levels changed. Later in the semester, when it would be drawing to a close, and some students would approach her with final thoughts, they would mention just this moment. Students would say things like, "You know how we talked in class that day? I did that with my mom. While we were making dinner. We talked about things that way. We started doing it all the time."

 

"Everybody," Prof. K said. "Amir's father came here from Bangladesh. He took difficult jobs, saved up, bought a rental property. How would you convince Amir's dad that he should pay higher taxes than he already pays, either the highest or among the highest in the country, to foot the bill for a utopian children's village, for psychiatrists, for HVAC experts visiting homes? And, if he said no, he didn't want to pay higher taxes, how successful would you be if you called him a racist?"

 

Ted, a big guy, an EMT, who might or might not change career course and go into teaching, he wasn't sure, raised his hand. "I don't know if this is what you're looking for," he began, tentatively.

 

"I'm looking for your opinion of Kozol's points, your opinion backed up by facts you adduce to support your opinion," Prof. K said.

 

Ted looked unsure. He was brave, though; he had just come from an over night visit to a fatal collision on Route 80. "When we started this, I thought, okay, I've heard all this before. I mean, we've been hearing it since grade school. We hear it on TV. America is racist, blah blah blah. And that's the cause of all the problems.

 

"I mean," he continued, "when we are assigned stuff in other classes, we are supposed to take it as is, and just agree that it's right. But you're asking us if we think it's right. And looking at it that way, I'm not sure."

 

That was all he said. That he wasn't sure. Just announcing in class that he wasn't sure took all the courage he had.

 

Hands shot up. Too late. Time for class to end.

 

"Students," Prof. K began the next class. "When you are looking at a piece of writing, please be mindful of what the author is not saying, as well as what he is saying. There are a couple of sentences in Kozol that he glides over quickly. Here's one, 'a quarter of the children are likely to go off to prison every weekend so they can see their fathers.' Here's another one. The children he's writing about 'come into their kindergarten year without the minimal social skills that children need in order to participate in class activities.' Why doesn't Kozol expand on those two sentences, and what's hiding behind his silence?"

 

"Some of the kids' dads are in jail! He's talking about the real world. Lotsa fathers in jail! My cousin has to take two buses every weekend! Just to see her man!" Lahoma declared emphatically, with a combination of mourning and indignation. Lahoma looked around the room with the confident air of a student who is convinced that she has said the important thing, and had the final word. She was waiting for approval.

 

"Yes, that's what Kozol is saying," Prof. K said. "And he doesn't elaborate on that. He doesn't say more. Why not? Is there more to be said?"

 

Ever since they began reading Kozol, Maria had been watching Prof. K with the eyes of a character in a heist movie. Maria looked as silently thoughtful as someone planning to break into the world's most carefully guarded museum and purloin the world's most famous jewel.

 

Maria Sanchez, a petite Latina, was in her late twenties, so she was a bit older than the average student. She came to class in business attire. She worked as an administrative assistant and was paying for college herself. Maria was never the first to raise her hand, even when she was the first to know or understand, and that was often. Her behavior suggested that she was the kind of person who proceeded with caution.

 

Maria appeared to have decided that it would be to her benefit to speak, and that today's class was a safe environment in which to speak. She raised her hand with neither fear nor coltish energy. Maria had all the time, and all the confidence, in the world.

 

"Maria," the professor acknowledged her.

 

Maria nodded. "So, here, Kozol points out that twenty-five percent of the students have a father in jail. And over here," Maria held up her hard copy of the assigned reading and indicated to the class the passage she was referencing. "Over here he says that the students have no social skills. He also says that they are trapped in a slum apartment, gazing down into the street or in front of a TV." Maria made eye contact with the professor.

 

The professor nodded. "Yes," she said.

 

"Okay," Maria continued. "What I think you're asking us to see is a couple of things. Well, a few things, actually. Kozol brings up these facts, the fathers in jail, the kids without social skills, how they spend all their time watching TV or staring at the street in a slum, to support his overall agenda. As we said in the last class, his writing is very emotional. He's trying to get us to feel sad and angry. And we do feel sad and angry for little kids whose fathers are in jail. And we are supposed to go along with his main idea, that all the bad things happen because white people are racist. And the solution to all these bad things is that white people need to pay more taxes to fix all this. But."

 

Maria stopped.

 

Prof. K was staring at Lahoma, chatting with the student behind her. "Lahoma, can Maria please have your attention? Maria did pay attention to you when you were speaking."

 

Lahoma twisted around in her chair, never making eye contact with the professor or Maria. She lifted her four-colored pen and began to scribble loudly and quickly in her notebook, her pen almost slashing the thin paper.

 

"Maria, please go on."

 

"There's a possible relationship there that he never comments on. He wants to keep it hidden from the reader. Maybe the kids lack social skills because, and maybe their lives suck so much because, because their parents aren't there for them. Like, the fathers are in jail. So the mothers have to work and nobody is taking the kids to the park or teaching them how to behave."

 

"Maria, does anything you just said relate to a possible solution?" Prof. K asked.

 

"Yeah. The kids need parents."

 

"Jamal," Prof. K asked, "Can you tell me what Maria just said?"

 

Prof. K spent several minutes making sure everyone in the class understood Maria's point. She ended with, "And how are tax dollars going to solve the problem?"

 

But it was time for class to end.

 

The next class, Prof. K asked, "Kozol uses the word 'insidious' to describe the 'right wing.' What does it mean to be right wing? And are right-wing people 'insidious?'"

 

After writing student definitions of "right wing," a term some students were familiar with, on the blackboard and defining "insidious," a word no students looked up, Prof. K pointed out that there are scholars who see things differently than does Jonathan Kozol. She reminded the students that there are supplementary readings available to them by right-wing authors, or authors presenting a right-wing point of view: Abigail Thernstrom, Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Nick Kristof, and Amy Chua.

 

"If you choose to read these authors, I want you to keep a running tally. Kozol mentions many facts. Are his facts correct, according to the right-wing authors? Kozol says that the solution is more taxpayer dollars. What does Abigail Thernstrom say about that, specifically in reference to the funding of DC schools? Thernstrom claimed that 'the best estimates are that [black and Hispanic students] have about as much money spent on them per pupil as the national average … Washington, D.C., is an almost entirely black system and spends' a lot per student and yet 'has the worst public schools in the country.' In Cambridge, 'despite colossal expenditures, despite a pupil-teacher ratio of something like nine students per teacher, the schools' black performance there is worse than the state average.'

 

"Kozol says that the solution is smaller class sizes. Do facts support that? How big were class sizes in the 1950s? One source says between 35 and 40 students per class. Class sizes have gone down since then. You'll find that in the 50s, class sizes were larger, and students were handling more difficult material.

 

"What does the Vanderbilt Study say about the efficacy of universal Pre-K? Have you heard about the Vanderbilt Study? No? Well, if you are going to be teachers someday, or even just taxpayers, you should know about it. Researchers spent years studying the impact. Over the course of time, students who attended pre-K actually did worse than students who did not.

 

"What, then, is missing?" Prof. K asked. "If Kozol is wrong about what explains the achievement gap, then what does explain it?"

 

The students were stumped. It appeared that it had never occurred to them to ask that question. If black students are not doing as well as white, East-Asian-descent, and Hispanic students, and if the explanation was not racism, what was the explanation?

 

"Read some of the right-wing authors to find out what they think," Prof. K said. "And read them as critically as I encouraged you to read Kozol. Separate fact from opinion. Check facts. Notice what is not being said. Notice if you are being manipulated. Notice when they use language meant to play on your emotions. Look up words you don't know," Prof. K said, knowing full well that she lacked the magic wand that would get students to look up words that they did not know.

 

After the class had emptied out, and the hubbub of students flirting or joking, rough-housing or arguing had died down, and Prof. K's only companion was the sunlight leaning into the room from the row of miserably awkward awning windows, she heard a little knock on the door frame. She looked up.

 

"Maria. What's up?"

 

Maria approached. She didn't wait till everyone was gone, she didn't knock quietly, because she was timid. She was calculating. She wanted the same A in this class that she received in every other class. She wanted no risk. But her inquisitive brain demanded that she take on risky acts.

 

"Professor, I read those right-wing authors you have in the supplementary reading file."

 

"Oh? Which ones?"

 

"All of them," Maria said.

 

"Okay," Prof. K said, trying to hide her delight.

 

"I grew up in the Bronx," Maria said.

 

Prof. K nodded.

 

"I went to one of those schools. The kind Kozol talked about."

 

"Mmm," Prof. K said.

 

"There were African students. Not African American but from Africa. They did really well."

 

"Interesting."

 

"There are black people in my family. Some Hispanics are more dark skinned. Some are really successful. Some are on welfare. All in my own family."

 

"Mmm hmm."

 

"I wonder why."

 

"Yeah."

 

"So I was thinking, can I write my final paper on this?"

 

"Be more specific."

 

"I don't know. How some people do better and some do worse. Is it Kozol? Is it white supremacy? Or are the right-wingers right?"

 

"Our final papers aren't due for some months yet. But now is a good time to start. Check out the documents I've posted online. You'll find a handout on how to write a research paper. You'll find examples of previous good papers. Have a look at that material, and keep in touch with me as your thoughts develop."

 

Maria almost looked happy, but too big of a smile, too much investment of enthusiasm, would be too big of a risk. Maria didn't leave. She was thinking, but not speaking. Prof. K intuited what Maria might be thinking.

 

"Maria. Your task for this class is to write a research paper, not an opinion paper."

 

"Yes, but what if…"

 

The ellipsis were not a sign of timidity, but strategy.

 

Prof. K wanted to get home so she cut to the chase. "What if your results support Kozol? What if your results prove Kozol wrong? What if you say something with which I disagree? Maria, you know Fatima, sits two seats across from you? The woman who wears hijab. She was in my class last semester. She disagrees with me about almost everything. She got an A. I wrote her a great letter of rec when she applied for a scholarship. I graded her on the quality of her work. Not her opinions."

 

Maria looked at Prof. K the way an appraiser looks at a diamond. Real, or fake? And what price would she pay if the professor were lying, and the professor graded on opinions? And what were her opinions, anyway?

 

"Maria, sit down." Prof. K sat across from Maria.

 

"Look. I assign a research paper because when I first arrived at this school I realized that students aren't aware of some of the basic tools of scholarship. Students knew how to get emotional, how to voice an opinion as emphatically as possible, usually the opinion that they assumed was the professor's, usually a left-wing opinion.

 

"But students didn't know what a thesis statement was, or a research design, or a scholarly article. They weren't familiar with basic concepts like peer review, double blind, quantitative versus qualitative, or the scientific method. Some students, after this class, will become teachers. Some won't. But I want every student to benefit from this class, and one of those benefits will be writing a research paper, will be mastering the very basic methods that our civilization has developed for differentiating fact from fiction.

 

"That's all I want you to do. To dip your toe in. To test drive academic inquiry. I don't care whether you support or undermine Kozol. I care about the quality of your performance in the driver's seat of the engine of scholarly research."

 

***

 

Prof. K always teared up at the end of the semester. The students were gone; their final papers were in a colorful tower of Pisa on her desk. Of course Maria would wait till everyone had left before she knocked, quietly, on the doorframe.

 

"Maria. What's up?"

 

"I wanted to give you my paper."

 

"Of course."

 

"The thing is."

 

"Maria, I don't care what your opinion is."

 

"Can you read it right now? I can change it."

 

"Have a seat."

 

Prof. K sat down, and she read. "Redistribution of material resources has a very poor track record when it comes to actually helping those who are lagging whether in education, in the economy or elsewhere.  What they need are the attitudes, priorities and behavior which produce the outcomes desired."

 

Prof. K had offered students a variety of catchy ways to begin a paper. One way was to open with a quote. Maria had opened with a quote from Race and Culture: A World View by Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell. This book was not assigned. Maria found it on her own. With her first sentence, Maria had wowed Prof. K.

 

The rest of the paper lived up to the promise of the first line. Maria didn't hem and haw. She came right out and stated her thesis. She summarized the point of view she aimed to shoot down: the achievement gap can be explained solely as an artifact of white supremacy. She cited those scholars with whom she disagreed, and she cited scholars, like Sowell, who pointed to group values as exercising considerable influence on group performance. Maria conducted original research, surveying dozens of students on their natal home and natal culture's values, and compared those results with their GPAs.

 

Her results supported her thesis. Student performance matched student and the student's family's investment in time, and their attitudes toward education as a valuable enterprise. The Asian-American students in her survey invested the most time and had the highest GPAs. African American students invested the least time, and their parents talked to them about their schooling the least. They had the lowest GPAs.

 

Maria rhetorically stomped her opposition. Prof. K wondered if Maria's ringing tone was inspired by her ethnicity. Maybe Maria was tired of leftists offering people like her a hopeless option: "You are helpless. You can only be saved when racist white people experience a change of heart and sprinkle their dollars upon you." Perhaps Maria was thrilled by scholars like Sowell who saw an immediate route to success for her. And, perhaps Maria was relieved to encounter scholars who didn't shame her for her own exceptional success, for being different from her own impoverished family members and her neighbors in the Bronx. Right-wingers were not shaming Maria for being a success. They were praising her for being a success, and telling her brothers and sisters, cousins and uncles that they could be a success, too, with the right attitude. Finally, right-wingers allowed Maria to understand her own success as something she created herself, out of her own hard work, dedication, and focus. Maria was Maria because of Maria. Maria was not Maria because some "enlightened," rich, white liberal generously sprinkled taxpayer dollars upon her.

 

Prof. K thought of something. She invited Maria to the classroom computer. She turned to Jonathan Kozol's website. In several photos, Kozol looks the heroic crusader. He is the center of attention, even though he may be surrounded by black students. In one, he is in the foreground. Behind him are people holding signs. The sign behind Kozol, held by an invisible protester, reads "PROTECT CHILDREN FROM SEGREGATION." A black woman, behind and appearing a foot shorter than Kozol, is partially obscured by her sign. Her facial features are blurred, while Kozol's are clear.

 

There was no place for Maria on that page. Beautiful Maria, working to pay for school, carefully assessing everything she heard in class for its value, applying herself to her research, reading major scholars in her field, both those she agreed with and those she rejected. Maria's presence would have made Kozol look small, even comical. Maria simply doesn't need a rich, white liberal to crusade for her.

 

Prof. K used her usual red pen to write an A atop Maria's paper. She handed it back to Maria.

 

"Please send me an electronic copy. I'd like to keep this."

 

Maria exhaled.

 

"Maria, I want to help you publish."

 

"Publish?"

 

"Yes. This is one of the best student papers I've received in my entire career. You have a fine mind and a feisty and yet disciplined prose style."

 

"I can't."

 

"What?"

 

"I can't. The rest of the world isn't like your class."

 

"The world is a pretty big place, and there is room for –"

 

"No. I still have plenty of classes to go before I get my degree. After that I have to get a job. You yourself showed us that education is dominated by left-wing faculty and staff."

 

Prof. K shrank in her chair. She suddenly felt cold.

 

"It's not my job to tell students what opinion to have, or what to do with their lives. I'll just say that, if you ever change your mind and I can help you find a publisher, let me know."

 

Maria left. Prof. K gathered up the precariously leaning tower of final papers, some in colorful binders, some simply naked white paper, and packed them into her backpack as carefully as she could, and she told herself, as she had so many times before, not to let the disappointments get her down.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery