The intense anger, threats of violence, and actual violence cascading through America’s progressives over court decisions, legislation, and executive orders that don’t go their way is the consequence of unaccustomed losses by a movement that for 75 years has grown used to victory.
This dynamic is chronicled in the latest book by Seth Barron, a New York Post editorial board member. “Weaponized: The Left’s Capture and Destruction of America’s Sacred Institutions” is an insightful, witty journey through the left’s manipulation of our politics to secure control over America’s institutions.
Where “Weaponized” really shines is calling out long-held progressive myths for what they are.
It has, for example, long been a foundational precept of the left that in the 1920s and 1930s, New York urban planner Robert Moses intentionally lowered parkway bridges to prevent blacks from using buses to get to the beach. In reality, commercial traffic, including buses, was generally banned from U.S. parkways. New York City was 97% white, 2% black, and 1% Puerto Rican. Even if Moses designed overpasses to prevent buses from efficiently getting to the beach, it wasn’t racially motivated.
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Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg often promotes another of the left’s favorite canards – that racism was “built into” the national highway system. It’s true that highways went through black neighborhoods, but many also went through white neighborhoods. Barron asks whether the left would have preferred that the explosion of highway construction in the 1950s benefit only whites.
During World War I, blacks began relocating to Northern cities in a mass movement that continued until the early 1970s. In the “Great Migration,” approximately 7 million blacks left the South. As recently as 1940, New York City was about 95% non-Hispanic white. Neighborhoods that are today considered historically nonwhite, including East Harlem, the Tremont area of the Bronx, and Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, were largely Jewish and Italian districts into the 1960s.
Progressives assert that residential segregation was an intended consequence of redlining, slum clearance, the allocation of public housing units, racist-motivated “white flight,” and the interstate highway system.
Sometimes these proclamations sound like satire. Writing in The Nation, P. E. Moskowitz claimed in 2023 that “The suburbs were invented as a reactionary tool against the women’s liberation and civil rights movements,” and that the U.S. government, banks, landowners, and home builders separated people into single homes, removed public spaces, and ensured that every neighborhood was segregated via redlining. “The suburbs would keep white women at home, and would keep white men at work to afford that home,” he wrote.
Also inveighing against “white flight,” Michelle Obama proclaimed that white families abandoned South Chicago because of “the color of our skin” and “the texture of our hair.” She asserted that whites “were afraid of what our families represented.” That’s a peculiar way of describing Americans’ concern about their personal safety: During the two decades that her neighborhood changed from a white neighborhood to a black one, it also changed from a safe neighborhood to a dangerous one.
Barron observes:
Though everyone knows that the statistical reality of interracial crime is overwhelmingly black-on-everyone-else, we are asked, nay ordered, against the evidence of our own senses, to go along with the story that black people suffer, not just economic or residential grief, but actual physical persecution at the hands of white people. Mentioning the facts about who perpetrates violent crime against whom is a kind of “malinformation,” to use a neologism of the Biden years: It may be true, but it can be used maliciously, and therefore it is worse than a lie, which, after all, can be disproven.
Heather MacDonald has written extensively about the suppression of crime statistics that contradict the left’s narrative. Belying the plot, middle class blacks have joined in the trek to the suburbs. Today, more than half of all black residents in major metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, and their children are educated in suburban schools. Although the exodus is partially to escape crime, it is also born of a desire to pursue the American Dream of a detached house, a yard, fresh air, and more space to raise a family.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that school districts had to take proactive steps to integrate schools. The result was “forced busing,” which became one of the hottest issues of the 1970s. Despite the inflammatory rhetoric, busing was consistently unpopular among both blacks and whites. Supreme Court rulings slowly reduced the power of judges to order busing, and by the early 2000s, most such efforts had ended.
Nonetheless, according to Pew, in 1995, about half of white students attended schools that were 90% white, and by 2018 that had dropped to just 18%. In 1995, 22% of black students attended schools that were 90% black. That dropped to 13% in 2018.
Contributing to increases in crime, many prosecutors and advocates on the left believe that law enforcement should protect illegal immigrant offenders. For example, former San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin cautioned against arresting illegal immigrant pushers who support their families. The Justice Department is investigating whether Fairfax County, Virginia, prosecutor Steve Descano gives preferential treatment to illegal aliens. Congress is also investigating after Abdul Jalloh, an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone with more than 30 prior arrests allegedly stabbed a mother to death after being repeatedly released by Descano’s office. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has refused to transfer Jalloh to ICE custody for deportation.
In their quest to control education and enrich teachers and consultants, the left also undermines public schools. Barron explains:
The problem with education for the Left is that success in school is based on individual merit, hard work, and self-discipline. But what do grit and smarts have to do with an agenda of equality of outcome, communal guilt and racial debt, and undoing systemic global oppression? If the goal of the Left is to get tomorrow’s voters on board with gender fluidity, green politics, and the destruction of the West, then encouraging them to go home, shut out all distractions, and hit the books is a form of counter-messaging.
Moving to the core issues that are stake, Barrron asks the right question – “Whose dream is it, anyway?
In 1908, English author Israel Zangwill referred to America as a “melting pot.” Then, in the early 1930s, historian James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase “American Dream” as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”
During the first two-thirds of the 20th century, the American population was roughly 89% non-Hispanic whites, 10% black, and 1% “other.” Today, because of immigration, non-Hispanic whites are about 58%, Hispanics about 20%, blacks about 12%, Asians about 6%, and mixed-race about 4%. As America became more diverse, the civil rights movement sought to redefine the American story. The American Dream ceased to be something for Americans and became, instead, something to which foreigners aspire.
Barron sees the left as incapable of minding its business, and the right as indifferent. I would say that conservatives don’t just believe in conservative values, they are by nature conservative, and would rather leave things as they are, and leave people alone.
Barron’s bottom line is that the left’s success in seizing control of our most important institutions is devastating those institutions, and unless stopped will finally extinguish the American Dream.
Kenin M. Spivak is founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank. He is the author of fiction and non-fiction books and a frequent speaker and contributor to media, including RealClearPolitics, The American Mind, National Review, television, radio, and podcasts.
