January 29, 2023

If you are trying to make sense of how our nation has become so toxic, a good starting point is the Supreme Court’s  1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan. That case radically altered existing law so that, for the first time in our history, it was impossible for any “public figure” to bring a successful defamation suit. There can be no better example of the horrid effect of that decision than a recent race-based defamation against Governor Ron DeSantis.

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Recently, the DeSantis administration sent a letter to the College Board informing it that the State of Florida would not allow a proposed AP African-American Studies curriculum to be taught within the state. The rationale was that much of the course was nothing more than a highly politicized and radical ideology dressed up as a history course, something illegal in Florida.

Factually, nothing DeSantis did was “racist”—that is, he did not treat Blacks differently because of their skin color. Nor did anything DeSantis say or do support “White supremacy”—that is, he did not promote White Americans as being inherently superior to Black Americans. And yet, the race hustlers instantly went on the attack:

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Since the 1960s, progressives have been using the race card to demonize and defame their ideological opponents.

In that vein, it would be hard to imagine a more classically defamatory article than that penned the other day by Renée Graham, an associate editor of the Boston Globe: “Ron DeSantis’s Fear of American History.” Graham outrageously slanders DeSantis by claiming that racism motivated him. She compares DeSantis’s refusal to allow the wildly ideological African American Studies AP Course to be taught in Florida to the actions of a slave owner who refused to allow his slaves to learn to read. It is, she says, an act of “white supremacy.”

Graham paints DeSantis as an evil and immoral person. This relieves her of the burden of addressing the substance of the DeSantis Administration’s complaints about the College Board course. It is enough that she labels him a racist and white supremacist.

What Graham has written could not be more divisive for our nation. She abandons reason and substitutes defamation posing as reasoned argument. This approach defines post-modernism. (See a perfect example here.)

This style utterly permeates all the victim’s studies programs in academia—and increasingly all of academia itself. There, for six decades, victim studies programs have been allowed to grow cancerous, free of any academic rigor. There is no better example than to point out that charges we deemed ridiculous in 1960 because they were devoid of fact are today embraced as truth in the scurrilous 1619 Project, a calumny on the country itself.