NEWS & EVENTS

The legal coalition hopes one of the lawsuits will make its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, at which point it will argue that the training programs violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” 

“Critical race theory is a grave threat to the American way of life,” Rufo said in a statement. “It divides Americans by race and traffics in the pernicious concepts of race essentialism, racial stereotyping, and race-based segregation—all under a false pursuit of ‘social justice.’”

In addition to the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty, members of the coalition include the Southeastern Legal Foundation; the Upper Midwest Law Center; Jonathan O’Brien with Schoolhouserights.org; the Los Angeles-based Pivtorak Law Firm; Wally Zimolong of the Wayne, Pennsylvania-based Zimolong LLC; and Eric Early and Peter Scott of Early, Sullivan, Wright, Gizer & McRae, a law firm with offices in six U.S. cities. 

The coalition’s ultimate goal is not only to ban critical race theory programs at the federal government, but to abolish the training, which has expanded into secondary school and college classrooms, as well as corporate boardrooms.

-Virginia Allen

It appears Mr. Rufo has a broad coalition reflecting how other countries have been haunted by reeducation programs such as Critical Race Theory, for instance, the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China and the Sovietized nations behind the Iron Curtain. 

David Pivtorak, an attorney in Los Angeles, was born in Ukraine and has joined Mr. Rufo’s coalition. He says, “I think at root what we are seeing is something that my parents and grandparents have been warning me about since I was a little kid.” He has become a coalition director and plans to lead his team in a lawsuit against the California wildlife department that could land it in the Supreme Court. I shall watch the progress of his case and the others begun by Mr. Rufo’s coalition with avidity.

Looking back over the history of this country, nothing like critical race theory has ever been tried. It is utterly foreign to the American spirit. Those who are its adepts are bringing an authoritarian project into a country that refers to itself as “The Land of the Free. The Home of the Brave.” 

-R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

President Biden’s lifting of the Trump-era ban on mandatory anti-bias training at federal agencies added fuel to an expanding legal fight against the training that critics call a “cultlike indoctrination.”

A coalition of lawyers under the banner Stop Critical Race Theory announced this week an aggressive legal campaign to confront the training across America.

The theory rejects the notion of a color-blind society and holds instead that racism created the entire system supporting the U.S.

The workshops tell participants they are, consciously or otherwise, complicit in, or a victim of, institutionalized oppression based on race and, often, also sexuality and/or gender.

The lawsuits, along with scores of anecdotes gathered by Mr. Rufo and others, describe classes and seminars reminiscent of the Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in which people were forced to confess and shoulder blame and guilt publicly.

David Pivtorak, a Los Angeles attorney who was born in Ukraine to a family that endured the Soviet Union and World War II, said the anti-bias training reminds him of tactics deployed by totalitarian regimes.

“I think at root what we are seeing is something that my parents and grandparents have been warning me about since I was a little kid,” said Mr. Pivtorak, a coalition director and lead plaintiff attorney in the lawsuit against the California wildlife department. 

Former President Donald Trump signed an executive order in August that barred anti-bias training, which critics say is steeped in critical race theory, from the federal workplace.

Mr. Pivtorak and other lawyers who joined the coalition said the cancel culture they see intertwined with CRT gave them pause.

“This is a second Cultural Revolution, that’s exactly what it is,” Mr. Pivtorak said. “They are telling 8-year-old kids their immutable characteristics amount to the original sin of being white, straight, male, etc. It’s pure poison, and this is how you tear a country apart, by scapegoating people.”

-James Varney

My reporting on critical race theory in the federal government was the impetus for the president’s executive order, so I can say with confidence that these training sessions had nothing to do with developing “racial sensitivity.” As I document in detailed reports for City Journal and the New York Post, critical race theory training sessions in public agencies have pushed a deeply ideological agenda that includes reducing people to a racial essence, segregating them, and judging them by their group identity rather than individual character, behavior and merit.

The examples are instructive. At a series of events at the Treasury Department and federal financial agencies, diversity trainer Howard Ross taught employees that America was “built on the backs of people who were enslaved” and that all white Americans are complicit in a system of white supremacy “by automatic response to the ways we’re taught.”

In accompanying documents, Mr. Ross argues that whites share an inborn oppressive streak. “Whiteness,” employees are told, “includes white privilege and white supremacy.” Consequently, whites “struggle to own their racism.”

At the Sandia National Laboratories, which develops technology for America’s nuclear arsenal, executives held a racially segregated training session for white male employees. The three-day event, which was led by a company called White Men as Full Diversity Partners, set the goal of examining “white male culture” and making the employees take responsibility for their “white privilege,” “male privilege” and “heterosexual privilege.” In one of the opening exercises, the instructors wrote on a whiteboard that “white male culture” can be associated with “white supremacists,” “KKK,” “Aryan Nation,” “MAGA hat” and “mass killings.” On the final day, the trainers asked employees to write letters to women and people of color. One participant apologized for his privilege and another pledged to “be a better ally.”

-Christopher F. Rufo

President Trump signed an executive order expanding a ban on government agencies receiving sensitivity training involving critical race theory to federal contractors.

“A few weeks ago, I BANNED efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies,” the president announced on Twitter on Tuesday.

“Today, I’ve expanded that ban to people and companies that do business with our Country, the United States Military, Government Contractors, and Grantees. Americans should be taught to take PRIDE in our Great Country, and if you don’t, there’s nothing in it for you!” he said in a second post.

The executive order says the government has prohibited federal contractors from “engaging in race or sex discrimination and required contractors to take affirmative action to ensure such discrimination does not occur.”

It says contractors’ workers who participate in training that “promotes race or sex-stereotyping or scapegoating similarly undermines efficiency in federal contracting,” adding that it promotes divisiveness and distracts from the “pursuit of excellence.”

-Mark Moore

The Washington Post is the latest news organization to settle a defamation lawsuit launched by Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann over its botched coverage of a viral confrontation with a Native American elder that had portrayed the Kentucky teen as the aggressor.

Sandmann announced the victory on Twitter.

"On 2/19/19, I filed $250M defamation lawsuit against Washington Post. Today, I turned 18 & WaPo settled my lawsuit. Thanks to @ToddMcMurtry & @LLinWood for their advocacy. Thanks to my family & millions of you who have stood your ground by supporting me. I still have more to do," Sandmann wrote on Friday.

-Joseph A. Wulfsohn

One of the few things that Barack Obama and Donald Trump agree on is cancel culture.

In the last year, as numerous public figures have become the targets of online campaigns by social media swarms, the former and current president have spoken out against the practice. “That’s not activism,” Obama said last November. “That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”

In a Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore, Trump said, “We want free and open debate, not speech codes and cancel culture. We embrace tolerance, not prejudice.” Speaking of the left, he added that “one of their political weapons is ‘cancel culture’ — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America.” (One commentator quickly pointed out that Trump has long been one of the most enthusiastic practitioners of cancel culture.)

-Ryan Lizza

MALIBU, CA — Two crashes involving at least six vehicles shut down sections of Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu Monday night.

The first crash occurred between at least two vehicles at around 7:25 p.m. on Pacific Coast Highway, near Kanan Dume Road, according Los Angeles County Fire Department Supervisor Imy McBride and Lt. Greg Evans of the Malibu-Lost Hills Sheriff's Station.

McBride said one vehicle overturned, but no one was taken to the hospital.

Westbound lanes were closed, but were reopened by 9:10 p.m, the department reported.

The second crash occurred between four vehicles at 8:22 p.m. on PCH near Corral Canyon Road, according to Evans. One victim was taken to the hospital in unknown condition.

Both eastbound lanes were closed to traffic, but all lanes were reopened by 11:52 p.m., according to the sheriff's station.

Information on injuries was not immediately available.

-Michael Wittner

A student has threatened legal action against Fordham after the university took disciplinary action in response to two Instagram posts that it found to be a violation of the university’s code of conduct.

The information became public on July 14 when Austin Tong, Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center ’21, posted a letter to University President Rev. Joseph M. McShane, S.J., and the Fordham Board of Trustees to his Instagram. In the letter, he claimed that Fordham was “breaching its own code of conduct, and treading on the fundamental freedoms of this country.” 

Tong had previously posted a photo on June 3 of the retired police captain David Dorn, who died while responding to a looting in St. Louis, Missouri. “Y’all a bunch of hypocrites,” the caption reads, expressing his disapproval that Dorn was not given as much widespread attention as the deaths of other Black people whose deaths sparked protests.

The next day, Tong shared a photo of himself holding a gun with the caption, “Don’t tread on me. #198964.” The hashtag references the date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which troops fired into a student-led, pro-democracy demonstration, wounding and killing thousands.

-Sophie Partridge-Hicks and Gillian Russo

Uber is offering free delivery for Uber Eats orders from Black-owned restaurants through the remainder of 2020 and announced a number of other initiatives to help support minority communities and employees in a Friday blog post.

The announcement comes as U.S. companies, including  Amazon and Netflix, step up efforts to become more inclusive and supportive of minority employees and communities in the wake of George Floyd's killing, which sparked global protests and conversations about racial inequality in the U.S. and elsewhere.

"In addition to extending the $0 delivery fee for Black-owned restaurants for all of 2020, we are taking steps to more effectively identify and highlight the diversity of restaurants on our platform, including Black-owned restaurants, permanently," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in a blog post.

-Audrey Conklin

Cisco Systems Inc. has fired a number of workers over racial comments made during a virtual all-hands conference on race and diversity last month.

Precisely how many employees were dismissed or when they were let go is unclear. Bloomberg reports that San Jose-based Cisco confirmed it fired a “handful” of employees. Bloomberg said it will not name those employees because it could not confirm their identities.

According to screenshots obtained by Bloomberg, the posts made by the fired employees included “Black lives don’t matter. All lives matter,” and “People who complain about racism probably have been a racist somewhere else to people from another race or part of systematic oppression in their own community!” Another comment stated that the phrase “Black Lives Matter” singles out one ethnic group and thus “reinforces racism.”

The remarks were made during a June 1 videoconference that followed the killing of George Floyd while he was in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. In that meeting — the first in a series — Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins spoke with Bryan Stevenson, a Black lawyer and author who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, and Darren Walker, who is also Black and is president of the Ford Foundation.

-Ryan Fernandez

One way to understand this thinking is to place it on a spectrum of thought about race. On the far right is open white supremacy, which instructs white people to fight for their interests as white people. (Hence the 14-word slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”) Moving to the left, standard-issue conservatism tends to discount the existence of racism and treat all problems in pure color-blind terms, as though racism has been banished. To the left of that is standard liberalism, which acknowledges the existence of racism as a problem that complicates simple race-neutral solutions.

The ideology of the racism-training industry is distinctively to the left of that. It collapses all identity into racial categories. “It is crucial for white people to acknowledge and recognize our collective racial experience,” writes DiAngelo, whose teachings often encourage the formation of racial affinity groups. The program does not allow any end point for the process of racial consciousness. Racism is not a problem white people need to overcome in order to see people who look different as fully human — it is totalizing and inescapable.

Of course, DiAngelo’s whites-only groups are not dreamed up in the same spirit as David Duke’s. The problem is that, at some point, the extremes begin to functionally resemble each other despite their mutual antipathy.

I want to make clear that when I compare the industry’s conscious racialism to the far right, I am not accusing it of “reverse racism” or bias against white people. In some cases its ideas literally replicate anti-Black racism.

-Jonathan Chait

Yet there may be something worth heeding in those who have resisted today’s antiracism training. Leslie Chislett, who is white and has attended around 10 antiracism workshops since 2017, was, until last year, an executive with New York City’s Department of Education. Some of the trainings she took predate the city’s current schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, but he has been their strongest advocate, in the belief that the compulsory workshops given to teachers and administrators throughout the system are essential to improving the education of Black and Hispanic children. Chislett filed suit in October against Carranza and the department. At least five other high-level, white D.O.E. executives have filed similar suits or won settlements from the city over the past 14 months. The trainings lie at the heart of their claims.

Some lessons of the antiracism trainings weren’t easy for Chislett to embrace. Colleagues on her multiracial A.P. for All team accused her, during and outside the workshops, of hindering exercises and refusing to acknowledge her own white supremacy, her own racism. Hostility ran high, and in 2018, according to Chislett, one white team member handed her a copy of DiAngelo’s original “White Fragility” journal article, suggesting that she needed to study it.

During a training in January 2019 run by Amante-Jackson, which Chislett recorded, Amante-Jackson sounded notes that were anti-intellectual by mainstream standards, declaring that “this culture says you have to be most expert; you have to be perfect; it has to be said perfectly.” She continued, “The more degrees you have, the more expert you are. I think back — the most brilliant people in my life don’t even have diplomas from middle school. But we have been taught that you can only value people when they’ve got letters behind their name. All of that is coming from the water” — the water of white supremacy. “Eighty-eight percent of the entire world are people of color,” she claimed earlier in the session, “but 96 percent of the world’s historical content is white.” She went on to present “some characteristics of whiteness,” prominent among them “an obsession with the written word. If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.”

-Daniel Bergner

The City of Seattle held a segregated training session for white staffers last month in which they instructed workers on how to ‘undo their whiteness’ and affirm their ‘complicity in racism’, reports suggest.

Titled ‘Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness’, the training session was reportedly held by the Office of Civil Rights on June 12, the same day protesters took part in the CHOP zone demonstrations in the Capitol Hill district.

Christopher F. Rufo, an editor for City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty, unearthed the session’s existence after filing a Freedom of Information request last week, which was approved Monday.

One handout distributed in the two-and-a-half hour session reportedly read that ‘racism is not our fault but we are responsible.’ 

Another said white staffers must give up ‘the land’ and their ‘guaranteed physical safety’ in order to be an ‘accomplice’ for racial justice.

“On May 28, progressive election data analyst David Shor tweeted about a new paper by Princeton professor Omar Wasow, showing that peaceful civil-rights protests moved public opinion toward protesters while violent protests had the opposite effect. The tweet violated a taboo in some left-wing quarters against criticizing violent protest and led within days to his firing.

What happened after that was even more bizarre. On June 11, I wrote an article briefly describing Shor’s tweet and firing. Four days later, “Progressphiles,” a LISTSERV for left-of-center data analysts, kicked Shor off. In a message to the group, the moderators described his tweet as “racist” and further accused him of having “encouraged harassment” of another member of the list.”

-Jonathan Chait

The Pivtorak Law Firm successfully represented mixed martial arts fighter Josh Barnett in an arbitration against Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). In an award issued March 23, 2018, the Arbitrator Richard H. McLaren, who was featured in the documentary Icarus, ruled that Barnett “is not a drug cheat. He unknowingly ingested a Contaminated Product. …he did not actively engage in attempting, in any way, to engage in the use of the Prohibited Substance.”  Whereas USADA had sought, among other things, a four year period of ineligibility, we were able to prove that Barnett was the victim of a contaminated supplement, and was minimally at fault at most, so the arbitrator imposed the minimal possible penalty, which is a reprimand. 

You can read about the case here and here or download the arbitrator's decision.