For years, they targeted me, calling me an “Islamophobe”. I am a Muslim. But I had had the temerity to call out Muslim establishment leaders who won’t acknowledge the Islamic extremism lying at the heart of crimes such as those of the Boston Marathon bombers. I am far from alone in suffering harassment on LoonWatch. Other Muslim reformers — such as Syrian-American physician Zuhdi Jasser and Pakistani-Canadian writer Raheel Raza — were also targeted; so, too, were ex-Muslims — including Somali-American author Ayaan Hirsi Ali — and agnostic thinkers such as comedian Bill Maher and scientist Richard Dawkins. Indeed, LoonWatch has denounced conservatives in general, as well as the FBI, the US military, the state of Israel and, more recently, Hindus and the state of India. I wondered: who was behind this network?

After a decade of research, I have revealed the architects of LoonWatch in my new book, Woke Army. They are none other than officials at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which presents itself as the face of American Islam and the nation’s largest Muslim “civil rights” organisation. It is anything but. Rather, CAIR is a front for an extremist form of Islam. (The organisation didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.) I also discovered that it is not acting alone. Although the internet often makes cancellations seem like spontaneous uprisings, the kind of character assassinations taking place on LoonWatch are targeted attacks by a loosely organised coalition of leftists and Islamist sympathisers. They seek to destroy, in the court of public opinion, anyone who strays from the “progressive” party line.

You’ve heard their catechisms: racism, not freedom, is America’s bedrock; white people are oppressors and black people are oppressed; meritocracy is white supremacy. And, as my own trolls so often implied, it is unconscionable to link Islam to the ghouls who murder in the name of Allah. Opinions straying from these principles cannot be tolerated.

These puritans are prolific beyond LoonWatch. I first encountered them after the beheading of my friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in 2002. He was kidnapped in Karachi and then killed for being American, Jewish and of Israeli heritage. Danny’s savage murder in the name of Islam propelled me from the news pages to the opinion pages, where I rejected the extremism of my friend’s killers and advocated for an Islam compatible with human rights, women’s rights, and secular governance. For this, I was pilloried, labelled not only an “Islamophobe” but also a “Zionist media whore”. I was accused of being an agent of Israel, and of having sexually transmitted diseases. My son, born after his father abandoned us, was called a “bastard”.

The creation of LoonWatch — a watering-hole for these extremists — presented an opportunity to unmask some of the individuals enabling this hate. In 2018, I filed a defamation lawsuit, Nomani v. John Doe et al., winning the power to subpoena internet service providers for the real identities of 48 “John Doe” anonymous attackers. This led me to a treasure-trove of files, including one that revealed the identity of “Zuhair Thomas”.

More from this author

Anti-racism betrays Asian students

By Asra Q. Nomani

His order was recorded in GoDaddy’s internal “Shopper Info” files with the note: “Verified by Fraud Dept — Customer OK”. But data in the documents makes it possible to identify “Zuhair” as Muhammad Tauseef Akbar, a staffer at CAIR’s Chicago chapter, who used the moniker “Garibaldi” to harass critics of the organisation. Over the years, the bills for the account he set up were paid by the credit card of Ahmed Rehab, a longtime official with CAIR’s national headquarters and the executive director of CAIR Chicago. Rehab’s email, home address and work phone number appeared on the documents, although he used “Emperor” as his fake name on LoonWatch. This GoDaddy account also bought other websites on which CAIR critics were anonymously attacked — including IslamophobiaToday.com and IslamophobiaSucks.com.

Akbar and Rehab didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but an attorney did respond on behalf of the anonymous “John Doe” defendants. She wrote little more than: “My name is Lena Masri, and I represent persons affected by the subpoenas you have issued against GoDaddy and Twitter.” Lena Masri is the National Litigation and Civil Rights Director at CAIR.

It’s clear that Muslim ideologues have allied themselves with leftist activists to exploit the freedoms of the West. Their aim, which they are pursuing relentlessly and often viciously, is to utterly discredit Muslim reformers, in order to promote a system of beliefs that runs counter to democratic values. These individuals, and the organisations they work for, seem determined to eliminate as much discussion of Islamic extremism as possible; the actual enemies of civilisation, in this twisted narrative, include the “Israeli apartheid state”, “white supremacists”, and more recently “Hindu extremists”. And these anonymous trolls have borrowed one of the most pernicious tools of the American Left to fuel their propaganda machine: critical race theory, which divides the world into white oppressors and oppressed people of colour. In the LoonWatch world, any criticism of Islam is a racist ploy to harm all Muslims. This framing is a diabolical co-opting of civil-rights language aimed at protecting people who are in fact determined to stamp out the civil rights of their critics. But we have reached a turning point.

Establishment Muslims and their far-Left sympathisers strike more openly now. Earlier this month, on the floor of the Virginia Senate, state Senator Ghazala Hashmi, a Muslim American from India (no relation to Javad Hashmi), hurled the “white supremacist” smear at another Indian-American woman of colour, albeit a Hindu one. Her name is Suparna Dutta. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed her to the Virginia Board of Education last year. On January 31, this year, the Virginia Senate Privileges and Elections Committee voted unanimously, 14-0, for her nomination. Every Democrat was on her side. But when the issue arose in the state Senate, a cohort of allegedly “progressive” Democrats derailed her appointment, in a 22-18 vote straight down party lines.

Suggested reading

America's Muslim #MeToo moment

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

What had Dutta, an advocate for meritocracy in education, done to deserve this? She had had the gall to call out the educrats who were behind the illegal dismemberment of the merit-based admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) — replacing it with a race-based process that, a federal judge ruled, discriminates against Asian students. In other words, in the name of “anti-racism”, real racism is being practised. With Dutta, in 2020, I got involved in the campaign to oppose this new “progressive” policy at TJ, where my son was a pupil. At one point, a school board member promoted the anti-Israel, antisemitic narratives of CAIR officials. At another point, teachers were instructed not to call the 9/11 hijackers “terrorists”.

Just as Dutta was labelled a “white supremacist”, I, too, was labelled a bigot for protesting against these policies. In September 2020, Virginia Education Secretary Atif Qarni, a Democrat, barred me from speaking at a town hall meeting he was hosting, though I was there as the TJ parent-teacher association representative. He claimed I belong to an “extremist” organisation: the Muslim Reform Movement, which advocates for women’s rights, human rights and secular governance.

Suggested reading

In defence of wokeness

By Tomiwa Owolade

Over the past several days, I have worked with Dutta through the night to trace the roots of the campaign against her. The day after the Select Committee approved her nomination, February 1, Dutta got into a back-and-forth with fellow board member Anne Holton, the wife of powerful Democratic Senator Tim Kaine. Dutta was supporting an effort to remove divisive ideology from Virginia’s history curriculum. Holton advocated for socialism and said the US Constitution wasn’t “remarkable”. Dutta, referencing her experience as an immigrant from India, begged to differ. This enraged her critics.

On the night of February 5, the Twitter account @RedForEdVA — a teachers’ union group that self-describes as supporting socialism — posted grainy photos from a parents’ rally that took place in Fairfax County, Virginia, in October 2021, which far-Right activists had tried to hijack, unbeknown to Dutta and other parents. By the next morning, activists on Twitter were equating the protest to the infamous Charlottesville Unite The Right rally and and the riots of January 6. Shortly afterwards, a Facebook account, Herndon-Reston Indivisible, shared an online campaign, led by the “Virginia Grassroots Coalition”, which includes about 51 far-Left groups; it declared: “Don’t let the Virginia Senate Confirm a Far-Right Extremist to the Board of Education.”

In six days, Dutta had gone from unanimously approved to being a pariah, because of beliefs and events that have nothing to do with her. Plenty of Muslim leaders publicly trashed Dutta, including Raheel Ahmed, a Pakistani-American mosque leader in Manassas, Virginia, and Atif Qarni, the former education secretary who smeared me as an “extremist”. Democrat leaders apparently accepted their criticisms unquestioningly. After Dutta was rejected, Democratic lawmaker Chap Petersen told constituents that “mosque elders” with important connections had called him. Those familiar with the calls say that one was from Rafi Ahmed, the Pakistani-American chair of an organisation representing northern Virginia mosques, and that his message was: “Vote no on Suparna Dutta. She belongs to an anti-Muslim extremist Hindu organisation.” Ahmed shared no evidence, and didn’t respond to requests for comment. He is part of a network of Muslim establishment organisations. It includes CAIR.

This network is dangerous. It purports to stand for the admirable principles of racial justice and equality. But it is distracting the public from illiberal Islamism by loudly and perpetually accusing the institutions, history and people of the United States of blanket racism. Claiming to have the moral high ground, the Woke Army attacks anything and anybody that stands in its way. It’s time to see this project for what it is.

I have come to realise that party affiliation is far less important to me than fealty to the values that made it possible for me, a Muslim immigrant from India, to prosper in America. In the summer of 1969, I arrived at JFK International Airport as a four-year-old with no English, destined for a new home in New Jersey and then Morgantown, West Virginia. My parents had made a keen study of US history. They knew it was a nation that had its flaws, but they were encouraged by some pivotal developments, particularly the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which banned racial segregation in public schools and declared unequivocally that race cannot play a role in school admissions. This, they thought, was a fair place to raise their kids.

When I came to learn my adopted nation’s history myself, at Martin Luther King Elementary School, I understood that the painful legacy of slavery was part of it. But I also knew that good and thoughtful people in the present had made honest attempts to address these issues — by passing laws banning racial discrimination, for instance. I hardly thought the US perfect but, as a native of India, I understood that societies that dwell forever on historical grievances tend not to be happy, free or prosperous places. America was fundamentally — and wonderfully — different.

But, in recent years, something very disturbing has happened. That is why, on the night of the midterm elections, I drove west after sundown on Route 66 with my friend Harry Jackson, the first black PTSA president at my son’s alma mater. We were driving to a party of kindred spirits, most of whom didn’t look anything like us.

Why? Because the Democratic Party, which once valued fairness and justice, has, alas, been torching the American Dream. Democratic politicians, school boards, governors and even US Supreme Court justices are pushing “equity” over equality, “anti-racist” bigotry over colour-blindness, and mediocrity over merit. Literacy and maths scores are plummeting nationwide, while black and Hispanic kids are falling further and further behind — and yet progressive Democrats are far more interested in bringing crackpot racialist theories into our classrooms. In other words: they choose indoctrination over education.

More from this author

Why anti-racism should be resisted

By Asra Q. Nomani

As a teenager and young American, I trended liberal. In the Eighties, I opposed former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s military escapades into Central America, his demand that young men register for the draft and his efforts to ban abortion. Decades later, I moved to Virginia as a single mother with a six-year-old son. Though the state’s history was steeped in racism, Virginia had just voted for a black man to be president. I thought it had finally become progressive enough for a woman of colour like me to raise a child freely.

But among the loudest voices ahead of last week’s midterm elections were those of aggrieved parents, who are waking up to the fact that Democrats aren’t defending a fundamental American value: that children should not be judged on the colour of their skin. Affirmative action wasn’t explicitly on the ballot, but the question of whether we are merit-based and colour-blind was the subtext of multiple campaigns.

In Union City, in the San Francisco Bay, Jeff Wang, who immigrated to the US from China in 1984 as a student, won with the campaign mission that his “American Dream” is to help others “achieve their ‘dream’”. In southern California, Republican Michelle Steel, an immigrant from South Korea, faced a tough race in the 45^th Congressional District against her Democratic opponent (who is Taiwanese American). Earlier this year, Steel signed an amicus brief with 81 congressional colleagues against the use of race in college admissions. “Shutting the door to applicants based on race is wrong,” she later wrote. There was not a single Democrat among the signatories. With votes still being counted, Steel is the frontrunner in her race.

I was 13 when the US Supreme Court Justice ruled, in a landmark 1978 case (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke), that universities could take race into account in admissions if there was a “compelling interest” — like needing to remedy past discrimination — but otherwise it banned racial quotas. In theory it makes sense to correct still-raw injustices with so-called affirmative action. But on the ground, we can’t realise “diversity” just by filling race-based quotas. My father ticked so many “diversity” boxes, but as a teen I saw him devastated by a decision: he had found a home at West Virginia University, happily teaching clinical nutrition, but (white) administrators in the late Seventies denied him tenure. I learned what it meant to fight the machine: my father appealed, represented himself and won tenure, not through quotas, but grit.

Suggested reading

America attracts the wrong immigrants

By Justin Webb

The watch party was full of people with equally impressive trajectories. The host was Republican congressional candidate Hung Cao, who arrived in the US as a refugee from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. His family settled in low-income housing in Reston, Virginia; in 1985 Cao entered the first class of a new selective school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. It had been established to make the US competitive against the Soviet Union in the new field of “STEM”. Back then, local Fairfax County was mostly white, and so was the school, but with increases in the number of Asian technology workers, more of their children started acing the school’s merit-based admissions tests.

Meritocracy, is seemed, was winning. Over the next years, nine states banned public colleges and universities from considering race or ethnicity at all in admissions to public institutions, kicking off with Proposition 209 in California in 1996. But in the summer of 2003, with my son just a newborn, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Grutter v. Bollinger that universities may use “narrowly-tailored”, “race-conscious” admissions as a “plus” in their efforts to achieve “diversity” on campus — as long as diversity isn’t defined “solely” by race and ethnicity. Former justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion with a sentence that would haunt the court years later. She wrote: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

The goal of diversity is noble in spirit. But the philosophy of “critical race theory” that dominates so many admissions departments today is toxic and illiberal. The focus is on increasing admissions of black and Hispanic students, meaning that hard-working Asian American students become sacrificial lambs in their racial experiment, caught in the crosshairs of preferential treatment for other minorities, as part of a war on merit. Indeed, one of America’s best-known “anti-racists”, Ibram X. Kendi, writes: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

In an attempt to stop racism in the name of “diversity”, more states banned race as a factor in hiring or admissions, including Michigan in 2006 and Oklahoma in 2012. In 2013, the US Supreme Court ruled in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that race can be considered in admissions only under “strict scrutiny”. Late the following year, in 2014, a new organisation, Students for Fair Admissions, filed lawsuits on behalf of Asian American students in federal court against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — for, among other things, violations of Title VI of the 1964 US Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any schools that receive federal funding from discriminating against people based on race and other identity markers. The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected to land next spring.

Suggested reading

Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

But then came the “racial reckoning” of 2020. In the spring of that year, Harry Jackson’s son was one of six black students admitted to Hung Cao’s alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. By then, my son was a sophomore at the school, admitted through its race-blind, merit-based admissions process. Little did we know that the school was about to be targeted by “equity warriors”, spurred on by the killing of George Floyd. Our school’s population was 70% Asian — but we were the wrong kind of brown for activists.

That autumn, as my son became a junior and Jackson’s son became a freshman, the local 12-0 Democratic school board became obsessed with rigging the admissions process so that the low number of black and Hispanic students would increase dramatically. In December 2020, in a devastating decision for kids who had been working hard for months to hone their maths skills, the board replaced the school’s merit-based admissions test with a new racially-engineered system that assigned “bonus points” to factors that were seemed like a proxy for race. One of the board members, Abrar Omeish, actually acknowledged in a text message to another member that the new process had an “anti-Asian feel…hate to say it lol”.

In the spring of 2021, a group of our families sued the school board for violating the 14th Amendment, in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. While Democrats condemned us, the Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Republican Glenn Youngkin, understood us. He sent us a video, supporting our efforts to maintain merit-based admissions. At almost 11pm, in his final rally of the election last year, off the backroads of Loudoun County, Virginia, Youngkin declared: “We will not be a Commonwealth of dream stealers. We will be a Commonwealth of dream enablers and builders.” The crowd, including myself, cheered.

And our vision of the American Dream triumphed. In March 2022, a federal judge ruled that the new admissions’ system was “patently unconstitutional”, because it discriminated against Asian American students. In the parlance of “anti-racists”, school officials had put in place systemic racism. The next month, Cao stood with other Asian American families — including my father, then 87, and me — at the steps of the US Supreme Court to argue against racism towards students of Asian descent in admissions to his alma mater. Soon after, Cao, a political newcomer, beat out a tough field of (all white) Republicans to run against Jennifer Wexton, the (white) Democratic incumbent for the 10th Congressional District of Virginia. And it wasn’t long ago that I was back on those steps. On Halloween, I walked into the US Supreme Court, as lawyers from both sides made their arguments in the case against Harvard and the UNC Chapel Hill.

It was hard to watch the so-called liberal justices turn a blind eye to the blatant anti-Asian racism that has become a hallmark of admissions to schools. But I felt great hope as the majority conservative justices expressed outrage over the “race conscious” biases in admissions. My prediction — and that of legal experts — is that the Court will bar Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill from using race in admissions, ending “race-conscious” systems that discriminate against Asian American students. Schools will likely get sneaky about how they use race, but, in a short video filmed outside the Court, I declared that the day was a “win for America” and all children.

Suggested reading

Antiracism is too middle-class

By Remi Adekoya

That video, once posted, triggered an assault like I had never witnessed before. Pamela Denise Long, a contributor to Newsweek and the creator of “trauma-informed” “humane antiracism” training, shared an image of me from the video and admonished me for “coming to somebody else’s country” and using “their laws” to win rights. I was disparaged as a “tool of white supremacy”, promoting a “wannabe white supremacist ideology”.

My views fall well within the mainstream of the vast majority of ordinary Americans: a new Pew poll of American adults found 74% think race or ethnicity “shouldn’t be considered” in admissions. Moreover, they are supported by countless black leaders. On the eve of Halloween, as Cao waged his battle for political office, Harry Jackson joined a rally of about 500 Asian Americans supporting the lawsuits against Harvard and the UNC Chapel Hill. “I am an ally!” he said. Next to him, an Asian American boy carried a sign: “I have an American Dream too.”

Any yet, my views get me pilloried. Self-described anti-racists bombard me with the view that I am “white adjacent”, “honorary white”, “white passing”, and part of the “dominant culture”. These attacks are reminiscent of the words of white extremists. And yet they come from a movement called “Foundational Black Americans” — which espouses the “Great Replacement” theory of white supremacists, accusing immigrants, including black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, of stealing resources. In one radio show, founder Tariq Nasheed accuses black immigrants of being “tethers” to America with “anchor babies”, “smelling like booty juice and flies”, “smelling like cheetah pee” and taking jobs and resources owed to black people born in the US. Nasheed says Foundational Black Americans is not a hate group, but rather a “lineage”.

My suspicion that the ire directed at me was a comment on my immigrant status was confirmed on the drive to the watch party. Speeding along the tarmac of Route 66, I got a message: “Go back to India.”

By the time I got there, I’d been accused of coming from an “upper caste family” (though I am Muslim, not Hindu); of being a “white Aryan Indian”, allegedly descending from the Aryan tribe that captured Hitler’s imagination; and of having “musty underarms”. “You Asians are the pets of white supremacy, flat face,” wrote one Twitter user.

It is worth saying again: among all this, it is the Republicans, not the Democrats, who are standing up for us. At the party, I was surrounded by people, like me, who feel they have been mugged by the political party that once shared our values and goals — but now gives us no choice but to reach out to the other side. Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin understand our concerns. Joe Biden and the progressive ideologues in his party wish we would go away — and belittle us when we refuse. And refuse we do.

At 10pm, the results were in. In a near-final tally, Wexton won 52.83% of the votes while Cao won 46.98%, narrowing the win to six percentage points, compared to Wexton’s 13 percentage point win in her last election in 2020.

“It hurts,” Cao acknowledged to the crowd, but he also stressed that he would never want “race-conscious” allowances to push him, as a minority, to victory. That is the way it should be, whether in schools or society at large. And he will continue fighting for that version of the American Dream. Like me, he declines to live in a society in which people who ought to know better judge, shame and browbeat us because we embrace honesty, hard work and education. We are not the racists here. We are the American Dream.

At my son’s school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), Asian children account for about 70% of the student body. Many have worked incredibly hard to get into the prestigious institute, supported by first generation immigrant parents who, like me, see education as the best route to security and success. But in the months when America was rocked by race riots, self-described “equity warriors” described the Asian, mostly immigrant families of TJ as “white-adjacent” and “resource hoarders”. The white principal, Ann Bonitatibus, told us to check our “privileges”, while one teacher called on her to push through a “Diversity Initiative” while “The Iron is hot!”

In the months that followed, the local school board — all 12 members endorsed by the Democratic Party — voted to remove the school’s merit-based, race-blind admissions process, and replace it with one that was race-based. Along with other parents I was horrified by the school’s readiness to use identity, rather than achievement, as the basis of admissions. But when we objected, the Virginia education secretary, a Democrat, told our families that preparing for tests was like using illegal “performance enhancement drugs”. A black father, Harry Jackson, who spoke up for our cause was called a “motherfucker” selling “segregationist bullshit” — by a white activist who uses the Twitter handle @Antiracist14. These “anti-racists” have worked day and night to try to silence us, using pressure and insults, instead of debating us.

And our story is far from unusual: racist admissions processes are being reintroduced across America. Take the case of San Francisco’s elite Lowell High School, which garnered national attention last week: the overwhelmingly progressive city — Republicans account for less than 7% of the electorate — voted to recall three Democratic members of the school board in a landslide. One of those fired was Alison Collins who, in a now infamous tweet, had called Asian Americans “house n****rs”, insinuating that Asian parents who disagreed with her plan to turn an outstanding school into an experiment in racialism are captive to white supremacist forces.

More from this author

Why anti-racism should be resisted

By Asra Q. Nomani

Like at TJ, activists waged a war on merit at Lowell, in the name of “equity”. Asian Americans, through diligence and ambition, had earned an impressive number of slots — so they were disparaged as “privileged” by anti-racist activists, who called on the school to replace merit-based testing with a lottery. The result was striking. Asian freshmen admitted to Lowell in 2021 fell to 42% from 50% the year before. White enrolment also decreased, to 16% from 21%. Black students increased to 5% from 2% and Hispanic students rose to 25% from 14%.

This process doesn’t just harm Asian American students. Despite increasing the enrolment of black and Hispanic students, schools like TJ put little effort into preparing them for their advanced academic classes. In school district enrolment figures made public for the first time, eight freshmen students, admitted through the new race-based admissions process, dropped out of TJ over just five months, between September 2021 and January 2022 (in the entire school year before, just one student dropped out). Changing admissions processes of outstanding schools does nothing to address the systemic failure of the education system to ensure these students are ready for rigorous training in Maths and Science. It also insults and demeans the achievements of black and Hispanic students who get into schools like Lowell and TJ through sacrifice and achievement. The message is clear: stop trying so hard. (The school district claims its new admissions process is “race neutral.”)

The United States Constitution — and common sense — tell us that a just society requires equality of opportunity, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or social status. “Equity” is a divisive, illiberal system fundamentally at odds with this ideal, because it preaches that there is a quota of opportunities for every group; individuals now find that their skin colour ends up being more important than their hard work.

One year ago, I waited in a virtual waiting room to express those views to the San Francisco school board. I wanted to explain that it had made me sick to my stomach to witness the disdain endured by parents who look like me, for immigrants from Asia with dreams like my family’s. I’ve written here before about how I moved to New Jersey from India, as a child who spoke no English. What I didn’t write was that we lived in poverty. While I was learning the alphabet, I received free breakfast, part of America’s social welfare program for the poor. Now, families like mine are being called “privileged” and “white adjacent” just because our children have achieved academic success, like I did.

Suggested reading

Critical Race Theory's new disguise

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The board members never called on me in that meeting. Instead of sharing my story, I listened to Collins — whose tweet calling Asian families “house n****r” had just emerged — discussing her efforts to change admissions to Lowell High School.

Other parents watched in shock, too. Siva Raj, an immigrant from India and father to two sons, wanted something very simple, he told me in an interview: for his sons to be able to return to school. For almost a year, the board had been on a virtue-signalling crusade — scrubbing American icons such as Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln out of school names — while utterly failing to address the elephant in the room. In cahoots with the powerful union, the California Teachers Association, and a far-Left wing of the Democratic Party, the Berniecrats, the board showed little concern as parents pleaded with them to come up with a plan to reopen schools closed during lockdown.

All children, but especially the most disadvantaged, were suffering terribly under remote learning. Even the uber-liberal mayor of San Francisco wanted schools reopened. But “the school board had a wall of indifference,” Raj told me. And so on Valentine’s Day 2021, he sat in his kitchen with his partner, Autumn Looijen, and cooked up a plan: a recall election.

Looijen readied the papers and that Friday, Raj posted a Priority Mail Express envelope, his hands trembling. At the time, he was only in the US on a work visa (now he is on the pathway to citizenship). Growing up in an apartment above a carton factory in Chennai, where his parents worked, Raj learned to never challenge authority. “This is what gets your throat slit”, he said. But he could see his sons withering under online learning.

Suggested reading

San Francisco's progressive nightmare

By Oliver Wiseman

Last week, Raj stepped onto a small stage at Manny’s, a community space in San Francisco’s Mission District, and read the results of the recall election. Looking on were leaders of the Chinese American and Indian American communities, as well as other parents. “We had a cross-fertilisation of energy”, Raj told me later: parents of all races, backgrounds and political beliefs had united to oppose the corruption of our educational system.

Even the progressive New York Times declared, “The recall, which galvanized Asian-Americans, was a victory for parents angered by the district’s priorities during the pandemic”. This felt like a turning point: the mainstream media has been all too eager to perpetuate the idea that parents who object to the prioritisation of “anti-racism” over effective education are “Republican strategists”, “right wing activists”, “suburban white moms”, “conservative white parents whipped into a frenzy” and “white supremacists” engaged in “domestic terrorism”. And yet these parents prevailed in San Francisco, arguably America’s bluest city.

And the implications of this victory ricochet across the nation. Prior to the recall election, Allison Collins posted a video of me speaking to my school board, asking why someone in Northern Virginia would care about a school’s dust-up on the West Coast. What was I thinking, “penning” articles about the story in which she was embroiled?

Suggested reading

The problem with anti-woke liberals

By Sohrab Ahmari

After the results were in, I answered Collins. I am “penning” articles about Lowell High School because it is one battleground of many where Asians have become the illiberal regressives’ scapegoat, punching bag, doormat — pick your metaphor. In the new hierarchy of human value put forward by “anti-racism,” Asians don’t count.

Indeed, Hannah Nikole Jones, the author of the controversial “1619 Project”, once posted a tweet arguing that it was “disingenuous” to say that New York’s specialised high schools have “majority people of color”, because the majority are Asian. In November 2020, North Thurston Public Schools in Washington state — which includes 22 schools and some 16,000 students — lumped Asian and white students together, excluding “Asians” as “Students of Color.”

And, in discriminating against Asians, Lowell mirrors not only my son’s school, but schools across the country. In August 2020, in Loudoun County, Virginia, the mostly-Democratic school board ignored the pleas of Asian families from India by suddenly eliminating the merit-based admissions test to its advanced academic science and technology high school programmes. The same year, Boston’s all-Democratic school board dismissed the protests of Asian parents, who said their children were being targeted in a plan to change admissions to the city’s most advanced schools, imposing postcode quotas and a lottery system. In both cases, just as in San Francisco and northern Virginia, new freshmen classes saw a decrease in the number of Asian students.

For a long while, the parents fighting against these measures were outliers. Many are understandably afraid of cancel culture; some are already marginalised in their communities, because of their race, their fear of challenging authority, immigrant status and the fact they speak English as a second language. But the case of Lowell High School shows what they can do when they find the moral courage to organise. This courage, for many, comes from the high stakes. For many immigrant families, education is a way out of poverty; for others, it is the path to becoming more settled: secure jobs, rewarding careers, a deciding role in America’s future. As one father said online, as parents celebrated at Manny’s, “They touched the third rail for Asians. Never mess with Asians and their education.”

Almost six decades later, from Massachusetts to Colorado, Jim Crow is being resurrected in public schools — this time through euphemisms such as “affinity circles”, “affinity dialogue groups” and “community building groups”. Centennial Elementary School in Denver, for instance, advertised a “Families of Color Playground Night” earlier this winter, on a marquee board outside the school. Last week, the Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, hosted a “meet and talk” with actress Karyn Parsons from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — exclusively for its “Students of Color affinity group”. “If you are a student of color or multiracial, please join us!” the invitation from a seventh grade teacher read.

Bigotry, meanwhile, is back on the curriculum, thanks partly to a “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign, which last week recommended the book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness to children as young as six in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, outside Chicago. “Whiteness is a bad deal”, the book argues; it amounts to signing a “contract” with the devil, who is illustrated with an indelicate pointy tail. Meanwhile, in an English lesson in Fairfax County, Virginia, students played a game of “Privilege Bingo”; even “Military Kid” has been shamed as having “privilege”.

It’s a tragedy that today’s schools are more segregated than mine was. I arrived in the United States in the summer of 1969, a four-year-old who knew not a word of English. Born in Bombay, I was part of the first generation of post-colonial Indians. My parents had survived the “white supremacy” of British rule, and witnessed Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement, which was an inspiration for the American civil rights movement.

The Civil Rights Act was passed the year before my birth, and I learned the alphabet at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Piscataway, New Jersey. My class photo from 1975 shows 25 diverse, smiling children lined up shoulder-to-shoulder in three rows — organised by height, not skin colour.

Suggested reading

Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

It makes me shudder to think what I would have felt if I had been told, then, to attend a “Families of Color Playground Night”. I happened to be a shy, “brown” girl raised in a Muslim immigrant family. I didn’t understand our classroom “Secret Santa” ritual or Valentine’s Day card exchanges. But I thrived in integration, not segregation.

I learned to read English with the fictional detective Nancy Drew — a white girl — as my best friend. My teachers never told me to check her privilege. Moving to mostly-white Morgantown, West Virginia, I became pen pals with a white friend named Barbara I’d left behind in Piscataway; at my new school, I was blessed with exemplary teachers who happened to be white, without whose efforts I couldn’t have become a reporter for the Wall Street Journal at the age of 23.

The beauty of Martin Luther King Jr’s America was that everyone’s humanity, worth and potential was appreciated, not undermined. Fighting racism used to mean rejecting the notion of a hierarchy of human value. But today the morally twisted teachings of “anti-racism” preach that a new hierarchy of human value, with whiteness at the bottom, is acceptable — and even evolved and “progressive”. Education activists seem intent on pushing the race-shaming, bigotry and segregation of “anti-racism”.

Take the example of Wellesley Public Schools (WPS), 17 miles west of Boston. It is a system with about 4,800 students in seven elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. According to its most recent demographics, it is about 70.6% white, 13.6% Asian, 6.7% multiracial, 5% Hispanic and 4.1% Black. It offers a window into the problem — and the fix: parents standing up with moral courage.

Suggested reading

Antiracism is too middle-class

By Remi Adekoya

In September 2019, Charmie Curry, a black former teacher, became Wellesley’s director of “diversity, equity and inclusion”. In her “entry plan”, Curry wrote that she would “hit the ground, learning”. But after George Floyd’s death, it wasn’t “learning” Curry pushed, but activism. In 2020, she released her “Entry Plan Report”, asking, “Who Am I in Anti-Racist Practice?”

At the start of the last school year, the school district’s superintendent David Lussier (who is white) put in place a new procedure, “Responding to Incidents of Bias or Discrimination”. Reports of “bias or discrimination” could, parents were told, lead to disciplinary action. In the age of cancel culture, it was easy to imagine this new policy being misused.

That year, WPS also released a five-year “Equity Strategic Plan”, promising to “amplify the voices” of certain students through “affinity spaces” for those with “shared identities”. On 25 January 2021, Curry emailed the middle school and high school principals about the first “affinity group” meeting on 10 February, for “our Black and Brown students and alumni”. She called it a “Listening Space”.

If such spaces had existed in my schooldays, they would have carved up my diverse yet tightly-knit class. Barbara and I would have been separated.

Suggested reading

Critical Race Theory's new disguise

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

But Wellesley is far from unusual. During the 2020 summer of race riots, schools across the country clamoured to virtue signal their message of “social justice”. “Affinity groups” have sprung up everywhere.

At Pierce Middle School in Milton Public Schools, Massachusetts, the “Mosaic Club” meets for “students of color who identify as African American/Black, Latinx/Hispanic American, Native American, Middle Eastern American, Asian/Asian American, or Multiracial”. Across the country, at Pathfinder Elementary School in Seattle Public Schools, students meet in  “Lunchtime Community Building Groups for BIPOC & Multiracial Scholars, K-8”.

And in Indianapolis Public Schools, “affinity groups” have held meetings with this potpourri of names: “Ability Diverse”, “Black/African American”, “LatinX”, “Asian/Pacific Islander”, “Native American/Indigenous”, “Jewish”, “Muslim”, “LGBTQIA+”, “Women’s Network”, “Multi-Racial”, “Multi-Lingual” and “Confronting White Privilege”.

The school district noted that the members of “Confronting White Privilege” picked their own name — presumably knowing how they could do in the oppression Olympics if they didn’t frame their identity with a mea culpa.

In private schools, too, children are segregated. Allen-Stevenson School in New York City hosts meetings of “BOCAS: Boys of Color at Allen-Stevenson” and “WISE: White Identifying Students for Equity”.

Suggested reading

Is Critical Race Theory racist?

By Helen Pluckrose

The second “affinity” group meeting at Wellesley revealed the dangers of this new segregation. It took place on 18 March 2021, two days after a gunman killed eight people in three Atlanta spas, most of them Asian women. That day, Curry hosted a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American students (grade 6-12), faculty/staff, and others in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community who wish to process recent events”.

A Wellesley Middle School teacher asked Curry if white students could participate. Her question answered, the teacher wrote to her students:

“This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White. If you identify as White, and need help to process recent events, please know I’m here for you as well as your guidance counselors. If you need to know more about why this is not for White students, please ask me!”

On the morning of the “healing space”, a white fitness and health teacher, asked Curry, “I wanted to check first, is it appropriate for me to go this healing space? I wasn’t sure?” (Her email signature read, ironically: “Be your own color and dance with joy”.) Later that morning, Curry replied and told her, “This time, we want to hold the space for the Asian and Asian American students and faculty/staff”. She wrote: “I hope this makes sense”.

It didn’t make sense. In fact, it is nonsense. And many parents saw through it. One mother wrote to the school in protest, arguing that:

“The email immediately pits one group of kids against another, ascribing guilt by mere identity to an entire population of children and adults who are equally scared by the events in Atlanta. I am concerned that in creating spaces for specific groups of students we are perpetuating the feelings of separation, isolation, and difference that we are trying to overcome”.

She pointed out, in measured tones: “Unfortunately, the healing space provided by the school further divides us at a time when we most need to come together and support one another”.

In response, the school doubled down. One Wellesley teacher circulated an “FAQ” document, written by a colleague. It advised that affinity-group sessions were a “safe space for members of the same identity or community” — where they can “share their experiences without risk of feeling like they will offend someone from another group, and without another group’s voices”.

Suggested watching

Why anti-racism should be resisted

By Flo Read

The morning after the “healing space”, a mother sent an email to the Wellesley Middle School principal, pointing out the hypocrisy at the heart of anti-racism. “We are all horrified by recent events”, she wrote. “I would hope this would be an opportunity to bring our student community together”.

She continued: “However, the reaction at WPS has been to discriminate against white students. I find this message a little confusing. Are we focusing on inclusion or exclusion? How does separating kids by race teach them anything?”

“We must do better for all of our students”.

The principal responded: “Affinity spaces are a known strategy in education that offer time for marginalized groups to process feelings and concern in productive ways. Our Office of DE&I [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] for WPS feels this space is important for those who want to attend”.

Then, in the early afternoon of 12 April 2021, the Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion sent an email to school district staff, grousing about “hateful messages” it had received. “Sometimes, this work puts us in the crosshairs of those who find this mission to be a threat”.

Suggested reading

You can't cure racism

By James Billot

Across the country, “diversity” officers and “equity” consultants are spinning a tale that segregation is virtuous. The historically progressive Southern Poverty Law Center, established in 1971 to fight racism, now provides schools with an online “Toolkit” to create “affinity groups”, through lesson plans it calls “Learning for Justice”. It argues that “affinity groups help marginalized students to be seen and heard”. It even shows schools how to “troubleshoot questions”, like the obvious: “Aren’t affinity groups exclusionary?”

But in WPS, the backlash could not be quashed. On 19 October 2021, Parents Defending Education filed a lawsuit against the school district on behalf of Parents A, B, C, D and E and their children, alleging violation of the 1965 Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the First Amendment for its “Bias or Discrimination” hotline, “weaponized by certain students to punish classmates who express unpopular views”.

This resulted in a partial victory. On 9 November 2021, Superintendent Lussier rescinded the original “Responding to Incidents of Bias of Discrimination”. But the school district wouldn’t back down on the “affinity groups”, segregated by race.

This week, however, in a significant victory for justice, lawyers for Parents Defending Education filed a settlement with the school district, which agreed to end its practice of race segregation. On Tuesday night, at a virtual meeting of the school board, Lussier read these four remarkable statements:

• Under existing School Committee policies regarding Nondiscrimination and Student Organizations, membership in and attendance at all student clubs, listening sessions and affinity spaces is open to all.
• The Constitution and federal laws prohibit schools from excluding students from affinity-based group sessions or any other school-sponsored activities on the basis of their race.
• No students will be excluded from affinity-based group sessions or any school-sponsored activities on the basis of race.
• When any affinity-based group session is held, all grade-eligible students are welcome to attend — regardless of their race — and notice of the event will be publicized so that all students are aware of the event.

Any announcement of an “affinity-based” group will also include this disclaimer: “This event is open to all students regardless of race, color, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation”.

Suggested reading

The day American justice died

By Bret Weinstein

It’s strange to think that in 2022, a declaration that disallows racial segregation is a victory not against “white supremacy” but against the bigotry of “anti-racism”. Like most people, I am appalled by actual racism — but I am also appalled by the efforts of doctrinaire progressives to impose their divisive worldview on children. As the case of WPS illustrates, a new Jim Crow is being promoted, often by stealth, by a small cadre of illiberal activists — woke school boards, “diversity” officers and compliant teachers. They often steamroll a community with their bad ideas, which they try to conceal with enthusiasm: “If you need to know more about why this is not for White students, please ask me!”

Their doctrine is abundantly clear. Whites — and only whites — are the oppressors and must acknowledge their “privilege”, and admit their shame. Blacks and “people of color”, meanwhile, are portrayed as perpetual victims, people unable hold their own against white people, hence the need for “affinity spaces”.

Could anything be more racist? This philosophy is blatantly cultish, peddling the idea of original sin, but without the forgiveness. No wonder clear-thinking parents of all races rebel against such transparent nonsense. Teaching children that there is a hierarchy of human value is as illiberal — and regressive — today as it was when King called it a “tragedy”.