Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes: A pillar of contemporary leftism is the notion of “white privilege.” Given that a generation of high school and college students are being taught that a great number of “unearned privileges” accrue to white Americans — the charge of white privilege demands rational inquiry.

The assertion turns out to be largely meaningless. And more significantly, it does great harm to blacks.

First, no reasonable person can argue that white privilege applies to the great majority of whites, let alone to all whites. There are simply too many variables other than race that determine individual success in America.

And if it were true, why would whites commit suicide at twice the rate of blacks (and at a higher rate than any other race in America except American Indians)? According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, white men, whom the left argue are the most privileged group of all in America, commit 7 of every 10 suicides in America — even though only 3 of 10 Americans are white males.

Whatever reason one gives for the white suicide rate, it is indisputable that, at the very least, considerably more whites than blacks consider life not worth living. To argue that all these whites were oblivious to all the unique privileges they had is to stretch the definition of “privilege” beyond credulity.

Second, there are a host of privileges that dwarf “white privilege.”

A huge one is “two-parent privilege.” If you are raised by a father and mother, you enter adulthood with more privileges than anyone else in American society, irrespective of race, ethnicity or sex. That’s why the poverty rate among two-parent black families is only 7 percent. Compare that to a 22 percent poverty rate among whites in single-parent homes. Obviously, the two-parent home is the decisive privilege.

Another “privilege,” if one wants to use that term, that dwarfs “white privilege” is “Asian privilege.” Asian-Americans do better than white Americans in school, on IQ tests, on credit scores and on other positive parameters. In fact, according to recent data from the Federal Reserve, Asians are about to surpass whites as the wealthiest group of Americans. Will the left soon complain about Asian privilege?

And how about “gentile privilege?” For most of American history it was a lot easier being a Christian than being a Jew in America. Yet, I do not know a Jew — myself included — who doesn’t believe that to be a Jew in America has always been an unbelievable stroke of good fortune. It is not surprising that an American Jew, Irving Berlin, wrote “God Bless America.”

There are even times when there is “minority privilege” in America today. Every high school student knows that given similar scholastic and extracurricular records, one’s chances of being accepted into a prestigious college are considerably greater if one is a member of a minority, most especially the black minority.

Read on.

Judaism has no position on a minimum wage, but most Jews in America are on the left and so they support a strong central government and higher minimum wage.

Dennis Prager writes:

The majority of Jews support increasing the minimum wage to $15. If asked why, they respond that a person cannot support a family on the current minimum wage, that it is matter of social justice and the Jewish obligation of tikkun olam (repairing the world).
I have no doubt that most of these Jews and the non-Jews who support the $15 minimum wage are sincere in their beliefs.
But sincerity is meaningless when you are wrong. The $15 minimum wage will hurt people, not help them, and it will do economic and social damage to California and New York, the two states that have thus far passed this minimum wage law.
In fact, the governor of California, Jerry Brown, actually admitted as much — on the record — at least twice.
In January, the Sacramento Business Journal reported that Brown said: “Raise the minimum wage too much, and you put a lot of poor people out of work. There won’t be a lot of jobs.”
And then again this month, the Sacramento Bee reported:
“Brown, traveling to the state’s largest media market to sign the landmark bill, remained hesitant about the economic effect of raising the minimum wage, saying, ‘Economically, minimum wages may not make sense’ [italics added]. But he said work is ‘not just an economic equation,’ calling labor ‘part of living in a moral community.’ ”
But if the minimum wage hike doesn’t make economic sense, it cannot make moral sense. The whole point of the minimum wage increase is to improve people’s economic condition. If it doesn’t, it isn’t moral. When “you put a lot of poor people out of work,” that’s immoral.
Even The New York Times editorialized how disastrous the minimum wage is. It ran the following headline on an editorial:
“The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.”
The editorial went on to explain, “There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed.”
But that was in 1987 — when some liberals still sat on The New York Times editorial board. Today, The New York Times is edited by leftists who support the higher minimum wage, not by liberals.
There is a huge difference between liberals and leftists. When deciding what political, social, and economic positions to take, liberals ask, “What does good?” Leftists ask, “What feels good?”
It feels good and moral to raise the minimum wage to $15; and feeling good and moral is a core impulse among progressives.
But the $15 minimum wage isn’t moral. It’s immoral. When the government raises the minimum wage, it destroys jobs and creates inflation — both of which hurt the poor the most.
Here’s one simple proof: If raising the minimum wage is good for workers and good for the economy, why not raise it to $20 an hour, or $30 or $50? Whatever answer you give applies equally to a $15 minimum wage.

Read on.

Dennis Prager writes: This month Stanford University students voted on a campus resolution that would have had their college require a course on Western civilization — as it did until the 1980s.

Stanford students rejected the proposal 1,992 to 347. A columnist in the Stanford Daily explained why: Teaching Western civilization means “upholding white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”

The vote and the column encapsulated the Left’s view of Western civilization: In Europe, Latin America, and America, the Left loathes Western civilization. Wherever there is conflict between the West — identified as white, capitalist, or of European roots — and the non-West, the Left portrays the West as the villain…

Today, the Left would revile any Westerner who used such language as xenophobic, racist, and Fascist. The Left similarly describes any suggestion that anything Western is superior to anything non-Western. Likewise, the Left dismisses virtually all Western achievements, but regards criticism of anything non-Western as racist, chauvinistic, imperialist, colonialist, xenophobic, etc.

That is why the Left is so protective of Islam. America’s first left-wing president, Barack Obama, will not use, or allow the government to use, the words “Islamic terrorism”; and all criticism of Islam is labeled “Islamophobic,” thereby morally equating any such criticism with racism. It is not that the Left is sympathetic to Islam; the Left has contempt for all religions. It is that many Muslims loathe the West, and the enemies of my enemy (the West) must be protected.

That is why the Left loathes Israel. If the Left actually cared about human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, or freedom of speech, religion, and the press, it would be wildly pro-Israel. But Israel, in the Left’s view, is white, European, and colonialist; in other words, Western. And the Palestinians are non-Western.

So, then, the Big Question is, Why? Why is the Left hostile to Western civilization? After decades of considering this question, the answer, I have concluded, is: standards. The Left hates standards – moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards. The West is built on all three, and has excelled in all three.

…the protection of Islam on the Left is so thorough that one cannot even say such obvious truths as that the status of women has been far superior in the Judeo-Christian West than in the Islamic world. The veil, for example, is dehumanizing; yet, in a speech at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a rabbi, at the time the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said that the veil “deserves our respect.”

Read on.