Read Jason Hill’s most recent column at FrontPage Mag
Slavery makes a weak case for California’s modern-day reparations
California has taken a historic step by forming a task force to consider reparations for Black residents and now faces a daunting task: defining a plausible strategy for implementing reparations. The architects of this effort — which was signed into law last year by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) as part of a bill to investigate the comprehensive effects of slavery on Black Americans in California — seem more interested in establishing the moral credibility of reparations before effecting a well thought out strategy for resource allocation.
Reparations: A Black existential crisis and supremacy for liberal whites
The reparations legislation known as H.R. 40, which has the support of President Biden and the endorsement of Vice President Harris, is an anachronistic document.
Reparations for Blacks has been achieved since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the establishment of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the initiatives launched by his “War on Poverty.” These programs specifically targeted Black Americans and the recipients of tax dollars from the middle- and higher-income classes. Millions of government checks, representing tens of billions of dollars, were printed, mailed and cashed. As Stanford University economist Martin Anderson stated: “The most ambitious attempt to redistribute income ever undertaken in the United States had begun.”
Read more on The Hill
HILL: Mexico Is A Failed State, And It’s Time For America To Fix It
It’s time for the United States to step in and clean up Mexico by whatever means necessary.
Last weekend, Fox News host Tucker Carlson stated that Mexico “is a hostile foreign power” and that America “must strike back. He identified Mexico as a hostile foreign power attacking he United States, and noted that for decades, the Mexican government has sent its poor north to the United States. This has allowed Mexico’s criminal oligarchy to get richer, and at great expense to the United States.
Read more on Daily Caller
On the Moral and Legal Status of Islam in the United States
Last week, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán and Canada's leading intellectual, Jordan Peterson, met to lambast illegal immigration and political correctness, which they believe make sensible public discussions impossible. Peterson also made a noteworthy claim worth thinking about. He said Islam is not compatible with democracy and that this issue has been barred from public discussion.
Read more on American Thinker
The Immorality of Free and Public Education
Why the demand for free education is un-American and unethical.
As I travel across the United States to give talks and seminars on my books and political and moral philosophy, I am increasingly struck by the degree to which today’s college students believe that they are morally entitled to a free education. They think that this entitlement starts from the time they were born right up until the time that they graduate from college.
Read more at Frontpage Mag
Daring to Suggest that All Cultures Aren’t Equal
The Acting Provost of DePaul University issues a formal censure against me.
It is a common canard among the educated cognoscenti that all cultures are equal. Indeed, a few weeks after writing an article in which I declared that not all cultures were equal, the Acting Provost of DePaul University—where I am a full tenured professor of philosophy—issued what I and many others considered to be a formal censure against me. She declared that at her university it is considered an accepted truism that all individuals are valued equally, and that she was truly disheartened that a member of the academic community would assert that “not all cultures are indeed equal.”
Read more at Frontpage Mag
The Rise of Cultural and Economic Jihadism in American Civilization
Selling us cultural suicide as a moral virtue.
Two Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Julian Castro, have agreed to speak before the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). The candidates will address the forum during its convention in Houston on August 31, 2019.
The ISNA is listed by the United States Justice department as an entity of the Muslim Brotherhood which is a terrorist organization linked to several Islamist and Jihadist global political movements. These movements have as their goal the establishment of a global caliphate. This means that their goals are to subject all human beings to Sharia law. In fact, the president of ISNA was quoted in a 2006 film as saying that the organization’s mission was to change the Constitution of America. The organization has as its goals, by means of a jihad campaign, the destruction of western civilization from within.
Read more at Frontpage Mag
Taboo Truths about Transphobia in America
Unveiling a surreal and totalitarian assault on our culture.
Gender Dysphoria involves a deep conflict between persons’ physical or assigned gender, that is, the biological sex determined by the chromosomal markers that determine their sex at birth (XX for females, and XY for males) and the gender with which they identify. Persons with gender dysphoria often feel they were born in the wrong body, feel conflicted with the gender roles they are expected to conform to, and are deeply uncomfortable with the anatomical sex body parts that are coterminous with their biological sex. One should say from the start, that the feelings of pain and suffering such individuals experience are real, and that they should never be eviscerated of their dignity, nor evicted from the domain of the ethical, or the realm of individual rights. They are human beings like everyone else, and they deserve equal protection as individuals (not as special groups) under the law. Such persons are often referred to and identify as transgendered individuals. Other terms used by society and said individuals are transvestites and transsexuals, the latter often being reserved for transgendered persons who have undergone complete gender reassignment surgeries.
Read more at Frontpage Mag
A Moral Philosopher’s Letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Leading the most beleaguered state on earth against the greatest threat to civilization.
Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu,
I write to you as an admirer; as a moral philosopher, and as an immigrant to America from Jamaica where part of my ancestral bloodline can be traced to a maternal great-grandfather who was a Sephardic Jew, and whose people came to Jamaica from Jerusalem via Portugal.
Read more at Frontpage Mag
Disband Students for Justice in Palestine and All BDS Movements
An open letter to Attorney General William Barr.
Editors’ note: Jason D. Hill is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. Below is his Open Letter to Attorney General, William Barr making the argument to disband Students for Justice in Palestine and all BDS movements.
Mr. Attorney General, On May 16, 2019, the German Parliament voted, as you know, to condemn as anti-Semitic, the BDS movement in Germany. The BDS is a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that targets Israeli organizations, academic institutions and companies engaged in entrepreneurial activities in Israel to weaken the Israeli economy and politically in an attempt to force Israel to change its policies towards Palestinians living there.
Read more at Frontpage Mag
Entitlement Rogues: Alive and Well on America’s Campuses
Who deserves free education, lower financial burdens and the right not to work at all?
On Monday, April 16, twenty students were arrested at Yale University after refusing to leave the school’s financial aid office during a rally. They were demanding that Yale remove what they regard as a financial burden for its low-income students on financial aid. The burden in question was the Student Effort requirement which requires students on significant financial aid to make a financial contribution of between $2,800 and $3,350 to their education by working on campus.
Read more at Frontpage Mag
The Moral Case For Israel Annexing The West Bank—And Beyond
Israel has the moral right to annex all of the West Bank, for a plethora of reasons. Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable and it has a right to unilaterally apply Israeli law over its nation-state.
The April 2019 election victory for Benjamin Netanyahu will see him serve a record fifth term as Israeli prime minister and form a new right-wing coalition government. It also brings the promise of a commitment Netanyahu made to the nation during his campaign: That he would annex Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territories.
Read more on The Federalist
I’m an immigrant and I find open borders troubling
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, claims America’s national borders create “an injustice” by keeping Mexican workers from traveling to the United States to look for higher-paying jobs. In an interview with progressive activist Rabbi Michael Lerner, Ellison stated that America’s “prosperity is based on the want that is experienced in other parts of the world” and complained that “people, regular people, cannot go back and forth across the border seeking out the highest wages.”
Ellison also sported a T-shirt with the words “I don’t believe in borders” while walking in a parade in May. The next month, he posed for a picture next to a sign that read, “No human being is illegal on stolen land.”
Read the rest of the story on The Hill
A professor’s call to shut down our nation’s universities
Thirty-three years ago, when I entered college, left-wing ideologies dominated American universities, and especially the humanities and social sciences. But one still could get a fair, balanced education by consulting traditional canonical texts that countered the dogma. Free speech was alive on college campuses. There were hisses and boos, of course, but for the most part, hearing perspectives different from your own was considered essential to your education. Few of us lived in our own curated silos.
Today, after 22 years of being a college professor, and having traveled much of America to lecture, I am sad to say the situation is not the same. The core principles and foundations that keep the United States intact, that provide our citizens with their civic personalities and national identities, are being annihilated. The gravest internal threat to this country is not illegal aliens; it is leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this country.
Read the rest of the story on The Hill
Critics of cultural appropriation suffer from a cultural deficit
On July 4, the Montreal International Jazz Festival announced it would cancel all performances of a controversial show featuring African-American slave songs. The show, SLAV, which had a white lead singer and mostly white cast, was met with virulent resistance from the African-American community. One black musician, Moses Sumney, dropped out of the festival in protest on grounds that the show was appropriative, hegemonic and neo-imperialistic.
The show’s white performer, Betty Bonifassi, who has been performing slave songs for over 15 years, has said that the production was billed as a tool for resilience and emancipation through traditional African-American, Serbian, Bulgarian and Métis songs. She has said that uniting two colors is a modern theme and that she doesn’t talk about blacks or whites in shows, but about human pain and suffering. People of all cultures and ethnicities suffer.
Read the rest of the story on The Hill
In The Name Of The Best Within You: An Immigrant’s Homage To The American People
On Aug. 11, 1985, at the age of 20, I boarded an Air Jamaica aircraft bound for Atlanta. Clutching the hand of my 72-year-old grandmother a little nervously, I was headed for what I still believe to be the greatest and most country on earth: the United States of America. Armed with $120, big dreams for my life and the love of my family, I blew a kiss to the throngs of onlookers in the old rundown wavers gallery who were waving crazily at everybody and nobody in particular — a hangover from the old colonial era — and never once looked back. A few hours later as a newly minted legal immigrant I made a covenant with my new country that in the name of the best and highest in me, I would seek faith in life’s better possibilities. That there would be no obstacles that my indefatigable spirit could not overcome, and that there would be no prejudice that a philosophy of individualism, which characterized the very essence of who I was at my core, could not transcend. This covenant spoke to the stupendous achievements I vowed to accomplish by taking advantage of the plethora of opportunities that I knew would become available to me. This was a moral contract I was making with my new country. It was an ethos of benevolence and goodwill that I would extend to my compatriots, and one that I expected to be reciprocated. The America I anticipated meeting, and the one I have come to know and love, is a country predicated on mutual exchange. I never looked back, and, indeed, fulfilled all of my goals including becoming the author of several books, earning four degrees including a doctorate and becoming a Distinguished Honors professor at a major university. America has brought me, now a proud citizen, to where I am.
Read the rest of the story on the The Daily Caller
Slavery apologies are empty rhetoric, not a real way forward
This week Charleston, S.C., became the latest city in the United States to apologize to African-Americans for its role in the slave trade. This port city, to which about 40 percent of America's enslaved Africans arrived, promised tolerance and proposed an office of racial reconciliation in its resolution.
Will this apology be beneficial to racial healing in America? Will it make a difference to African-Americans?
Read the rest of the story on The Hill
“Kneeling players betray the moral meaning of America”
President Trump this week invited the Philadelphia Eagles to the White House to celebrate the team’s Super Bowl win. Most players chose not to attend because they disagree with the president’s policy towards players who refused to stand for the national anthem during games. The president subsequently canceled the event. A day later, the NBA’s Stephen Curry and LeBron James echoed the sentiment of their teammates, saying the Warriors and Cavaliers had no desire to be invited to the White House.
Read the editorial on The Hill
“Mr. President, please send the troops to Chicago”
President Trump, during your presidential campaign you made a promise to send federal troops to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C., and also one festering with feral thugs and gang-bangers who are committing genocide among black Americans right in the great city of Chicago.
I won’t quote you the homicide statistics, past and present, because by the time you read this they will have changed. Suffice it to say: They are horrific.
Something is terribly wrong when, in the most moral nation on earth, its third-largest city is ruled by gangs with a crime rate that is 35 percent higher than the national average.
Read the editorial on The Hill
“The black nihilism of Ta-Nehisi Coates”
The past few years, ever since the publication of his celebrated books Between the World and Me (2015) and We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), have been superlatively successful ones for Ta-Nehisi Coates. He has been hailed as the pre-eminent black intellectual of his generation, awarded a National Book Award, a MacArthur Genius Award, and courted as a public speaker by major college campuses across the country.
Read the editorial at Spiked
“My ‘Black Lives Matter’ Problem: Wrong on crime, wrong on Israel, and wrong on education”
I had lunch recently with a colleague of mine named Allan. He’s a retired professor who once taught at a university in New York and now teaches inside prisons. Allan was talking in despairing tones about America and wanted to know my thoughts on the matter. When I asked him to be more specific, he was taken aback at the idea that further clarification was needed. He couldn’t understand my failure to see the utter hopelessness of the society all around me.
Read the editorial at Commentary Magazine
Commentary Magazine: “An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Dream is Real”
Dear Ta-Nehisi Coates:
I read your book Between the World and Me, an elegant and poetic elegy written to your son on “the question,” as you put it, “of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the [American] Dream.” In the book, you reflect on your revelatory experiences, from the fears you felt growing up in your neighborhood in Baltimore to attending Howard University to visiting the South Side of Chicago to your relentless study of African history to your reckoning with the meaning of the Civil War...
Read the open letter at Commentary Magazine
“An immigrant’s American Dream: Jason D Hill on identity politics, multiculturalism and why he’s not a victim of white oppression”
Jason D Hill, a professor of philosophy at De Paul University, has long been a staunch critic of identity politics. Or better still, he has long been a staunch critic of those theories and worldviews that reduce individuals to a set of ethnic or racial characteristics, limit them to their cultural backgrounds, or tie them down to their ancestral roots. It is a critical, philosophical impulse evident in all his works published thus far, from Becoming a Cosmopolitan (2000) and Beyond Blood Identities (2009) to Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Identity (2013).
And little wonder. For Hill himself is a testament to the freedom to become, to go beyond one’s background and cultural milieu. The 20-year-old Jamaican who arrived in the United States in 1985, ‘armed with $120, big dreams for my life, and the love of my family’, as he put it in a piece for Commentary magazine earlier this year, never allowed himself to be constrained by the accidents of birth. He was determined to become what he had always striven to be; a public intellectual. That he was able to do so, Hill argues, was due to the rights and liberties enshrined in the US, the country of his adoption.
Read the interview at Spiked