By Betsy McCaughey  Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.  September 28, 2021

By Betsy McCaughey     August 11, 2021

The infrastructure bill the Senate passed Tuesday discriminates against white people at every turn.

Americans are enthusiastic about spending money on physical infrastructure — bridges, roads, broadband. But this racist bill hands out jobs and contracts and locates projects based on race, not merit. Minority businesses and neighborhoods hold the inside track. If you’re white, you’re low-priority.

The bill includes grants to install solar or wind technologies and generate jobs in areas decimated by closing coal mines or coal-fired electric plants. Here’s the catch: When contractors bid, the bill says minority-owned businesses will get selected first. Bad news for small-time white contractors in depressed areas.

The same is true for the bill’s proposals to improve traffic patterns in cities. Contractors and subcontractors get priority only if they’re owned by minorities or women. White male business owners can take a hike.

Americans should be outraged — but not surprised. After all, President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, passed in March, also put into place an ugly system of discrimination against whites. It offered debt relief to black farmers, but not white farmers. Another provision offered billions in aid to minority-owned and women-owned restaurants, but told struggling restaurants owners who happened to be white men that they had to go to the back of the line.

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By   Christopher F. Rufo
Founder and Director, Battlefront

Christopher F. Rufo is founder and director of Battlefront, a public policy research center. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and a former Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. As executive director at the Documentary Foundation, he has directed four films for PBS, including most recently America Lost, which explores life in Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where he covers topics including critical race theory, homelessness, addiction, and crime.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 30, 2021.

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million of their own people. They are remembered for their gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, where there were large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their Leftist political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

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By Jeffrey H. Anderson  Jeffrey H. Anderson served as the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021 and is the co-creator of the Anderson & Hester Rankings, which were part of college football’s Bowl Championship Series from 1998 to 2014.    April 22, 2021

President Joe Biden’s “infrastructure” plan is called the American Jobs Plan, but it doesn’t focus much on infrastructure and wouldn’t create many jobs. A more appropriate name for the $2.2 trillion proposal would be the “American Debt Plan.”

Former President Barack Obama’s “stimulus” bill, which Congress passed in 2009 with Biden as vice president, cost taxpayers a cool $278,000 for every new job added or saved, based on estimates from Obama’s hand-picked economists. Biden’s “infrastructure” plan might have trouble matching even that pathetic record. The plan’s overarching philosophy appears to be that the private sector doesn’t create jobs but government creates jobs.

Moody’s Analytics projects that Biden’s “infrastructure” plan would result in there being 2.7 million additional nonfarm jobs by 2030 at a total cost of $2,183,800,000,000. That works out to $809,000 per job — nearly three times as much as those under Obama’s failed “stimulus” bill. Yet Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that creating fewer than 3 million jobs at the cost of more than $2 trillion “is a great place to be.”

Perhaps Buttigieg is comparing this anemic rate of return to that of Biden’s recently passed “COVID-19 stimulus” bill, which Moody’s projects will result in about 700,000 additional jobs by 2030 at a cost, per the Congressional Budget Office, of $1.8 trillion. That’s a little over $2.5 million per job. Still, compared to anything but Biden’s wasteful COVID-19 stimulus bill, his infrastructure plan would be an appallingly inefficient job-creation program.

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