According to the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

The arena is either intellect or will. And if it’s will, then truth has no advantage over nonsense.

The keynote, indeed the only note, of the 1619 Project is that racism is the story behind every story.

if you control for frequency of interactions—that is, if you take into account the fact that black people are far more likely, per capita, to be contacted by cops—you find that the police are no more likely to use lethal force against black suspects than against white suspects.

Fryer also found that the police were 50 percent more likely to use non-lethal force against black suspects. Cops, in other words, were more likely to rough up black suspects than white suspects, yet no more likely to kill them.

As soon as you argue that racism can be a feature of nonconscious systems rather than of the human beings who design and inhabit them, you flirt with meaninglessness.

How is it possible that racism had nothing to do with the incident that galvanized the demand for “racial justice” across the United States?

Remember that the purpose of a safe space is not to protect people; it’s to protect people’s feelings, to set their feelings beyond rational debate. To render them true by virtue of their being sincerely felt.

ask yourself this: In the last several millennia of recorded human endeavor, can you name one writer, one artist, one thinker, one remotely interesting, original, or memorable person who, as a young adult, wanted to know less about the world?