Why Do Americans Care More About Microaggressions Than Disorder?

“Immigrants from poor countries like my own, Venezuela, often joke that Americans complain too much about ‘First World problems,’” Daniel Di Martino writes. “Back home, we don’t worry about microaggressions; we’re too busy figuring out how to put food on the table or stay safe from crime and government censorship.”

But the irony, he points out, is that Americans don’t care enough about Third World problems: shoplifting, trash in the streets, increasing disorder, and a decline in civility. In Venezuela, citizens call this thinking Third Worldism. “It’s the idea that you can do whatever you want,” he explains, “no matter how it affects others—littering without shame, blasting music at fellow citizens, shoplifting, jumping turnstiles, refusing to pay the bus fare, defacing property, and ignoring rules meant to keep the commons usable for everyone.”

With the help of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), universities are using diversity checkpoints, where administrators cancel job candidate searches when they find the applicant pool isn’t diverse enough.

“Many university leaders have denounced Donald Trump’s interventions in campus affairs,” John Sailer writes. “Yet, as the rise of diversity checkpoints illustrates, the federal government has fueled some of the most controversial and consequential university hiring practices, which gave power-seeking administrators a tool that’s hard for any university to resist: cash.”

Read more about his investigation here.

When Samuel J. Abrams was heading home on the train after a Yankees game, his son started singing “God Bless America,” still excited from having just done so during the seventh inning.

“The reaction on the subway, however, was chilling,” Abrams writes. “Faces turned. People glared. A man muttered about ‘indoctrination.’ A woman scowled and shook her head. It wasn’t the noise that bothered them—it was the patriotism.”

The incident is an alarming reminder of the growing disdain for public expressions of national pride, Abrams points out. “A country whose citizens no longer believe in its core goodness will struggle to sustain itself—whether in the classroom or on the battlefield.”

Last month, the New York State Legislature passed a measure requiring the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to ensure all subway trains have a train operator and a conductor. If enacted, the law would worsen the MTA’s operating costs (labor expenses are currently $11 billion each year), while benefiting the city’s transit-worker unions.

“The powerful transit unions have repeatedly lobbied against one-person train operation not because they fear losing union jobs,” Paul Dreyer writes, “but because they want to keep the overtime gravy train running for their 3,552 subway conductors—even if it hurts the system’s viability.”

“ESG, like DEI, is a failure of fiduciary responsibility.”

Photo credit: Andrew Lichtenstein / Contributor / Corbis News via Getty Images