Radical students and professors on college campuses claim that their schools participate in systemic racism. In order to appease these radicals, college presidents have been all too willing to agree with the charge with a promise to end systemic racism.

But words have meaning. They also have consequences, as Princeton University is now discovering. The president of Princeton published an open letter promising to combat systemic racism at the school in an attempt to mollify progressive students and faculty.

The letter caught the eye of the Assistant Secretary of Education. Robert King wrote to the president requesting records related to his confession of bias. King cited the president’s letter that said that racist assumptions are “embedded in the structure of the university itself.”

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stipulates that no one on the basis of race should “be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Each year colleges must certify with the Department of Education that no discrimination has taken place.

Essentially the Department of Education is asking this question: Which is it? Are you just saying there is systemic racism but don’t really mean it? Or has discrimination taken place? If so, the university will be fined and have to forfeit federal funds.

We have all heard the phrase “talk is cheap.” Phrases like systemic racism and white privilege are tossed around indiscriminately. The president of Princeton University is about to find out there could be a heavy price to pay for making such comments.

Throughout this pandemic we have been told to trust the experts. But you have probably concluded from the many public statements, that not all the medical experts agree. And the easiest way to demonstrate that is to look at what the experts have been saying about the importance of wearing a mask.

At one extreme you have the very strong comments by the Surgeon General Jerome Adams back in February. Here’s his tweet: “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing the general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

On radio we pointed out at the time that the second part of his tweet contradicted the first part of the tweet. He told the American people to stop buying masks because they were not effective in preventing the coronavirus. Then he implied that you shouldn’t buy them because healthcare providers needed them. But why did they need them if they weren’t effective?

We found out later from him and other medical experts that they didn’t want people buying them because they wanted to make sure that personal protective equipment would be available for healthcare workers.

At the other extreme was the testimony this month by the CDC Director Robert Redfield. In front of the Senate Appropriations Committee he testified that “these facemasks, are the most important, powerful public health tool we have.” He then when on to make the outrageous statement that “this facemask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take the COVID vaccine.”

Back in February he even testified that healthy people should not be wearing a mask. Now he is saying wearing a mask would provide MORE protection than a vaccine. Perhaps you can see why the American people have had some trouble trusting the medical experts.

Our national election is just five weeks away, and yet many news stories illustrate that there are problems on the horizon. Much of the rhetoric focuses on the possibility of election fraud. A greater problem may simply be election mismanagement.

The state of New Jersey has provided many illustrations. The election in the state’s third-largest city (Patterson) was such a mess that they will redo the election on November 3. They had to take a “Mulligan” in the election because a quarter (24.29%) of the ballots had to be rejected.

As troubling as those actions were, the reaction to this debacle was worse. A New Jersey judge acknowledged that many ballots in the election were rejected, but then tried to put a positive spin by noting that the overall ballot-rejection rate in other elections was “only 9.6%.” I am troubled he used the word like “only” to describe ballots tossed out.

New Jersey was in the news again when officials in Sussex Country announced they had discovered 1,666 ballots “in a bin that was mislabeled.” But don’t worry, said the local board of elections, these 1,666 missing ballots did not change the outcome of any primary election. My question is: What if it did? How do you lose more than a thousand ballots, and what happens if something like this happens in November?

The casual, cavalier reactions from these elected officials should alarm us. Imagine if votes were valued the way we value money. Imagine if your bank told you that their ATM machine “only” made a mistake 9.6% of the time. Imagine if your bank misplaced $1,666 of your money.

Voting and elections are important. I am deeply concerned that some of these election officials don’t take it very seriously.

We are a divided country, but it may be worse than we imagined. An article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discussed what is called “motive attribution asymmetry.” That’s a technical term for the assumption that your ideology is based in love and your opponent’s is based on hate. Put another way: we are the good guys, and they are the bad guys.

They discovered that the average Republican and the average Democrat today are as divided as the Palestinians and Israelis. In his op-ed in the New York Times Arthur Brooks says we see the other side as “an enemy with whom one cannot negotiate or compromise.”

He comes to this startling conclusion. “People often say that our problem in America is incivility or intolerance. That is incorrect. Motive attribution asymmetry leads to something far worse: contempt, which is a noxious brew of anger and disgust.” And it is made worse by what he calls the “outrage industrial complex” that caters to one side and criticizes the other.

When people hear about political conflicts, they often prescribe the wrong solutions. Just because we disagree, doesn’t mean we should put aside our disagreements. Arthur Brooks says we need not disagree less. Instead, we need to disagree better. Whether we are discussing politics, economics, or philosophy we should engage is a robust “competition of ideas.” We can disagree without being so disagreeable.

He suggests two steps. First, turn away from what he calls the “rhetorical dope peddlers.” These are powerful people on your side who are profiting from the culture of contempt. Second, make a commitment never to treat others with contempt. Christians should be civil and gracious.

In a previous set of commentaries, I talked about the interview Nick Pitts and I did with Jonathan Haidt on his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Then I saw an essay that quoted his earlier book, The Righteous Mind, where he talked about “the conservative advantage.” As a liberal, he wrote the book because he “was convinced that American liberals did not get the morals and motives of their conservative countrymen.”

In one study he did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, they tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. They had the people fill out their Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time, they were supposed to fill out the questions normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time, they were asked to fill out the questions as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. And one-third of the time, they were supposed to fill out the questionnaire the way they believed a “typical conservative” would respond.

The design of the research allowed the researchers to examine the stereotypes that each side had about the other. And this also allowed them to see how accurate their answers were compared to people who were liberal and people who were conservative.

“The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as ‘very liberal.'”

I might add that the study was published ten years ago. I think it is even more likely that the gap in perception by liberals of conservatives has grown even more. Much of what Jonathan Haidt has written about in his recent book illustrates how millennial college students want even more “protection” from ideas they don’t like. They are less likely than before to engage foreign ideas. This is one more example of why we have such polarization in the political arena.

The US Senate as an institution is sick and dysfunctional. Senator Ben Sasse, playing the role of physician, provides both an accurate diagnosis and recommended cures. But I fear that the Senate will prefer to remain sick.

His first recommendation is to “cut the cameras” since most of what happens in committee hearings “isn’t oversight, its showmanship.” Senators give speeches that are chopped up and shipped to the local media. The senators aren’t trying to learn since they are actually competing for sound bites.

Senator Sasse also wants to abolish standing committees. The current structure ends up being “20 permanent fiefdoms.” Instead, he proposes temporary two-year committees devoted to making real progress.

His third recommendation is to “pack the floor.” Serious debate, he argues, only happens when senators show up. Most of the time when you see a senator talking on the floor, he or she is speaking to a nearly empty chamber. Changing the rules to allow committees to control some floor time would bring senators to the floor to debate.

Senator Sasse also calls for Congress to “make a real budget.” This certainly is a criticism of the House of Representatives where revenue bills are to begin. Both houses of Congress have budget responsibilities, but the “the budget process is completely broken.”

He also believes we should “repeal the 17th Amendment.” Ratified in 1913, this replaced the appointment of senators by state legislatures with direct election. The Senate was supposed to be less influenced by election and more responsible to the states. Although it is unlikely that this recommendation will ever be implemented, doing so would likely transform the US Senate back into deliberative body that it was supposed to be.

The US Senate should take seriously the proposals put forth by Senator Sasse. Unfortunately, I fear they will be ignored.

On my radio program recently, one of my guests mentioned that it is nearly always assumed that any racial disparities are due to racism. When there is a significant difference between black and white citizens, certainly racial prejudice or discrimination should be considered. But it shouldn’t always be the assumed conclusion. Mario Loyola believes we can often find other explanations.

For example, according to reports from the New York Police Department, “black men are arrested and prosecuted in about 60 to 70 percent of every category of violent crime, though they are just over 10 percent of the city’s population.” He then points out that a major reason for this disparity “is the disproportionate number of 911 calls from black neighborhoods.” I suppose you could argue that if we want fewer cops in black neighborhoods, then the citizens should make fewer 911 calls. Those calls to police are for help dealing with the crimes that are occurring in that neighborhood.

Another disparity can be found in the prisons. More than five percent of black males are in prison at any given time. This is five times the incarceration rate of whites. Yet if we once again look at New York City, we discover that criminal suspects in the city are disproportionately black since most of the victims of crime in the city are black.

These two examples aren’t meant to say that all racial disparities can be explained away. My point is to briefly illustrate why we shouldn’t immediately assume that any significant difference in statistics between races is due to racial prejudice or some form of discrimination.

If we are to truly address issues of race in society and remedy true discrimination, we will be better served not to jump to such conclusions. Sometimes there are other reasonable explanations for such disparities.

As we get closer to Election Day, some people are asking the “what if” question. What if the ballots in some states aren’t confirmed by the time the Electoral College meets in December? What if neither presidential candidate wins the Electoral College vote? Those are important questions that I hope we don’t have to answer in real life, but here are how those questions should be decided according to the Constitution.

The procedure is set forth in the Article II of the Constitution and modified by the addition of the 12th Amendment. The House of Representatives meets to vote for the president. You might assume that would be good news for Joe Biden since there are more Democrats in that chamber. But this would be the newly elected House members, which may or may not be majority Democrat.

If you look at the Constitution, you will see that doesn’t matter anyway. Each state delegation gets one vote. California gets one vote even though they have 52 representatives in Congress, while Wyoming gets one vote. Currently, there are more states (27) with Republicans than Democrats. Assuming those state delegations vote along party lines, that would be good news for Donald Trump.

What about the vote for Vice-President? In this case, the Senate would vote for the Vice-President. Although it is unlikely, it would be possible that the president who is selected and the vice-president who is selected could be from different parties. That has happened before in American politics but not since the 19th century.

What if the House of Representatives fail to select the president by Inauguration Day? The 20th Amendment specifies the vice-president-elect becomes the acting president until the House selects a president. But if neither chamber selects a president or vice-president, then the Speaker of the House becomes president on Inauguration Day.

If you are troubled by all of this, I suggest you start praying that none of this happens and that you make sure you vote this year.