Hmmm.

So over there at my old stomping grounds at CNN, my own former Pennsylvania United States Senator Rick Santorum and my former CNN colleague Don Lemon got into a dust-up.

To be clear, I know and like them both, and yes, have voted for Rick every time he was on the ballot. And yes, I bought Don’s recent book This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism. and am reading currently.

I should begin with a recounting of exactly what took place.

President Joe Biden may not be afforded the chance to appoint three justices to the country’s highest court like his predecessor, President Donald Trump, but he’s already jockeying to make his mark at the federal level.

Two of President Biden’s Cabinet nominees are slamming into confirmation hurdles on Capitol Hill, testing the White House’s ability to navigate a tenuous Senate majority amid deep partisan divisions in Washington.

Biden’s pick for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Neera Tanden, now appears unlikely to be confirmed after two Senate panels delayed business meetings to vote on her nomination Wednesday.

And Republicans are solidifying their opposition to Xavier Becerra, Biden’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Prominent Democrats in Washington are weaponizing identity politics to defend some of President Biden's most controversial Cabinet nominees from criticism.

Neera Tanden, Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M. and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra have all faced intense scrutiny for their policy positions and public statements, but some Democrats are suggesting that the nominees' critics are motivated by prejudice.

In American Awakening, Georgetown political theory dean Joshua Mitchell unmasks identity politics for what it is: a toxic outgrowth of Protestant Christianity that threatens the American regime of liberty and self-government. The book builds on popular critiques of wokeness by placing the phenomenon in the grander scheme of our post-1989 experiment in secular hyper-liberalism.

2020 was the year that a divisive form of racial identity politics, embodied in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, was accelerated and institutionalised.

BLM brought with it a politics of victimhood, a view of races as rigidly defined and adversarial, and a view of the past as something to be sanitised and fought against. The cowardice and capitulation of our institutions to censorious mob pressure made 2020 the year we nearly lost our collective grip on reality.

We are not the same. Neither men, nor women, nor races, nor ages, nor nationalities, nor in wealth, nor in training, nor in beauty. We are not equal in any way. And that is a reason to be proud and happy, because at the end of the day we are human and not the product of some factory. Let us once and for all praise difference, bless the inequality that makes some people prefer beer and others water (because otherwise there would be a shortage of beer, and that would cruelly condemn us bohemians to discovering what water tastes like).

"Where would the Black Lives Matter movement be without the right to free speech?" asks Ira Glasser, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1978 to 2001. "There is no social justice movement in America that has ever not needed the First Amendment to initiate its movement for justice, to sustain its movement to justice, to help its movement survive."

How identity politics changed the Democratic Party — for the better.

Polarization, party sorting, and identity politics are central villains of our time. Politicians lament them. Pundits loathe them. Book after book has been written blaming them for society’s ills, from the decline of reason to the electoral travails of the Democratic Party to the death of American democracy.

But the past month of sustained, mass activism against police brutality offers evidence for the defense — that sorting around identity can be inclusive, that polarization can be productive.

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious.