Bryan Caplan is an economics professor at George Mason University. He rightly objected to ideological indoctrination of students at George Mason University, through compulsory courses with an ideological slant, known as “Just Societies” classes. Starting in Fall 2024, GMU students will have to take two such classes to graduate. Such ideologically-slanted classes — which a libertarian legal scholar described as the “return of compulsory chapel” — not only force people to parrot views they don’t hold, they also fuel grade inflation, because ideological “studies” classes tend to give students an easy “A” as long as they agree with the professor’s left-wing politics.
In retaliation, Caplan was reported to his University’s “DEI office to alert them” to his “thoughtcrime.”
Professor Caplan was also trashed on social media by Radley Balko, a leftist writer who specializes in depicting every “nook and cranny” of the criminal justice system as “racist” (a depiction that is false, according to a meta-analysis of the criminal-justice system).
The irony of Balko’s attack on Caplan is that Caplan is a libertarian professor, and Balko was once employed by the libertarian magazine Reason and is currently still listed as a fellow at the Cato Institute, the world’s largest libertarian think-tank.
But Balko has since drifted to the left, and has trashed any number of libertarians on Twitter, such as Reason Magazine’s Robby Soave, who exposes campus free-speech and due-process violations. Balko has also attacked conservatives who sought to cut welfare, and has mocked people who oppose government funding for the Kennedy Center, even though government subsidies for the arts is not a libertarian position.
Balko also regularly gets facts wrong. He peddled the false idea that a court ruled that a woman could not sue over being forced into baptism by religious fundamentalists. In fact, the court ruled just the opposite in Riley v. Hamilton County Government. It allowed Sheriff’s deputies to be sued for constitutional violations for doing that, denying them qualified immunity.
But Balko’s inaccuracies don’t stop libertarians from praising and promoting his writings under the mistaken assumption that he is one of them — even though he attacks libertarians on Twitter and Bluesky.
If someone attacked my friends, for criticizing civil-liberties violations, I wouldn’t pal around with the attacker, or promote his writings. Yet, this is what some libertarians on social media do — they praise Balko right after he attacks other libertarians, and retweet his writings.
Is this a case of bad self-esteem on the part of those libertarians? Or just a blindness to Balko’s ideological transformation? For some “libertarians”, libertarianism may just be a temporary way station on the road to progressivism.
Balko regularly attacks libertarians and conservatives to taking positions that were long held by libertarians. He attacked Mike Pence for supporting a Religious Freedom Restoration act, which was almost identical to a federal law passed with bipartisan support and the support of libertarians and civil-liberties groups. As The Washington Post’s Hunter Schwarz reported, many states have their own Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and “Indiana is actually … one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
Radley Balko approvingly retweeted a July 2020 article in “The Atlantic” defending “cancel culture.” That article defended the firing of the editor of a liberal newspaper for publishing a conservative op-ed that offended black staffers by endorsing a crackdown on rioters. Balko also approved the withdrawal under pressure of an academic study finding that police shootings weren’t usually racist. He did so even though another libertarian academic who is an expert on scientific evidence found nothing wrong with the study’s methodology.
As that libertarian law professor, who is an expert on junk science, the history of racial segregation, and the Supreme Court’s Daubert decision, observed, “It’s absurd to ask that a valid study be retracted [because] you think others are ‘misusing’ it. A study says what it says, and so long as it wasn’t actually flawed it shouldn’t be retracted for political reasons except perhaps under truly extreme circumstances, which this isn’t.” Critics objected to an “extrapolation” in the study, but it was a “perfectly reasonable one.” The study’s “retraction resulted from a sustained attempt to discredit politically unpopular research,” rather than anything being wrong with the research.”
On Twitter, Balko smeared an Asian-American college official who discussed the police-shooting study as a white supremacist, citing the fact that that Asian-American college official had talked to Ron Unz, a Jewish man who had been cited by Balko’s own colleague. (Unz later veered to the right after he talked to the Asian-American college official, but at the time, he was a pro-immigration libertarian who had been cited as such by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh). Balko also attacks people for accurately citing crime statistics that debunk left-wing talking points.
Balko falsely implies to readers that there are very few studies of the criminal justice system that don’t find systemic racial bias in the area they are studying. But that is quite wrong. In 1994, federal government statistician Patrick A. Langan analyzed data on 42,500 defendants in the nation’s 75 largest counties and found “no evidence that, in the places where blacks in the United States have most of their contacts with the justice system, that system treats them more harshly than whites.” As he noted, “No Racism in the Justice System,” “Many studies have been conducted that show no bias in the arrest, prosecution, adjudication, and sentencing of blacks,” while “other studies show possible evidence of bias.”
That remains true today. “Overall, the criminal justice system appears to be remarkably neutral” and evenhanded in terms of how it treats people of different races, finds a meta-analysis published in March 2024. It also finds that race is not a predictor for most criminal sentencing outcomes. “Overall results suggested that neither class nor race biases for criminal adjudications for either violent or property crimes could be reliably detected,” reports the study, “Race, class, and criminal adjudication: Is the US criminal justice system as biased as is often assumed? A meta-analytic review.” It is published in Aggression and Violent Behavior, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the leading academic publisher Elsevier.
This finding that the criminal justice system is usually racially fair is consistent with a recent government study as well. A 2021 study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at much higher rate than whites, this mostly reflected underlying crime rates, not racism: “white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018). The fact that the black percentage of people arrested was similar to the black percentage of perpetrators of “crime reported to police” is telling, because the people who report violent crimes to police — mainly crime victims — are disproportionately black people themselves. Since victims are overwhelmingly the same race as their attacker, there is no reason to think that they are reporting those crimes out of racism. Most crimes against black people are black-on-black, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. According to FBI data, 89 percent of blacks who were murdered in 2018 were killed by black offenders.
Other studies have also found the criminal justice system is racially unbiased in key respects. The RAND Corporation statistical expert Dr. Stephen P. Klein, a left-leaning researcher, looked carefully at California’s state criminal justice system and, controlling for relevant variables, found that criminal sentencing in California was racially fair and non-discriminatory, overall, and that blacks and whites in California who were similarly-situated got very similar sentences. (See Stephen P. Klein, et al., “Race and Imprisonment Decisions in California,” 247 Science 812 (1990)).
Similarly, a 1991 RAND Corporation study of adult robbery and burglary defendants in 14 large U.S. cities found that a defendant’s race or ethnic group bore almost no relation to conviction rates, sentencing severity, or other key measures.
Balko has attacked Reason Magazine’s Robby Soave, a libertarian who focuses on campus civil-liberties abuses, on multiple occasions. For example, he approvingly retweeted a Twitter user’s attack on Robby Soave as a “right wing hack” who “accuses a private party of violating free speech, hand-waves student opposition without mentioning they’re the paying customers, and concludes by telling the university to ‘move on’ without offering any solutions.”
Soave was criticizing Georgetown University’s breach of contractual academic freedom guarantees, which occurred when it suspended a former Cato Institute employee for criticizing affirmative action, in violation of its contractual academic-freedom provisions.
The argument Balko was endorsing suggested that black students, as “paying customers”, should be entitled to have the critic of affirmative action fired. Needless to say, there is no exception to academic freedom for speech that offends some “paying customers,” which would render academic freedom meaningless. Courts have enforced academic freedom guarantees against colleges that punished faculty for speech that offended some minority students in cases like McAdams v. Marquette University (2018).
Balko also attacked Robby Soave for his article, “Emory Law Journal Refuses To Publish Conservative Professor’s Dismissal of Systemic Racism,” which criticized a journal for first soliciting a law review article from a conservative law professor, and then — after the professor spent many, many hours writing it — rejecting it based on a series of contrived objections.
The radical black writer Ibram Kendi famously said, “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.”
Similarly, Balko treats statistical disparities as proof of racism, even without any evidence that blacks are treated differently than similarly situated whites, and even without any evidence that these disparities are traceable to a policy that needs to be fixed. For example, his most famous article in the Washington Post cites as proof of racism the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection, which shows differences in racial suspension rates by race (nationally, blacks are suspended at higher rates than whites, while Asians are suspended at lower rates). He wrote, “Data released in 2016 from the Department of Education found that black students were nearly four times more likely to be suspended than white students.” He lists this as one of his “studies” showing racism in the criminal justice system, via “school suspensions and the school-to-prison pipeline.” (See Balko, There’s overwhelming evidence that the criminal justice system is racist. Here’s the proof, Washington Post, June 10, 2020.)
But this is just wrong. The Civil Rights Data Collection does not claim that differences in suspension rates are racist, nor does it draw any conclusion whatsoever about what is causing different races to have different school suspension rates. The Civil Rights Data Collection is a data set, not a “study” showing racism!
Nor do the differences in suspension rates shown in the Civil Rights Data Collection actually show racism. Not even progressive civil-rights bureaucrats find a school system automatically guilty of discrimination just because blacks are suspended at a higher rate than whites. Instead, liability requires a showing either of (1) racial double standards, or (2) racially “disparate impact.” (“Disparate impact” means a significantly higher black suspension rate caused by a school policy that lacks a “substantial legitimate justification“ (whatever that means — the vagueness of that standard can sometimes incentivize unconstitutional racial quotas in school discipline) — or ignores viable “alternatives” that have less disparate impact).
Moreover, white students are four times more likely to be suspended than Asian students, in many school systems, yet no one — including Balko — claims this is due to racism against whites and in favor of Asians. In California in 2015, whites were suspended at four times the rate of Asian students, who had the lowest suspension rate of all races, while blacks were suspended for misconduct at more than four times the white rate. (See Tom Loveless, The 2017 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?, Brookings Institution, March 2017, pg. 25).
A 2014 study by John Paul Wright and several other academics in the Journal of Criminal Justice found that higher rates of “prior problem behavior” among black students — not racism — are why black students are suspended at a higher rate.