Unbelievable. Not only did they *arrest* a child merely for saying ugly things to a celebrity of color, but they're *bragging* about having arrested a child for words. Ugly words, yes, but words. He's 12 years old. What are you, @wmpolice, the Stasi? https://t.co/z1ENthqT8r
The Heritage Foundation recently published a must-read report on the Left’s widely successful effort to first stigmatize, and eventually to criminalize, speech and ideas it doesn’t like, thus shutting down all discussion and debate over very significant cultural and policy issues.
America is the only Western nation that does not criminalize “hate speech.†Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most nations of Europe already do so. The United Nations relentlessly pressures the remaining holdouts to follow suit: “As a matter of principle,†says the U.N. Secretary-General, “the United Nations must confront hate speech at every turn.â€
Meanwhile in America, Members of Congress issue their support for speech restrictions, and Big Tech’s digital oligarchs, enjoying a disproportionate power over society, continue to impose speech restrictions in exchange for access to their platforms. So are America’s colleges and universities more and more governed by an aggressive chorus of students, faculty, and administrators who demand and impose speech codes. These fronts promises to grow in size, strength, and confidence in the coming years.
Leading restriction advocates want not only to banish “hate speech,†but also to criminalize it. In the words of Mari Matsuda, an influential professor at the University of Hawaii Law School, “[F]ormal criminal and administrative sanction—public as opposed to private prosecution—is also an appropriate response to racist speech.â€
Perhaps most surprising, legal precedents that would bring this revolution fully into existence in America are already embedded in two areas of our legal system: antidiscrimination and harassment laws, and Supreme Court rulings favoring sexual liberation that are based on a new view of “dignity.â€
If Americans are to resist this growing movement, they must understand the arguments, the demands, and the consequences of outlawing “hate speech.†No laws of history dictate that America must submit and follow this path.
The debate over “hate speech†reveals a fundamental disagreement about the purpose of America. Either it is political liberty, in which case the freedom of speech is essential for presumptively rational citizens to rule themselves politically and to pursue the truth through science, philosophy, or religion. Or it is the equal self-respect and dignity of marginalized and self-created identities, in which case these must not only be publicly affirmed and celebrated, but also shielded from (even well-meaning) scrutiny and criticism, called “speech violence†or “hate speech.†These two views cannot coexist. Indeed, restriction advocates admit that America’s understanding of speech “comes into tension with the aspiration of equal dignity.â€
They want to eliminate the former to make way for the latter.
Crazy left-wing busybodies rule the world. Didn’t you know? If there is anything going on that useful, productive, or merely fun, they’ve got Environmentalism to use to get their way. Essentially anything human beings do can be argued to produce changes in the world, and any changes can be claimed to be somehow, in some sense, negative. Voilà ! Mustn’t offend Gaia! That’s been banned!
Driven grouse shooting in England & Scotland is not only a sport. It’s also an economic activity. The sale of wild game was banned early in the last century in the United States. Market hunters were responsible for the eradication of the buffalo and the near extinction of some other species, and they competed with sport hunters. In Britain, on the other hand, game bird management on enormous estates included harvesting by sportsmen followed by commercial sale. British restaurants compete to offer red grouse the soonest after the shooting season opens on the traditional date of August 12th.
The goo-goos have all these rationalizations about heather-burning being bad for the environment, but they are all anti-blood sports, and enviromentalism always provides excuses for lefties to nobble things they don’t like, from timber-harvesting to grouse shooting.
The controversial practice of setting heather-covered moorland on fire – often carried out by gamekeepers to create more attractive habitats for grouse – is now banned on more than 30 major tracts of land in northern England. Three large landowners have confirmed that their tenants are no longer allowed to burn heather routinely.
The ban is a blow to grouse shoots, which burn older heather to make way for younger, more nutritious plants for grouse to feed on, but environmental groups say the practice harms the environment. Research by the University of Leeds has found that burning grouse moors degrades peatland habitat, releases climate-altering gases, reduces biodiversity and increases flood risk.
Last year, the Observer reported that Yorkshire Water was reviewing each of its grouse-shooting leases amid concerns about the practice of routine burning. The company says has written into its lease a presumption against burning as a land management technique.
United Utilities is also altering its leases to shorter terms, with a similar review to Yorkshire Water’s expected. Last month, it confirmed to the campaign group Ban Bloodsports on Yorkshire’s Moors (BBYM) that it now prohibits routine burning on its land.
And three estates overseen by the National Trust – Marsden, Braithwaite Hall and Dark Peak – also told the group that tenants were no longer allowed to conduct routine burning. Braithwaite Hall said tenants required written consent to do so, and that it had taken legal action against one. Dark Peak said it retained complete control of burning practices on its land. Marsden said tenants could not carry out any burning.
A National Trust spokeswoman said: “We don’t allow burning on deep peat and over recent years have moved away from using controlled grouse-moor burning as a matter of course. There are a diminishing number of historic agreements where burning may occasionally be used but we are working with these tenants to introduce more sustainable land-management practice.â€
Power-line’s Steve Hayward has an important new book recommendation.
This week’s mail brought me Anthony Kronman’s new book, The Assault on American Excellence, which begins with a chronicle of the follies of Yale University, where Kronman teaches and once served as dean of Yale Law. … I got to meet Prof. Kronman at a terrific colloquium about Max Weber last year at UCLA, where he told me some about his new book, which arose out of his rising disgust with identity politics and what it is doing to higher education. In one sentence, it is bringing “higher education†quite low.
Kronman is significant because, like Columbia’s Mark Lilla, he considers himself to be a liberal/progressive in his general political views. As such, he represents perhaps a last gasp of an older liberalism what was generally liberal. And sure enough, like Mark Lilla, Kronman has drawn some early attacks for the book, such as this disgraceful review in the Washington Post by Wesleyan University president Michael Roth, who I thought might be part of the resistance to the nihilism of identity politics, but turns out instead now to be a fraud.
I suspect Kronman is going to get a frosty reception in the Yale faculty lounges and faculty meetings. But all hope is not lost. Last summer we reported on the campaign of journalist Jamie Kirchick to be elected as the Alumni Fellow to the board of the Yale Corporation, with the intentions of trying to argue at the board level about Yale’s moral and intellectual dereliction. To be a candidate in the board election requires a lot of Yale alumni signatures within a short window of time, and Kirchick’s drive fell short.
This year Nicholas Quinn Rosencranz, a Yale Law grad and currently professor of law at Georgetown, is running an insurgent campaign. (The Rosencranz family has been very generous to Yale over the years; there’s a building named for them.) See this statement of the Alumni for Excellence at Yale about the myriad reasons for his candidacy, but most important, if you are a Yale alum (undergraduate or graduate school), scroll to the bottom and click on the button to sign Nick’s petition to be put on the board ballot. He needs to get 4,266 alumni signatures by October 1, at which point a full-fledged campaign can begin to win the alumni vote.
Amy Wax, a professor at Penn Law, has gravely jeopardized both her career and personal reputation, tip-toeing around the edge of the Overton Window, by questioning the absolute equality of mankind’s cultures.
In Nazi Germany, when somebody got this far out of line, they’d get a visit from the Gestapo. In the Soviet Union, it would be the N.K.V.D. rapping on the door. In contemporary America, the New Yorker sends a professional apparatchik like Isaac Chotiner to assassinate by interview.
If a politician with a history of anti-Semitism says, “The Jews control a giant chunk of Hollywood,†and he starts ranting about that, do you think that the proper response is to say, “Well, let’s investigate exactly how much power Jews have in Hollywood, and, if it’s true that Jews have a lot of power in Hollywood, we should let this person rant about how much power the Jews have in Hollywood, because, after all, it is true?†And so anything that is true can’t be racist. What do you think of my example there?
Well, here you go with the “racist†again. I mean, is it true? Are there a lot of Jews in Hollywood? Yeah, there are. Let’s start with that—there are a tremendous number of Jews, out of proportion to their numbers in the population within the universities, within the media, in the professions. We can ask all of these questions, and you know what? They admit of an answer. But essentially what the left is saying is: We can’t even answer the question. We can’t. Once we’ve labelled something racist, the conversation stops. It comes to a halt, and we are the arbiters of what can be discussed and what can’t be discussed. We are the arbiters of the words that can be used, of the things that can be said.
I can tell you, and, once again, this is just from the mail I get, from the e-mails I get, from the people I talk to, that kind of move is deeply resented.
I’m just trying to make a point about how something could be true but still racist or used in a racist manner. Not that I think that everything you said is true.
Once again, you’d have to define racism. You’re basically saying any generalization about a group, whether true or false—and we know it doesn’t apply to everybody in the group, because that’s just a straw man—is racist. I mean, we could do “sexist,†right?
We could.
So, women, on average, are more agreeable than men. Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men. Now, I can actually back up all those statements with social-science research.
You can send me links for women are “less intellectual than men.†I’m happy to include that in the piece if you have a good link for that.
O.K., well, there’s a literature in Britain, a series of papers that were done, and I need to look them up, that show that women are less knowledgeable than men. They know less about every single subject, except fashion. There is a literature out of Vanderbilt University that looks at women of very high ability—so, controlling for ability—and, starting in adolescence, women are less interested in the single-minded pursuit of abstract intellectual goals than men. They want more balance in their life. They want more time with family, friends, and people. They’re less interested in working hard on abstract ideas. You can put together a database that shows that. The person who has the literature is a man named David Lubinski, and he shows that intelligence isn’t what’s driving it. It is interest, orientation, what people want to spend their time doing.
Now, is that sexist? We can argue all day about whether it is sexist. We can argue from morning till night. And it is sterile. It is pointless. Let’s talk about the actual findings and what implications they have for policy, for expectations.
[Wax sent links to two studies whose lead author is Richard Lynn, a British psychologist who is known for believing in racial differences in intelligence, supporting eugenics, and associating with white supremacists. (She also shared the Wikipedia page for “general knowledge,†which cites several of Lynn’s studies.) David Lubinski, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt, clarified that his research was about the life choices of men and women and did not address claims such as women being less intellectual than men.]
Professor Wax, throughout the interview, is trying to identify the Progressive restriction of speech and thought as a serious national and academic problem. Chotiner, throughout the interview, is looking for some damaging quotes he can use to hang her.
The government is currently investigating the possibility of banning the use of Norse runes. It is reported that the Minister of Justice, Morgan Johansson (Socialist) is behind the initiative. Among members of the Asa-samfundet, the organization of contemporary followers of the Norse Pagan Religion, and people with an interest in the Norse cultural heritage, the outrage is great about what would amount to a restriction on, among other things, religious freedom. A petition has been started and on Friday a demonstration is planned outside the Parliament House in protest against the proposal.
The background of the proposal is said to be the consideration that neo-Nazis in Sweden use the so-called Tyr-rune as a symbol. The fact that this is is the case is something that neither Norse Pagan-believers nor those interested in cultural heritage are particularly happy about.
It is thought, however, that it is not reasonable to deal with this by banning an entire written language and to also violate the freedom of constitutional and convention-protected religion. When the government applies other meanings to the runic script than the real ones, it make the same mistakes as the Nazis, one points out.
“Our attitude is that prejudices and errors are best cured with knowledge and facts! It is not appropriate to try to ban the our symbols on the basis of their own prejudices. To forbid them would be to ban portions of our own history, culture and beliefs – and our right to express them because of political interpretations that have nothing to do with the Ancient Norse Religion!
Contemporary political activists have no right to destroy the expressions of a religion and culture as old as the first evidence of the first human residents of the Norse Region, posted the Asa-samfundet on its website.
According to the government proposal, ancient Norse symbols and jewelry would also be banned as inciting animosity against ethnic groups. This would apply to the Thor’s hammer Mjölner, Odin’s Valknut and the Vegvisir.
The Asa-samfundet has started a campaign against the government’s plans, called “The Rune Battle” with the slogan “Do not touch our runes”. A petition has been started which at the time of writing had gathered nearly 6,000 signatures.
On Friday, May 24, between 14:00 and 16:00, a demonstration is also scheduled at Slottsbacken in connection with which the petition will be submitted to the government.
Interest in the Old Norse has grown strongly in recent times, also internationally, including TV series such as Vikings, The Last Kingdom and Game of Thrones.
Anyone who wants to sign the petition for the protection of the Norse cultural heritage and the right to practice the Old Norse religion can do it HERE.
Anyone who wants to participate in Friday’s manifestation in Stockholm will find more information about the event HERE.
Rod Dreher finds that the behavior of the Left has hit a new low in Madison, Wisconsin.
Matthew Schmitz posted this comment from Solzhenitsyn to Twitter just now:
Well. In Madison, Wisconsin, the city council has voted overwhelmingly to remove a cemetery marker noting the names of about 140 Confederates, most of whom died in a prisoner of war camp in the town. More:
“You don’t have discussion in a cemetery. You have reflection, and you have memories, and this (monument) brings up memories that are not so pleasant in our history,†said Council Vice President Sheri Carter.
These are Americans who died as prisoners of war. “They die off like rotten sheep,†said a Union soldier who worked at the camp, where conditions were bad. The “monument†is a tombstone large enough to feature the names of each of the dead. This is not a statue of a Confederate war hero. It is simply a grave marker noting the names of POWs who died far from home.
There is no longer equality before God of the fallen, not in Madison, Wisconsin. The city council spits on these dead men, who passed away not in combat, but in Union custody.
In Grace Church cemetery in my Louisiana hometown, you can visit the grave of Lt. Commander John Hart, US Navy, who captained a Union gunboat that was shelling the town and that very church in 1863. Cmdr Hart committed suicide on the boat during the battle. He was a Freemason, as many of the Confederates were. Hart’s men asked for a truce, and for the right to bury their commander in the Grace Church cemetery with full Masonic honors. The Confederate Masons agreed. So the war stopped while all the combatants gathered around the grave to commit Cmdr Hart to the earth.
Children in my hometown are often taken to Hart’s grave and told the story. His grave is treated with great respect locally, and always has been. That’s what decent people do for the dead. There is a brotherhood that defies mortal conflicts.
The leaders of Madison, Wisconsin, are manifestly not decent people.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner at Washington Hilton on April 28, 2018 in Washington, DC.
Virginia is a special place, home of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, birthplace of the nation really. And Lexington is a special little town, home of VMI. Stonewall Jackson lived there and taught both mathematics at VMI and the Bible at a black Sunday School he founded himself and where he promoted black literacy in defiance of state law. Robert E. Lee also lived there, serving as president of Washington College, now Washington and Lee.
Al Perrotta is justifiably indignant that a transplanted Yankee (the kind of specimen that old Ben Hardaway, long-time Master of the Midland Hunt, used to complain about: Northern migrants who “perch in our trees and shit on our ground”) made Lexington the focus of a national news story by refusing service to the President’s press secretary. This kind of behavior is un-Southern, and especially un-Virginian.
Imagine. You’ve had a rough week at the office. You’ve had a pressure-packed month that had you traveling halfway across the world for meetings that could decide the fate of millions. Your return has brought no rest. Every day you still have to stand in front of a bunch of people screaming the same questions at you — loaded questions, rude questions, “Let’s see if I can get trending on Twitter†questions. Questions where one wrong word from you can send markets crashing, foreign leaders vexing, to say nothing of sending talking heads into a frenzy. And you have to take this daily barrage with supernatural control and restraint, despite being genetically wired to be a wise-cracker.
Finally, it’s Friday. TGIF! Escape! You head out I-66 with the job and the nation’s Capitol in your rear view mirror. You head south down I-81. Way south. With each mile you lose the stench of the Swamp, the weight of your responsibility, the burden of a boss who works 17 hours a day and rarely on script. Up ahead is a nice dinner with some friends, a couple’s night.
You arrive in a quaint town tucked in the Shenandoah Mountains. A haven. You sit down at your table. You breathe. Perhaps for the first time in a month, you breathe.
The owner comes over. Not to say hi. Not even to discuss the night’s specials. She’s there to throw you out. Throw your whole party out. (literally and figuratively). Why? Because she hates your boss, and by extension hates you.
What happened to Sarah Sanders Friday night at the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia is an abomination. It is a violation of all standards of decency and hospitality. Worse, it is the latest vile display of the unrepentant and unhinged spirit that says “Those I disagree with politically I must destroy.†(Actually, not the latest. Florida’s Attorney General got verbally assaulted inside a screening of the new Mr. Rogers documentary Saturday. It’s an ugly day in the neighborhood.)
Journalist denied entry to UK to interview right-wing politician and to film her boyfriend, a founder of an Austrian right-wing group “Generation Identity,” giving a speech in Hyde Park, because “her planned activities.. bear a serious threat to the fundamental interests of society.”
Vox Day admires all the grammatical errors, which suggests to me that the person in authority and laying down the decision on who might or might not enter the country was someone not a native speaker of English, and then proceeds to quote John Derbyshire on the ironies of current British entry policy:
Young Ahmed sneaked into Britain hidden in a truck that brought him through the Channel Tunnel from France. British immigration officers intercepted him. Ahmed told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.
Let me just repeat that: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.
But Ahmed was not refused entry. Instead, he was given free accommodation, first in a charity shelter, then in a pleasant middle-class foster home. [Betrayed by the ‘shy and polite’ boy they took into their home: Iraqi asylum seeker, 18, is found guilty of trying to blow up 93 Parsons Green commuters with bomb built with his foster parents’ Tupperware while pair were on holiday, Daily Mail, March 16, 2018] He was sent to school, at British taxpayer expense of course. His teachers reported him telling them it was his duty as a Muslim to hate Britain.
Today, Friday, March 16, 2018, Ahmed was convicted of making a bomb and trying to detonate it in a London subway train last Fall. Fortunately, the thing didn’t explode properly; but it still left 51 subway passengers with serious burns.
Let me just repeat one more time: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.
Enoch Powell got it right: “Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.â€
Jonathan Kay reflects on the publication thirty years ago of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind only to note sadly just how much worse things have gotten in the course of three more decades.
Much of Bloom’s success no doubt was owed to his book’s inspired title, The Closing of the American Mind. But the timing was perfect, too, arriving on shelves in the fall of 1987, when political correctness was just becoming an acute force for censorship. I was a college student at the time. And reading Bloom’s book helped convince me that, no, it wasn’t just me: something really was wrong with the way my generation was being educated and politically programmed.
Bloom was especially repelled by relativism, which he described as “the consciousness that one loves one’s own way because it is one’s own, not because it is good.†Though he was hardly the first postwar critic to abhor the fragmenting of cultural life and the marginalisation of the Western canon, Bloom went deeper with his analysis, showing how the emerging obsession with identity politics (as we now call it) left students glum and aimless — brimming with grievances, while lacking the sense of common purpose that once animated higher learning.
The author died in 1992, just before the advent of the world wide web exacerbated many of the problems he described. Social media, in particular, has reduced attention spans — making it difficult to teach students classic texts that are not immediately relevant to modern forms of self-identification. At the same time, these networks allow activists to shame heterodox ideas on a peer-to-peer basis.
If Bloom spent a single day on Facebook or Twitter today, he would instantly recognise the “mixture of egotism and high-mindedness†that he detected among his own undergraduates. But he also would be shocked by the rigid ideological conformity that now is demanded of students on matters relating to race, gender and sexuality. The speech codes Bloom saw metastasising in the late 1980s and early 1990s have become largely unnecessary: university administrators can now rely on students to police themselves.
that a Stanford and University of Chicago-trained philosophy and religion professor (who holds an M.Div) believes that the proper way to address Charles Murray’s arguments is by shouting them down. Let the record show that a Stanford-and-Chicago-trained philosophy and religion professor believes that we should not allow the arguments of C.S. Lewis — C.S. Lewis! — to be heard, because people might come to believe them. And let the record show that this did not appear in a magazine of the radical left, but in a center-left publication owned by Jeff Bezos, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world.
Alan Levinovitz declared in Slate that Tolerance is not the goal, “the truth” of which he personally happens to be in possession of is.
Progress today depends, as it always has, on the refusal to tolerate falsehood and immorality. In certain circumstances proper intolerance will demand reasoned discourse; in others it will demand shouting and breaking the law. We may disagree about how to fight for what’s right, but that disagreement should come in the context of recognizing our proud participation in a long, necessary history of virtuous intolerance. Only then can we hope to defend truth unfettered by hypocrisy and self-contradiction.
Back in the 1950s, when supporting Totalitarianism was looked upon as reprehensible by normal ordinary Americans, the Left cried out for Tolerance. We still hear constantly about the horrors of McCarthyism and the national reign of terror in which a small number of disloyal radicals faced social and professional disapproval for supporting an aggressive alien ideology that 37,000 Americans had recently laid down their lives to oppose in Korea. In those days, the University of California at Berkeley prohibited the on-campus distribution of Communist propaganda and used the laws of trespass to exclude outside agitators.
The Left responded with the so-called Free Speech Movement of 1964-1965 demanding Tolerance. The Left got its tolerance for political agitation, propagandizing, and on-campus organization and recruiting, and a half century later the Left owns all the campuses. Now, the necessity and desirability of Tolerance is over. All of which proves that the fainting liberals of the 1950s and ’60s who were moved by the Left’s hypocritical please for tolerance were simply suckers.
“My students who are most intellectually engaged, most intellectually thirsty, they would tell me that they feel that there’s no place for them at Yale.”
