Category Archives: culture

The Bigotry of the Left’s Identity Politics

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…writ large.  Here’s Van Gosse, of Franklin & Marshall College (I hesitate to call him a professor, even though that’s what he’s pleased to profess to do at the school) in his op-ed in Newsweek:

Why has the ascent of a bunch of people who in an earlier period might have been called Micks drawn no notice at all?

Maybe because they’re all Americans, who happen to have Irish ethnicity, and not Irishmen and -women who happen to have American citizenship.  This is the bigotry of the identity politics of ex-President Barack Obama (D), of ex-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D), of Progressive-Democratic Party Chairman Tom Perez, the Party in general, and the Left exposed.

This is the bigotry of the folks who would run our government and remake our nation made plain.

The silence of the Left, of the Party’s rank and file—of its politicians in Congress—on this rank racism is deafening.

Mao is Dead

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Long live Mao.

People’s Republic of China’s newly crowned Emperor and President-for-Life Xi Jinping has mounted his throne and is starting to exercise his power.

Under Mr Xi’s orders, mandatory political-study sessions emphasizing his speeches and policies were revived for all party members.

And

So was the Mao-era practice of members criticizing others and themselves.

Can we look forward to reeducation camps, too?  Maybe.  Here’s Xi on necessary fervor and “right thinking:”

We must continue to rid ourselves of any virus that erodes the party’s fabric[.]

And

Many government agencies and state-owned businesses require party members to attend study sessions at least once a month. Some officials organize weekly discussions, ask members to spend an hour a day on political self-study or arrange field trips to revolutionary landmarks.

And here’s an indication of the level of Orwellian micromanaging control over individuals that Xi expects the party to exercise:

Rank-and-file Communist Party members must take notes in standard-issue journals and submit them for review, as well as spend spare time studying for regular political discussions and quizzes.

We’re going to live in interesting times.  And so are the Chinese people on the mainland.

Centralizing Power

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China’s Communist Party granted President Xi Jinping authority on a par with Chairman Mao, revising its constitution to inscribe a political theory bearing Mr Xi’s name and endorse policies to make the nation a world power.

A weeklong party congress that ended Tuesday appeared to give Mr Xi unassailable power as he begins a second five-year term.

The move was unanimous, with not a single Party member out of 2,336 willing to vote no—an indication of Xi’s already present overweening power.

Adding to the significance of this power grab, only two other People’s Republic of China leaders have had their “thoughts” added to the nation’s constitution: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and both of these were dead before the CPC codified their “thoughts.”  Xi is alive and well and in a position to build on this move.

It seems as though the running dog is, indeed, the permanent leader of the pack.

A couple of questions come up in my pea brain: Will he get his own statute, too?  Does anyone in the Communist Party of China have the stones to ask Xi about his caldrons?

Free Speech at the Universities

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Kent Fuchs, University of Florida President, and Glenn Altschuler, Cornell Professor of American Studies, have some…interesting…thoughts on this in their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Public universities that choose to grant access to speakers who are not invited or affiliated with the institution are legally obligated to accept all such speakers. As a result, they may become hostage to Nazis or other extremists—forced to stand by as these groups capitalize on their university’s visibility and prestige to amplify their vile messages.

Fuchs and Altschuler wrote that as if it were a bad thing.  I have to ask: why are they so terrified of a contest of ideas in an open, public forum?

And:

[A] partial solution [to handling costs] could entail a new Federal Extremist Speakers Fund to help universities with their exorbitant security costs. That would shift the financial burden of following the First Amendment to the government that requires universities to do so.

Wow.  Apparently, Fuchs and Altschuler slept through their eighth-grade Civics class.  Government isn’t making universities do anything here.  We the People, through our 1st Amendment, are making the government protect free speech in all public forums.

And:

Meanwhile, when openly racist and virulently anti-Semitic speakers show up on campus, we need to deprive them of attention and confrontation, the oxygen on which they thrive, by shunning them.

Certainly.  And that will happen pretty much automatically over the course of the ideas contest of which Fuchs and Altschuler are so terrified.

“Fear of Violent Protests Raises Cost of Free Speech on Campus”

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That’s the title of Douglas Belkin’s piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal.  However, it’s inaccurate.  What is feared by college/university management is the thugs who protest free speech with violence and others who protest free speech with noise and interruptions and venue entrance blockings that prevent the speaker from speaking.

Schools have struggled to come up with a consistent answer to requests to speak, pitting their free-speech ideals against security concerns.

Schools are being disingenuous when they pretend to these concerns, and the WSJ is misunderstanding the problem when it characterizes the schools as having free-speech ideals. The existence of the schools’ trading off security for free-speech demonstrates the lack of ideals regarding free-speech.

Were the schools’ managers truly concerned, they would understand the greatest violence is done to liberty when they cravenly trade free-speech for security, when they cravenly force disfavored speech into school-mandated “free speech” zones, when they cravenly allow “protestors” to prevent disfavored speakers from speaking, when they cravenly, despicably, allow “protestors” to dictate to others what speech those others will be allowed to hear.

“We have a non-negotiable commitment to provide safety and security for our guests and the public at large and we have an equally unwavering commitment to free speech,” said Mr [UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor, Dan] Mogulof. “That puts us between a rock and a hard place; we can’t step back from either one.”

Mogulof is being disingenuous. There’s no need to step back from either—allow the one, and provide the other. Worried about cost? Get serious about dealing with thugs who masquerade as protestors blocking speech of which the thugs disapprove. Get serious about snowflakes who pretend to being “triggered” when they hear speech they claim frightens them.

What’s plainly of distant secondary importance to these managers is actual free speech.  With their timidity, these managers fail to seriously defend the free speech rights of the speaker and, worse, fail to defend the free speech rights of others to make their own choice of what speech they will hear.