Daily Archives: March 29, 2021

Political correctness and its cancel culture are starting to evoke the second great Red Scare and the tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

Last week the talented young political journalist Alexi McCammond was pushed out of the editorship of Teen Vogue magazine just as she was starting the job. Anti-Asian and anti-homosexual comments she had made on the internet 10 years ago, when she was 17, galvanized the magazine's staff against her, and two advertisers threatened to withdraw. The magazine's owner, the Conde Nast chain, which had been aware of McCammond's old offense, turned on her.

It didn't matter that McCammond, who is Black may have come to recognize her own bigotry as she grew up. Two years ago she had acknowledged and publicly apologized for the mean comments and alerted her prospective employer about them. Conde Nast first thought that youthful mistakes might well be forgiven when sincerely repented. But the PC cancel culture, which seems especially virulent among journalists, quickly intimidated management out of its quaint attitude.

McCammond's hateful adversaries are teaching not only that there can be no forgiveness for thought and speech crime even when it is repented but also that it merits a virtual death sentence. For how is McCammond to get another job now? What employer will consider hiring her and risking a confrontation with the woke mob?

And if there is to be no forgiveness, why should anyone repent anything?

The prophet of old taught: "Go and sin no more." The prophets of the cancel culture teach: "Go and cut your throat before we do it for you."

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COLLEGE LOAN RACKET: With its first tranche of college loan debt cancellation, the Biden administration has confirmed that much of higher education is a racket and aid to it is not support for education at all but just for educators, who are a big part of the Democratic Party's army.

The cancellation, announced this week by U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, will erase obligations to repay about a billion dollars in loans taken by students who claim that their colleges deceived or defrauded them in some way. This billion dollars is a small fraction of the estimated $1.7 trillionowed by about 45 million college borrowers. While most of them are quite able to pay, the Biden administration is expected to follow with more loan forgiveness.

The college racket goes far beyond college borrowers who have not found employment that pays well enough to support a decent living as well as loan payments. The racket also encompasses the millions of college graduates and dropouts who hold jobs for which no higher education is required.

Secretary Cardona did not announce prosecutions of any colleges that defrauded or deceived students, nor any reconsideration of the self-serving attitude prevailing in educational circles that everyone should go to college. In his brief tenure as Connecticut's education commissioner, Cardona never addressed the remedial nature of public higher education in the state, where most freshmen at public colleges never mastered high school work and so must take remedial courses.

College loans are not the country's big educational problem. The failure oflowereducation is.

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UNJUSTIFIED GUILT: No matter how much they scramble and publicize, state and municipal government officials can't satisfy themselves over what they call the "equity" of their campaign to get people vaccinated against the virus epidemic. Vaccination in Connecticut so far has covered a much larger share of the white population than the racial minority population.

Officials should stop lashing themselves about this, for it is only to be expected. Racial minorities long have lagged in the metrics of many good things and have led in the metrics of many bad things -- because race correlates heavily with wealth and poverty.

People with more money can afford to take better care of themselves. They tend to be better educated and more engaged with society and to know more about how to deal with the world.

Not so with the poor. Extra efforts always must be made with them, and even then they may be suspicious and standoffish.

Thereisa big "equity" issue here but it has little to do with vaccinations. It is the failure of welfare and education policy -- and it can't be discussed.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.

More:

Cancel culture mob teaches that there can be no forgiveness - Journal Inquirer

It was one Australian television's most beloved shows and host Daryl Somers and the rest of his crew were household names. Hey, Hey It's Saturday was loaded with slapstick humour, double entendres and corny jokes: it was family entertainment at its finest. Or was it?

After Daryl Somers pre-empted his comeback as a co-host of Dancing with the Stars by saying he thought Hey Hey wouldn't get made today because of political correctness. Australian singing legend and Hey Hey regular guest Kamahl hit back, saying he was regularly humiliated on the show and the butt of racist jokes. So what does that mean in terms of how we look back on our cultural history and what are the lessons to be learnt looking forward to the future of Australian television?

Dr Jason Sternberg in a Senior Lecturer with the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology and he's chatting with ABC Radio Brisbane Afternoons presenter Kat Feeney.

Read more here:

Hey Hey It's Saturday and cancel culture - Afternoons - ABC Local

Silent majority must speak out

In America, when a small group complains loudly enough about perceived injustices, the silent majority, peaceful to a fault, yields to the demonstrative minority. It began in the 1960s with the banning of school prayer.

The elimination of Chief Illiniwek at the University of Illinois because of a small vocal group who claimed to be offended or attempts to force sports teams to change names is part of political correctness. Holiday parties supplant Christmas parties. Merry Christmas is no longer spoken because it might offend someone? Really!?

People come here seeking liberty, the pursuit of happiness and equal opportunity, not equality. Immigrants dont sail in leaky boats, swim rivers or cram into stifling trucks because we are politically correct. The rush to enter the United States, legally or illegally, isnt because we stopped saying Merry Christmas, removed the Ten Commandments or banished Bibles.

Many of these changes originated on college campuses. The elitist few have indoctrinated our youth and shoved their beliefs down the throats of the rest of the country. We have adopted the campus philosophy.

In spite of the spiritual foundation of this nation, those in authority are saying we are not a spiritual nation and that there must be stricter boundaries on our spiritual expressions.

Correct speech is the beginning of totalitarianism. Read the true history of how tyrannies grew in Europe and China, for example. In the face of adversity and resistance, the silent majority must speak out. Be courageous.

DAVID BOYD

Champaign

Read more from the original source:

Letter to the Editor | Silent majority must speak out - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette

Richard D. Wilkins lives in DeWitt.

How dark the picture that SUNY Geneseo Distinguished Professor Michael Leroy Oberg paints of American history, while nastily attacking those who would celebrate it (The Republican War on American history, Feb. 12, 2021). Slavery and Jim Crow unquestionably deeply stained Americas story, but were hardly central to it. The New York Times 1619 Project he promotes has been heavily criticized by leading historians. such as Peter Wood, Ph.D., president of the National Association of Scholars. America didnt begin in 1619, with a handful of indentured servants landing in what is now Virginia, but in the 1620 Mayflower Compact, among a group of religious freedom seekers.

Freedom was the overarching idea inspiring colonists to declare independence, and forge an enduring Constitution. Slavery was then deeply embedded in the agrarian Southern economy. Unanimous passage required reluctant compromise, but abolitionists succeeded in ending slave importation by 1808, and inserted the much misunderstood 3/5th rule, limiting Southern political power.

The continuing struggle forced balanced free and slave state admissions into the Union, characterized by the Compromises of 1820 and 1850. A bloody Civil War brought forth Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation, and Amendments 13, 14, and 15, which promised, though soon thwarted, equal rights for all citizens. That awaited Brown v. Board of Education, 1960s Civil Rights acts, and subsequent reparative measures.

That large, but limited, blemished beginning cant begin to account for how a cluster of competing colonies, thinly spread along the Atlantic littoral, soon traversed the continent, becoming the greatest and most prosperous nation in world history. It ignores the multitudes who, throughout, advocated, fought and died for the achievement of equality for all, It ignores the millions who flocked to these shores, fleeing oppression and persecution, in search of freedom, and who have contributed so much to its development.

Southern wealth from enslavement was soon gone with the wind. Contra Obergs reductive analysis, the nations great wealth was generated in the North, with its massive industrialization, employing free native and immigrant labor, and powered by inventiveness and ingenuity. Even the cotton gin, savior of the Southern economy, was developed there.

The Academy has opened a Pandoras Box of societal ills: political correctness, multiculturalism, Critical Race Theory, antiracism and phantom cancel culture. Not so slowly, but surely, though not yet by Congress, First Amendment freedoms of speech, press, worship and peaceable assembly are being seriously eroded. Having ever said, or done, anything now objectionable, regardless of intent or age, can bar one permanently from the public square. One can publish anything they want , as long as Big Tech approves. Religious conscience must now bend before government edict. In the name of public health, more persons have been allowed at a time into casinos than into congregations. Contributing to a disfavored cause, or supporting a disliked public figure, can get one doxxed, physically confronted or fired.

History as civic education is for K-12, history as a discipline for higher education. Schoolchildren are being ideologically indoctrinated, not americanized. They are being prepared not for the work, but the woke world, groomed for political activism, not for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Instead of encouraging individual talent and initiative, all must be tethered to the least common denominator. Equality of opportunity for all, inevitably resulting in disparate outcomes, is being replaced by equity, an impossible demand for equal collective outcomes, among warring racial, sexual, and ethnic clans.

America remains an exceptional nation. Yet, it seems rapidly devolving into the Disunited States. Such social unraveling desperately needs to be arrested. In strikingly similar times, Lincoln wisely warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

That was true then; it remains true today.

Related: The Republican war on American history (Commentary)

More here:

Freedom was the overarching idea of America, not slavery (Commentary) - syracuse.com

I am not the target audience for this. I found this thought echoing around my head as I read Andrew Reeds March 12 column Steven Pinker Wants to Repair Campus Culture. The piece has a pretty veneer and frames itself as hopeful, but concerned. I am not convinced its true purpose is quite so positive.

The essay is a discussion with Steven Pinker, focusing primarily on the recent wave of illiberalism, particularly on college campuses. A full and nuanced rebuttal of the article would be the length of a novel, which Im sure is by design. It is riddled with over-simplifications, misrepresentations and conservative buzzwords that mean very little but have loaded connotations. Anyone familiar with these rhetorical strategies, or indeed with the content Reed discusses, will immediately recognize how the focus of the argument skews reality. This is why I was quickly convinced that the article wasnt written with my fellow Brown students and me in mind. Instead, it seems aimed at those who already believe that there is an epidemic of political correctness and cancel culture ruining our institutions of higher learning. It says to these people: You are right, this is an issue you should be focused on, and I can give you more evidence to confirm it.

Reed opens with an introduction of Pinker, a Harvard professor turned celebrity intellectual. Pinkers work argues that society is improving on the whole, but he has recently become concerned about cancel culture and censorship. Reed, a staff columnist at an Ivy League newspaper, does not note the irony of his discussion of this topic with a tenured professor who has published 16 books. Clearly, both are able to broadcast their views on prestigious platforms despite Pinker receiving criticism from members of the Linguistics Society of America, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the general public; as well as becoming embroiled in controversy over connections with Jeffrey Epstein.

Pinker claims that illiberalism on college campuses is not new, but that it originated in the 70s and has gotten steadily worse since. Reed cites several recent examples of cancellation: He writes that In 2017, Evergreen College in Washington State descended into chaos when a white professor refused to leave campus after a group of activists organized a day without white students and faculty. Interested to learn more about this clearly outrageous occurrence, I looked at the source he provided. As it turns out, the issue is not quite as Reed has presented it; Evergreens Day of Absence is an event that has been held for decades, and usually involves students and faculty of color leaving campus while white community members stay behind. In light of Trumps election and incidents of harassment at Evergreen (including a police officer shooting two Black students in 2015), organizers proposed a reversal of tradition. Of course, controversy followed and one professor publicly opposed white students and faculty being encouraged to leave campus. A video of student protestors later engaging with the professor and calling for him to be fired went viral, and he went on Tucker Carlsons show on Fox News to talk about being silenced. The school, student activists and a Black professor were then targeted by the alt-right and were doxxed and threatened. Not only was the event canceled the next year, but so were classes after an anonymous caller claimed he had a weapon and was going to execute as many people on that campus as I can get a hold of. Even this description is a simplification, but Reed summarizing the incident as chaos conveniently ignores that the people who suffered most were students and activists who already felt unheard and unrecognized.

The other examples Reed employs are similarly not quite as supportive of his argument as they appear: the Middlebury College incident was also complex and student protesters who did not participate in the violence were disproportionately punished. Rather than quashing debate, the incident sparked fierce discussion on the campus; rather than de-platforming Charles Murray, he became the topic of national conversation and was actually invited back to the school for the third time last year. Finally, the Lisa Littman case is far from an example of illiberalism in academia, but rather an incident of rigorous academic critique and revision to create better scholarship. Littman retained her position at the University and her work is still published.

These tactics continue throughout the rest of the piece, where Pinker goes on to claim that college administrators are now part of the problem. He invokes postmodernism and Marxist critical theory, academic terms which have been co-opted and muddied to the point of uselessness by conservative talking heads, and manages to define the ideologies behind them in a way that is painfully dishonest. These are umbrella terms for complicated and diverse schools of thought, which often contradict each other and cannot be distilled down to statements like history is a struggle.

In one particularly amusing quote, Pinker says that nowadays, the radical student protesters bring in the campus bureaucracy to multiply their own power, something they wouldnt have been caught dead doing when he was an undergraduate. Pinker studied for his Bachelor of Arts at McGill from 1973 to 1976 and he may be partially correct the relationship between student activists and university administrations was certainly strained in the late 60s and early 70s. There could be shocking, disproportionate consequences for disruptive advocacy. McGill fired a professor in 1969 for leading protests, and in 1970, four student activists were killed by the Ohio National Guard in what is now referred to as the Kent State Massacre. I hardly think that students and university administrators are allied now (the Middlebury case that Reed references illustrates this), but surely improvements from the antagonistic relationship of 50 years ago make students and faculty safer and therefore benefit open debate.

Though I find Reeds piece to be a disingenuous representation of the culture in higher education, I share his and Pinkers concerns about narrow viewpoints, and I agree that there is a lot at stake. Who controls the conversation in academia? What are the best ways to make sure that there are diverse viewpoints? In answering these questions, Pinkers emphasis on cancel culture overblows the issue and distracts from the more pressing problem of accessibility in academia especially at elite universities like Brown and Harvard a problem that far more directly restricts campus discourse and narrows the range of acceptable viewpoints. Around 29 percent of Brown students come from private schools suspiciously higher than the two percent of American students at large who are in the private school system. Almost 20 percent of Brown students are from the top one percent of incomes in the United States, with a whopping 70 percent of students coming from the top 20 percent. When Pinker started his Bachelor of Arts at McGill, Brown had only been fully co-educational for two years. Progress was made during the 70s because of lawsuits and student activism that forced the school to be more accessible to and supportive of its underrepresented faculty and students.

My time at Brown exposed me to a huge range of ideas and perspectives. These changed how I see the world and taught me how to communicate productively with people who hold different views from mine. Its clear, however, that there is more work to be done. Though I never felt silenced by my peers, I often felt out of place and insignificant beside the vast wealth and power of the administration. The University was built to serve the needs of white men from private schools. When I see discussions about who deserves a platform, I think about how hard my fellow students with marginalized identities have had and continue to have to fight for their voices to be heard. In order to convince their audience to fear the perils of censoring other viewpoints, Pinker and Reed inaccurately describe and fail to contextualize the people and views they critique. The essay is emblematic of how lamentations of cancel culture often work, more effectively than any protest, to silence others.

Anna House 20 can be reached at anna_house@alumni.brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

See the rest here:

House '20: Steven Pinker and who decides how campus culture should be repaired - The Brown Daily Herald

Late Night with Seth Meyerscalled out Fox News and Republicans in A Closer Look, arguing that their opposition to stricter gun control is without merit. Seth Meyers made his case for why Republicans, Fox News personalities, and the gun lobby are a small minority obstructing actually progress

In less than a week, there were two mass shootings that resulted in 18 deaths. The massacres in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado reinvigorated calls for federal assault weapon bans and immediate gun legislation reform.

As usual, these calls to action were met with resistance from some conservatives who claimed it would be politicizing the tragedies.The Late Show with Stephen Colbertpushed back against this stance earlier this week.

Wednesday night was Seth Meyers chance to do the same. In A Closer Look, theLate Nighthost referenced specific individuals he claims are acting as roadblocks when it comes to gun control reform by spreading lies.

Since President Donald Trump left office, Seth Meyers has noticed a pattern among Fox News personalities and Republicans. According to Meyers, their priorities have changed to a culture war that fixates on cancel culture and political correctness. The late night comedian cant quite understand why these issues are so important during an ongoing pandemic and now two mass shootings in a week.

Meyers calls out Sean Hannity for failing to cover the shooting in Boulder and then goes after Senator Ted Cruz for criticizing Democrats calling for change. A Closer Look cites an epidemic of gun violence and public support for stricter gun control for reasons why change should happen immediately.

Resistance to gun legislation is often framed as a politician defending the Second Amendment. Its what Sean Hannity suggested Sen. Cruz was doing and its what many pro-gun Republicans say while campaigning.

Seth Meyers takes issue with this idea, calling it a ridiculous lie to think that opposition to any gun safety legislation means standing up for the Second Amendment. Meyers points out that modern gun ownership doesnt reflect the well-regulated militia referenced in the Constitution. But the point has been lost thanks to what A Closer Look refers to as one of the greatest cons in the history of politics.

Meyers concludes that conservatives like Hannity and Cruz have no logical argument for opposing even the smallest changes to gun ownership laws. Despite a majority of Americans supporting these reforms, A Closer Look makes it clear nothing will happen as long as the Republican Party remains in the way of change.

What did you think of this installment of A Closer Look? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Seth Meyers: A Closer Look at Fox News and GOP on gun control - Last Night On