Category Archives: Political Correctness

Sometimes its very hard to sort a thought or line of thoughts because a clear answer or understandable conclusion cannot be reached that would bring the thought to a logical conclusion.

But, there are times when the thought creates a thread that seems to unravel many other thoughts that may be related, or not, causing no clear answer to be reached.

The thought keeps nagging though, and some ruminations on the thought can only offer partial clear answers. I think some of my thoughts may open a dialogue on one such rumination.

One thought that persists is how did we get to the place the nation is in today, where political correctness (PC) and the woke philosophy has taken such a deep hold on our society and body politic.

Being a believer in history and how it reflects on the present, I have a sense that PC has evolved from a need to civically address an injustice, a tool to destroy dessent from anything but the accepted PC or woke position in vogue at the moment.

As far as I can trace this phenomenon, their origins are a mystery with at best guesses as to when they started but woke in this instance is being conscious of racial discrimination in society and other forms of oppression and injustice.

Woke has been around in the black community since at least 1942, when it was used in the Negro Digest. PC is the avoidance of language or behavior considered to be discriminatory or offensive to certain groups of people.

The PC origin can be traced back to 1917, where it first appeared in the Marist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution, used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

PC is generally tied to the early Soviet Union, where the whims of those in power continually kept society in an upheaval, using PC as their weapon of choice. The government would put out, through its control of the media, conflicting goals or policies that never let the population know for sure where it stood or what was the proper stance they were required to take.

PC and woke philosophies are tied together by their need to make society adhere to words, terms or positions that are contrary to the norms historically in place. Altering accepted beliefs of the time or forcing society to alter its principles to conform to a different position.

If, for instance, a society has an entrenched belief with an idea about one segment of society that is based on flawed truths, then in order to rectify that flawed truth, society accepts the idea that a particular word or identity must be changed as a way to resolve the flawed truth.

I liken it to the acknowledgment of society that the common description of blacks in my youth was negro or the N word. At the time, these were the most common words used to identify blacks, without exception, across the country.

As society began to become aware of the way blacks felt, and still feel, about the N word, society started to accept the descriptions that blacks found acceptable, thus the politically correct way blacks wanted to be addressed.

As far as I can find, this was the first obvious example of political correctness, in this country, that changed the terminology used to describe a group based on their self-identity.

It became clear that in order to be politically correct, you refrained from using the N word to describe blacks and, at the same time, the word Negro went out of vogue, being replaced with African American or black.

PC evolved from the Marist-Lenist meaning, adherence to a political position, to a linguist application. PC permitted different groups to alter society through the use of what they determined to be proper language and usage of language to describe themselves.

In essence, PC weaponized language; language was used to force society into positions when it was not in conformity with PC. Language became the weapon of choice for groups that wanted a voice in society.

Even though many of these groups were very small minorities, they used political correctness to force society to acknowledge their position, unquestioned, without debate.

Almost every group that has risen to the forefront of societal change: gay rights, womens rights, civil rights, gender rights or any of the multiple segments of society, demanding this or that change in society to be made, to accommodate their sliver of society, have used PC to force the rest of society to conform to their demands.

Clearly, there is and was a place for minority groups to ask for, or even demand, societal changes because of the obvious discrimination against them. All the different rights groups in society have legitimate grievances that society should address.

But when those groups exceed their true grievance and brow-beat society into positions beyond their actual grievance with PC, society suffers. If any group uses intimation to suppress any other group, it will lead to divisiveness and the splintering of society.

PC is a weapon, and a weapon that has been used effectively by minority groups to demand changes in our society and body politic.

The weaponizing of language has resulted in keeping the country in a constant state of flux, where no one is sure of whether they are being politically correct or not when we are dealing with each other, and that is tragic. The end result of PC is confusion and fear.

Woke has come into use in the last few years to further intimate society by presenting arguments by inference that makes an individual an immediate outcast from society just by inferring that this or that person has committed the sin of being politically incorrect, even without factual basis for claims made against them, but only by accusation.

When that accusation becomes the face of the claim without factual support, what happens to objectivity and the rights of the accused?

Logically, one would say that when a police officer kills someone or uses excessive force and violates the law while injuring or killing that person, then that police officer should be prosecuted to the fullness extent of the law. Thats why we have laws in this country to protect people from overzealous policemen/women.

But in a woke culture, not only is the law-breaking policeman accused of a crime, the entire police apparatus is lumped together with the policeman committing the crime.

Instead of developing the facts and prosecuting the individual, woke-ness insists and demands outlandish concessions unrelated to the incident. When we apply woke-ness to an incident, it becomes much to easier to defame, defund and label all police officers as evil set on attacking innocent black men.

With the use of woke in the past few years and the continuing use of PC, society has accelerated down the road of disintegration.

PC and woke harken back to other misguided ideas from the past, such as the Salem Witch Trails, the Red Scare of the 1950s, the only good Indian is a dead Indian and the anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Jewish views.

If we look at what PC and woke-ism are, it doesnt take long to realize that when the pressures created by PC and woke-ness are applied to society, that society can very easily lose its sense of unity.

So I am left with initial questions of how PC and woke-ness have taken such a hold on our body politic and why are they so influential in our culture? I know what they are and how they are used by one or the other parts of society against some other part of society, but I do not understand why.

I dont understand why we as a society, who proudly believe in our freedoms and liberties, then turn around and allow the weaponizing of our language to further one groups desire to overlord the rest of society.

I dont understand the concept that each and every minority has power over the majority at every level of society through the power of PC and woke-ness. I dont understand why we are failing each other by allowing one segment of society to dictate what we can say, think, interact with each other, how we conduct business and what we teach our children.

Knowing what I do about PC and woke-ness and the history of, especially, political correctness, I have very uneasy feelings about our ultimate future. I already see PC and woke-ness attacking the very people who first used it against their initial targets.

And that is my greatest fear, because when we create a continuous state of flux and societys ideology is constantly in a fluid motion where nothing can gel or set up into a solid state, I fear we will be left with continuous whiplash where we will not have a solid set of ideals to keep us as one.

One out of many, not many out of one, is our national motto, and if we cannot accept the fact that this nation is made up from many different cultures, races, nationalities, religions and from every corner of the world, we will lose the thing we should be most proud of: even though we come from very different backgrounds and places, we are here by choice and one of the whole.

I hope my shared rumination will create some conversation, knowing that what has been said is not the only answer, but the questions should be explored, even though they may not be resolved.

BERNARD LESLIE is a beekeeping expert who lives beside Kentucky Lake in the northeast corner of Henry County. His email address is bleslie0515@gmail.com.

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How did we get to where political correctness and woke-ness rule in our society? - Paris Post Intelligencer

It's been three days since actor Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscar's after Rock made a joke about Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, and the hot takes are still coming. The slap set off a fierce debate about whether Smith was violently overreacting to a joke or gallantly standing up for his woman against misogyny and racism. But lost in the conversation has been the precedent for Smith's actions; Smith's slap wasn't the result of some outdated notion of honor culture but something much more mundane: political correctness shutting down comedy.

For though the event shocked the world, the incident in question did not occur in a cultural vacuum. The climate surrounding comedians has been rife with controversy for years now, with comedians frequently the targets of calls for censorship, deplatforming and reputation destruction in the name of social awareness.

Just last year, comedian Dave Chappelle's comedy special "The Closer" dominated the news cycle after a controversy erupted based over his allegedly "anti trans" jokes. The special sparked such outrage among LGBTQ activists that a protest flared up at Netflix's headquarters. Demands were made that the special be removed from the streaming network. Despite Chappelle's insistence that his jokes were in good humor and not hate-filled rants against the trans community, his pleas fell on deaf ears; mainstream media outlets continue to associate Chappelle's image with transphobia to this day.

It's this trend that Will Smith has joinedthe one that sought to cancel Chappelle over jokes. The one that recently set its sights on Joe Rogan, subjected to the collective ire of medical professionals and mainstream media outlets after using his successful platform to deviate from the accepted narrative on COVID-19 vaccinations, mandates and lockdowns.

The Rogan cancelation attempt peaked absurdly when White House press secretary Jen Psaki urged Spotify, the streaming network that hosts Joe Rogan's popular podcast, to take further action against Rogan and help stop the spread of "misinformation." We witnessed the White House, in its official capacity, urging a private company to dampen the voice of a comedian who had committed no crime or violation of the law.

Saturday night's Academy Awards controversy was yet another incarnation of this pernicious trend, but one that escalated to the absurd degree of resulting in physical violence. And while many are decrying the violence on display, the truth is that the incident between Will Smith and Chris Rock was the culmination of a precedent that has been culturally sanctioned by a powerful liberal elite to silence, slander and demonize comedians and commentators who dare to trigger cultural or political sensitivities.

If the federal government is willing to openly demand that private platforms censor comedians, if the mainstream media can benefit from scarring the reputations of those who question their edicts, then why shouldn't any means of silencing, including violence, be the next logical step?

Smith's act would have resulted in anyone less famous or influential being carted off stage by security. And yet, after slapping Chris Rock for making an innocuous joke about his wife's hairstyle (Jada Pinkett Smith has alopecia, something Rock later said he was not aware of), Smith and Pinkett Smith were showered with affirmation from fellow celebrities. Smith went on to win an Oscar that night and then gave a long-winded, tearful speech saturated in racial justice platitudes and appeals to the Black community which further earned the sympathy of those with cultural allegiance to the powerful social justice constituency.

No apology was made that evening to Chris Rock, which sent a worrying message to the entire world after we all witnessed one of Hollywood's most beloved figures assault a comedian over "hurt feelings" and suffer no consequences.

What does this communicate at a time when social critics and commentators are quickly becoming a favored political scapegoat?

It communicates that we are in a culture that has become so narcissistic, so impotent and so humorless that even a slight cultural provocation that deviates from the strict and often absurd rules of "political correctness" can be met with the most inhumane violations of personal rights and freedoms, from federal overreach (Joe Rogan) to physical attacks (Chris Rock).

It's no surprise that in a media and political landscape where conformity, compliance and deference to official narratives are heavily incentivized, growing cultural hostility toward comedians and social critics would also flourish, and this creates an environment dangerous and unstable enough to deter free expression.

It sends the powerful and terrifying message that those who offend, deviate or provoke will not be afforded the same protection, charity and dignity as those who conform.

Nobody should be assaulted for telling a joke. Such a premise should never be culturally sanctioned, normalized or unpunished. Only time will tell if this unfortunate moment in entertainment history will become yet another example of culturally sanctioned intimidation and hostility directed at comedians and commentators, or if something will finally be done to combat this unhealthy cycle.

Angie Speaks is a cultural commentator and cohost of the Low Society Podcast.

The views in this article are the writer's own.

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Will Smith's Slap Is Political Correctness Taken to Its Logical Conclusion | Opinion - Newsweek

The POTUS does not need to nor should he walk back his personal belief that Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power.

One of our American freedoms is the freedom of free speech. The presidential oath of office requires the president to uphold our Constitution; it does not require a pledge to abrogate his human compassion and consciousness.

President Joe Biden was speaking from his heart. Today, too many are concerned with political correctness. What nonsense!

The White House was dismayed when the president went off script. Of more concern to me is that political advisers apparently believe the American public needs to be fed only pre-programed, scripted speeches. This is not free speech.

Do spokespersons truly believe unscripted statements must be reinterpreted for public consumption?

Biden demonstrated he cannot ignore the atrocities being committed against the people of Ukraine. A wonderful demonstration of his personal compassion. No need to walk back or re-explain.

Freedom of speech is just that free to express thoughts, beliefs and compassion.

Mr. President no walk-back is needed.

Thank you for your well-expressed personal compassion.

Cindie Petersen

Johnstown

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Letter to the editor | Free to express thoughts | Readers Forum | tribdem.com - TribDem.com

Politics is alive again in university campuses, inspiring students to speak up on social issues. This retreat from political apathy is good news for democracy. But it is rather confined.

Students care deeply about gender and race identity and believe that how we speak publicly is a matter of social justice. This focus is a far cry from the protests against the invasion of Iraq, or the introduction of fees in higher education, which took students to the streets a generation ago. Even recent political controversies, such as thejustifiability of strict lockdowns or mandatory vaccination, fail to get students very passionate. Many appear much more concerned with what pronouns people may use and who should be given a university platform. As one of my students told me last week: It is the only area of public life where our voice gets heard.

The emphasis on identity and speech has redrawn the old political maps. Right-wing conservatives used to favour restrictions on speech aimed at upholding public morals and family values. Now, they champion freedom of speech to criticise the deplatforming of far-right figures and so-called cancel culture. Left-wing progressives used to oppose government regulation of speech. Now, they call for government restrictions on hate speech and the public observance of linguistic norms of political correctness. The new free speech wars are toxic and messy.

The Public Order Act 1986 prohibits the expression of hatred on account of certain protected characteristics. But many students feel that even speech within the limits of the law might make them unsafe and increase the risk of rights violations. This argument is not new: it was made by prominent feminists in the 1980s and 1990s, who called for a ban on pornography. Except that the argument is now turned against the feminists who deny that transgender women are women. Kathleen Stock, a prominent gender-critical feminist who has been at the receiving end of student protestsand attempts to deplatform her, invokes free speech and academic freedom in her defence.

Controversies surrounding who has the right to speak at university platforms are not new, either. Universities in modern times have always been places of contestation. Students always claimed the right to disrupt university events as an act of political protest. In most countries, the tension between speech and protest within campuses is handled internally, free from government interference. But in the UK, the government is now proposing a new law, through the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which would give it great powers over universities. It makes academic no platforming an offence and gives legal powers to a regulatorto monitor university practices. The government is seeking to assert control over academic speech and its proper balance against freedom of protest. We must therefore ask who has rights over academic platforms.

It is easy to conflate academic freedom with freedom of speech, as the proposed legislation does. The aim of universities is to pursue knowledge in a scholarly, critical and impartial way. The free exchange of ideas, particularly through publishing, is essential to that aim. But the primary meaning of academic freedom is not to reiterate a right to freedom of speech that everyone has under article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Thereare an infinite number of platforms online, via which any speaker, academic or otherwise, can freely publicise their views. Unlike airwaves, platforms for addressing the public are no longer a scarce public good, to be distributed equally under some conception of social justice. What distinguishes university platforms is that they are credible and influential because they are typically run by experts. But there is no such thing as a free-speech right to a good platform. Jimmy Fallon does not breach my free-speech right by not inviting me on to The Tonight Show. Nor am I silenced by law colleagues who do not invite me to academic conferences on how human rights judges are abusing their power. They are free to have a balanced debate among those who oppose judicial review, and exclude those like me who defend it. You cannot be wronged by being deprived of something to which you had no right.

The point of academic freedom is rather different. It is to assert the independence of the academic community from government, in the pursuit of knowledge. Government has no right to tell academics what to research or teach, what views to defend, or what to publish. Orthodoxies in academic disciplines should rise and fall in a bottom-up way, through peer debate and criticism, not top-down, through government fiat.

This independence of the academic community from government extends to most of its functions, including who should be given or denied an academic platform. Government may not force me to invite home secretary Priti Patel to speak in my human rights seminar series, let alone to defend her policies. Nor can it force me not to rescind an invitation to her if I realise subsequently that her talk will only muddle the debate about immigration and human rights. When the subject-matter is academic, speaker invitations are for me and my colleagues to decide.

I do not mean to suggest that rescinding an invitation to speak is never wrongful. Just like disinviting a guest from ones dinner party, it may break promises made to a speaker, defeat their expectations, or frustrate their plans. But these are neither free speech wrongs nor violations of academic freedom. What violates academic freedom is to take control of university platforms away from academics, as the proposed bill does.

We cannot respect a right to extend invitations without respecting a right to rescind them.

It is tempting to think that the bill does not take control away from academics but, on the contrary, secures it. Deplatforming is often not the choice of the organisers but the result of pressure or disruptive protests by students. We might naturally worry that small groups within universities will acquire a veto over what views academics can express on campus. Or we might worry that this veto always favours one side of the political spectrum, alienating students on the opposite side. But the idea that government should protect academics from their students is not straightforward.

Students have an abstract political right to freedom of protest within campus, including protest that is disruptive. Often, this right prevails over the aim of holding a public debate on some issue. For example, students may legitimately disrupt an event in which a speaker defends slavery, as long as they stay within the limits of the criminal law.

Disruptive protest, too, is a form of speech, falling under article 10 of the ECHR. By making deplatforming an offence, applicable also to student unions, the government will extinguish students right to protest on campus, a right whose exercise has proved pivotal in the past in fighting evil regimes and serious injustices, like apartheid. Justas we would not want government to decide which topics are legitimate for academic research, likewise we should not want government to decide which topics are legitimate grounds for disruptive protests.

Could universities come up with a list of views that all academics agree must never be expressed on campus and insist that any speech outside that list should be protected? The problem is that there is no agreement on what should be on that list. Nor has there been one historically. What is now the dominant view of what counts as extreme or dangerous speech started out as the dissident voice of a small group of student activists. Do we really want to claim that the current majority has the definitive view in history of which forms of speech are out of bounds?

Nor is it a good argument that speakers whose opinions meet some scholarly standards of academic rigour should never be deplatformed. Academics disagree within and across disciplines on what these standards are. It is a noble task to try to show why ones views are not hateful or bigoted, but reasonable and scholarly. But one cannot expect others to agree. University platforms belong to no one and to everyone within the academic community.

A direct consequence of this conception of academic freedom is that mobilised groups of students may frequently succeed in disrupting talks that an academic is scheduled to give outside their own university, on the sole basis that they find their views unacceptable. And this is possible even when the academics views are reasonable and far from hateful or offensive. It could happen to me because of this article.

Such a predicament is difficult and unfortunate. No speaker likes to be heckled, or forced to walk away from a platform. But assuming there is no harassment or other violations of the criminal law, it would hardly be a violation of either my right to free speech or my academic freedom.

Aslong as my job is protected, I can still set the syllabus and the exam questions for my course. I can air my views in countless online platforms. I can publish them in academic journals, including a new title dedicated to controversial ideas. I will most likely receive invitations or job offers from university departments where academics and their students find my ideas agreeable. I will be able to reach whatever audience my views deserve.

It is true that in a worst-case scenario, an academic with controversial views may be ostracised from most university platforms in the country, simply because of a small but vocal minority of protesting students. This would be a sad state of affairs for democracy, but it is the risk that scholars who advocate publicly their views have to take. The alternative is far worse: to allow government to extinguish students right to political protest on campus and to prevent academics from exercising their own judgement as to whether an invitation should be rescinded.

Universities must, of course, condemn proteststhat target individual academics, rather than public events, andthat cross the limits of the law. Harassment is a criminal offence and universities have a duty to protect academics against any unlawful behaviour on campus. This is particularly important when disruptive protests come from students against their own professors since one central element of harassment is persistent conduct that causes distress. It is one thing to be deplatformed or no platformed from public events taking place at other universities. It is a whole different thing to face constantly intimidating protests by ones own students when carrying out day-to-day employment tasks, such as teaching a class or using ones office. But the proposed bill fails to distinguish between visiting speakers and university employees, prohibiting denial of access to platforms in both cases. And no new legislation is needed to ensure that academics are protected in their workplace against harassment.

In reality, the Higher Education Bill has little to do with freedom of speech. It seeks to assert control over academic platforms that, as it happens, will mainly benefit right-wing speech by external speakers. But the very sponsors of this bill would be appalled if the next parliament passed a law that gives government such drastic powers over university speech for a different purpose, such as to mandate the use of gender-neutral pronouns on campus. And whatever arguments they would make against that law also apply against their own bill. The independence of academic speech from government cannot be selective.

If government really cared about academic freedom,it would restrict the scope of the proposed offence to cases where academics lose their jobs or are denied promotion merely because of their ideas, beliefs or views.Itwould specify that university management must not force or put pressure on academics to cancel their courses or change their syllabuses.It would protect academics against any content-based interference by university management, such as monitoring sensitive courses and events or asking academics to share in advance what opinions or views they plan to express.

These are the real threats to academic freedom, and they come from university management. They are materialising already within UK higher education, facilitated by the consumerist culture that has come to dominate universities after the introduction of tuition fees.

The current debate on deplatforming and free speech is a distraction. We must ask: what good is it to academics if access to university platforms is protected by law when the core of their academic freedom has been taken away?

George Letsas is professor of the philosophy of law at UCL.

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There is no free-speech right to a university platform - Times Higher Education

Chris Pizzello/ The Associated Press

Dear Will Smith:

They say timing is everything. Sadly, your timing couldnt have been worse.

After a stellar career and a reputation as one of Hollywoods good guys, you destroyed much of that legacy by your behavior at the Oscars. You brought shame upon yourself, embarrassed many in your hometown of Philly, disgraced the Academy Awards, and stole the thunder from every other winner. Worst of all, your actions set a terrible example for the most important among us our impressionable children. Most wont remember apologies, or understand any personal issues you may have been enduring. Instead, they may think that physically assaulting and verbally abusing anyone who disrespects them is justified, since their hero did just that in front of the entire world.

Tinseltown loves to say theres no such thing as bad publicity. But in your case, that may not be true. Since you already have fame and fortune, the effect of additional good publicity is marginal. So it stands to reason that bad PR might be just that bad. Bad for your soul. Bad for your reputation. And bad for your legacy, which, for most successful people, is the thing they most covet. Sure, youll never have to look for work in Hollywood, since you remain a bankable name. But when it comes down to it, losing your cool and hitting someone solely because of a joke is what people will most remember about Will Smith.

To combat that, the best thing you could do is embark on a genuine mea culpa tour, where you speak about accountability and civility and why violence is never the answer.

Otherwise, youll be most remembered not as a Prince or King, but as a Bad Boy.

For those living under a rock (no pun intended), comedian Chris Rock hosted the Academy Awards on Sunday, where he made a joke about Will Smiths wife Jada Pinkett Smith due to her shaved head. At first, it appeared that Will laughed right along with many others. But after that and possibly after seeing his wifes disdain Smith leapt onto the stage, approached Rock, and slapped him in the face. Upon returning to his seat, he unleashed expletives at the host.

For his part, Rock played it as best he could after being assaulted on live international television. He composed himself, ad-libbed a quick joke, and carried on hosting. Bolstering his reputation as a class act, Rock refused to press charges even though Smith didnt apologize to him after winning an Oscar minutes later, or after the ceremony concluded, instead choosing to party the night away. Only the next day did Smith apologize to the comedian, but frankly, it seems too little, too late.

Some thoughts on the sordid affair:

First and foremost, Chris Rock is a comedian. By definition, comics make jokes. Sometimes they are funny, and sometimes they bomb, but by the nature of what they do, comics are not meant to be viewed seriously nor their jokes taken personally.

To be even having a discussion over a harmless Oscars joke as to whether or not it was appropriate is so mindboggling that, if someone scripted it, hed be laughed out of the room, even by Hollywoods low standards.

Whats the solution? Should Chris Rock have requested the medical records of every person he might have roasted that night, and planned his jokes accordingly? Or, in the name of political correctness and censorship and to protect the offended class should he have been given a list of topics and people who were off the table? If so, be prepared for future hosts telling nothing but second-grade knock-knock jokes, because thats all thatll pass such ridiculous litmus tests.

2) Rock declined to press charges, but the L.A. District Attorneys office could. At the least, it should consider doing so. This wasnt chivalrous, nor a romantic gesture, or a private fight mano-a-mano out of public view, but a live physical assault in front of literally the entire planet. People get arrested every day for less, so the D.A. should be careful not to be seen as giving a celebrity a free pass.

Arrest or not, the best outcome would be for Will Smith to actively engage in community service, hitting the speaking circuit to discuss the consequences of actions, anger management, forgiveness and rehabilitation. It would be a win-win: Smith would salvage his reputation, and his star power could have a huge impact on Americas youth by helping them avoid the path of bad choices.

3) Many are calling for the Academy to strip Smith of his Oscar. It should not, since winning the award has nothing to do with his behavior at the ceremony. In other words, since he had already earned the prize, the recognition of that achievement should not be tied to events that occurred off-screen. Its akin to stripping athletes of awards because of activities off the field. Ultimately, such punitive actions are meaningless since everyone knows those people earned their awards through hard work and merit.

4) Where are we going when Americas hyper-sensitivity no longer allows us to laugh at ourselves? And worse, when we willfully permit the thought police to exercise control over every aspect of our lives?

This is precisely why some comedians such as Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry the Cable Guy have refused to perform on college campuses, and why some commencement speakers have withdrawn from graduation ceremonies. Spoiled brats, insulated-from-reality, protest everything and everyone so frequently that its gotten to the point where normal people are walking away, refusing to subject themselves to such treatment.

Comedy acts are not news programs, and should not be treated as such. Instead, since the goal is simply to make people laugh, nothing said should be taken with a straight face. What part of that dont people understand?

You can tell a lot about a society by its sense of humor. The strong ones have the ability to laugh, poke fun, and engage in self-deprecating humor, made possible by an innate confidence and the ability not to take itself too seriously.

Conversely, societies that live in fear, get constantly offended and attempt to sanitize everything with the goal of complete homogenization put themselves on the path to self-destruction. Political correctness rules the day, common sense goes out the window, and a bitter resentment grows as people feel they can only express themselves behind closed doors, fearful of being labeled insensitive and bigoted.

This is no laughing matter. Its time to grow a spine and push back against this rising tide of insanity. No more backing down for innocent jokes, and no more apologies to people whose entire existence is predicated upon being offended.

Hey Chris Rock keep the laughs coming. And for anyone who disagrees, the jokes on them.

Chris Freind is an independent columnist and commentator whose column appears every Wednesday. He can be reached at CF@FFZMedia.com Follow him on Twitter @chrisfreind.

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Chris Freind: Open letter to Will Smith: Your worst performance ever - The Delaware County Daily Times

Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri has cast aside the false filters of political correctness and shed the inhibitions of a warped secularism to tell the story directly to the people as it happened

Vivek Agnihotri's 'The Kashmir Files' has been receiving a lot of love at the box office.

It was a bolt from the blue that caught our bleeding-heart liberals off guard; their lies exposed, their chicanery defined with precision and their immorality hanging like a banner for all to see. The spontaneous and spectacular success of the movie,The Kashmir Files,which portrays movingly the brutal ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley, has expectedly unleashed a barrage of criticism violent and malignant that attempts to shred the credibility of the movie, undermine its message and ensure that the atrocities committed on the Kashmiri Pandits is relegated to oblivion so that the nation does not have to answer uncomfortable questions.

One film critic dubbed it a fantasy-revisionist drama while another accused the movie of propagandist verve, and cementing the current dispensations favoured discourse. The very first sentence of yet another review in a major newspaper left no doubt as to where its sympathies lay: Once upon a time, writer-director Vivek Agnihotri told us a Hate Story; this week, he has etched yet another.

But how accurate and valid are these over-the-top conjectures? Do a few insignificant factual compromises that can pass for artistic liberty detract from the leitmotif of the film? And can the sufferings of the Kashmiri Pandits be wished away or trivialised just because the movie fails to address the issue of Kashmiri Muslim lives lost in the conflict?

Tagging a narrative as hate or inciting hate has become an expedient modus operandi for some to discredit their ideological adversaries or counter a stance that does not suit their viewpoint. First, Agnihotri did not manufacture the hate that is depicted in the movie. He merely did his duty by bringing the hate that was rampant in the Valley to the attention of the public, something that nobody had the courage to do so far. The gory incidents that he picturises are all based on real events. For hate to be countered, hate needs to be identified, highlighted and condemned so that the purveyors of hate know that it is unacceptable and will be penalised.

By papering over such incidents under the dubious pretension of not upsetting the delicate communal balances and by not confronting hate face to face, we not only embolden hate-mongers but become unwittingly complicit in their crime. Our inability as a nation to highlight and counter the diabolicity of the separatist movement in Kashmir is what allowed it to fester for so long and get away with such barbarism.

***

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Off-centre | The Kashmir Files creates a new language and aesthetics of protest

The Kashmir Files talks about one genocide, but what about others confined to whispers and whisperers?

The Kashmir Files opens up wounds that never healed

After The Kashmir Files, revisiting Vidhu Vinod Chopra's 'sanitised' version on Kashmiri Pandits exodus in Shikara

Vivek Agnihotri on The Kashmir Files: 'I wanted to make a film about people who did not pick up guns'

Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri deactivates his Twitter account ahead of The Kashmir Files release; heres why

Watch: Trailer of Vivek Agnihotris The Kashmir Files, starring Anupam Kher, Mithun Chakraborty

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The charge that failure to co-opt the Kashmiri Muslim version of the conflict, makes the movie unbelievable and biased does not pass muster. The tragedy of the Kashmiri Pandits is apocalyptic: Brutal, savage and barbaric. It was also a story that had been deliberately swept under the carpet to mask the fundamentalism and xenophobia of separatism in Kashmir. Therefore, their story had to be told with a single-minded focus, without nuances, without sugarcoating and without dilution or distraction by the other facets of the Kashmir conflict. The perpetrators of the crime had to be called out with a definitiveness that was indisputable. That is what Agnihotri has done in blunt, unvarnished terms; a bluntness that the so-called intellectuals supporting the separatist movement find troubling because the same derogatory terms like Nazi and fascism that they used so flippantly to describe the other side has now become an apt and telling euphemism for them and their misguided cause.

And by the way the dominant narrative of the Kashmir conflict in the international and domestic media, including movies till now has been lopsided; a narrative that has focused overwhelmingly on what has been touted as Muslim self-determination. That story does not warrant reiteration.

Emphasising this one-sided depiction of the Kashmir issue so far, Aanchal Magazine, herself a Kashmiri Pandit writes (On Kashmir, listen to all those who suffered;Indian Express, 24 March): I was one-year-old in 1990. Growing up, I would often scan news reports about us but not to much avail. I would sit through movies based on Kashmir, waiting for a mention of Kashmiri Pandits. An insignificant territory to explore for mainstream filmmakers, they would often be a fleeting reference. In one such movie shot in Kashmir and released in 2014 with a running time of 162 minutes, Kashmiri Pandits had a mention: One line.

When previous films have consistently blanked out the tragedy of the Pandits, why is it thatThe Kashmir Filesis being held to a different standard?

Such double standards and hypocrisy cannot help to build a nation that is morally robust and equitable.

Another reason for the ire of the liberals is because this movie conclusively punctures the myth of Hindu majoritarianism: A false narrative craftily woven into our national discourse by painting a communal riot as a pogrom (Gujarat 2002) and dubbing a humanitarian law (CAA) as discriminatory. Can brutalisation of the majority community occur with such audacity in a nation where the reigning mantra is majoritarianism?

Agnihotri has cast aside the false filters of political correctness and shed the inhibitions of a warped secularism to tell the story directly to the people as it happened. He has dared to uncover the truth of a horrendous past, intentionally kept buried for over 30 years; he has dared to let Indians know what their brethren suffered; and he has dared to jolt the comatose conscience of an indifferent nation. We must be grateful to him for this moral wake-up call.

One film critic (The Kashmir Filestries showing 1990 exodus truth but Agnihotri gives it death blow; Amogh Rohmetra,The Print,13 March 2022) wryly remarked: WhileThe Kashmir Filesbrings out the truth and the much-needed story of Kashmiri Pandits, it tanks its credibility by mingling with facts, defaming JNU, blaming selective politicians

It is not the credibility of the movie that is tanked. By his heart-wrenching expose Agnihotri has tanked the credibility of JNU, those selective politicians and those biased sections of the media that downplayed what is unequivocally the ultimate moral lapse of post-Independence India: The blatant ethnic cleansing of over a quarter million Kashmiri Hindus who became refugees in their own country overnight all in a secular democratic nation.

Finally, what is extremely troubling is the utter insensitivity and crass moral depravity of the anti-Kashmir Filescampaign. Instead of sincerely acknowledging the sufferings of the Pandits with sobriety and empathising with them, what we are witnessing is a vicious and deliberate game of whataboutery; one that derides the government for making it tax-free and accuses the movie of inciting hate all in attempt to distract from the main focus of the film and achieve its nauseating objective the denial of the ethnic cleansing of the Kashmiri Pandits; a negation that parallels the holocaust denial.

The writer is a US-based author. Views expressed are personal.

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How The Kashmir Files has caught our bleeding-heart liberals off guard and their lies exposed - Firstpost

Atlus fighting game seriesPower Instinct will have its 30th anniversary in 2023. However, there will be no ports or re-releases during the timeframe.Keiko Chuuko Ijuu, the former representative director of Noise Factory and producer of the series, made the announcement on Twitter.

The first tweet revealed that Chuuko had sent petitions to the series rights holder since November 2021. However, the holder rejected it because one of the series characters would have a high risk of triggering litigation related to political correctness.

After the first refusal, Chuuko suggested releasing thePower Instinct title by excluding the controversial character. The rights holder still refused the proposal, citing a change in trends of the era and the difficulty in re-releasing past games.

With game ports out of the question, Chuuko is now sending proposals for republications of non-game content, such as soundtrack and character background documents. She also expressed her intent to set up a one-person company to publish content related to Power Instinct.

The series developer company Noise Factory went defunct in 2017. Although the website is no longer available, Chuuko is still actively managing the Twitter account. In early January 2022, she asked Power Instinct fans whether they would like to see ports of previous games ahead of the series 30th anniversary in 2023.

Power Instinct is known in Japan asGouketsuji Ichizoku (The Gouketsuji Clan). Atlus has been publishing the fighting game series since the first title was released in 1993. Only the first two titles received English releases. The company released further sequels exclusively in Japan.

The latest title in thePower Instinct series is Gouketsuji Ichizoku: Senzo Kuyou, available on arcades in Japan since 2009.

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There Will Be No Power Instinct Re-Release on Its 30th Anniversary - Siliconera

The editorial board of The New York Times made a calculated splash last weekend by publishing a lead editorial under the headline: America Has a Free Speech Problem. The piece has already been effectively demolished by many other writers, but of course that does not stop the editorial from convincing the credulous and the conniving alike that there is a deep and worsening problem with so-called cancel culture.

In a Verdict column last May titled Go Ahead and Cancel Me, You Erasing, Censorious Silencers; Also . . . Woke! I argued that the entire notion of cancel culture and wokeness is void of content and merely amounts to a rebranding of the equally vacuous epithet political correctness. That is, every time a person uses any of those terms, we should ask: What does this person actually mean, other than Im going to put a negative label on this thing I dont like? The answer is always that these various labels are merely a way to make personal grievance sound like a high-minded appeal to Free Speech.

Nothing has changed in the months since I wrote that column, but even so, the mythology of cancel culture has moved from novel rebranding to conventional wisdom among the media elite on both sides of the political divide. It is thus worth looking again at why there is no content to this now-evergreen trope, because invoking cancel culture perversely has the effect of genuinely silencing dissentwhich is supposedly what we all should be trying not to do.

It is especially disappointing when a prominent group with a liberal reputation like the editorial board of The Times feeds this beast, because the result is to strengthen conservatives who continue to claim victimhood when anyone dares to criticize their views. Indeed, the editors roused themselves from their fainting couches and led off their editorial with this:

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

What in the world are they talking about? Have we not all been taught again and again that Justice Brandeis was clearly right when he wrote: If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence?

Being shamed and shunned, rather than estopped or jailed, is exactly what is supposed to happen to people who peddle falsehoods and fallacies. No matter the label usedpolitical correctness, cancel culture, woke mobs, or anything elsethe reality has always been that certain people want to have it both ways: say horrible things and then take offense when anyone tells them that they have said horrible things. But if politics aint beanbag, as the old saying goes, neither is free speech necessarily pleasant.

Brandeis did not say that additional speech must be crafted not to hurt anyones feelings. The idea is that, for example, Nazis can march peacefully through a town where Holocaust survivors live, and the government must allow that to happen, because we do not want the government to make choices about what is and is not acceptable speech in the public square. But the more speech idea enters the story precisely because the bad speech can and must be challenged. No one imagines, I would have thought, that the people who attempt to shame and shun people with hateful ideologies are somehow abusing their own rights to free speech and association.

The response to this from the editors of The Times and those who agree with them, however, is that we are not talking about truly odious people being shamed and shunned. We are told that regular, everyday folks are now

understandably confused, then, about what they can say and where they can say it. People should be able to put forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working throughall without fearing cancellation.

Again, what exactly is cancellation? Former Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York now says that he was the victim of cancel culture, as does his brother Chris, the fired pundit formerly of CNN. They both lost their positions because of things they did, not what they said, but they are now jumping on the bandwagon and claiming to have been hounded out of office by carping prigs.

It is true that there is a small number of well-worn examples of people having been fired or demoted due to what amounted to misunderstandings, but such injustices have always been with us. There is nothing in the public recordand certainly nothing in that editorialthat shows that this is a unique or growing problem.

The best the editors can do is to cite a recent poll (which they commissioned and paid for) which found that 84 percent of adults said it is a very serious or somewhat serious problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.

In the spirit of constructive dialogue, I hereby offer an alternative reason that the pollsters find people saying that they feel censored: people are hearing about cancel culture everywhere they turn, and they grab onto it as an explanation for whatever is bothering them. Oh, yeah, I remember someone giving me the stink-eye when I said that cripples shouldnt have their own parking spaces. Come to think of it, Ive been canceled!

Even worse, the poll that The Times commissioned is a classic example of a push-poll, that is, a poll with questions designed to shape the answers. In particular, the question to which the editors referred was this: How much of a problem is it that some Americans do not exercise their freedom of speech in everyday situations out of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism? Well golly, even I might say that that is very serious or somewhat serious, if I had a pollster presenting as fact the idea that Americans are not exercising their freedom of speech. Even people who had never heard of cancel culture might respond in the way that the editors wanted them to respond. It sounds bad. That it is not happening is beside the point.

The fact is that there is nothing wrong with people exercising their freedom not to speak, evenor especiallyin everyday situations, whatever that might mean. If I go to a party with a bunch of people who think that the greatest rocknroll band of all time is ABBA, I might decide not to tell them that they are clearly wrong. (I like ABBA, but the greatest?)

More seriously, if a person were to use a term that has fallen out of favor, like mentally retarded, and if she did so out of pure ignorance from not having heard that that term is offensive, I would hope that she would be corrected gently. If so, she would surely appreciate it, whereas if she were shamed and shunned, that would feel bad to her. But that is not a free speech problem. At worst, it means that she should try harder to make her good faith clear and to be better informed about current usage.

But the editors at The Times are sure that that is terrible. They even claim that it a threat to democracy itself, because [i]deas that go unchallenged by opposing views risk becoming weak and brittle rather than being strengthened by tough scrutiny.

I bow to no one in my concern that American democracy is under threatindeed, that it might already have suffered fatal blows and is in the process of bleeding outbut what the editors wrote is self-contradictory nonsense. The idea, apparently, is that we need to expose our views to potential criticismindeed, to tough scrutinybut then when the criticism comes, we can say: Dont make me feel like I have to self-censor, or youll destroy democracy!

For all of its windy rhetoric about the importance of robust debate, The Timess editorial board is afraid of that very thing. In the end, they seem to be saying that there are polite ways to discuss matters. That is true, but when did we adopt the rule that public conversations must be genteel?

Because of its importance in the global media ecosystem, an editorial in The New York Times garners a lot of attention. This past Monday, the Morning Joe crew on MSNBC responded to the editorial with a long segment in which panelistsincluding a person who was favorably quoted in the piece itselfagreed with everything that the editors at The Times had written.

Joe Scarborough noted what he thought was an ironythat the pushback the editors had received demonstrated that people are in fact too censorious. That response, however, is not censure but argument. What I found truly ironic, however, was that Scarborough did not have a single person on the panel who disagreed with anyone else. Scarborough is a NeverTrump conservative and Al Sharpton is a liberal, but all of the people on the panel are denizens of the ecosystem that has been tut-tutting about cancel culture all along.

In more than 17 minutes of discussion, the examples that the Morning Joe crew came up with were painfully minor. Scarborough twice mentioned a time when Condoleezza Rice was disinvited as a commencement speaker, acting as if that was an example of cancel culture. But as I pointed out in a column several years ago, commencements are the worst possible example for the anti-cancelers to invoke, because graduation day is not a seminar meeting but a celebration. I wonder if Scarborough would hold a wedding anniversary party and invite Donald Trump, who has accused him of murdering one of his staffers (and has insulted Scarboroughs wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, in very personal terms).

For that matter, I do not recall Scarborough enriching the debate on his showwhich is not a celebratory event but a discussion of important issuesby scheduling anyone who has said such things. Is he, as he claimed on his show regarding the supposedly intolerant cancelers, not confident of his own point of view? Or maybe, as is perfectly normal, he has his own standards for what arguments can and cannot be tolerated, even as he complains when others do the same.

Beyond the commencement example, the Morning Joe panel mostly wrung its hands about how young people supposedly feel shut down on college campuses these days. Even though Scarborough laughingly allowed that it was hardly new for students to tailor their speech to the contextclaiming to have written exam answers in college and law school to cater to his perceptions of a professors preferred answershe insisted that there is something big and new going on. He could not define it, but he was sure that it was bad.

When I was in my first year of law school in 2000, there was a discussion of date rape in my criminal law class. After some conversation about the difficulty of defining that crime, a consensus emerged regarding undue influence, threats of force, and so on. One male in the class then said: If thats the definition of date rape, then I and all of my friends have committed date rape.

He apparently thought that this would make people think that the definition was too open-ended, but a female student responded by saying: Thank you for warning us. In current terminology, that man was thenceforth canceledthat is, his dating life was over at that law school. He was not capable of being shamed, but he was undeniably shunned.

I suppose one could say that we lose something if someone decides not to self-indict during discussions in public, but if the sanction of shunning is not available, what exactly is the point? I know you just confessed to being a serial date-rapist, but in the interest of democracy Im going to continue to be your friend?

The most bizarre aspect of the Morning Joe segment was that it opened with a clip from 1966 in which Senator Robert F. Kennedy gave a speech in Cape Town, South Africa. The speech is a moving description of how free speech can overcome resistance, yet later in the segment, Scarborough claimed that things have become so bad in the US that if Kennedy had tried to give that speech today, he would have been shouted down. That assertion is completely ridiculous, but in any case, Kennedy did not argue that free speech is easy but that it is difficult and that it inevitably meets resistance, precisely because free speech is best used to disagree with the powerful. He did not say that the people who disagree must be well-mannered about it.

To be clear, I absolutely do not like it when people are rude to me. I understand why people like Joe Scarborough and the editors of The New York Times are shocked to have people disagree with them and even to be disrespectful to them. If they are calling for people to be more courteous, then I only ask: Where is your line for when it is acceptable to be discourteous? And if people draw that line where you wish it were not drawn, are you willing to cancel those people?

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No, America Does Not Have a Free Speech ProblemAt Least, Not the One The New York Timess Editors Imagine - Justia Verdict

Theres a politics loose in our democracy that is all about nothing.

The evangelical church serves as the incubator and enabler of the politics of nothing. This is not a sermon, but it suggests a biblical text: The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.

Isaiah speaks here of humanity, but his dreary truthful tropes can apply to what I call the politics of nothing. While the politics of nothing has its chimera of glory, it will wither and fade like flowers and grass.

The politics of nothing sells the public a bill of goods, empty bags, inflated promises, and so much rage. The politics of nothing is riding humanity hard now, and they think it will last forever, but the grass withers, the flower fades.

The politics of nothing is not the future of our democracy, but unless we see it for its uselessness, it may be the end. The politics of nothing is like a frontier medicine man peddling bottles of liquor dressed up as miraculous healing medicine but in reality worthless except for a temporary moment of feeling high.

What is the politics of nothing? It is emotionally laden speech that has no policies attached. It is a rage against how bodies act and interact in culture, with no goods offered to bodies in return.

The politics of nothing has allergic reactions to policies substantive policies designed to empower, enable, protect and assist humans. Our current outbreak of the politics of nothing has no place for policy.

The politics of nothing has allergic reactions to policies.

The politics of nothing uses pathos to induce feelings of freedom and goodness in the audience. Ironically, the feel good, feel free theme of the politics of nothing relies on the rhetoric of demonization, evidence-flouting and repudiation of institutions.

Somehow the politics of nothing manages to be entertaining and terrifying at the same time. The pathos is that of a stand-up comedian getting people to laugh nervously at the destruction of others who can safely be made fun of and put down in nefarious and hurtful ways. The politics of nothing churns out shame on the bodies of those who are different. It channels anxiety, narcissism and alienation to attract supporters who are now given the signal that it is OK to rage against the dreaded others.

The church has not always promoted a politics of nothing. The Reformation was a religious/political struggle as Catholics and Protestants battled over sacraments, polity, theology. At least the age produced an amazing number of theologians: Luther, Calvin and Wesley, for example.

Now, evangelicals are spewing out populist, affluent preachers who are all hand-tamed by Republican politics successful blessers of a successful culture, as Carlyle Marney said. In the 19th century, churches fought to abolish slavery. In the late 19th century, evangelicals promoted the rights of workers, womens rights and care for the poor. In the 20th century, churches fought to end segregation, promote civil rights and protest war. These all were serious issues with both theological and political ramifications.

Now, politicians perform rituals of feeling good, feeling free a nothing dance to win votes rather than help persons. It promises people a land of promise flowing with milk and honey, but it produces a land of fear and violence. It promises a well of fresh water but produces only brackish, bad-tasting water from the sewer. It promises a feast of fine wine and platters of meat but gives only sour wine like vinegar and a valley of dry bones.

It promises people a land of promise flowing with milk and honey, but it produces a land of fear and violence.

The politics of nothing attempts to impose a strict moralism on the nation. Actual issues that impact the political life of the democracy are ignored as evangelicals pour forth emotional appeals dealing with issues that dont have anything to do with food, water, clothing, housing, health care.

The politics of nothing has now degraded to a class of politicians eager to smear, denigrate and defame. Now, the evangelicals line up to promote spurious revisions of history, the undoing of scientific knowledge and a hyper-patriotism that smacks of idolatry.

The politics of nothing obsesses about sex. For example, Newt Gingrichs take on Judge Ketanji Brown Jacksons judicial hearing for a Supreme Court slot was that she disqualified herself because she could not define a woman. Nothing about the Constitution, the law, being a qualified judge, but a slap from Gingrich about sexuality transgender persons. This is the politics of nothing.

In the mighty house of democracy, a house built on the rock of freedom, the politics of nothing concentrates all its attention on the closet and the bathroom.

For decades, evangelicals struggled to keep gays in the closet. I always have been puzzled by the evangelical attachment to the closet as a negative trope where gays were to be housed. After all, evangelicals know that Jesus elevated the closet to a room of prominence in his teaching: Whenever you pray, go into your closet and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you (Matthew 6:6).

The politics of nothing concentrates all its attention on the closet and the bathroom.

The closet was to be a room of prayer, not a prison where you locked away those you deemed unworthy. Now that the closet doors have been thrown wide open, evangelicals switched to obsessing about the bathroom. From homophobia they transitioned to fear of transgender persons. Legislation about bathrooms and transgender persons in sports pile up in state legislators like a late April snow in upstate New York.

The Parental Rights in Education bill, more commonly known as the Dont Say Gay bill, has been signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The bill prohibits teachers and school staff from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms and limits such discussion among older students to an undefined age-appropriate standard.

The Idaho House of Representatives passed a bill that makes it a crime punishable by life in prison for parents to seek out gender-affirming care for their child. If made law, it also would make it a crime for parents to leave the state with their transgender teen to get gender-affirming care. A guilty verdict would mean life in prison.

InAlabama, lawmakers are pushing a bill that makes it a felony for a doctor to provide gender-affirming care, namely puberty blockers, hormones or surgeries to children 18 years old or younger. The offense is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

At least 29 states have introduced bills that would exclude transgender children and teens from sports. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has called gender-affirming procedures child abuse. There must be something in the water in Texas because it is also the home of the Southern Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress who has claimed that the Democratic Party is now the party of atheism.

The politics of nothing is a gathering of politicians who come out, call on the name of God, freedom and patriotism, wave their hands in the air and declare that people are free from everything truth, responsibility, empathy, mutualism.

An image of Naaman the leper, in his snit fit over the preacher not coming to greet him in person, fits the politics of nothing attitude: I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of theLordhis God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy! (2 Kings 5:11).

The politics of nothing is performative rhetoric, not policy-making legislation.

The politics of nothing is performative rhetoric, not policy-making legislation. Lights, action, cameras roll the performance begins. In the 1990s, the situation comedy The Seinfeld Show was dubbed the show about nothing. Closer examination determined that the show actually was about quite a lot.

There is, however, a show that really is about nothing: The Republican Congress starring Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Louie Gohmert of Texas, et al.

Sen. Cotton attempts to deny federal funding for the New York Times 1619 Project. He rails about the loss of civilizational confidence among white people.

Gov. DeSantis of Florida presents a bill designed to make sure no history teacher teaches Critical Race Theory or anything that might make white people uncomfortable. Somehow, he managed to have the word freedom in his bill. How odd that the people of Florida would need a law that gave them the freedom to be comfortable. One would think that the land of sunshine, gated condos, lounge chairs, flip-flops, ill-colored shirts, margaritas, eye-popping bikinis, orange juice and beaches would be basking in comfort.

The politics of nothing turns out to be a labeling company that spends all its time and energy on ginning up protests an entire list of emotional issues that amount to nothing. These efforts are more than quips, slogans or tweets. They are determined propaganda efforts to sway the nations voters. The labeling factory at the Politics of Nothing has churned out political correctness, CRT, wokeness, Dont Say Gay, anti-LGBTQA legislation, and All Democrats are communists. The purpose is to engender rage at, well, nothing.

The new Do Nothing Party in D.C. does have some activity, but like the business end of a bee its got a lot of stings and no value. Greene and Boebert between them have filed five bills to impeach President Joe Biden. Here the revenge motive glares back at us as if we were watching reruns of The Godfather.

Greene has introduced 17 bills in Congress four to impeach Biden, one to present the Congressional Medal of Honor to Kyle Rittenhouse, one to eliminate the ATF, one to remove Maxine Waters from the Committee on Financial Services, one to fire Anthony Fauci, two to give Americans more freedom with guns, and one to congratulate the University of Georgia on winning the national championship in football. Theres nothing in any of those bills of benefit to American citizens.

Theres nothing in any of those bills of benefit to American citizens.

Boebert has introduced bills such as Stop AOC Act, Protect our Kids from Harmful Research, (but dont provide free hot breakfast at school), Were not paying you to break our laws act, impeach President Biden for high crimes and misdemeanors, impeach Vice President Kamala Harris for the same reasons, Stop the Biden Caravan Now Act, and the No Mask Mandate Act.

Sen. Cotton has introduced a bill to defund Critical Race Theory called the Stop CRT Act. He also has introduced the Saving American History Act, which would prohibit federal funds from being used to teach the 1619 Project curriculum.

Media coverage of the politics of nothing has inspired people to run for Congress on a Do Nothing platform. South Carolina Republican candidate for the House Katie Arrington has said her top priorities include dismantling the Department of Education, impeaching President Joe Biden and completing Trumps border wall.

The politics of nothing wantonly imposes poverty, lack of education, fear of public education, ill-health and a truncated social safety net. Dragging its collective feet on the COVID pandemic, the ranting anti-maskers, Fire Dr. Fauci wingnuts, the anti-vaxxers, and the we cant shut down the nation railers, we have managed to kill almost one million of our fellow Americans in the name of something called freedom.

Lt. Gov.Dan Patrick of Texas, a politics of nothing poster boy, famously suggested that senior citizens should volunteer to die from COVID in order to keep the economy running, because, God knows, money is more important than senior citizens. And that rolled off the backs of Americans like water off a duck even though it is crazy.

The politicians of nothing are a gaggle of geese loud, obnoxious creatures who leave a mess for others to clean and add nothing to the well-being of our democracy.

The politics of nothing offends all human compassion. When the politicians of nothing entice us, we should resist. If they say, Come with us, let us lay an ambush for transgenders, the poor, the immigrants, the women, the children, let us waylay the oppressed, let us swallow them as sheol swallows life. Let us undermine the teaching of biology and the life-saving research of science, let us revise American history to make light of our nations flaws, ignore them. When they say, We shall enrich ourselves and fill our houses with spoil. Throw in your lot with us, resist.

The wise woman of Proverbs eviscerates the politics of nothing as twisted speech.

The wise woman of Proverbs eviscerates the politics of nothing as twisted speech, as politicians who forsake straight paths, who take pleasure in evildoing, who journey on ways of darkness. Their tracks are labyrinthine and tortuous. Smooth speech, empty rhetoric, promises without policies this is the way of the politics of nothing. The wise woman uses straightforward speech, plain utterances and her mouth speaks truth, her sayings are honest: I, Wisdom, am neighbor to shrewdness, I find out right procedures. I possess policy and competence, insight and power. By me kings reign, and rulers enact what is right. I walk in the path of righteousness, in the tracks of justice (Proverbs 8:12 16, 20).

Bottom line fact: The politics of nothing does nothing to improve peoples lives. The politics of nothing doesnt advocate for the poor or pass legislation that would feed the poor. Being anti-science, anti-history, anti-mask, anti-vaccine, or anti-CRT doesnt put food on anyones table. The politics of nothing has nothing to say about the comfort of persons of color, persons of precarious economic standing, and persons who are living in fear and want. Hungry people cant eat the ideas floating around in the cesspool of the politics of nothing.

Universal health care would improve all lives, but the politics of nothing rails against it. The parable of the Good Samaritan needs to expand from one wealthy man helping one poor beaten man to a government that provides health care for everyone. The politics of nothing doesnt provide doctors in poor rural areas. The politics of nothing doesnt make prescription drugs available for the poor because the profits of big pharma matter more than persons in need of medical care.

Our most sustained effort at providing health care for everyone is the Affordable Care Act passed during the administration of President Barack Obama. The politics of nothing called universal health care a government takeover and said the program provided for death panels. Misinformation and lies. The politics of nothing thought it was good political strategy to refuse to use the name of the act: Affordable Health Care. Instead, they labeled it Obamacare. The name of the bill was about so much that most Americans support and believe in: Affordable. Health. Care.

Church leaders working to influence politics would be better served to promote issues that improve and empower humans rather than emotions laced with fear, rage and a bunch of nothing. Instead of restrictive rules about bodies, why cant church leaders promote an incarnational, embodied concern for all bodies? Christian faith is fleshly, material, physical.

Politics turns out to be too fleshly, too material, too bodily to succumb to the politics of nothing. A church known as the body of Christ should at least be prepared to make politics more about the least of these rather than about nothing.

Rodney W. Kennedycurrently serves as interim pastor of Emmanuel Freiden Federated Church in Schenectady, N.Y., and as preaching instructor at Palmer Theological Seminary. He is the author of nine books, including the newly releasedThe Immaculate Mistake,about how evangelical Christians gave birth to Donald Trump.

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The politics of nothing and the enabling church - Baptist News Global

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Culture secretary Nadine Dorries has announced a real terms cut forBBC funding, with plans to freeze the license fee for two years. There are several theories on the Tories motives. Are they strong-arming the BBC into shape? Reducing funding in retaliation for unfavourable coverage? Or is this a PR manoeuvre intended to appease hard right voters who think the broadcaster is too woke?

On the face of it, accusingthe BBC of having a left-wing slantwould suggest a woeful misreading of the political temperature. Its a talking point that wouldnt appear out of place on GB News. But while the idea that the institution is biased against Conservatives might be absurd, it would be foolish to dismiss the idea that the BBC has any political leaning in itself given it has a clear bias against the left.

The persecution complex is a right-wingers bread and butter. Delusions of maltreatment contribute to a grand victim narrative: mundanities become sinister anti-Conservative plots, evidence of a society that is actively hostile to their beliefs, as opposed to one literally governed by the Conservative Party. The objective of this is to garner sympathy, to convince the wider electorate that if their views are controversial enough to be censored by influential, wokeprogressives, then surely they must be worth listening to.

In 2022, these dishonest tactics manifest in discourse about a culture war. The term of the day is cancel culture, a mostly online phenomenon involving the supposed censorship of Conservatives by the aforementioned powerful progressives. This perceived political suppression ranges from online deplatforming, i.e. losing access to a social media account, to being barred from a venue or space such as a university campus.

JK Rowling is perhaps the most high profile, alleged case of cancel culture. The authors many, many controversial tweets about transgender women may not have hurt her bank account, but did lead to significant online backlash. Perhaps nursing a bruised ego,Rowling characterised this as cancel culture in an open letter, signed by various writers:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

If the power imbalance inherent in a cisgender celebrity millionaire smearing a historically oppressed community wasnt damning enough, the fact that said millionaire suffered no professional consequencesfor her comments should have fatally invalidated Rowlings notion of cancel culture. It didnt.

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Establishment media is a crucial component in this narrative of persecution, with the BBC used as both soapbox and scapegoat. Right-wing commentators and MPs alike use the platform of the broadcaster to condemn what they perceive as the left for the cancelling of their politics. Ironically, the BBC itself often becomes a scapegoat for these grievances a patsy for their image of a left which is somehowinstitutionally all-powerful and morally craven at the same time.

Even while being interviewed on Newsnight or Politics Live, Conservative figures argue that the broadcaster has a discriminative agenda; that its an arm of Big Journalism infringing on their freedom of speech, and that diversity quotas are corrupting its audience and programming. This is what informs right-wing support of the licence fee cut-off: as long as the BBC is cancelling Conservatives, it is a moral imperative to defund it.

Of course, this is all total rubbish.

If the media landscape of the past six years has shown anything, its that the BBCs coverage of historically oppressed peoples is far from impartial. Take recent BBC News articles on the transgender community, such as the notorious Were being pressured into sex by some trans women. When initially published, the piece featured comments by pornographic actress Lily Cade, herself accused of sexual misconduct, who later encouraged the lynching of trans women in a now deleted blog post. Clearly, transgender women arent even permitted to date freely withoutthe nations most popular, impartial news platform associating themwith sexual assault. But its apparently acceptable for the very samebroadcaster to use a cisgender woman accused of sexual assault as a contributor.

BBC News also has a dismal track record when it comes to their coverage, or lack thereof, during protests. Trans right activists were still protestingWere beingpressured into sex by some trans womenmonths after its publication, but theBBCneglected to report on any of such demonstrations, even while protestors rallied outside their Londonbroadcasting house. To acknowledge dissent is to legitimise it.

And who could forget the multiple occasions on which the BBC publicised images of Kill the Bill protestors, after they were circulated by Avon and Somerset Police? A state broadcaster rolling CCTV close-ups of wanted anti-authoritarian protestors like something out of a dystopian police state. Articles like these have laid bare a reactionary bias that legitimises transphobic tropes, and a contempt for those who reject the Conservative status quo.

Arguably even more pervasive is the BBCs ideological bias. For some, the broadcasters red scare-style vilification of Jeremy Corbyn defined the past two elections. BBC News coverage of Labours recent election campaigns continues to be scrutinised, including at an academic level. The former Labour leader and his manifesto were often presented with, at best, an air of exaggerated incredulity, and, at worst, downright cynicism.

The BBCs complaints division responds to criticism on occasion, but never in good faith. For example, former director-general Tony Hall dismissed allegations of bias as conspiracy theories in the aftermath of the 2019 General Election. Also,Newsnight was accused of manipulating a headshot of Corbyn wearing a capto associate him with communist Russia, by photoshopping a Kremlin backdrop and a shade of Soviet red onto the image. Instead of addressing these complaints, BBC editors only responded to the lesser allegation that they had visually exaggerated the shape of the Labour leaders hat. Theirexplanation was a simple technical distortion, a result of the image [being] projected on to a large curved screen as reported by the Guardian, though this didnt explain the colour alteration and background image.

The subtle yet brazen bias of the BBCs reporting is perhaps not all that surprising given the senior figures at the broadcaster withlinks to the Conservative Party. But that isnt changing the minds of anyone on the right. The online behemoth that is cancel culture is a profitable one, generating more political and social capital with every contrived scandal.

The reality is that the BBC isnt cancelling right-wingers. Theyre providing them with a pulpit; giving commentators access to the most popular news platform in the country, from which they broadcast an incredibly powerful faux victim narrative. Cancel culture isnt something wielded against the right, certainly not by the BBC rather, its used to undermine and incite violence against the left. Threatening the status quo makes you fair game: transgender people, young protestors, and anyone further left than the most moderate of social democrats are all subject to incendiary smear campaigns.

Conservative diehards who pride themselves on being frank and outspoken have established themselves as puritans of the online realm. They tell themselves that the entire British establishment is out to get them for their traditional right-wing values, but then condemn media for being inclusive or progressive. They are fundamentally the ones addicted to cancel culture. They clutch their pearls at anything which doesnt fit with their worldview and beliefs, which often includes queerness, Black and Brown people, and sincerity. All the while, they characterise themselves as the only people brave enough to tell it how it is amidst a sea of sensitive snowflakes. The outrage surrounding the BBCs wokeness and political correctness before it (a lineage that stretches back to Mary Whitehouse) is simply the cultural indignation of bigots, dressed up as sensible, no-nonsense populism. Prejudice disguised as pragmatism.

Many British political moderates seem to be reluctant to criticise a broadcaster which has essentially become a right-wing propaganda platform. Some feel unwilling to turn on this world-beatingservice, because the alternative is joining a critical voice that is, currently, predominantly right-wing. But its important to keep in mind that the Conservatives campaign against the BBC, ridiculous as it may be, doesnt mean that the BBC is in the right. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Hand-wringing about optics is useless: if the BBC is allowed to continue its arbitrary, McCarthyist crusade against the left, then speaking out against biased reporting will always be an uphill battle.

Establishment media will never view even the most moderate of left-wing principles as legitimate, so why worry about the consequences of opposing the establishment? Dont be tentative to resist an institution that will never approach you with the journalistic impartiality it affords your opponents. Instead, criticise the BBC!

As a progressive, consider that a de facto state broadcaster that has consistently conflated your politics with Stalinism might, in fact, deserve to lose its funding.

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If the BBC is cancelling anyone, it's cancelling the Left - The Canary