Category Archives: Political Correctness

The 1994 moviePCU, about a rebellious fraternity resisting its politically correct university, was a milestone. Not because the movie was especially goodit wasn't. It was a milestone because it showed that political correctness had officially become a joke.

The derisive term "P.C." had referred to a genuine and powerful force on campus for the previous decade. But by the mid-1990s, it had become the butt of jokes from across the political spectrum. The production of a mainstream movie mocking political correctness showed that its cultural moment had passed.

At the same time, punitive campus speech codes were being struck down. Among the most prominent cases was Stanford Law School, which boasted a notorious speech code banning "speech or other expressionintended to insult or stigmatize" an individual on the basis of membership in a protected class arguably including every living human. You don't have to be a lawyer to see how a ban on anything that "insults" would be abused: Even showingPCUitself, which makes fun of campus activists, feminists, and vegetarians, could potentially get you in trouble under such a broad and vague rule. The 1995 court defeat of the Stanford speech code marked the end of the First Great Age of Political Correctness.

Some assumed this meant political correctness was a fad that was gone forever. On the contrary, it gathered strength over the next two decades, rooting itself in university hiring practices and speech policing, until it became what people now refer to as "wokeness" or the much-abused term "cancel culture."

Political correctness didn't decline and fall. It went underground and then rose again. If anything, it's stronger than ever today. Yet some influential figures on the left still downplay the problem, going so far as to pretend that the increase in even tenured professors being fired for off-limits speech is a sign of a healthy campus. And this unwillingness to recognize a serious problem in academia has helped embolden culture warriors on the right, who have launched their own attacks on free speech and viewpoint diversity in the American education system.

We've fully entered the Second Great Age of Political Correctness. If we are to find a way out, we must understand how we got here and admit the true depths of the problem.

In the decades that followed the First Great Age of Political Correctness, you could be forgiven for assuming that campus attacks on free speech were a thing of the past.

Professors and administrators dismissed concerns, claiming there was no shortage of viewpoint diversity (and that those who suggested otherwise had sinister, probably racist motivations). Speech codes had been roundly defeated wherever they were legally challenged. The P.C. movement had been reduced to a punchline. Indeed, it was such a common punching bag that some pundits rejected the whole idea as a kind of right-wing hoax. Problem solved, right?

Hardly. In reality, the major change after the mid-'90s was that professors were less openly enamored of speech codes. The campus speech wars entered their Ignored Years, during which far less attention was paid to campus speech even as the underlying problem grew worse. It was during this period that the seeds were sown for a deeper change just one generation later.

After the Stanford policy was defeated in court in 1995, speech codes should have faded away into legal oblivion. Instead, their number dramaticallyincreased. By 2009, 74 percent of colleges had extremely restrictive codes, 21 percent had vague speech codes that could be abused to restrict speech, and only eight of the top 346 colleges surveyed had no restrictive code. Unlike in the '90s, many of these policies were championed by a burgeoning administrative class rather than by faculty.

Meanwhile, viewpoint diversity among professors plummeted. In 1996, the ratio of self-identified liberal faculty to self-identified conservative faculty was 2-to-1; by 2011, the ratio was 5-to-1, according tothe Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

More recent statistics paint a starker picture. A 2019 study by the National Association of Scholars on the political registration of professors at the two highest-ranked public and private universities in each state found that registered Democrat faculty outnumbered registered Republican faculty about 9-to-1. In the Northeast, the ratio was about 15-to-1.

In the most evenly split discipline, economics, Democrats outnumber Republicans "only" 3-to-1. The second most even discipline, mathematics, has a ratio of about 6-to-1. Compare this to English and sociology, where the ratios are about 27-to-1. In anthropology, it's a staggering 42-to-1.

In the Ignored Years, higher education became far more expensive and considerably more bureaucratized. From 199495 to 201819, the inflation-adjusted cost of public college tuition nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the administrative class expanded, from roughly one administrator for every two faculty members in 1990 to nearly equal numbers of faculty and administrators in 2012.

What's more, preliminary research showed a "12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators," wrote Samuel J. Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College inThe New York Timesin 2018. His conclusion: "It appears that afairlyliberal student body is being taught by averyliberal professoriateand socialized by anincrediblyliberal group of administrators." Following theTimesarticle, Abrams was targeted twice by students in an unsuccessful campaign to get him fired for speaking out.

The '00s also brought the popularization of "bias-related incident programs," commonly known as "bias response teams" or "BRTs." These programs exist to root out "bias" (once called "prejudice") on campus by empowering anyone within the community to file complaints with the administration, often anonymously. They are attempts to enforce campus orthodoxy in ways that might be (just barely) constitutional. By 2016, nearly 40 percent of surveyed colleges had BRTs.

Early versions of BRTs involved policing inside jokes and pop culture references. Eventually, reported speech included everything from a "snow penis" at the University of Michigan to a humor magazine at the University of California San Diego that had satirized the idea of safe spaces to an incident at John Carroll University in Ohio, where an "anonymous student reported that [the]African-American Alliance's student protest was making white students feel uncomfortable."

It was also in the '00s that ideas such as "trigger warnings" and "microaggressions" burrowed their way into everyday campus parlance. Meanwhile, the number of speaker disinvitations, in which speaking requests were rescinded because of protests or other objections, slowly crept up.

Education schools, in particular, became even more activist, which had an outsized impact on where we are today. The early 2000s began with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)the accreditor of over 600 graduate education programs"recommending" that education students be required to demonstrate a commitment to social justice. The extremely influential Teachers College at Columbia University adopted the requirement, as did others. In 2005, in the face of protest from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), where I am president and CEO, NCATE removed the recommendation. But many schools, including Columbia's Teachers College, did not.

Education school graduates who had been steeped in social justice activism went on to dominate not only K-12 teaching but also the swelling ranks of campus administrators. A random sample taken by Sarah Lawrence's Abrams indicates that 54 percent of college administrators have degrees from education schools.

Two education school graduates helped develop and popularize "orientation" programs, implemented in various forms around the country, that could be described as efforts at thought reform. At the University of Delaware in the late '00s, for example, students were subjected to interrogations by student leaders about all manner of personal topicstheir views on gay marriage, their own sexual orientations, when they discovered their sexuality, whether they would consider dating members of other races and ethnicities, and more. The program then sought to provide students with "treatments," such as mandatory one-on-one sessions with their resident advisers, meant to inculcate them with "correct" moral beliefs.

Requiring "diversity statements" as a condition of faculty hires and promotions is yet another way colleges enforce ideological conformity on campus. These statements effectively require faculty to affirm and provide examples of their commitment to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusionwhich, of course, are rarely defined. Like NCATE's recommended social justice requirement, they function as political litmus testsdemonstrations of one's commitment to prevailing orthodoxies.

The University of California, Berkeley, uses a rubric to score prospective faculty on adherence to specific ideological positions. Candidates are scored negatively, for instance, for attesting to the position that one should "ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and 'treat everyone the same.'"

During the Ignored Years, then, university administrators created infrastructure to keep P.C. alivemoving from speech codes to BRTs as speech codes were shot down in court; encouraging the hiring of even more politically homogeneous professors and administrators; and reframing speech policing as a crucial part of protecting students' mental health.

If a single piece of writing marks the end of the Ignored Years, it's Jenny Jarvie's "Trigger Happy," a March 2014New Republicarticle critical of campus trigger warningsthe practice of alerting students anytime a potentially sensitive topic is about to come up in class conversation if the teacher thinks it may "trigger" a trauma response in students or just upset them in some way. Jarvie's piece presaged a marked increase in coverage of such issues beyond conservative media. Other milestones included Jonathan Chait'sNew Yorkmagazine article "Not A Very P.C. Thing to Say" and Jon Ronson's bookSo You've Been Publicly Shamed, both published in 2015. Suddenly, people were paying attention to speech on campus again.

But it wasn't just an increase in coverage. Something else had changed on campus. During the previous two decades, administrators were usually the leaders of campus censorship campaigns. Students, in turn, resisted those efforts. In late 2013, however, there was an explosion in censorship that was student-led. The infrastructure built during the Ignored Years was producing downstream effects.

The generation hitting campuses in 2013 had been educated by the graduates of those activist education schools. In some cases they were literally the children of the students who had pushed for (or at least were OK with) speech codes in the '80s and '90s.

This generation also grew up with social media; it had a genuine awareness of how hurtful and nasty speech can be, especially when anonymous and online. But it had not been taught that freedom to engage in nasty speech is necessary to the functioning of our democracy and to the production of knowledge.

In 2015 alone, there were multiple high-profile free-speech blowups on campus. Perhaps most famous was the confrontation between sociologist Nicholas Christakis and students at Yale that began over school guidance about inappropriate Halloween costumes.

In 2017, there was outright violence at Berkeley and Middlebury College, with activist students using force in response to speech they opposed. (At Middlebury, a professor named Allison Stanger was permanently injured in a melee during an appearance by the author Charles Murray.) Then came 2020, with hundreds of high-profile examples of attempts to get professors and students canceled, all across the country.

One might assume that the increased media attention and the numerous high-profile incidents of campus speech crackdownsincluding violent confrontations caught on videowould have definitively demonstrated that the campus free speech situation has become dismal. Yet not only were there debates about whether campus speech was really in crisis but new arguments appeared insisting that campus censorship and academic freedom simply weren't problems at all.

Netflix's The Chair is a smart, well-written, well-acted show. The series examines the many challenges facing an English professor and her department at an elite liberal arts college with dwindling admissions. One of the series' main throughlines occurs when a tenured professor is pushed out of his job after giving a satirical Nazi salute during a lecture on modernism. Students call him a Nazi and demand his resignation.

It's not quite as overtly comic, but it could be seen as this era'sPCU, in that it signals that it's OK to mock and resist the illiberalism we've seen emerge on campuses over the last five or six years. And it might be taken as a sign that people are finally willing to address the repressive atmosphere at many colleges.

But not all viewers saw it that way.New York Timescolumnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that "a real-world tenured professor like Bill would be extremely unlikely to lose his job for making fun of Nazis in the wrong way." She also posited that concern about the climate on campus isreallyabout people over 40 feeling ashamed of being "repelled by the sensibilities of the young."

In fact, polling finds that Generation Z (the cohort of young people born in 1996 or after) has the most negative outlook on cancel culture of any generation. And Goldberg's assertion thatThe Chairused an implausible example of a threat to free speech on campus is undermined by the fact that something very similar actually happened earlier this year.

In January, University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Robert Schuyler was pushed into retirement after he reacted to being silenced in a departmental meeting by giving a mock Nazi salute. Critics characterized this one-second gesture as "heinous acts" and called on the university to punish Schuyler in order to demonstrate its opposition to "all forms of prejudice." The student newspaper dutifully reported that Schuyler told it "he does not endorse Nazism," as if his sarcastic reply to the rigid enforcement of faculty meeting rules could legitimately be interpreted as an expression of support for the National Socalist philosophy.

For those who defend free speech on campus, a case involving a Nazi salute would be among the less sympathetic cases in a given year. (The fact that Schuyler's gesture was sarcastic barely registers in an age when the alleged effect of speech is deemed more important than the intent.) But it doesn't take an accusation of Nazism to get you in trouble these days. Professors have been targeted for quoting James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.; for asking students to analyze the consequences of the historical shift in trading and travel patterns known as "Columbian exchange"; and for speculating on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, University of Illinois Chicago law professor Jason Kilborn was placed on leave and subjected to months of investigation after students complained about aself-censoredreference to two epithetsliterally, "N_____" and "B____"in a law school exam hypotheticalaboutworkplace discrimination.

If anything,The Chairmade the students demanding the professor's resignation look more reasonable than they often do in real life. The series features a confrontation with students evocative of Christakis' confrontation in 2015, an encounter I witnessed. There, students surrounded Christakis, screamed at him, broke down in tears, called him disgusting, and told him he shouldn't sleep at night. The cause? Nicholas' wife, Erika, had argued in an email that students should be able to decide which Halloween costumes to wearan argumentin favor of student autonomythat was surely less offensive than a Nazi salute.

Since 2015, there have been at least 200 attempts to get speakers disinvited from campuses; 101 of those were successful. But even when the events go on, student protesters sometimes physically block the entrance to speeches deemed problematic or chant, bang drums, or pull the fire alarm so the speeches can't be heard. A few speakers have actually been assaulted, including unknown chemicals sprayed at conservative podcaster Michael Knowles at University of MissouriKansas City. Riots at Berkeley in 2017 over a Milo Yiannopoulos speech included smashed windows, bloodied spectators, and fire bombs.

Goldberg's article was premised in part on the claim, advanced byLiberal Currentseditor Adam Gurri, that only a small number of professors have been targeted for cancellation. "If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale," Gurri wrote, "we would consider it effectively solved."

Gurri's count of targeted professors comes from data collected by FIRE. In context, it does not show a problem effectively solved.

From 2015 through mid-October 2021, FIRE identified 471 attempts to get professors fired or punished for their constitutionally protected speech, with almost three-quarters of them resulting in some type of sanction. In 106 of those cases, the sanction included the loss of a job. The frequency of these attempts has risen dramatically, from 30 in 2015 to 122 in 2020. And the list includes 172 tenured professors who were punished, 27 of whom were fired.

Tenure was designed to be a nearly invincible protection from termination for one's speech, beliefs, teaching, or research. Until very recently, even a single fired tenured professor for anything related to his or her speech or scholarship was a huge deal. Twenty-seven tenured professors fired in a handful of years for their expression is unprecedented. It undermines the whole function of tenure, which is to protect academic freedom by assuring professors they won't find themselves unemployed for exercising it. Contrary to Gurri's framing, this number is not small.

His argument resembles another misleading argument made by those who say campus speech culture is not a problem. It typically starts by noting that there are 6,000 colleges in the country and then shrugs off the hundreds of attempts to push out professors as a small number. This makes the problem look diffuse. In reality, it's quite concentrated.

Of the top 100 schools according toU.S. News & World Report, 65 have had a professor targeted since 2015. Meanwhile, the top 10 schools had an average of seven incidentseach.

In fact, if you start with the top 100 universities and then eliminate the schools that appeared in FIRE's Scholars Under Fire database, schools with severely restrictive "red light" speech codes, schools where FIRE intervened on behalf of a student or faculty member, schools with a successful disinvitation campaign, and schools with a Bias Response Team, you are left with only two institutions: the California Institute of Technology and the Colorado School of Mines. If you eliminate schools with vague "yellow light" speech codes as well, there would be no colleges in the top 100 left.

But the problem is disproportionate in some places. Take the "most influential university in the world," Harvard, which educates a notably large share of America's ruling class. Keep in mind that the Harvard faculty, as at most elite colleges, is politically homogeneous: Just 2.5 percent of its faculty of arts and sciences identifies as "conservative" and 0.4 percent as "very conservative." Despite that overwhelming ideological unity, there have been 12 public attacks on professors just since 2015.

In 2017, Harvard rescinded the admission of 10 would-be students over offensive memes in a Facebook group. In 2013, the school surreptitiously scanned resident deans' email accounts in the wake of a cheating scandalnot to find the cheaters but to sniff out who had leaked an emailaboutthe scandal, a gross violation of faculty privacy.

By downplaying the scale of such problems, Gurri and others are wishing away the "chilling effect," the well-recognized fact in both law and psychology that when people have to guess as to which opinion, joke, or idea will get them in trouble, they tend to self-censor. Indeed, professors have been telling us they are chilled for years. As far back as 2010, when the Association of American Colleges & Universities asked professors to respond to the statement, "It is safe to have unpopular views on campus," only 16.7 percent strongly agreed.

According to a 2021 report from Eric Kaufmann at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, 70 percent of conservative academics in America say that there is a hostile climate toward their beliefs, and 62 percent of conservative graduate students agree that "my political views wouldn't fit, which could make my life difficult." Meanwhile, 1 in 5 faculty members openly admit to having discriminated against a grant proposal because it was perceived as conservative or "right-leaning," and slightly more than 1 in 10 faculty members say they have discriminated against conservatives on both paper submissions and promotions.

Perhaps the saddest story of a targeted tenured professor is that of University of North Carolina Wilmington criminology professor Mike Adams, whose struggles at the school spanned nearly 20 years. After Adams was denied tenure because of his conservative writing, he filed a successful lawsuit, which not only won him tenure but also resulted in an important 4th Circuit appeals court decision protecting academic freedom in five states. Nonetheless, last summer, Adams was pushed into early retirement after he tweeted a sarcastic comparison of COVID-19 restrictions to slavery. In the weeks that followed, he killed himself.

Of the 471 incidents mentioned above, most have come from the left of the targeted scholar. But 164 of them have come from the scholar's right. In fact, many of the efforts by conservatives to turn the tide on campus have mutated into approaches that look uncomfortably like the very speech codes they battled for decades.

In one case, researchers trying to determine whether liberals were becoming more comfortable with political violence were targeted by conservative author Todd Starnes, who insisted that a survey to discover student attitudes was equivalent to endorsing violence. In another case, the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party demanded that the University of Virginia investigate professor Larry Sabato for tweets that were critical of former President Donald Trump.

Across the country, conservatives trying to reduce the influence of campus-style identity politics have passed laws banning what they dub "critical race theory" (CRT), a catchall term for a constellation of ideas that encompass a certain perspective on race and its intersections with society. For most of its history, critical race theory was a niche area of study within the academy. But since the George Floyd protests of 2020, it has gone mainstream with the political left and become a villain to the political right.

The laws that Republican lawmakers have written in their effort to counter CRT are almost always unconstitutional as applied to higher education. What's more, they're likely to backfire. Giving campus administrators permission to get rid of professors who teach or subscribe to a particular ideology will almost always be used to get rid of dissenters. And conservatives who honestly express their opinions are, by definition, dissenters on most campuses today.

What's remarkable about this debate, asThe Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf has pointed out, is that the right and the left have swapped places. Two of CRT's leading thinkers, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda, were two of the strongest proponents of hate speech laws and campus speech codes in the '80s and '90s. And both have contributed to books with titles such asWords That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. By relying on the idea that ideas are dangerous, the anti-CRT laws now being promoted by activists on the right are direct descendents of the speech policies long favored by Matsuda and Delgado.

Pennsylvania H.B. 1532 bans requiring "a student to read, view or listen to a book, article, video presentation, digital presentation or other learning material that espouses, advocates or promotes a racist or sexist concept" in public K-12 schooling and higher education and bans hosting or providing a venue for a speaker that "espouses, advocates or promotes any racist or sexist concept." Laws in Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma ban courses that teach that "any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex"; bills in eight more states would impose the same language; and a federal bill referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform proposes restraining Washington, D.C., schools in the same way.

As with Matsuda and Delgado's work, the underlying notion is that some discomforting speechespecially speech that causes discomfort about race or genderis harmful and should be prohibited.

Defenders of anti-CRT laws usually concede that the legislation's language is overbroad and poorly crafted. Almost invariably, they then insist the laws' vagueness should be ignored because of the scale of the problem and because those crafting the laws are on the side of the angels. I have seen this exact same argument made for decades to defend speech codes aimed at addressing racism and sexism on campus: In the face of such a terrible problem, the specifics of the law don't matter; only the intentions do.

As anti-CRT laws have proliferated, many on the left suddenly became aware of how broad and vague speech codes can be used to punish ideologies, and educators, they are fond of. Meanwhile, many on the right suddenly began to embrace the same sorts of codes they had fought for decades, hoping such codes could be the weapon they've long needed in order to turn the ideological tide on campus.

True believers from across the political spectrum seem to believe that some weapons are good if they're wielded by the right people and bad if wielded by the wrong people. That's a problem that needs to be solved, lest campus culture become a tit-for-tat race to the proverbial gutter.

Amid the Second Great Age of Political Correctness,American higher education has become too expensive, too illiberal, and too conformist. It has descended into a period of profound crisis wrought by shifts in hiring, student development, and politically charged speech codes developed during the Ignored Years, when too few were paying attention. American campuses should be bastions of free expression and academic freedom. Instead, both are in decline.

We cannot afford to just give up on higher ed. College and university presidents can and should do the following five things:

Those who donate to colleges should refuse to do so without demanding these changes.

But we need to do more than reform our existing institutions. We need alternative models to traditional higher education.

In early November 2021, an upstart called the University of Austin announced the intention to create a new academic institution on the principles of radically open inquiry, civil discourse, and engagement with diverse perspectives. Publicly available information is sparse, but according to Pano Kanelos, the incoming president of the University of Austin and a former president of St. John's College, it plans to launch masters programs in 2022 and 2023 and an undergraduate program in 2024.

Meanwhile, Khan Academy is an online program where anyone can watch free, high-quality instructional videos on a variety of topics and receive an assessment of their abilities in return. Minerva University is an ambitious hybrid model offering brick-and-mortar facilities in San Francisco and several foreign cities and online instruction to students around the world. It focuses on teaching "critical wisdom" to top-tier students and claims to be more exclusive than the most elite colleges. It's not too hard to imagine a future in which employers value a mastery level from the Khan Academy or a degree from Minerva more than a degree from a middling traditional university.

The bottom line is that the opinions of professors and students should be ferociously protected, and that those who run universities must reject the idea that colleges and universities exist to impose orthodoxies on anyone. Over the past decade, too many academic institutions have grown used to promoting specific views of the world to incoming students.

Radical open-mindedness would be wildly out of place at most contemporary universities. Getting there will take substantial cultural and political change.

That starts with self-awareness. One lesson of the First Great Age of Political Correctness and the P.C. wars of the 1980s and '90s is that it was a huge mistake to think that because a movie likePCUskewered campus culture, the problem had already fixed itself. As a result, the problem was allowed to grow worse.

We can't make that mistake again. The ideal time for achieving real change in higher ed was 30 or even 40 years ago. The next best time is now.

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The Second Great Age of Political Correctness - Reason

Sarah Silverman has never been one to care too much about political correctness. Yet she understands that publicly identifying with a particular political group is one way to signal your basic ideologies, and shes worried that some people who self-identify as liberals or progressives might be losing sight of what that stands for.

As Mediaite reports, Silverman shared a personal story on the latest episode of her podcast about how her friends kid goes to a so-called liberal school, where they just expelled a group of eighth-graders for essentially doing the kinds of things that eighth-graders do. In this case: Making a list of all the kids in their class, then ranking them by popularity, from most to least.

Silverman said that she couldnt stop thinking about the story, because it was something she was seeing happening with liberals and progressives. [And] I worry what liberal has become is becoming antithetical to its cause.

Given that the traditional definition of a liberal is one who supports the individual and individual rights such as freedom of speech, Silverman has a point. Which isnt to say that she agrees with the exercise in question. But, in her mind, it could have been a teachable moment:

Its not nice, of course. But it is a part of how children develop. These misguided attempts of figuring out: Where do I fit? Where am I in this picture? Its very usual of behavior at that age

I mean god, what an opportunity to teach them about why you had that impulse, and who you hurt, Give them detention, punish them. But expulsion? There needs to be, especially, and critically for children, a path to redemption when you make a mistake. Its such a f***ing teachable moment.

To Silverman, that the schools immediate reaction was to remove the teens involved in the incident means that they should no longer be able to identify as a liberal place of learning.

You are not progressive if youll not allow children with developing mindsif you allow them no room to progress for progress, she said. You cant call yourself progressive if youre kicking kids out of school for navigating childhood poorly.

You can listen to the full episode on Spotify.

(Via Mediaite)

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Sarah Silverman Is Worried Liberals Are Losing Their Way - UPROXX

Dominic Raab is to outline a sweeping overhaul of human rights law that he claims will counter wokery and political correctness and expedite the deportation of foreign criminals.

The highly controversial reforms, to be announced on Tuesday which will create a new bill of rights will introduce a permission stage to deter spurious human rights claims and change the balance between freedom of expression and privacy.

But lawyers described the proposed changes to the Human Rights Act as dangerous and fuelled by political rhetoric rather than necessity. They pointed out that the government has signalled its intentions before the independent review of the Human Rights Act, which is due to be published later on Tuesday.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said the intended reforms would allow judges to override rulings from the European court of human rights, rather than following them blindly.

It claimed that as many as seven out of 10 successful human rights challenges were brought by foreign national offenders who cited a right to family life in the first instance when appealing against deportation orders a practice it wants to end.

A senior MoJ source said the government felt strongly that free speech and democratic debate had been whittled away whether by wokery or political correctness.

After the Mail on Sundays failed appeal over its publication of a letter written by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, to her estranged father, the source said common-law privacy laws had come in by the back door and that freedom of speech needed to be given extra weight.

But Stephanie Boyce, president of the Law Society, said any changes to the Human Rights Act should be led by evidence and not driven by political rhetoric.

She said: British judges deliver British justice based on British laws, looking closely at how judgments fit into the national context, and disapplying them if there is good reason to do so. UK courts do not, as government suggests, blindly follow case law from the European court of human rights.

Equally, foreign criminals already can be deported in the public interest even where there are arguments against this from the right to family life. Every case is different, making it necessary to weigh each on its own particulars. Talk of restricting rights is dangerous and does not reflect the nuanced job the courts have to do.

The MoJ has highlighted the fight over prisoners voting rights, and the requirement for police to issue threat to life notices known as Osman warnings to gang members as examples of unwelcome interference from Strasbourg.

Without explaining how, the MoJ said its plans would also reduce pull factors to the UK being exploited by people-smugglers facilitating dangerous small boat crossings. But it confirmed that the UK would remain a party to the European convention on human rights.

Martha Spurrier, director at Liberty, highlighted instances of the Human Rights Act helping people achieve justice, including LGBT military veterans getting their medals back after they were stripped of them because of their sexuality, and unmarried women receiving their widows pension after the death of their partners.

She described the plans as a blatant, unashamed power grab, adding: Todays announcement is being cast as strengthening our rights when in fact, if this plan goes through, they will be fatally weakened. This government is systematically shutting down all avenues of accountability through a succession of rushed and oppressive bills. We must ensure the government changes course as a matter of urgency, before we very quickly find ourselves wondering where our fundamental human rights have gone.

Sacha Deshmukh, the chief executive of Amnesty International, said human rights are not sweets ministers can pick and choose from and the aggressive attempt to roll-back the laws needs to be stopped.

He added: If ministers move ahead with plans to water down the Human Rights Act and override judgments with which they disagree, they risk aligning themselves with authoritarian regimes around the world.

Prof Philippe Sands QC, who sat on the 2013 commission on a bill of rights, said: The concern is that this will mark a further step in the governments eager embrace of lawlessness, undermining the rights of all individuals, the effective role of British judges and the European court, and the devolution settlement into which the Human Rights Act is embedded.

Adam Wagner, a leading human rights barrister with Doughty Street chambers, said: If this is to be a true bill of rights, instead of a party political rights wishlist, as this appears to be, the government should obtain cross-party support.

More here:

Raab to claim overhaul of human rights law will counter political correctness - The Guardian

When are we supposed to get the Harriet Tubman $20 bill that we were promised by the Democrats a few years ago?

Former President Andrew Jackson needs to come off the front of the bill. He was a racist slave owner and he horribly mistreated Native Americans in the Trail of Tears.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew announced in 2016 that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. That was under the administration of former President Obama.

The Trump administration slowed down the process, calling the change pure political correctness.

Now a lady in U.S. Sen. Mark Warners office told me that this is to happen in 2032.

The Democrats appear to be long on promises and short on delivery.

NAOMI GAYLE SAUNDERS

Richmond

Editors note: The Biden administration said in January that it was trying to speed up efforts to make the change, but it may not happen until 2030 at the earliest because of the federal Treasury Departments redesign process that includes required security and anti-counterfeiting measures, according to officials.

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Waiting for Harriet Tubman to appear on U.S. currency - Richmond Free Press

You can freeze during the traditional New Years Eve ball drop in New Yorks Times Square.

Or you can welcome 2022 someplace tropical, like the Florida Keys.

Key West revelers can choose from several lighthearted takeoffs on the Times Square gala as midnight approaches Friday, Dec. 31.

At the Bourbon St. Pub/New Orleans House complex, 724 Duval St., female impersonator Sushi is to star in the Red Shoe Drop festivities for the 24th year. Seconds before midnight, a super-sized red high heel carrying the elaborately gowned Sushi will be lowered from the complexs balcony toward the cheering crowd below.

As well as Sushis lively banter prior to the drop, spectators can enjoy performances by notable female impersonators and other local and national talents on a street-side stage.

Street viewing of the entertainment and drop is free and open to the public. A limited number of tickets for a VIP balcony party overlooking the stage is offered each year; call New Orleans House Guest House at 305-293-9800 for VIP ticket availability.

Party people on lower Duval Street can watch the drop of a gigantic manmade conch shell, the symbol of the Florida Keys, to the flat roof of Sloppy Joes Bar, 201 Duval St. Festivities are emceed by a rooftop host and, as a huge clock counts down the seconds to midnight, the supersized shell begins to descend. Live music inside Sloppy Joes rounds out the revelry. Visit http://www.sloppyjoes.com.

In the Key West Historic Seaport, New Years Eve merriment is centered on the Schooner Wharf Bar, 202 William St., and celebrates the islands colorful seafaring heritage. Just before midnight, political correctness is out the window as a pirate wench is to be lowered from the top of a majestic tall ships mast completing her descent as the clock strikes and cannons boom to welcome 2022. The event includes live music, dancing and festivities at the Schooner Wharf. Visit http://www.schoonerwharf.com.

At the Ocean Key Resort & Spa, 0 Duval St. on Key West Harbor, plans call for a huge replica of a Key lime wedge to splash down into a larger-than-life margarita glass on the propertys Sunset Pier at midnight. The event features live entertainment by The Beatle Band as well as dancing, a super-premium open bar and butler-passed appetizers. Only 125 tickets are available for the gala. For a ticketing link, visit http://www.facebook.com/OceanKeyResort/events/?ref=page_ internal.

New Years Eve festivities also are planned at the original home of Pan American World Airways featuring the midnight flight of a stewardess in a replica Pan Am aircraft. Today called First Flight Island Restaurant & Brewery, the structure now at 301 Whitehead St. was the place where Pan Ams first tickets were sold in 1927. Other attractions include a full open bar, champagne, chef-manned food stations and live music. Attendees are encouraged to wear 1920s Gatsby-era costumes. For information and ticketing, visit http://www.firstflightkw.com/nye.

In Marathon, the Lighthouse Grill at the Faro Blanco Resort & Yacht Club, 1996 Overseas Highway, is planning a midnight Anchor Drop from the iconic Faro Blanco lighthouse, a beacon that has guided guests to the popular resort and marina since the 1950s. Revelers can first enjoy dinner at the grill, as well as dancing and snapping shots in a photo booth, and toast the New Year with complimentary champagne. For reservations, call 305-434-9039. For information, visit ,www.facebook.com/ events/436927494701313?ref=newsfeed.

Islamoradas Cheeca Lodge & Spa, mile marker 82 oceanside, also is staging a New Years Eve celebration and midnight fireworks display. Revelers can savor a multi-course gourmet dinner at the flagship Atlantics Edge restaurant while enjoying panoramic ocean views. Live music is scheduled from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. For more information, costs and reservations (required), call 305-517-4447.

While the festivities outlined here are New Years Eve highlights in the Florida Keys, a roster of Keys holiday activities and other special events can be viewed at http://www.fla-keys.com/calendar/.

See more here:

Places across the Keys to ring in 2022 - Key West Florida Weekly

SUDDENLY, its not looking very good for the Prime Minister.

Behind in the polls and his personal standing plummeting.

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Meanwhile, he just suffered a huge act of defiance by 100 of his own back-benchers. Seems theyve had enough of him too.

The latest problem came with his plans for tackling the Omigod! variant of Covid.It is apparently ripping through the population like a Doberman Pinscher through a tin of Pedigree Chum.

Boriss response has been to confuse the bejesus out of people. So, work from home, he says.

But dont forget to attend the office Christmas party! This makes no sense.

Were going to have a nice Christmas, he tells us.

But there are hints that much stricter measures may be just around the corner. A Plan C, apparently.

Listen, Johnson, if its THAT serious, then sod Christmas.

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And here we have the two big problems the stuff which is turning people off BoJo and the Tories very quickly.

First, he is incoherent. He flip-flops from day to day. The measures he introduces sometimes seem contradictory.

According to a Labour MP, one minister said the travel restrictions are useless. But then theres this his other big flaw. He is not how can I put this terribly honest.

He is trying to scare us about Omicron. It is a variant which is very transmissible. Fine, we understand that.

But according to the PM, it is also lethal. One person in the UK has already died with it. But he wont tell us who that person is. Nor how old they are.

And my guess is that this is because the person is indeed very old. And probably with very serious underlying health conditions.

It seems to be the NHS that Boris is trying to protect, rather than us.

Because all the evidence we have so far is that Omicron is much, much milder than the Delta variant and considerably milder than the original virus.

In which case it is scarcely worse than a cold. Maybe a nasty cold.

This seems to tally with official reports from South Africa. There, the hospitalisation rate has been one third lower than with previous mutations of this virus.

Whats more, the rates of infection there are slowing.

Boris is trying to use Omicron as a means to force the reluctant to get vaccinated.But theres a problem here, too. He is telling the unvaccinated that they need a couple of jabs to protect them.

While telling those who have had two jabs that this is nowhere near enough and they need a booster.

This all looks like a Government which is coming apart at the seams.

The backbenchers have no faith in the leadership. Some senior Tories are mumbling that Boris has to go.

They are right, I think. That lethal cocktail of incoherence and dishonesty is destroying a Government which we once had so much faith in.

A Prime Minister who never seems to be actually skippering the ship of state. But letting it drift aimlessly.

The public needs honesty and decisiveness. But those are two things which seem utterly alien to our Prime Minister.

The clock is ticking, Boris.

For your premiership its aboutlet me check my watch two minutes to midnight.

Should I stay or should I go?

IT looks very much like Ed Sheeran and Sir Elton John will capture the Christmas No1 spot with their hugely original take on the yuletide single, Merry Christmas.

In it, Mr Sheeran talks about mistletoe, Christmas trees and sitting by a roaring fire.

Although nowhere near as close to it as I would l like him to be.

Luckily, pop-pickers, there are some other lovely tunes in competition with Ed and Elton for that coveted chart-topping slot and, below, Ive come up with some ideas of my own.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go? Introducing Bojo... & The True Bluenotes

It's not my party (and I'll cry if I want to), Allegra Stratton

The Only Way Is App, Sajid Javid & The Exciters

I enjoyed my Sun columnist mate Jane Moores awards of the year.

Especially Prince Harry The Fresh Prince of Hot Air.

7

My hero of the year is another colleague of mine.

A writer called Toby Young.

Now, were some way short of being the closest of friends, me and Tobes.

Never trust a QPR fan, for a start. But less than two years ago he set up the Free Speech Union.

It has been a huge success, fighting the cancel culture.

And sticking up for people persecuted by the woke brigade.

Its an incredible achievement and gives us all a bit of hope while the progressive nutters are doing their stuff.

Kind of hate to say it, Toby but respect.

Meanwhile, my own special award for Privileged Dim Witted Ponce of the Year goes to university drop-out Miles Routledge, aged 21.

He is the dork who had to be airlifted out of Afghanistan at taxpayers expense when the Taliban took over.

Hed travelled there to see what is was like.

Now the drongo is in South Sudan. A country beset by civil war.

No airlift this time, Miles. Hunker down in your mud hut Mummy isnt coming to save you again.

I wonder to what extent political correctness played a part in the horrible death of poor Star Hobson?

Social workers thought relatives were being homophobic when they expressed their concerns.

As it turned out, those worries were absolutely justified.

Political correctness kills.

Well done to American athlete Lia Thomas.

What a swimmer. Keeps smashing all the records for womens swimming.

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Thats because Lia, right, is a bloke. She is a bloke who has transitioned to being a woman. Rivals are not best pleased about it.

But theyre scared to speak for fear of being cancelled.

When will this madness stop?

Remember Geronimo, the alpaca killed by the Government?

They said he had bovine TB. He didnt.

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The final post mortem tests have discovered not even the tiniest trace of bovine TB anywhere within the poor creatures cadaver.

Environment Secretary George Eustice had Geronimo slaughtered, utterly pointlessly, at great expense in order to preserve his appalling badger cull, which has been of questionable success in slowing the spread of the disease.

When this increasingly ridiculous Government insists how enlightened it is on animal rights, remember Geronimo and the badger cull.

Good for Boris! No, dont be daft not that Boris.

I mean Boris the Siberian Eagle Owl.

7

He has chewed through his tether and escaped captivity in Hampshire.Been gone a week and his owner is getting worried.

But thats what owls should be doing. Flying around untethered.

His owner reckons he might be on the look out for a quick shag.

Good luck with that, Boris.

I dont think there are many Siberian Eagle Owl babes hanging around Southampton.

Hes nearly 3ft tall and with a 6ft wingspan, by the way.

So if youre out walking in Hampshire with a poodle, keep it on a tight

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Boris Johnson is incoherent, he flip flops from day to day and his measures are contradictory... - The US Sun

In the upside-down world alternate universe created by Fox News,"real Americans" are under siege in "their owncountry" from nonwhite, non-English-speaking immigrants, Black and brown people more generally, and street violence orchestrated by antifa, the Black Lives Mattermovement and other bogeymen

America's suburbsare being overrun by criminals (understood by default to be Black or brown), and patriotic Americans face relentless censorship and discrimination from the forces of "wokeness." Teachers and activistsare spreading "critical race theory" in public schools, devoted tobrainwashing white children into self-hatred.

"Socialism" is running amok and destroying America. Gay menand lesbians have ruined the institution of marriage, and trans people are sexual deviants who loiterin public bathrooms seeking to molest children or, more to the point,seduce trueAmerican heterosexual manly men.

"Political correctness" is taking away (white) people's freedoms and oppressing them. Christmas is being destroyed. America's "Christian values" and origins are being disrespected. The country's pristine history asa "Christiannation" and the shining city on the hillare being "canceled" by leftist scolds,the 1619 Project and otherAmerica-haters."Western civilization" (meaning some imaginaryversion of what used to be called Christendom) facesexistential danger.

RELATED:'Tis the season, once again: Evangelicals must save Christmas from an imaginary enemy

Social scientists and other researchers have repeatedly documented thatFox News viewers know less about empirical reality and current events than people who do not consume any news at all.

In the Age of Trump and America's crisis of democracy, matters have growneven more dire: Those who live in the Fox News universe (and that of the larger right-wing media)are also much more likely to believe in the Big Lie that Donald Trump "won" the 2020 election, that Joe Biden is a usurper, that theterrorists who attempted to overthrow democracy on Jan. 6 are patriots, and that violence in defense of "traditional Americanvalues"is legitimate and necessary.

Fox News takes thesociopathic values and policies of the Trump-ruled Republican Party, and the even darker currents below those,and seeks towhitewashthem into normal and even idealistic political positions.As such, Fox News can legitimately be considereda public menace and a danger to America's collective safety and sanity.

In a recent conversation with Salon, documentary filmmaker and author Jen Senko discussed how Fox News is destroying families and other personal relationships:

A woman recently shared with me how her husband was a good, sweet guy and a really quiet person. Right before Trump ran for office and became president, he started watching Fox News and his personality completely changed. He would yell at her and their child more. He would criticize her, his wife, because she was a Democrat,yell at her, yell at her kid, start criticizing her. The husband was becoming emotionally abusive.

The woman who reached out to me was afraid that it was going to traumatize her child and that she mighthave to leave her husband. She was really sad about it because she had once been very much in love with him.

Another person who contacted me lost several members of her family to COVID. Her father still wouldn't get the vaccine. He got COVID, and still wouldn't get the vaccine or said he wouldn't and he died because Tucker Carlson and other people on Fox Newswere telling people like him not to get vaccinated.

I think they're in a trance. They are definitely not awake. They're almost on autopilot. They are going to accept anything they are told by Fox.

RELATED:Jen Senko on how Fox News brainwashed her dad and is prepping its audience for fascism

It hardly needs sayingthat there is no real "news" seen on Fox News although some in America's political and media classes still pretend otherwise, for a range of personal and professional reasons. Chris Wallace's recent announcement that he is leaving Fox News after 18 years will be greeted by the mainstream media as another sign that "respectable Republicans" are turning against the fascist insurgency and that a "civil war" is raging on the right. In fact, Wallace and other"old school" reporters at Fox News have largely served as beards, lendingcover and legitimacy to the channel'spropaganda operation..

Many outsiders to Fox News, who still live in normal society,cannot navigate or decipher the power that Fox News holds over its public and the larger right-wing political cult. For that we have Andrew Lawrence,a senior researcher at Media Matters and a professional guide to the Fox News universe, who told me that he watches the channel so others don't have to.

In our recentconversation, Lawrence explained howFox News functions inthe Republican anti-democracy movement, and how its programs usefear,repetition and lies to condition its viewers into compliance, submission and a constant state of anxiety.Healso discussed the role of white supremacy and white victimology in the Fox News universe, and in particular specifically thelarger narrative being offered by Tucker Carlson and other highly-rated Fox news prime-time hosts.

Toward the end of this conversation, Lawrence offers his advice on how media consumers can leadhealthier and more balanced livesin this timeof 24/7 news coverage, an escalating democracy crisisand what feels like a never-ending torrent ofexistential danger.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Given American's escalating democracy crisis, how are you feeling? How doyou makesense of this constant deluge of events?

There's been so much and there continues to be so much happening. It is day after day after day. It can be overwhelming. The whole situation can be depressing. I watch Fox News so that other people don't have to.

There are little blips of good news here and there. It's not all doom and gloom, but watching the things that we watch every single night at Media Matters is hard. We don't just look at Fox News we go into the worst parts of the internet and keep tabs on extremist groups as well.

The right-wing attacks on democracy, to me, are entirelypredictable. To cite one obvious example, the Jan.6 coup attempt and attack on the Capitol was announced publicly in advance. There was no surprise, yet there is an entire media class that pretends to be shockedby the obvious. As someone whotracksright-wing media for a living, how do you make sense of this pattern?

I was recently thinking about the El Paso Walmart shooting. It was inspired by all this Fox News right-wing talk about an "invasion" along the Southern border from Latin and South America. The El Paso shooter put out a manifesto. Here at Media Matters we went back and looked at how many times Fox News had mentionedan "invasion."

RELATED:El Paso is the best of America. No wonder a white nationalist terrorist attacked it

Another example is how you can go all the way back to George Tiller,an abortion doctor who was murdered,and how Bill O'Reilly was labeling him "George Tiller the Baby Killer."This happened right up until hiskilling. There was ashooting at Planned Parenthood in Colorado, whenFox News was reporting that they were selling baby parts.

You have the invasion rhetoric. You have Tree of Life Synagogue [in Pittsburgh], where the shooter was a guy who thought George Soros was funding migrant "caravans," which was another main talking point on Fox News. There is inspiration for these events coming from right-wing media talking points, over and over and over again. It leads to serious acts of violence.

Jan.6 is another example where there wasa mob of people swarming the Capitol and Fox News hosts were treating it like a college football game in how they were hyping it up beforehand.

You said you watch Fox News so other people don't have to. Why are their viewers so dedicated?

What Fox News is doing is capitalizing on fear, more than anything. That is theformula for keeping their viewers enraged and engaged. Using the COVID vaccine as an example,Fox News understands that their audience has a distrust in the government and some type of "they" who, in their minds, hold power and are controlling things. Fox News leverages that more than anything else. What I have realized, especially over the last sixmonths, is that Fox News is just a grift.

They're just grifting their viewers and they're going to say anything that they have to in order to keep eyeballs on their station for as long as they can. Fox News will say whatever they need to in the exact moment necessary to tell their audience what it needs to hear to keep watching

What are the long-term themes that Fox News is emphasizing in the Age of Trump?

The main theme on Fox News right now is that the only racism that exists is racismagainst white people. "They" are coming for white people. It's a constant theme throughout the network. I would say Tucker Carlson is a little bit more upfront about it. He'll do segments on supposed anti-white policies.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

You can see this common thread right now running through nearly every segment that Fox News does, which is that white people are in danger and that theyare coming for you. I would say that is the main theme, more than anything. That's what keeps the viewers' eyeballs on the network all day, every day.

I focus on the prime-time Fox News shows and personalities. Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity in particular, they'll say things you won't hear on any other network. Why? Because what they are saying is not true.

For example, they claim that the COVID vaccine has killed tens of thousands of people. Fox News is the only place where you are going to hear such a thing. Fox News viewers then start to think, "If I'm not watching this show every single night, then I could die.It's life or death, if I watch this show or not, because they're the only ones whoare going to tell me that the vaccine is killing people." Or Fox News is the only one that's going to claimthat major cities are in complete ruins right now, and if I go there I might die. Fox News and their hosts are the only onestelling me that Cory Booker is coming for the suburbs. Those kinds of stories are whatkeeps the majority ofFox News viewers plugged in every single night.

What is the world like, according to Fox News and its viewers?

The world that they're living in is just constant fear. It is a constant theme of "They are coming for you."Black Lives Matter protesters are comingto yoursuburbs. They're going to be marching down your street. They're coming for your history. They're coming for your Confederate statues.

On a recent show, Tucker Carlson said that the government may force conservatives to take psychotropic drugs because they don't like their ideas. What is happening is supposedly a civilizational battle. It is always a battle for what they describe as "Western civilization."It's always just teetering on the razor's edge. "They" are about to win. They're going to take everything that's American from youand civilization, as we know it, is going to end.

Apocalypse is a constant theme on Fox News, all the time. I believed that, eventually, when the apocalypse didn't come, when Joe Biden didn't round people up and put them into FEMA camps, Fox News would stop with that story and would lose viewers from a lack of interest. That did not happen. The viewers just need more of it.

Tucker Carlson and Fox News recently featured a three-part series about Jan. 6 and the aftermath called "Patriot Purge."It was a masterful and dangerous example of fascist propaganda. Joseph Goebbels would have approved. What was your reaction?

It was sickening. Watching Tucker's series, it felt like something from a fictional movie, a dystopian movie where fascism has taken over the United States. Much of that "Patriot Purge" series was meant to whitewash white supremacy.

One of Tucker's biggest themes is that white supremacy doesn't exist. There's no such thing. When there is any criticism of white supremacy, Tucker tells his audience that is a criticism of all Republicans and all conservatives.

There is no connection between the truth and Tucker's Patriot Purge series. He features some of the most extreme actors tied to Jan.6and introduces them to the audience as though they are sympathetic characters, which in turn is getting the viewers fired up.

Fox News is the center of a much larger right-wing propaganda machine and echo chamber. How does it work?

Let's focus on "critical race theory" as an example. That came up out of nowhere.Nobody was talking about critical race theory before Fox News and Tucker Carlson and the right-wing political activists and strategists started talking about it.

They begin by saying that critical race theory is a huge problem. They say that people are pissed off about it. Fox News viewers are enraged, so they start going to school board meetings and yelling about their version of something called critical race theory which is not being taught in these schools. But they're very upset about it. Fox News starts interviewing these people and calls them parents, even though the majority of them are Republican operatives.

RELATED:"Critical race theory" is a fairytale but America's monsters are real

It is all one big circle and feedback loop. Now you're sitting there as a viewer and you're saying, "Wow, these parents, they have kids in these schools. They're furious." And it just goes round and round and round again like that.

As for the right-wing media echo system and the bubble that they are in, there is nothing like it on the left. Fox News did some 1,900 segments on critical race theory. That goes out to other right-wing websites and personalities on social media who will take themessage and make it go viral. They will hammer on a topic for months at a time if they need to.

These people are just making so much money offthis stuff. There is just so much money to be made in conservative media right now. There is no equivalent on the left.

Another aspect of this echo chamber and loop is how they all just talk amongst themselves. Then the message starts to get out. There are people who do not watch the news, but they see it on television in the gym and that's how they get their information. Then what they see on Fox News is a huge problem and a crisis. Or they just see a Facebook post from one of their friends who heard something. That is how these "controversies" startto break out of the right-wing bubble and into the mainstream.

There are supposed liberals and progressives who will appear onFox News. Their logic is that they will somehow win over or convince Fox News viewers to analternative point of view by providing the truth. What are your thoughts?

All that liberals are doing when they go on the channelis to givethe Fox News PR team a talking point: "We're reasonable. We'll bring on anybody." I think it's extremely damaging. I thinkit gives Fox News people a credibility that they don't deserve. During the 2020 campaign, Bernie Sanders did a town hall on Fox News and he got a standing ovation for his comments about Medicare for All. It was a big deal at the time and got lots of attention. The narrative was, "Oh, wow. Look at what he accomplished. Look at what he exposed all these Fox News viewers to."That was true in that exact moment. But then what Fox News focused on from the town hall was how Bernie Sanders made some comment about raising taxes.

Fox News trapped him: Allthey talked about was Bernie Sanders wanting to raise taxes. They didn't bring up the Medicare for All again. But that was one instance, for one moment. He didn't convince any Fox News viewers to support Medicare for All because after that, Fox News hosts and alltheir other guests Ted Cruz andeverybody else they bring on is just hammeringhow universal health care is really socialism, and somehow that is going to be the end of America.

It's impossible to convince Fox News viewers to change their beliefs. Fox News has spent 25 years telling their audience, "We are the only ones that you can trust. Literally, everyone else is lying to you. We're the only ones you can trust." That has paid huge dividends.

What is the role of Fox News in America's democracy crisis?

They are the leaders. They're not just leading it, they're pushing for it. They want this type of division because they know it's good for ratings, because they know it keeps eyeballs on their network.

You watch Fox News for a living and take on allthat stress and misery. What advice do you have for those Americans who are exhausted by the right-wing assaultand by this never-ending torrent of bad news and the resulting feelings of doom? How do you stay level?

I'm very lucky. I'm very privileged. I grew up in a middle-class family. I'm white and straight. For me, I try to completely disassociate when I can and when it makes sense. I'm not saying don't stay involved, but ifthis is all you're doing and all you're thinking about is politics and current events24/7, you're going to be miserable because there's so much awfulness out there. At some point you have to realize that you're just one person and you're doing everything you can. I try to embrace what is good out there as much as I possibly can when I'm not working, and when I'm not sitting there furious at my television.

Original post:

This man lives in the paranoid alternate universe of Fox News so you don't have to - Salon

With President Joe Bidens approval rating down to 36 percent, he is now more unpopular than his two predecessors ever were in office.

But, beyond politics, the very idea of America is losing luster. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (and rising) believe their country is not headed in the right direction. For decades, it was assumed America is the place to be an entrepreneur. The U.S. economy was synonymous with the American Dream. No longer. Upward mobility may be more alive in Canada than in America.

Indeed, upward mobility has been disincentivized, while the climbers are punished for daring to succeed. Government benefits are plentiful, while taxing the rich is the easiest refrain in politics. Under Bidens Build Back Better plan, the average top tax rate on personal income would reach 57.4 percent in the United Statesthe highest rate in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). All 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., would impose top tax rates on personal income exceeding 50 percent.

Todays experiment in Big Government wont end well for the United States. But it will make entrepreneurs, investors, and other wealthy Americans reconsider their place in the world and reevaluate their optionsand thats a good thing. Countries should compete for residents. If people arent treated well in one country, why shouldnt they go where theyre treated better?

People with means ultimately go where theyre treated best, and Americans are reaping the benefits of globalization more than ever before. From Croatia to the Caribbean, digital nomads across the socioeconomic spectrum are leaving one lifestyle for a better one.

As an offshore consultant who guides clients to where theyre treated best, I regularly advise high-net-worth individuals on second citizenship and residences. And, in recent months, I have seen a 300 percent increase in wealthy Americans seeking better tax climates and brighter futures. They have had enough of 50 percent tax rates.

While tax policy is a top complaint, there are other gripes. One is woke culture, which tightens the parameters of free speech and forces people into submission through political correctness. In a world of seemingly endless cancellations and contrived apologies, the First Amendment is under attack from all sides, while its public defenders are fewer and farther between.

Put it all together, and the result is a less appealing America to those with options. Other than patriotism and personal allegiance, why should a New York entrepreneur remain in a city with rising crime and legal drug injection sites? Why put up with constantly changing COVID-19 policies in Washington, D.C., when foreign governments may be more transparent? Why stick with 50 percent tax rates when tax climates are better in dozens of Asian, European, and South American countries?

I have lived in dozens of countries around the world, and its reassuring to escape the radical Lefts grasp abroad. In some Eastern European countries, wokism doesnt even exist. Politics isnt a fact of everyday life. People treat each other like human beings, not Twitter bots. In many Latin American countries, you can live more affordably and retain your individualismfree from government overreach. The same goes for certain Asian countries that continue to value entrepreneurship and upward mobilitywith no disincentives, no punishments.

This is not to be alarmist for alarmisms sake. But Americans need to ask themselves, and they are: Am I treated well here? Can I live better elsewhere?

With each passing day, more and more Americans are rethinking the meaning of home. The ongoing exodus to Florida is a perfect example. If people can move from New York to the Sunshine State for a better tax climate and brighter future, why cant they move abroad too?

They can, and they are. The American exodus is here to stay and growing by the day.

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In Biden's America, Americans Should Go Where They're Treated Best InsideSources - InsideSources

Will the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade? No U.S. president since Warren Harding has left such a huge thumbprint on the Supreme Court in such a short time as former President Donald Trump. The three people he picked to serve on the court are conservative products of my generation.

That means their formative thinking occurred in the 1980s. Its hard to explain to younger people today, who live in a more distracted and diverse America, just how dominant conservative thinking was in the 1980s. And just how enthusiastic people were about President Ronald Reagans sunny vision of America; all those Christmas-toy-town-on-a-chocolate-box feelings he stirred up.

In fact, conservative thinking was so dominant that liberal theory was essentially nonexistent in the 1980s. It would return in the 1990s with globalization, identity politics and political correctness, but during the 1980s, liberalism was a desert.

Morality was the keyword for 1980s conservatives. There was a set of essential values that ordered society, and conservatives were uniquely positioned to plug into them: good people were conservative. In reality, I believe they turned out to be bad-tempered crusaders with lurid vices, which separated them from older conservatives, who were very well-mannered and deeply circumspect, and who liked being thought of as respectable.

In the 1980s, conservatives moral certitude was a reaction against the moral relativism and situational ethics of 1970s liberalism. Roe v. Wade was the prime example for 1980s conservatives of a decision reached through the lens of situational ethics.

Trumps Supreme Court picks are 1980s conservatives, who are still optimistic in that Reagan way.

Matthew Atlee

Lancaster

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Reaganism and Roe v. Wade (letter) | Letters To The Editor | lancasteronline.com - LNP | LancasterOnline

Spoiler alert. This column runs the serious risk of not being politically correct. Just read or rip it up, but dont send me emails telling me that I am an insensitive lout who doesnt get it.

It turns out, no surprise, that humor in the workplace (not the wokeplace) is serious business. Two Stanford professors, Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, actually teach a course on the subject. They say, humor is an under-leveraged superpower in business.

Cue laugh track here.

When it comes to coaching CEOs, I am a strong advocate for a few things. First, a few years of psychotherapy would certainly do no harm. Second, taking some classes in improvisation could be very helpful. Everyone thinks they can think on their feet, but most of us are wearing two left shoes (high heels included) and it is a studied art. It can be learned, and it is powerful, but it is not the natural default.

And finally, learning to laugh at yourself is an excellent first assignment. Telling a joke is hard to do well, making people feel at ease with a humorous turn of phrase takes practice, and creating comfortable humor in the workplace without getting sued or fired is, at the moment, very challenging.

Many studies show with absolute certainty, if you laugh, you will live longer. Chuckling only adds a few years; you need to let it out loud.

Bagdonas says, Laughing actually changes the chemistry of our brains, making us more creative, bonded and resilient. She says that humor is an elixir for trust and an antidote to arrogance. But what I think is funny may not match what you think. And the dark but true side is that humor has at its core the concepts of irreverence, making fun of and causing some level of embarrassment. Someone or something gets called out. Whether it is Bill Maher, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Larry David, Dave Chappelle. They all leverage some unspoken rules that put us on the side of we get it, and some of that getting it is stereotypical and racist and rude.

A recent Curb Your Enthusiasm episode has a scene with two Black men feeling good about themselves and their desire to eat watermelon. I assure you this was both funny and offensive at the same time. Consider the ground-breaking sitcom, All In The Family. Archie Bunker was hilarious and outrageous and insulted every ethnic category, but at its core, and this is crucial, while we laughed at one moment, in the next, the humor also enlightened and made us more aware of our own bigotries.

Now in 2021, it seems that we are tipping (in my humble opinion) to the other end of the scale, where even knock-knock jokes are suspect in the workplace or in the public square. One of the unintended consequences of cancel culture and political correctness is that the lack of laughter actually impacts your happiness.

Bagdonas and Aaker play it safe and obvious. They say, never punch down or make fun of someone of lower status. No argument there, but that does limit some of your best shots on goal. Finding just the right edge of humor to balance on is the whole game.

Seriously folks, (that is a trick word, designed to let you get away with a barb and then take it back at the same time), you cannot demean or humiliate, and for a complete list of forbiddens, consult your mother or your HR director.

But, if a CEO/leader can find that small space (a lot smaller than it used to be) to stand where he or she can engage the team with humor, where a shared laugh breeds community and collegiality, and finally, where the humor increases the humanity of the recipients, then that is the right stuff. The best humor can ease an awkward pain and create a shared bond.

It is proven that physical laughter decreases stress hormones, increases immune cells, releases endorphins and creates infection-fighting antibodies. So, my next company is going to make a medical device that uses artificial intelligence to channel Groucho Marx and is embedded in your frontal cortex so that in moments of stress, if you say the magic word, the duck will come down and give you $50.

Rule No. 692: Quack, quack.

Neil Senturia is a serial entrepreneur who invests in early stage technology companies. You can hear his weekly podcast on innovation and entrepreneurship at http://www.imthereforyoubaby.com. Please email ideas to Neil at neil@blackbirdv.com.

Link:

Levity and laughter for leaders: Why we still need a sense of humor in the workplace - The San Diego Union-Tribune