Posted on 02/06/2018 9:13:20 AM PST by daniel1212
The defense of free speech has always been a bedrock bipartisan principle. So it’s unusual to hear a veteran liberal politician excuse campus outrage squads that shout down dissent. But that’s exactly what former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee head Howard Dean did in a recent appearance..
Dean’s take on this was that there are “consequences to free speech.” He caricatured Erika Christakis’s thoughtful, sensitive letter as an ugly screed mocking “snowflake” students and defending racist costumes. He also described the protesters as well-behaved, despite their screaming and bullying. ...
Dean is hardly alone...progressives on and off campus are taking illiberal stances that polarize society, put a chill on free speech, and erode respect for due process.
Not long ago, tropes such as “white privilege” or “rape culture,” which reduce a vast range of social dynamics to racism and misogyny, were seldom heard outside the radical wing of the academy; today, they’ve joined the mainstream. The term “microaggression,” describing statements and acts deemed unintentionally prejudiced, now shows up without explanation even in business publications...
the social justice movement, on and off campus, goes far beyond that. It labels people by identity, creating a hierarchy in which being “marginalized” confers status while being “privileged” brings shame. Moreover, given its focus on changing “wrong” attitudes, is almost by definition hostile to free speech: dissent, even counterargument, becomes “microaggression” or “discursive violence.”..
in the 1960s, campus protesters fought for free speech, mostly in opposition to the Vietnam-era draft. In the late ’80s and early ’90s came the “political correctness” wars, which reflected shifting cultural mores on race and gender and helped entrench leftist orthodoxies on campuses...
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
When the Museum of Fine Arts put on an interactive event that let visitors try on a kimono, protesters — primarily student activists — denounced it as “orientalism” and “cultural appropriation....
Typical of the genre was a recent NBC News opinion piece by writer Noah Berlatsky, who argued that the First Amendment is too broad and that hate speech should be legally restricted ..Publishers now employ “sensitivity readers” to prevent offense — which doesn’t always work.
Two years ago, Oberlin College was briefly at the center of a PC-gone-mad story when some students complained about culturally insensitive ethnic cafeteria food. Earlier this year — after an outcry against “culinary white supremacy” in the online press and social media in Portland, Ore. — two women (one white, one part Chinese) felt obliged to shut down the burrito shop they had started after a trip to Mexico. Their handmade tortillas, it seems, were too oppressive.
How do ideas like “culinary white supremacy” make it off university grounds? Partly, it’s because professors who marinate in campus politics enjoy intellectual authority in the outside world, and their opinions appear in the national media. Partly, it’s also because a huge generation of students who have absorbed the “social justice” creed of the campus left, often promoted not only in class but in mandatory workshops, take that outlook with them when they graduate.
Among other things, this trend is evident in the recent conflicts over #MeToo, the movement against sexual abuse. As the list of accused men has grown, even veteran feminists, such as Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, have criticized the movement for equating accusation with guilt and boorish come-ons with rape. The call to “believe women” — instead of waiting for evidence and due process — was a campus protest slogan before #MeToo adopted it.
Recent graduates, and the cultural politics they bring, also influence corporations that want to maintain a progressive image — including the tech giants that set the tone for much of the social media. One popular code of conduct for digital communities, cited as a model by companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, stresses that “marginalized people’s safety” must be prioritized over “privileged people’s comfort.”
What’s more, left-wing campus politics also feed and empower the right. Stories of political correctness run amok, gleefully picked up by conservative media (and in some cases overblown), boost the perception of rampant hypersensitivity, speech policing, and anti-male and/or anti-white bias. New research by Georgia State University Ph.D. candidate Zack Goldberg confirms anecdotal reports that many Trump voters were at least partly motivated by concerns about political correctness.
You have no idea how right you are, sans-culotte
From 45 goals of the Communist Party USA (1959):
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.”
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