PC 2 multiculturalism

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">see main&nbsp;</font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="" /><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</b></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">SEE PC 3 CANCEL</b></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">orphan disambig --> age of trump repurpose 5/17</span><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">see academic suppression</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div style=""><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/tim-pool/tim-pool-calls-allen-texas-shooters-pro-nazi-online-footprint-psyop-and-blames-mass">https://www.mediamatters.org/tim-pool/tim-pool-calls-allen-texas-shooters-pro-nazi-online-footprint-psyop-and-blames-mass</a></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.38;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);">tiM POOL (HOST): So, I mean the first thing I just want to say before we get into any of the politics from either side is, we don't want these things to happen, we want these things to stop.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">We need to figure out what the issue is in our society, in our culture. I genuinely believe it's dissociation. It is a dejected society where individuals don't know or care about each other and they seek validation or they seek to push some extremist ideology. And this whole thing creates a recipe for disaster.&nbsp;</span></font></p><p style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);">And I'll put it simply, I think it's </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">multiculturalism.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);">&nbsp;And not the idea that people of all different types are holding hands under the rainbow, it's that you have different communities stacked on top of each other and&nbsp;</span><b style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);">next to each other with wildly different views and they don't like each other. And then people who are crazy will do crazy things.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">But what ends up happening today, we have this story from the Daily Mail, “Revealed: Texas gunman staked out massacre mall to monitor peak times three weeks before killing eight and posting details on&nbsp;<b>Russian social media alongside photos of Nazis,&nbsp;</b>guns, and ammunition.” You see, here’s where we get into the PSYOP.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);">&nbsp;</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/cancel-culture/">https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/cancel-culture/</a></font></div><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>In discussing the truth about "cancel culture,"</strong>&nbsp;I'm going to ask you to act for a moment like a journalist. Journalists are concerned, or should be concerned, with gathering relevant facts, crafting stories using relevant facts, clarifying ambiguities and identifying as much as possible who is doing what to whom, when, where, why and how. As applied to "cancel culture," this means who is using the term, in what context are they using it, why are they using it, and whom are they applying it to.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When you look at "cancel culture" from the point of view of a journalist, you can see that the people most likely to use "cancel culture" are most likely critical of the maddeningly muddled liberalization of American society in which people historically on the margins of respectability and power are slowly taking their equally entitled place at their center. Most critics are conservative. Some are liberal in that they worry about freedoms lost as freedoms are won. Others are merely and transparently fascist</span>.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The context in which critics use "cancel culture" is naturally related to language.</b>&nbsp;I say "naturally," because the words we use to engage the political reality we all inhabit is naturally as important as the reality itself. Indeed, the words we use can create their own fictional reality, one that ends up competing with, or even replacing, political reality. Because of the link between language and power, forces of liberalization are naturally interested in reshaping the language we all use in the interest of expanding the rights, liberties and blessings of the franchise.<b>&nbsp;Forces against liberalization are naturally resistant to tampering with the language et al. And as these polar forces collide, there might arise legitimate constitutional questions of freedoms and rights.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But this binary I have established—advocates for and critics against the reshaping of the language that we use in order to engage the reality we inhabit—is mostly false. It's distorting, because it suggests an equal moral footing. Fact is, critics of "cancel culture" are not being honest with you. Advocates are not trying to cancel anyone. They are trying to change the political culture for the purpose of improving as many lives as possible. Critics understand that. That's why they invented a term of art in order to malign advocates—"cancel culture" is an inchoate threat we&nbsp;<em>must face before it's too late</em>. Critics of "cancel culture" are doing the same thing critics of liberalism have done since forever. While liberals complain about problems, critics complain about liberals. And they go to great lengths to get the liberals to shut the hell up.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>While "cancel culture" is a fiction invented by critics of liberalization for the purpose of attacking liberals, there&nbsp;<em>is</em>&nbsp;such a thing as cancel culture. We just don't call it that, because real cancel culture has plagued human relations since the dawn of human history—it's&nbsp;<em>when the politically powerful stomp the politically weak</em>.&nbsp;</b>Maltreatment on such a vast and historical scale is so normal, pervasive and ubiquitous that it's almost entirely invisible to those of us lucky enough to have been born on the giving end of it. Those of us unlucky enough to have been born on the receiving end of it, however, can see real cancel culture quite clearly. Again, the difference should be a familiar one. Those with the power to name, name. Those without the power to name, don't name. Those with the power call it "cancel culture." Those without the power sit in silence.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Power is, in fact, how you tell the difference between cancel culture and "cancel culture.</b>" It's the best way, to my way of thinking, to make sense of stuff that just doesn't make sense. For instance, the&nbsp;<em>Times</em>&nbsp;reported the story of a Black student at Smith College who claimed being targeted for discrimination by the school's white staffers. The claim wasn't true, turns out, but Smith College's president continued to take the student's side for reasons related to systemic racism. Critics of "cancel culture" howled. This was proof of wokeness run amok! Stop it before it's too late!</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This wasn't "cancel culture," though. It was real cancel culture. A privileged Black student at one of the elite institutions of higher education in the United States chose for her own bad reasons to stomp some white working-class stiffs with the full faith and approval of her elite institution, an injustice as old as the history of the country.</b>&nbsp;The problem for critics of "cancel culture" was not, however, the abuse of power. It was not that Smith College took the side of a student in abusing her power. It was the abuse of power by a Black person who isn't supposed to have any power to abuse.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Critics of "cancel culture" would rather not talk about the old hierarchies of power, however, because talking about the old hierarchies of power makes things that don't make sense make sense. The question is almost never about language and freedom of speech. The question is almost always about who is doing what to whom, when, where, why and how. Critics prefer we debate unclear and unresolvable abstractions. But you can free yourself from propaganda by acting, for a moment, as a journalist should.</font></p><div class="around-the-web"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</font></div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><li class="from-your-siteitem"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/cancel-culture-is-a-reactionary-fraud-and-liberals-need-to-stop-falling-for-it/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">'Cancel culture' is a reactionary fraud and liberals need to stop ... ›</a></font></font></font></font></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/eric-trump/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Eric Trump hit with avalanche of tweets after insisting liberal 'cancel ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/jim-jordan-2649927623/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">'Cancel Jim Jordan': GOP rep mocked for whining about 'cancel ... ›</a></li></ul><div class="around-the-webheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase; margin-top: 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</font></div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><li class="around-the-webitem"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://nypost.com/article/what-is-cancel-culture-breaking-down-the-toxic-online-trend/" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">What is cancel culture? Breaking down the toxic online trend ›</a></font></font></font></font></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/965815679/is-cancel-culture-the-future-of-the-gop" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">When Republicans Attack 'Cancel Culture,' What Does It Mean? : NPR ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/30/20879720/what-is-cancel-culture-explained-history-debate" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">What is cancel culture? Why we keep fighting about canceling ... ›</a></li></ul></div></div><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/pompeo/">https://www.alternet.org<b>/2021/01/pompeo/</b></a></font></div><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a shocking tweet barely 24 hours before he will no longer be the U.S. Secretary of State,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=Mike+Pompeo" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>Mike Pompeo</strong></a>&nbsp;unleashed a disturbing tweet denouncing "multiculturalism" and claiming it is "not who America is." He also linked multiculturalism to authoritarianism. The outgoing diplomat, a former GOP congressman and former CIA director, is being lambasted on social media for his claim.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The United States is built on the histories and heritages of people from other countries who travel to America. By definition, the United States is a multicultural society: "the presence of, or support for the presence of, several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society."</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He has spent the past few weeks pushing out a large number of tweets bragging about what he sees as his successes while attempting to position himself as the logical successor to President Donald Trump. On his last full day in office Secretary Pompeo is being called a "demagogue" and is being accused of white supremacy for his remarks.</font></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Woke-ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms — they're not who America is," Pompeo tweeted. "They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. Our enemies stoke these divisions because they know they make us weaker."</font></b></p></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style=""><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/historian-push-back-with-a-brutal-takedown-of-1776-commission-report/">https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/historian-push-back-with-a-brutal-takedown-of-1776-commission-report/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the Trump administration released its report on the "1776 Commission," historians wasted no time firing back with brutal criticism of the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Presidents-Advisory-1776-Commission-Final-Report.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">45-page document</a>, purported to be authored by "some of America's most distinguished scholars and historians." But one historian, Torsten Kathke is noting that the committee responsible for developing the report consisted of mostly conservatives and Trump loyalists.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Many others are already parsing the report of the 1776 Commission," Kathke tweeted.&nbsp;<b>"This much here: It's a propagandist hack job. What interested me were the people involved with it. (They're pretty much who you would expect them to be.)"</b></font></p><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a64ff247b0cfd556b2c50cd1e201c05d" id="871f7" style=""><div class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: flex; max-width: 550px; width: 550px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><blockquote class="twitter-custom-tweet twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-lazy-tweet-id="1351313689530478592" data-twitter-tweet-id="1351313689530478592" data-twitter-extracted-i1611081880535904626="true" style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); font-style: italic;"><div style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many others are already parsing the report of the 1776 Commission. This much here: It's a propagandist hack job. W… https://t.co/lYcZIjnkQG</font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)<a href="https://twitter.com/torstenkathke/statuses/1351313689530478592" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">1611013264.0</a></font></blockquote></div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kathke noted that the top three individuals listed on the committee list are not even historians. He tweeted, "The three above-the-line people leading the commission. Not one who is primarily a historian. Considering the commission states "the facts of our founding are not partisan. They are a matter of history" it feels not out of bounds to ask: Why not let a historian chair it?"
</font></p><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="0e3accf3388da2f041a812ab97a6fd3e" id="93e83" style=""><div class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: flex; max-width: 550px; width: 550px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><blockquote class="twitter-custom-tweet twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-lazy-tweet-id="1351313718274109443" data-twitter-tweet-id="1351313718274109443" data-twitter-extracted-i1611081880535904626="true" style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); font-style: italic;"><div style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The three above-the-line people leading the commission. Not one who is primarily a historian. Considering the co… https://t.co/QXurPAuKvh</font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)<a href="https://twitter.com/torstenkathke/statuses/1351313718274109443" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">1611013271.0</a></font></blockquote></div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>He went on to highlight the problem with former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) being part of the commission. Although Bryant supported replacing the state flag (which paid homage to the Confederate flag), he had previously insisted on honoring the legacy of the Confederacy.</b></font></p><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="22f7f1518ae264882e70c8a2fa379ebb" id="fc884" style=""><div class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: flex; max-width: 550px; width: 550px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><blockquote class="twitter-custom-tweet twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-lazy-tweet-id="1351316648838516739" data-twitter-tweet-id="1351316648838516739" data-twitter-extracted-i1611081880535904626="true" style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); font-style: italic;"><div style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A few more names: Phil Bryant. MA in Political Science. Former Mississippi Governor. Came out in favor of replac… https://t.co/YNZ3UA2gCh</font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)<a href="https://twitter.com/torstenkathke/statuses/1351316648838516739" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">1611013969.0</a></font></blockquote></div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kathke went on to highlight issues with other members of the committee:</font></p><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="036b091ecbce2d517101b1c9d48d3a0c" id="8c894" style=""><div class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: flex; max-width: 550px; width: 550px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><blockquote class="twitter-custom-tweet twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-lazy-tweet-id="1351337317936603136" data-twitter-tweet-id="1351337317936603136" data-twitter-extracted-i1611081880535904626="true" style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); font-style: italic;"><div style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Charles Kesler. Political scientist whom @politico called "the intellectual avatar of Trumpism."… https://t.co/s1JaNp76gm</font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)<a href="https://twitter.com/torstenkathke/statuses/1351337317936603136" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">1611018897.0</a></font></blockquote></div><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="058bb17bb8d69d939389f71e01ed6998" id="def18" style=""><div class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: flex; max-width: 550px; width: 550px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><blockquote class="twitter-custom-tweet twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-lazy-tweet-id="1351335870494892032" data-twitter-tweet-id="1351335870494892032" data-twitter-extracted-i1611081880535904626="true" style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);"><div style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Victor Davis Hanson. Ph.D. in classics. That qualifies him, I suppose, as the first historian on the list. Though</b><i>&nbsp;n… https://t.co/Gisi450mr3</i></font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-style: italic;">— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)<a href="https://twitter.com/torstenkathke/statuses/1351335870494892032" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">1611018552.0</a></font></blockquote></div><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="eeeeb157223f028cbad4a13ac34e1336" id="f87fa" style=""><div class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: flex; max-width: 550px; width: 550px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><blockquote class="twitter-custom-tweet twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-lazy-tweet-id="1351331285982195714" data-twitter-tweet-id="1351331285982195714" data-twitter-extracted-i1611081880535904626="true" style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); font-style: italic;"><div style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mike Gonzalez. MBA. Journalist and speechwriter. https://t.co/eUflFV361f https://t.co/6YOTsqdH04</font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)<a href="https://twitter.com/torstenkathke/statuses/1351331285982195714" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">1611017459.0</a></font></blockquote></div><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6b56b02579e01ffbfaea8466a53b4d4d" id="e0244" style=""><div class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: flex; max-width: 550px; width: 550px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><blockquote class="twitter-custom-tweet twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-lazy-tweet-id="1351328605377323010" data-twitter-tweet-id="1351328605377323010" data-twitter-extracted-i1611081880535904626="true" style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);"><div style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John Gibbs. Master of Public Administration. Who "has a history of making inflammatory remarks and spreading false… https://t.co/idnFX4igKT</font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)<span style="transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">1611016820.0</span></font></blockquote></div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kathke's criticism came shortly after the Trump administration released the "1776 Commission Report" on Martin Luther King Day. According to<em>&nbsp;The New York Times</em>, the report&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/trump-1776-commission-report.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">"denounces the charge that the American founders were hypocrites who preached equality even as they codified slavery in the Constitution and held slaves themselves."</a>
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The report, created by an 18-member commission chaired by Trump ally and conservative Larry Arnn, reads, "this charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric."</b></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The "1776 Commission Report" also argues that the "'distorted histories' of the country "labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil.'" It also presented a defense of slavery insisting that it should "be seen in a much broader perspective" as it noted the "unfortunate fact" that slavery "has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history."</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the Trump White House, the civil rights movement became a case of "identity politics" which "teaches that America itself is to blame for oppression."
</font></p><div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</font></div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><li class="from-your-siteitem"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/loving-your-country-is-not-the-same-as-loving-trump-how-the-right-makes-a-mockery-of-us-patriotism/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Loving your country is not the same as loving Trump: How the right ... ›</a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/kkk-conservatives/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">How conservative demands for 'patriotic' history education echo the ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trumps-patriotic-education-commission-is-yet-another-battle-over-the-meaning-of-words/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Trump's 'patriotic education' commission is yet another battle over ... ›</a></li></ul><div class="around-the-webheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase; margin-top: 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</font></div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><li class="around-the-webitem"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/19/trump-1776-commission-proof-america-spiraling-toward-facism" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Trump's 1776 commission is proof America is spiraling toward fascism ›</a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/1776-commission-report.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Trump's 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided ... ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://nypost.com/2021/01/18/trump-1776-commission-slams-destructive-scholarship-in-reprot/" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Trump 1776 Commission slams 'destructive scholarship' in reprot ›</a></li></ul></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">AHA DOH!</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">left gets accused of name-calling/ intolerance, we use these terms to beat down legit conservative thought/voices (cf campus freeedom bs) BUT:</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">but made me realize it's fox's biz model?! ISLAMOPHOBIA, XENOPHOBIA&nbsp; AFRO-PHOBIA, , HOMOPHOBIA, MISOGYNY (planned parenthood is selling baby body parts?!), COMMIE-PHOBIA mccarthy witch hunts, under the bed infiltrate state dept.</span></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/heres-the-data-that-proves-americans-who-rage-against-political-correctness-are-the-most-xenophobic-and-most-likely-to-vote-trump-in-2020">https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/heres-the-data-that-proves-americans-who-rage-against-political-correctness-are-the-most-xenophobic-and-most-likely-to-vote-trump-in-2020</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no lnx</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Here’s the data that shows Americans who rage against political correctness are the most xenophobic — and most likely to vote Trump</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Written by Samuel L. Perry / <b>Religion Dispatches March 24, 2020</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Admittedly, Trump’s initial references to “the Chinese Virus” earlier in March seemed rather ad-hoc. Though clearly xenophobic in context and implication, it seemed that Trump was casually parroting the language of other far-Right commentators like Charlie Kirk. Within the past week, however, Trump has ramped up his labeling campaign, often going out of his way to refer to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus” in Twitter storms and White House press briefings.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Two key strategies likely drive Trump’s efforts here. Both involve distracting Americans from his own administration’s failings at dealing with the coronavirus earlier on. The first is simply to blame China, laying responsibility for America’s situation solely at their feet. The fact that a Chinese propaganda director recently suggested the virus may have originated with American soldiers who brought it to China provided the perfect (and tacitly justifiable) motivation for Trump to remind the world forcefully and repeatedly where the virus originated.</span></div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The second factor also involves distraction from Trump’s failings, but one in which “China” is only incidental. They are merely a stand-in for all “dangerous outsiders.”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> By repeatedly and brazenly referring to “the Chinese Virus,” and provoking a media backlash against the xenophobic implications of his language, Trump wishes to remind his base who our internal threats are: politically correct liberals who care more about defending foreigners than they do the American people.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Though Trump has previously raged against political correctness explicitly, and indeed, campaigned on it in 2016, when it comes to this recent COVID-19 labeling campaign, other far-Right thought-leaders have been doing this for him. For example, in a March 14th interview on Fox News, Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton stated, “Anyone who complains that it’s racist or xenophobic to call this virus the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan virus is a <b>politically correct fool</b>, and they ought not to be listened to about anything.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And March 20th, Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told Glenn Beck: “The worst thing in this pandemic virus outside of the actual illness itself of course is the political [sic] correct media still, still peddling garbage that hurts the American people.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">” Quoting an ABC News reporter, O’Reilly said in a whiny, mocking voice, “A lot of people think it’s racist if you call it the Chinese Virus. …It’s sickening.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But survey data confirm that white Americans—like President Trump, Senator Tom Cotton, Bill O’Reilly, or their followers—who attack politically correct language as the enemy are in fact the most likely to hold racist or xenophobic views. In a nationally representative survey fielded in February 2020, we asked Americans to indicate how much they agreed with statements about using politically correct language. We also asked Americans for their views on refugees from the Middle East and America’s control over its Southern border.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the first figure [left], we see that, as Americans’ agreement with the statement “Too many people are easily offended these days over language” increases, the more likely they are to believe that the federal government should do more to secure the Southern border and that Middle Eastern refugees pose a terrorist threat.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the second figure [below, right], we see a similar trend, but in the opposite direction. The more strongly Americans disagree with the statement “People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people,” the more likely they are to hold xenophobic views about refugees from the Middle East and to want stricter border control.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>In sum: both figures show that white Americans who voice the strongest opinions against politically correct language also hold the strongest anti-immigrant attitudes.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Just as important, they are also the group most likely to plan on voting Trump in 2020.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[no graf]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The last figure [left] shows the percentage of white Americans who indicate they plan on voting Trump in 2020 by their level of agreement with our two statements regarding politically correct language. Nearly 80% of white Americans who strongly disagree that “People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people,” or who strongly agree that “Too many people are easily offended these days over language,” intend to vote for Trump in November.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Seen in light of these data, Trump’s dual strategy is clear. By unapologetically referring to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus,” Trump is first able to signal to his white base that he too is disdainful of scheming, disease-ridden outsiders. But he can also intentionally provoke a backlash against his hurtful and xenophobic language, which he and his followers can dismiss as leftist “political correctness.”&nbsp; Trump shores up support against both a perceived external threat (immigrants) and an internal threat (liberals) with a single dangerous and offensive swipe.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/conservative-writers-have-found-weird-new-argument-claim-theyre-oppressed">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/conservative-writers-have-found-weird-new-argument-claim-theyre-oppressed</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">D</font><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">espite the fact that Republican politicians are in charge of Congress and the White House while a conservative-leaning majority reigns in the Supreme Court, conservatives are nevertheless convinced that "the Left" is using political correctness to quash their ideas.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>This pattern of thought is nowhere more evident than in the writings of National Review writer David French, who Friday published a story defending a recent article — written by the New York Times' Bari Weiss — about the "Intellectual Dark Web."</div><div>
</div><div>The web is a "network" of iconoclastic thinkers who include people like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Ayan Hirsi Ali.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Despite these individuals' relative success, the idea of the Intellectual Dark Web is that they are somehow kept down by oppressive political correctness and excluded from legacy media outlets. French argues, however, that "the path to prominence for many of these now-popular people has sometimes been painful."</div><div>
</div><div>As evidence for this, he cites the bizarre example of Shapiro leaving Breitbart after receiving anti-semitic attacks. This is, of course, condemnable, as no one should face racist hate speech. But Breitbart is a famously racist website, which frequently smears the entire religion of Islam and has an article tag for "black crime." Backlash from those readers is hardly evidence of leftist political correctness. (Shapiro, as it happens, has a documented history of racist comments.)</div><div>
</div><div>On the topic of Peterson, he says his struggle has been battling for free speech in Canada, whatever that means.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Surely these and other thinkers of their ilk still receive horrible death threats for their work — as do most people who write in the internet age.</div><div>
</div><div>For French, it seems the biggest threat to free speech is that he can't question transgender people's gender identity in corporate boardrooms. (Meanwhile, you can still legally be fired just for being gay or transgender in most states.) This supposedly horrific form of censorship pushes people to these "marginalized" writers, and potentially to even darker places like Milo Yiannopoulos and the trenches of the alt-right.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The narrative of the oppressed conservative thinker — which often just means people who are made they get called out for being racist or bigoted — is certainly not going away. The "Intellectual Dark Web" is just another manifestation of it.</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">lakoff on trump:</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Political Correctness</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There are at least tens of millions of conservatives in America who share strict father morality and its moral hierarchy. Many of them are poor or middle class and many are white men who see themselves as superior to immigrants, nonwhites, women, non-Christians, gays, and people who rely on public assistance. In other words, they are what liberals would call bigots. For many years, such bigotry has not been publicly acceptable, especially as more immigrants have arrived, as the country has become less white, as more women have become educated and moved into the workplace, and as gays have become more visible and gay marriage acceptable.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>As liberal anti-bigotry organizations have loudly pointed out and made a public issue of the un-American nature of such bigotry, those conservatives have felt more and more oppressed by what they call “political correctness” — public pressure against their views and against what they see as “free speech</b>.” This has become exaggerated since 9/11, when anti-Muslim feelings became strong.</span>&nbsp;<b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The election of President Barack Obama</span>&nbsp;c</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>reated outrage</b>&nbsp;among those conservatives, and they refused to see him as a legitimate American (as in the birther movement), much less as a legitimate authority, especially as his liberal views contradicted almost everything else they believe as conservatives.</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Donald Trump expresses out loud everything they feel, with force, aggression, anger, and no shame. All they have to do is support and vote for Trump and they don’t even have to express their "politically incorrect:" views, since he does it for them and his victories make those views respectable. He is their champion. He gives them a sense of self-respect, authority and the possibility of power.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whenever you hear the words “political correctness” remember this.</font></p></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/6/after_texas_massacre_drexel_prof_asks" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/6/after_texas_massacre_drexel_prof_asks</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/08/texas-organiser-vows-hold-white-lives-matter-rally-170814072936129.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/08/texas-organiser-vows-hold-white-lives-matter-rally-170814072936129.html</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4 rally tamu, curry death threats:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/07/threats-attacks-white-supremacists-target-campuses-170708055258069.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/07/threats-attacks-white-supremacists-target-campuses-170708055258069.html</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">op ed:<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/10/10/conservatives-are-the-real-campus-thought-police-squashing-academic-freedom/?utm_term=.3b13293c02fd" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">&nbsp;https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/10/10/conservatives-are-the-real-campus-thought-police-squashing-academic-freedom/?utm_term=.3b13293c02fd</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">many link not:</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week, I sent a string of relatively uncontroversial tweets in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre, in which I sought to answer a question about mass shootings in the United States:<b>&nbsp;Why are these crimes almost always carried out by white men</b>? “It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid,” I tweeted, before then diagnosing a sense of double entitlement — as white people and as men — that, when frustrated, can occasionally lead to violent consequences.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">My argument was not new, but rather reflects decades of research on how race and gender function in our society. To be both white and male is to be subject to a potent cocktail of entitlement to economic and political power, and to dominate nonwhite and female bodies. When that entitlement is frustrated, it can lead to what the criminologist Mike King calls “aggrieved whiteness,” an ambient furor based on the idea that white Americans have become oppressed victims of politically correct multiculturalism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[I invited Ann Coulter to speak at UC Berkeley. Here’s why.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In my view as a researcher and professor of politics, these tweets were neither provocative in tone nor controversial in content. Rather, the insight they provided felt all the more pressing now that President Trump has brought this aggrieved whiteness into daily headlines. As a scholar and teacher, giving context and depth to contemporary debates is an important part of what I do, and it’s a calling I take seriously. But more and more, professors like me are being targeted by a coordinated right-wing campaign to undermine our academic freedom — one that relies on misrepresentation and sometimes outright lying, and often puts us and our students in danger.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This time, the outrage machine geared up as it often does, with a minor conservative media outlet — in this case, the Daily Caller — chopping my tweets up into a misleading mishmash that transformed a nuanced diagnosis of white male frustration into an attack on white people in general.</b>&nbsp;When the Daily Caller posted the article to Facebook, moreover, the intention was clearly to incite: “Absolutely unforgiveable” (sic) read the post, which by now has been shared nearly 2,000 times and commented upon more than 3,000 times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Hate mail and death threats began to roll in.&nbsp;</b>“I will beat your skull in till there is no tomorrow.” “Soon all you p-----s will get exactly what you deserve.” “Do the world a favor, and kill yourself … I’ll help you find death sooner than later.” One called me a “pig f---er like Obama,” adding homophobic slurs for good measure. Many called me a “cuck” — a favorite racial and sexual insult of the alt-right — while others urged me to move to North Korea or Venezuela. One “love note from a WHITE American” wrongly identified me as a “greasy South American a--hole.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">From there, the contagion was rapid, with Stephen Bannon’s Breitbart News and even Milo Yiannopoulos’s own website running their own cribbed copies of the same story. Then came FrontPage, the Blaze, the College Fix and the campus mercenaries at Turning Point. Soon, the manufactured story had hit the conspiratorial fringes of Infowars and online forums across the right: from “blue lives matter” to those preparing for the inevitable rapture.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Could everyone please stop melting down about college kids?]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Finally, the story crossed the mainstream-fringe barrier at its most permeable point: Fox News.</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Fox claimed that not only do I blame Trump for the Las Vegas massacre, but that I even somehow blame the victims. Threatening emails increased to a flood. An invitation to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show arrived in short order, only confirming the insular nature of the machine, which amplifies to a furious roar the same small group of voices. I declined.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I am by no means the first, and will not be the last target of this kind of smear campaign by conservatives aimed at academics. In every case, it is the same right-wing media outlets leading the charge, and campuses are increasingly the target. Universities and colleges have become the perfect target for such crusades: Purportedly hotbeds of multiculturalism, “safe spaces” and political correctness, campuses represent everything the resentful right is afraid of. At the same time that the right-wing media smears professors like myself, decrying our tenure and demanding our heads, they breathlessly chronicle the supposed intolerance of the left when confronted with&nbsp;<b>provocative campus tours by Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and others.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And things aren’t letting up. While noteworthy cases such as Saida Grundy and Zandria Robinson in 2015 gave a glimpse of what was to come, the months since Trump’s election have seen a generalized assault on anti-racist academics. In May, Tommy Curry at Texas A&M was targeted for a years-old podcast; Princeton’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor was forced to cancel public events after threats following a commencement speech; and Johnny Eric Williams at Trinity College was targeted and suspended reposting someone else’s words on Facebook. Increasingly, leftist professors are being targeted for “things they never really said.” As Princeton’s Eddie Glaude has put it, when the right is so easily triggered by anti-racism and feminism, they make it perfectly clear who the “real snowflakes” are.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Free speech on campus is not as simple as everyone seems to think]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Caught in this wave of right-wing threats and provocations, many universities are scrambling to keep up with the coordinated onslaught. In the best of cases, university administrations and departments have publicly condemned threats against faculty and made clear that they do not cave to intimidation campaigns. The American&nbsp;<b>Association of University Professors (AAUP)&nbsp;</b>has even responded to our cases with new guidelines urging universities to resist the targeted online harassment of their faculty.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In response to such illegal threats of violence, Drexel has chosen to place me on administrative leave. Earlier in the week, I asked my students to explain the relation between white masculinity and mass killings, and they offered in a few short minutes of class discussion far more insight than any mainstream media outlet has offered all week. But now, their own academic freedom has been curtailed by their university, and they are unable to even attend the classes they registered for.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By bowing to pressure from racist internet trolls, Drexel has sent the wrong signal: That you can control a university’s curriculum with anonymous threats of violence. Such cowardice notwithstanding, I am prepared to take all necessary legal action to protect my academic freedom, tenure rights and most importantly, the rights of my students to learn in a safe environment where threats don’t hold sway over intellectual debate. Alongside organizations like the&nbsp;<b>Campus Antifascist Network,</b>&nbsp;I will continue to challenge white supremacists in an effort to make Drexel and all universities safe space for an intellectual debate among equals.</font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;=</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges</a></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As&nbsp;s far-right speakers face loud student opposition at their university speaking gigs,&nbsp;<b>conservative lawmakers in several states are introducing legislation that cracks down on protesters. As</b><b>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.unkochmycampus.org/mar-1-2017-protest-ban-sold-as-free-speech/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;">uncovered</a>&nbsp;by UnKoch My Campus’ Ralph Wilson, numerous states have borrowed their so-called “campus free speech” bills from the rightwing Goldwater Institute, which is funded by conservative plutocrats including Charles Koch and the Mercer family.</b></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Second Lieutenant Spenser Rapone is, by all accounts, a contrarian. He was a free thinker at West Point, a communist in the U.S. Army, a soldier who reads Gramsci, and most tragically, a threat to the peace of mind of&nbsp;<a href="https://thehill.com/policy/defense/353901-rubio-army-should-revoke-commission-of-west-point-grad-with-pro-communist" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Senator Marco Rubio</a>.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What second Lt. Rapone is not, is a threat to "<a href="https://twitter.com/polNewsInfinity/status/913101141390577669" style="text-decoration-line: none;">overthrow the U.S. government</a>," a "<a href="https://twitter.com/dmccue69/status/912586666753380352" style="text-decoration-line: none;">threat to our safety</a>," guilty of "<a href="https://twitter.com/NoSlackDelta/status/912528206279962624" style="text-decoration-line: none;">treason</a>," or “100%” certain to commit "<a href="https://twitter.com/SpeciousThesis/status/915983708653522945" style="text-decoration-line: none;">mass murder in the near future</a>." This is despite what&nbsp;some may have read about him on right-wing&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/TweetBrettMac/status/912501426131210242" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Twitter</a>&nbsp;and in the reactionary&nbsp;<a href="https://dailycaller.com/2017/09/26/army-opens-investigation-into-west-point-grad-for-promoting-communism/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Daily Caller</a>.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fake journalist Mike Cernovich, a master of the non-sequitur, concludes Rapone’s heresies should convince you that the National Security Council is run by the Muslim Brotherhood.&nbsp;</font></p><blockquote data-lang="en" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spenser Rapone is proof that cultural Marxism has taken over at West Point, still think that the NSC isn't run by Muslim Brotherhood?</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich)&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/913169357181788160?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" style="text-decoration-line: none;">September 27, 2017</a></font></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now the Army is investigating Lt. Rapone, the veterans in the&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/DSA_law" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Democratic Socialists of America</a>&nbsp;are defending him, and the social media hive is starting to buzz.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Truly Scary</font></b></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Welcome to another culture war in which the fate of America hangs in the balance, at least until the end of the news cycle or the next white man’s massacre, whichever comes first.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lt. Rapone’s notoriety illuminates one of the lesser (but still annoying) hazards of our troubled times: The power of social media platforms to elevate the trivial to the apocalyptic, to transform curious developments into civilizational dilemmas that require righteous indignation from all right-thinking people.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tired of chasing Colin Kaepernick out of the ideological pocket, the right-wing thought police are now swarming to chase Lt. Rapone out of the barracks. His crime: free thinking, which is truly scary to many on the right and even some on the left. Out of fear, the thought police seek to win the debate by preventing it from happening.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The political right is far worse than the left on this score, but leftist intolerance is on the rise, too.&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last spring, sociologist Charles Murray, who has authored works of sophisticated racism and works of insightful cultural criticism, was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.alternet.org/challenge-defending-free-speech-age-trump" style="text-decoration-line: none;">prevented from speaking at Middlebury College</a>&nbsp;by professors and students proud to say&nbsp;<em>they had never read what he had written.</em></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Just last week in Washington, a group of American University students were thwarted when they sought to promote unpopular views on campus.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The group Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) was blocked from holding a forum on the&nbsp;<a href="https://reason.com/blog/2017/09/29/au-campus-safe-from-title-ix-hate-speech" style="text-decoration-line: none;">politics and jurisprudence of campus sexual assault</a>.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To the local chapter of the </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">American Association of University Women,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/348623722250145/permalink/349987812113736/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the unpopular was intolerable.</a>&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">They declared that the YAL speakers were engaging in "</span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/348623722250145/permalink/349987812113736/" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">hate speech</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">," a claim for which there is little evidence. YAL lost access to a campus venue and had to go elsewhere to hold its discussion of Title IX and other timely issues of interest to young people</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lt. Rapone is having a similar effect on the right. He wore a Che Guevara T-shirt under his uniform. He wrote a paper quoting Gramsci to support his view that the&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/cuttlefish_btc/status/912735438032572422" style="text-decoration-line: none;">U.S. Army should intervene in Kurdistan</a>.&nbsp; AAUW actually&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/348623722250145/permalink/349987812113736/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">celebrated on Facebook</a>&nbsp;that they succeeded in making sure that the speaker's unorthodox opinions did not infect the presumably innocent ears of female (and male) undergraduates allegedly certain to suffer some kind of harm (what kind of harm is not very clear) from hearing a point of view they might find obnoxious or tendentious or persuasive. The thought police imagined they had won the debate by preventing it from happening.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But wait, there's worse: He shouted during an office debate with a professor. He failed to wear his uniform in a West Point building where uniforms are mandatory. And, get this, he&nbsp;<a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/360708005/Heffington-Sworn-Statement-18-Nov-2015-Signed-2#from_embed" style="text-decoration-line: none;">stared at a fellow officer’s name tag</a>&nbsp;for&nbsp;<em>a long time.</em>Very suspicious.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(The Daily Caller reports that social media accounts “linked” to Lt. Rapone have included harsh and profane comments. I could not independently confirm the linkage. Since the Daily Caller is not a trustworthy source, I will not quote the alleged comments.)</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Isn't it obvious Lt. Rapone is a clear and present danger to the safe spaces of Daily Caller staffers? Isn’t it imperative that he be driven out of the U.S. armed forces in the name of all that is right and good? Isn’t this the moment when&nbsp;<a href="https://thehill.com/policy/defense/353901-rubio-army-should-revoke-commission-of-west-point-grad-with-pro-communist" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Senator Rubio</a>&nbsp;can overcome anxieties about his dimunitive stature and do&nbsp;<a href="https://thehill.com/policy/defense/353901-rubio-army-should-revoke-commission-of-west-point-grad-with-pro-communist" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Something Important</a>?</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alas, it is.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Do the Right Thing</font></strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">West Point officials were apparently&nbsp;<a href="https://thehill.com/policy/defense/353901-rubio-army-should-revoke-commission-of-west-point-grad-with-pro-communist" style="text-decoration-line: none;">aware of Rapone’s private political opinions</a>&nbsp;in 2015 and let him continue to serve, another subject generating yards of online outrage.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I think West Point did the right thing. Lt. Rapone’s superiors saw that an aspiring officer had strong and unpopular opinions. They saw that he passed his classes and fulfilled his duties, so they concluded he was acting within his constitutionally secured rights—the very freedoms the Army is supposed to defend. They sent him to Afghanistan where he served one tour.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lt. Rapone is currently assigned to the 10th Mountain Division, according to the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2017/09/29/former-west-point-cadet-in-che-guevara-shirt-is-an-afghanistan-combat-veteran-and-other-rumors-clarified/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Army Times</a>.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maybe his criticism of American society and admiration for rebellious spirits like Che Guevara and Antonio Gramsci will prove incompatible with fighting one of the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176300/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_the_commandos_of_everywhere/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">seven wars the U.S. government is now waging</a>&nbsp;around the world. I hope so.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Or maybe Lt. Rapone is a good soldier who knows what he wants to risk his life for: free speech. That wouldn’t be a bad outcome either. Free speech needs more defenders, especially lately.&nbsp;</font></p><div wibbitz="embed-main-player" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="bio-new body_story" style="width: 630px; line-height: 22px; height: auto; border-top: 3px solid rgb(223, 223, 218); clear: both; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="author-bio" style=""><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jefferson Morley is AlterNet's Washington correspondent. He is the author of the forthcoming biography&nbsp;<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Secret-Spymaster-James-Angleton/dp/1250080614/?tag%3Dalternorg08-20&source=gmail&ust=1495923304426000&usg=AFQjCNHsRWrKLOl8_Y0XsLS3zJo1WlBDAQ" href="https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Secret-Spymaster-James-Angleton/dp/1250080614/?tag=alternorg08-20" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton</a>&nbsp;(St. Martin's Press, October 2017) and&nbsp;<a href="https://amazon.com/Snow-Storm-August-Washington-Francis-Forgotten/dp/0385533373/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.</a></font></p></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">817 overview update</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/activism/enough-blue-baiting-biggest-threat-campus-has-nothing-do-free-speech">http://www.alternet.org/activism/enough-blue-baiting-biggest-threat-campus-has-nothing-do-free-speech</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">dictable outcomes of the Charlottesville, Va., attacks earlier this month was that rather than lead to a reasoned and careful conversation about the rise of hate groups in our nation, it led to debates about whether the white supremacist neo-Nazis on display were the victims of discrimination. In Trumpland everything is on its head. Thus we have become desensitized to its dangerous combination of absurdity and malice.</span></font></div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Charlottesville is not only a story about the mainstreaming of hate and fascism in the Trump era; it’s also a story about how the right has engaged in an all-out war to dismantle our public universities. As we have watched the rising public displays of fascism and bigotry sweep across the nation, it has been easy to overlook the fact that many of these rallies have been purposefully staged on college campuses. The decision to hold these rallies on campuses and to thereby provoke counter-protests also on campuses is a deliberate move by the right: one designed to allow them to further their narrative that college campuses are places that are hostile to free speech.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These days, as many of us across the nation head back into classrooms, we would do well to remember that campus hysteria over free speech has a long history. Before the recent attacks in Charlottesville on the University of Virginia campus, universities grappled with the effects of the McCarthyist red scare of the 1950s. In that period the fear was that communists were infiltrating universities in order to brainwash students and bias knowledge production in favor of a sinister commie agenda.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The details may shift but the pattern of right-wing assaults on higher ed are always the same. Create panic and hysteria by overblowing a perceived threat. Paint the student as an innocent threatened by dangerous professors or describe the student as a whiny, but no less threatening, snowflake determined to undermine any sense of social order. And sow the seeds that will make the public fear, distrust and disapprove of our colleges and universities.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1950 fewer than 50,000 Americans out of a U.S. population of 150 million were members of the Communist Party. But that tiny statistic of .033 percent didn’t temper right-wing fears of communist subversion. Government loyalty boards investigated millions of federal employees and more than 39&nbsp;states required teachers and other public employees to take loyalty oaths.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At a certain level the McCarthy era attacks on higher education as a hotbed of left politics that threatened the fabric of our society never let up; they simply morphed with the times.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the ’90s, as debates raged over the pernicious effects of multiculturalism and diversity and what Dinesh D’Souza called “<a href="mailto:https://www.amazon.com/Illiberal-Education-Politics-Race-Campus/dp/0684863847" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">illiberal education</a>,” they had little sway. But the events of 9/11/2001 gave the right new traction in their attacks. Led by David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes of Campus Watch, the argument was that universities were not patriotic enough. In Horowitz’s “<a href="mailto:https://www.amazon.com/Art-Political-Other-Radical-Pursuits/dp/1890626287/ref=sr_1_1%3Fs=books%26ie=UTF8%26qid=1504278027%26sr=1-1%26keywords=the+art+of+political+war" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">The Art of Political War</a>,” published just before the&nbsp;&nbsp;9/11 attacks, he wrote,&nbsp;&nbsp;“For some time now, conservatives have watched anxiously as tenured leftists have conducted mind experiments on American campuses, regulating speech and punishing ideas that are politically incorrect.”</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As Vijay Prashad noted in a piece for “</span><a href="mailto:http://www.frontline.in/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Frontline</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">”&nbsp;in November 2004, the right-wing popular radio host Rush Limbaugh discussed David Horowitz’s efforts to out liberal faculty on his nationally syndicated radio program: “The Right had taken care of the ‘liberal bias’ in the media, he announced, and the new war will be on the academy. In the language of right-wing critics like Horowitz, today’s communists are leftist professors, but the scandal is no less sensational.”</span></font><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thus the 1950s era of red-baiting started to adjust to a new version of blue-baiting.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Blue-baiting replaces the communists of red-baiting with liberals who advocate for marginalized identities, social equality and civic justice. It describes these ”blue” activities as a threat to our society and a violation of our nation’s core values. The transition to blue-baiting from red-baiting started as the right moved to attack academic attention to identity politics and campus efforts to diversify the curriculum.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The goal of red-baiting is to intimidate, and today’s blue-baiting continues that trend. But even worse, blue-baiting follows in the footsteps of red-baiting and is designed to destroy public trust in higher education. Ultimately the goal, as seen in the not-so-subtle policies of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, is the total destruction of public education as a common good and as a foundation for civic engagement.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Blue-baiting operates today alongside red-baiting as a strategy designed to dominate the narrative and control the conversation.&nbsp;&nbsp;In fact,&nbsp;Kathryn Olmsted, chairwoman of the Department of History at University of California, Davis,&nbsp;<a href="mailto:http://thenewpress.com/books/right-out-of-california" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">argues in her study of Herbert Hoover’s use of red-baiting</a>&nbsp;that the red scare allowed today’s alt-right politics to emerge. Their efforts enabled the ideology and tactics that led to cultural fears that leftists “were endangering the home and family.” Whether attacking red commies or blue liberals, the goal is to convince the public that everything they hold dear is under attack and that college campuses are ground zero.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s of even greater concern is that today their plan is working better than ever. A&nbsp;<a href="mailto:http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-national-institutions/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">recent study by the Pew Research Center</a>&nbsp;found that for the first time a majority of Republicans (58 percent) say colleges have a negative effect on the way things are going in this country. Just two years ago, 54&nbsp;percent of Republicans said colleges had a positive impact on the country’s direction, with 37&nbsp;percent rating higher education negatively.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The 20 percent decline in support can be traced directly to news media coverage of blue-baiting activities on campuses that characterize students legitimately protesting the alt-right as rabid menaces to the social order.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today news about college campuses is overwhelmingly dominated by coverage of the debates over free speech.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="mailto:v" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">As Inside Higher Education reports</a>,&nbsp;“virtually every day Fox News,&nbsp;Breitbart&nbsp;and other conservative outlets run critical articles about free speech disputes on college campuses, typically with coverage focused on the perceived liberal orthodoxy and political correctness in higher education.”Stories about the antifa movement, for instance, focus on the notion that these protesters are scary and violent. And piece after piece,&nbsp;<a href="mailto:http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/what-is-antifa-trnd/index.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">like this recent one from CNN</a>,&nbsp;puff up the myth that anti-fascists are&nbsp;“just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than the right wing could ever be.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Every year there seems to be one higher education policy issue that spreads rapidly throughout the states,” says Thomas Harnisch, director of state relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities&nbsp;<a href="mailto:https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-07-31/campus-free-speech-laws-ignite-the-country" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">in a piece in US News and World Report.</a>&nbsp;“This year it’s campus free speech legislation.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These conflicts over free speech on campus are a direct result of conservative efforts to stir things up and to pass laws purportedly designed to protect free speech on campuses that they suggest limit it. “The campus free speech legislation has largely, if not exclusively, been introduced by conservative state lawmakers who have argued that campuses are not doing enough to ensure that all viewpoints are welcome to be expressed,” Harnisch says.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on how successful the right has been in launching its&nbsp;narrative that free speech is threatened on campuses these days.&nbsp;&nbsp;One article after another covers the story as it has been framed on the right with little or no attention to the fact that these arguments are either overblown or completely without merit.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Less than a year ago&nbsp;Turning Point USA launched&nbsp;Professor Watchlist, a website designed&nbsp;to call out&nbsp;college professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Turning Point’s founder and executive director, Charlie Kirk, wrote a&nbsp;blog post to explain that the purpose of the list was to expose professors who are out of line. “Throughout the next 120 days, Turning Point USA will be running ads to make sure students, faculty, and administrators see that these professors made the Professor Watchlist.” The 22-year-old closed his post with the chilling phrase: “We believe these people need to be exposed.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But guess what? Even if we assume that the list is fair and accurate, which is a big assumption, the list fingers a paltry .013 percent of the entire professoriate in this nation as a threat to free speech. Rather than highlight an epidemic of lefty profs who discriminate against the right,&nbsp;it proves there isn’t one.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="mailto:http://www.salon.com/2016/12/04/academic-witch-hunts-are-back-the-new-mccarthyism-a-sign-of-the-stupidity-of-the-post-truth-era/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">As I wrote for Salon shortly after Turning Point was launched</a>, the problem with the list — besides its more than obvious blue-bait tactics — is that it’s really stupid. It makes claims that have no basis in reality. It exaggerates. It creates crisis where there is none. And worst of all, it promises to increase conflict rather than improve it.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the coming weeks&nbsp;<a href="mailto:https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp%3Fid=372" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">about 20.4 million students will begin their next year at college.</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;But rather than hear about the real challenges this generation of college students will face, chances are pretty good that the news will focus on the campus debates over free speech that have been orchestrated by the right.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite the fact that only about&nbsp;<a href="mailto:https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/02/freshman-survey/462429/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">9 percent of college students will even participate in a campus protest</a>, it is far more likely that their activities will be covered than&nbsp;<a href="mailto:https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/slideshows/10-student-loan-facts-college-grads-need-to-know" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the 70 percent of students</a>&nbsp;who will graduate with loans averaging $37,172.&nbsp;44.2&nbsp;million Americans&nbsp;<a href="mailto:v" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">are burdened with student loan debt</a>&nbsp;and 59 percent of millennials have no idea when their student loans, which average monthly payments of about $350, will be paid off.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But rather than cover that story, we will hear that white supremacist Richard Spencer was denied&nbsp;<a href="mailto:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/08/22/after-charlottesville-white-nationalist-richard-spencer-is-not-welcome-to-speak-at-penn-state/%3Futm_term=.55ea16fa3e9b" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">yet another speaking engagement.</a></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And that leads me to the real crisis facing higher education in our nation. While everyone gets distracted by debates over free speech, Republican-controlled states are slashing support for higher education at precisely the time when our nation’s students need more, not less, funding.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="mailto:http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-gop-dems-state-control-20170804-story.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Republicans now hold 34 governorships</a>, matching the party’s all-time high from 1922. And it is those same governors, like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who have been behind cuts in funding for their state’s colleges. Recently elected Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens&nbsp;<a href="http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/eve-big-speech-greitens-swings-budget-ax" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">cut $68 million</a>&nbsp;in core funding to colleges, universities and community colleges in his state for the current budget year.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="mailto:https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/funding-down-tuition-up" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">According to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report</a>, in total, after adjusting for inflation, funding for public two- and four-year colleges is nearly $10 billion below what it was just before the recession. They further report that the average state is spending $1,598, or 18 percent, less per student than before the recession.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To make up for the shortfall in public funding students work while going to school.&nbsp;<a href="https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/workinglearners/#full-report" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Forty percent</a>&nbsp;of students work at least 30 hours a week. About 25 percent work full-time and go to school full-time.&nbsp;<a href="mailto:http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/07/california-colleges-full-of-hungry-students/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">A recent study found that</a>&nbsp;13 percent of households with students at community colleges and 11 percent with students at four-year colleges worried about having enough money to buy food in 2015.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UC Berkeley’s food pantry served more than&nbsp;2,000 students last spring, or 5&nbsp;percent of its total student population, but it’s the student protesters who&nbsp;are getting the news coverage and leading&nbsp;<a href="mailto:https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/uc-berkeley-protests-milo-yiannopolous" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">President Trump to talk about defunding Berkeley even more.</a></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is not to say that counter-protests and free speech debates aren’t important and don’t deserve our attention. But it is stunning to note the public apathy toward the systematic defunding of higher ed — a move that affects all families regardless of political beliefs.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And yet the shrill blue-baiting continues, distracting us from our real crises, sowing distrust in higher education and disincentivizing those on the right from even seeking college degrees&nbsp;— a move guaranteed to help a party&nbsp;<a href="mailto:http://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-among-voters-1992-2016/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">that appeals to the less educated.</a></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite the fact that the right has tried to twist the meaning of “baiting” by turning the phrase “race-baiting” on its head, it is worth remembering that the term red-baiting and my neologism blue-baiting each derive from the verb “to bait.” Which means to set dogs to bite and harass another animal that is usually chained. The goal is for the dogs to subdue the attacked animal by incapacitating it or killing it.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The chained animal in this story is our institutions of higher ed.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Make no mistake: The right’s blue-baiting has zero interest in helping make our colleges more open to debate and discussion. But it does want to unravel the one institution our nation needs in order to foster an informed and educated citizenry.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></p><div wibbitz="embed-main-player" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="bio-new body_activism" style="width: 630px; font-style: italic; line-height: 22px; height: auto; border-top: 3px solid rgb(223, 223, 218); clear: both; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="author-bio" style=""><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://sophiamcclennen.com/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Sophia A. McClennen</a>&nbsp;is professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. Her latest book, co-authored with Remy M. Maisel, is,&nbsp;<a href="http://amzn.com/1137427965" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Is Satire Saving Our Nation? Mockery and American Politics</a>.&nbsp;</font></p></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">nb not on the payroll, just riding wave:</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-bent-becoming-tyrant-and-liberals-have-never-looked-more-helpless-stop-him">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-bent-becoming-tyrant-and-liberals-have-never-looked-more-helpless-stop-him</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio is only another of the hastening steps on his not-so-long march toward an authoritarian presidency. However incoherent his intentions, he's bent on becoming a tyrant—<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://opendemocracy.net/jim-sleeper/die-is-cast-why-trump-can-t-help-but-try-dictatorship&source=gmail&ust=1504045833232000&usg=AFQjCNGlNH8kl9EE4Q55GX64x5O5hG_wpg" href="https://opendemocracy.net/jim-sleeper/die-is-cast-why-trump-can-t-help-but-try-dictatorship" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">or at least trying to become one</a>. And too many of us who know this are clueless about how to stop him, at least partly because we’re obsessed with secondary, almost irrelevant developments. Sometimes it seems as if we’d do&nbsp;anything&nbsp;but confront the most important challenge. Let me try, starting with how liberals have been dodging the full truth.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That haplessness in the face of a real challenge was on display at the Washington, D.C. bookstore Politics & Prose&nbsp;on Sunday&nbsp;evening, as Columbia professor Mark Lilla held forth on the dangers—and as he sees it, the evils—of racial and sexual identity politics before a seemingly contrite white audience. That was until a&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">questioner asked him if he realizes he’s riding the crest of a lavishly funded, brilliantly orchestrated conservative campaign, led by the&nbsp;<b>Foundation for Individual Rights in Education</b>, to inflate identity politics’ noxious excesses in “politically correct” demonstrations on campuses in order to distract us from the far-greater dangers closing in on us.&nbsp;</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lilla, promoting his book "The Once and Future Liberal,"&nbsp;mostly ducked the question, at first pleading ignorance of the campaign and then insisting, with something like circular logic, that liberals need to acknowledge that those noxious excesses do hobble their chances of winning elections. A week earlier, the magazine’s editor David Remnick pushed him to justify his sweeping, sardonic dismissals of today’s social movements and campus racial and sexual protocols on the grounds that they insult and alienate voters in aggrieved, white, working-class communities like the one he grew up in.&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s an old argument (one&nbsp;<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://books.google.com/books?id%3DINvG6UX9_ksC%26pg%3DPA1%26lpg%3DPA1%26dq%3D%2522life%2Bafter%2Bdiversity%2522%2Band%2B%2522jim%2Bsleeper%2522%26source%3Dbl%26ots%3DvLShXaqRx5%26sig%3DE5DZZ4W2-1VmvKas5w6TmNt8CXA%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26ved%3D0ahUKEwi8xLnMocTQAhUE0WMKHRB1DZEQ6AEIGjAA%23v%3Donepage%26q%3D%2522life%2520after%2520diversity%2522%2520and%2520%2522jim%2520sleeper%2522%26f%3Dfalse&source=gmail&ust=1504045833232000&usg=AFQjCNFo3HMJ3bFL3VUAyUDzOoqJyPHt6g" href="https://books.google.com/books?id=INvG6UX9_ksC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=%22life+after+diversity%22+and+%22jim+sleeper%22&source=bl&ots=vLShXaqRx5&sig=E5DZZ4W2-1VmvKas5w6TmNt8CXA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi8xLnMocTQAhUE0WMKHRB1DZEQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=%22life%20after%20diversity%22%20and%20%22jim%20sleeper%22&f=false" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">I made 20 years ago</a>&nbsp;at the same Politics & Prose bookstore).&nbsp;The argument still has merit, but is correcting the politically correct really what we should be doing now in the teeth of Trump’s attempted political lockdown? Or should we, like Lilla’s questioner at the bookstore, be focusing instead on what’s really causing the injuries and resentments that carried him to the White House?&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"When I read Lilla's book and then&nbsp;<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/john-ridley-on-charlottesville-and-nick-lowe-gets-old&source=gmail&ust=1504045833233000&usg=AFQjCNGSwNRLYDW4QFRAKG1wR-HDGJn18w" href="http://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/john-ridley-on-charlottesville-and-nick-lowe-gets-old" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">talked with him for the New Yorker Radio Hour</a>,” Remnick notes, “I found much to disagree with, not least his cutting dismissals of ‘social-justice warriors’ or movements like Black Lives Matter, which he sees as a ‘textbook example of how not to build solidarity.” Remnick questioned Lilla’s&nbsp;antipathy to social movements and to the follies of campus “political correctness” that Lilla thinks drive many of those movements.&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lilla acknowledged that part of the problem of campus “correctness” is driven by late-adolescent groping for identity and communal belonging, and that factors unrelated to identity politics are indeed in play. But his conversation with Remnick ends where it should have begun. It doesn’t ponder the far more overwhelming factors that are driving Trump’s march.&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?429352-3/free-speech-college-campuses">https://www.c-span.org/video/?429352-3/free-speech-college-campuses</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="video-page-title" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-weight: 700; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Free Speech on College Campuses</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;Panelists talked about free speech and censorship on college campuses. They discussed incidents of protests against commencement speakers, along with issues of safety, security costs, “hate speech” and the role of college administrations and faculty. Speakers included a college student from the University of California at Berkeley who founded a group that aims to create the free exchange of ideas without the fear of violence.</span></font></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Judith Shapiro</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>WERE A LOT WORSE THAN EVEN I THOUGHT AND THEY WERE REALLY LUCKY NOBODY GOT KILLED. I UNDERSTAND THE INTENSE INTEREST, BUT IT DOES COME FROM THINGS...</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Show Full Text</div><div>00:13:37</div><div>&nbsp;<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div>Pranav Jandhyala</div><div>YOU. PRANAV? >> I WANT TO THANK YOU ALL FOR COMING. I JUST WANT TO SAY BEFORE I GET INTO SOME OF THE POINT IS I'M VERY EXCITED TO BE HER SITTING --...</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Show Full Text</div><div>00:17:37</div><div>&nbsp;<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div>Scott Jaschik</div><div>COMBINED WITH JUST INABILITY TO PROTECT A SPEAKER BECAUSE OF RESOURCES. >> SO I WANT TO ASK THE PANELISTS ABOUT THAT, SOME ISSUES YOU JUST RAISED. WE...</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Greg Lukianoff</div><div>THE FREE SPEECH ISSUE, BUT ALSO IN TERMS OF THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE OF STUDENTS? >> I MEAN, THEY WOULDN'T HAVE GOTTEN SOME ATTENTION IF THERE HAD...</div></span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font></div><div><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/as-hate-crimes-rise-the-trump-administration-blocks-funding-to-fight-domestic-extremism/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/as-hate-crimes-rise-the-trump-administration-blocks-funding-to-fight-domestic-extremism/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>In the midst of a rise in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/05/27/530393081/splc-has-seen-rise-in-hate-crime-domestic-terrorism-attacks" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">hate</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/racist-who-killed-black-man-is-charged-with-terrorist-murder.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">crimes</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amny.com/news/hate-crimes-subway-incidents-spike-in-first-3-months-of-2017-1.13357112" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">and</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/06/this_year_s_string_of_brutal_hate_crimes_is_intrinsically_connected_to_the.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">domestic</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/142346/kansas-meatpacking-somali-muslim-refugee-murder-plot-trump-supporters" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">extremism</a>, such as the recent white supremacist attack in Portland, the Trump administration is cutting down on programs aimed at combating domestic extremism.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>As Reuters&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-budget-extremism-idUSKBN18J2HJ" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">reported</a>&nbsp;last month, the president’s proposed budget seeks to “cut all funding to a Department of Homeland Security program known as ‘countering violent extremism,’ which provides grants to communities to counter radicalism through outreach.”</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">According to Reuters, the administration previously considered changing the program’s focus to solely provide “grants that dealt with the Islamic community, not other communities that may have extremist views like white supremacists.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yesterday, Voice of America&nbsp;<a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/groups-focused-countering-violent-extremism-still-waiting-funds/3883241.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">found</a>&nbsp;that despite the “rising tide of violent activity attributed to white supremacists,” the White House has halted funding directed towards groups that work to counteract domestic extremism:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; hyphens: none; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; padding: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0.75em 2em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Helping people fill personal needs doesn’t always sound like a viable way to fight extremism. But last year, the Obama administration took a chance on it, allotting $10 million in grants to groups that aim to stop extremists through prevention and personal intervention, a process dubbed Countering Violent Extremism.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Picciolini’s group found out in January, just a few days before the new president was inaugurated, that Life After Hate had been given a $400,000 grant to develop an online way to reach out to teens at risk of joining extremist groups. The idea was to hook those teens up with former members of violent extremist groups who grew disillusioned, dropped out and now are ideal counselors for at-risk youth who are reaching the same crossroads.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Although the grants were supposed to be disbursed within 30 days of the announcement of the winners, there has been no official word from the Trump administration on when or whether those funds will appear in mailboxes. Several groups, Life After Hate among them, have said publicly that they have heard nothing more about whether to expect the money.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Reuters news agency published a story in February quoting sources in the Trump administration as saying the Countering Violent Extremism funding might be rerouted to programs focused solely on overseas groups such as Islamic State. (The program falls under the Department of Homeland Security, which has not answered repeated VOA requests for comment.)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But a study by the George Washington University’s program on extremism says the number of white nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers on Twitter has multiplied more than 600 percent since 2012.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">…</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">While this year’s money is in limbo, the Trump budget for fiscal 2018 has wiped out the entire $50 million CVE program at a time when, its supporters argue, the need for preventive and rehabilitative measures is higher than ever.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Before the election in November, we were getting maybe one to three requests [for help] per week,” Picciolini said. “Now, we get one to four requests per day.”</font></p></blockquote></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">==</font></div></div></div></div>