Wednesday roundup

I haven't seen the documentary The Rise of Jordan Peterson, but my sense, from reading about it, is that it is balanced, nuanced and in-depth.  That's not stopping the jackboots from using threats to try to prevent anyone from seeing it.

A similar exercise in jackbootery is underway at Sarah Lawrence College, as the American Enterprise Institute's Samuel J. Abrams reports:

I am currently teaching a First-Year Study at Sarah Lawrence College called American Dreams. The class is a deep dive into our nation’s difficult history and addresses the question of what it means to be an American today and how that has changed over time.

In creating the class, I was deeply concerned with promoting intellectual and ideological balance, along with creating a space where students could freely question and discuss questions ranging from identity politics to social policy. As such, the reading list is as a mix of social science works, historical pieces, and memoirs, which range from Charles Murray’s Coming Apart to Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me and is intended to offer a wide range of perspectives on the American Dream and truly promote viewpoint diversity.

I even included specific provisions in the syllabus to promote balance, such as reminding students of the 1967 Chicago Kalven Committee Report about the import of higher education as an “institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.”

Moreover, the class operates  under Chatham House rules along with the College’s Principles of Mutual Respect which not only asserts that those in the school’s community seek to “embrace our diversity in all its dimensions” but also that we work to “foster honest inquiry, free speech, and open discourse.”

This course was recently featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education because the class explicitly attempts to help students understand other points of view beyond the fairly narrow, progressive monoculture that afflicts so many campuses.

I share this background because my course’s content and ideological balance are hardly objectionable. However, many of my students are being bullied outside of the classroom – in their dorms, in the student center, in the dining halls – by other students for simply taking the course with me. The course content cannot possibly be the source of the bullying. Rather, the intimidation is presumably a result of a 2018 op-ed that I wrote in the New York Times which questioned the partisan and ideological nature of the programming coming out of some administrative offices on campus and resulting storm of protests and demands, which included the usual host of meritless slanderous and defamatory claims.

It now appears that by remaining in my course or by not explicitly and publicly condemning me in some capacity, the students risk reputational damage and the stress of being viewed as  pariahs or being labeled a complicit supporter of me or my “objectionable views.” I truly do not envy my students here and completely empathize with the position my students find themselves in.

I am grateful that my students come to class ready to engage, question, and debate topics and questions across the ideological spectrum, but it is completely unacceptable that they must censor themselves or feel the slightest bit of discomfort over attending my class.

Whenever I tangle with Trumpists, I always arrive at a juncture at which I have to concede the very significant good policy moves that have occurred on the VSG's watch - judicial appointments, deregulation, pulling out of the Paris Accord and there JCPOA, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. They don't outweigh that which is disastrous about the VSG, but they must be acknowledged. One such move was appointing William Barr as Attorney General. Barr's recent speech to the Notre Dame law school is the kind of thunderous analysis of post-America's spiritual sickness that could only come from a highly refined conservative mind:

Last week, US Attorney General William Barr gave an extraordinary speech about religious liberty at Notre Dame Law School. I have not been able to locate a transcript, and only found time to watch it this morning. Here’s a video of the entire thing. The speech itself begins at about the four-minute mark.

The AG begins by talking about the capacity for self-government, meaning not the form of administration of a liberal democracy, but the ability of individuals to master their own passions, and subject them to reason. Can we handle freedom? That, says Barr, is a question that preoccupied the Founders.

No society can exist without the capacity to restrain vice, he goes on to say. If you depend only on the government to do this, you get tyranny. (This, by the way, is what’s happening in China; many Chinese actually support the tyrannical Social Credit System, because communism destroyed civil society and social trust.) But, says Barr, licentiousness is another form of tyranny. People enslaved by their own appetites make community life impossible. (This, I would say, is what we are more endangered by in America today … and it will ultimately call forth tyranny, Chinese-style.)

Barr offers this quotation from Edmund Burke:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.”

Why is religion a public good? Because, says Barr, it “trains people to want what is good.” It helps to frame a society’s moral culture, and instills moral discipline. No secular creed has emerged that can do what religion does, he says. And by casting religion out, we are dismantling the foundation of our public morality.

“What we call ‘values’ today are nothing more than mere sentimentality, drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity,” says the AG.

Barr took the gloves off, saying that religion is not jumping to its death; it’s being pushed.

“This is not decay,” he said. “This is organized destruction.” He named secularists in academia, media, and elsewhere as figures who are not neutral at all, but have rather inculcated a kind of religiosity in their own project of destroying religion. They conduct their own inquisitions and excommunications for heresy.

Then Barr said something, almost in passing, that in truth deserves a lot more attention by religious and philosophical observers: that we have created a popular culture in which we the people are “too distracted” to take these questions seriously. Just last night, readers, I received an e-mail from one of you who said that “the really striking thing of our age is the complete anesthesia of religious questions.” That’s true. This, I think, is where I would push back against AG Barr somewhat. It’s not only that the secularists want to suppress religion; it’s also that many of us aren’t interested in religion in the first place. To be clear, religious questions — that is, questions of transcendence and ultimate truth — can’t be suppressed forever. But we seem to be doing a great job of avoiding them.

Anyway, back to the Barr speech. He says that we are in a time like the days of the early Church, when the Roman authorities weren’t content to leave Christians alone to pray in peace, but actually tried to force them to violate their beliefs.

Barr says in his talk that one of the most important aspects of religious liberty is the freedom to pass the faith on to your children. This is where the battle is joined — and, because the Trump administration supports “religious accommodation,” the real battles are happening at the state level. Ground Zero for the warfare is at the schools. Barr identifies three specific areas of conflict:

1. Content of public school curriculum. Meaning the implementation of an anti-traditional values curriculum without any opt-out for families. E.g., New Jersey, Illinois, and California law mandating LGBT curriculum. He cites a diktat by the Orange County (Calif.) board of education saying that parents cannot opt their kids out of LGBT training.
2. State policies designed to starve religious schools of generally available funds, to force religious people to put their kids into public schools.
3. Use of state laws to force religious schools to accept secular morality.

The Attorney General concluded by telling his Catholic audience that only by conversion of ourselves can we hope to transform society. He adds that Christians must have more emphasis on moral content in education. “Education is not vocational training,” he said. If we don’t pass on our faith and moral conviction to our children “in full vigor,” all is lost.

Another AEI scholar, Danielle Pletka  says that, with regard to what the VSG's withdrawal of a US presence from Northern Syria is doing to the power dynamic on the world stage, the root cause doesn't lend itself to a tidy left-right analytical model. The involvement-in-hot-spots-is-icky-let's-just-come-home mentality can be found on both sides of the spectrum:

we must recognize that this is a failure of leadership. Yes… the leadership of people like me and those like me who believe that the world is a better place when America leads; who believe that “never again” once meant something; who think that we must build the foundations of democratic transformation and human freedom. We must persuade our leadership, our policymakers, and the public that it is always cheaper to try to solve problems overseas before they become wars, but we haven’t done so. Second, we must set aside the left-right anger that is only deepening between us. The true adversary on the American political scene is the isolationist, the do–nothing, the one who believes “nation building here at home” is somehow mutually exclusive from leadership abroad. The problem to confront is the one that suggests that anyone who wants a foreign policy and a strategy to confront dangers is a warmonger determined to sacrifice blood and treasure.

California is going to let illegal aliens serve on government boards.

Last night's debate made more plain than ever that Joe Biden's star is fading.

Kim Jong-un has been photographed riding a white horse across the snowfields on Mt. Paektu, which, according to North Korean media, means something grand is afoot.

A Rutgers University gender-studies professor says that Donald Trump is to blame for any obesity among black women.