Sunday roundup

 Samantha Jones, who is writing pseudonymously as a "dissident Women's Studies PhD" at Quillette, asks "How Will Decolonizing The Curriculum Help the Poor and Dispossessed?"

She sets the table by reviewing the state of things in academe, the whole business about #DisruptTexts and casting the pursuit of objective knowledge as an arrogant Western notion, and the call to "integrate subjugated and local epistemologies."

She reviews the attempt - all too successful - to make Francis Bacon, of all people, a controversial figure back in the 1990s:

During the “Science Wars” of the 1990s, between scientific realists and postmodernists, Sandra Harding, Carolyn Merchant, and Evelyn Fox Keller condemned Francis Bacon for what they deemed misogynistic sexual metaphors. Although they could have critiqued Bacon’s writing and left it at that, these feminists went much further, arguing that misogyny is at the heart of modern science. In 1995, Alan Soble made a convincing case that postmodern feminist readings of Bacon are based on misquotations, passages taken out of context, projection, and scholarly uncharitability. I would add that these critiques are wholly contingent upon the technological advancements produced by applying the epistemology advocated for by thinkers like Bacon. Imagine the short-sightedness of encountering a metaphor you dislike in a 17th century philosophical treatise, then proclaiming that the entire epistemological basis of modern civilization is inherently flawed—all while typing on a computer powered by reliable electricity, in a stable country, where you’ve never gone hungry.

She says, with more tact than I can muster, that there is more than a touch of spoiled-brat-ism in all this:

It is also essential to underscore that demands for decolonization in Western universities are the product of affluence. What do you think that impoverished people in the global South care about more: decolonizing Western epistemology or increasing their prosperity? While indigenous people are probably proud of their epistemology, I would bet that the majority care more about meeting their material needs. Decolonization activists might consider how changing epistemology in Western universities will solve the main problems experienced by most people in the world, including extreme poverty, rampant political corruption, substandard infrastructure, inadequate police, and dysfunctional judicial systems. The political advancement of the Enlightenment, liberalism, provides a framework for solving these problems by establishing limited, republican government; enforcing the rule of law; and protecting individual rights and liberties, especially freedom of speech, so that people can have honest discussions about problems and work toward solutions—without descending into authoritarianism and violence.

And she concludes by grimly reminding us that this has implications beyond the confines of the campus:

Be forewarned: decolonization demands won’t stop at the university gates. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang state, decolonization is not a metaphor; it is a struggle over dispossession, the repatriation of indigenous land, and the seizing of imperial wealth. If you have any European heritage, the activists will soon demand that you be decolonized, too.

Elaine McCusker and Dov Zakheim of the American Enterprise Institute explain why slashing the Pentagon budget would be a disaster.  

There is little that is new in the letter that 50 members of the House of Representatives sent to President Joe Biden on March 16. In particular, the letter raises the disingenuous argument that “we could cut the Pentagon budget by more than 10% and still spend more than the next 10 largest militaries combined.”

This statement is misleading to the point of irresponsibility.

Completely overlooked is America’s role in the world, and with it the necessity of implementing a strategy that responds to its international interests. Equally important, the statement omits differences in economic systems, purchasing power and transparency that impact the comparative defense budgets of the United States and its increasingly powerful competitor, the People’s Republic of China. 

And it's not just China that we have to think about:

As a global power with critical interests and key allies in Europe, the Indo-Pacific region and the Middle East, the United States must maintain forces that can separately address threats in all three regions against one or more hostile powers. It therefore makes little sense to compare American defense spending to that of regional powers.

In one of my journalistic roles, I report on our state legislature for a local media company, and this next subject has been hot lately. Our local state Representative and state Senator have their heads squarely on their shoulders, bu there's a lot of pressure on them to relent in the matter of enhancing choice in the matter of education. A lot of it takes the form of intimations that public school funding is suffering at the expense of charter schools, private schools and home schooling. Corey DeAngelis, a scholar with the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation and the American Federation for Children, in a National Review piece entitled "The Pernicious Myth of Shrinking Public School Budgets," demonstrates that this is just not so.

A young British woman named Keira Bell, writing at Persuasion, has a story to tell that will break your heart. She had a truly crummy childhood. Her mother was a mentally ill alcoholic and her father was absent to a considerable degree. She was a tomboy, and as adolescent hormonal changes began to set in, she was encouraged to consider that maybe she had a gender identity different from her sex. She found a clinic willing to indulge her in this, and started down the rabbit hole of puberty blockers, breast binders, male hormone treatment, and finally a double mastectomy at age 20. And then remorse set in:

The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.

The Very Stable Genius was in rare form Saturday night performing for Republican donors, This loudmouth narcissist was our president for four years:

Donald Trump spoke to Republican Party donors at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday night and tore into Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, calling him a “dumb son of a bitch” and “a stone-cold loser.”

Speaking to attendees of the Republican National Committee’s donor retreat about the 2020 presidential election that he lost, Trump blamed the Republican leader in the Senate for not interfering with democracy.

“If that were [Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer instead of this dumb son of a bitch Mitch McConnell they would never allow it to happen. They would have fought it,” Trump said, according to the Washington Post.

The former president also went after his former transportation secretary and McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao.

“I hired his wife. Did he ever say thank you?” Trump said. The Post also reported that Trump mocked Chao, who resigned following the Capitol riot, sarcastically saying, “She suffered so greatly.”

And Trump attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, saying, “Have you ever seen anybody that is so full of crap?” He then told those gathered that it had been suggested to him that the Covid-19 vaccine should be called the “Trumpcine.”

One for us all to keep our eyes on: Russia has amassed 100,000 troops on its border with Ukraine.  Also lots of fancy robotic weaponry. 

 

Heaven forfend that college students should be exposed to the idea that they can take charge of their lives

 It's important, in the polemics biz, to not gratuitously rant about every instance of higher-education shamefulness. They come down the pike with such regularity that we risk becoming inured to the cultural rot they further.

Occasionally, though, a story points up a particular kind of rot with such egregiousness that it must be remarked upon.

I guess you know who Suze Orman is. She's one of the superstars of the financial-advice-for-everyday-folks field, alongside Dave Ramsey. She's about empowering people. She's about as uncontroversial as one can get.

Well, except in the eyes of the trade association for student-affairs administrators. That's the bunch that's in the field of offering guidance to college and university students sorting out the life decisions facing them.

Their collective view of how to go about their work is downright chilling, as the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess recounts:

It’s one thing to insist that we need to address systemic challenges and structural barriers when talking about economic circumstances. It’s quite another to insist that anything else is verboten and to shout down talk of personal agency as “tone-deaf, uninformed and out of touch with the current socioeconomic climate.” Yet, that’s where the nation’s higher education establishment finds itself. 

On Wednesday, financial advice guru Suze Orman delivered the keynote for the annual conference of NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (yeah, the acronym doesn’t match the name—don’t ask). Orman, who for decades has been a successful television personality peddling a combination of straight talk, encouragement, and basic financial know-how, delivered precisely what one might expect. Orman emphasized the importance of financial literacy, urged student affairs workers to push for better pay and more opportunities, and addressed the “obstacles to wealth” that an individual can control. 

The problem? Some vocal portion of the audience was outraged that Orman didn’t wade into “systemic barriers to wealth such as class, race or gender.” (Oh, and Orman referred to the South Side of Chicago, where she grew up, as “the hood” and “the ghetto.” If those terms are to be memory-holed, though, someone really should tell all the equity-minded academics who frequently use them in their writing.) While the complaints immediately took off on social media, there’s no way to tell how widely shared the concerns actually were—whether they were broadly shared or were the handiwork of a bullying few. 

Either way, within hours of Orman’s remarks, NASPA’s leadership blasted out a cringing official apology, begging forgiveness for having “missed the mark” by inviting a speaker who made comments “offensive to your lived experiences and to our NASPA values.” 

The apology went on to insist, “We cannot discuss financial literacy without first acknowledging the inequitable and unjust systems that have prevented Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Queer, Trans, first-gen, low-income, and many other historically minoritized and marginalized communities from attaining education and generational wealth.”

The organization went out of its way to throw Orman under the bus, opting for a familiar tone in declaring that “Suze’s comments tied self-worth to financial progress, ignored the difficulties that many individuals experience when navigating existing systemic structures and tools, and used offensive language to describe the area of Chicago in which she grew up.” Of course, NASPA has also said it will refuse to release the speech, making it impossible for any observers to judge this slur.

It’s appropriate to note that systemic issues can and must be part of any conversation on compensation and opportunity. But even Orman’s most determined critics were quick to acknowledge that, as Inside Higher Ed put it, her “address was not representative of the overall conference.” In other words, the issue was not whether systemic issues should be on the agenda, but whether an invited keynoter could talk about anything else.

The answer: apparently not. 

The stampede to disavow and belittle Orman may have been depressingly predictable, given that surveys find that left-leaning student affairs administrators outnumber right-leaning ones by a ratio of 12-to-1. When campus life is managed by those only too eager to kneecap an accomplished keynote speaker that they invited, the troubled state of free inquiry on campus is even easier to understand. 

You know, these higher education professionals might want to think about this a bit. Given that they work in a sector whose whole existence is premised largely on the notion that taxpayers and students should pay for colleges because they help people achieve better lives, a wholesale denunciation of personal agency seems like a perilous stance. If an emphasis on personal agency truly is irrelevant, or even offensive, it raises grave questions about how we think about the future of higher education.

Ya got yer "unjust systems," doncha know. 

By the way, this is a great opportunity to point out once again that only about 3 percent of Hispanics like the term "Latinx."

This push by the Left to make sure that our society never comes to a consensus that we look at each other as individuals rather than demographics that are either oppressed or oppressing is gathering momentum at a terrifying pace. 

Those orchestrating this have one end in mind: their own power. They have to keep large swaths of post-America viewing themselves as victims in need of government protection and provision in order to secure their perches in the catbird seat.

The damage is great and undoing it is going to require a level of courage that we'd better get prepared to muster. 

Monday roundup

 As you're aware, since the Biden administration has commenced, there is a renewed focus on the global climate. One figure whose pronouncements on the subject are getting a lot of attention is Bill Gates. David Harsanyi at National Review shows that most of what Gates has to say is good old collectivist coercion based on shoddy "scientific" conclusions:

Americans use over 20 million barrels of petroleum products every day — now more abundant and easier to extract than ever before — so, unless some completely new technology emerges, it will take a fascistic technocracy to win this conflict. Now, I don’t use “fascistic” lightly here. Nor am I suggesting that Gates envisions goose-stepping Gestapo agents banging on your door every time you set the air conditioner below 75 degrees. And, anyway, what kind of monster would own an air conditioner with an extinction-level threat hanging over humanity? He does, however, envision the state dictating virtually every decision made by industry that relates to carbon emissions — which is to say the entire economy. If there is a more precise phrase that describes a state-controlled economy that directs both private and public ownership over the means of production during wartime, I will be happy to use it.

One for the you-will-get-your-mind-right file. Coca Cola has instituted a confronting-racism "training program" that shows you how to be less oppressive, arrogant, certain, defensive and ignorant. One screen from the presentation says that "one-time workshops on racism are not enough." The company needs to "establish a set of organizational practices such as monthly affinity groups, cross-racial discussions, ongoing professional development, [and] revamped interview questions that address racial issues."

Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility fame is involved in the program's development.

I do believe I've had my last swig of Dr. Pemberton's iconic American elixir. 

Another one for the you-will-get-your-mind-right file: Bari Weiss, writing at her Substack page, recounts the experience of Smith College's Student Support Coordinator Jodi Shaw, who resigned her position rather than submit to identity-politics militancy:

Jodi Shaw was, until this afternoon, a staffer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She made $45,000 a year — less than the yearly tuition at the school. 

She is a divorced mother of two children. She is a lifelong liberal and an alumna of the college. And she has had a front-row seat to the illiberal, neo-racist ideology masquerading as progress.

In October 2020, after Shaw felt that she had exhausted all her internal options, she posted a video on YouTube, blowing the whistle on, what she says, is an atmosphere of racial discrimination at the school. 

“I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself,” she said. “Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.”

From Shaw's letter to Smith's president:

in August 2018, just days before I was to present a library orientation program into which I had poured a tremendous amount of time and effort, and which had previously been approved by my supervisors, I was told that I could not proceed with the planned program. Because it was going to be done in rap form and “because you are white,” as my supervisor told me, that could be viewed as “cultural appropriation.” My supervisor made clear he did not object to a rap in general, nor to the idea of using music to convey orientation information to students. The problem was my skin color.

I was up for a full-time position in the library at that time, and I was essentially informed that my candidacy for that position was dependent upon my ability, in a matter of days, to reinvent a program to which I had devoted months of time. 

Humiliated, and knowing my candidacy for the full-time position was now dead in the water, I moved into my current, lower-paying position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life. 

As it turned out, my experience in the library was just the beginning. In my new position, I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race. 

Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.

Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.

The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.” I was the only person in the room to abstain.

Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of “white fragility.” They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is actually a “power play.” In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues.

I filed an internal complaint about the hostile environment, but throughout that process, over the course of almost six months, I felt like my complaint was taken less seriously because of my race. I was told that the civil rights law protections were not created to help people like me. And after I filed my complaint, I started to experience retaliatory behavior, like having important aspects of my job taken away without explanation. 

Per Frederick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute, more campus identity-politics jackboot-ism, leveled at an economics professor who had the temerity to speak common sense about poverty:

Professor Frank Gunter has learned that, the next time Lehigh University asks him to talk about poverty, he should keep his mouth shut. Earlier this year, Lehigh asked its business school faculty to offer counsel to the Biden administration in a series of short “kitchen table talk” videos.  

Gunter, a professor of economics, did as he was asked. In late January, Lehigh posted his video on “Three Myths Concerning Poverty.” Sounding a lot like AEI’s own Ian Rowe, Gunter argued that poverty is not “mostly a matter of race,” that it’s not a “generational curse,” and that individuals have great agency when it comes to determining their own economic fate.

Gunter observed that most black Americans are not in poverty and that three-quarters of poor Americans aren’t black, while pointing to data on economic mobility to rebut those who suggest that poverty is an inherited condition. He proceeded to note that evidence on the “success sequence” suggests that a series of straightforward actions (finish high school, get a job, get married before having kids) will keep most Americans out of poverty. 

For doing what Lehigh had asked, Gunter was soon attacked by students and faculty for his choice of topics, evidence, data presentation, verbiage, and context. Students for Black Lives Matter thundered, “The points brought up by Professor Gunter were not points of opinion, but incorrect and damaging statistics meant to put blame on impoverished people.” Of course, what Gunter said is more accurately characterized as a series of “accurate data points” than as “points of opinion.”

In any event, Students for Black Lives Matter labeled Gunter’s little video “racist and ignorant” and then gave the game away, declaring, “We don’t need a debate, we need action.” In short order, the university complied. It took down the video. The College of Business then explained that, to correct for Gunter’s wrongthink, it would “post more videos with diverse perspectives on this topic.” Lehigh then reposted Gunter’s informal little video chat alongside a critique created by its departments of sociology and anthropology, without informing Gunter of what it was doing or giving him a chance to respond in turn.

Even the teaching of mathematics is not untouched by this kind of poison.  

Look, I'm no fan of Ted Cruz or Kayleigh McEnanay, and not much of one of Dan Crenshaw, but this campaign afoot on the Harvard campus to revoke their degrees from that institution is chilling.

Joe Carter at The Gospel Coalition on what you need to know about the Equality Act that the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on. The essence of why it's disturbing:

As Andrew T. Walker wrote in an article for TGC, “The bill represents the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed in America. Given that it touches areas of education, public accommodation, employment, and federal funding, were it to pass, its sweeping effects on religious liberty, free speech, and freedom of conscience would be both historic and also chilling.”

“Virtually no area of American life would emerge unscathed from the Equality Act’s reach,” Walker added. “No less significant would be the long-term effects of how the law would shape the moral imagination of future generations.”

Twenty-four states have similar laws, and the consequences for residents of those states have been disastrous, says Monica Burke, research assistant in the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society. “These policies are not being used to promote equality,” Burke says. “Instead, they are being used as a blunt-force weapon to ban disagreement on marriage and sexuality by punishing dissenters.”

Arkansas state senator Jim Hendren's powerful statement on why he's leaving the Republican Party. 

The valid argument that the Very Stable Genius's most positive legacy is his judicial appointments is rich with irony. Today's example is the Supreme Court ruling that a New York grand jury can obtain the VSG's tax returns.  Hee hee. 

 

 

 

In 2019, the campus jackboots feel comfortable making their real agenda this plain

Frederick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute passes along any eye-opening remark from a prominent academic:

Some in the academy increasingly argue that the whole notion of free inquiry is a reactionary blemish rather than a bedrock principle. Indeed, in a new book published by Oxford University Press, New York University professor Ulrich Baer has done a signal (if disheartening) service in articulating this ominous new stance.

NYU’s Baer, a professor of comparative literature, German, and English, and author of What Snowflakes Get Right, told Inside Higher Education last week that “the urge to block speech, which is really a reminder that the university’s purpose is to vet ideas and regulate speech so that teaching and learning can proceed, is related to a new generation’s realization that free speech has become a weapon for conservatives to undermine equality and the university itself.” He explained that free speech “is neither a blanket permission to say anything without consequence . . . nor identical with academic freedom.”

Got that? Forget all that talk of free, untrammeled inquiry. The university’s very purpose is to “vet ideas and regulate speech” — with an eye to the fact that “free speech” itself is a political “weapon” that threatens the “equality and the university itself.” What Baer offers is a pivot that would leave behind any squeamishness for those wishing to stifle conservative perspectives or maintain any romantic attachment to the age-old principles articulated by the American Association of University Professors.

You see, Baer argues, “universities get confused about their mission in the free speech debates and insist . . . that open-ended and unregulated inquiry is their purpose.” In fact, Baer says, universities are supposed to tolerate free inquiry only as a means for “advancing knowledge and seeking truth,” and the campus mandarins should serve as censors who determine which ideas and speech do so — and which do not.

This is the next front in the push by campus culture warriors to marginalize and silence those who hold objectionable views or values. Baer is explicit on this count, explaining that “free speech only has meaning in the university when it’s paired with the legally mandated principle of equality for all qualified participants.” He elaborates: “When a speaker proposes that some people are innately inferior, such speech conflicts directly with the university’s mandate to provide equal access to its facilities and resources.”

Now, I’m scratching my head trying to think of many campus speakers in 2019 who spend their time arguing “that some people are innately inferior.” But the game, of course, is that Baer and his cronies will define ideas and thoughts they dislike as fitting the bill — and they trust that progressive, weak-kneed campus censors will see things their way. Recent history suggests that they’re on safe ground, on that score.

Baer explains that this profound redefinition of the university reflects the “new generation’s” sense “that free speech can serve as a hollow concept to advance a reactionary agenda.” This cynical dismissal is a telling summation of how Baer and likeminded illiberal thugs view the ideals of free inquiry and academic freedom.

Be sure that hordes of like-minded jackboots are chomping at the bit to make this guy a thought leader. The camel's nose is now in the tent.

Baer and his ilk are going to be appointed arbiters of what "equality" means. And that in turn will establish the parameters around what we get to say without running afoul of them.

It's very late in the day. There's not much time to mount effective resistance to this.

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.

Barney & Clyde - episode 8

Ah, there you are!  We saved you a seat at the libation station. We have a number of items on the national plate to dish from the libertarian and conservative perspectives: how the free market is the best cure for bigotry and racism, how tariffs have already eaten away tax cut benefits, the Oberlin College - Gibson’s Bakery situation, the fun Texas governor Greg Abbott has been having signing pro-freedom bills on social media, and the US Agriculture Department employees having a hissy fit about moving from DC to Kansas City. Along the way, an interesting array of figures make cameo appearances: Frederic Bastiat, Charles Grandison Finney, William Barrett Travis and Pee Wee Crayton, among others. 

Saturday roundup

A culture-war skirmish that turned out right:

Oberlin College in Ohio may be one of the most egregious politically correct campuses in the nation. Back in 2013, the campus closed down for a day of “racial sensitivity training” despite the fact that the administration knew that the supposed “racial incident” that prompted this “crisis” (someone spotted wearing Klan robes on campus) was a hoax.

Then in 2016, Black Lives Matter and a number of super-woke Oberlin students launched protests and a boycott against Gibson’s Bakery, a family-owned and run establishment that has been a fixture of downtown Oberlin since 1885. What prompted this? Gibson’s had the temerity to apprehend and charge three students with shoplifting (they later pled guilty), but because of the race of the offenders, the Oberlin College wokerati accused Gibson’s with racism, racial profiling, and probably genocide for all I know.

The Oberlin student Senate passed a resolution charging Gibson’s with “a long history of racial profiling,” and the Oberlin dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, endorsed and distributed the flyer. The college also discontinued purchasing baked goods from Gibsons, because you just can’t take the chance that you’ll cause literal pain or mental anguish to Oberlin students by procuring a bag of racist bear claws for the faculty lounge.

Gibson’s decided not to take this politically-motivated harassment lying down. They filed a  libel and slander suit against Oberlin College, and yesterday a jury found for Gibson’s, ordering Oberlin to pay $11 million in compensatory damages. A punitive damages hearing will follow, so the total award could grow to over $30 million.

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has a complete account of the background of the case and the legal drama that has played out. A news account quotes Jacobson: “The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners. The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.”

And here's another one. Take your $21.5 million and stuff it, Culverhouse:

The University of Alabama's board of trustees has voted to return a $21.5 million gift from Hugh Culverhouse Jr. — the school's biggest donor — and take his name off its law school. The move comes after Culverhouse urged businesses and prospective students to boycott the university and the state over Alabama's new abortion law.

The school says the transaction to return the funds was processed Friday morning and that it will also return any accrued interest. Last fall, Culverhouse pledged to donate a total of $26.5 million over four years.

"The action taken by the Board today was a direct result of Mr. Culverhouse's ongoing attempts to interfere in the operations of the Law School," the university's vice chancellor for communication, Kellee Reinhart, said Friday. "That was the only reason the Board voted to remove his name and return his money."

Culverhouse issued a statement Friday in which he renewed his call for students "to protest and reconsider their educational options in Alabama."

Pardes Seleh gets video of a standoff at the Dyke March between the main group, which is excluding any Stars of David, Israeli flags or other symbols of Judaism, and a group displaying those very things. The spokesdyke for the exclusionary group explains her bunch's position in a too-nice-nice way, dripping with sanctimony. She's determined to be all peace, love, tofu and sprouts, even though we all know she can't stand the sight of the other bunch. And there's just something about the way she  enunciates the word "dyke." And is "dyke" some special category of female homosexuality? I'm assuming it is, and that I'm hopelessly behind the curve.

Great Alexandra deSanctis piece at National Review entitled "Joe Biden Never Was Pro-Life." Along with tracing his public support for the Hyde Amendment until about 48 hours ago, going back to voting on its passage in 1976, she reminds us of such Biden moves as voting against Robert Bork's SCOTUS nomination (a move similar to his latest, in that he originally supported Bork). That seat, of course, went to Kennedy, who "went on to affirm Roe v. Wade in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, authoring the constitutionally illiterate decision that upheld the Court-imposed regime of abortion-on-demand."

And speaking of the procedure whereby the brains are vacuumed out of the skulls of people who aren't born yet, here's a HuffPost piece that may be the wackiest thing you'll read this decade. (I can say that, because this decade's nearly over. As to how soon after that you'll read something wackier, I wouldn't be willing to bet.) It's entitled "Women Aren't the Only People Who Get Abortions." A taste:

Even the most progressive health organizations, like Planned Parenthood, are still not up to speed on some of the most rudimental ways to give competent and compassionate care to trans and nonbinary folks. 

“Even the pro-choice people are constantly, constantly choosing to ignore my existence,” Gutiérrez said. 

Dr. Krystal Redman, executive director of southeastern nonprofit SPARK: Reproductive Justice Now, pointed to the fact that, historically, legislation in the U.S. has been created by cisgender white people. And that, she argued, creates a systemic “narrative of gender being binary.” 

“Just based on the history of how these laws were created, naturally the narrative and the conversations behind it become this cis-het [cisgender, heteronormative] centered narrative,” said Redman, a cisgender woman.

The language of choice was specifically created by cisgender people for cisgender people, Redman explained. Instead of the question being “Are you male or female?″ or “Do you have insurance or are you uninsured?”, the question for most nonbinary and gender-nonconforming folks is, “What provider can I go to that truly understands the dynamics of my body?”

“Cis folks need to understand that they operate within a privilege,” Redman said. “I don’t care what other racial or ethnic identity you identify with but just by the premise of being cis-identified, there is so much more privilege that you have over folks who do not identify as cis.”

Fewer post-Americans are moving - near or far - than at any time since 1948.  Discuss among yourselves.

 

Post-American "education" is nothing but an arena of jackbootery - today's edition

Two examples.

This one demonizes one of the most useful plants on Earth:

This doesn’t appear to be some sort of spoof:

A cotton plant growing at Campbell Elementary School [in Arlington, Virginia] drew criticism online today, but Arlington Public Schools said allegations that staff were going to make kids “pick cotton” was a misunderstanding.

“At no time, never, was the school going to have students pick cotton,” said APS spokesman Frank Bellavia.

That prompts me to ask the following question: If the staff had said they were going to make only the white students pick cotton, would those same now-outraged people have applauded them?

Continuing:

Catherine Ashby, the Director of Communications for APS, tells ARLnow that a teacher planted cotton seeds in pots as an experiment to see how they would grow. Social media posts about the experiment from the teacher prompted objections from other educators.

“She tweeted about her experiment and what she was growing, and that’s what got other staff members upset about what she was doing,” said Ashby.

Social media again. The center of our outrage age.

More [emphasis mine]:

Community members started talking online about the incident after an email circulated from Campbell Principal Maureen Nesselrode, who called a staff meeting to discuss what to do with the plant. Bellavia said the plant was destroyed after the meeting.

So the modern Red Guards aren’t content with just destroying reputations of living people or statues of dead people. Offending plants must be destroyed.

And this one demonizes the right of the accused to representation in court:

A dean at Harvard Law School has come under attack by social justice warriors, and finally “relieved of his position” by Harvard University, for offering his skills in the defense of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The poor little flowers are objecting to a Harvard professor participating in the legal defense of a man accused of sexual crimes. 

But wait! Isn’t that what defense lawyers do? Isn’t that, in other words, precisely what Harvard Law School is supposed to be teaching its students — the future top lawyers of America — namely that justice in a civil society demands that everyone be entitled to a defense, entitled to have his day in court? Doesn’t the rule of law specifically define the lawyer’s role as representing clients to the best of his abilities, in accordance with the law’s objective procedures, and on the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty? Should Harvey Weinstein (or anyone else) be denied legal representation and the presumption of innocence because the crimes of which he is accused are especially revolting. On the contrary, is it not precisely such a case that tests and proves the nobility of a civil society’s principles of justice? 

The social justice warriors (read my explanation of that concept here) in both Harvard’s student body and its administration, are demanding that the essential premises of criminal justice in America be suspended in cases that they personally find distasteful or “triggering.” In other words, they are placing their subjective emotional responses above the objective tenets of equality before the law. That is to say, they are thinking and behaving like tyrants.

And these are Harvard Law students, the future movers and shakers of America’s legal system, its future star attorneys, its future constitutional interpreters, its future professors of law, its future supreme court justices. 

Both are based on the passive-aggressive means of cultural warfare that the modern Left has perfected. "I'll melt if I have to be exposed to anything unsettling!"

"Conservatives" who shout the latest GDP and employment numbers from the rooftops are throwing up a smokescreen regarding the pervasive rot of our culture, because reversal of said rot would require a level of astuteness, courage and effort that goes way beyond that required for providing people with job opportunities.  For fifty-five years, Western civilization has ceded ground to those bent on its destruction, because it has lost sight of the transcendent and the immutable. Everything is now ephemeral. If it's all relative and fleeting, what's there to defend?