People Can Fight Back — If They Will

Violence and Harassment Against Conservatives and Trump Supporters

It’s a standard tactic of partisans to accuse people on the other side of being violent crazies. And indeed, liberals can not shut up about the woman who was killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville. Then there was the case of Gabrielle Giffords who was shot by a lunatic with completely undecipherable political views, but the media blamed Sarah Palin!

But sometimes one side is the violent and unhinged force in American politics.

Just now, it’s the anti-Trump left. Enraged by Trump’s successes — most recently, the Senate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh — they have been on a rampage, and this has included not merely public temper tantrums, but stalking, harassment, threats of violence and outright attacks.

The List

Breitbart assiduously keeps track of these incidents, and their list now extends to 583 cases (it might be longer when you read this).

Some random entries:

October 8, 2018: Leftist Teacher Tweets: “So Who’s Gonna Take One For the Team and Kill Kavanaugh?”

October 6, 2018: Sen. Collins Flooded with Abusive Tweets Threatening Death, Violence

October 1, 2018: Vandals Hit IL GOP Headquarters With ‘RAPE’ Graffiti

October 1, 2018: Senator Mitch McConnell Badgered At Airport By Anti-Kavanaugh Activists

September 30, 2018: Georgetown prof: White GOP senators in Kavanaugh hearing ‘deserve miserable deaths’

September 25, 2018: CNN Defends harassment of Ted Cruz

September 25, 2018: Ted Cruz and Wife harassed out of DC restaurant

September 10,2018: Broadway Star Carole Cook on Trump: ‘Where’s John Wilkes Booth When you Need Him?

September 6, 2018: Black Trump Fan Booted from Bar for Wearing Trump Hat

. . . and on and on.

It would be unfair to say that the average liberal would do any of these things.  But such things are increasingly condoned by mainstream Democrats. The New York Times, for example, has noted that these kinds of attacks have “opened a rift in the party over whether stoking anti-Trump outrage is helping or undermining its prospects in the midterm elections.”

Younger Democrats, the Times notes:

. . . believe that conventional politics are insufficient to the threat posed by a would-be authoritarian — and that their millennial and nonwhite base must be assured that the party is doing all it can to halt Mr. Trump.

Thus the bigotry and intolerance of the campus left is increasingly infiltrating the Democratic Party. Only a resounding defeat at the ballot box (or perhaps it will take two or three) is likely to cause liberals to back off of tactics that can only be described as fascist.

Update

Yes, and now Hillary supports the nastiness:

During an interview with CNN on Tuesday, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton stated that it’s impossible to be civil with a party “that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” She continued that if Democrats win back one or both chambers of Congress, “that’s when civility can start again.”

Hillary said, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.”

This is a new level of cluelessness, even for Hillary. The fascist tactics don’t show strength, they show weakness.

Facebook Censorship: Can’t Criticize Transgenderism

This speaks for itself as an example of how transgenderism has become an intolerant orthodoxy in large sectors of U.S. society.

Update

The above was posted on our Facebook timeline, and embedded here.

Facebook censored it on our timeline. So here is the post for all to see:

Zach Petrizzo/Vicki McKenna on Student Expelled from Marquette

The student was expelled in due to a supposed “racist” photo that circulated among black students on campus. This in spite of the fact that the image that caused all the uproar was not racist, and fell into the hands of a black student due to the expelled student’s careless use of AirDrop on his smart phone, with no intention to do any harm to anybody.

Zach Petrizzo has been on top of the story for Campus Reform, and he discusses it with Vicki McKenna.

Scapegoated for “Racist” Picture that Wasn’t Racist: Update

From Zachary Petrizzo of Campus Reform, who has been following the case closely, and investigating in-depth: an update on the student who was expelled from Marquette in a racial hysteria. All due to a supposed “racist” photo that was not at all racist. Some cogent points:

• A Marquette University student was recently expelled after coming forward to explain the context of a photo that had sparked fears of racism on campus.
• Alex Ruiz said he took responsibility for accidentally sharing the photo with a classmate in hopes of mollifying the outrage on campus by explaining that there was no racist intent.
• Instead, Marquette subjected him to a disciplinary hearing that led to his expulsion for “discriminatory harassment,” a verdict that was upheld on appeal.

More details:

One night, according to a campus police “Incident Report” obtained by Campus Reform, Alex and friends were playing a “game” in which they would randomly scroll through their phones while the “Apple Airdrop” function was on, which allows photos to be sent to all nearby devices without specifying a recipient, resulting in the photo being unintentionally shared with a classmate.

According to the university, “sending [photos] to another person is harassment.” Ruiz and his father both told Campus Reform that they are deeply “apologetic” about what occurred, but feel that the university was not fair in its handling of the matter.

Sending photos to random people who happen to be connected to the same Wi-Fi hotspot is pretty dumb. But undergraduates do dumb things. Intentions matter. There was no intention to send the photo to a black female student, and the photo was not racist — unless you really, badly want it to be racist.

Ruiz’s father asserted that he had made “multiple attempts” to contact university officials, even calling President Michael Lovell, but said Lovell ignored “multiple requests” to speak to the family even after they flew from Colorado to Marquette to meet with school administrators.

Ruiz’s family originally immigrated to the United States three years ago from Mexico, and continues to struggle with English fluency. The father claims that the university summarily “dismissed” his outreach, and was looking to “out a student” to calm the outrage on campus.

Note that Ruiz would be a “person of color” and entitled to special treatment in other circumstances. But when it’s convenient for Marquette officials, he’s just another privileged white male.

Another Photo

In addition to the widely circulated photo of four guys pretending to be gangsta rappers, there was another photo of “an edited image of a black male’s face on a gorilla.” That certainly sounds racist. But in fact, it’s probably largely irrelevant.

In the first place, nobody seems to have the image. While the gangsta rapper image is all over Twitter, and posted with news articles on the incident, we have been unable to find the other one. It appears that all the fuss has been over the benign image, and not this second one.

Secondly, Ruiz explained this image to the campus cops:

RUIZ stated that the photos were not racially motivated other than some friends taking random pictures for fun. RUIZ stated the second photo of a gorilla with a M/B, face attached to the body of the gorilla, is a cropped photo of his high school. RUIZ identified the M/B as HS Friend. RUIZ stated the circumstances surrounding this photo was just more friends having fun and sending out funny pictures among each other via group massaging.

Given that Ruiz was a teenager, and migrated to the U.S. from Mexico only three years ago, it’s unlikely he would know how toxic the meme of associating black people with simians has been.

The campus cops, who had both photos and had talked to Ruiz, explained:

I contacted Milwaukee County District Attorney Kelly HEDGE and informed her of the incident and due to the lack of intent by RUIZ no criminal charges for harassment would be issued.

I then spoke with [the complainant] at MUPD and informed her that the investigation was wrapping up and informed that the individual that sent the photos had no intent to harass her and was not targeting her.

What Did He do Wrong?

Marquette outlined his supposed crime in a letter expelling him. It says the images he sent were “discriminatory and racist,” but doesn’t explain how.

Why not? Because any such explanation (especially when addressed to the image everybody saw) would be unconvincing, and the university is committed to the view that anything that anybody calls “racist” must actually be. Doing otherwise would be to admit that some students have a racial chip on their shoulder, and may claim racism falsely.

The letter then goes on to outline the uproar on campus that resulted when black students widely distributed the rapper image.

The clear implication is that Ruiz was punished for the reaction of black students, rather than for what he actually did.

This constitutes a kind of “heckler’s veto” where people can shut up expression merely by taking offense. Admittedly, this expression was pretty trivial, but campus leftists have used the heckler’s veto to shut up important discussions of real issues.

Perhaps some punishment was merited, simply because of the sheer recklessness of sending random photos to random people. But again, intention matters, and Ruiz had no evil intention.

Marquette Stonewalls

Lovell’s bull-headed refusal to talk to the Ruiz family was of a piece with his disastrous attempt to fire this blogger, which was slapped down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court last Friday.

We have always wondered about Lovell. Is he simply a bureaucrat pandering to the forces of political correctness on campus, such as the leftist faculty who wanted us fired? Or is he a rigid fanatic, who fully believes in his own righteousness?

This case has us leaning toward “fanatic.”

[Update]

Updated 7/13 to discuss the “second photo.”

Scapegoat: Marquette Student Expelled Over Gag Photo in Racial Hysteria

Given recent headlines, one would think that the Ku Klux Klan was running wild at Marquette. The Channel 12 website said:

MILWAUKEE — A disturbing and racially charged photo posted on Snapchat has some students on Marquette University’s campus upset.

“As a black student on this campus, I’m ashamed of what happened. It’s not right,” said Richard Nwabuzor, the vice president of the campus chapter of the NAACP.

[Deija] Richards said a lot of students in the black campus community don’t feel safe.

“I felt personally attacked, and I know a lot of people around me did,” she added.

So what does this scary image look like? Guys in KKK hoods? Rednecks with guns and a Confederate battle flag? Not at all. This is the image.

Click on Image to Enlarge

It’s quite obviously four white guys pretending to be gangsta rappers, with toy guns, hoodies, and gang signs (see the fellow on the right). The black doll isn’t any sort of demeaning image of a black man, but a hip looking fellow in a pinstripe vest who might be (say) a record company executive.

The word “chuuch” is, according to the Urban Dictionary, “an old pimp way of saying ‘Amen.’”

White guys staging a tableau of this sort may be a bit silly, but it’s not the least bit racist.

The fellow in the hoodie in the back (see the arrow) is a Marquette student. A Latino, we will call him “Enrique.” The photo was shot almost two years ago, with Enrique and some of his high school buddies and members of his soccer team.  The black doll was owned by one of Enrique’s buddies; he carried it around a lot.

Enrique’s dad, in an e-mail to the Warrior Blog, confirmed that his son’s intention was “merely a game” and not any sort of racist display.

Things Get Wild

Enrique, this past April, used AirDrop on his iPhone to send the photo to several people at random. Most thought it was humorous, but one black female student got the image, was offended, and complained loudly to other black students. An uproar ensued with over-the-top rhetoric and irate tweets, like this one:

I have the right to be at this university just like every other white student. I worked my ass off for my spot, twice as hard. And for the Lovell to laugh in the face of my struggle and oppression. Go fuck yourself. I am Marquette too.

— Saint Samantha 👑 (@SaintSamantha1) April 26, 2018

Of course, the College Democrats chimed in:

Hate crimes have no place on our campus. We expect Marquette University to hold these students accountable for their appalling behavior. This is a Jesuit University and we stand against... https://t.co/nyg4FWWyLt

— Marquette Democrats (@marquettedems) April 26, 2018

Panderfest

Naturally, in the wake of any claimed racist incident, campus bureaucrats will pander shamelessly, and that was certainly the case here. As Zachary Petrizzo reported in Campus Reform, the Office of Student Affairs and the Office of Mission and Ministry held a forum so that “we as members of the white community must take an increased responsibility to learn about our role in contributing to racism on campus and in our communities.” Never mind that it was only one Latino in the community who did something that was not racist — although perhaps ill-advised, given the number of people on campus looking for a racial grievance.

And of course Vice President of Student Affairs Xavier Cole chimed in saying:

Our job at Marquette, which we will do much more of, is to help provide safe spaces, provide support for our students of color but also for our majority students to provide tools that we need so we will be able to engage in meaningful conversations, solutions, and dialogues that not only make Marquette better, but our city, and then our state. . . . 

Campus bureaucrats love “racist incidents,” since they give them an excuse to expand their staffs and budgets with new “initiatives.”

More Pandering

Perhaps the creepiest pandering came from President Michael Lovell, who tweeted the following:

It bears repeating: We shouldn’t expect only students of color to respond to racism. I’m asking all of @MarquetteU to join me and share why you #StandAgainstRacism pic.twitter.com/ZzS4nlSxqU

— Michael Lovell (@PresLovell) April 30, 2018

Enrique Comes Forward

Noticing the uproar, and naïvely thinking he just needed to explain things, Enrique came forward to the campus cops. After an investigation, they talked to the woman who had complained and (according to the police report):

. . . informed her that the investigation was wrapping up and informed [her] that the individual that sent the photos had no intent to harass her and was not targeting her.

The campus cops forwarded their report to Campus Conduct officials. Unfortunately, those folks were out for blood.

Enrique was first given a hearing in front of two Marquette counsels, and then an appeal before a panel of Marquette faculty, after which he was expelled.

Even before the expulsion, his father explains that:

My son was removed immediately from the dorms and had to find where to stay for the rest of the year and had numerous . . . sleepless nights because of the whole situation.

Summarizing the whole incident, the father said:

Somewhere in April the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other communities gather together and talked about this and we never had the chance to voice our side of the story.

I do not see why [they would] punish a very good person and judging him just by one mistake he made to send a picture anonymously to another person that opted to received it instead of hearing the whole story and judging him by the whole person he is.

How Does Marquette Respond to Leftist Vandalism?

It might be useful to compare this case to one where leftist students in the feminist group Empowerment vandalized an anti-abortion display in October, 2016.


They covered over the display board with their own pro-abortion signs and tore up the blue and pink flags planted in the ground (representing boy and girl babies who had been aborted).

How were they punished? Each of the vandals was required to write a three page paper explaining how they acted irresponsibly. Two students refused to do this (claiming it was finals week), and they were given a semester probation.

Translation: slap on the wrist.

So a blatant, head-on attack on free expression got off with a trivial punishment, and a gag photo was punished with expulsion.

Conclusion

Marquette bureaucrats, quite simply, compulsively pander to the forces of political correctness. A lot of black students were up in arms about the gag photo, so the fellow in the photo had to be expelled. But several faculty intervened in the case of the abortion display vandalism, demanding leniency for the culprits. Marquette gave them a slap on the wrist for an offense far worse than the gag photo.

This is racialized “justice.” This is where Marquette is.

[Update: story updated 5:33 p.m. to correct ownership of the doll.]

[Update: story updated 7/16, photo not sent to people he knew, but rather random people.

Five Clichés Used to Attack Free Speech

The Privileged Anger of the Left

From Daniel Greenfield on Front Page Mag.

If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger.

There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you’re angry that Trump won, your anger is socially acceptable. If you were angry that Obama won, it wasn’t.

James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be socially acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not alone. There’s Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Dallas, and Gavin Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton Rouge. If you’re black and angry about the police, your anger is celebrated. If you’re white and angry about the Terror travel ban, the Paris Climate treaty, ObamaCare repeal or any leftist cause, you’re on the side of the angry angels.

But if you’re white and angry that your job is going to China or that you just missed being killed in a Muslim suicide bombing, your anger is unacceptable.

If you’re an angry leftist, your party leader, Tom Perez will scream and curse into a microphone, and your aspiring presidential candidate, Kirsten Gillibrand, will curse along, to channel the anger of the base. But if you’re an angry conservative, then Trump channeling your anger is “dangerous” because you aren’t allowed to be angry.

Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.

Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you hounded out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all. Instead it’s linguistically whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous.” Bad anger however is “worrying” or “dangerous.” Angry left-wing protesters “call out,” angry right-wing protesters “threaten.” Good anger is left-wing. Bad anger is right-wing.

Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus protests, are invariably left-wing.

Left-wing anger over the elections of Bush and Trump was sanctified. Right-wing outrage over Obama’s victory was demonized. Now that left-wing anger led a Bernie Sanders volunteer to open fire at a Republican charity baseball practice outing. And the media reluctantly concedes that maybe both sides should moderate their rhetoric. Before listing examples that lean to the right like “Lock her up.”

Why were chants of “Lock her up” immoderate, but not Bush era cries of “Jail to the chief?” Why were Tea Party rallies “ominous” but the latest We Hate Trump march is “courageous?” Why is killing Trump on stage the hottest thing to hit Shakespeare while a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask was hounded by everyone from the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri to the NAACP?

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological foundations are good. Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.

It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature that makes it good or bad.

And that is why the left so easily slips into violence. All its ideological ends are good. Therefore its means, from mass starvation to gulags to riots and tyranny, must be good. If I slash your tires because of your Obama bumper sticker, I’m a monster. But if you key my car because of my Trump bumper sticker, you’re fighting racism and fascism. Your tactics might be in error, but your viewpoint isn’t.

There are no universal standards of behavior. Civility, like everything else, is ideologically limited.

Intersectionality frowns on expecting civil behavior from “oppressed” protesters. Asking that shrieking campus crybully not to scream threats in your face is “tone policing.” An African-American millionaire’s child at Yale is fighting for her “existence,” unlike the Pennsylvania coal miner, the Baltimore police officer and the Christian florist whose existences really are threatened.

Tone policing is how the anger of privileged leftists is protected while the frustration of their victims is suppressed. The existence of tone policing as a specific term to protect displays of left-wing anger shows the collapse of civility into anger privilege. Civility has been replaced by a political entitlement to anger.

The left prides itself on an unearned moral superiority (“When they go low, we go high”) reinforced by its own echo chamber even as it has become incapable of controlling its angry outbursts. The national tantrum after Trump’s victory has all but shut down the government, turned every media outlet into a non-stop feed of conspiracy theories and set off protests that quickly escalated into street violence.

But Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with the left that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It is animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority doubles as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its anger. The media dresses up the seething rage so that the left never has to look at its inner Hodgkinson in the mirror.

The left is as angry as ever. Campus riots and assassinations of Republican politicians are nothing new. What is changing is that its opponents are beginning to match its anger. The left still clings to the same anger it had when it was a theoretical movement with plans, but little impact on the country. The outrage at the left is no longer ideological. There are millions of people whose health care was destroyed by ObamaCare, whose First Amendment rights were taken away, whose land was seized, whose children were turned against them and whose livelihoods were destroyed.

The angry left has gained a great deal of power. It has used that power to wreck lives. It is feverishly plotting to deprive nearly 63 million Americans of their vote by using its entrenched power in the government, the media and the non-profit sector. And it is too blinded by its own anger over the results of the election to realize the anger over its wholesale abuses of power and privileged tantrums.

But monopolies on anger only work in totalitarian states. In a free society, both sides are expected to control their anger and find terms on which to debate and settle issues. The left rejects civility and refuses to control its anger. The only settlement it will accept is absolute power. If an election doesn’t go its way, it will overturn the results. If someone offends it, he must be punished. Or there will be anger.

The angry left demands that everyone recognize the absolute righteousness of its anger as the basis for its power. This anger privilege, like tone policing, is often cast in terms of oppressed groups. But its anger isn’t in defiance of oppression, but in pursuit of oppression.

Anger privilege is used to silence opposition, to enforce illegal policies and to seize power. But the left’s monopolies on anger are cultural, not political. The entertainment industry and the media can enforce anger privilege norms through public shaming, but their smears can’t stop the consequences of the collapse of civility in public life. There are no monopolies on emotion.

When anger becomes the basis for political power, then it won’t stop with Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders. That’s what the left found out in the last election. Its phony pearl clutching was a reaction to the consequences of its destruction of civility. Its reaction to that show of anger by conservatives and independents was to escalate the conflict. Instead of being the opposition, the left became the “resistance.” Trump was simultaneously Hitler and a traitor. Republicans were evil beasts.

James Hodgkinson absorbed all this. The left fed his anger. And eventually he snapped.

Anger has to go somewhere.

The left likes to think that its anger is good anger because it’s angry over the plight of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists, transgender bathrooms, the lack of abortion in South Carolina, the minimum wage at Taco Bell, budget cuts, tax cuts, police arrests, drone strikes and all the other ways in which reality differs from its utopia. But all that anger isn’t the road to a better world, but to hate and violence.

Millions of leftists, just like Hodgkinson, are told every day that Republicans are responsible for everything wrong with their lives, the country and the planet. Despite everything they do, all the petitions they sign, the marches they attend, the donations, the angry letters, the social media rants, Republicans continue to exist and even be elected to public office. Where does that anger go?

Either we have a political system based on existing laws and norms of civility. Or we have one based on coups and populist leftist anger. And there are already a whole bunch of those south of the border.

Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every other election. Its choice is to try to understand the rest of the country or to intimidate, censor, oppress and eventually kill them.

James Hodgkinson took the latter course. His personal leftist revolution ended, as all leftist revolutions do, in blood and violence. The left can check its anger privilege and examine its entitlement.

Or his violence will be our future.

Political Harassment: John Chisholm’s John Doe Investigation

Trump: Very Lucky in His Enemies

Peggy Noonan is far from being a Trump supporter, although she’s not an implacable enemy either. She sees his flaws, but hopes he will do better.

But she notes that Trump has one huge asset: his enemies.

Mr. Trump has struggled so colorfully the past three months, we’ve barely noticed his great good luck—that in that time the Democratic Party and the progressive left have been having a very public nervous breakdown. The new head of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, performs unhinged diatribes. He told an audience in Las Vegas that “Trump doesn’t give a sh— about health care.” In a Maine speech, “They call it a skinny budget. I call it a sh—y budget.” In Newark, he said Republicans “don’t give a sh— about people.”

This is said to be an attempt to get down with millennials. I know a lot of millennials and they’re not idiots, so that won’t work.

The perennially sunny Rep. Maxine Waters of California called Mr. Trump’s cabinet “a bunch of scumbags.” New York’s junior Democratic senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, has taken to using the F-word in interviews.

I thought Mr. Trump was supposed to be the loudmouth vulgarian who swears in public. They are aping what they profess to hate. They excoriated him for lowering the bar. Now look at them.

And they’re doing it because they have nothing else—not a plan, not a program, not a philosophy that can be uttered.

The closest they got to meaning recently was when Mr. Perez found it helpful to say, of a Democratic mayoral candidate who’d backed some pro-life bills, that that kind of thinking had no place in the party. Bernie Sanders rightly called this out as madness. You can’t do this “if we’re going to become a 50-state party.”

Imagine a great, lost party defining itself by who it’s throwing out. They’re like the Republicans the past 20 years, throwing people out for opposing Iraq or George W. Bush, or for not joining NeverTrump. Where does this get you? It gets you to where we are.

That most entrenched bastion of the progressive left, America’s great universities, has been swept by . . . well, one hardly knows what to call it. “Political correctness” is too old and doesn’t do it justice. It is a hysteria—a screeching, ignorant wave of sometimes violent intolerance for free speech. It is mortifying to see those who lead great universities cower in fear of it, attempt to placate it, instead of stopping it.

When I see tapes of the protests and riots at schools like Berkeley, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna and Yale, it doesn’t have the feel of something that happens in politics. It has the special brew of malice and personal instability seen in the Salem witch trials. It sent me back to rereading Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Heather Mac Donald danced with the devil! Charles Murray put the needle in the poppet! As in 17th-century Salem, the accusers have no proof of anything because they don’t know, read or comprehend anything.

The cursing pols, the anathematizing abortion advocates, the screeching students—they are now the face of the progressive left.

This is what America sees now as the face of the Democratic Party. It is a party blowing itself up whose only hope is that Donald Trump blows up first.

He may not be lucky in all of his decisions or staffers, or in his own immaturities and dramas. But hand it to him a hundred days in: He’s lucky in his main foes.

Even a casual observer can add to her list of liberal derangement. That’s not her fault. This is a column, not a book.

Health Care

Jeff Jacoby provides several examples from the debate on health care:

• “Donald Trump and Republicans just celebrated voting to let thousands of Americans die so that billionaires get tax breaks.” Those are the words of a prominent US senator.
• “They” — Republican House members who voted for the AHCA — “should be lined up and shot. That’s not hyperbole; blood is on their hands.” So fumes a professor at the Art Institute of Washington.
• “I hope every GOPer who voted for Trumpcare sees a family member get long-term condition, lose insurance, and die. I want the GOPers who support this to feel the pain in their own families. . . . I want them to be tortured.” Those sentiments are expressed via Twitter by a senior writer at Newsweek.
• “The GOP Plan For Obamacare Could Kill More People Each Year Than Gun Homicides.” That’s the headline in Vox, a popular news and opinion website.

There is no shortage of additional examples, just as enraged or hysterical. . . .

Some progressives justify the shredding of civil discourse; with Trump in the White House, they say, courtesy is a luxury the nation can’t afford. “America, don’t be polite in the face of demagoguery,” exhorts Jessica Valenti in the Guardian. Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, is likewise unapologetic about resorting to rhetorical brutality. “This is a new time in politics where people are just blatantly lying and essentially producing policies that are going to kill people,” Gallego tells CNN. “I think the old time of civility needs to go until we actually go back to the rules.”

The Daily Caller lists many more examples of violence, harassment and intimidation.

And of course, who could forget Stephen Colbert’s deranged rant.  (Note that one word has been censored in the YouTube version, but was originally broadcast.)

Trump, it seems, is not very good at governing, but he’s great at driving his adversaries nuts. That’s a political asset, although it’s not the sort we would prefer he have.

What is new about this is not that a lot of liberals hate conservatives, and particularly hate Donald Trump (who isn’t really a conservative). People in American politics have long hated their partisan enemies. It goes back even further than the followers of Jefferson and Hamilton. And plenty of conservatives have hated liberals.

What is new, and peculiar to the left, is the overt claim that it is good to hate. That people on the other side deserve to be hated, harassed, intimidated and even attacked.

Social Psychologists Finally Admit: Liberals are Prejudiced

Since the field of social psychology leans sharply left, it’s no surprise that a lot of “scholarly literature” claims that conservatives are more “prejudiced” than liberals.

Of course, “prejudice” is defined, by these professors, as disliking groups that the liberal professors like and are solicitous of. If you express negative attitudes toward such groups, it must be “prejudice” rather than some principled moral stance. If one believes homosexual acts are immoral, is one “prejudiced” or has one simply reached a different conclusion about sexual morality? The liberal social psychologists assume the former.

But sometimes, in the social sciences, empirical reality wins out.

From Politico, an article outlining recent research, titled “Why Liberals Aren’t as Tolerant as They Think: The political left might consider itself more open-minded than the right. But research shows that liberals are just as prejudiced against conservatives as conservatives are against liberals.”

This conclusion won’t surprise anybody who reads this blog; the only surprise is that several social scientists have admitted it, based on their research.

There is a long list of groups that liberals dislike, and they dislike those groups as much as conservatives dislike the groups they dislike. Citing just one example, while conservatives don’t like atheists, liberals don’t like Christians.

We, not surprisingly, think that liberal intolerance is a much bigger problem than conservative intolerance, for one simple reason: intolerant conservatives tend to be marginalized, far from centers of power, and intolerant liberals tend to be at the centers of cultural power and influence, in the media, schools and colleges, government bureaucracies. Where “social issues” like gay and transgender issues are concerned, they dominate the business world.

Thus we can’t remember when any leftist speaker on a college campus was shouted down or assaulted, but that happens to conservative speakers about once a week.

Slap on the Wrist: Trivial Discipline for Marquette Students Who Defaced Anti-Abortion Display

It was the kind of stunning intolerance that has become common on college campuses: members of the feminist group Empowerment (along with some other students) defaced a university-approved anti-abortion display this past October.

Marquette has failed to explain whether any punishment was meted out to the students guilty of the vandalism. They have not even issued any assurance that punishment would be imposed for an egregious infringement on free expression.

Now we know why.

An Admission

Yesterday, Marquette held a full-day “workshop” titled “Freedom Dreams Now: Whose Lives Matter? A challenge for academics.” Yes, it was as biased and politically correct as it sounds. But one particularly interesting session was a “faculty/student round-table.” One of the students, a black female, admitted she participated in the vandalism.

Actually, it was more than an admission. She outright bragged about her action, and felt it grossly unfair that a minor punishment had been imposed on her. She complained that an officer from the campus Police Department came to question her at her workplace.

Vandalism is a criminal offense, but multiple Marquette faculty intervened on behalf of the students, and there were no criminal charges brought. Rather, Marquette’s own internal student conduct process imposed a minor punishment: the students were required to write a three page paper on how they had acted irresponsibly in defacing the display.

The student on the panel refused to, saying “it’s finals week.” So did one other student. Both were thus put on university probation for a semester. Not suspension, but mere probation.

Marquette, in other words, treated a frontal assault of free expression as a minor peccadillo. If some conservative students had vandalized a “gay rights” display on campus, we can’t imagine any such lenient treatment.

Faculty Response

Rather appalling was faculty response toward this student and her vandalism, which was favorable. One female faculty member described the vandalism as “free speech” and expressed her joy at seeing the vandalized display. Other faculty expressed the hope that the incident would not appear on the permanent record of the student who spoke.

Of course, the expressed opinions of a few faculty may not have represented the views of everybody in the room, and indeed, the people in the room were probably heavily self-selected from among leftist politically correct faculty. But there can be no doubt that a considerable number of Marquette faculty welcome this suppression of politically incorrect opinions.

Any Discipline for Students Who Vandalized Anti-Abortion Display?

It was an outrage. A bunch of feminist students, members of the campus group Empowerment vandalized an anti-abortion display on campus.

Even worse, in a huge display of chutzpah, two students bragged about doing it on Facebook, one in her own post, and another in comments to a post from the Young Americans for Freedom. One of the students admitted to a reporter that she had “tagged along” with members of Empowerment when they trashed the display.

Both the College Democrats, and the group Empowerment came out with statements supporting the vandalism.

Had any conservative group supported the vandalism of any leftist display on campus, the group would have been quickly suspended.

But what about the students who actually did the vandalism? Were they punished in any way? We have been trying to find out, and have been stonewalled by Marquette.

Starting on October 24, we have sent three e-mails to Xavier Cole, Vice President for Student Affairs, within whose bureaucracy discipline would be administered. We also sent him one Tweet, and sent an e-mail to Brian Dorrington, Marquette’s official spokesman.

From: John McAdams
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2016 2:52 PM
To: Cole, Xavier
Subject: Investigation of Vandalizing of Anti-Abortion Display

Hi, Xavier,

I’m wondering whether you can tell me anything about the progress of the investigation into the vandalizing of the anti-abortion display of Marquette for Life.

I’m sure you are aware of two students who have confessed to (actually bragged about) taking part in it. And further that one of those students told a local reporter that she “tagged along” with members of Empowerment, who did the vandalizing.

Regardless of whether you can comment on the investigation, I’m assuming you can answer a question of policy: will Marquette announce the results of the investigation and what punishment has been meted out to the guilty parties?

On the record (unless you tell me otherwise).

John McAdams
Political Science
Marquette Warrior Blog

@DrXavierCole Are students who vandalized the anti-abortion display being disciplined in any way?

— jmcadams (@jmcadams) November 18, 2016

From: John McAdams
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2016 4:15 PM
To: Cole, Xavier
Subject: RE: Investigation of Vandalizing of Anti-Abortion Display

Hi, Xavier,

I haven’t heard from you on this, perhaps because when you got it, there was no actual information you could share.

But now, I’m assuming that the case has progressed.

I’m particularly interested in knowing whether any discipline has been imposed on the students who engaged in the vandalism.

I would also be interested in knowing whether the student group whose members engaged in the vandalism (Empowerment) and a student group which explicitly endorsed the vandalism (College Democrats) have faced any consequences.

Again, on the record unless you tell me otherwise. I’ll most certainly be blogging about this.
John McAdams
Marquette Warrior Blog

Tue 12/6/2016 4:13 PM
From: John McAdams
To: Brian Dorrington

Hi, Brian,

Can you give me an official statement as to whether any discipline was imposed on the Marquette students who vandalized an anti-abortion display on campus?

I’m sure you are aware that Marquette’s silence on this will necessarily lead to the conclusion that nothing was done, and Marquette implicitly condoned the vandalism.

Interestingly, Penn State does take vandalism of a political display seriously.

https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=8468

John McAdams
Political Science
Marquette Warrior Blog

12/14/16
From: John McAdams To: Xavier Cole

Xavier,

I still haven’t heard from you on this.

I’m sure you know that, in the absence of any comment from Marquette to the contrary, it has to be assumed that the students in question were not disciplined at all.

Some universities take attacks on speech seriously.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/12/05/penn-state-students-fined-for-destroying-pro-trump-signs/

I hope to hear from you by the end of the day.

John McAdams
Political Science
Marquette Warrior Blog

Marquette has failed to provide any response.

The inference is obvious: the students have gotten off scott-free. Even if Marquette refused to reveal the identity of the students, they could explain what punishment has been meted out. But apparently, none has been.

Marquette has been pandering mightily to the campus leftists. One particularly egregious example was when both Michael Lovell (President) and Daniel J. Myers (Provost) demonstrated with students in support of the bullies at the University of Missouri.

As the links above show, Penn State was willing to discipline students who tore up Donald Trump signs. It’s ironic that Marquette, apparently, is unwilling to defend free expression on campus, and even to defend expression of the Catholic position on abortion.

Update

The vandals in fact received a minor, “slap on the wrist” punishment.

The Tolerant, Compassionate Liberals: Trying to Manipulate Kids

Window of a real estate agency in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. pic.twitter.com/bZJWgNlxrC

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) November 21, 2016

Science Guy: Punish Climate Skeptics

Global Warming Fascism: Use Government to Shut Up Skepticism

From the Wall Street Journal, an article about the bullying and intimidation deployed against any group that takes a less than alarmist view of global warming.

Punishing Climate-Change Skeptics

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment and financial ruin. As the scientific case for a climate-change catastrophe wanes, proponents of big-ticket climate policies are increasingly focused on punishing dissent from an asserted “consensus” view that the only way to address global warming is to restructure society—how it harnesses and uses energy. That we might muddle through a couple degrees’ of global warming over decades or even centuries, without any major disruption, is the new heresy and must be suppressed.

The Climate Inquisition began with Michael Mann’s 2012 lawsuit against critics of his “hockey stick” research—a holy text to climate alarmists. The suggestion that Prof. Mann’s famous diagram showing rapid recent warming was an artifact of his statistical methods, rather than an accurate representation of historical reality, was too much for the Penn State climatologist and his acolytes to bear.

Among their targets (and our client in his lawsuit) was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank prominent for its skeptical viewpoint in climate-policy debates. Mr. Mann’s lawsuit seeks to put it, along with National Review magazine, out of business. Four years on, the courts are still pondering the First Amendment values at stake. In the meantime, the lawsuit has had its intended effect, fostering legal uncertainty that chills speech challenging the “consensus” view.

Mr. Mann’s lawsuit divided climate scientists—many of whom recognized that it threatened vital scientific debate—but the climate Inquisition was only getting started. The past year has witnessed even more heavy-handed attempts to enforce alarmist doctrine and stamp out dissent.

Assuming the mantle of Grand Inquisitor is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). Last spring he called on the Justice Department to bring charges against those behind a “coordinated strategy” to spread heterodox views on global warming, including the energy industry, trade associations, “conservative policy institutes” and scientists. Mr. Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, identified as a legal basis for charges that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, the federal statute enacted to take down mafia organizations and drug cartels.

In September a group of 20 climate scientists wrote to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch encouraging them to heed Mr. Whitehouse and launch a RICO investigation targeting climate skeptics. This was necessary since, they claimed, America’s policy response to climate change was currently “insufficient,” because of dissenting views regarding the risks of climate change. Email correspondence subsequently obtained through public-records requests revealed that this letter was also coordinated by Mr. Whitehouse.

Reps. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) and Mark DeSaulnier (D., Calif.) followed up with a formal request for the Justice Department to launch an investigation, specifically targeting Exxon Mobil for its funding of climate research and policy organizations skeptical of extreme warming claims. Attorney General Lynch announced in testimony this month that the matter had been referred to the FBI “to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on.” Similar investigations are already spearheaded by state attorneys general in California and New York.

Meanwhile, Mr. Whitehouse, joined by Sens. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), sent letters to a hundred organizations—from private companies to policy institutes—demanding that they turn over information about funding and research relating to climate issues. In his response to the senators, Cato Institute President John Allison called the effort “an obvious attempt to chill research into and funding of public policy projects you don’t like.”

Intimidation is the point of these efforts. Individual scientists, think tanks and private businesses are no match for the vast powers that government officials determined to stifle dissent are able to wield. An onslaught of investigations—with the risk of lawsuits, prosecution and punishment—is more than most can afford to bear. As a practical reality, defending First Amendment rights in these circumstances requires the resources to take on the government and win—no matter the cost or how long it takes.

It also requires taking on the Climate Inquisition directly. Spurious government investigations, driven by the desire to suppress a particular viewpoint, constitute illegal retaliation against protected speech and, as such, can be checked by the courts, with money damages potentially available against the federal and state perpetrators. If anyone is going to be intimidated, it should be officials who are willing to abuse their powers to target speech with which they disagree.

That is why we are establishing the Free Speech in Science Project to defend the kind of open inquiry and debate that are central to scientific advancement and understanding. The project will fund legal advice and defense to those who need it, while executing an offense to turn the tables on abusive officials. Scientists, policy organizations and others should not have to fear that they will be the next victims of the Climate Inquisition—that they may face punishment and personal ruin for engaging in research and advocating their views.

The principle of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court recognized in Dennis v. United States (1951), is that “speech can rebut speech, propaganda will answer propaganda, free debate of ideas will result in the wisest governmental policies.” For that principle to prevail—in something less than the 350 years it took for the Catholic Church to acknowledge its mistake in persecuting Galileo—the inquisition of those breaking from the climate “consensus” must be stopped.

Marquette on Drudge — Again

If you are going to get bad publicity, the last place you want to see it linked is on the Drudge Report, a hugely popular news aggregator. We’ve seen reports of daily newspapers in mid-size cities having their servers melt down because of the traffic that a link on Drudge creates. (Not literally melt, you understand.)

So it can’t have pleased Marquette officials when a link to the Breitbart story on their attempt to fire us appeared on Drudge.



As has been typical in the media, the headline gets the story wrong. We didn’t “defend man-woman marriage,” merely the right of a student to express opinions on the subject without being demeaned and bullied.

The Drudge link is the second one in less than a year. The last time was when the story broke that Marquette’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center had, painted on its wall, a mural glorifying cop killer and terrorist Assata Shakur.

Thus, the narrative of Marquette being a place dominated by intolerant political correctness is gaining steam. Will this hurt Marquette?

Many kinds of institutions can be as politically correct as they want with impunity. Ivy League universities, for example, are so prestigious that they can do almost anything and still attract a massive number of applicants. If you can get yourself admitted to Yale, you want to go to Yale, and will tolerate the political correctness.

Public universities, likewise, have a captive clientèle consisting of families that can’t (or don’t want to) pay the high tuition of a private university. Especially if they doubt that the private university provides a better education.

But Marquette, as a mid-level institution (ranked in the top 100 nationally, but not in the top 50) which markets itself as a “Catholic university” and has high tuition, may be especially vulnerable when the notion that it’s actually Catholic becomes more and more transparently untrue.

Marquette Theology Professor Critiques University’s Gender Regime

From First Things, Marquette Theology Professor Mickey L. Mattox on the “gender regime” of this supposedly Catholic university:

Working in my Marquette office one afternoon in the spring of 2010, I heard unusual sounds coming from the normally quiet lawns outside my window. I was surprised to see a modest assembly of students and professors preparing to march in protest. Against what? Minutes later, an email arrived informing me that the university’s then-president, Robert Wild, S.J., had voided a contract extended to Jodi O’Brien to join us as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Though the contract had already been signed, Fr. Wild—perhaps under external pressure—decided that O’Brien, a partnered lesbian whose research included queer studies, was not an appropriate choice to represent our mission and identity.

Although an ordinary person with a passing knowledge of the moral teachings of the Catholic Church would think such a decision obvious, the department chairs in the college soon gathered and voted almost unanimously to censure Wild’s decision. The press, meanwhile, demanded an explanation. On the ­defensive, the university allegedly paid a considerable sum in order to break the contract. Officials were soon exercising themselves to demonstrate their concern for equitable treatment of gays and lesbians. The university would initiate projects, courses, conferences, and the like to explore issues of sex and gender! The clear implication was that change would come, though slowly. Marquette would get with the sexual-liberation program so that something like the O’Brien affair would never happen again.

And that, indeed, is what has happened.

Since 2010, the campaign for sexual diversity at Marquette has advanced rapidly. Last year, the university announced the expansion of the former Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (established in the wake of the O’Brien dustup) into two new initiatives: a Center for Gender and Sexualities Studies and an LGBTQ Resource Center. How much funding has been increased has not been disclosed. We also now have an Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, which offers faculty and staff awards for excellence in, yes, “diversity and inclusion.” Again, how much this will cost hasn’t been revealed. We do know, however, that funds have been promised to support the development of new courses that advance the cause. A faculty fellows program in diversity is also in the works.

“Diversity” and “inclusion” are vague and uncertain terms that can mean almost anything. Here at Marquette they have become code for challenging Catholic sexual morality and pushing forward a gender ideology that denies that human beings were created as male and female in the image of God. Attempting to ­instill communal meaning through the new quest for diversity, Marquette news releases breathlessly announce that the struggle for civil rights begun by Martin Luther King Jr. is now being fulfilled here by the campaign for the inclusion of sexual minorities.

. . .

Meanwhile, recent announcements from university leaders indicate that they are increasingly comfortable affirming LGBTQ ideology. Their language remains cautious about explicitly endorsing revisionist accounts of sexuality and the human person. It is nevertheless clear that Marquette’s leaders do not share the grave concerns about LGBTQ ­theory expressed by the United States ­Conference of Catholic Bishops and other representatives of the Church’s magisterium.

Senior officials endorse LGBTQ programs without qualification, casting doubt on their readiness to affirm Church teaching. In fact, the level of enthusiasm for LGBTQ causes casts doubt on their willingness to tolerate anyone who thinks otherwise.

Imagine, for example, a new freshman who has recently completed an invigorating course on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body in her parish. After orientation week at Marquette, will she feel free to express her newfound understanding of the nuptial meaning of the body? Or will she fear that her words will be treated as exclusionary and hateful?

I’m afraid the questions answer themselves. The problem with the new inclusion, of course, is that it’s not inclusive, nor can it be. It is simply a new way of defining sexual morality that masquerades as a bureaucratic, therapeutic project of “inclusion.” At Marquette, it’s clear that this project seeks to displace traditional Catholic accounts of sexual morality.

By all means read the entire essay.

Aside from the bureaucratic motives of University officials, one might think that the new gender regime is just the result of “tolerance.” Why be unkind to people who are gay or lesbian, or transgender, or even gender queer?

The problem with this is that tolerance is a two way street. Gays and lesbians, for example, have a right not to be demeaned or derided. But they don’t have a right to demand affirmation of their sexual activity from anybody else. Such a demand is itself intolerant.

In a genuinely Catholic university, gays and lesbians should hear Church teaching about sexuality taught. It should be taught respectfully, and nobody has to agree with it, but wanting it censored is intolerant.

For example, the National Catholic Register reported that at Marquette:

At least one theology faculty member teaching about Genesis in his classroom received a [harassment] complaint, after a student who had two fathers objected to the classroom presentation of the Church’s teaching of marriage.

It’s clear who was intolerant here.

Inclusion for Only Some

Of course, for the inclusion crowd, challenging the faith of Catholic students is fine. Late last semester, one member of a group of Concerned Catholics reported “a student who told him of a professor who has made slurs against the Church e.g. mocking the idea of Mary’s virginity etc. in class.”

Actual mocking should be out of bounds at Marquette, although dissent from Catholic teaching is protected by academic freedom. But if a majority of the faculty overtly dissent from Catholic teaching, Marquette should cease calling itself Catholic.

Likewise, saying things to which black students might take exception is forbidden, but berating white students about their “white privilege” is just fine. So is bashing white males.

Thus the use of words like “tolerance” and “inclusion” by the campus left is downright Orwellian. Genuine tolerance would mean tolerating Catholic views on sexuality (and indeed criticism of such views). Genuine tolerance would require that gays have no more right to demand affirmation of their sexual activity than Republicans have to demand that all Democrats convert to Republican political views.

Genuine “inclusion” would demand acceptance of the idea that Marquette has a right to be genuinely Catholic, just as this or that private liberal arts college has a right to be secular.

It is, in fact, the campus left that is most intolerant and exclusionary.

Leftist Intolerance in Academia

From Bloomberg News:

Consider this recent account of a graduate admissions committee meeting. An applicant to a linguistics Ph.D. program is a matriculating senior at a small historically black college unknown to some committee members. “Left-wing black nationalists,” one committee member said of the college, while another said, to much laughter, that the college was “the academic arm of Black Lives Matter.”

The committee then spent more time discussing details of the applicant’s GRE scores and background — high GRE scores, high-poverty urban school district — than it did with some other candidates. The chair of the committee said, “I would like to beat that college out of her,” and asked, to laughter from committee members, “You don’t think she’s a nutcase?”

Other committee members defended her, but didn’t challenge the assumptions about the historically black college or the people who attend it. One noted that the college had a good reputation in the humanities. And another said that her personal statement indicated intellectual independence from her college and good critical thinking. She was eventually passed on to the second round but rejected there, and given the comments of the earlier reviewers, it’s reasonable to think that in that second round, her background probably counted against her.

This is beyond outrageous. Giving a candidate a harder look because they grew up in a high poverty school district, and attended a historically black college? No, no one said “we don’t want blacks in this program”; they don’t have to. They just have to decide that traits common to black candidates, like growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood, or attending a historically black college, disqualify you from being “one of us.”

While characters in movies often make explicit speeches about how they hate black people, in reality they aren’t necessary. Racists build their racist consensus in coded language, perhaps sometimes language so coded the speaker doesn’t think about the true message.

That makes it that much harder to root this kind of pervasive bigotry out of our society. And why it’s so outrageous to hear this kind of racist talk on a graduate admissions committee in this day and age.

“But,” you are thinking, “I can’t imagine a bunch of liberal professors talking this way.” And you would be right. Read on.

Or it would be, if graduate admissions committees talked like that. I changed a few of the important details. In fact, the conversation I’m alluding to concerned a young woman who was home-schooled before attending a small Christian college, which the reviewers of her application dismissed as a place of “right-wing religious fundamentalists” that was “supported by the Koch brothers.”

What happened on that committee is bigotry, plain and simple. And it’s not just a problem for conservative Christians, and people seen as conservative Christians. It’s a problem for academia.

Needless to say, the woman did not get admitted. The author goes on:

In fact, few other professional spheres are as strongly skewed to the right as academia is to the left; when I looked into this a few years ago, the only professional group I could find with a similar rightward skew was Southern Baptist ministers, a comparison that neither group probably finds very flattering. Military officers are weakly conservative (two-thirds to one-third), but the enlisted are less so, and whether your business skews Democratic or Republican varies by industry and job description. Professors really do stand out as extremely politically concentrated on the left in a way that few other groups are, especially in areas like social psychology.

As Jonathan Haidt and the good folks at Heterodox Academy have argued, this makes it too easy for the group to adopt weak theories that flatter consensus beliefs without giving them the rigorous interrogation they’d get from a more balanced profession.

There’s another harm: The leftward skew disconnects academia from the society that it is supposed to serve. The bitter culture wars we’ve been living through, and the increasingly nasty partisanship, are the signs of a society whose factions no longer know how to talk to one another.

This reminds us of a conversation over lunch with one of our colleagues in the Marquette Political Science Department. He was fussing and fuming about the fact that the American Political Science Association convention was being held in New Orleans, in spite of a campaign by the political science gay lobby to have it moved. It seems the good citizens of Louisiana had voted against gay marriage.

It did not occur to him to ask whether the APSA should violate its own constitution, which forbids it to take positions on partisan political issues.

It also didn’t occur to him to ask why the gay lobby should pick on Louisiana, since many other states (including Wisconsin and California) had voted against gay marriage.

When we brought up the notion of political correctness, he responded that he didn’t know what “political correctness” meant.

But of course, fish don’t know what it means to be wet. That’s an apt metaphor for academics. They are so immersed in their insular culture that they don’t know that they have any particular culture.

Not All College Students are Intimidated

From the Wall Street Journal:

Not least among those welcoming the respite of Thanksgiving must be the nation’s college and university administrators. After student protests evicted Tim Wolfe as president of the University of Missouri, officials at other institutions of higher learning (if we may still call them that) were harassed by shouting or otherwise threatening students. At Princeton University, students occupied the office of the school’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, demanding that he throw Woodrow Wilson down the memory hole.

Even at the remove of several weeks, it is remarkable to recall that the disturbance at Yale University was over “offensive” Halloween costumes. But amid the protests, some important principles are now at risk, notably free speech. We asked at the time where the adults were on campus—either school presidents or boards of trustees? The answer, so far, is that most have caved like wet cardboard. The most hopeful adult response has come from 18- to 22-year olds—the students themselves.

At Claremont McKenna, where a dean was driven from office over a supposedly objectionable email, the student editors of the Claremont Independent published “We Dissent.”

The editors took themselves to task for not speaking out earlier. But no more. Their editorial ended: “We are not immoral because we don’t buy the flawed rhetoric of a spiteful movement. We are not evil because we don’t want this movement to tear across our campuses completely unchecked. We are no longer afraid to be voices of dissent.”

This political courage may be catching on. At Princeton last week, students under the banner of the Open Campus Coalition sent President Eisgruber their own strong statement of dissent. It describes a student body intimidated to silence by the likelihood of being vilified, in public or on social media. It ends: “Princeton undergraduates opposed to the curtailment of academic freedom refuse to remain silent out of fear of being slandered.” They signed their names and class years, and we hope their professors don’t dock their grades for thinking for themselves.

With campus administrators and faculty cowed by political correctness run amok, these students are shaping a movement of principled, civilized dissent. Let’s hope it grows.

So where are the dissenters on the Marquette campus? Turning Point USA has an honorable history. The College Republicans have hardly been heard from. Where are other conservative student groups?

In fact, we know the answer: campus leftists are aggressive and intolerant, and it takes a lot of guts to face them down. Most students don’t want the grief, so they speak up when anonymity is guaranteed, in such places as the Climate Survey and Yik Yak. But like most people most of the time they simply withdraw in order to avoid the bullies.

But the few who don’t count as heroes.