Religion is a Mental Illness

Is the Decline in Community Life Driving A Rising Demand For Illiberalism?

We must rebuild the American community to keep extremists from overturning the existing social order.

realityslaststand.com

If people can’t satisfy their need for deep connection in other ways, they’ll be more receptive to a smooth-talking leader who urges them to renounce their lives of “selfish momentary pleasure” and follow him onward to “that purely spiritual existence” in which their value as human beings consists.

When people lack connections to others, they are unable to test the veracity of their own views, whether in the give-and-take of casual conversation or in more formal deliberation. Without such an opportunity, people are more likely to be swayed by their worst impulses. It is no coincidence that random acts of violence, such as the 1999 spate of schoolyard shootings, tend to be committed by people identified, after the fact, as “loners.”

In the last decades of the nineteenth century Americans created and joined an unprecedented number of voluntary associations. Beginning in the 1870s and extending into the 1910s, new types of association multiplied, chapters of preexisting associations proliferated, and associations increasingly federated into state and national organizations. In Peoria and St. Louis, Boston and Boise and Bath and Bowling Green, Americans organized clubs and churches and lodges and veterans groups. Everywhere, from the great entrepôt metropolises to small towns in the heartland, the number of voluntary associations grew even faster than the rapidly growing population.

Julian Adorney is a columnist at Reality's Last Stand and the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement dedicated to preserving liberalism. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and spiritual men's coach at The Undaunted Man. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.

Geoff is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He has spent the last twenty-six years coaching people world-wide, with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential. Along with Mark, he is a co-founder of The Undaunted Man.

Why Is the Liberal Order Eroding (And What Can We Do About It)?

If we’re going to preserve the freedoms we cherish, we must find the courage to stand up for our ideals.

realityslaststand.com

There’s a sense that the liberal order is eroding.

What do we mean by that? By “liberal order” we mean three things: political liberalism, economic liberalism, and epistemic liberalism.

Politically, it’s tough to shake the sense that we’re drifting away from our liberal roots. Fringes on both sides are rejecting the liberal principle that all human beings are created equal and that our differences are dwarfed by our shared humanity. On the left, prominent activists are endorsing the idea that people with different immutable characteristics (race, gender, etc.) have different intrinsic worth. For instance, in 2021, Yale University’s Child Study Center hosted a psychiatrist who gave a speech titled, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” where she compared white people to “a demented violent predator who thinks they are a saint or a superhero.” In response to Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, Yale professor Zareena Grewal tweeted, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” Across the political aisle, Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams called black Americans a “hate group” whom white Americans should “get the hell away from.”

If a core component of political liberalism is that all human beings are created equal, then many prominent voices are pushing us rapidly toward an illiberal worldview where one’s worth is determined by immutable characteristics. 

Increasingly, members of both parties seek to change liberal institutions to lock the opposition out of power. Their apparent goal is to undermine a key outcome of political liberalism: a peaceful and regular transfer of power between large and well-represented factions. On the right, prominent Republicans have refused to concede Trump’s loss in 2020, and many are refusing to commit to certifying the 2024 election should Trump lose again. “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump,” Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) said in response to repeated questions about whether or not he would accept the election results. On the left, prominent Democrats advocate for abolishing the Electoral College, partly on the grounds that it favors Republicans; and for splitting California into multiple states to gain more blue Senate seats. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tina Smith (D-MN), among others, have called for expanding the Supreme Court explicitly so they can pack it with Democrats.

This disdain for democratic norms isn’t limited to political elites on right or left; it is permeating the general populace. According to a 2023 poll, only 54 percent of young Americans (aged 18-29) agree with the statement, “Democracy is the greatest form of government.”

Economic liberalism is also under attack. In 2022, Pew found that only 57 percent of the public had a favorable view of capitalism. Those numbers are even worse among young Americans; only 40 percent among those aged 18-29 had a positive view of capitalism. By contrast, 44 percent of the same age group reported having a positive view of socialism. Faced with the choice of which system we should live under, it’s unclear whether young Americans would prefer economic liberalism over the command-and-control systems of socialism or communism. And while young people typically hold more left-of-center views and often become more conservative as they age, the intensity of young peoples’ opposition to capitalism should not be discounted. From 2010 to 2018, a separate Gallup poll found that the number of young Americans (aged 18-29) with a positive view of capitalism dropped by 23 percent. 

Epistemic liberalism is on the ropes too. As the Harper’s Letter warned, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” In recent years, even prominent intellectuals have been terrified of being canceled for daring to write outside of the lines set by a new and predominantly left-wing orthodoxy, adversely affecting out discourse. Again, this disdain for liberalism is more acute among young people: a 2019 survey found that 41 percent of young Americans didn’t believe that the First Amendment should protect hate speech. Furthermore, a full majority (51 percent) of college students considered it “sometimes” or “always acceptable” to “shout down speakers or try to prevent them from talking.”

As Jonathan Rauch argues in The Constitution of Knowledge, a necessary precondition of epistemic liberalism is that everyone should be allowed to speak freely, a precondition increasingly unmet in recent years.

In their book Is Everyone Really Equal?, Robin DiAngelo (of White Fragility fame) and Özlem Sensoy even challenge the foundation of epistemic liberalism itself: the scientific method. This method mandates that hypotheses be tested against reality before acceptance. “Critical Theory developed in part as a response to this presumed infallibility of scientific method,” they write “and raised questions about whose rationality and whose presumed objectivity underlies scientific methods.” Of course, once we jettison the principle that ideas should be tested by holding them up to reality, all we have left are mythologies and accusations. One of the great triumphs of the Enlightenment was giving us the scientific tools to more accurately understand the world, but those tools—like other facets of liberalism—are increasingly under attack.

So, what went wrong? Why do so many Americans, particularly young Americans, harbor such disdain for our liberal order? Why have we seen the rise of widespread social censorship, and why do books telling us that not all humans are created equal become mega-bestsellers? We believe a key reason is that too many proponents of the liberal order (ourselves included) have failed to defend our ideals vigorously. In the face of our complacency, a small but impassioned minority intent on dismantling the pillars of liberalism has been gaining ground, both within institutions and within the hearts and minds of the younger generation.

Why haven’t many of us stood up for our ideas? We posit two reasons. First, there is a sense of complacency: a lot of us look at illiberalism and think, “It can't happen here.” The United States was founded as an essentially liberal country. We were the first country to really seek to embody Enlightenment ideals (however imperfectly) from our birth. Throughout our 250-year history, despite fluctuating levels of government intervention in Americans' social and economic lives, we have never lost our political, economic, or epistemological liberal foundations. This long track record of resilience has led many of us to overlook the rising threat of illiberal ideals, assuming our liberal system is too robust to be torn down.

Adding to this complacency is the fact that many threats to our liberal social contract are largely invisible to those outside educational or academic circles. Cloaked in the guise of combating racism, Critical Race Theory takes aim at the liberal order; however, most people who haven’t been inside the halls of a university in the last 10 or so years may not be aware of this aspect. Critical Theory—including Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, and others—generally opposes Enlightenment thinking, but its arguments are wrapped in jargon and mostly live in academic papers. For example, the book Is Everyone Really Equal? criticizes political, economic, and epistemic liberalism, but it’s not a mainstream bestseller; instead, it’s a widely-used textbook for prospective teachers. What begins in the academy often seeps out into schools and eventually permeates the broader society, and many teachers and professors of these ideologies explicitly describe themselves as activists or as scholar-activists whose goal is to turn the next generation onto these ideas. The threat is real, but the more anti-liberal facets of these ideologies aren’t exactly being shouted by CNN, which makes it easy to miss.

Second, as humans, we often abandon our ideals in the face of social pressure. Consider an organization consisting of ten people: one progressive and nine moderates. In 2020, each member starts to hear about Black Lives Matter (BLM). The progressive enthusiastically supports BLM, and loudly encourages his colleagues to do the same. What happens next illustrates how prone we are to jettison our ideals if doing so brings social rewards.

The first moderate faces a choice. He could thoroughly research BLM by investigating police violence nationwide, examining the evidence of systemic racism or system-wide equality, exploring BLM’s proposed program and what they actually advocate for, and making an informed decision about whether or not he supports the organization. But that’s a lot of work for not a lot of return. After all, his job doesn’t require that he understand BLM; the only immediate consequence is his colleague’s opinion of him. Consequently, he engages in what Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman calls “substitution.” As Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” For example, when participants were asked how much money Exxon should pay for nets to prevent birds from drowning in oil ponds, they did not perform an economic calculation. Instead, what drove their decision-making process was emotion: “the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil.”

Thus, the moderate engages in substitution. Instead of tackling the complex and difficult question “What do I think of BLM?” he asks himself an easier but more emotional question: “How much do I care about black people?” For any decent person, the answer is “quite a lot”—and so he signs on with his progressive colleague. The fact that he’s now supporting an illiberal ideology—one of BLM’s co-founders said in 2019 that “I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society"—never occurs to him.

When the next moderate is asked the same question about whether he supports BLM, he has the same incentive as his colleague to engage in substitution, but with added social pressure: now two of his nine coworkers support BLM, and he risks losing social capital if he does not. As humans, we are social animals. Sociologist Brooke Harrington explains that we often value others’ perception of us more than our own survival, as social ostracism in our distant past often meant death anyway. As she puts it, “social death is more frightening than physical death.” And so, motivated by the social rewards for supporting BLM and the fear of social punishment if he does not, one coworker after another agrees to support BLM.

Adding to our social calculus is the fact that we all want to be seen as (and, even more importantly, see ourselves as) empathetic. In the example of BLM, we don’t want to be perceived as racists. If this means going along with an organization that says that police “cannot [be] reform[ed]” because they were “born out of slave patrols,” then that’s a small price to pay. This same desire to be seen as empathetic (again, especially by ourselves) holds when we are called to cancel a professor for saying something insensitive, or to condemn cultural appropriation, or to read and praise books and articles claiming that liberalism has failed marginalized people and that a new, totalitarian system is necessary for their salvation.

But why shouldn’t we be complacent? Why shouldn’t we go along to get along, and let our values bend here and there so we can fit in with the new illiberal crowd? One reason is that the stakes are no longer trivial. There is nothing magical about the liberal order that guarantees it will always triumph. History shows us that liberalism can give way to totalitarianism, as it did in Nazi Germany; or to empire, as in ancient Rome. In England, new rules regulate what people are allowed to say, with citizens facing fines or imprisonment for saying something the political establishment does not like. In Canada, a new bill supported by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would criminalize speech that those in power consider hateful. The United States is not immune to these dangers. Our Constitution alone is not a sufficient defense, because laws are downstream from culture. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be interpreted by illiberal justices (and have been in the 20th century); and when this happens, our rights can erode very rapidly indeed. Our freedom is sustained not by our geography or even our founding documents, but by our willingness to fight for liberalism—to defend it in the court of public opinion.

If we’re going to preserve the freedoms we cherish, that is what it will take. We must find the courage to stand up for our ideals—to speak and act based on principle alone. We must be open to new evidence that might change our views, but at the same time resist having our minds changed for us. We must prioritize truth over popular opinion.

In essence, we must think and act more like August Landmesser.

Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving our liberal social contract. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.

Peter Boghossian: Can you like, nutshell what is what were you trying to do with "Cynical Theories" when you published that, was 2019 right?

Helen Pluckrose: Yeah, and I was trying to show how postmodern concepts of knowledge, power and language, in which we are to understand that knowledge is socially constructed by the people who are powerful in society - typically straight white men - in order to serve their own interests, they then make that knowledge legitimate and then everybody speaks according to that legitimized knowledge, and that perpetuates things like white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, transphobia, homophobia, etc. So, we need to then address the language, the discourses

And so I wanted to show that so many of the ideas that we're seeing now, which really sort of mystify people who believe that humans can actually talk to each other and exchange ideas and evaluate ideas for themselves, I wanted to show how this is tracing back. So I went backwards, really, started with the theories we're seeing now, and because I studied postmodernism in other contexts in University as well, just trace the citations back and the trail is very clear. I mean, Foucault is standing out right at the top of most cited people. And that's because that's where most citations lead.

Boghossian: So then you went from "Cynical Theories" and you've been writing about liberalism. There's so much confusion about liberalism and authoritarianism. Let's see if we can clear some of that up would you please, for us? How do you define liberalism?

Pluckrose: Okay, at its most simple, the overarching principle of liberalism is that we let people believe, speak and live as they see fit, provided it does no harm to anyone else nor prevents them from doing the same. So, that's John Stewart Mill's harm principle and that essentially comes down to the principle of anti-authoritarianism. I sometimes find with people who don't like the word "liberal" because they associate it with other things in their particular tradition, if I say anti-authoritarian, that is something that they will agree that they can commit to.

On another level, sort of philosophical, liberalism can be a disposition, a broader set of principles which takes this idea of live and let live essentially - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - and draws from it a lot of other ideas like democratic institutions and the free exchange ideas as a way of producing knowledge, the idea that there should be no barriers preventing anybody from accessing everything. All these ideas are drawn from that that liberal tradition.

Boghossian: So, what we see now is competing forms of authoritarianism? Right, we see much-- critical social justice is the attempt at the imposition of certain conclusions upon-- that people have to either believe or pretend to believe. Have you noticed that in the anti-woke space or on the right, there is an emerging kind of authoritarianism in response to, or is a backlash to, critical social justice?

Pluckrose: I have certainly noticed this, yeah. And this is what I've been addressing quite a lot as well, because of course there has always been authoritarianism on the right, but what we're seeing now as well is a kind of, I call it reactive overcompensation, because it-- just to take one example.

So racism has always been a form of white identity politics. This isn't new. You know, typical racism, say in an American context, is a form of white identity politics. That we made significant progress on a consensus that that was both stupid and unethical. And then when we had so many of the critical theorists of race in particular, constantly linking their own theories with black people or brown people, then we had this kind of reaction to the theories but which were actually hitting black and brown people, who may or may not subscribe to those theories. So that's the authoritarianism that's kind of come back, because people possibly who are already inclined to hold racist ideas, can then present them as an anti-woke position, as criticizing an ideology.

Liberalism Is Not the Belief That Society Is Already Liberal

(I don't think you heard me the first 1000 times)

helenpluckrose.substack.com

”We need universities to ensure academic freedom and viewpoint diversity.” “But that’s not the real world! Universities are possibly the most politically biased and censorious institutions in the country!”

“Nobody should be made to undergo training in Critical Social Justice ideology and affirm things they don’t believe. “But that’s exactly what is happening! It’s a whole industry!”

1. People don’t generally dedicate time and effort to arguing for the creation of laws, systems or norms that already exist or which they believe to already exist. What would be the point? If somebody is arguing that there is a need for something to happen, you can generally assume they know it is not happening. Likewise, if someone says that people shouldn’t do something, you should really take from this that they know people are doing that thing. The oddest thing here is that this is generally understood and we very seldom see people misunderstanding words like ‘need’ and ‘should/should not’ in everyday, non-political contexts. We do not see this, for example.

“We really need some rain for the plants.” ”What are you talking about? It’s sunny and has been for a fortnight.”

“You shouldn’t leave your shoes on the stairs. Someone will trip over them.” ”Are you blind? My shoes are right there on the stairs!”

1. This does not seem to happen to people speaking from other philosophical or political positions. The belief that liberals are people who believe society is already liberal is not mirrored in beliefs about people arguing from other frameworks. We do not, for example, see misconceptions that socialists are people who believe they live in a socialist system or that conservatives are people who believe society is satisfactorily conservative. In those cases, they are understood to be people who want to make society more socialist or more conservative because they believe that this is what it lacks and achieving it would make things better. This position is then typically responded to with straightforward agreement, qualified agreement or disagreement.

• I post about opposing medical mutilation of kids who are overwhelmingly gay, autistic, traumatized or just gender non-conforming. -- Are you saying that accurately diagnosing autism and trauma, letting gay kids be gay, not giving kids pornography in schools, and not cutting the breasts of tomboys or the testicles off femme boys is "MAGA"?
• I post about the low quality evidence in so-called "gender affirming care," as demonstrated by the reviews in multiple European countries. -- Are you saying that a dogged commitment to science and evidence is "MAGA"?
• I post about how, while gender dysphoria is a demonstrable medical condition, "gender identity" even conceptually is based on stereotypes, contradictory and self-refuting (if it's a "social construct," your "gender identity" would be different in a different society), and a "gender identity" that is untethered from all biology is ultimately indistinguishable from the Xian notion of a "soul" that is untethered from all biology. -- Are you saying that skepticism of things that can't be shown to be real is "MAGA"?
• I post about Claudine Gay being protected from criticism for her skin color, despite demonstrated career-long plagiarism, overseeing the steadfast suppression of free speech (as shown by FIRE's rankings where Harvard got a zero) and imposition of a specific postmodern orthodoxy, and her hypocrisy over her retreat regarding antisemitism at Harvard to the same "free speech" she systematically suppressed. -- Are you saying that consistent expectations, consistent standards, is "MAGA"?
• I post about racial discrimination in STEM programs which disproportionately disadvantages Asian kids. -- Are you saying that opposition to racial discrimination is "MAGA"?
• I post about male suicides, male victims of domestic violence, male victims of sexual assault, male victims of false accusations, and the statistics surrounding them that don't get the attention they need. -- Are you saying that equality and recognising statistics and evidence to inform reality and public policy is "MAGA"?
• I post about how authoritarianism, narcissistic personality disorder, controlling others and even mistreating others are reliably the motivations for activists who don't have a pro-social motivation. -- Are you saying that not submitting to or giving power to those with malevolent, narcissistic and psychopathic intent is "MAGA"?
• I post about how Kendi and Gay promote a victimhood and defeatist mindset in black Americans based on a grand conspiracy theory, one which perpetuates problems in society, solves nothing and only serves to inflate the standing and bank balances of elites who don't understand the actual problems or causes (e.g. crime, fatherlessness, literacy), don't care to, and will call you names if you try to. -- Are you saying that responsibility, empowerment, and the rejection of "god did it" faux-answers is "MAGA"?
• I post about how nuts it is for western college students and even LGBT people to support a terrorist organization that has the explicitly stated goal of conquering the world and forcing everyone to adopt Islam, who would be thrown off the nearest roof if they ever actually stepped foot on their territory, while excoriating and chanting for the destruction of the only country in the region with the same values as they pretend to hold. -- Are you saying that not supporting religious fundamentalist terrorists and not endorsing a global jihad is "MAGA"?
• I post about MLK Jr's speech-writer being frustrated at King's message being lost, with people pretending that nothing has gotten better, and with current-day messaging that society is irredeemably damaged (sinful) and preaching a form of nihilism that the same results that they use to justify their ideology in the first place (self-fulfilling). -- Are you saying that black empowerment and personal excellence is "MAGA"?
• And the one I strongly suspect instigated this in the first place, but I wasn't about to let you get away that easily... I post about Chris Rufo working to reinstate merit, color blind policy ("the content of their character"), outlaw racial discrimination, rejection of both left-wing and right-wing identarianism, and refocus institutions back to their original mission, which is inquiry, knowledge production and the pursuit of truth, and away from their current obsession with producing nothing but grievance-motivated identity politics bullshit and fragile, mentally ill activists. -- Are you saying that merit, colorblindness, rejection of racial discrimination and the pursuit of objective truth are "MAGA"?

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights.

"Illiberal leftists think liberalism leads to fascism and illiberal conservatives think liberalism leads to communism. They dislike liberalism because it creates space for the ideologies they want to disallow." — @BooneMcHenry

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights.

Erec Smith – Free Black Thought

My guest this week is Erec Smith, professor of rhetoric at York College and co-founder of the nonprofit Free Black Thought. Erec came onto t

glennloury.substack.com

My guest this week is Erec Smith, professor of rhetoric at York College and co-founder of the nonprofit Free Black Thought. Erec came onto the show to talk about why an organization dedicated to fostering and promoting the true diversity of black thought is necessary. Now with a podcast, a journal, and the nonprofit itself, Erec is doing more than just criticizing the current state of mainstream-left race discourse. He’s helping to change it. As the inaugural contributor to the Journal of Free Black Thought, I’m happy to help.

I begin by asking Erec about how “free” Free Black Thought is. After all, sometimes when you say “black heterodoxy,” people hear “black conservatism.” He tells me about its mission, its journal and podcast, and its basis in classical liberalism. Erec’s opposition to DEI comes from experience. For a time, he served as a college diversity officer, and he saw things there he couldn’t unsee. Affirmative action and DEI aren’t viable ways to get black students up to par. Showing young people how to lay claim to their agency is key, and Erec wants to use Free Black Thought to do just that. And finally, I ask Erec just what “rhetoric” is, and the professor educates me.

The Return of the Indecent Left

How the war between Israel and Hamas resuscitated an ignoble tradition.

liberalpatriot.com

More than twenty years ago, the philosopher Michael Walzer famously asked whether or not there could be a “decent left.” After seeing the left’s reaction to the heinous October 7 terrorist atrocities in Israel, the answer is clearly no, there is no decent left—and we shouldn’t expect one to come into being any time soon.

It seemed that this indecent left had gone into remission with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Outside a subset of inveterate anti-American ideologues, it was left to self-proclaimed realists to make the case for letting Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine stand—or, failing that, negotiate a settlement that would reward the Kremlin with chunks of Ukrainian territory. Indeed, a number of individuals affiliated with the so-called “restraint” school of foreign policy disassociated themselves from their erstwhile comrades while Democratic political leaders brutally smacked down half-baked calls from progressives to negotiate away Ukrainian sovereignty on terms favorable to Vladimir Putin.

But the indecent left roared back to life with a vengeance almost immediately after October 7, excusing and “contextualizing”—and sometimes outright denying—deliberate mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of ordinary Israeli civilians and foreigners. Outright anti-Semitism permeated the indecent left’s reaction to the Hamas terror attacks from the start, with a number of left-wing activists, academics, and intellectuals alike either celebrating or apologizing for the pogrom as soon as it occurred. At best, the left issued impotent calls for an immediate ceasefire that amounted to demands that Israel do nothing after 1,200 of its citizens were brutally massacred and another 240 or so taken hostage by Hamas and its allies.

If anything, the pathologies Walzer described two decades ago have only gotten worse. This is not a political movement that wants to think seriously or coherently about the war between Israel and Hamas or foreign policy and armed conflict more generally; as Walzer wrote twenty years ago, “ideologically primed leftists were likely to think that they already understood whatever needed to be understood.” An epidemic of denial has characterized the indecent left’s response to October 7, one marked by three great refusals.

A refusal to deal with the problem at hand: what to do about Hamas?

Many ceasefire calls mean well: ordinary people are understandably appalled by the death and destruction and quite reasonably just want it to stop. While this humanitarian sentiment is commendable, it fails to address the question at the heart of the current conflict: what to do about Hamas in the wake of October 7? Other much-touted ceasefire calls from politicians like Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) essentially amount to terms of surrender for Hamas—immediate release of all hostages, giving up arms, and relinquishing control over Gaza. Likewise, the hostage release deal the Biden administration and Middle East partners brokered between Israel and Hamas only temporarily pauses the fighting.

Most immediate ceasefire calls coming from the indecent left essentially call for Israel to do nothing in response to October 7. Occasionally they come with provisions requiring Hamas release the hostages it took during its attack, but typically they amount to demands for a unilateral Israeli ceasefire without any explicit reciprocity from Hamas to, say, stop firing rockets into Israeli cities. Worse, they fail to take into account repeated threats by Hamas leaders to carry out October 7-style pogroms over and over again, much less the terrorist group’s long-standing, recently restated objective of destroying Israel itself. Since October 7, it’s obvious that many on the indecent left would have no problem with that outcome.

When asked what Israel—or America and the world at large—should do about Hamas after the cruelty of October 7, the indecent left’s repeated calls for an immediate ceasefire make clear that its answer is, at best, “nothing.” There may not be any good answers to this question, but “nothing” remains a grossly inadequate response.

A neo-Orientalist refusal to take either Palestinians or Israelis seriously

By and large, the indecent left has also demonstrated a remarkable lack of curiosity about either Palestinian or Israeli society and politics. It’s part and parcel of what TLP’s Brian Katulis dubbed neo-Orientalism: the use of nations and people overseas as props in America’s own domestic political debates. In particular, the indecent left spouts simplistic slogans while it professes “great concern and sympathy for the people of the region, while remaining largely indifferent to the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives within particular countries and societies.” That’s especially acute when it comes to discussions of Israel and the Palestinians, where the indecent left attempts to force the conflict into its own parochial ideological frameworks of “decolonization,” “white supremacy,” and “systemic racism.”

In other words, the indecent left thinks it already knows everything it needs to know about any given conflict—and especially any conflict that involves Israel. While “decolonization” provides the indecent left with a marginally coherent ideological framework, it amounts to little more than a “historically nonsensical” but nonetheless toxic stew of Soviet-era propaganda, half-baked academic theories, and contemporary identity politics. That includes the vogue to blame anything and everything on a mystical, all-pervasive white supremacy of which Israeli Jews somehow bizarrely partake. Why should the indecent left engage with the particularities of Palestinian politics or even give so much as a second glance to Israeli society when its ideology already gives it all the answers it needs?

As a result, the indecent left engages very little with actual Palestinian politics and society. It refuses to grant Palestinians any real agency and therefore refuses to acknowledge any real politics among Palestinians themselves, much less the fact that Hamas has repeatedly put forward an openly genocidal program or that it violently suppresses dissent among the Palestinians under its authority. Instead, many on the left fantasize about a single binational state in what was once the British Mandate of Palestine—something few Palestinians actually favor. Other leftists endorse slogans calling for a single Palestinian Arab state, but either way few of them actually delve into the complex power dynamics within Palestinian society—including those factions that don’t respect the basic rights and freedoms of a wide range of people.

If indecent leftists generally fail to engage with Palestinian politics and society in any meaningful way, they actively avoid any sort of real engagement with—or even understanding—of Israeli society and politics. At best, the indecent left ignores Israeli society and politics; at worst, it views Israeli society as somehow counterfeit. Other segments of the indecent left, especially in academia, actively discourage any engagement with Israelis and Israeli institutions. With zero understanding of Israeli society and politics, it cannot understand Israeli fears or motivations in any real way. The indecent left doesn’t know anything about Israeli society, and it doesn’t want to know anything about it.

A refusal to make elementary—if difficult—moral and ethical distinctions

In its rhetoric and analysis of the war between Israel and Hamas, the indecent left frequently equates the deliberate and premeditated murder, rape, and kidnapping of ordinary civilians with the inadvertent and unintentional deaths of civilians in what appear to be otherwise legitimate and legal military operations. Here as elsewhere, the left refuses to make what Walzer calls “one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing.” At some fundamental level, many on the indecent left understand this distinction—as seen by the strenuous effort to portray just about any and every Israeli military action as unlawful and illegitimate by definition.

It may well be the case that the Israeli military has played fast and loose with the laws of war or committed war crimes in its war against Hamas. The sheer amount of ordnance dropped on Gaza between October 7 and the start of the Israeli ground offensive roughly three weeks later remains stunning—but it’s not necessarily illegal. It’s entirely legitimate and very much appropriate to question how well or how seriously the Israeli military takes its obligations to protect civilians, but as Walzer points out it’s impossible for any military to fight a war without putting civilians at risk. The Israeli military can and should probably do a better job protecting civilians, but it’s unrealistic to expect any war to end with zero civilian casualties.

By contrast, the indecent left remains either silent or in denial about blatant Hamas war crimes. It’s been an open secret for well over a decade that Hamas uses hospitals, schools, mosques, and other protected civilian buildings and facilities as command centers and bases for operations against Israel; sources ranging from the New York Times and PBS to non-governmental organizations typically unsympathetic to Israel like Amnesty International and even UNRWA attest to this fact. It’s not surprising to see the maze of tunnels uncovered beneath the Shifa hospital complex, nor is it shocking to see that Hamas brought hostages seized on October 7 to this medical facility. These Hamas abuses don’t even cover the deliberate and premeditated targeting of civilians for murder and rape on October 7 itself.

Then there’s the moral equivalence many on the indecent left have drawn between Israeli hostages held by Hamas and Palestinians jailed by Israel. There are many flaws and abuses in the way Israel treats detained Palestinians (particularly in East Jerusalem and the West Bank), but it’s hard to know what drives people to try and establish a moral equivalence between a four-year-old abducted by Hamas after terrorists killed her parents and a failed car bomber. However, that’s typical of an indecent left that tears down posters of hostages held by Hamas after October 7.

In its failure to make difficult but necessary moral distinctions, the indecent left contributes in its own way to the erosion of both the laws of war and the idea of crimes against humanity. It diminishes the force of both while giving the perpetrators of actual war crimes and atrocities effective political and moral cover. If there are no relevant distinctions between legal and legitimate actions in war and illegal and illegitimate ones—much less between legal and legitimate military operations and deliberate atrocities like October 7—it simply makes war even more brutal and appalling crimes against humanity more likely.

* * *

The pathologies of the indecent left burst out into the open once again after October 7, but they’ve been present in large swathes of the left for decades now. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that these pathologies are inherent to and embedded in the left, and that no amount of argumentation or persuasion will eliminate or mitigate them. There are many decent leftists, but there is no decent left.

What should liberals and decent leftists do, then?

First, recognize that the indecent left is not your friend in any way, shape, or form. Indeed, the indecent left sees liberals and decent leftists—not conservatives or right-wing populists—as its primary adversaries. Even when there are ostensible areas of agreement, the underlying analysis and motivations and goals of the indecent left stand at odds with those of the broader center-left. It may not seem like much, but it’s important for mainstream liberals and decent leftists to understand this basic fact.

As a corollary, it’s important to note that the indecent left remains a small faction in American politics—it’s a paper tiger that garners excessive attention through activity on social media platforms and destructive political tactics. Different polls use different definitions and give different results, but the “progressive left” amounted to just six percent of the population in a 2021 Pew poll and eight percent in the 2018 Hidden Tribes poll.

Next, quarantine the indecent left. Much as mainstream liberals and decent leftists did in the late 1940s, today’s liberals and decent leftists must establish intellectual and political firewalls against the indecent left. That’s easier said than done, especially given the structure of contemporary center-left politics; unions and political parties that once filtered out bad-faith actors and indecent politics have weakened enormously in the intervening decades. Many of the same problems that plague domestic politics—an overreliance on college-educated professionals from foundation-funded non-profit institutions to staff government offices and agencies, for instance—likewise make it more difficult to combat indecent leftists on foreign policy.

Finally, liberals and the decent left need to articulate their own vision of foreign policy. The Biden administration and others on the mainstream center-left have been slowly groping their way toward this vision, particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But liberals and the decent left need to accelerate their own efforts to establish a foreign policy that stands in opposition not only to the indecent left but the isolationist America First right and the technocratic approach of the post-Cold War era. It’s an urgent task that can no longer be postponed.

Liberals and decent leftists did it once before, albeit under vastly different circumstances. But that should give us hope that we can do it again today.

Bari Weiss on Why We Should End DEI

It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.

Tablet Magazine

It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.

Twenty years ago, when I was a college student, I started writing about a then-nameless, niche ideology that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.

It is possible I would not have perceived the nature of this ideology—or rather, I would have been able to avoid seeing its true nature—had I not been a Jew. But I was. I am. And in noticing the way I had been written out of the equation, I started to notice that it wasn’t just me, but that the whole system rested on an illusion.

What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Colorblindness with race-obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as Jamie Kirchick concisely put it in these pages: “Muslim > gay, Black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”

I was an undergraduate back then, but you didn’t need a Ph.D. to see where this could go. And so I watched, in horror, sounding alarms as loudly as I could. I was told by most Jewish leaders that, yes, it wasn’t great, but not to be so hysterical. Campuses were always hotbeds of radicalism, they said. This ideology, they promised, would surely dissipate as young people made their way in the world.

It did not.

Over the past two decades, I saw this inverting worldview swallow all of the crucial sense-making institutions of American life. It started with the universities. Then it moved on to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. Then on to our medical schools and our law schools. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. The takeover is so comprehensive that it’s now almost hard to notice it—because it is everywhere.

Including in the Jewish community.

Some of the most important Jewish communal organizations transformed themselves in order to prop up this ideology. Or at the very least, they contorted themselves to signal that they could be good allies in the fight for equal rights—even as those rights are no longer presumed inalienable or equal, and are handed out rather than protected.

For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are 2% of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.

It isn’t only Jews who suffer from the suggestion that merit and excellence are dirty words. It is strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class. That is why Asian American success, for example, is suspicious. The percentages are off. The scores are too high. From whom did you steal all that success?

Of course this new ideology doesn’t come right out and say all that. It doesn’t even like to be named. Some call it wokeness or anti-racism or progressivism or safetyism or critical social justice or identity-Marxism. But whatever term you use, what’s clear is that it has gained power in a conceptual instrument called “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI.

In theory, all three of these words represent noble causes. They are in fact all causes to which American Jews in particular have long been devoted, both individually and collectively. But in reality, these words are now metaphors for an ideological movement bent on recategorizing every American not as an individual, but as an avatar of an identity group, his or her behavior prejudged accordingly, setting all of us up in a kind of zero-sum game.

We have been seeing for several years now the damage this ideology has done: DEI, and its cadres of enforcers, undermine the central missions of the institutions that adopt it. But nothing has made the dangers of DEI more clear than what’s happening these days on our college campuses—the places where our future leaders are nurtured.

It is there that professors are compelled to pledge fidelity to DEI in order to get hired, promoted, or tenured. (For more on this, please read John Sailer’s Free Press piece: "How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities.”) And it is there that the hideousness of this worldview has been on full display over the past few weeks: We see students and professors, immersed not in facts, knowledge, and history, but in a dehumanizing ideology that has led them to celebrate or justify terrorism.

Jews, who understand that being made in the image of God bestows inviolate sanctity on every human life, must not stand by as that principle, so central to the promise of this country and its hard won freedoms, is erased.

What we must do is reverse this.

The answer is not for the Jewish community to plead its cause before the intersectional coalition, or beg for a higher ranking in the new ladder of victimhood. That is a losing strategy—not just for Jewish dignity, but for the values we hold as Jews and as Americans.

The Jewish commitment to justice—and the American Jewish community’s powerful and historic opposition to racism—is a source of tremendous pride. That should never waver. Nor should our commitment to stand by our friends, especially when they need our support as we now need theirs.

But “DEI” is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power.

And the movement that is gathering all this power does not like America or liberalism. It does not believe that America is a good country—at least no better than China or Iran. It calls itself progressive, but it does not believe in progress; it is explicitly anti-growth. It claims to promote “equity,” but its answer to the challenge of teaching math or reading to disadvantaged children is to eliminate math and reading tests. It demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual.

An ideology that pathologizes these fundamental human virtues is one that seeks to undermine what makes America exceptional.

It is time to end DEI for good. No more standing by as people are encouraged to segregate themselves. No more forced declarations that you will prioritize identity over excellence. No more compelled speech. No more going along with little lies for the sake of being polite.

The Jewish people have outlived every single regime and ideology that has sought our elimination. We will persist, one way or another. But DEI is undermining America, and that for which it stands—including the principles that have made it a place of unparalleled opportunity, safety, and freedom for so many. Fighting it is the least we owe this country.

The Basis of Classical Liberalism

by James Lindsay

newdiscourses.substack.com

We are not God. We cannot become God, make God, or speak with the authority of God. This is axiomatic and the beginning of wisdom and prosperity.

Because we are not God, we cannot know the full nature of God, or even for certainty whether God exists at all. As a result, we cannot know any purpose, including ultimate purpose, each of our lives may have. Because we cannot know the full nature of God, should He exist, nor any purpose our lives may have in His sight, we lack the authority to compel the beliefs of others, lest we lead them into ultimate error. In particular, we therefore lack the authority to alienate anyone, self or other, from the possibility of fulfilling that purpose. In short, lacking the authority of God, we lack justification for the compulsion of our fellow man.

In that we all lack the authority of God and thus any justification for the compulsion of our fellow man, all men are created politically equal. Nothing in the world, which is also not God, justifies an intrinsically limited human being to hold political or social authority over another without the consent of both parties to that relationship. Any authority we can hold over any other person must therefore be earned, provisional, temporary, and voluntarily given and accepted.

Men, by their morally limited nature, which is sometimes called “fallen,” often seek to compel the belief, speech, and action of other men, both for good reasons and bad. The primary mechanisms by which a man can successfully compel another man to belief, speech, or action are through credible threats to his life, liberty, and livelihood, generally recognized in the last case as his property. Further, because of the nature of the ultimate privacy of conscience, which men may have any number of good reasons to keep private from other men, undue violation of the privacy of man and the contents of his mind can coerce him. Any who can destroy another’s life, liberty, or livelihood, or sufficiently violate his privacy, can compel his belief, speech, and activity and thus alienate him through destruction or compulsion from any potential ultimate purpose he may have. Only God could possibly hold such authority, and we are not God. No man can justify claiming such authority.

Thus, we hold these truths to be self-evident: that we are not God, and by virtue of that, we have been endowed by that which led to our existence, our Creator, whether the Laws of Nature or Nature’s God, with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are his life, liberty, and property, including the property of the private contents of our minds, and the ability to make use of these to pursue our happiness, fortunes, and whatever purposes, ultimate or otherwise, there may be within and of our lives.

These rights and the privacy necessary to maintain them shall be set aside and therefore, in light of the original meaning of the word, regarded as holy.

Because men must nevertheless live among one another in as much peace and in pursuit of as much prosperity as we may attain, some political system—a just government—needs to be instituted among them not for their rule but for the securing of these holy and unalienable rights. The primary purpose of a just government is therefore to secure these rights and to facilitate the peaceful resolution of conflicts and disputes that arise between men as a result of them and their individual differences.

What must such a government abide by, then, so that it can achieve this sacred task without itself alienating man from that which is unalienable? Government, too, is not God, no matter in what way it is instituted among men. It cannot become God, neither can it make God, nor can it speak or act with the authority of God. It must abide by limitations of nearly every imaginable sort and must secure the inalienable rights of man from itself and others.

Because a government lacks the authority of God, a just government has no intrinsic political authority over the men among whom it is constituted. That is, a just government cannot rule, and it cannot govern except with the consent of those whom it governs. Since government cannot usurp the authority to rule, law must rule in its place, subject to mechanisms of production and amendment that guarantee the participation and consent of those over whom it rules. In that none possesses any special political authority, none can be exempt from the law that is instituted among men for their own just governance. 

All governments, including a just government, must possess and wield political authority, however, including to produce and enforce the law, which rules in its stead. That authority in a just government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, and as such it is all loaned political authority ultimately answerable at any time to the people it governs, is provisional, and subject to limits of time, scope, and checks and balances on its power.

A just government must be democratic in nature to obtain the consent of those it governs, but it cannot secure the rights of the few against the many unless the democracy is republican in application. Servants must be consented to by the people they represent. Fair and impartial elections must be held at intervals to loan political authority to public servants and to pass it to others at want or need, or else it usurps an authority greater than itself to which it can claim no right. The greater must be given a say and the lesser must be granted enough representation to counter the tide of opinion held prejudicially or negligently against it.

A just government must secure the rights of speech, press, protest, and petition or it cannot be held to account and the consent with which it governs cannot be duly informed. Its powers must be limited, divided, and placed into a system of checks and balances to prevent it from any illegitimate claim to rule with political authority it cannot have. Government is not God because we are not God. Just governments understand this and keep it. Unjust governments reject this and run afoul of it and the men they are meant to serve.

A just government cannot compel the beliefs, speech, or actions of men because it lacks any such authority, which cannot even be given on loan, and consequently it cannot deprive men of their lives, liberties, or properties, or a reasonable expectation of privacy, without the due process of law pursuant to its solitary sacred objective: to secure the inalienable rights of those whom it serves and protects. It therefore must secure the right to believe, speak, and worship as well as the rights to defend oneself against any and all attempts to alienate men from those fundamental rights which he retains inalienably.  It cannot punish cruelly or unusually, torture, or compel any man to profess his own guilt.

Because individual belief and conscience is self-evidently inviolate, just government consequently must also secure a right to privacy without interference in private spaces and a reasonable expectation of limited privacy even in public spaces. In that governments are not God, because we are not God and they are instituted amongst us, they have no authority to violate the inner sanctity of the human mind in any person, neither to torture, nor to surveil persons without justified suspicion or manipulate their beliefs, actions, or environments so as to coerce them against their self-determined will. Instead, as with our other unalienable rights, just governments have a duty to secure a reasonable right to privacy between citizens and hold no right to violate that right themselves. Because we also are not God, none of us individually has any such authority over one another either.

As with just governments, just individuals must obtain any social or political authority they hold over another man by obtaining his consent. Because none possess intrinsic authority over others, consent to hold political authority must not be absolute and should be given freely and under contract according to merits and on terms determined by both relevant parties to be acceptable to each. Political authority between adults is therefore extended by virtue of demonstrated competence that is compelling to those in the relationship. Just governments should secure these arrangements and establish courts of justice to facilitate the resolution of conflicts between parties. The courts must adjudicate the law with impartiality, favoring neither the greater nor the lesser, and only under such judicial restraint should just men submit to the court. Arbitrary power must be resisted, and any doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind. Courts must therefore be impartial in carrying out the law.

Because belief cannot be compelled, likewise, none possess the authority to compel another to believe in any idea, right or wrong, true or false. Therefore, no proposition is to be regarded as true or good by virtue of he who made it. Every proposition earns its authority through processes of validation that demand it survive challenge by competing ideas that ultimately must be brought to bear against our best assessment of the laws of nature of objective reality or of God’s Creation, which by definition cannot be wrong or false and rest outside of but are accessible to each and every man. Men can establish themselves as authorities, to which others can consent or not, based upon their demonstrated capacities to determine that which is right and true through the successful applications of their talents and perceptions. In that every man is not God, which is to say he is limited and finite, no man obtains special or final authority on any of his proclamations of rightness or truth and must consent to seeing his own ideas challenged by those of others.

Because our right to our own property is inalienable, so is our right to do with our property what we will so long as it doesn’t violate the inalienable rights of others. In other words, we have the right not only to hold our property but to engage in commerce with it according to the principles of free enterprise under the law. Property can be exchanged by any two parties who mutually consent to the terms of the contract of exchange without undue interference by third parties, and a just government should secure this right to engage in commerce under its duty to secure the rights of each citizen’s property.

In summary, we are not God. The consequences of this self-evident proposition are vast. None of us possesses the authority to compel another or his belief because we lack in our limitation understanding of the significance of any error against his intrinsic value and potential purpose made in that way. We therefore self-evidently start the project of organizing our society from a position of political equality with certain rights that are inalienable, among these life, liberty, property, capacity for their use toward our happiness and purposes, and a reasonable expectation of privacy in which we can maintain their sanctity. Lacking authority to rule over one another, we are ruled instead by law and merit and lend social and political authority in limited ways as such through processes that are open in their nature and that may best determine these as objectively as we may. Individual belief is sacrosanct not because any man is God but because every man is not. The individual is politically inviolate because he is the vessel of his own sacrosanct individual belief.

Together, these provocative and humbling ideas and the social and political project they define have a name. These are classical liberalism.

I wrote an an essay about it, you know, "Is liberalism the best way to beat wokeness?" and the answer to that ism it depends on what society you want to live in.

If you want to live in one where you don't have to pretend to believe anything you don't believe in, you don't have to fear cancellation for saying the wrong thing, then you have to aim for a liberal society.

There are other growing movements that could potentially have more power to push out liberalism, but then we would likely find ourselves in a frying pan-fire situation.

I don't want to be cancelled for criticizing the monarchy any more than I want to be cancelled for criticizing critical social justice.

So, I would ask those people, are you considering, when you're thinking about liberalism and whether it is the best way to create a society that is sound, that is just, are you using liberalism as a tool to get to something else, or is liberalism the end goal?

And for me and for liberals generally, a liberal society is the end goal.

We have we have two choices, really. If we want to defeat authoritarianism, we can either get more firmly liberal and just not - and very strongly not - tolerate impositions. There's nothing anti-liberal in saying, no we are not going to let you institutionalize your ideology, in the same way that we wouldn't let you institutionalize your Christian faith, say.

We wouldn't let you make everybody recite the Apostle's Creed, you shouldn't have to do a Diversity Equity and Inclusion statement.

So, it's perfectly liberal to put laws in place to say to defend that kind of freedom of belief.

Because the only other possibility to more strongly defending liberalism -- and I think that is the weakness, we have not defended liberalism strongly enough, we have not noticed when things are that are illiberal are getting power to deny other people freedom.

-- or we can can go and pick something else which we think will push wokeness out better and get behind that.

And then where are we? Where are we going to be? And this is what I ask people if they ask me, do you really think liberalism can work, wouldn't it be better to try something else -- they're usually talking about a form of social conservatism.

I say, well what would I have to pretend to believe in your new society? What would I not be allowed to say in public? What would prevent me from being employable? If the answer is nothing, you're still free to say and believe whatever you want, then you're still looking for a liberal society.

It really is quite black and white.

Free speech is in trouble

Young liberals are abandoning it — and other groups are too comfortable with tit-for-tat hypocrisy

natesilver.net

Student groups often invite speakers to campus to express their views on a range of topics. Regardless of your own views of the topic, should your school ALLOW or NOT ALLOW a speaker on campus who previously expressed the following idea: ______________

C1. Transgender people have a mental disorder. C2. Abortion should be completely illegal. C3. Black Lives Matter is a hate group. L1. The Second Amendment should be repealed so that guns can be confiscated. L2. Religious liberty is used as an excuse to discriminate against gays and lesbians. L3. Structural racism maintains inequality by protecting White privilege.

The ideological shift that has surprised me the most is witnessing “free speech” become coded as a right-wing value, and something that when the phrase is uttered makes people sympathetic to “woke” ideas suspicious. The argument is that unrestricted speech harms people. There isn’t an equal platform to speak in the first place, so racists and other unpleasant people are able to use the norm of free speech to terrorise groups who are oppressed. I think the strangest example of this new norm in action was the response to Elon Musk buying Twitter. Traditionally, liberal ideology is fearful of overreach by powerful figures like billionaires, and is in favour of more permissive speech rules and norms as a hedge against their power. But the “woke” complaint about the new owner is that under Musk’s leadership, Twitter will not be censorious enough, and will be too permissive over what speech is allowed on the platform.

In 2020, Harvard ranked 46 out of 55 schools. In 2021, it ranked 130 out of 154 schools. Last year, it ranked 170 out of 203 schools. And this year, Harvard completed its downward spiral in dramatic fashion, coming in dead last with the worst score ever: 0.00 out of a possible 100.00. This earns it the notorious distinction of being the only school ranked this year with an “Abysmal” speech climate.

What’s more, granting Harvard a score of 0.00 is generous. Its actual score is -10.69, more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania.

Liberals have forgotten what free speech means

The Armistice protest should not be banned

UnHerd

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”