Thank goodness for FIRE. It's filling the gap abdicated by the ACLU which seems to love hate-speech codes and can't spend enough energy on making sure kids have a right to get that trans surgery! Hey, medical experiments on children in the name of gender ideology--what's wrong with that!? Anyway, to me the existence of FIRE and the rise of outlets like the Free Press give me modest hope that the flame free speech and expression may yet rekindle a true fire....
The most glaring and frightening example, 51 former "intelligence" officials signing a letter saying the hunter biden laptop was Russian propaganda. And then to have Leon Panetta defend the letter after it was proven false was a slap in the face to personal integrity. I guess the left has no integrity left in anyone who can even verify a public truth. Remember when you vote, D stands for duplicitous.
it's a clown show. Freedom of speech is the first amendment for a reason . if you don't think it's an important thing to value, then I would propose you don't believe in the founding ideas that built this country.
As one of the 200 or so academics who've been fired for exercising their academic freedom, I deeply appreciate the work FIRE has done in general and Lukianoff and Schlott for authoring this excellent text. So much of what they have reported relates directly to my case as well as many others. Here's the story:
"In the face of backlash, historian and Tufts University professor Kerri Greenidge even asked for her name to be removed from the original letter and tweeted, “I do not endorse this @harpers letter,” before adding her name to the counter-letter."
“We know Emma Camp, and she is not conservative. But even if she were, why should that label magically discredit her argument?” This. I’m so tired of conservative thought being automatically labeled as bigotry, racism and stupidity. Even this article takes pains to point out all the times non-conservative individuals signed a certain letter or are concerned about cancel culture. The hypocrisy of left-wing authoritarianism is blinding; maybe that’s why so many people seem unable to see it or call it out?
I hate to admit it, but the only way to fight ideologies that capture the culture, is by lawsuit, and the demand for monetary compensation. Employees who are fired or “cancelled” for their conservative views must sue. Students and professors not protected because of their views in higher education or unfortunately now secondary school, must sue for protection. Children transitioned by a medical, psychiatric and pediatric community who have lost all concept of “do no harm”, must sue for compensation. That is the only way, in America, that we can change this scourge.
It’s a sad truth that “money talks”, but in America it works. Ask Bud Light.
I'm not sure why the author decided to put this on the feet of Herbert Marcuse? It's flat out wrong. Marcuse became a darling of the "New Left," and the young because of his book "One Dimensional Man," not some obscure article. "One Dimensional Man" was a duel critique of consumer capitalism in the US and Soviet Bureaucracy. He argues that new and more intensive forms of control are coming, the thinning of the political possibilities, the conquest of the consciousness which he called repressive desublimation and the closing of the allowable discourse. It's interesting that these 4 areas are now being exposed by conservatives as part of the left's agenda. Marcuse was, of course, a Marxist, but he seems to have framed the conservative argument.
Rest of the article was interesting................
It’s interesting the lengths they will go to cancel speech and police, capitalism, and anything determined to be white. But they do not want to cancel crime or drug use.
It's even more interesting that they do it while attending universities founded by, named after, and funded by white men. Clueless spoiled brats is what most of them are.
Its wonderful to read articles exposing the existence of this mentality. We ALL run into it, and not just on college campuses. Thank you for the information.
I voted today. On my way out I saw a young leftie with a social justice t-shirt. And it occurred to me.. people are SO EASILY manipulated. SO, SO, SO easily. I give you meaning in life, maybe some status and a title, you give me your time, energy, and soul. It has always been thus.
So many lives shaped as the powerful want them to be. The powerful don't BENEFIT from molding strong, independent minds, they benefit from CONTROLLING them.
Look, the Dems are very powerful right now. They play the game hard and play it well. They have the media infrastructure and the University Madrassas to help them. The Republicans, overall, just aren't as professional or as powerful. It will take a generation for them to catch up. IF they catch up.
TWO bits of good news? 1) This is still a 50-50 country and 2) all of this manipulation is happening in the age of the internet, where it's more easily visible. Otherwise, given the fevered pitch of today's young and impressionable, you may very well have a Red Guard scenario.
The mind is a terrible thing to waste. All we can do is live our lives, look inside, and act on what WE know is true, not what our puppet-masters say is true. And keep our minds clean. As for me? I'll do what I can in this world and let God sort them out...
We can only do what we can do. But I get frightened when I observe the depth of hate on the left and the seeming breadth of its influence and power. Lots of misery in the wake of such influence.
What these people don't understand is that when you shut down entire groups of people or entire ways of thought, those people still think and speak. They do it underground, with rage and contempt. That is dangerous.
My daughter is in STEM and just applied to a university listed on FIRE’s top five list for free speech. We are taking the tack of change-from-within.
Sidebar: the application didn’t ask for SAT or letter of reference. Her present counselor (and I’ve heard other high school counselors doing same) are all pressing the importance of the essay portion that asks for a student to describe/share themselves.
Nothing seems merit based and the acceptance rate is extremely high. Gone are the days where a student is nervously waiting to see if their hard work paid off in an acceptance letter from their dream college.
I've seen just the opposite impact -- students anxiety-stricken because fewer and fewer credentials are considered, giving the essay outsized importance and rendering rejections devastatingly personal. The damage is compounded because they're so fragile, having never been criticized or forced to endure 'violent' speech. It is soooo important to alert your adolescent children when they say something moronic. Here are two responses you can try: "That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard." "When you say things like that, it makes me think you're stupid." Also, I've found laughing to be very effective.
On a tangential topic related to endowments: Taxpayer Bailouts for Student Loan Debtors. With the $932 BILLION of endowments mentioned in the article (comprised of marketable securities not old campus bldgs.) why on earth wouldn’t the almost $1 TRILLION of endowment funds be used as the first tranche of debt forgiveness?
Think of it as a warranty of sorts. If you can’t pay back education loans, the ‘education’ you purchased must be a bit lacking right? It’s the sellers responsibility, not the Federal Govt, to deal with their flawed ‘product’. Of course, that’s completely ignoring any personal responsibility and blaming everything on external factors . . . .
The simple purpose of debt "cancellation", i.e. transference of the expense onto the poorer classes who didn't attend college, is to buy votes in the next election so the party can remain in power. As a byproduct, it helps the rich get richer by alleviating their debt, and it helps the poor get poorer by getting even less services for their tax dollars. So it has the exact long term impact of the one thing that liberals say they hate - giving tax breaks to the rich while screwing the poor. Ultimately, this magic trick reveals the one singular purpose of all political parties: to acquire power. Saying they support this or that cause is only their marketing program to attract "buyers".
Thank goodness for FIRE. It's filling the gap abdicated by the ACLU which seems to love hate-speech codes and can't spend enough energy on making sure kids have a right to get that trans surgery! Hey, medical experiments on children in the name of gender ideology--what's wrong with that!? Anyway, to me the existence of FIRE and the rise of outlets like the Free Press give me modest hope that the flame free speech and expression may yet rekindle a true fire....
The most glaring and frightening example, 51 former "intelligence" officials signing a letter saying the hunter biden laptop was Russian propaganda. And then to have Leon Panetta defend the letter after it was proven false was a slap in the face to personal integrity. I guess the left has no integrity left in anyone who can even verify a public truth. Remember when you vote, D stands for duplicitous.
it's a clown show. Freedom of speech is the first amendment for a reason . if you don't think it's an important thing to value, then I would propose you don't believe in the founding ideas that built this country.
As one of the 200 or so academics who've been fired for exercising their academic freedom, I deeply appreciate the work FIRE has done in general and Lukianoff and Schlott for authoring this excellent text. So much of what they have reported relates directly to my case as well as many others. Here's the story:
Porter, D. (2022). “Case Summary (Porter vs Sergent & Berea College).” In Krauss, L. M., The sad case of David Porter and his fight for academic freedom: Guest Post. Critical Mass Nov 3. https://lawrencekrauss.substack.com/p/the-sad-case-of-david-porter-and
And the survey that was all the evidence needed to end my tenure and cause to dismiss me:
https://researchers.one/articles/22.11.00007v1
"In the face of backlash, historian and Tufts University professor Kerri Greenidge even asked for her name to be removed from the original letter and tweeted, “I do not endorse this @harpers letter,” before adding her name to the counter-letter."
I am stunned at her level of courage.
“We know Emma Camp, and she is not conservative. But even if she were, why should that label magically discredit her argument?” This. I’m so tired of conservative thought being automatically labeled as bigotry, racism and stupidity. Even this article takes pains to point out all the times non-conservative individuals signed a certain letter or are concerned about cancel culture. The hypocrisy of left-wing authoritarianism is blinding; maybe that’s why so many people seem unable to see it or call it out?
I hate to admit it, but the only way to fight ideologies that capture the culture, is by lawsuit, and the demand for monetary compensation. Employees who are fired or “cancelled” for their conservative views must sue. Students and professors not protected because of their views in higher education or unfortunately now secondary school, must sue for protection. Children transitioned by a medical, psychiatric and pediatric community who have lost all concept of “do no harm”, must sue for compensation. That is the only way, in America, that we can change this scourge.
It’s a sad truth that “money talks”, but in America it works. Ask Bud Light.
I'm not sure why the author decided to put this on the feet of Herbert Marcuse? It's flat out wrong. Marcuse became a darling of the "New Left," and the young because of his book "One Dimensional Man," not some obscure article. "One Dimensional Man" was a duel critique of consumer capitalism in the US and Soviet Bureaucracy. He argues that new and more intensive forms of control are coming, the thinning of the political possibilities, the conquest of the consciousness which he called repressive desublimation and the closing of the allowable discourse. It's interesting that these 4 areas are now being exposed by conservatives as part of the left's agenda. Marcuse was, of course, a Marxist, but he seems to have framed the conservative argument.
Rest of the article was interesting................
Hmm....thought provoking indeed. Wondering if this is why Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale” is on the banned list!
articles like this are the reason I subscribe
It’s interesting the lengths they will go to cancel speech and police, capitalism, and anything determined to be white. But they do not want to cancel crime or drug use.
It's even more interesting that they do it while attending universities founded by, named after, and funded by white men. Clueless spoiled brats is what most of them are.
Its wonderful to read articles exposing the existence of this mentality. We ALL run into it, and not just on college campuses. Thank you for the information.
I voted today. On my way out I saw a young leftie with a social justice t-shirt. And it occurred to me.. people are SO EASILY manipulated. SO, SO, SO easily. I give you meaning in life, maybe some status and a title, you give me your time, energy, and soul. It has always been thus.
So many lives shaped as the powerful want them to be. The powerful don't BENEFIT from molding strong, independent minds, they benefit from CONTROLLING them.
Look, the Dems are very powerful right now. They play the game hard and play it well. They have the media infrastructure and the University Madrassas to help them. The Republicans, overall, just aren't as professional or as powerful. It will take a generation for them to catch up. IF they catch up.
TWO bits of good news? 1) This is still a 50-50 country and 2) all of this manipulation is happening in the age of the internet, where it's more easily visible. Otherwise, given the fevered pitch of today's young and impressionable, you may very well have a Red Guard scenario.
The mind is a terrible thing to waste. All we can do is live our lives, look inside, and act on what WE know is true, not what our puppet-masters say is true. And keep our minds clean. As for me? I'll do what I can in this world and let God sort them out...
We can only do what we can do. But I get frightened when I observe the depth of hate on the left and the seeming breadth of its influence and power. Lots of misery in the wake of such influence.
absolutely. so unfortunate but as you said, we can only do what we can do.
What these people don't understand is that when you shut down entire groups of people or entire ways of thought, those people still think and speak. They do it underground, with rage and contempt. That is dangerous.
And some people do it literally underground, as we have tragically seen recently. But that's a whole different motivational dynamic.
True. Very true.
My daughter is in STEM and just applied to a university listed on FIRE’s top five list for free speech. We are taking the tack of change-from-within.
Sidebar: the application didn’t ask for SAT or letter of reference. Her present counselor (and I’ve heard other high school counselors doing same) are all pressing the importance of the essay portion that asks for a student to describe/share themselves.
Nothing seems merit based and the acceptance rate is extremely high. Gone are the days where a student is nervously waiting to see if their hard work paid off in an acceptance letter from their dream college.
I've seen just the opposite impact -- students anxiety-stricken because fewer and fewer credentials are considered, giving the essay outsized importance and rendering rejections devastatingly personal. The damage is compounded because they're so fragile, having never been criticized or forced to endure 'violent' speech. It is soooo important to alert your adolescent children when they say something moronic. Here are two responses you can try: "That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard." "When you say things like that, it makes me think you're stupid." Also, I've found laughing to be very effective.
On a tangential topic related to endowments: Taxpayer Bailouts for Student Loan Debtors. With the $932 BILLION of endowments mentioned in the article (comprised of marketable securities not old campus bldgs.) why on earth wouldn’t the almost $1 TRILLION of endowment funds be used as the first tranche of debt forgiveness?
Think of it as a warranty of sorts. If you can’t pay back education loans, the ‘education’ you purchased must be a bit lacking right? It’s the sellers responsibility, not the Federal Govt, to deal with their flawed ‘product’. Of course, that’s completely ignoring any personal responsibility and blaming everything on external factors . . . .
The simple purpose of debt "cancellation", i.e. transference of the expense onto the poorer classes who didn't attend college, is to buy votes in the next election so the party can remain in power. As a byproduct, it helps the rich get richer by alleviating their debt, and it helps the poor get poorer by getting even less services for their tax dollars. So it has the exact long term impact of the one thing that liberals say they hate - giving tax breaks to the rich while screwing the poor. Ultimately, this magic trick reveals the one singular purpose of all political parties: to acquire power. Saying they support this or that cause is only their marketing program to attract "buyers".
🪒🛎️🔨