Liberalism’s Imaginary Enemies
Posted: December 1, 2015 Filed under: Global, Mediasphere, Science & Technology, Think Tank, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Amateur Athletic Union, Association of American Universities, Boston, Harvard Law School, Office for Civil Rights, Sexual abuse, Sexual assault, Title IX, United States Department of Education, University of Virginia 1 Comment
Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.
Bret Stephens
writes: Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy. Liberal advocacy groups routinely claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country where the poorest counties have the highest rates of obesity. The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation from a dubious Agriculture Department measure of “food insecurity.” But the line gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have nots.
The campus-rape epidemic—in which one in five female college students is said to be the victim of sexual assault—is an imaginary enemy. Never mind the debunked rape scandals at Duke and the University of Virginia, or the soon-to-be-debunked case at the heart of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about an alleged sexual assault at Harvard Law School. The real question is: If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school? They do because there is no epidemic. But the campus-rape narrative sustains liberal fictions of a never-ending war on women.
[Read the full text here, at WSJ]
Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that the same college administrators who have made a religion of diversity are really the second coming of Strom Thurmond. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that twice electing a black president is evidence of our racial incorrigibility. We’re supposed to believe this anyway because the future of liberal racialism—from affirmative action to diversity quotas to slavery reparations—requires periodic sightings of the ghosts of a racist past.
I mention these examples by way of preface to the climate-change summit that began this week in Paris. But first notice a pattern. Read the rest of this entry »
David Kaufman: ‘Sorry, Kids: A Real Movement Needs More than Hurt Feelings’
Posted: November 14, 2015 Filed under: Censorship, Education, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Academia, Amateur Athletic Union, Association of American Universities, college, David Kaufman, Facebook, Fascism, Intolerance, Left Wing, Marxism, New York Post, Progressivism, propaganda, Totalitarianism, University, Yale University Leave a comment
The protests at the University of Missouri and Yale University have given us endless tales of racial slights and looming violence at campuses nationwide. But where’s the agenda?
“Most worrisome, by rooting these complaints almost entirely in an emotional agenda, the protesters conveniently shield themselves from a cornerstone of American liberal-arts education — self-reflection and honest critique.”
The alleged offenses range from the horrific — fecal swastikas, social-media threats against black students — to more trivial questions about skin tone, hair texture and economic status.
Stung by a seemingly endless barrage of race-based attacks, Missouri students feel “awkward,” “exhausted” and “uncomfortable,” The New York Times reports.
Elle interviewed a Yale senior who says the school makes people of color “feel small” and she, personally, like “the token black girl at the party every weekend.”
And The Washington Post wrote of Missouri students as “hurting victims” in need of a “rare space where their blackness could not be violated.”
Having survived my own journey as a minority at a pair of elite East Coast universities, I can understand these kids’ sentiments — no matter the navel-gazing. But the sentiment seems to drown out any discussion of much actual fact.
Reared on a diet of “microaggressions” and “hostile environments,” “safe spaces” and the need for “validation,” many of these students have seemingly conflated hurt feelings with actual outright discrimination.
[Read the full story here, at the New York Post]
The distinction is important — particularly at a moment when words like “violence,” “outrage” and “marginalization” have become little more than opportunistic jargon. Offense, while unfortunate, does not a movement make — a point wisely raised by Hillary Clinton when confronting #blacklivesmatter protesters this April. Read the rest of this entry »
pundit from another planet 