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Latest Front In The Social Justice War: Censoring Beloved Children’s Books

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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We must resist the insidious rewriting of beloved classics to make them retroactively conform to today’s social attitudes and dogmas

This blog has been (justifiably) quite hard on Ariane Sherine, the Spectator’s latest affirmative action hire, expressing exasperation with her wide-eyed surprise that Ukippers and pro-Brexit folks don’t immediately lynch every single Asian person they come across and suggesting (ahem) that she represents everything that is wrong with the closed shop of Westminster political journalism.

But credit where credit is due – her latest piece in The Spectator identifies a real and insidious issue, and Sherine even manages to come down on the right side of it.

That issue: the censorship and rewriting of beloved children’s literature to make the texts conform to with the current dogma that young people must not be exposed to old-fashioned turns of phrase, ideas or even names which jar with today’s coddling, infantilising and achingly PC culture.

Sherine writes:

Six years ago, the publishers Hachette took the well-meaning yet preposterous step of making ‘sensitive text revisions’ to Enid Blyton’s classic Famous Five books. So ‘tinker’ was changed to ‘traveller’, ‘mother and father’ to ‘mum and dad’ and ‘awful swotter’ to ‘bookworm’. The suggestion that tomboy George needed ‘a good spanking’ became ‘a good talking to’, while girly Anne’s assertion, ‘You see, I do like pretty frocks — and I love my dolls — and you can’t do that if you’re a boy’ had its final clause removed, rendering the sentence throwaway rather than poignant. Unsurprisingly, given that all the charm had been stripped out of them, the revised editions flopped, and last weekend it was reported that Hachette were reverting to the originals. The publishers conceded that the updates had proved ‘very unpopular’.

But Hachette isn’t the only culprit. Earli­­­er this year, I bought my five-year-old daughter one of the Blyton titles I had enjoyed most as a child, The Magic Faraway Tree. I read it aloud to her, expecting to feel warmly nostalgic, but I merely felt baffled and irritated to discover that the publishers, Egmont, had also made several unnecessary changes. The names Fanny and Dick had been changed to Frannie and Rick. At first, I thought this was a misguided effort to avoid schoolchildren giggling at unintentional innuendo, but then I found that the names Jo and Bessie had also been pointlessly updated to Joe and Beth.

Joe and Beth? It wasn’t enough for Hachette to butcher beloved Enid Blyton characters, they really had to turn them into preening, insufferable hipsters too? No, this is too much.

Sherine continues:

Decisions to amend old, politically incorrect texts are based on a myth: that children are malleable, delicate creatures. Let’s eradicate anything remotely contentious! But anyone with a child over five knows that to edit the past is to insult both their intelligence and their resilience. My little girl is astute, tough and robust, and gleefully recounts gruesome fairy tales she has heard from friends. A colleague’s young sons delight in reading Old Testament stories of massacres and murders in their 1960s version of the Bible. These parables won’t turn our children into serial killers, and nor will Blyton’s unreconstructed slant on the world adversely influence their characters. I spent ages five to 12 engrossed in Blyton’s novels, and am yet to be branded sexist, racist or classist.

She’s lucky; I myself have been accused of the holy trifecta (sexism, racism and classism) despite being a mixed race person from pretty humble socio-economic background, primarily because I fail to spout the “correct” progressive left wing opinions on social justice, affirmative action and redistribution – but I don’t hold my avid readership of The Five Find-Outers to blame.

But Sherine is absolutely right, children are resilient creatures. In fact, children are the the epitome of anti-fragility – that precious quality of actually becoming stronger and more durable the more they are challenged and stretched in their thinking. And yet we seem determined to beat this precious quality out of our young people today, and we do so with such zeal that by the time they leave school for university many young adults are quivering wrecks, convinced that any exposure to conflicting ideas or any feedback less than warmly affirming will somehow gravely injure them and even “invalidate” their carefully-constructed “identities”.

More:

In fact, older books’ anachronisms can prompt useful conversations about changing attitudes towards race, sex, sexuality and class. The comedy writer Nathaniel Tapley recently encouraged his young son Thomas to read the 1967 children’s book Lion Adventure by Willard Price, remembering the boys’ adventure series as being rip-roaring fun. When his son asked: ‘Daddy, what does, “This is black man’s country’ mean?”’ they went on to discuss how differently people think about race these days, and whether or not people should live together.

[..] Children should not be patronised or mollycoddled — they should be free to read all about the amusingly quaint ideas, thoughts, words and names from the olden days, however sexist, unpalatable or wrong these may be considered now. They can learn from the past — but only if it remains uncensored.

This is a really important point. I was born in 1982, and some of the things I read in Enid Blyton books seemed strange or jarring to modern sensibilities even then. Did this in any way detract from my enjoyment of the books? No. Did it cause me to absorb the 1940s attitudes toward race and gender contained within? No. Did it prompt a conversation or two with my mother about why things were different, or why characters talked a certain way? Probably, yes. And from those discussions I learned and grew, as will young children today if they are given the chance to read the unadulterated, uncensored Enid Blyton.

This doesn’t just apply to children’s literature, of course. In 2011, a pinch-faced, hectoring Social Justice edition of Huckleberry Finn was released, in which the racist term “nigger” was replaced with the more emollient “slave”. This in turn was in response to numerous schools dropping the American classic from their curriculum because the PC zealots in charge preferred to pander to the imagined fragility of their students rather than read and teach through the awkwardness to understand the time and context in which the book was written.

But whether it is adult literature or beloved children’s classics, publishers have no business vandalising and defacing important artefacts from human civilisation just because they fail to live up to the tremulous, wobbly-lipped standards of the Permanently Offended.

Ariane Sherine is right to be outraged at the censorship of Enid Blyton. We should all be outraged. Because as with everything else connected with social justice, the progressive censors are not really signalling their low approval of these long-dead authors. No, what they are actually doing is signalling their disapproval of us. They are saying that we either are too pathetic and delicate to understand these social and literary anachronisms, or that we simply cannot be trusted to hear racist, sexist or homophobic dialogue in the context of great or beloved works of literature, lest the lumpen masses seek to recreate the 1950s (or the 1850s) in today’s world.

In other words, the progressive censors believe that you are either a perpetual victim or a would-be future racist, sexist or thought criminal. And if there is any ugly sentiment which should be purged from the world, the progressive metro-left’s sneering contempt for ordinary people would rank very high indeed on the list.

 

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Top Image: “The Magic Faraway Tree” by Kerry Darlington

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Live Blog: Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton, First Presidential Debate

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

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Live Blog: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton face off in the first of three high-stakes live televised debates

Debate Time: 9PM East Coast / 2AM UK Time

Watch Online: Live Stream Here

Contact: semipartisansam@gmail.com

 

10:42PM New York / 03:42AM London

INITIAL SUMMARY

CNN pundits seem very quick to call this debate for Hillary Clinton. And yes, she won on points (as we knew she probably would). But in terms of what the pundits say vs what the country feels, I can’t help but think that the media class might be getting out ahead of the country, rather like the British media declared the 2014 Nigel Farage v Nick Clegg European Union debates a victory for Nick Clegg, and then had to eat their words as post-debate polling showed the British people considered it a resounding triumph for Farage.

As I said about 45 minutes ago:

To me, this seems very much within the bounds of a normal presidential debate. Sure, it might have been a bit more tetchy in places than Obama-McCain or Obama-Romney, but visually and in terms of subject matter this is relatively unexceptional.

And that is bad, bad, bad for Hillary Clinton. Clinton needs Trump to blow his top and say something really incendiary, insensitive or uncommonly stupid. And he isn’t rising to the bait. Clinton may have had a couple of good pre-canned zingers that Trump lacked, but he has had her on the ropes a couple of times, too. At no point as Trump been stumped for words, and at no point was he pinned down on what people commonly perceive to be his weak points: his taxes, climate change, trade.

Clinton did become more effective during the final 30 minutes, which her campaign will be very relieved about. And did she manage to rile Donald Trump? Yes – but no more than the country is used to seeing after his tussles with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz.

I’ll do a fuller analysis later (bed beckons now…) but my gut says that this was a victory for Hillary Clinton on points, but a score draw in terms of public reception. Time will soon tell.

And that’s me signing off for tonight. Many thanks for following along!

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10:42PM New York / 03:42AM London

On points, probably, yes. But a points victory is not what Hillary Clinton really needed.

https://twitter.com/PoliticoRyan/status/780597958064607232

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10:40PM New York / 03:40AM London

And that’s it. The debate ends, and an audience member shouts out loud “Donald Trump, we love you!” Strange to have no real closing statements.

Handshakes and family huddles now.

And let the spinning begin.

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10:39PM New York / 03:39AM London

Oh, pipe down. As if angry liberals didn’t use the same language all the time to talk about George W. Bush.

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10:37PM New York / 03:37AM London

Hillary Clinton rightly calls out Donald Trump’s attempt to switch focus from looks (Lester Holt’s original question) to stamina. Hillary Clinton goes for the jugular, rattling off some of the many ways in which Donald Trump has publicly and crassly disrespected women.

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10:35PM New York / 03:35AM London

Donald Trump reiterates his belief that Hillary Clinton does not have the stamina to be president.

Trump: “You have so many different things you have to be able to do [as president], and I don’t believe she has the stamina”.

Rather set himself up for Hillary Clinton’s well-drilled list of her workload and accomplishments as Secretary of State. Audience cheers.

Trump: “She’s got experience, but it is bad experience. More audience cheers.

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10:29PM New York / 03:29AM London

Yeah, that was definitely a wobble:

https://twitter.com/timothy_stanley/status/780593902252355584

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10:27PM New York / 03:27AM London

Clinton: “A man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes”.

Quite.

Donald Trump responds by reiterating his statement that NATO members that do not pay their fair share should lose US protection. Now, the free rider problem is real and this will go down well with a number of Americans, but it doesn’t suggest the world’s greatest grasp of realpolitik.

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10:25PM New York / 03:25AM London

This has been the first real, significant chink in Donald Trump’s Teflon armour tonight:

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10:23PM New York / 03:23AM London

Trump: “By far my strongest asset is my temperament. I have a winning temperament. I know how to win”.

Really?

Okay, perhaps the wheels are starting to come off Donald Trump’s performance in a way that might be favourable to Hillary Clinton, now. She rightly pushes back on Trump’s fanciful plans for NATO by schooling the debate audience on Article 5.

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10:21PM New York / 03:21AM London

Trump really going to the wall denying that he ever supported the Iraq war – it’s all a figment of the mainstream media’s imagination, apparently. I’m not sure that this is really the hill Donald Trump wants to die trying to storm.

But apparently America needs only to “call up Sean Hannity”, and the Fox News presenter will then provide a cast-iron alibi for Trump…

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10:20PM New York / 03:20AM London

So Donald Trump wants to use NATO to “knock the hell out of ISIS” now? Not sure how keen the allies will be to embark on a vague, open-ended commitment like that…

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10:17PM New York / 03:17AM London

Hillary Clinton rightly taking Donald Trump to task for his extreme and unconstitutional plan to halt immigration of all Muslims into the United States. I’m surprised she didn’t go stronger on this – where was the fire, where was the outrage? Trump was allowed to wriggle free with a rambling rebuttal.

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10:14PM New York / 03:14AM London

Donald Trump’s fair point about the vacuum in which ISIS formed is rather undermined by his false statement that he initially opposed the Iraq war, and his glib plan to “take the oil” in payment for America’s troubles.

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10:10PM New York / 03:10AM London

Hillary Clinton doing her best to link Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. Clinton’s hawkishness on Russia is rather offputting. While America’s national interests must absolutely be defended robustly and while Russia’s backsliding into anti-democratic authoritarianism is extremely troubling, Russia is an economically diminished country with a relatively shrivelled military, more concerned with defending its shrinking field of influence than truly grand pretensions on the world stage. Let’s not make more of the threat they pose than is accurate.

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10:05PM New York / 03:05AM London

Good to see Hillary Clinton rake Donald Trump over the coals for his tawdry birtherism. Despite his attempts to pin the genesis on people in the Clinton ’08 campaign, Donald Trump was the unapologetic face of American birtherism for over a year, keeping incredibly dodgy company and stirring very ugly sentiments.

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10:00PM New York / 03:00AM London

Good line from Clinton: “I think Mr. Trump just accused me of preparing for this debate. And yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I also prepared for being president of this country. And I think that’s a good thing”.

That effective zinger won a small audience applause.

And another: “Well, just listen to what you heard.”

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9:59PM New York / 02:59AM London

My thoughts so far, two thirds of the way into the debate with one hour gone and thirty minutes to go. To me, this seems very much within the bounds of a normal presidential debate. Sure, it might have been a bit more tetchy in places than Obama-McCain or Obama-Romney, but visually and in terms of subject matter this is relatively unexceptional.

And that is bad, bad, bad for Hillary Clinton. Clinton needs Trump to blow his top and say something really incendiary, insensitive or uncommonly stupid. And he isn’t rising to the bait. Clinton may have had a couple of good pre-canned zingers that Trump lacked, but he has had her on the ropes a couple of times, too. At no point as Trump been stumped for words, and at no point was he pinned down on what people commonly perceive to be his weak points: his taxes, climate change, trade.

Hillary Clinton has 30 minutes to make Donald Trump seem more unacceptable than Trump has made himself appear throughout the Republican primary process and the general election campaign so far.

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9:55PM New York / 02:55AM London

Hillary Clinton: “If you are too dangerous to fly, you are too dangerous to have a gun”.

Neat catchphrase, but ignores the fact that there is no due process when it comes to putting someone on a watch list. People will therefore be denied their Second Amendment rights under the Constitution – so more thorny an issue than it looks.

Nonetheless, Trump agrees in principle.

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9:50PM New York / 02:50AM London

Trump actually making a fair point on the need for better police/community relationships, and the costs of police withdrawal from inner city communities.

I lived in Chicago – a real Democratic Party rotten borough – back in 2010-2011, just as things were about to tip into the current violent lawlessness. Gun control and wall-to-wall Democrat control are not tremendously good for violent crime rates.

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9:48PM New York / 02:48AM London

Donald Trump predictably takes a more “law and order” stance, and gets to brag about his endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police.

Trump: “We have to protect our inner cities because African American communities are being decimated by crime”.

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9:45PM New York / 02:45AM London

A change of pace now, as Lester Holt moves the debate on to the subject of recent police shootings.

Clinton :”Everyone should be respected by the law, and everyone should respect the law. Right now that’s not the case in a lot of our neighbourhoods”.

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9:43PM New York / 02:43AM London

Trump, explaining his business bankruptcies and refusals to pay suppliers: “I take advantage of the laws of the nation”.

Well, it won’t hurt him among his existing supporters, not sure how that semi-amoral approach will register with the broader country though…

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9:41PM New York / 02:41AM London

Clinton: “I’ve met dishwashers, painters, architects … who you refused to pay when they finished the work you asked them to do. We have an architect in the audience who designed one of the clubhouses at your golf courses … Do the thousands of people you have stiffed in your businesses not deserve some kind of apologies?”

Good from Clinton, attacking Trump’s unscrupulous business practices.

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9:40PM New York / 02:40AM London

Hillary keeps pounding away, but Donald Trump keeps deploying his “bemoaning the state of America” evasion, and by and large getting away with it:

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9:39PM New York / 02:39AM London

Donald Trump, the Shakespeare of our times:

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9:36PM New York / 02:36AM London

And Hillary Clinton deals with her email “mistake”. She doesn’t sound very contrite, and Donald Trump rightly hammers her for it: “That wasn’t a mistake, it was deliberate … And I think it’s disgraceful”.

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9:35PM New York / 02:35AM London

And Trump pivots away more successfully by raising the subject of Hillary Clinton’s emails. This raises a loud cheer from pro-Trump factions in the audience, and an admonition to the audience from Lester Holt.

Hillary Clinton: “Well, I think you’ve just seen a classic example of bait and switch”.

And proceeds to goad Trump: “Maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is. Maybe he is not as charitable … We know he owes about $650 million to foreign banks. Or maybe he doesn’t want you to know he has paid nothing in federal taxes … And that means zero for troops, zero for health, zero for schools”.

Ouch.

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9:32PM New York / 02:32AM London

Aaand Lester Holt asks  Donald Trump about his tax returns.

Trump tries to wriggle off the hook by repeating his “I’m under audit” line, immediately pivots away to how America is being “ripped off by every single country in the world”. This is a rather desperate evasion, and if Lester Holt wants to avoid the criticisms levelled at Matt Lauer after the Commander in Chief forum he will ask the question again and demand a better response…

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9:29PM New York / 02:29AM London

Clinton: “I have a feeling by the end of this debate I’ll have been blamed for everything!”

And her first snide put-down of Trump: “Sure, let’s keep saying crazy things”

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9:28PM New York / 02:28AM London

Now squabbling about ISIS. Trump says “No wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire life”. What?!

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9:26PM New York / 02:26AM London

First stunt of the debate – Hillary Clinton has supposedly turned the front page of her campaign website into a “fact-checker” to call out Trump’s lies. And so she has:

hillary-clinton-website-front-page-fact-check-presidential-debate

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9:22PM New York / 02:22AM London

Agree with him or not, Trump sounds a lot more confident and almost righteously angry when he is inveighing against NAFTA. And he actually has Clinton on the ropes now. “You called it the gold standard, you called it the finest trade deal you’d ever seen”.

Facts aside, Clinton has a habit of taking credit for things that happened during the Bill Clinton administration or during her term as New York senator while ducking blame for any areas where she is criticised. Was she “in power” then or not? Trump may be on to something by trying to pin Clinton down on this.

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9:19PM New York / 02:19AM London

Good from Clinton – “Let’s not assume trade is the only challenge we have in the economy”. True. Trump can often sound like a one-trick pony on this.

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9:17PM New York / 02:17AM London

Andrew Sullivan thinks that Clinton had the brighter start:

9:09 p.m. Trump begins by denying reality – that jobs are leaving the U.S. in droves. He has almost nothing substantive to counter Clinton’s policies, except a massive tax cut. A weak start for the Donald.

If we were scoring on points, I would agree. But Clinton could well win this debate on points, and still lose (or draw, which would be the same thing). Trump just needs to appear calm and acceptable.

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9:16PM New York / 02:16AM London

So protectionism, basically. That’s what Donald Trump is advocating.

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9:13PM New York / 02:13AM London

Donald Trump on his politest behaviour: “In all fairness to ‘Secretary Clinton’ – is that okay? I want you to be very happy”.

I hate to say it, but so far Trump looks quite…presidential?

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9:12PM New York / 02:12AM London

Hillary Clinton seems to have digressed into a lengthy explanation of the process of silk screen printing…

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9:11PM New York / 02:11AM London

“Trumped up trickle down” – really, Hillary?

Not that Donald Trump offered anything more meaty for Hillary Clinton to sink her teeth into, policy-wise.

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9:10PM New York / 02:10AM London

Donald Trump begins by doing what Trump always does when asked a question – he spends 90% of the time restating and rephrasing the question in various ways, bemoaning the state of America. “We need to stop our jobs from being stolen from us, we need to stop our companies leaving the United States”. And he runs out his opening 2 minutes without having to offer a real answer beyond “reducing taxes tremendously”. But it’s going to be “a beautiful thing to watch”, apparently.

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9:09PM New York / 02:09AM London

Decent opening statement from Clinton – gracious to Donald Trump, spoke firmly but in platitudes about the nature of the economic challenge. A steady start.

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9:06PM New York / 02:06AM London

So we begin with job creation. I’m not sure either candidate has a good answer to this. Easy to talk about “building an economy that works for everyone”, much harder to talk about how to embrace globalisation while helping displaced people and low-paid workers adapt to it.

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9:01PM New York / 02:01AM London

However this debate goes, one person who will likely get no thanks is moderator Lester Holt. Any perceived favouritism toward Trump or Clinton, however slight (or imaginary) will be immediately jumped on:

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8:59PM New York / 01:59AM London

How long until Donald Trump declares victory? Not long, predicts Tim Stanley. Indeed, there is speculation that Donald Trump may enter the post-debate spin room himself to help things along in that particular regard…

https://twitter.com/timothy_stanley/status/780572288521469952

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8:57PM New York / 01:57AM London

Okay, we’re getting underway now. Here goes.

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8:52PM New York / 01:52AM London

I should bloody well hope so:

No Gennifer Flowers, though.

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8:49PM New York / 01:49AM London

A reminder that the more conspiratorial fringes of the American Right will be keeping their eyes peeled for any signs of residual illness in Hillary Clinton:

This blog does not share in the extensive conspiracy theories, but Clinton’s dishonesty and downplaying of her pneumonia is part of a broader problem the Democratic nominee has with full and proper disclosure.

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8:42PM New York / 01:42AM London

We seem to be into the self-congratulatory grandstanding part of tonight’s programme, where the organisers congratulate themselves for having successfully wrangled two egotistical and highly risk-averse presidential candidates onto a stage where they have almost nothing significant to gain and everything to lose.

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8:40PM New York / 01:40AM London

This from Ben Shapiro sums up the low bar we seem to have set for both candidates:

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8:32PM New York / 01:32AM London

Well, at least somebody is actually enjoying this spectacle…

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8:26PM New York / 01:26AM London

Good news – Andrew Sullivan is also live-blogging the debate, for New York Magazine:

Just a heads up that I’ll be liveblogging the debate tonight – and will take a Xanax beforehand.

For those of you who can’t bear to watch, read the liveblog!
For those prepared to watch the republic crumble in real time, join me!

It’s at 9 pm, and at nymag.com.

Know hope

Andrew

Read along here – but don’t forget about me!

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8:22PM New York / 01:22AM London

Wow, CNN leaking some last-minute spin from unnamed Trump campaign sources, suggesting that they fear their candidate has not prepared enough and *isn’t ready*. This is some masterful expectations-lowering going on here, the culmination of a weeks-long effort to talk down Trump’s chances. At this rate, he’ll be declared the victor if he manages not to fall down.

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8:20PM New York / 01:20AM London

Just a reminder that as we go into this first presidential debate the polls are essentially tied. From Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight:

Well, folks, this is getting tight. Donald Trump is in his strongest-ever position in FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus forecast, which gives him a 46 percent chance of winning the election. Trump’s chances are about the same, 45 percent, according our polls-only forecast, his best standing since it showed him with a 50 percent chance in the midst of his convention bounce.

Our models have been on the move toward Trump for roughly six weeks. But with dozens of polls coming out over the past few days, he’s no longer much of an underdog at all. Hillary Clinton leads narrowly — by 1.5 percentage points — in our projection of the popular vote. But polling weakness in states that Clinton probably needs to win, particularly Colorado and Pennsylvania, makes the Electoral College almost even.

It is hard to think of any other plausible Democratic Party candidate who could be making such a struggle of running against Donald J Trump. Mostly because were it not for Trump’s sky-high unfavourables, Hillary Clinton’s unfavourables would also be setting a dismal record.

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8:10PM New York / 01:10AM London

The Battle of the Foundations

The Washington Post has a rather forensic exposé of the financial wheelings and dealings of the Trump Foundation:

Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has received approximately $2.3 million from companies that owed money to Trump or one of his businesses but were instructed to pay Trump’s tax-exempt foundation instead, according to people familiar with the transactions.

In cases where he diverted his own income to his foundation, tax experts said, Trump would still likely be required to pay taxes on the income. Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns. His campaign said he paid income tax on one of the donations, but did not respond to questions about the others.

That gift was a $400,000 payment from Comedy Central, which owed Trump an appearance fee for his 2011 “roast.”

The suggestion is that by diverting income through his “charitable” foundation, Trump may have avoided paying income tax – something we will likely never know until (if) Donald Trump finally deigns to release his tax returns.

While Trump’s foundation trickery is of the more overt kind, the ethical concerns surrounding the Clinton Foundation are hazier. This blog’s conclusion:

The point, I suppose, is that a family charitable foundation is a perfectly legitimate option for an ex-president and his family who intend to quit the political game after leaving office. But when this is not the case – when Hillary was pursuing senatorial ambitions and later becoming Secretary of State – conflicts of interest are inevitably going to occur.

When one is as rich and well-connected as the Clintons, acquiring more money becomes of limited interest. Instead, the reason for getting up in the morning after having left the White House often becomes the building of power, influence and legacy – and, of course, keeping the family in the style of living to which they have become accustomed (i.e. minimal contact with ordinary people). A family foundation accomplishes all of these objectives wonderfully. But when one or more members of the family are still politically active it is highly questionable.

It would have been far better, when there are still active political careers in play, for the Clintons to have put ego aside and thrown their support behind an alternative, existing foundation – much like Warren Buffett is giving away much of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recognising that it makes little sense to build up his own philanthropic expertise from scratch and create all the overheads which come from a second foundation when a perfectly good one already exists.

Why did the Clintons not take the Warren Buffett approach? Three reasons – ego, power and prestige. It is great that the Clintons are philanthropically active. But nearly all of their philanthropic work is done through the Clinton Foundation ($1 million to the foundation in 2015 and just $42,000 to another charity), meaning they want to do charity on their terms. It is a few distinct shades further away from pure altruism, and more to do with continuing to exercise power after the White House.

When Bill Clinton’s presidency ended in 2001, like a shark he had to keep swimming or surely die. Sitting at home in front of the television was never an option. But neither was Bill Clinton about to show up to work for Bill and Melinda Gates, or Habitat for Humanity. He wanted the benefits of his charitable work to accrue to him and his family, not to the Gates family or anyone else. And so the Clinton Foundation was born.

And since the Clintons choose to conduct philanthropic activities on their own terms and through their own foundation, in a way which aggrandises the Clinton family name and brings them power and influence, it is perfectly reasonable to ask questions about any other “fringe benefits” which Hillary Clinton pursued while holding the immeasurably valuable bargaining chip of being a senior part of the Obama administration. And when there is smoke, it is not churlish or unreasonable for journalists to have lots of questions about these activities.

In short, there is billowing smoke on both sides. But Trump could very easily go a long way to proving his probity regarding the Trump Foundation by actually releasing his tax returns.

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7:56PM New York / 12:56AM London

Mike Pence on CNN trying and failing to make the case that Donald Trump epitomises the American Spirit. Eventually the moderator, pitying him, moves on to another question.

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7:48PM New York / 12:48AM London

It’s worth remembering the context in which this presidential debate is taking place – a stultifying new age of censorship, in which infantilised young students and pandering professors seek to cocoon themselves in an ideological bubble in which Bad Ideas (generally conservatives ones) are prohibited.

MRC TV reports:

Hofstra University has posted a “trigger warning” sign to warn students about the potentially disturbing content that may be discussed during Monday night’s presidential debate.

According to CBS New York reporter Tony Aiello, a sign inside of the student center at Hofstra reads, “Trigger warning: The event conducted just beyond this sign may contain triggering and/or sensitive material. Sexual violence, sexual assault, and abuse are some topics mentioned within this event. If you feel triggered, please know there are resources to help you.”

Utterly pathetic – though it should be noted that this particular trigger warning relates to a previous event which took place on campus, and not the presidential debate.

You can read this blog’s extensive coverage of the trigger warning / safe space / social justice phenomenon here.

https://twitter.com/kyletblaine/status/780513699803045888

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7:26PM New York / 12:26AM London

This is turning out to be a great interview with Bernie Sanders on CNN right now. The vapid talking head / presenter keeps trying to switch the focus to style and appearance rather than policy content and character, and Sanders keeps swatting down that assertion.

“But we all know that style matters a lot –” says the presenter, trying to drag the interview onto the petty, personality-based politics which is CNN’s only real strength.

“No, no, I don’t agree” says Senator Sanders, sticking to his guns.

This is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more that pundits and cable news channels obsess over style and appearances, the more they will be magnified in importance – and vice versa.

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7:22PM New York / 12:22AM London

“This is not a night of entertainment. This is not the Superbowl, this is not the World Series…” – Senator Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s defeated Democratic primary foe, making what should be (but sadly isn’t) a very obvious point on CNN right now.

UK readers can view a CNN live stream on YouTube.

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7:18PM New York / 12:18AM London

This reference to Hillary Clinton’s description of half of Trump supporters as “deplorables” should serve as a timely reminder that sneering disdain and condescension toward Donald Trump supporters during the upcoming debate will only harden Trump’s support and win Clinton no new fans:

This debate is many things, but it is absolutely not a wise moment for Hillary Clinton to play to the gallery of smug, virtue-signalling leftists.

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6:59PM New York / 11:59PM London

Jonathan Chait is panicking, and thinks that you should be, too:

Should the wisdom of the markets comfort Democrats, non-authoritarian Republicans, and other people who are fond of life on Earth as we know it? No, it probably shouldn’t. Betting markets do not appear to have any special knowledge. The prediction markets badly missed the outcome of the Brexit vote. Markets also gave Trump less than a 50 percent chance of securing his party’s nomination in February, and less than a 60 percent chance as recently as April. In both of these cases, prediction markets diverged from what the polling suggested, and the polling proved correct. The other commonality between these events is that conventional wisdom reflected the preferences of social and economic elites, who refused to take seriously beliefs held by very few people in their own circles.

So what do the polls say? FiveThirtyEight, Silver’s site, gives Clinton a 51.5 percent chance of winning. The Upshot, the New York Times calculator, gives her a 69 percent chance. (Both forecasts are based mostly on polling results.) Silver’s forecast makes Clinton the equivalent of a football team that is a 1-point favorite. The Upshot’s forecast makes her the equivalent of a 5.5-point favorite.

If your football team is either a 1-point favorite or a 5.5-point favorite, then you should be deeply concerned about the chance of losing. If the outcome is not a football game but the chance that the Executive branch falls under the control of a bigoted, uninformed, dictator-admiring man-child, you should be more than concerned. You should be freaked out.

Jeremy Corbyn. Brexit. Who is still going to offer swaggering, cast-iron certainties given this year of huge and unexpected political turmoil?

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6:37PM New York / 11:37PM London

From Daniel Larison’s preview in The American Conservative:

Trump has never been interested in outlining policy proposals in any detail during debates, and he isn’t going to start now. That gives him a slight advantage in that most voters don’t especially care about policy specifics, and tend not to react well to candidates that are absorbed with them. If there is one thing Trump knows about, it is how to perform on television, so I don’t know that it matters so much that this will be the first head-to-head debate he has done as a candidate. Clinton has considerably more experience with these formats from both her Senate and presidential campaigns, but she has never faced off against an opponent quite as shameless and unconventional as Trump. Clinton probably has the edge in being able to give the canned, scripted answers that these events demand. Trump’s willingness to say almost anything means that he may surprise her with an attack or proposal that she isn’t anticipating.

The debate “topics” that have been announced in advance are very vague, but I assume “securing America” will be the section of the debate related to foreign policy and national security. Because of her tenure at the State Department, this is the section during which Clinton will be expected to dominate Trump, who knows little and understands even less about the rest of the world. However, because of her record of poor judgment on foreign policy, especially as it relates to military intervention, Clinton will be vulnerable to attacks that Trump won’t hesitate to make regarding the Iraq and Libyan wars. Trump may be a lousy messenger for these criticisms, but they are attacks that she was mostly spared during the primaries and for that reason she hasn’t had much practice in defending against them. This section of the debate seems likely to serve as a microcosm of the election as a whole: Clinton has experience but also has lousy judgment, while Trump is a shameless opportunist who doesn’t know much except for how to take advantage of his opponents’ poor records.

Hard to disagree with this assessment. Despite all the hype, I anticipate a tense and nervous affair in which both candidates attempt to limit their exposure and avoid any kind of genuine, extemporaneous thinking that may result in a “gaffe”. The winner will be the candidate who avoids going out on a limb.

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6:04PM New York / 11:04PM London

The National Review’s Ian Tuttle is pessimistic about the debate, saying that it cannot possibly reveal anything we don’t already know – that both candidates are terrible:

At 9 p.m. EST tonight, the two major-party presidential candidates will take the stage for the season’s first general-election debate. One candidate is a pathological liar and egomaniac. The other is Donald Trump.

Whether their sparring match will actually matter is an open question. Political scientists are more skeptical than pundits about the influence of presidential debates, several studies having shown that even the most memorable debates occasioned only small polling shifts. Nonetheless, tonight is being billed as a potentially “epic” “battle royale.” The Washington Post suggests that 80 to 100 million people — that is, a quarter or more of the country — could tune in for at least part. That would make the debate not just the most-watched political event in modern American history but quite possibly the largest communal act of masochism in human history.

Tuttle concludes:

In other words, there are no good outcomes to this. It’s a contest to determine which candidate we’d be marginally more chagrined to see devoured by crocodiles, or stricken by plague. There’s the candidate who silences sexual-assault victims, or the candidate who calls women “dogs” and “pigs”; there’s the candidate who hides from the press, or the candidate who wants to sue them; there’s the candidate who “Hispanders,” or the candidate who calls Mexicans “rapists.” Take your pick.

I think he goes too far. While Hillary Clinton is certainly a flawed candidate and no conservative’s obvious choice for president (what with being a Democrat ‘n all), she is a known quantity, and whatever questions may exist about her judgment she at least understands the machinery of government.

Besides, I simply don’t buy the most egregious alarmism about Clinton from the American Right. They say that she is gunning for the Second Amendment. Well, Republicans made exactly the same accusation of President Obama. Each year was supposed to be the year when the Evil Marxist Kenyan would finally reveal his true colours and begin confiscating America’s guns. This whipped-up paranoia manifested itself in higher gun and ammunition sales across America. And yet with only 115 days of his presidency left, he really is waiting until the last minute.

And when conservatives overreach like this for political gain (making Americans fear unnecessarily that the Second Amendment is about to be “abolished”, as though that were possible with this Congress and Supreme Court) it calls into question some of their other more shrill accusations against Hillary Clinton.

So yes, both candidates are bad. But Hillary Clinton’s sins are grey ethics and a lack of vision, while Trump’s are unknown and potentially far worse. Given the choice, is reluctantly endorsing Clinton not the real conservative thing to do?

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5:45PM New York / 10:45PM London

Why is politics so bitterly partisan yet so emptied out of meaningful, ideological policy discussion? Well, it doesn’t help when the news channels promote a presidential debate as though it were Wrestlemania rather than a serious, sober public event:

Next up on CNN: a re-enactment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in 3D IMAX.

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5:37PM New York / 10:37PM London

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf ruminates on Donald Trump’s unnervingly cruel streak:

In national politics, harsh attacks are to be expected. I certainly don’t fault Trump for calling Hillary Clinton dishonest, or wrongheaded, or possessed of bad judgment, even if it’s a jarring departure from the glowing compliments that he used to pay her.

But even in a realm where the harshest critiques are part of the civic process, Trump crossed a line this week when he declared his intention to invite Gennifer Flowers to today’s presidential debate. What kind of man invites a husband’s former mistress to an event to taunt his wife? Trump managed to launch an attack that couldn’t be less relevant to his opponent’s qualifications or more personally cruel. His campaign and his running-mate later said that it was all a big joke. No matter. Whether in earnest or in jest, Trump showed his tendency to humiliate others.

And concludes:

People disagree about the ideal traits to have in a leader. But almost no one wants a president who has proven himself an addict to being cruel, mean-spirited, and spiteful. For decades, Trump has been deliberately cruel to others, often in the most public ways. He behaves this way flagrantly, showing no sign of shame or reflection.

What kind of person still acts that way at 70? A bad person.

It is that simple.

Giving a cruel man power and expecting that he won’t use it to inflict cruelty is madness. To vote for Trump, knowing all of this, is to knowingly empower cruelty.

Better to recoil in disgust.

Even if every single ethical allegation against Hillary Clinton were definitively proven true, it would do nothing to set at rest this blog’s gnawing unease that Donald Trump either suffers from some undiagnosed personality disorder or is literally just so coarse and brutish that he will humiliate friend and foe alike for his passing amusement.

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5:20PM New York / 10:20PM London

The expectations game

David Graham at The Atlantic notes the effective job done by the Trump campaign in lowering expectations:

It’s well-established that Donald Trump’s campaign doesn’t do most of the things a traditional political team does. There’s scarcely any policy, weak fundraising, and no ground game. But in one classic area of political positioning, the Trump team has proven it is historically great at one classic tactic: expectations setting.

With a few hours to go before the first presidential debate, it’s hard to see what the Republican nominee could do to avoid the meeting being judged at least a tie. Through a combination of months of campaigning, leaks about his debate prep, and aggressive working of the referees, Trump has set expectations so low that it’s hard to imagine how he finishes the debate without getting positive reviews from mainstream commentators.

[..] Separately, aides told Politico that Trump’s team has constructed an elaborate psychological profile of Clinton that he’s using to prepare. It’s hard to tell what is a psych-out and what’s real, but the effect of the balance of these leaks is to present Trump as so bumbling that simply standing up straight is an achievement.

We’ve seen all this before, of course. Famously weak debater George W. Bush went to great pains to raise expectations of his opponent John Kerry, with one Bush aide going so far as telling the media – with a straight face – that the rather staid, wooden Kerry was “the best debater since Cicero”. It seems that no hyperbole is too ludicrous when it comes to trying to give your candidate an edge.

While we have had no individual statements or acts of expectation-setting as ridiculous as the Kerry-Cicero comparison, the cumulative effect of the Trump campaign’s expectations-lowering has likely been greater. As the anti-establishment challenger, Trump has been held to a different standard since he first launched his campaign. But now, for the first time, Hillary Clinton’s much-vaunted experience – the “most qualified candidate ever to run for president”, we are continuously, implausibly told – will be a dead weight around her neck.

If Trump can avoid self-immolating and land one or two punches, that may well be enough to count as a “victory” or at least a draw, even if Hillary Clinton wins on points (as she almost certainly will). In other words, being graded on a very generous curve could well be to Donald Trump’s great advantage.

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5:06PM New York / 10:06PM London

Putting my cards on the table

I’m a small government conservative, but I won’t vote for bold-faced authoritarians or unashamed ignoramuses just because they cloak themselves in the mantle of conservatism. This blog supported Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008, because John McCain fatally compromised his own judgment and principles by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate and unleashing that force on an undeserving world.

On the same grounds, this blog cannot support Donald Trump, a man who makes George W. Bush’s mockery of fiscal conservatism look like the strictest observance, whose ignorance of policy is matched only by his disregard for the Constitution and whose temperament and character flaws make him a reckless choice in an unstable world.

That said, this blog is no fan of Hillary Clinton – as outlined in this rather tortured explanation of my decision to support her candidacy over that of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton is nothing if not a continuity candidate, which is fine for those who are currently prospering under the status quo but dreadful for those who are struggling. There are real concerns of character and ethics too, which would be disqualifying if her Republican opponent were anyone but Donald Trump. But we are where we are.

And this blog believes that it is not enough for fellow conservatives against Trump to quietly sit on the sidelines out of some perverse, unearned loyalty to the Republican nominee. While one has to respect the mandate bestowed by GOP primary voters, that does not mean suppressing dissent or deserved criticism. And while the 2016 presidential election offers a most unpalatable choice, principled conservatives should have the courage to declare their intention to vote for the least worst option, Hillary Clinton.

Here’s my reasoning:

A Hillary Clinton presidency gives the Republican Party four more years to come up with a more palatable option than John McCain, Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. In those four years, precious little will happen to fill conservative hearts with glee. But it is also highly unlikely that anything cataclysmicly, unfixably awful will happen either. That, to this blog, seems like a much better deal than letting Donald Trump loose on the Oval Office and potentially having him tarnishing the conservative and Republican brands even more than he has been able to as a presidential candidate.

Many of Trump’s desperate apologists try to trip up the #NeverTrump brigade by pouring scorn on the idea that Hillary Clinton is more conservative than Trump (see Ace of Spades’ sarcastic description of Clinton as “the One True Conservative in the race”). This misses the point. Many of us see Hillary Clinton exactly for what she is – namely a very calculating centrist with no core political convictions whatsoever. She was never the swivel-eyed leftist that Newt Gingrich tried to suggest – witness her glacial movement on gay marriage, only cautiously signalling her support once she was sure that Joe Biden and Barack Obama had not done themselves any political damage.

So the question is not one of whether Hillary Clinton is “more” of a conservative than Trump (though Donald Trump certainly is no conservative). The question is one of temperament and basic competence to execute the job. And while Hillary Clinton may be dogged by many legitimate ethical questions, few doubt that she could handle the levers of government, if only to maintain America on its present course.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is a complete unknown quantity, and a hugely volatile one at that. When he goes off-script he is liable to say or do anything (insulting the most sympathetic of characters or getting into Twitter wars with D-list celebrities) which comes to mind, and when he is on-script (as at his recent summit with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto) he sounds like he has been lobotomised. I have about as much confidence that Donald Trump has read, understood and respects the US Constitution as I believe his claim that “nobody reads the bible more than me“.

The choice, then, is not between a leftist ideologue and an honest, hard-workin’ conservative whose only crime is to be a bit politically incorrect sometimes, as Trump’s loyal cheerleader Sean Hannity loves to put it. The choice is between an ideologically rootless centrist who will likely maintain the status quo because she and her family have too much vested in it to see it fail, or a madman.

So that’s where I stand. This blog is opposed to Donald Trump, though I respect and sympathise with many Americans who are drawn to his candidacy. But that does not make this an ardently pro-Hillary blog – I will continue to call out shortcomings and failures as I see them.

And that’s how I’ll be live-blogging the debate tonight, and covering the remainder of the election in general. With scepticism and no small amount of disillusionment directed at both sides.

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4:00PM New York / 9:00PM London

Welcome to the Semi-Partisan Politics live blog of the first 2016 presidential debate between Hillary Clinton (Democrat) and Donald Trump (Republican).

For newcomers to this blog, I write from the perspective of a British guy and future American citizen married to a proud Texan girl, currently living in London but ultimately destined to move back to the United States (timing potentially dependent on the outcome of this election!)

I have lived and worked in Chicago and the Mid West, travelled widely throughout America, follow American politics as closely as British, and so feel more than justified in weighing in with my many opinions. Those still in doubt can read my brief bio here, and a more long-winded version here.

Politically, I lean classically liberal or (depending on the definition) conservatarian. My positions in a nutshell: Catholic, small state, maximum personal liberty, pro civil liberties, free speech, pro-Second Amendment (with common sense gun control), anti-death penalty, separation of church and state, pro-legal immigration, anti attempts to ennoble illegal immigration, anti identity politics, anti-SJW. If it’s remotely socialist, I generally oppose it.

Click on US Politics or US Current Affairs for my American coverage.

 

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 41 – UCL Archaeology Students Triggered By ‘Scary Bones’

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

In tracking the spread of social justice/identity politics poison through the academic world, every day now seems to bring some new ridiculous example of petty intolerance or exaggerated student fragility. And each new story prompts the incredulous reaction that things can’t possibly get any more surreal, that we must surely have now reached Peak SJW. And then something even more ridiculous transpires on a Western university campus.

From the Daily Mail:

Students at UCL taking the archaeologies of modern conflict course have been told that they will encounter ‘historical events that may be disturbing, even traumatising’.

If they feel stressed, they can ‘step outside’ for the rest of the class ‘without penalty’, though they should catch up by copying the notes of another student.

Lecturer Gabriel Moshenska, who co-ordinates the UCL course on how archaeology can help unearth the truth about 20th and 21st century conflicts, said some students had been in the Armed Forces and may have suffered psychological trauma.

He admitted no one had ever complained that they found one of his talks upsetting and said the alert was ‘precautionary’.

What’s particularly concerning here is that the professor involved, Gabriel Moshenska, took the decision to add the precautionary trigger warning to his class entirely voluntarily, through his own initiative. There was no coercion to do so by angry students staging a sit-in outside his office, or through a coordinated social media campaign. Moschenska simply decided that people who had signed up to study the archaeology of modern conflict might need to be warned that they would encounter the remnants of conflict during the course of their studies.

What this shows us is that the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics, and its associated infantilising of students, has reached a critical mass whereby the culture of enforcing safe spaces, trigger warnings and treating grown adults like they are children takes place automatically without any further need for threats or campaigns. Professors and lecturers are capitulating to the student babies before anything is even demanded of them, either because they simply want an easy life and to avoid conflict, or because they actively support these efforts to infantilise young adults.

This is not a good development. If we thought it was bad when universities like Yale and Mizzou limply rolled over and capitulated when threatened by snarling, baby-faced SJWs with their protests and boycotts, that’s nothing compared to the further setbacks we may witness when faculty are active co-conspirators.

And this can lead nowhere good, as Brendan O’Neill laments The Spectator:

But of course there’s a major problem here: the relentless infantilisation of students, the treatment of them as overgrown children liable to be plunged by mere words or images into actual trauma (‘a disturbing experience which affects the mind or nerves of a person so as to induce hysteria or psychic conditions’: OED). The very idea of the university becomes impossible if students are presumed to be so mentally fragile that even class chatter could unhinge them psychically.

[..] This presumption of mental frailty among students, now seen as so psychically vulnerable that even F Scott Fitzgerald might traumatise them, is antithetical to the whole idea of university life, whose starting point must surely be that young adults are not only mentally competent but morally autonomous and intellectually curious. The overuse of the word ‘trauma’ to describe everything from an archaeology class to an old play shows how entrenched this view of students has become. As an American professor of psychology says, ‘When we describe misfortune, sadness or even pain as trauma… [we] turn every event into a catastrophe, leaving us helpless, broken and unable to move on’. In short, the more we tell young adults that everything is potentially traumatic, the more likely they are to experience everything as traumatic, or at least terrifying. We’re seriously teaching young people to see Shakespeare as potentially harmful to their mental health.

Strikingly, the UCL archaeology lecturer says that so far none of his students has accepted his offer to leave a ‘traumatic’ class discussion. That’s encouraging. It’s also revealing. It suggests the new campus craziness, the wild allergy to difficult debate and fear of offensive texts, doesn’t always come from students themselves. It’s been institutionalised, among actual academics, to such an extent that universities no longer instil in their students the Kantian idea that one should ‘Dare to know’ but rather tell them: ‘Sometimes it’s risky to know. What you find out might hurt you. So maybe you shouldn’t know that thing, or read that book, or listen to this lecture.’ The safety of ignorance.

Brendan O’Neill is more optimistic than I – he sees it as a positive thing that none of Nanny Moshenska’s students have yet chosen to avail themselves of their Right to Flee. And I suppose it is a good thing. But when professors provide even the option of leaving the classroom when confronted with learning material that arouses anything but positive emotions, they effectively legitimise the idea that words and ideas can cause actual physical harm, that being exposed to contrary viewpoints or shocking information is somehow dangerous, and that avoidance coping (staying away from things that upset you) actually works. In reality, there is no proof for any of these assertions, and many reasons to suspect that they are complete psychobabble hokum.

This year’s intake of Archaeologies of Modern Conflict students may be a hardy bunch (by the low standards we now set for young adults, meaning they won’t burst into tears and soil themselves at the sight of a human skull). But now that it is widely known that professors and Serious Adults consider it perfectly acceptable if students do have extreme reactions to academic material and need to flee the lecture hall, such behaviour is normalised and given the tacit approval of university authorities, making it much more likely that future students – believing it to be normal – will opt out of lectures which cause them emotional or intellectual discomfort.

In other words, academic freedom (and the reasonable expectation that students be treated like responsible adults) is now trapped in a pincer movement, with angry SJWs demanding to be infantilised on one side, and spineless collaborationist professors happy to oblige them on the other.

If there is an upside to all this, it can only be that with student populations and turncoat faculties now racing to outdo each other in their contempt for academic freedom and personal resilience, we will now reach our eventual rock bottom – wherever that may be – sooner than was previously the case.

Rejoice and be glad.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Conservatism, Behind Enemy Lines

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Rod Dreher reports on a fascinating (and depressing) exchange posted on the wall of Princeton professor Robert P. George, between Professor George and a closeted conservative colleague.

The recounted exchange is worth posting in full:

Closeted conservative colleague: “I don’t feel I can say what I think, at least not at this stage. I have a family to care for and other responsibilities, you know.”

Me: “Sure. I’m not criticizing you.”

CCC: “I’ve seen people’s careers ruined for saying what they think.”

Me: “I have, too. I’m really not criticizing you. I assume you’re following your conscience.”

CCC: “You say what you think and you’ve survived. But your the exception.”

Me: “I’ve been very fortunate. That’s true. But there are plenty of others. I’m not unique. There’s Harvey Mansfield, Hadley Arkes, Mary Ann Glendon, Jim Ceaser, and others. Even some people they’ve tried hard to destroy have survived. Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas, Austin,” for example. They threw everything they could find at him, every calumny imaginable. They tried to get him formally investigated and fired. But he has beaten them. I predict he’ll be promoted to full professor this year.”

CCC: “Yes, but there have been lots of victims, too.”

Me: “Yes. Alas. Lots of victims.”

CCC: “You think I should say what I think.”

Me: “I think you should follow your conscience.”

CCC: “That’s just your way of saying I should say what I think.”

Me:; “Look, as I said, I’m not criticizing you. Only you can discern the demands of your own conscience. I didn’t even bring this whole subject up, you did.”

CCC: “I know what you tell your graduate students to do. You tell them not to hide their politically incorrect views.”

Me: “Well, yes, I hardly hide my advice to them. They initially find it counterintuitive. Their natural instinct is to hide their dissenting beliefs or downplay them. I think that’s risky from a character point of view and also not the best strategy for success.”

CCC: “You ARE judging those of us who keep our opinions to ourselves, then.”

Me: “For heaven’s sake, I’m just saying that there is a certain moral hazard in not speaking your mind. As scholars, we’ve got a special obligation to truth and a vocation to truth-telling. Of course, everybody has a basic obligation to honor the truth, as best they grasp it, but our obligation is even more central to who we are. So, speaking for myself, I don’t see what the point of being a scholar is if we’re not willing to speak the truth as best we understand it. I mean, there are lots of other fields we could go into. We could be lawyers, or doctors, operate hedge funds. There’s the insurance business. Wendy’s franchises. Anyway, again speaking for myself, if I felt I couldn’t speak the truth out loud, I would abandon academic life and go do something else.”

CCC: “You’re not afraid to say what you think because you’ve been able to get away with it without your academic career being ruined.”

Me: “That’s exactly backwards. I’ve been able to get away with it because I’m not afraid to say what I think. Fear empowers the bullies. They’re far less bold and aggressive when they know you’re not afraid of them.”

CCC: “Well, I am afraid of them.”

What emotion do you suppose is primarily motivating CCC? I think that the answer is quite clear: terror. Sheer, unbridled terror at the thought of being purged not only from one’s current job but from one’s profession field altogether if one so much as questions the progressive, social justice/identity politics dogma which has descended on academia like a suffocating blanket.

Where else in history have we seen such terror, such fear of having one’s heretical personal beliefs exposed and punished by the state or the mob? It’s hard not to give way to hyperbole, but this is literally the stuff of Orwell’s 1984, or (back in the real world) Soviet Russia during the purges.

And for what? To bring about forced adherence to the new orthodoxy on gender identity, racial politics, climate change, immigration and any other left wing cause du jour. Left-wing academics and students have abandoned any glancing interest in persuasion as a tool, and have jumped straight to brutal enforcement. Some academic fields will take longer than others to fall under the jackboots of this new authoritarianism – the STEM subjects are still relatively free, the humanities dangle over the precipice while the social sciences have long since fallen – but all are heading in the same direction.

And this is why Robert P. George’s own stance matters, and is correct. Just as there can be no equitable accommodation with people who want to establish a fundamentalist Islamist caliphate across the West, neither can conservative academics and other defenders of free speech split the difference with the authoritarian, petty tyrants who are busy consolidating their control over the university campus. One either has academic freedom and the right to free speech, or one does not. There is either censorship and an ideological test for working in certain professions, or there is not.

The time for keeping one’s head down and trying to avoid trouble is over. Those of us who believe in free speech and unrestricted academic enquiry have an obligation to speak out in defence of those being persecuted or intimidated for their beliefs, today and in the future, whether we agree with the particular speech in question or not.

They can’t arrest us all and they can’t fire everyone simultaneously. Conservatism needs to make a stand, to boldly assert that it will not be intimidated and purged from academia without a fight, or without exposing the progressive, social justice cultists as the modern day tyrants that they are.

 

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Donald Trump Meets Social Justice Therapy Culture, And No One Comes Away Looking Good

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Now apparently Donald Trump has made it impossible for millennials to experience love. Hysterical accusations and overreactions like this from his opponents will do more than anything to sweep Trump to victory in November

Donald Trump would almost certainly make a terrible president – and yet one is half tempted to give him a shot when confronted with the hysterical reactions of America’s permanent victims, who have naturally found a way to make a debate about the future of the republic and the possibility of a Trump presidency all about them, their own anxieties and their pwecious feewings.

Michelle Goldberg has a particularly nauseating article in Slate, in which a succession of weepy Manhattan therapists drone on about the sleepless nights and anxiety attacks being suffered by their patients, and even by their fellow therapists, at the mere thought of Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office.

Some choice quotes:

“People are scared,” says Fiachra “Figs” O’Sullivan, a psychotherapist in San Francisco who specializes in relationships. “People are distressed, and it’s affecting their level of presence in their relationships with their significant others.” Dorie Chamberlain, a 54-year-old stay-at-home mom in Los Angeles who says she talks about Trump every time she goes to therapy, says watching the election “is like living in a house where everybody screams.”

There is, of course, no way to quantify the scope of mental anguish caused by Trump’s campaign; these stories are entirely anecdotal. There are, however, a lot of anecdotes, as I discovered when I started speaking to both therapists and panicking voters. I’ve covered four elections as a journalist, but this is the first one to regularly poison my dreams; at least once a week I wake up in the middle of the night in clammy, agitated horror.

Oh good grief. Mental anguish? At this point one should already have a good idea of the thrust of the piece – journalist and subjects alike are self-regarding, quivering mounds of useless emotion.

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Some of the therapists told me they are talking their patients through their Trump terror while trying not to succumb to it themselves. “The therapists that I know are pretty overwhelmed by managing their personal feelings, which we have to do and we’re doing, but it’s a lot,” says psychologist Heather Silvestri. She belongs to a meditation group for therapists and says the election comes up in every session.

I have also recently been through a high-stakes election – the EU referendum on 23 June, which was far more of an existential question for Britain than even this high-stakes election is for America. By some miracle, my side won and Britain voted to leave the European Union. But if we had lost (as I fully expected to happen) I would not have claimed to have suffered severe emotional harm and retreated to my safe space. I would have dusted myself off, licked my wounds and prepared to fight another day.

A Donald Trump presidency would be bad for any number of reasons, but to carry on as though it were automatically the end of the world – as though the American system of government had no checks and balances to limit the impact of a buffoon leading the executive branch (it wouldn’t be the first time) – is an overreaction in the extreme. Be upset about the rise of Donald Trump for political reasons; don’t make it about “personal feelings”.

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About two weeks ago, Liz, a 45-year-old photographer in suburban Minneapolis who asked to be identified only by her first name, started noticing alarming symptoms: headaches, jitteriness, tightness in her chest, sometimes even difficulty breathing. She went to her physician, who said it sounded like she was suffering from anxiety. “I thought, huh, I don’t even have a stressful job. I don’t know what that can be,” she says. Then she went home and turned on the news, “and all the sudden the symptoms came back with a fury.” She realized that thinking about Trump was affecting her health.

Liz hasn’t agreed with past Republican candidates, she says, but she didn’t think they would “ruin my country, or cause civil war, or cause World War III.” But her fear also stems from her incredulous realization that so many of her fellow citizens inhabit a reality that barely intersects with her own. “I can no longer see where they’re coming from,” she says of Trump supporters. “I feel like I’m in The Twilight Zone.” Even if Clinton wins, she’s terrified of Trump’s followers responding with violence. “We’re getting closer and closer and closer to something that seems so insane,” she says, “The thought of him winning, or even the thought of her winning and parts of the country imploding in chaos as a result—it all just seems like a nightmare.”

The anxiety is encroaching on her relationships, Liz says. Sometimes she’ll delay putting her 9-year-old daughter to bed because she’s so caught up in the news.

I don’t contest for a moment the fact that Donald Trump is an extremely egotistical person – an “oleaginous clump of non sequiturs [who] sweat[s] his insecurities on national television”, in the immortal words of Jonah Goldberg. But this “Liz” character must really have personally wronged or provoked Trump very badly indeed if she is literally having sleepless nights and neglecting her daughter out of fear of what might happen to her if he gets the nuclear codes. This seems like a vast overreaction.

But in another sense, Liz’s case really cuts to the heart of the issue – particularly her “incredulous realisation” that so many Americans see the world so differently. This suggests a failure to empathise with other Americans prior to this point, particularly the economically struggling lower middle class who make up the backbone of Trump’s support.

We saw the same thing in Britain with the EU referendum. I am loathe to draw any parallels at all between Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, primarily because Brexit is pure and noble and about democracy, while Trump is mostly about authoritarianism and demagoguery. But suffice it to say that the Remain side lost partly because it was comprised of and led by urban-dwelling metro-leftists who had no conception of what life is like in hard-scrabble towns or the suburbs, and who had only contempt for the people who live in such places, including people who have tended to be on the losing side of globalisation.

There was an utter failure of empathy in Britain, with the pro-EU ruling class furiously unwilling to look at things from the perspective of anybody not like them. It was this failure of empathy which blindsided the British establishment to the extent of anti-EU sentiment, and it could likewise be this failure of the American creative and upper middle class to show any solidarity with those struggling beneath them that effectively pushes people into the arms of Donald Trump.

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Fear of a Trump presidency is a normal human reaction, of course, not a clinical condition. A vertiginous sense of unreality is a symptom of an anxiety attack, but it is also a symptom of being a thinking person in America in the fall of 2016. People with anxiety disorders tend to imagine that catastrophe is imminent, but in this case they may not be wrong. “You can’t pathologize this anxiety,” says Andrea Gitter, a New York psychotherapist and member of the faculty at the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute. “People who are marginalized to begin with know that they are targets because of the hatred that’s been unearthed.” Gitter says the election comes up daily in her practice.

Ah yes, the marginalised people, all of whom Trump intends to ship to concentration camps within the first hundred days of his presidency. We all remember that pledge from his campaign website.

This is a familiar trick from the EU referendum campaign, too. In Britain, desperate Remainers attempted to smear eurosceptics and Leave voters by suggesting that they were solely responsible for the toxic political climate in the country. This culminated in the shameful harnessing of the murder of MP Jo Cox by cynical Remain supporters who thought they could make political capital by effectively blaming innocent Leave campaigners for the death of a young woman.

Now, Donald Trump has admittedly gone further than the British anti-EU campaign in terms of his rhetoric, appalling statements about Muslims and seeming comfort in the presence of his fringe supporters. But he has not incited “hatred”, and the people that Michelle Goldberg patronisingly refers to as being “marginalised” are grown adults with voices of their own, and are certainly free to rebut anything and everything that the Trump campaign says.

But then the article gets really surreal:

Sometimes the election’s psychic fallout takes less obvious forms. [Psychologist Heather] Silvestri, for example, has noticed a curious phenomenon among some of the millennial women in her practice: The rise of Trump has made them wonder how much they can reasonably expect from romantic relationships. Trump embodies some of the worst aspects of their ex-boyfriends, men who were “self-aggrandizing, self-important, not amenable to collaboration, cooperation, etc.,” Silvestri says. “When you break up with someone you need space, and they’re feeling like they can’t get space because their ex is sort of incarnate all over the news.”

It’s not just that Trump reminds them of their exes. It’s that Trump’s success seems to validate the men’s behavior. “They had gotten themselves to a place of, This is not what I deserve, I deserve better, I can do better,” Silvestri says. But watching dutiful, responsible Clinton struggle to best Trump, “people are really backtracking and saying, ‘I made this move to be more empowered and be who I am based on my values, but now I see my ex writ large on the national stage, and everyone’s following him,’ ” Silvestri says. They start thinking that, for a woman, maybe being beautiful really is more important than being smart, assertive, and authentic. “What happens in microcosm on a Friday night,” she says, is now playing out on the national stage. “The men have the power, and [the women] are trying to be a better version of themselves, but it doesn’t play well.”

We are through the looking glass now, folks. Apparently the mere fact of Donald Trump’s existence is so triggering to American millennial women that his candidacy (I feel stupid even writing this) conjures up painful memories of their ex-boyfriends – all of whom were (naturally) swaggering, chauvinistic misogynists utterly lacking in the virtuous qualities of “collaboration” and “cooperation”. And this is so traumatic that it is preventing these poor triggered millennial women from successfully forming future romantic relationships. Yes – Donald Trump has ruined love itself.

What can one say in the face of such preening, baseless hyperbole? This is the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics writ large, throwing absolutely everything it can at Donald Trump in the hope of discrediting him, and not realising that it renders Trump’s accusers every bit as ridiculous as the man himself.

Are there some people with legitimate anxiety disorders whose conditions have been exacerbated through worry about the presidential election and the possibility of a Trump victory? I have no doubt. But by definition, these are people with a specific illness, and not representative of the general population. If Michelle Goldberg had wanted to write an article about the impact of the Donald Trump candidacy on people with diagnosed anxiety conditions then she could have done so. But she didn’t – Goldberg painted with a far broader brush, including the perspective of therapists as well as therapy patients, ordinary people not in therapy and even millennial women in general.

The result is an incoherent mess of an article which proves nothing at all and makes no clear argument of any kind, other than the fact that the Bad Man Donald Trump has evidently replaced the monster under the bed in the childlike imaginations of America’s infantilised millennials and assorted other permanent victims.

The trouble with pursuing a line of attack against a presidential candidate based not on facts or policy (where there is plenty of material to damn Trump) but rather on how that candidate makes certain other people feel is that Trump and his supporters can legitimately respond by saying “so what?”

Above all, it is a lazy line of attack. It reeks of a lazy refusal to take on Donald Trump on the issues, instead seeking to void and invalidate his candidacy because he generates overwhelmingly negative emotions in certain sensitive souls.

And while there are many reasons why Trump would make a terrible president, the fact that his name keeps coming up on the therapist’s couch is not one of them.

 

Donald Trump Hosts Nevada Caucus Night Watch Party In Las Vegas

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Top Image: Washington Post, Dominick Reuter/Reuters

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