Donald Berlusconi: What If Trump News Network, Not The White House, Is The Real Goal?

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

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Donald Trump either knows he has already lost the election, or is planning a corrupt presidency to rival the rule of media empire-owning former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi

With just 21 days to go until the US presidential election, there are new signs that Donald Trump (or at least those around him) are increasingly coming to believe that the game is up, and looking ahead to life after the election under the presidency of Hillary Clinton.

The Financial Times reports that Donald Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, has been making confidential overtures to investors about funding a new startup Trump News Network:

Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has informally approached one of the media industry’s top dealmakers about the prospect of setting up a Trump television network after the presidential election in November.

Mr Kushner — an increasingly influential figure in the billionaire’s presidential campaign — contacted Aryeh Bourkoff, the founder and chief executive of LionTree, a boutique investment bank, within the past couple of months, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Their conversation was brief and has not progressed since, the people said. Mr Bourkoff and Mr Kushner both declined to comment.

However, the approach suggests Mr Kushner and the Republican candidate himself are thinking about how to capitalise on the populist movement that has sprung up around their campaign in the event of an election defeat to Democrat Hillary Clinton next month. Mr Trump has in recent days ramped up his criticism of the “dishonest and distorted” mainstream media, which he accuses of being biased against him in collusion with the Clinton campaign.

This would certainly explain an awful lot about how Trump has been behaving since seizing the Republican Party presidential nomination in the summer. Since that time, Trump has overwhelmingly defaulted on his promises to switch gears and become “so presidential” and to reach out to centrist voters left unmoved by shrill denunciations of Hillary Clinton as a traitorous criminal.

In fact, rather than any tack back to traditional Republican values, Trump has doubled down on his conspiracy theorising and weaponised victimhood, preferring to drive the segment of America already well disposed to him wild with glee rather than expand his support base or help the prospects of down-ticket Republicans.

In this context, the idea that Trump either never intended to seriously challenge for the presidency (still a stretch, I think) or gradually gave up on that original ambition as he lurched from disaster to disaster (more plausible) starts to gain credence.

As a serious attempt to build an election-winning coalition of voters or persuade a majority to abandon their doubts and embrace his “ideology”, Trump’s continued behaviour has been entirely counterproductive. But as a strategy to enthuse his most ardent supporters and drive a further wedge between them and all mainstream sources of news (even including Fox News) it has been a masterpiece. Journalists are now routinely booed at Trump rallies, while the candidate himself accuses the media of being part of an organised establishment plot to swing the election for Hillary Clinton.

Currently these voters are served only by the more fringe conservative media – sites such as World Net Daily, Breitbart, InfoWars and alt-right personalities like Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich. And while many of these outlets are professionalising their operations, there probably still exists a gap in the market for a well-funded, professional-looking television news network that looks like CNN but talks like Alex Jones.

And now there is compelling evidence that Donald Trump, rather than seeking to help unite America in either victory or defeat, instead intends to capitalise on the partisan rancour and mutual distrust which will be left in the wake of this toxic presidential election campaign.

All of which raises a couple of rather pressing questions.

If Donald Trump is planning to set up a television news network regardless of the outcome of the election – raising the prospect of the most powerful man in the world also having a media empire to sing his praises from dawn to dusk, like Silvio Berlusconi (in so many ways) on steroids – is that not yet more evidence of his authoritarian, almost dictatorial intentions?

But if the Republican presidential nominee really has given up any prospect of winning the election and is instead abusing his platform to whip up a narrower subset of supporters with the hope of turning them into a loyal viewer base for his new television news network, then should he not be summarily removed from the GOP presidential ticket and replaced with somebody who is actually running to win for party and country?

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 42 – Universities Hunker Down For Halloween

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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As the nightmare of confected Social Justice Warrior outrage about Halloween costumes comes round once again, spineless university administrators pre-emptively roll over, warning students not to wear “harmful” costumes and preparing lavish contingency plans to flatter and placate anyone who is triggered or traumatised by the annual celebration

Can you believe it has been a year since spoiled and hysterical Yale undergrad Jerelyn Luther achieved her dismal moment in the media sunlight for her on-campus meltdown at a professor who refused to echo the tiresome SJW pre-emptive condemnation of “offensive” Halloween costumes?

A brief reminder:

Some context: the university administrator in question is Nicholas Christakis, the Master of Silliman College. When the university sent a campus-wide notice asking people to be “culturally sensitive” when choosing Halloween costumes this year, Christakis’s wife (repeat: not Christakis, his wife) – who also works for the university – had the temerity to send an email saying that as an educator, what her students choose to wear is none of her damn business.

This didn’t go down at all well with Yale’s coddled population of Stepford Students, for reasons which are now depressingly familiar to many of us. And so it led to a confrontation between some angry young protesters – indignant that the safety of their Safe Space had been compromised – and a harried Nicholas Christakis.

That incident did not end well. The toxic atmosphere churned up by the entitled and oversensitive student protesters led to Professor Christakis having to give up his pastoral position as Master of Silliam College at Yale, while the students themselves shamed themselves in front of the entire world by weeping and rending their garments about Halloween costumes while enjoying the immense privilege of receiving one of the finest educations that money can buy while young people in less fortunate parts of the world are starving, being unjustly imprisoned or having their limbs blown off.

But nobody can say that last Halloween was not an instructive experience – for those currently working or studying at university as well as many other people who became aware of the madness infecting our campuses for the first time. But sadly, it appears that many universities have not learned the right lesson.

Now that Halloween is about to roll around again, the University of Florida is attempting to head off any costume-related hysteria from their student population of adult babies by sending a memo reminding them that wearing the wrong item of clothing could potentially cause “harm” to a completely unrelated third party, and that university authorities will be watching them closely.

From the International Business Times:

Certain Halloween costumes related to race, religion or culture are often deemed offensive. Now, the University of Florida is offering counselling to students who have been troubled by such costumes.

The university sent out a memo to students urging them to make appropriate costume choices for the upcoming holiday. It has also asked students to report incidents of bias to the university’s support team.

“Some Halloween costumes reinforce stereotypes of particular races, genders, cultures, or religions. Regardless of intent, these costumes can perpetuate negative stereotypes, causing harm and offense to groups of people,” the university said in the memo earlier this week. “Also, keep in mind that social media posts can have a long-term impact on your personal and professional reputation.”

Its Bias Education and Response Team will “respond to any reported incident of bias,” the university added. It will also “educate those that were involved, and to provide support by connecting those that were impacted to the appropriate services and resources.”

So standard practice, basically. Students are encouraged to self-censor their own personal expression, with the bar of “acceptable” behaviour set at the triggering level of the most oversensitive and feeble-minded of student crybabies.

That wobbly-lipped little SJW who spends their life hopping from safe space to safe space, and who thinks that encountering the occasional conservative opinion is tantamount to being the victim of “hate crime”? That’s the person who effectively now sits in judgement of all University of Florida students and the costumes that they decide to wear to their own private social engagements. Everyone must limit their own self-expression to avoid triggering the most easily-triggered of souls on campus.

And what if they don’t? What if some awful student, some shameful subhuman, some latter-day Nazi decides to wear whatever they damn well please to a Halloween party, whether it is a white girl wearing a sombrero or some other piece of “culturally appropriative” garb? Well never fear, because the University of Florida’s hilariously named Bias Education and Response Team (the acronym BERT belying its totalitarian mission) is on hand to “educate those that were involved”.

So while students technically keep their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and expression, in reality the ever-watchful university authorities will be holding them to infantilising yet maddeningly opaque standards of behaviour, and stand ready to send students who cause “offence” to re-education classes.

And what then? What if the student refuses to be re-educated? What if they refuse to be put on “social probation”, as other paternalistic and authoritarian universities are now doing to students who commit speech, thought or clothing crime? Are they to be expelled for

Even the local newspaper, which bends over backwards to be reasonable to the insane people usurping the local university, thinks that they go too far by treating the approach of Halloween as though it as potentially harmful as an incoming hurricane:

We don’t necessarily intend to mock UF. The advisory speaks for itself. But the wording suggests that the current crop of UF students bears no resemblance to the university’s fierce, fearless and armor-skinned mascot. Their collective shells, like their capacity for mirth, seem thin.

It should be noted that UF is not trying to ban Halloween festivities, as far as we can tell. But it would not be surprising to learn that a wayward fraternity prankster who dons The Donald mask would invite chants of “Lock him up!”

[..] One might think mounting debt and a shrinking job market would be more intimidating to these students than a politically incorrect costume. But yes, that’s what we want our next generation of leaders to be: sheltered from controversy, aggrieved by contrary opinions yet critical of, if not revengeful against, those who express them, steeped in identity politics, and adjoined at the hip with some ego-stroking “counselor” so hurt feelings don’t linger. To borrow a phrase popular at the moment, feeding such an attitude at UF and beyond is definitely not how we’ll make America great again.

The behaviour of University of Florida administrators is so far beyond the traditional or reasonable remit of custodians of a place of learning that it quite simply beggars belief. These are young adults, not kindergarten students. These are people old enough to join the military and open lines of credit whom the university does not trust to successfully manage their own interpersonal relationships and any conflicts which arise on their own, without heavy-handed paternalistic intervention?

But to be fair, the students have created the university that they deserve. The minority (and one hopes that it is still a minority) who shriek for the authorities to adjudicate their every social encounter and nurse them back to good mental health in the event of a “bias incident” force university administrators to behave in this way. For as we have all seen over the past couple of years, even bleeding heart leftist professors and administrators with impeccable Social Justice credentials have found themselves vilified and hounded out of their jobs for failing to be sufficiently proactive in anticipating the unique needs of the snowflake generation.

So successful has the campus coup conducted by the Cult Social Justice and Identity Politics been that pre-emptive guidelines about acceptable and unacceptable Halloween costumes (together with stern warnings of punishment and “re-education” for those who transgress) are now all but inevitable.

Spineless university administrators and their thin-skinned, victimhood culture-soaked students are now trapped in a self-reinforcing negative spiral, with each new concession or collaborationist attempt to placate the Social Justice Warriors only serving to validate their actions and encourage them to make ever more egregious demands.

And that’s the real nightmare this Halloween.

 

Postscript: The University of Florida memo in full:

October brings fall weather and Halloween. If you choose to participate in Halloween activities, we encourage you to think about your choices of costumes and themes. Some Halloween costumes reinforce stereotypes of particular races, genders, cultures, or religions. Regardless of intent, these costumes can perpetuate negative stereotypes, causing harm and offense to groups of people. Also, keep in mind that social media posts can have a long-term impact on your personal and professional reputation. The University of Florida’s Division of Student Affairs Diversity and Social Justice Statement reminds us that UF fosters a community that values and respects diversity. An inclusive definition of diversity recognizes the variety of personal and social experiences that make individuals and communities different from one another.

As a community, we aspire to demonstrate integrity, respect, and compassion that strives to maintain an affirming campus climate for all members of our community. If you are troubled by an incident that does occur, please know that there are many resources available. Please take advantage of the 7 day a week presence of the U Matter, We Care program at the University of Florida by emailing umatter@ufl.edu. Additionally, there is a 24/7 counselor in the Counseling and Wellness Center available to speak by phone at 352-392-1575. Lastly, the Bias Education and Response Team at the University of Florida is able to respond to any reported incidents of bias, to educate those that were involved, and to provide support by connecting those that were impacted to the appropriate services and resources. You may submit a bias incident report at http://www.umatter.ufl.edu/stopbias. Thank you for being mindful of these values, and have a fun and safe Halloween

 

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German Politicians, Drunk On Power, Prepare A Fresh Assault On Free Speech

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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German social media users test their leaders’ patience by exercising awkward, unruly free speech at their own peril

German politicians, ever anxious to squash strident criticism of their unilateral and, uh, somewhat controversial decision to expand the population by nearly a million migrants and refugees in the space of a year, are rounding on social media companies to strike another blow on already-constrained freedom of speech in Europe.

From Deutsche Welle:

Volker Kauder, a member of German Chancellor Merkel’s CDU, has said Facebook should pay for failing to remove online hate comments. There has been a surge in xenophobic posts as refugees have arrived over the last year.

Speaking to German magazine “Der Spiegel,” Kauder said: “The time for roundtables is over. I’ve run out of patience.” He said if companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter failed to remove offensive comments within a week of them being posted, they should be penalized with a 50,000 euro ($54,490) fine.

Social media websites needed to rethink their strategy, he said. “Otherwise, I have another suggestion. Cigarette packs always carry a warning that smoking can be dangerous. Why don’t we ask these [social network] providers to carry a warning on their websites, saying: ‘Anyone who communicates here must expect insulting remarks,'” Kauder said.

Kauder also insisted that the justice ministry should demand that the companies submit the IP addresses of people who posted hate messages on social networks.

Because heaven forfend that politicians should have to explain their decisions and win support for their actions (or better yet, follow the will of the people in the first place once in awhile). Far better to simply make it increasingly difficult for people to register their boisterous dissent.

Note the language. Kauder has “run out of patience”, suggesting that free speech in Germany is something granted to citizens at the sufferance of their thin-skinned leaders rather than an inalienable right. And of course that is exactly how it is in Germany, and most of Europe (including Britain). If some jumped-up politician decides that the civil discourse has become too un-civil – or, let’s be realistic too critical of them – then it is perfectly legitimate for them to turn the screws on private companies to shut it down.

Note too the ludicrous “public health” defence creeping into politicians’ language. One interpretation of Kauder’s threat to slap a mandatory trigger warning on the home pages of social networks is that he thinks so little of the German people’s intelligence that he genuinely believes they might currently be unaware that websites where political issues are discussed may contain opinions with which they disagree. That is one interpretation. But the other one (and the correct one in my view) is that it is simply a way of trying to hurt private enterprise for not bending the knee and doing government’s bidding.

Stephen Fuchs of the German-American culture blog German Pulse shares the same suspicions:

Do I think Germany is out of line to expect a level of cooperation to remove highly offensive posts once reported? No, not entirely. Where I begin to disagree though comes when any government starts policing excessively to the point where our outlets for expression become restricted by a set of rules that make any level of opinion a bannable offense.

How long until Germany pushes Facebook to delete any negative comments or opinions about a certain political party or candidate?

Negative remarks about refugees are deemed hate speech in Germany, but what about the negative remarks about Merkel’s refugee policies? Should we expect Facebook or Twitter to delete those immediately as well?

Maybe the government would be better off addressing the real issues that lead to the divisiveness, instead of playing the “you hurt my feelings” game online.

This is why free speech needs to be an absolute and indivisible right. It is a fragile freedom, with the slightest infringement causing a crack which easily grows and fractures our entire right to self expression. And while some (like Fuchs) may find it distasteful, the battle for freedom of speech must be fought at the unpalatable margins. Only by defending the rights of the racist to spew their bile about Syrian refugees can we be confident of preserving the upstanding citizen’s right to criticise German immigration policy without fear or expectation of censorship.

And as German Pulse rightly points out, no one step, no new draconian crackdown on freedom of expression is ever enough – just as one new health warning on cigarettes sugary food is never enough for the public health police. Individuals and companies cede more of their rights and autonomy, and it only ever emboldens the state to demand yet more.

Demanding that social media companies submit the IP addresses of users who post “hateful messages”to the justice ministry suggests that the German government (or at least significant factions within the ruling Christian Democratic Union) aims to become much more proactive in their persecution of thought and speechcrime. Why dream of building a massive database of social media users who type unacceptable keywords or are reported for causing “offence” by their thin-skinned peers unless you plan on unleashing some kind of retribution on them in response?

This is yet another dark day for free speech in Europe, but perhaps there is an upside – Theresa May will be able to find so much common cause with Angela Merkel over their mutual contempt for basic civil liberties that their shared authoritarianism could yet grease the wheels of the upcoming Brexit negotiations.

 

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Hacked Clinton Campaign Emails Reveal What The Political Class Really Think Of Ordinary Americans

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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Hacked emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign are unlikely to provide “smoking gun” evidence which might derail her candidacy, but they do paint a very depressing picture of exactly how the American political class view the people they supposedly serve

With each new release of hacked Clinton campaign emails released by Wikileaks, reporters have tended to swarm over the documents looking for a “smoking gun” of some kind – hard and fast evidence that Hillary Clinton may have engaged in illegal or clearly unethical acts. Such bombshell revelations are unlikely to emerge.

Why? Well, as Jonah Goldberg points out, we are dealing with an extraordinarily astute political operator here. Whether it is the work of the Clinton Foundation or her off-the-books correspondence as Secretary of State, shamefully kept on a bootleg server installed in her home, if Hillary Clinton wanted to commit any serious wrongdoing it would not have been committed to black and white in the first place, however well hidden and guarded.

Besides which, the definition of “smoking gun” has continuously evolved to ensure that Hillary Clinton remains on the safe side of it. Jonah Goldberg made this very point awhile ago:

But it’s really as if people don’t understand that a smoking gun is a very high evidentiary bar that most prosecutors — or journalists — never have to meet. Imagine a cop answers a call and comes to a bar where a guy named Jack Butler is caked in the blood of a dozen victims. One of the victims actually wrote, in his own blood, “Butler did it,” which was ironic because the victim was also a big fan of 1930s detective novels. A waitress who hid behind the juke box points at Butler and says, “He did it!” Butler himself says, “You got me.”

But the cop, going by the standards of Beltway clichés says, “Damn, there’s nothing I can do. I don’t see any smoke coming out of his gun.”

So quests to find smoking gun evidence in the hacked emails already released or those to come are likely to end in disappointment.

But far more interesting than any smoking gun evidence is the insight that these emails provide into the way that America’s ruling class thinks about the people. Typically, on election night, politicians and pundits alike pause hostilities to proclaim the beauty of democracy and laud the deep and abiding wisdom of the American people. You hear a hundred variations on this theme every election day as cable news anchors scramble to fill the unforgiving silence before the exit polls and results start to come in.

But the tone and content of these emails between Clinton staffers, discussing strategy and various ways to limit the damage from tawdry things that their candidate has done, reveals what the political elite really think of the people. And none more so than this email sent to John Podesta, chairman of the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, by Bill Ivey, a longtime Clinton supporter and former Bill Clinton political appointee.

Some context: the two men are kicking back and forth ways that Hillary Clinton can cut through Donald Trump’s “entertainment” appeal to better get her message out to people who really don’t want to hear it.

Ivey writes to Podesta:

Well, we all thought the big problem for our US democracy was Citizens United/Koch Brothers big money in politics. Silly us; turns out that money isn’t all that important if you can conflate entertainment with the electoral process. Trump masters TV, TV so-called news picks up and repeats and repeats to death this opinionated blowhard and his hairbrained ideas, free-floating discontent attaches to a seeming strongman and we’re off and running. JFK, Jr would be delighted by all this as his “George” magazine saw celebrity politics coming. The magazine struggled as it was ahead of its time but now looks prescient. George, of course, played the development pretty lightly, basically for charm and gossip, like People, but what we are dealing with now is dead serious. How does this get handled in the general? Secretary Clinton is not an entertainer, and not a celebrity in the Trump, Kardashian mold; what can she do to offset this? I’m certain the poll-directed insiders are sure things will default to policy as soon as the conventions are over, but I think not. And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking – and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.

My emphasis in bold.

Now, it might not come as a surprise that senior politicians and their aides are complicit in deliberately trying to keep people ill-informed and docile. But in our more optimistic moments we might like to believe that this is merely an unfortunate side effect of politics rather than one of its central aims. Yet here we are, with two Clinton confidantes casually discussing that political operatives are fully aware and “quite content” to behave in this way.

What’s more, these people actively celebrate a docile and ignorant population, because when gerrymandered districts means that very few House and district races are actually competitive, it makes life easier for everyone if political parties can simply take for granted whole swathes of the population while focusing their efforts on a few narrowly defined demographics and swing states. In other words, it is to everyone’s advantage that Americans are neatly pigeonholed into ideological bubbles and prodded to action once every two years rather than becoming more thoughtful and genuinely engaged citizens. And these two Clinton operatives talk about this as though it is the most normal thing in the world.

Indeed, their only cause for alarm seems to be that while the ignorance remains strong, the people’s willingness to obey instructions is rapidly fading. And of course Clinton’s aides would be worried – their boss needed the underhand intervention of the Democratic National Committee simply to prevail over Bernie Sanders, an ornery old socialist, in her primary race. The Republican Party lost control of their uncompliant base completely, which is why they are now saddled with Donald Trump as their nominee rather than somebody who is, you know, an actual conservative.

But in neither case (for this is a problem of the political class in general, and not confined to one or other party) is there any sense of shame or introspection at having patronised and manipulated their party bases for so long that people rebelled in search of genuine authenticity. They don’t think they did anything wrong. They simply acknowledge that they now have a problem to solve, because the people’s “compliance is obviously fading rapidly”. They want to find a way to return their supporters to their rightful stupor as quickly as possible, so that they can go on governing as they see fit without having to respond to popular pressure to do things differently.

And in a way, that is more damning than any “smoking gun” email showing that Hillary Clinton broke the law or wielded inappropriate evidence ever could be. Because it shows that even when this election is over and one or other candidate fades to become a footnote in history, these parasitic  political operatives and bag carriers will still be there, waiting to serve their next master by keeping the population as dumb and compliant as possible.

And if that doesn’t depress you, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

 

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Debating Political Diversity And The Importance Of ‘Brave Spaces’ At The University Of Miami

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Whether “brave spaces” are any less infantilising than “safe spaces” is a matter for debate, but the University of Miami community’s recognition of the importance of a more politically diverse faculty and campus is an encouraging sign

The editorial board of the University of Miami student newspaper, the Miami Hurricane, takes a surprisingly bold stance on the problem of progressive ideological dominance on campus, and – encouragingly for a student publication – calls for greater ideological diversity rather than the fearful conformism demanded by many students.

From the Hurricane’s editorial:

UM leans to the left, as do most universities. A report published earlier in the campaign by The Tab documented that 60 percent of faculty donations were made to Hillary Clinton’s campaign; the other 40 percent was split between the other Republican candidates and Bernie Sanders.

In the classroom, professors can be very vocal about their political opinions, whether that’s a subtle joke woven into a lecture or an actual discussion of their political beliefs.

When professors deride or mock certain political views in their teaching, that only alienates students and undermines the purpose of an educational forum. Part of the reason that conservative students feel so disenfranchised from the media and academia may be because for most of their lives, the intellectual “authorities” in their lives have been liberal and taught in left-leaning ways.

At this point, I actually felt a little uneasy. While it is certainly true that the progressivism and intolerance of conservative ideas shown by many university professors is often off-putting to conservative students and academic peers, the idea of people being disenfranchised or excluded because of the words of other peers and authority figures skates awfully close to the wheedling complaints of Social Justice Warriors that criticism and free speech must be suspended for their own mental health.

This blog has warned before that it is only a matter of time before conservatives, persecuted for their beliefs by fellow students and university administrators alike, begin to use the same language of fragility and vulnerability used by the SJWs – and I think we are now starting to see that prediction come true. None of that detracts from the point made by the Hurricane’s editorial board, which remains valid. But as always, a creeping culture of victimhood is something to watch out for, and guard against.

Fortunately, the editorial soon improves:

Courses like The Election are great because they expose students to professors and guests from both sides of the aisle, which can help break down the barriers of bias.  It is much easier to dismiss the opinions of a peer, a social media troll, or a crazy uncle than it is to automatically dismiss the ideas of an authoritative figure who has a Ph.D. in the relevant discipline. Ideological diversity may also help students recognize the flaws in their own opinions and be more self-critical.

When conversations focus on sweeping platitudes rather than individual reasons, our personal networks suffer as well. Too many students have given up Facebook friends or real-life acquaintances over political differences. It’s easy to generalize a whole group of people just based on one or two beliefs that they voice, but these generalizations create many false assumptions, especially in this election when few people are completely behind their candidate.

Restrain from automatically assuming that another student is racist, sexist, elitist or corrupt due to a few of their demonstrated ideological beliefs. People have reasons for holding their beliefs, and if they’re willing to talk about it in a respectful way, then take the opportunity to respond with dialogue rather than a diatribe. Identity politics has made political opinions just as personal as ethnicity and religion, making it hard to separate feelings from ideas.

This is good. Most of us can at times be too quick to pigeonhole and condemn people based on a few assumptions and extrapolations about their political leanings, and the board’s point that many people are not strongly behind their candidate this time (either disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters reluctantly supporting Hillary Clinton or Republicans holding their nose while supporting Donald Trump) should warn us of the sweeping range of variety and nuance which is lost when we simply label people as Trump or Clinton supporters.

The editorial board is also quite right to observe that the rise of identity politics has made it much harder to separate feelings from ideas. A self-aggrandising worldview which places the individual at the centre of everything is an atrocious way to discuss ideas, as it makes rejection of an idea seem like a personal attack. That’s why weepy young students now talk about their identities being “invalidated” when people do not accept the new orthodoxies around sexuality and gender, as though they might simply vanish in a puff of smoke unless everyone on campus is forced to approve of everyone else’s life choices.

And then comes an unusual suggestion:

A healthier alternative for a “safe space” is a “brave space.” A “brave space” encourages people to freely explore different questions and issues – still trying to respect other people, but not restricted by the fear that certain ideas make others feel uncomfortable.

The goal of a diverse college campus is not to create comfortable spaces, but to be caught a little off guard by all of the different types of people and ideas that might not be found in East Portland or a small town in South Dakota. That’s okay. If we embrace that vision, we can create a more tolerant, educated and cooperative community.

Well, a brave space is certainly an improvement on a space where the First Amendment is suspended in order to prevent glass-jawed snowflakes from colliding with reality. The rejection of the notion that uncomfortable ideas should be avoided is, in these depressing times for free speech and academic freedom, a positive step forward.

But surely it would be better still to simply cease talking about “spaces” at all? The term is now ubiquitous – even news articles totally unrelated to the Social Justice agenda talk about the need for public bathrooms to have a “safe space” for parents to change their baby’s diapers. As opposed to what, an unsafe space like a gun range or a demolition site?

Why, when the term “a convenient place” would have sufficed a decade ago, must we now describe everything as a “safe space“? Welcome to my home; here’s a safe space for you to hang your coat, and over there is a safe space for you to sit and watch television. It’s puerile and infantilising.

Is the whole world really so riddled with danger that we need to mark out those places which are actually safe for human foot to tread? The journey from my dorm room to my Ivy League college classroom is fraught with many dangers, but at least the gender neutral restroom offers me a safe place to pee, the shuttle bus provides a safe space for me to ride across campus, the students’ union is a safe place for me to relax between classes and the lecture hall itself is a place where no idea that I deem central to my identity can ever be challenged.

Flippant, yes, but also an accurate transcription of how the contemporary student mind seems to work. And of course it is utterly offensive – there are people in benighted parts of the world where daily physical safety cannot be taken for granted and is routinely violated, yet here are some of the most privileged youths of any generation in history trembling in fear that they may encounter disapproval or mean comments while walking between buildings at their $40,000-a-year degree factory.

(As Malcolm Gladwell explains, this is a result of a shift in the way which we describe actions or behaviours which are undesirable. Whereas once we would have condemned sexism, racism or homophobia as simply being wrong, today we talk spuriously of the “harm” that these words and encounters visit upon us. And when every single human interaction is viewed as having the ability to physically or emotionally harm us, calls for network of safe spaces to act as stepping stones through the world inevitably follow).

Brave spaces are marginally better, perhaps, but it is depressing indeed that we now have to pat ourselves on the back and give ourselves a lollipop for being “brave” and subjecting ourselves to the mere possibility of hearing contradictory viewpoints or unpleasant ideas.

This used to simply be called “being an adult”. Is it really too much to ask that we return to that bygone age of resilience and maturity?

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Top Image: Pixabay

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