URLs du Jour

2022-05-24

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  • Next time someone tells you that cancel culture doesn't exist… you can send them to this WSJ column from ex-Princeton prof Joshua Katz: Princeton Fed Me to the Cancel Culture Mob.

    Nearly two years ago, I wrote in these pages, “I survived cancellation at Princeton.” I was wrong. The university where I taught for nearly a quarter of a century and which promoted me to the tenured ranks in 2006, has revoked my tenure and dismissed me. Whoever you are and whatever your beliefs, this should terrify you.

    The issues around my termination aren’t easy to summarize. What is nearly impossible to deny (though Princeton does deny it) is that I have been subjected to “cultural double jeopardy,” with the university relitigating a long-past offense—I had a consensual relationship with a 21-year-old student—for which I was already suspended for a year without pay well over a decade after my offense. This was, I emphasize, a violation of an internal university rule, not a Title IX matter or any other crime.

    While I stand by my words to this day, even in the immediate aftermath of the faculty letter, few of my colleagues gave signs of standing by theirs. But as they go about their merry destructive way, I live with the tremendous backlash against me, which has never ceased. It was during a fleeting and illusory lull in late July 2020—after Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, who had initially condemned me, stated that what I had written was protected speech after all—that I rashly suggested all was well.

    For what it's worth, I blogged about Katz here back in 2020, and speculated "Katz will probably survive." This is why I shouldn't make predictions.


  • Just an old sweet song. Rich Lowry has Georgia on his mind: Georgia’s early-voting shows the smears about its voting law were nonsense.

    We all know what happens when a tree falls in an empty forest. What happens when a democracy emerges unscathed from a purported vile racist threat to its very existence?

    Pretty much the same thing, it turns out.

    The surge in the early vote in Georgia shows that all the smears about the state’s new voting law, repeated by everyone from the president of the United States on down, were complete nonsense.

    On the Republican side, according to the secretary of state’s office, there have been 453,929 early votes and 29,220 absentee votes this primary season (absentee votes are still coming in as of this writing). This is compared with just 153,264 early votes and 14,795 absentee votes during the last, pre-pandemic midterm, in 2018.

    The Democrats have seen a similar surge. In 2022, there have been 337,245 early votes and 31,704 absentee votes, compared with only 134,542 early votes and 13,051 absentee votes in 2018.

    Lowry details the hysteria that accompanied the law's passage. (Incompletely. He doesn't mention Major League Baseball yanking last year's All-Star Game from Atlanta.) I'm not sure anyone (from Biden on down) is apologizing for being wrong.


  • From one smear to the next. Heather Mac Donald notes that President Wheezy is Using the Buffalo Tragedy for Racial Propaganda.

    President Joe Biden has been lecturing white Americans about hate again. On May 15, the day after an 18-year-old white supremacist massacred ten black shoppers in a Buffalo supermarket, Biden called on Americans to “address the hate that remains a stain” on the country’s soul. Those stained by hate were not named by race, but the reference was clear.

    Two days later, Biden gave a longer speech in Buffalo about the attack. In Biden’s telling, white Americans are at best indifferent to the racist slaughter of their fellow black citizens. “We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America. None,” Biden insisted. Biden’s exhortations and moral clarity were the only forces impeding a slide back toward Jim Crow and the reign of the KKK: “I promise you. Hate will not prevail. And white supremacy will not have the last word. . . . We can’t allow . . . these hate-filled attacks . . . to destroy the soul of the nation.” We can’t allow this violence, the president intoned, to “be the story of our time.” To “confront the ideology of hate requires caring about all people”—something that whites, in their silent complicity with racist rampages, apparently fail to do.

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    Mac Donald notes that the most recent crime data reported by the FBI show that, in the USA, blacks are twice as likely to commit a "hate crime" as whites ("among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known.")

    I assume the FBI has something specific in mind that distinguishes "hate crimes" from other crimes. Which I assume are motivated by other causes.

    I was gonna say that nobody ever talks about "love crimes", but…


  • I'm not a Tucker Carlson fan, but… as it turns out, I'm even less of a Carl Cameron fan. Karen Townsend relates his latest crusade: Lock him up! Campaign Carl takes aim at Tucker, suggests jail or "something worse".

    The long knives are out for Fox News Channel and also Rupert Murdoch and his family. Again. The cable news network with the highest ratings regularly comes under attack by those who work for other networks and their guests. Something odd is going on lately, though. Two men in particular have leveled wildly dramatic claims against FNC hosts like Tucker Carlson and suggested draconian punishments like jail time or even deportation for the Murdoch family.

    Last week things got weird. Cameron was on CNN with Jim Acosta (I know) and during his interview, Cameron officially joined in the chorus of voices calling for action against Tucker Carlson and Fox News Channel in general. The mass shooting in Buffalo, New York seems to be the latest trigger for calling for the dismissal of Carlson from FNC. Cameron wants Biden and law enforcement to take action against Tucker and also social media. Lock him up! He compared Carlson’s show to falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre.

    Carl Cameron used to be on our local TV station, WMUR! Back in 1995, WaPo's Howard Kurtz noted that Cameron would be moderating the GOP debate, broadcast on CNN, for the upcoming primary:

    Pretty heady stuff for a baby-faced fellow with an unfashionable wardrobe who spent the '80s as a struggling sales consultant. But for the small band of men determined to win the season's first primary, Cameron, 34, may be the most influential reporter in the country.

    And he knows it. Cameron's high opinion of his work is matched only by his disdain for network correspondents who parachute into town for a quick political fix. Smart, savvy and defiantly brash, he's also a bit self-absorbed; during 4 1/2 hours of conversation, the only question he asks a visitor is what he thinks of WMUR's political coverage.

    "Carl has an ego bigger than a house," says Deborah "Arnie" Arnesen, a prominent Democrat here. "He's always having his ego massaged by all these guys who ordinarily would never talk to a peon reporter."

    And now he wants Tucker Carlson taken down, equating his FNC bloviations with that hoary old movie theater example. If Cameron had ever known anything about the First Amendment, I guess it has been forgotten.


  • But can I eat a Chick-fil-A while watching Disney+? Sonny Bunch has a long enough memory to complain: No One Has a Position Anymore.

    It used to be that liberals thought that corporations had no free speech rights. End Citizens United, they demanded.

    And this set of assumptions was why progressive activists and politicians felt so comfortable—nay, righteous—during that same campaign season going after Chick-fil-A, the fast-food purveyor that rubbed the morality of its owners in the face of nonbelievers by donating to causes deemed anti-LGBTQ. Conservatives were outraged when Chicago pols, New York pols, and the San Antonio, Texas, airport went to war against Chick-fil-A. The government has no right to tell a business or its officers how to spend their money; government neutrality in all matters speech is a fundamental First Amendment principle. This, anyway, was the Republican view.

    Now it’s Democrats who—feeling a bit adrift, having lost control of the courts and seemingly unable to pass meaningful federal legislation—take solace in the idea that corporations are people, nothing more than the avatars of their employees and customers. That’s why Disney personnel were outraged when CEO Bob Chapek argued that the company shouldn’t weigh in on Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, which proponents say is necessary to protect children from age-inappropriate sex education and opponents decry as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would force teachers back in the closet. In hindsight, Chapek was right that the Mouse House would be used as a cudgel in the culture war to the detriment of both the cause and the corporation. But that didn’t matter to Disney’s rank and file. What mattered was the company taking a stand and doing the right thing.

    "When is it OK for government to punish corporations for the political views?"

    "Easy. When they disagree with me."


Last Modified 2024-01-17 3:41 PM EDT