It’s easy enough, some sixty-five years after the fact, to cluck our tongues at the cowardice and stupidity of those who went along with McCarthyism (He was right about the DEMOCRATS and Communism, as we later learned).
It’s especially easy for liberals and academics to say that had they been alive back then, they would certainly have had the courage to stand up for discourse and to stand up for those being blacklisted. That’s partly because universities like to present themselves as bastions of free thought and discourse, where students, faculty, and guests discuss the most important issues of the day. Liberal academics especially like to present themselves as encouraging of these discussions.
Bullshit.
A new McCarthyism—complete with blacklisting—has overtaken universities, and discourse in general, and far from opposing it, liberal academics are its most active and ardent perpetrators, demanding a hegemony of thought and discourse that rivals the original.
For the past decade and half, deplatforming—the disinvitation of a speaker at the insistence of a special interest group—"cancel culture", and blacklisting have been, to use the word of an organization that tracks the erosion of academic freedom through the increased use of deplatforming, “exploding.” And the targets of the liberals and leftists are not confined to the right (although they do certainly target right-wingers as well).
Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges was deplatformed because he speaks out against prostitution as exploitative of women.
Writer and activist Gail Dines was deplatformed because she speaks out against pornography.
An anarchist organization called “Civil Liberties Defense Center” lent its efforts to attempts to deplatform writer and activist Lierre Keith from the University of Oregon because she’s a radical feminist.
The irony of an organization with “civil liberties” in its title attempting to deplatform someone because her ideology doesn’t fit its own doesn’t escape me, and probably won’t escape anyone outside of anarchist/liberal/leftist circles.
A female genital mutilation survivor, child bride survivor, and feminist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali was disinvited from receiving an honorary degree at Brandeis because she writes, from unspeakably painful experience, about how millions of women are treated under Islam.
McCarthy used the rhetoric of “communism” to blacklist. The modern-day McCarthys use the rhetoric of “oppression” and “trauma.”
Things have gotten bad enough that Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and other talented comedians have said they can’t or won’t play colleges any more.
As Bill Maher commented, “When Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld say you have a stick up your ass, you don’t have to wait for the X-rays to come back. That’s right, a black, and a Jew walk onto a college campus and they all can’t wait to leave.”
Things have gotten bad enough that as far back as 2015, The Onion put out a satirical piece titled, “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea: Students, Faculty, Invited to Freely Express Single Viewpoint.”
The article concluded with fictitious college President Kevin Abrams stating, “‘Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.’ Abrams told reporters that counseling resources were available for any student made uncomfortable by the viewpoint.”
https://tinyurl.com/vesolmz
