Category: ideological culture

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education and schooling First Amendment rights ideological culture

The De-Frocking of Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson, censorship. licensing, mind control

The Canadian psychologist fighting for the right to opine without having to submit to “social media training” — reeducation — has lost a court battle.

An Ontario court has dismissed Jordan Peterson’s appeal of a decision that had ruled in favor of the autocratic College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO).

A year ago, Dr. Peterson’s livelihood was jeopardized because, on social media, he challenged “consensus” determinations on matters like climate change, sex-change operations on minors, and COVID-19 policies.

That’s when CPO, a regulatory body established by legislation, told Peterson that he must either submit to degrading “training” as the penalty for participating in public discourse or forfeit his right to practice.

With the new ruling, “There are no other legal avenues open to me now,” he says on Twitter. “It’s capitulate to the petty bureaucrats and the addlepated woke mob or lose my professional licence.”

The setback pertains only to “this round,” though. And: “There is nothing you can take from me that I’m unwilling to lose.”

In a recent National Post column, he says that he can either comply with the reeducation and confess his ideological sins or “tell my would-be masters to go directly to the hell they are so rapidly gathering around themselves and everyone else.”

If you read Dr. Peterson’s warnings to fellow Canadians about the precarious state of their liberties and interpret his tone accurately, I think you’ll agree that he’s going with the go-to-hell option.

Peterson has made millions off the fame he garnered by opposing the compelled speech aspect aspect of Canada’s Bill C-16. Thanks to the marketplace of ideas, he has more go-to-hell money than most folks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

GOP, ACLU, and NRA Together Again

ACLU, NRA, GOP, rights, free speech, self defense. 2nd Amendment, 1st Amendment

Occasionally, the stars align and adversaries become allies.

So it is that dozens of Republican congressmen have filed an amicus brief to support an NRA lawsuit against Maria Vullo, a former New York State regulator of the financial services industry. And so it is that the NRA will be represented before the Supreme Court by the American Civil Liberties Union.

After the 2018 Parkland shooting, Vullo pressured financial service companies to boycott organizations like the National Rifle Association that advocate Second Amendment rights.

The NRA sued, contending that Vullo had acted against their First Amendment rights. When the Supreme Court agreed to take their case, the NRA thought: who better to represent us before the justices than the ACLU?

The ACLU, which has not always been consistent in defending free speech, agreed.

Its national legal director, David Cole, says that “the ACLU has long stood for the proposition that we may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Although this case is also about speech, more directly it is about using governmental force to try to stop people from conducting peaceful financial transactions.

If such intimidation of financial companies — or, what is being challenged in separate litigation, of social media companies — were allowed to stand, government would be fully unleashed to threaten market actors in order to prevent constitutionally protected actions and speech that officials dislike.

Our constitutional rights made meaningless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom ideological culture

Comic-Book Isms

equity, equality, communism, egalitarianism, nanny state

“This is crazy,” says Reardon Sullivan, former chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Party.

He means the way Montgomery County has been selling vendor space at a comics convention, MoComCon, being held January 20. The county is charging vendors in a way that has nothing to do with what is being sold but that county officials call “inclusive” (having learned that this adjective transmutes any evil).

If you belong to a favored group, you get a special rate. Nonindigenous straight white males pay $275 per table or, with electricity, $325. But if you’re a woman or favored minority, the price per table is $225 or $250.

Sullivan says that as a black person who grew up in Montgomery County, he finds it “truly insulting to say that a seller who’s black or BIPOC is disadvantaged. All we ever want is a level playing field.” (“BIPOC” is kitchen-sink code for “black, indigenous, and people of color.”)

Sullivan has the right spirit but errs in suggesting that the only thing members of currently favored groups (“we”) want is a level playing field.

One can hope that this is true of most members of these groups.

But if white guilt or white male guilt were the only impetus propelling affirmative action and other forms of race-based or sex-based preferential treatment — if, like Sullivan, all intended beneficiaries regarded such policies as condescending, destructive lunacy — these policies would be dead and buried by now.

As they should be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies regulation

Children’s Crusade Goes Forth

climate panic

In 2015, a group of young people sued the federal government.

The government’s allegedly actionable dereliction was having “known for decades that carbon dioxide pollution was causing catastrophic climate change . . . and a nation-wide transition away from fossil fuels was needed to protect plaintiff’s constitutional rights.”

The government “recklessly allowed” transport of fossil fuels, combustion of fossil fuels, etc.

I blame the lawyers more than the kids for the filing’s falsehoods and non sequiturs. Outlawing fossil fuels would be the actual catastrophe and actual reckless violation of individual and constitutional rights.

Climate variations are nothing new in the earth’s four-billion-year history. We should expect to see all the usual dry spells, hurricanes, and tornadoes that have buffeted human beings since we emerged as human beings. Fossil fuels help us to protect ourselves from these things.

Government cannot outlaw fossil fuels slowly or quickly without in effect putting a gun to the heads of everyone who wants to use a gas-fueled car, bulldozer, or airplane and saying, “You have no right to take the actions required for your survival.”

Efforts by several states and the federal government to outlaw various uses of fossil fuels are what deserve lawsuits.

Judge Ann Aiken, who recently had a chance to end this litigation but is illogically allowing it to move forward, has one thing right: “Some may balk at the Court’s approach as errant or unmeasured. . . .”

I balk. It’s errant. And over the top.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture scandal

The “Racial Animus” Gambit

race card, Harvard

Among the deflections littering former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation letter is the claim that major criticisms of her conduct are “fueled by racial animus.”

The controversies have made Gay, a black woman, very visible. She may have been subjected to racial attacks in emails or on somebody’s blog. I haven’t seen reports of such. It’s possible.

But her letter makes it seem as if she feels all of it, all the criticisms of her understanding of policies regarding the treatment of Jews on campus and criticisms of her own treatment of the words of others in her published work, were “fueled by racial animus.”

If only blacks alone were ever charged with ambiguity about antisemitism or committing plagiarism, the implication might be at least superficially plausible. 

But it’s not.

Yesterday, I discussed the considerations that properly affect campus speech policies (“The Resignation”).

Here let me note, first, that scholars of all hues and sexes have been plausibly accused of plagiarism. Example: historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, white woman. Male example: Steven Ambrose.

And, second, that Harvard’s backing and filling and own animus in response to documented charges of plagiarism have converted the matter from a problem mostly for Claudine Gay personally to a problem for Harvard as an institution. By violating its own policies for dealing with the charges and by attacking the messenger, Harvard seemed to be saying that standards of scholarship like “Don’t plagiarize” don’t matter.

But they do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Division, Exclusion, Indoctrination

college, house of cards, money

Wisconsin has decided to stop using tax dollars to subsidize ideological assaults on academic freedom.

Under the leadership of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the Wisconsin legislature struck a blow against DEI domination of the state’s university system.

The acronym means “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Yet, the goal of DEI is to herd all participants in academic life into the same collectivist “antiracist,” anti-individualist straitjacket, no dissent permitted. What DEI really means, Vos says, is “division, exclusion, and indoctrination.”

The Vos-steered budget that passed in the last session eliminated $32 million from funding for the university system. It also hiked the pay of university employees and funded new campus buildings.

Using his line-item veto, the Democratic governor tried to thwart the move. But he couldn’t block the spending cut.

Then, after much negotiating, the university system agreed to freeze hiring of DEI officials, transfer DEI employees to other jobs, and implement race-blind, merit-based admissions policies.

Bullied by lefties, the board of rejects initially rejected the deal by a 9–8 vote. Vos wouldn’t budge. The board met again and accepted the deal.

As National Review’s editors put it, “when push came to shove, it wasn’t worth rejecting pay raises for all employees and putting building projects on hold for the sake of a handful of progressive ideologues.”

Until the whole house of cards collapses and there’s no longer any public funding of higher education, all states assailed by DEI should do the same kind of thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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