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ideological culture Internet controversy social media

Die, Disney, Die!

Disney is taking big financial losses, after a series of bombs on the silver screen and on its own channel, including a billion on last year’s four film fiascos.

Why?

The company went super-​woke. And could, therefore, go broke.

Or, says Patrick Ben David, become a “zombie company,” unable to make profits, kept alive only by low interest rates and the hope that Apple will buy it.

Nevertheless, Disney joined a group of major players pulling their advertising off Twitter, er, X.

Why?

Because X’s new owner, Elon Musk, favorably forwarded a tweet about anti-​white racism that was said, by many, to be antisemitic.

It’s the rage, now, not only to support Hamas’s terrorism but to excoriate Israel, Zionism, and even Jews in general, yet it was Musk’s forwarded tweet about how Jewish intellectuals and organizations too often support anti-​white rhetoric that panicked the big companies, including Bob Iger-​headed Disney.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, in an on-​stage New York Times interview, asked Mr. Musk to respond to all this. “I hope they stop,” Musk said. “Don’t advertise.”

Musk went on: “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me, with advertising — blackmail me with money? — ‘go f**k yourself.’”

Then Musk repeated that command, using hand signals. 

“Is that clear? I hope it is.” Smiling, he added, “Hey Bob … if you’re in the audience.”

Mr. Sorkin pressed X’s owner on the consequences.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” said Musk, amidst his usual stutters. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company — and we will document it in great detail.”

“But those advertisers are going to say, ‘we didn’t kill the company.’”

“Oh, yeah? Tell it to Earth.”

Musk explained that both he and the boycotters will make their cases, “and we’ll see what the outcome is.”

The idea is to take the culture war outside educational institutions, the news media, and government bodies, and to shove it into boardrooms everywhere. It’s a great game of chicken, buck buck buck. And, unlike Gale Wynand in The Fountainhead, Musk appears more than willing to lose his investment in X just to prove the point.

An interesting place we’ve come to. The insider elites, and the ideological left, seek to advance woke ideology even if it ruins their own companies, such as Disney, and squelch free speech, even if it means betraying every last principle of American liberty.

So, in this war with other people’s fortunes, take sides: die, Disney, die — before X, let’s hope.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Combatting Campus Cancel Culture

We keep hearing how students and professors are being targeted for saying stuff they’re not supposed to say — from the perspective of the hard-​left students, professors, and off-​campus third parties who launch most of the attacks, that is.

Which seem to be happening more and more often.

The numbers confirm it. New research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) indicates that attacks on professors for impolitic speech have increased since 2015. Most of the attacks — 74 percent — have resulted in sanctions against the accused.

According to FIRE, “calls for sanction” of a professor rose from 24 in 2015 to 113 in 2020.

Three fourths of the tallied incidents, 314 out of 426, have led to punishments like suspension or termination.

The attacks tend to occur on university campuses with “severely speech-​restrictive” policies. Like many Ivy League schools.

One of the researchers, Komi German, says that university administrators and presidents must “explicitly state that the protection of free speech and academic inquiry supersedes protection from words that are perceived as offensive.”

Good idea. Let them do that.

Why aren’t the censorious administrators doing it already, though? 

Probably because they lack allegiance to the value of freedom of speech on campus.

Until these academics all have Damascus-​level conversions, parents and students must do what they can themselves to discourage these censorious policies. This means, abstaining from attending and paying tuition at schools that penalize professors and others for wrongspeech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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cancel/​wisdom

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folly ideological culture

Peak Absurdity

We have gone on beyond nonsense. Theodore Geisel — Dr. Seuss — whimsically drew and rhymed his way into our hearts. But owners of his copyrights and trademarks have announced that they will no longer keep in print a handful of Seussiana, including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, and On Beyond Zebra! 

“These books portray people,” says a press release from “Seussville,” “in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

The objection appears to be that caricatures of Chinese and Africans and others are based on stereotypes and, therefore, “hurtful.”

After retrieving your rolled eyes from deep within their sockets, recognize that cartoons and caricatures rely upon stereotypes. Which is why I still own copies of the first two books on the list and will not hesitate to read them and show the pictures to any child of any race or ethnicity who might be interested.

While the woke guardians of the Seuss brand have every right to cease publication — just as eBay, the trading platform, possesses the right to prohibit sale of used copies — this is historic. The woke social justice crowd have pushed  their mania past absurdity.

Not, alas, a funny, Seussian absurdity. 

His very liberal voice, favoring individuality, diversity and just being nice, was utterly at odds with the implied calumny from the corporation that bears his pen name.

But I do hear chanting in the background: “boil that dust speck!” (A great line from Horton Hears a Who.) Seuss developed his case against intolerance and mob mania in a number of works, most of them not deprecated by his heirs, thankfully. 

Kids who read them possess the tools to understand the whys of woke nonsense. 

Pity that the adults in charge do not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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First Amendment rights social media

Tracking Big-​Tech Attacks

Instagram is further restricting what users may say in direct messages, and the company will eject any user who utters hate speech. Instagram will also provide information about account holders to UK police.

But what is hate speech? 

Nasty utterances that we’d all agree are hateful. Sure. But it also appears to be disagreeing with someone about “gender identity” or supporting Melania Trump. In other words, “hate speech” is whatever offends the authoritarian sensibilities of whoever operates the delete-​account button at the social-​media giants.

A lot of this has been happening lately.

YouTube has deleted the YouTube channel of LifeSiteNews, a Christian news outlet. 

YouTube and Facebook have banned a documentary about pandemic policies called “Planet Lockdown,” and GoFundMe has cancelled a fundraising campaign for the film.

China will start accrediting reporters based on their social media histories, and it will penalize companies who employ unaccredited reporters. “Citizen journalists” (people with cell phones) will also have to be accredited.

Every day, tyrannical governments and their private-​sector allies — the big-​tech hall monitors now dropping all pretense of providing neutral forums — act to smother discussion and dissent on the net. In self-​defense, we need to know about these anti-​speech efforts. But keeping track is a big job. 

Fortunately, ReclaimTheNet is doing this big job for us. Its regular e‑letter (subscribe here) reprints the latest stories published on their website. 

This job has to be outsourced, as far as I am concerned. Were I to report on all of it here, I wouldn’t be able to talk about anything else.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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education and schooling folly

Not Fired for Teaching

The headline states that a “USC Professor Who Used Chinese Word That Sounds Like English Slur” was “ ‘Not Dismissed Nor Suspended.’ ”

Sure. The professor was “only” removed from the course he was teaching.

Greg Patton, who teaches business communication at the University of Southern California, had been telling students about “filler words,” which for native English speakers is stuff like “uh, uh, uh.” We apparently don’t all grope for words in exactly the same way. If one grew up speaking Mandarin, one tends to say “nèi ge, nèi ge, nèi ge.”

No sooner had the example been provided than a contingent of the perpetually aggrieved lurched into action. 

Their failure to simply talk to Professor Patton, and the overkill of their response — including a letter claiming that his utterance “offended all of the Black members of our Class.… Our mental health has been affected.…” — suggests the disingenuousness of that response.

A USC dean issued an abject public apology. 

Patton also, regrettably, apologized.

Fortunately, many of Patton’s students, and others, rose to his defense, including Chinese class members who noted that Patton’s “use of ‘nei ge’ [was] an accurate rendition of common Chinese use, and an entirely appropriate … illustration of the use of pauses.”

If only the professor had been a mind reader and expert military strategist, he might have avoided this land mine. But training in proactive appeasement of bullies is not the solution here. 

What’s needed is a determination to stop appeasing bullies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture Regulating Protest

The Coming Backlash

The George Floyd protests and subsequent riots, along with calls for “Defund the police,” are changing political opinions, and not in the way the most in-​our-​faces activists want.

At Reason, J. D. Tuccille declares 2020 to be the year “gun control died,” arguing that “to push gun control proposals” amounts to advocating “that the likes of Derek Chauvin — the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd — should be armed, while the communities they terrorize should be helpless.”

As movements like “defund the police” make headway, gun control seems increasingly bootless. It is wrong “to insist that when police fail at their supposedly core task of protecting the public, people should be deprived of the means for defending themselves”; it is even worse after woke leftists take police off the streets.

As I noted weeks ago, violence in the wake of (or surrounding) protests causes a backlash. 

To which even cancel culture is not immune. 

Take the case of David Shor, a social democrat who was not allowed to get away with merely relaying the uncomfortable truth just stated above. On Twitter, he synopsized a study that found that “Post-​MLK-​assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-​violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”

For daring to tell a truth that protesters did not want to hear, he was fired from his job as a data analyst.

As happened in Salem in 1692, this mania will implode, unacceptable in America’s free and open society.

Even witch hunts burn out. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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