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general freedom ideological culture media and media people

“You in Your Whiteness”

The “antiracist” training now often inflicted in the west resembles the efforts to shame and remake people during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today’s western cultural revolutionaries are not (yet) going nearly as far as China’s, when people were routinely humiliated, beaten to a pulp, imprisoned, and murdered for “wrong” ideas or background.

In the west of 2023, people with “wrong” politics and background (i.e., white) are merely humiliated, censored, perhaps forced out of a job. But we can now add another similarity to Mao’s era: the possibility that hounded victims will commit suicide, as Richard Bilkszto recently did.

Yes, Mr. Bilkszto killed himself.

In 2021, Kike Ojo-​Thompson — hired to conduct “antiracist” struggle sessions that Bilkszto, a fill-​in principal in Toronto, was required to attend — blasted him for disagreeing with her officially-​approved contention that Canada is “more racist” than the United States.

While the issue could be subject to much debate, most of it would likely be pointless. Neither side stands on firm ground.

According to Bilkszto’s eventual lawsuit against the school district, Ojo-​Thompson berated, “We are here to talk about anti-​Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people.” She also accused Bilkszto of being a white supremacist.

Repeatedly.

A workplace agency found that Ojo-​Thompson had indeed engaged in “harassment and bullying.” And, perhaps because of his complaint with the agency, the school district declined to renew Bilkszto’s contract. His lawsuit contends that his reputation was “systematically demolished.”

Now that he’s safely dead, do those who punished Bilkszto for uttering the “wrong” view of racial claims now regret their conduct? 

No more, I bet, than they regard themselves as the bullies they are.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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education and schooling ideological culture

The Enforcers of Conformity

In the American academe of 2022, you never know who will be next on the chopping block for disputing the latest insanities. At the moment, that someone is former Princeton University classics professor Joshua Katz.

Katz is supposedly being fired for a relationship he had with a student 15 years ago and for which he was penalized in 2017. Actually, it’s for exposing the racist assumptions of so-​called antiracism in a 2020 article.

It seems Princeton has been itching for an excuse to can him. Last year, the university found its excuse when the student involved in the older controversy, provoked by the new one, revived the old complaint.

Katz’s lawyer, Samantha Harris, says “the message to would-​be dissenters is clear: the price of speaking out is having your personal life turned inside out looking for information to destroy you.”

Only a few colleagues have publicly supported Professor Katz.

Or even still talk to him. 

More have joined the bandwagon against him. When it’s been most urgent to profess the truth, these professors have preferred a “safer” path.

In 2020, Katz wrote: “The pressure to apologize . . . to appease one’s tormentors can be tremendous, but do not give in to the pressure. If you feel you did no wrong, do not apologize.”

If Professor Katz wants to put this nightmare behind him, I’d understand. If he wants to sue Princeton for a billion dollars or so, well, I’d understand that too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Erecting Democracy

Though I opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was not at all offended when an Iraqi mob toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein. 

I liked it. That statue was a symbol of oppression.

In my mind, at least. 

I guess that’s the rub, eh? A symbol of oppression to one person might be an important piece of history to another.

Here in the good ole USA, we now have our own variant of statue roulette going on, of course. And I wonder: Can we not find a better way to decide public policy regarding statue removal than today’s status quo of leaving it up to roaming, violent mobs? Iconoclastic crowds that, we can see, have some trouble coherently identifying the enemy symbols they seek to vandalize.*

“[T]he choice in 2020 is very simple,” offers President Trump. “Do you want to bow before the left-​wing mob or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”

Actually, cancel those calisthenics.

Let’s vote on the issue. 

Either lawmakers or citizens should initiate ballot measures, city by city, state by state, asking voters to choose: keep or remove said statute(s).

The advantages?

  • A more fair and democratic approach, for starters. 
  • Less public policy decision-​making by mobs.
  • No one else need be critically injured from faulty statue-​removal efforts.

Perhaps most important of all, a real discussion and debate can take place.

Where all sides can be heard. 

Whatever decisions get made regarding any given monument, we would at least better understand each other.

Let’s stop fighting and start voting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* Monuments to famous abolitionists, Matthias Baldwin and John Greenleaf Whittier, as well as a memorial to fallen Union soldiers, who gave their “last full measure of devotion” to end slavery, have been defaced or destroyed. “The irony of vandalizing a monument to those who died to end slavery,” said a Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park member, “is lost on the morons who don’t know their history.” 

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Ngo Go Zone

Last week, photojournalist Andy Ngo was attacked on the streets of Portland, Oregon, while video-​recording a Patriot Prayer march and its Antifa opposition.

As they attacked, one malefactor can be heard screaming, “F**k you, Andy!” Another cried, “F**king owned bitch.”

It was personal. They knew Mr. Ngo, who had been covering Antifa and other far-​left activists rioting in Portland for several years.

Ngo’s new GoPro camera was stolen, he was hit on the head, had eggs and milkshakes thrown at him, and shot with silly string. The aim, apparently, was to humiliate and hurt and incapacitate.

Aside from the Antifa terrorists’ personal sense of aggrievement, there is that odd element where the putative “protesters” just do not want to be recorded. Which, after all, is the whole point of actual protest.

Odder yet, while Antifa is allegedly for equality and inclusion, the faces of the arrested malefactors appear largely white, and from what we know in the past, the black-​clad, hooded-​or-​masked mob is mostly made up of white, twenty-​something men. 

A white mob attacking a gay Asian sure seems racist and homophobic.

So maybe there is a bit of truth to the notion that Antifa is mainly a bunch of guys unleashing their lust for violence and mayhem. “Anti-​fascism” is just a not very plausible excuse. 

But, significantly, it is one that major media continue to make for the group. And many in the media go further, apparently seeking to excuse Antifa by labelling Ngo as a “conservative” (!) and a “provocateur.”

There is no excuse for Antifa — or its apologists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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initiative, referendum, and recall

Meet the Mob

North Dakota faces a serious problem: The Mob. 

“The point of being a republic is so that Mob doesn’t rule,” warned Chris Berg, host of Point of View on Fargo, North Dakota’s Valley News Live. “If you live in a true democracy that’s where Mob can rule.”

Berg called citizens petitioning issues onto the ballot for a vote “a mob-​rule system … that allows us to change the actual constitution of our state.”

Not sure which constitution one might work to amend except for the “actual” constitution. But I do see a clearly articulated concern with mob rule. 

“A republic, my folks, is what we live in,” continued Berg, juxtaposing the ballot initiative process as “a pure democratic system.”

But ballot measures are no more pure democracy than are acts enacted by the legislature. Both can be challenged and overturned if they violate constitutional rights.

The focus of Berg’s anti-​initiative worry is Measure 1, an ethics amendment passed last November and derided by Berg as “a bunch of Hollywood money to change North Dakota.” 

True, Measure 1 did receive support from folks outside North Dakota, including groups supported by Hollywood stars. 

Those financial backers were well known to North Dakotans, 54 percent of whom voted for the measure. 

And freedom means the right to associate with fellow Americans across state lines. 

Responding to Berg, Dustin Gawrylow, managing director of the North Dakota Watchdog Network, said the citizen initiative process was “the best way to keep legislators honest and in tune with the people.”

After all, without “a way for the people to actually set the rules for lawmakers,” the people would be ruled by … the capitol mob.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people

Transcendent Gray Lady

How far are we away from a completely vindictive, murderous madness like The Terror of revolutionary France?

I know, almost no one is talking of guillotines. 

But a lot of people seem determined to destroy others’ lives publicly. We are all too familiar with Twitterstorms where worked-​up outrage forces someone out of a job or a deal  — usually for making jokes.

But it’s not just jokes. Not long ago an actor got in trouble for Tweeting that commentator and Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro seems a nice, honest person on the right that a leftist might listen to. The actor was forced to recant, and then Shapiro himself publicly recanted from some past putatively “dumb” things he “did” or “said.” Or something.

Since we’re talking about Mr. Shapiro, his commentary on the Sarah Jeong case is not irrelevant. The New York Times hired Ms. Jeong despite her past racist tweets. 

Well, racist-​against-​whites. 

“By the rules of the left,” says Shapiro, “this person should now be excised from polite society.”

But the Times is keeping her.

Shapiro finds this “indicative” of more than just the Times. The left at large seems OK with anti-​white racism but not anti-any-other-race.

It’s indicative of a lot more, though, not just racism and anti-​racism and anti-​anti-​racism. 

Outrage and the Twittermob may be fun. But it’s time to stop.

Is the Times leading the way?

Only when the decrepit old rag defends someone not on its own ideological side. Transcending partisan mob mania means first transcending partisanship. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


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