All presidents have had a hand in wars we have fought but starting with the Viet Nam War political micro-managing took root and during the Obama Era more lawyers were involved in determining how the fighting was conducted than generals.
Apparently the General in Afghanistan was allowed to drop the bomb when and if he sought and felt comfortable enough he would be backed and not second guessed.
PC'ism should have been buried a long time ago. Perhaps its death knell is now tolling.
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Will a nuclear war begin and Trump be blamed because he chose to stand up to N Korea? Anything is possible when you seek sanity in dealing with nut cases. Chamberlain thought he could do it by giving Czech's away and WW 2 was the result. Rabin thought he could do it in Oslo and Arafat gave Israel its first Intifada and so it goes
I seriously doubt N Korea's fat boy is going to precipitate a war but Trump is not one to be challenged or to have his bluff called. (See 1 below.)
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A message to the Palestinians - Try peace for a change. (See 2 below.)
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Will Michigan Democrats nominate this Muslim to be their candidate for governor?
If so, it means Sharia Law becomes a step closer to becoming inculcated into our legal system whether he wins or not. (See 3 below.)
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Campus free speech interruptions have reached a critical point. If allowed to continue the future of campus free speech could be severely impacted and maybe ended. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
BREAKING ALERT! North Korea Just Ordered Evacuation Of Their Capital City A “MAJOR EVENT” Looms
The deportations of nearly a quarter of Pyongyang’s residents come as North Korea readies its sixth nuclear test – and a potential military strike by the US in response.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has ordered the evacuation of almost 600,000 residents from the capital, Pyongyang, according to South Korean media.
“Among those who were chosen by authorities to move are people whose relatives defected to South Korea, had been jailed in a prison camp, used drugs or counterfeit money, and produced, distributed or sold pirated films from the South,” reported the Korea Joongang Daily.
This implies that Jong-un wants to people in the capital who are less likely to aid foreign troops during an invasion.
“Population control was the pretext of the latest order,” said an anonymous insider. “But in reality, the purpose is to ‘purify’ the North Korean capital and allow only the loyal elite class to live there.”
That said, population control could be a factor if North Korea, which has lost millions to famine over the past few decades, considers Pyongyang a national redoubt.
The conflict in North Korea is deepening by the day; on Wednesday Infowars reported that China warned it will “react strongly” to the rogue nation’s nuclear threats.
North Korea may test an nuclear weapon on April 15 – the birthday of its founding president Kim Il Sung – as an act of defiance against the US strike group anchored off the Korean peninsula.
“The North Korean nuclear test scare comes just a few weeks after Japan began staging mass evacuation drills after Kim Jong-un test fired missiles and conducted rocket engine tests on intercontinental missiles,” reported The Sun. “The first exercise of its kind saw civilians young and old scrambling for cover as air-raid sirens wailed away.”
The Japanese government is already releasing public emergency measures in case of nuclear war.
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2)
If Palestinians Don't Like Settlements, They Should Give Peace a Chance
By Jim Sinkinson
Consider this: If the Arabs had made peace with Israel when they had chances—in 1948, 1967, 1973, 2001 and 2008—when Israel made offers of land for peace to defeated Arab nations, as well as to the Palestinians, the settlements would not be an issue today.
In fact, from 1948-1967 there were no Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), yet the Arabs have stubbornly refused all of Israel’s offers of peace from 1948 (when Israel was founded) through the present. They have refused to recognize the Jewish state and have refused to negotiate.
Take this enduring example of the Arabs’ unqualified and unrelenting hostility: Following Israel’s repulsion in 1967 of attacks by Egypt, Jordan and Syria during the Six-Day War—as well as Israel’s subsequent offer to return captured land for peace—the Arab League responded with its infamous “Three No’s of Khartoum”: No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.
Remember, this was before any settlements.
This 60-year refusal to make peace with Israel—this never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity—has dearly cost the Arab world and the Palestinians specifically. Since 1948, Israel has skyrocketed—while even suffering under numerous wars and extreme political adversity levied by the Arab world—to become one of the world’s economic and technology powerhouses, while also consistently scoring among the top 15 “happiest” countries on Earth.
Meanwhile, the Arab world is mostly an economic and political disaster zone, and even those countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, which are reasonably stable, are 100% dependent on oil, and have failed to use their largess to build engines of economic independence.
The Palestinians are in worse shape than ever. They are politically divided between the isolated Hamas terror dictatorship in Gaza and the hopelessly corrupt West Bank Arabs, who are utterly dependent on the global welfare system. Neither group has held democratic elections in 12 years. Both oppose the existence of the Jewish state.
Contrast the Palestinians’ obstinacy and political bankruptcy with Israel’s many offers of peace and its persistent success as a state. The greatest puzzle is why so many Westerners passionately believe the Palestinians deserve statehood. But setting aside this perplexing philosophical riddle, what of Israel’s settlements?
It’s clear the settlements are not the problem, nor have they ever been. It’s also clear that once the Palestinians make peace, the borders between Israel and “Palestine” will be drawn, and the question of settlements will instantly go away.
The final thing that should be clear to the Palestinians—though they seem steadfastly to deny it—is that absent a peace agreement, Israel’s settlements will continue, slowly but surely, to expand. After all, the land in question—Judea and Samaria—doesn’t “belong” to the Palestinians, and it is, by virtue of Israel’s defeating Jordan in 1967, under Israeli control.
In other words—and please consider this a universal truth—the longer the Palestinians wait to trade land for peace, the less land will be available to trade for.
This week’s FLAME Hotline featured article, below, comes from Elliott Abrams, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who provides a concise analysis of the Trump administration’s position on the settlements, contrasting it with the bumbling, hash-making doctrine of the Obama administration.
Abrams points out that Trump, unlike Obama, is not so ideologically driven and therefore does not insist on imposition of rigid guidelines for Israel’s settlements, but rather strongly requests restraint. This gives Prime Minister Netanyahu a bit of breathing room in managing disparate factions to his left and right in his governing coalition back home.
If you ever hear friends or colleagues bemoaning Israel’s settlements, as I constantly do, you’ll be glad you read Abram’s brief piece. While President Trump still hasn’t done much to fulfill his big campaign promises to Israel and to us American Zionists, Abrams makes clear that Trump’s ambiguous stance on this matter is still an improvement over the past eight years . . . and likely moves us closer to peace.
Finally, I hope you’ll also quickly review the P.S. immediately below, which describes FLAME’s current hasbarah campaign to expose five despicable media myths about Israel’s settlements in Judea and Samaria.
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3)The Democratic Party may have found its next Barack Obama. He's running for Governor of Michigan.
By Leo Hohmann
His name is Dr. Abdul el-Sayed, he’s a 32-year-old medical doctor and he recently launched his campaign for Governor of Michigan, the election for which is in November 2018. If he wins he would be America’s first Muslim governor.
He speaks articulately, without an accent, inserts humor into his speeches at seemingly just the right moments, and he has the full backing of America’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood-linked network of Islamic organizations.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Sayed said Michigan voters are having “buyer’s remorse,” and that President Trump’s decisions “are at odds with deeply held American values, and distractions from real issues.”
Sayed served as the executive director of the Detroit Health Department and Health Officer for the City of Detroit, appointed by Mayor Mike Duggan. At 30 years old, he was at the time of his appointment in 2015 the youngest health director in a major U.S. city.
According to El-Sayed, his decision to run was influenced by concerns over state leadership following the lead-tainted water crisis in Flint, as well as policies being implemented in Washington, D.C., under President Trump.
Dick Manasseri, spokesman for Secure Michigan, a group that educates Michiganders about the threat of Shariah law, predicts that Sayed will at least win the Democratic nomination for governor.
“It is the exact same thing as Barack Obama in Chicago in the early 2000s,” said Manasseri. “He’s young, attractive, he does not give out a lot of information, he speaks in platitudes about celebrating inclusiveness and diversity.”
Sayed is known as a warrior for environmental justice. He talks about “standing up to corporate polluters,” and how, in his family, he was taught that having “love and compassion” for the vulnerable are “more important than where you’re from.”
“How could any good progressive Democrat vote against that in good conscience?” asks Manasseri.
Sayed is highly educated, a Rhodes scholar who attended Oxford University in 2009 and became a practicing epidemiologist.
“He’s very well packaged,” Manasseri said. “He’s far more accomplished than Barack Obama. Obama was not this accomplished, they connected him to certain foundations and his candidacy took off.”
Sayed is the recipient of several research awards, including being named one of the Carnegie Council’s Policy Innovators. He created and taught the Mailman School’s first-ever course on systems science and population health. He co-edited a textbook on the topic with Sandro Galea published in 2017 by Oxford University Press entitled “Systems Science and Population Health.”
In his new video ad, Sayed says that as health director one of the first big things he did was come up with a government program to purchase eyeglasses for every kid that needed a pair. “Why? Because every child deserves the right to see what’s on the blackboard,” he said in his campaign launch speech.
He pointed to his hand as the map of Michigan to locate Gratiot County, “in the heartland of Michigan,” the place where he was born to Egyptian-immigrant parents and raised by his dad, Muhammad, and his stepmother, a native Michigander.
Watch Sayed’s 2-minute campaign ad for governor of Michigan:
In his campaign launch on Feb. 25 at Detroit’s Eastern Market, Sayed talked about his dad growing up one of six kids in a one-bedroom apartment in Egypt and coming to America and bringing his diversity of culture to Michigan. It’s all about celebrating multiculturalism, he said, standing at a podium in the market amid supporters holding signs that read “Abdul for Michigan.”
“He would come to this market to buy the foods to make the dishes that would make him feel at home. You see this market for him brought him home, from Alexandria right here in Detroit. Some of my most wholesome memories took place right here,” Sayed said. “And I remember buying those foods… but not only that I remember the diversity of faces that I would experience here, black and white, Asian, Latino. People who are coming together to celebrate something, together. Farmers and truckers and factory workers. Families from up north doing business with families from right here in Detroit. Each of them Buying and selling the same exact ingredients that they would take home to turn into the dishes that celebrated their families’ history.”
Sayed promotes what he calls his “rather unusual American story.”
He said his proud Egyptian parents, Fattah and Muhammad, emigrated to the U.S. “in search of a better life.
“When they came here they took a bet on an America that was big enough for them, too. They believed in a country that would give them dignified well-paying jobs, that would educate their children. Where they could pray however they wanted to pray.”
Sayed said his “diverse if highly unlikely family” taught him that “what you believe and stand for is more important than where you come from, to have compassion and care and respect for those more vulnerable.” He said he was taught that “real leaders are those that can stand firm against the powerful, stand strong with the weak, and stand humbly before God.”
At the Thanksgiving dinner table, “which is a very diverse dinner table,” hosted by he and his wife Sarah, he said his family includes a Presbyterian deacon from Flint, an imam from Egypt and an atheist-Polish uncle who is a professor at Michigan.
“And they share hard conversations about life in American and they don’t always agree, but they respect and love each other…they share a common future that brings them together. And as Michiganders, so do we.”
Manaserri says the Muslim Brotherhood would never support a candidate that didn’t have tons of money behind him and that they did not believe “has a real chance of winning.”
“Any Republican would be afraid to confront him on his Muslim Brotherhood connections or his views on Shariah,” Manasseri said. “He is a devout Shariah-compliant guy, and I would predict that he will be endorsed by the Catholic Church, which is very powerful in Michigan.”
Manasseri points out that a bill supporting American Law for American Courts, widely regarded as an anti-Shariah law, was defeated in the Michigan Legislature when two powerful lobbies – the Michigan Catholic Conference and the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR – teamed up to kill it. He expects the same coalition to form behind a candidate who would make history as America’s first Muslim governor.
“So if this guy rises in the polls, I would predict the Catholic Church will support his candidacy,” he said. “Just like with Obama, because we gotta make history.”
“It’s Obama II,” Manasseri said. “Elizabeth Warren will be coming to campaign for him, the Democrats in other states will be raising money for him. The DNC number-two man [Keith Ellison] will be raising money for him. Of course this guy is going to be on the Sunday morning talk shows. He’ll be everywhere. A candidate for governor who is Muslim Brotherhood …if that doesn’t tell you there’s a Shariah swamp in Michigan I don’t know what does.”
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4) Understanding the Campus Free-Speech Crisis
By Stanly Kurtz
These incidents follow the February riot that forced the cancellation of a Milo Yiannopoulos talk at UC Berkeley, and the March shout-down at Middlebury College of conservative Charles Murray, followed by the violent attack that sent Murray’s liberal interlocutor, Professor Allison Stanger, to the hospital.What’s gone wrong on our college campuses and how can we fix it? This past week, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald, a knowledgeable supporter of America’s criminal justice system and thoughtful critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, was repeatedly shouted down by protesters at UCLA, then silenced and forced to escape with a police escort the next day, during what should have been her talk at Claremont McKenna College.
The immediate lesson of the UCLA shout-down and the Claremont shut-down is that widespread condemnation by all sides of the Berkeley and Middlebury incidents has not restored campus free speech. On the contrary, America’s colleges continue their descent into low-grade anarchy.
Why is that? The immediate explanation is that leftist college students are furious at the election of Donald Trump as president. Yet often-illiberal demonstrations swept over the nation’s campuses during the 2015–16 academic year, well before Trump became a factor. The crisis of free speech has also been aggravated by a rising tide of shout-downs and disruptions of pro-Israel speakers since 2014. Before that, I reported in 2013 on a few of the more egregious silencing incidents sparked by the campus fossil-fuel divestment movement, then in full swing. In fact, I began covering campus silencing incidents for NRO in 2001, when I wrote about angry UC Berkeley students storming the offices of the Daily Californian to destroy a run of papers containing a David Horowitz ad opposing reparations for slavery. Today’s problems are hardly new.
Back in 2001, as reported by ABC News, thefts of campus newspapers had increased by 600 percent over the previous decade and campus speeches by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, anti-preferences activist Ward Connerly, and Second Amendment supporter Charlton Heston were often disrupted or canceled. Here is a very partial excerpt from David Horowitz’s description of his reception at various campuses in the early 2000s: “I once had to terminate a talk prematurely despite the presence of thirty armed police and four bodyguards at Berkeley. I had to be protected by twelve armed police and a German Shepard at the University of Michigan. I was rushed by clearly deranged individuals and saved only by the intervention of a bodyguard, twice — at M.I.T. and Princeton.” (Sixteen years later, Horowitz has become the latest example of a campus free speech shut-down.)
A San Francisco Chronicle article from 2000 describes an incident at Berkeley in which 200 demonstrators broke through police barricades and blocked a talk by then-former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The incident was publicly condemned in a column by Berkeley mayor Shirley Dean and condemned as well in a joint letter by several members of the original Berkeley Free Speech Movement. These interventions by prestigious voices on the left were fueled by “cumulative frustration over several years of leftist demonstrations, particularly at the UC campus, disrupting speeches of those they view as criminal in one form or another.” Targets of UC Berkeley disruptions stretching from the mid 1980s to the year 2000 included Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and former NATO commander General Wesley Clark.
The first in this series of UC Berkeley speaker disruptions of the post-1960s era seems to have been the 1983 shout-down down of Ronald Reagan’s United Nations ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, by hecklers opposed to U.S. policy in El Salvador. Although her words were drowned out, Kirkpatrick went through the motions of reading her talk. Her follow-up Berkeley lecture was canceled, however. This incident, at a time when shout-downs were rare, sparked a national discussion and broad condemnation. Yet far from this condemnation preventing further disruptions, the virus quickly spread. Kirkpatrick was shouted down two weeks later at the University of Minnesota and her scheduled 1983 commencement address at Smith was canceled. The current era of campus shout-downs, shut-downs, and disinvitations had arrived. Yet the origins of this era lay still further back in time.
The campus disruptions of the 1960s and early 1970s set the pattern for all that was to follow from the mid 1980s onward. Most important for our purposes, Yale’s Woodward Report of 1974, the classic defense of campus free speech, identified a series of shout-downs and disinvitations stretching back eleven years as the pattern that Yale would need to break. What the Woodward Report called Yale’s “failures” began in 1963 when President Kingman Brewster, “in the interest of law and order” and in deference to New Haven’s black community, canceled a scheduled talk by segregationist Alabama governor George C. Wallace at the height of the Civil Rights struggle.Keep in mind that the report’s chairman, Yale historian C. Vann Woodward, had advised Thurgood Marshall’s legal team as it argued for school desegregation in what became the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954. And Woodward’s book, The Strange Case of Jim Crow, had been dubbed “the historical bible of the civil rights movement” by Martin Luther King Jr. himself. Yet this Civil Rights hero, along with other liberal faculty members at Yale, pressured President Brewster to defend the freedom of speakers such as George Wallace.
None of this is to deny that the problem of campus shout-downs and disinvitations is getting worse. Yet it’s important to keep in mind that today’s pattern is an intensification of a long-standing crisis that has had its ups and downs since the early Sixties, but has not fundamentally changed in form for well over five decades. What’s clear after 50-some years is that the academy has proven itself incapable of solving its free-speech problem on its own. Let’s see why.
We can think of the challenges to free-speech since the Sixties as washing over our campuses in four great waves. The first wave (“Young Radicals”) was made up of the illiberal and violent Sixties student radicals. Notwithstanding the views of the Free Speech Movement veterans who condemned the Berkeley Netanyahu shut-down of 2000, a great many of the Sixties radicals rejected classical-liberal conceptions of freedom in favor of a neo-Marxist analysis. In this view, free speech and constitutional democracy are tools used by the ruling class to suppress dissent and protect an oppressive society.
The second anti–free-speech wave (“Long March”) hit colleges in the early-to-mid 1980s, as the radicals left graduate school and took up junior faculty positions, bringing their suspicions of free speech with them. These faculty did away with required Western Civilization courses as well, helping to launch the academic “culture war” that began at Stanford in 1987. After allied leftist faculty and students succeeded in abolishing Stanford’s Western Civilization requirement in 1988, student demonstrators began demanding speech codes (partly in hopes of silencing students who had challenged them during the Western Civilization debate)
The third anti–free-speech wave (“Takeover”) began in the mid 1990s, as the older generation of professors began to retire. At this point, the younger and more radical generation of faculty members reached critical mass. That is, they had the numbers to control hiring. Not believing in the classical-liberal vision of a marketplace of ideas, these faculty used the tenure system, not to seek out and protect the finest scholarly representatives of diverse perspectives, but to solidify an intellectual monopoly of the Left. By the 2000s, the tenured radicals constituted a controlling majority in many social science and humanities departments, and stood as the most powerful plurality in the university as a whole.
The fourth anti–free-speech wave (“Transformed Generation”) consists of the late Millennial students who began demanding safe-spaces and trigger warnings around 2014, just as the number of university shout-downs and disinvitations began to spike. Free-speech advocate Gregg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt attribute the new student sensitivities, in part, to parental coddling by the Baby Boomers. No doubt there is truth to this, but this college generation’s K–12 curriculum also differed dramatically from past standards.
Although Lynne Cheney, former National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, managed to convince the U.S. Senate to condemn the proposed new multiculturalist National History Standards of 1994, the left-leaning post-Sixties generation of K–12 teachers adopted them in practice anyway. The rest of the curriculum was also quickly remodeled along lines that stressed group conflict and America’s sins. The generation that brought us “micro-aggressions” and “white privilege” duly entered college 20 years later.
The key to solving the campus free-speech crisis lies in the decade-long interregnum between the radical Sixties and the kick-off of the campus culture wars in the mid 1980s. This was also a period of relative calm in the country as a whole.
The widely praised Woodward Report of 1974 marked the effective end of the Young Radicals phase (wave one), and ushered in the decade-long restoration of campus free speech. That restoration ended with the Jeane Kirkpatrick shout-down at Berkeley in 1983, which initiated the second wave of free-speech crisis.
What distinguished the Woodward Report of 1974 from Berkeley’s response to the Kirkpatrick shout-down of 1983 was the issue of discipline. The Woodward Report not only eloquently upheld the principle of free speech, it insisted that students who shouted down visiting speakers must be disciplined. The Woodward Report also established a sanctions policy, and a system for warning disruptive students of potential disciplinary consequences. This approach carried the day at Yale and elsewhere during the post-Sixties restoration of free speech. In effect, the Woodward Report and its positive national reception helped return the credible threat of discipline for speaker shout-downs that had been abandoned by craven administrators during the 1960s.
A decade after the Woodward Report, things changed. While the Berkeley faculty as a whole condemned the students who shouted down Jeane Kirkpatrick in 1983, a faculty resolution to have Kirkpatrick’s hecklers punished was defeated. This was likely a concession to the many junior faculty who openly defended Kirkpatrick’s disruptors on the grounds that “oppressors” have no free-speech rights. Although many observers felt that disciplinary action against Kirkpatrick’s hecklers had to be taken, the UC Board of Regents also declined to follow up on a demand for discipline initiated by Regents’ chairman Glenn Campbell. Meanwhile, UC Berkeley chancellor Ira Heyman indicated that no disciplinary action would be taken.
With more leftist faculty streaming in over succeeding years, those who favored discipline for disruptors grew less powerful. The days when even (or especially) liberal Civil Rights heroes understood the need to grant free speech to segregationists were over. The policy of disciplinary sanctions for shout-downs instituted to national praise by Yale in 1974, definitively went by the boards at Berkeley in 1983. Speaker disruptions then slowly grew in frequency and force at Berkeley and beyond. So, the refusal to discipline the students who shouted down Kirkpatrick ultimately helped lock today’s quasi-anarchic anti-speech system into place.
The thuggishness and violence of the Sixties demonstrations at their height exceeded what we see today. Yet today’s chronic, pervasive, and steadily growing vice-grip of campus orthodoxy, punctuated and enforced by occasional shout-downs and meeting takeovers, is in its way more dangerous.
There are plenty of indications that campus free speech is more besieged nowadays than it’s been in decades. Trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions signal a cultural sea-change. Anti-Israel shout-downs and disruptions have multiplied dramatically. These are no longer occasional embarrassing episodes but the fruit of a deliberate strategy devised by influential sectors of the campus left. FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), which keeps an index of disinvitations and shout-downs, says the overall rate of all such incidents is increasing.Yet statistics tell only part of the story. We can’t assume a constant rate of speakers attempting to counter campus orthodoxies. Top comedians and an unknowable number of conservative speakers now avoid college campuses. At some point, a decreasing rate of shout-downs may actually indicate that free speech, along with resistance to campus orthodoxies, has been successfully crushed. And in a world of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, a few well-publicized shout-downs may suffice to chill speech and encourage violent demonstrators across the entire country. Finally, in contrast to the Sixties, today’s illiberal demonstrators, disruptive and ornery though they may seem, may actually be allied with significant sections of the faculty and administration (as KC Johnson has cogently argued).
So there are important reasons to believe that today’s free-speech crisis is locked-in and unchangeable in the absence of outside intervention. The alliance of radical students with dominant sections of the faculty (precisely those faculty members who reject classical liberalism) means that few C. Vann Woodwards remain to pressure administrators into defending free speech. Meanwhile, the ideologically based “studies” programs (various ethnic studies, women’s studies, and environmental studies majors) have grown to challenge the conventional academic departments in size and influence. This creates a large and permanent faculty and student constituency schooled in suspicion of classic liberalism.
Ultimately, the public has granted the academy certain rights and privileges — special financial and policy protections (especially tenure) — on the understanding that institutions of higher education will pursue truth under conditions of free inquiry and fairness to all points of view. There is a kind of implicit bargain or social contract here, and the academy has so consistently and persistently violated its side of the bargain that public action is now necessary.
In particular, the tenure system, designed to ensure freedom of speech and secure the marketplace of ideas, has been abused to create an illiberal intellectual monopoly. And precisely because of this monopolistic abuse of the unique privilege of academic tenure, along with the unresolved, decades-long crisis of campus free speech, the traditional policy presumption in favor of local control can no longer be sustained in this sector.
That is why state and federal legislators cannot look the other way but must act to restore our most basic liberties to the academy. And while legislation eliminating restrictive speech codes and so-called free-speech zones is very much in order, the underlying problem will not be solved until administrators are pressed to restore discipline for speaker shout-downs. The administrative refusal to discipline disruptors, which took off in the Sixties and resumed with the Kirkpatrick incident in 1983, must be reversed. Only a return to the policies and ethos of the Woodward Report offers hope.There are several state-level campus free-speech bills on offer, but only the model legislation proposed in the Goldwater Report systematically addresses the problem of discipline for campus shout-downs. I have also offered a plan to tie federal aid to higher education to a restoration of discipline for speaker shout-downs, among other things.
The tattered campus climate of free speech ultimately rests on deeper cultural shifts that must be addressed by educators over the long-term. Yet legislative action to protect campus free speech could serve as the shock that initiates cultural change.
Short of legislative steps to restore discipline for disruption, even bipartisan condemnation of campus shout-downs will fail, as it has failed repeatedly in the past. The ranks of authentically liberal faculty members are far too thinned to do what Woodward and his colleagues did in 1974. Without an intervention by the public through its elected representatives, the structure of the anti-free-speech university is locked-in for the foreseeable future.
After 54 years, we are indeed at an inflection point. Act now, or campus free speech will be lost for a lifetime.— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com.
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