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Bari speaks up in her own inimitable style and if you are truly interested in fairness then sign up with "FAIR:"
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Plus: a new organization picking up the flag the
ACLU has put down.
I know a lot of people
who live in fear of saying what they really think. In red America and in blue America — and,
perhaps more so, on the red internet and the blue internet — we are in the grip
of an epidemic of self-silencing. What you censor, of course, depends on where
you sit.
My liberal friends who
live in red America confess to avoiding discussions of masks, Dominion, Ted Cruz, Josh
Hawley, the 2020 election and Donald Trump, to name just a few. When those who
disagree with the surrounding majority speak their mind, they suffer the
consequences. I think here of my friend, the conservative writer David French,
who for four years endured an avalanche of horrific attacks against himself and
his family for criticizing the Trump administration that ultimately
required the intervention of the FBI.
But there are two
illiberal cultures swallowing up the country. I know because I live in blue
America, in a world awash in NPR tote bags and front lawn signs proclaiming the
social justice bonafides of the family inside.
In my America, the
people who keep quiet don’t fear the wrath of Trump supporters. They fear the
illiberal left.
They are feminists who
believe there are biological differences between men and women. Journalists who
believe their job is to tell the truth about the world, even when it’s inconvenient.
Doctors whose only creed is science. Lawyers who will not compromise on the
principle of equal treatment under the law. Professors who seek the freedom to
write and research without fear of being smeared. In short, they are centrists,
libertarians, liberals and progressives who do not ascribe to every single
aspect of the new far-left orthodoxy.
That’s the opening of an
essay I wrote about America’s self-silencing majority for The Deseret News Magazine,
published this week. It was my effort
to explain the widespread phenomenon — and seeming contradiction — of
doublethink in our democracy.
I am not speaking here
of people holding their tongue in order to be polite. I’m speaking about people
who are closeting their common-sensical beliefs for fear of a censorious,
merciless ideology that tags any skeptics as bigots.
These aren’t simply
anecdotes. A recent national study from the Cato Institute found
that 62% of Americans say they self-censor. The more conservative a group is,
the more likely they are to hide their views: 52% of Democrats confess to
self-censoring compared with 77% of Republicans. But still: 52% of
Democrats.
Two studies published
this week round out the picture.
One is Heterodox Academy’s annual Campus Expression
Survey Report, which found that in 2020, 62% of college students the group
surveyed “agreed the climate on their campus prevents students from saying
things they believe.” In other words, the majority of college students say that
they cannot tell the truth in institutions that exist for the purpose of
pursuing the truth. Read the whole thing.
The second is a report from the Center for the Study of
Partisanship and Ideology conducted by Eric Kaufmann. Again, it’s worth reading the whole thing, but one item stands
out: seven in ten conservative
academics in non-STEM fields say they self-censor.
Do ten conservative
American academics even exist? (Try naming ten outside of Hillsdale College.
I’ll go: Harvey Mansfield, Niall Ferguson, Ruth Wisse, Robby George. Struggling
to come up with a fifth without Google.) Then again, we wouldn’t know because
they are closeted.
This was a week when the
trend I have been writing about seemed to accelerate exponentially, touching subjects
I honestly was not expecting. Like Mr. Potato Head. And Dr.
Seuss.
By now you have surely
heard that the Seuss estate is ceasing publication of
six books, including “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and “If I
Ran the Zoo” because they show images that, according to the estate, are
“hurtful and wrong.”
Yes, of course: the
Seuss estate is welcome to discontinue any books it wants. But does it not
strike you as dystopian when eBay decides that people who own those books
cannot even resell them?
“EBay is currently
sweeping our marketplace to remove these items,” the company told the Wall
Street Journal. In the meantime, one can still reliably purchase works by those
paragons of social justice, Mussolini, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin, as Matt
Taibbi helpfully points out.
There’s more. Amazon
this week unveiled a new policy that it could erase the listings of
“inappropriate and offensive” works, or books that promote “hate speech.” Who
decides what is inappropriate, hateful or offensive? The same faceless (and
increasingly irreplaceable) company that delivers Haagen Dazs. “You needn’t
burn forbidden books if people can’t buy them in the first place,” Abigail
Shrier puts it in a sharp
piece about what this new policy portends.
It’s hard to fully
capture the downstream effects of this corporate totalitarianism. “For the
people saying that you'll be able to find copies of these books at libraries or
garage sales. Yes, perhaps. But writers do not support themselves like that.
They need markets. And so they will learn to anticipate the corporate power and
the result is self-censorship,” observed the critic Thomas Chatterton Williams
on Twitter. He’s right. But that kind of preemptive censorship is already here.
Don’t take my word for
it. Listen to my hero Natan Sharansky. In this essay — worth printing out and
reading slowly — he and co-author Gil Troy warn us about the
“bottom-up cultural totalitarianism” that’s sweeping across the West.
I know. It’s depressing.
Perhaps you’re sick of complaining and want to do something about it.
Good news: Yesterday we
launched the Foundation Against Intolerance and
Racism.
FAIR is an organization
that is picking up the flag the ACLU and the SPLC have put down by standing up
for civil rights, civil liberties, equality under the law, fairness, tolerance,
and pro-human anti-racism. Our mission statement spells it out beautifully.
The board of advisors is an advertisement for
what we’re all about: a coalition of liberals, moderates, and conservatives
joining together to defend our most essential values. The group
includes Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter, Melissa Chen, Ian Rowe, Glenn
Loury, Eli Steele, Steven Pinker, Daryl Davis, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Zaid Jilani,
Kmele Foster, Andrew Doyle, Chris Rufo, Liang-Fang Chao, Megyn Kelly, and more.
I’m honored to be working alongside them.
So please check out our website. And sign up here to make sure you’re in the
loop.
So far, FAIR is an
all-volunteer organization. I really hope you’ll get involved.
Last thing: Nellie is, far and away, the writing
talent in this house. Her essay this week
bowled me over and I’m really proud to share it.
Shabbat shalom, dear
readers! See you next week.
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Watching Biden painful for Lifson and soon most of the American public but never for the mass media because they are blinded by their prejudice:
Uh-oh! They let Biden get in front of a
microphone again
Even ten minutes reading
from a teleprompter on a Saturday afternoon was too much for the 45th President
of the United States. I suppose his handlers figured that it was important to
mark Senate passage of the nearly $2 trillion pork-laden, blue state-bailing
out “stimulus” bill with some presidential remarks. It may, after all, turn out
to be the high point of the Biden presidency, since Senate passage of the rest
of the Biden agenda looks iffy, now that Senators Manchin and Sinema have
stated their opposition to ending the filibuster.
But how much longer will
the American people accept the spectacle of their command-in-chief visibly
incapable of coherence? It’s painful to watch even 35 seconds of it.
When he had all of his
(limited) faculties, Biden knew that a bipartisan bill was one that attracted
votes from both parties. The husk of his former self does not.
We’re all getting older,
and it is no fun at all to notice how addled he is getting.
My guess is that his
handlers had some date in mind for pulling the plug on Joe’s presidency via the
25th Amendment, figuring that it would look too fishy to evacuate him from the
Oval Office too soon. A year at least, right? Anything less would suggest that
they knew he was unable to perform the duties of office but pulled a fast one
on the voters with the enthusiastic help of the media. Not even Democrat
primary voters were willing to vote for Kamala as president, so he was her
human shield, her stand-in.
But poor Joe seems to be
fading fast. The awesome responsibilities of office seem to age presidents at a
scary pace (except Donald Trump, who looked in terrific form a week ago at
CPAC). Jen Psaki asked for 3+ weeks until he does a press conference. I
am beginning to wonder if that will be the one where he announces he is
stepping aside?
The part that bothers me
the most are his eyes, the windows on his soul.
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Why wasn’t Dr. Seuss racist when Michelle Obama invited him to the White House? pic.twitter.com/riaDSkzfbB
— Errol Webber (@ErrolWebber) March 2, 2021
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Charles Barkley's daughter is marrying into a Jewish family so he is losing weight . See why below:
Charles Barkley lost weight because he was worried about being lifted in a chair for the traditional Jewish hora at his daughter's wedding
Charles Barkley is looking forward to his daughter's wedding this weekend, but he's a little worried about one aspect of the ceremony.
<img src="https://i.insider.com/
Charles Barkley rides a horse. REUTERS/Steve Sisney
In an appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" this week, the basketball Hall of Famer and current host of "NBA on TNT" chatted about the preparation for his only child's big day. In the lead-up to his 32-year-old daughter, Christiana Barkley, marrying entrepreneur Ilya Hoffman on Saturday, Barkley said he's "been really working out hard because apparently, they've got to pick me up in a chair."
The 6-foot-6, 250-pound Barkley and his family, are expected to participate in the hora — a traditional Jewish celebratory dance in which party guests are lifted in a chair — with Hoffman, who is Jewish, and his family.
"Listen, I need all Jewish people on deck, brother," Barkley said. "Because I can only get so skinny by Saturday, man. It's like I'm a soldier, all hands on deck."
<img src="https://i.insider.com/
Charles Barkley (left) chats with Michael Jordan. AP Photo/John Swart
Aside from his understandable anxiety surrounding his upcoming chair-hoist, the 11-time NBA All-Star said he's excited for the wedding and eager to welcome Hoffman and his relatives into his own family because "they are amazing people."
"Hopefully, this'll be the only one, too," Barkley said. "I promised [my daughter] this; this has to work because this is the only one I'm paying for."
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