A new survey on Americans’ views of free speech gives mixed results

October 31, 2017 • 10:00 am

I’ve known about this survey on free speech for a while, but was told not to divulge the details until it was published. Well, it still hasn’t come out yet, but since Conor Friedersdorf published some of its results in The Atlantic (“American’s many divides over free speech“), these are now in the public domain. There are a lot more data to come, of course, but I’ll just summarize what’s been published.

The results, which come from a Cato Institute/YouGov survey of 2300 people, are heartening but not completely so. The good news is that most Americans favor no or very limited restrictions on speech. The bad news is that a substantial fraction of Americans still want restrictions on “hate speech” (despite even more of them arguing, correctly, that defining “hate speech” is problematic), and even laws against it. Many Americans think that “hate speech” is already illegal, though it isn’t. Further, a large percentage of Americans with college experience think that some viewpoints should not be allowed to be expressed by speakers at colleges.  I’ll bulletpoint the main results reported by Friedersdorf (and will link to the survey when it appears).

While many readers have claimed that speech restrictions are largely something approved by young people rather than older ones, and that students will grow out of censoriousness as they age, there are no data on that in the article. I trust there will be data published that’s divided up by age, since there are clearly data divided up by whether students are in college or have gone to college. In the meantime, have a gander. I’ve indented and put quotation marks around Friedersdorf’s words, and placed my own comments flush left.

  • “. . . 59 percent of Americans say people should be able to express even deeply offensive views, while 40 percent said government should prevent people from engaging in hate speech, with partisan and racial divides characterizing the results.”

That’s almost 100% in total, so few people have no answer or are undecided.  But even though a majority favor the courts’ interpretation of the First Amendment, four in ten of all people surveyed still think that the government should prevent hate speech, and the only way to do that is through the law—making it illegal and punishing people. 40% is way too high. Remember, this is not just college students, but (presumably) a representative sample of all Americans.

Here’s a strange result when combined with what I’ll say shortly:

  • “An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that ‘it would be hard to ban hate speech because people can’t agree what speech is hateful,’ including 78 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Latinos, and 59 percent of African Americans. And the notion that ‘freedom of speech ensures the truth will ultimately win out’ was shared by 70 percent of Latinos, 68 percent of African Americans, and 63 percent of Democrats.

It’s surprising that minorities are more in favor of the “truth value” of  free speech than Democrats in general, since restrictions of freedom of speech are usually said to be there to protect minorities. But then get this:

  • “Yet a majority of Americans and a supermajority of African Americans believe that ‘society can prohibit hate speech and still protect free speech.’ (To complicate matters, a quarter of Americans, 38 percent of African Americans, and 45 percent of Latinos erroneously believe it is already illegal to make a racist statement in public.)”

That conflicts with the finding that a majority of Americans (including 78 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Latinos, and 59 percent of African Americans) think that it would be hard to ban hate speech because of the difficulty of defining it. Who, then, is to define it? This is a puzzling dichotomy of opinions. As for widespread ignorance of the First Amendment, well, that needs to be remedied, perhaps in school.

What kind of speech should be banned, then?

  • Forty-six percent would support a law making it illegal to say offensive things about African Americans; there is less support for banning insults against other groups (41 percent for Jews, 40 percent for immigrants and military-service members, 39 percent for Hispanics, 37 percent for Muslims, 36 percent for gays, lesbians, and transgender people, 35 percent for Christians).
    Forty-seven percent of Latinos, 41 percent of African Americans, and 26 percent of whites would favor a law making it illegal to say offensive things about white people in public.Should there be a law making it illegal to say offensive or disrespectful things in public about the police? Fifty-one percent of Latinos say yes. So do 40 percent of African Americans, 38 percent of Democrats, and 36 percent of both independents and Republicans.

Here we have nearly 4 in 10 Americans, despite their “overwhelming belief that it would be hard to ban hate speech” because it’s hard to define, clearly implying they know what hate speech is, and supporting laws against it. None of this should be illegal, for this kind of offensive speech, including anti-police speech, is protected by the First Amendment.

  • “Fifty-one percent of Democrats would favor a law “requiring people to refer to a transgender person by their preferred gender pronouns and not according to their biological sex.” Majorities of African Americans, Latinos, whites, and Republicans disagreed.”

Mere civility mandates that you call someone by the pronoun they prefer, but to enforce that with a law is ludicrous! Again, Democrats in general are more authoritarian than minorities (and Republicans!)

In other results, 72% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats think people should be punished for desecrating or burning the American flag. Sorry, but that’s legal, too! And 46% of Democrats? What is it that riles people about a scrap of cloth, whose burning merely symbolizes one’s feelings about what it stands for? That is speech. Further, “53 percent of Republicans and 49 percent of Latinos favor ‘stripping a person of their U.S. citizenship if they burn the American flag.’” (Data from Democrats or other groups aren’t given.) It’s really distressing that so many people feel that exercising one’s Constitutional rights should get them stripped of their citizenship!

You can read the article to see data on being fired for holding offensive beliefs (most people say no) and about punching Nazis (surprisingly, white people are more in favor of such punching than are Latinos or African Americans though only 56% of whites find Nazi-punching immoral). Further, a large majority of all groups “agreed that colleges and universities are not doing enough to teach young Americans about the value of free speech, and not doing enough to ensure students are exposed to a variety of viewpoints––though a small majority believes colleges ‘have an obligation to protect students from offensive speech and ideas that could create a difficult learning environment.’”  I would have been happier if both of those questions garnered large majorities in favor of free speech.

I’ll finish with this and throw it to the readers about what viewpoints should be demonized in colleges.

  • “When asked, “Suppose the following people were invited to speak at your college, should they be allowed to speak?” respondents who were college students or had college experience answered “no,” various viewpoints should not be allowed, as follows:
    • A speaker who advocates for violent protests (81 percent)
    • A speaker who plans to publicly reveal the names of illegal immigrants attending the college (65 percent)
    • A speaker who says the Holocaust did not occur (57 percent)
    • A speaker who says all white people are racist (51 percent)
    • A speaker who says Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to come to the U.S. (50 percent)
    • A speaker who advocates conversion therapy for gays and lesbians (50 percent)
    • A speaker who says transgender people have a mental disorder (50 percent)
    • A speaker who publicly criticizes and disrespects the police (49 percent)
    • A speaker who says that all Christians are backwards and brainwashed (49 percent)
    • A speaker who says the average IQ of whites and Asians is higher than African Americans and Hispanics (48 percent)
    • A speaker who says the police are justified in stopping African Americans at higher rates than other groups (48 percent)
    • A person who says all illegal immigrants should be deported (41 percent)
    • A speaker who says men on average are better at math than women (40 percent)

While all of this should be permitted if a group invites somebody to campus (the advocacy of violence is allowed so long as it doesn’t call for imminent violence on the spot), I can’t imagine that advocates of some of these views would ever be invited, even by Republicans. But even hearing odious stuff like “conversion therapy for gays and lesbians” can be instructive, if for no other reason than we need to learn the best arguments of our opponents. If you don’t want to hear that stuff, don’t go to the talk! So I would say that all of the advocates of those views, if they were invited to speak and accepted, should be allowed to speak.

“DrBrydon”, who kindly sent me this link (and the next one I’ll post on), found these results heartening, but I don’t. Clearly many Americans don’t even understand what the First Amendment says, much less why it was put into the Bill of Rights.

h/t: DrBrydon

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 31, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader Colin Franks (website here, Facebook here, Instagram here) sent us another lovely batch of gorgeous bird photos. His IDs are indented. And keep sending in your photos, please.

Yellow-rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronate):

Pileated Woodpecker (Hylatomus pileatus):

Rufus Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus):

Brown Creeper (Certhia Americana):

Bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus):

Common Loon (Gavia immer):

Golden-crowned Kinglet (Regulus satrapa):

Northern Pintail (Anas acuta):

Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica):

Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus):

Tuesday: Hili dialogue, Halloween Black Cat edition

October 31, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s the last day of October, 2017, and that means it’s Halloween, as well as National Caramel Apple Day, and, in Mexico, the beginning of the Day of the Dead, which is really three days. We’ll quickly reprise the events of this day and then onto Halloween.

On this day in 1923, a heat wave began in Oz: it was the first of 160 consecutive days of 100° Fahrenheit (38° C) heat at Marble Bar  in northwestern Australia. And people still live there—the population is 208! On this day in 1940, the Battle of Britain came to an end, with many owing a lot to very few.  Exactly a year later, Mount Rushmore’s sculpture was completed, though plans originally called for showing each President to the waist (lack of funds precluded that). Here it is (I’ve never seen it):

On October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (Nehru’s daughter, no relation to the Mahatma) was shot to death by two of her Sikh security guards, leading to riots and the death of about 3,000 Sikhs.  Finally, on this day six years ago, the UN certified that the world population of humans reached 7 billion. How they got so exact I’ll never know.

Notables born on this day include John Keats (1795), Adolf von Baeyer (1835), Vallbhbha Patel (1875; India’s first Deputy Prime Minister), Dan Rather (1931), John Candy and Jane Pauley (both 1950), and Muzzy Izzet (1974, an English-Turkish soccer player whose name I like).  Those who died on October 31 include Kitagawa Utamaro (1806), Egon Schiele (1918, only 28 years old), Harry Houdini (1926; died on Halloween!), Indira Gandhi (see above), Ring Larder, Jr. (2000), and Chicago writer Studs Terkel (2008).

Here are two Utamamaro prints of women and cats:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is asking about consciousness (she’s been doing a lot of reading lately):

Hili: What are qualia?
A: Nothing edible.
Hili: Strange. They sound as if they were.
In Polish:
Hili: Co to są qualia?
Ja: Nic do jedzenia.
Hili: Dziwne, brzmią jakby były.

On to the holiday. Here are a few readers’ black cats, but be sure to check out the Halloween Black Cat Parade from two years ago.

From reader Cicely, a photo entitled “Arabella pretending to be civilised. . . but waiting for the right moment:

From reader Rachel:

Here’s my Lloyd, age 10, meeting his doppelgänger. When I was looking to adopt a cat 7 years ago I remembered hearing that black cats were statistically the least likely to be adopted from shelters. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do think that black cats are the most beautiful of all cats, so I deliberately set out to fall in love with a black cat. I think I interviewed half the black cats in Milwaukee, where I was going to grad school at the time, before I found my boy.

From reader Andrey:

This is my cat Electron. Originally from the swamps of the south Louisiana bayou she is now a denizen of the Pacific Northwest living in West Seattle.  She is very talkative, but this is one of her contemplative moments.

Reader Tubby sends his black cat with the brief note, “Here is Orson looking pensive.”

And an extra: “Included is a picture of Orson’s licorice toebeans, which, sadly, he does not allow me to touch.”

From reader Ken, a deceased cat:

Pele was a great combination of a super loving staff owner, who loved to be held, and loved to be involved in everything I did, as you can see by his supervisory position on top of my aging PC, circa 2000.

Linda Calhoun has several black cats. This one is Billy the Kit, which, as she says, “is John’s cat. Unless John is gone, I am just the person who opens the cans.”

From reader Woody:

This is my black cat Moe (9 years old), practicing for Trick or Treaters.

From reader David:

Here’s a pic of my daughter’s newly adopted black kitten, Winter, from Tampa, FL. She likes to sit on top of the stairs and look down on her staff like Ceiling Cat.

Happy Halloween! And may you not be forced to eat candy corn (note that the cat below has rejected the corn):

Reader Roger summarizes my feelings about candy corn:

Matthew sent a link to five short Halloween horror stories, each a graphic and each in two sentences. Here’s one:

Source

Reader Simon sent some lovely carved pumpkins from here in Chicago:

Just been to the Night of a Thousand Lanterns at the Botanic Garden. Some things you don’t expect on pumpkins. So here are some with “acceptable” subjects. I know goats are not one of your normally favored species. but in this case you can make an exception!

Now you tell me what the goat means! (I know, but I want readers to guess.) By the way, these aren’t done by computers, but were created by “master carvers” (see below):

 

Here’s a master carver working on a psychotic clown pumpkin:

 

Finally, if you click on today’s Google Doodle (i.e., screenshot below), you’ll go to a YouTube video, “Jinx’s night out” with the description, ” Today’s Halloween Doodle checks in on Jinx, the lonely ghost, who embarks on a mission to find the perfect costume — and a place to belong.”  Note a case of Asian cultural appropriation in costumes at 1:35: Google screwed up!

 

But last year’s Doodle, “Magic Cat Academy”, an interactive game, was much better, and I don’t know how I missed it! You can play it by clicking on the screenshot below (draw a ghost’s symbol with your mouse to dispel the spook). There are several levels, and I got to 15,400 before my cat used up his nine lives.

Finally, a tw**t sent by Matthew (for non-Brits, Matthew explains: “Celebrations are cheap small versions of confectionary bars. A Rennie is an indigestion tablet”).

This is a travesty

October 30, 2017 • 2:30 pm

America is truly going to hell. First we elect a loon as President, and now this. Our department office keeps a bowl of candy for those who drop in, and the pickings are always pretty good (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, small 100 Grand candy bars, etc.) But today I found this in the bowl.

It’s a fast day for me, so I just took it and will try it tomorrow. I want to see if there’s any difference between the “good organic stuff” and the usual mixture of wax, sugar, dye, and chemicals that is known to Americans as “candy corn”.

AND THEN. . . . someone put this on my FB page, which led me to Google “candy corn Jesus”, and well. . . let’s just say there’s a lot of stuff.  Just another reason to hate that vile confection:

There’s this:

Can you imagine getting this in your Halloween bag? It’s doubly odious:

I’d add that religion poisons everything, but candy corn is already poison.

Two easy pieces

October 30, 2017 • 1:30 pm

Since I can’t brain today, I’ll just give you some light reading: in this case, two short articles. The first, by author Lionel Shriver (if you don’t remember her battles against cultural appropriation, go here, here, and here), appears in the Spectator, and is called “Millennials don’t fear censorship because they plan on doing all the censorship.” It’s largely some familiar arguments for free speech (“if you oppose it, you could be the one who gets censored”, etc.). But it’s well written and makes a good point—the one summarized in the title:

It’s a universal given that young people think they are young. That is, youngness feels central to their very essence. They’ve yet to have the consternating experience of waking up to find they’re 45. Thus youth seems an eternal state of being, and in order to have been permanently condemned to middle age and senility as if consigned to Dante’s realms of hell, all those old farts must have done something terrible.

Accordingly, the young casually assume not only that they’re the cutting-edge, trend-setting arbiters of the acceptable now, but that they always will be. The students running campuses like re-education camps aren’t afraid of being muzzled, because they imagine they will always be the ones doing the muzzling — the ones dictating what words we can use (cis, not heterosexual), what books we can read (Tom Sawyer is out), what practices we can embrace (white people may not wear dreadlocks). These millennials don’t fear censorship because they plan on doing all the censoring.

Here’s another classic argument for allowing the “reprehensibles” the right to talk:

‘Freedom of speech’ is only thorny in relation to sentiments that you find obnoxious, stupid, wicked, false or outright appalling. (One of the positions I find it most painful to allow others to advocate in an unfettered public square is the relentless restriction of free speech.) Yet, however horrific the opinion, freedom of expression has benefits. Given the rope to hang themselves, fools, liars and demagogues make ample use of the noose. You needn’t refute their dopey assertions because those assertions sound dopey already. Allowed to talk, people reveal themselves. The world is a safer place.

That’s pretty much the case for the white supremacists and neo-Nazis whose appearance is always protested and often shut down. Yet they sound like fools; I can’t imagine they’d persuade many Americans to join them.

And one of her visions of the future, which isn’t that unthinkable:

Yet suppose that over the next two decades our pert contemporary young person is inexorably demoted to middle-aged slob. During those years, having been paying attention, this still socially aware crusader has concluded that religions are more a force for ill than good — that most religions promote joylessness, superstition, scientific ignorance, polarisation, persecution, a retrograde obsession with sex and oppression of women. The many faiths exerting a drag on human progress include Islam. But thanks to our former young person’s earlier activism, the expression of views offensive to minorities has been criminalised, and Islam in particular enjoys protected status. Any ‘hate speech’ about it tars you as an Islamophobe, a designation that by 2037 lands you in the slammer for ten years.

Here’s a short discussion between Shriver and Yasmin Abdel-Magied, who walked out of Shriver’s talk at the writer’s festival in Brisbane and criticized it in the Guardian, touching off a big debate.

*********

A lot of British Leftists don’t like Matt Ridley (who’s at once an evolutionary biologist, a very rich man, and a Viscount) because he’s a Brexiteer, a staunch libertarian, and was chairman of the Northern Rock Bank when it went bust, sticking the British taxpayer with the bill. Yet he’s also written several good biology books, including Genome and The Origins of Virtue, as well as a well-regarded biography of Francis Crick.  (I reviewed his last book, about how everything should be privatized, and didn’t much like it.)

That said, his new piece in the Times, “New enemies threaten the Enlightenment“, isn’t bad, and not just because he quoted me. Here we see a libertarian siding with Bret Weinstein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and others, arguing that despite his previous optimism (Ridley wrote The Rational Optimist), he’s worried that the Enlightenment may be stalling—or even reversing itself. (Note the climate-change remark below.)

The no-platforming, safe-space, trigger-warning culture is no longer confined to academia, or to America, but lies behind the judgmentalism of many social media campaigns. Every writer I know feels that he or she is one remark away from disgrace. A de facto blasphemy prohibition has re-emerged in western society and is being enforced not just by the Islamists who murder cartoonists, but, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the black, feminist victim of female genital mutilation has experienced, by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which called her an anti-Muslim extremist.

Countries where in my youth women wore mini-skirts in public now enforce hijabs or burkas. Sharia law, homophobia and explicit antisemitism are spreading in Britain, where in some state-funded schools four-year-olds are made to wear hijabs. Turkey’s government has joined US Christian evangelicals in trying to expunge evolution from the school curriculum.

This is not just about Islam, though it is curious how silent feminists are on Islamic sexism. The enforcement of dogma is happening everywhere. Members of a transgender campaign group have refused to condemn an activist for punching a feminist. Anybody questioning the idea that climate change is an imminent catastrophe, however gently, is quickly labelled a “denier” (ie, blasphemer). How bad is this spasm of intolerance going to get? Perhaps it is a brief hiatus in rationalism, a dimming of the hard-won secular enlightenment, which will soon re-brighten after doing little harm. Or perhaps it is like China’s Cultural Revolution: a short-lived but vicious phenomenon confined to one part of the world that will do terrible harm then cease.

He then recounts one earlier episode of dogma-enforcement and statue-toppling: the effacement of classical culture by Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries. (I didn’t know much about the woman philosopher and polymath Hypatia of Alexandria until I saw Ridley’s reference, and have spent some time looking her up; she was cruelly murdered by Christians). This kind of stuff was what the Enlightenment ended, but Ridley says we still “have a fight on our hands.”  I’m not so sure about that, but to stave off anxiety, I’m going to read Steve Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress when it comes out on February 27. I’m sure it will be bracing and optimistic.

 

More speech disruption, this time at Rutgers

October 30, 2017 • 11:15 am

As I’ve mentioned before Spiked is mounting a four-session “Unsafe Space” tour in the U.S. (see schedule here), featuring thoughtful people debating a variety of topics—all of which are “controversial.” The first discussion, “Title IX: Feminism, sex and censorship on campus”, was supposed to be at American University on September 28, but was canceled at the University and had to be held elsewhere, probably due to pressure from the University branch of the American Association of University Women. (Jebus!)

The second discussion took place at Rutgers on October 2. The topic was “Identity politics: the new racialism on campus?“, and featured Kmele Foster, Sarah Haider,  Mark Lilla, and Brian Stascavage. It wasn’t canceled, but there were loud and aggressive protestors in the audience who disrupted the presentations and made the Q&A largely impossible to hear. The session is described by J. Oliver Conroy in an article in Quillette, “Get on the bus or get under it: Shouting down free speech at Rugers.” Conroy not only describes what happened, but includes a thoughtful discussion of intersectionality. First, a bit about the disruption:

As if some signal had been given, the protesters, who had remained mostly quiet during the panelists’ opening statements, began working overtime to hijack the evening. For the course of the 90-minute panel, they repeatedly interrupted the panelists (and other audience members) to deliver vociferous, open-ended monologues that went on for minutes; they drowned out the panel by chanting “Black lives matter” (a slogan completely unrelated to anything the panelists had just said); and they started screaming whenever someone said something with which they disagreed. Usually they kept screaming till they ran out of breath or coherence.

The panelists responded with grace and generosity. They not only tolerated the disruptors’ obnoxious behavior, but gave the protesters numerous opportunities to speak. In fact, the panelists repeatedly made it clear that they agreed with many of the protestors’ concerns. But that was beside the point. Most of the protestors clearly had no idea who the panelists were (they kept mispronouncing their names) or what the event was about; their rage was rooted in a vague sense that the panel’s very existence was an injustice and they therefore had a mandate to shut it down and prevent its contagion from spreading.

Many of the disruptions took the form of impromptu, condescending lectures on intersectionality, a once obscure academic theory that has over time become the driving doctrine of identity politics for a significant part of the progressive and radical Left. Simply stated, intersectionality refers to the idea that people exist at the intersection of multiple identities, and some of those identities have suffered greater disadvantage than others. So, for example, a white woman is oppressed by virtue of being a woman; but a white gay woman is doubly oppressed, and a black or Latina lesbian is more oppressed than either. Intricate instructional diagrams (such as the “matrix of oppression” table and the illustration below) exist to guide initiates. [JAC: See the article for the illustration.]

Now the idea that you can be oppressed in multiple ways is not only worth considering, but surely true. A black woman will face more obstacles than a white woman, who in turn will face more obstacles than a white man (the apogee of privilege). That’s surely worth pondering, and understanding, even though “class” seems to mysteriously disappear from the matrix. What bothers both Conrad and me is how “intersectionality” is used to give one a form of “speech privilege”: in other words, if you’re oppressed in any way, you can claim authority in all arguments on your axis, if you’re oppressed in two ways, you can shut down an even larger group of people, and so on. Beyond that is the criticism that not everybody who is, say, a woman, will have the same political opinions or the same “lived experience.” This does not mean we shouldn’t consider people as groups, for bigotry is based on group membership.

What seems to bother Conroy most is not the concept of joint forms of bias, but what that has done to Leftist politics, producing something he calls “the intersectional worldview”. That, he claims (and I agree), is somehow ineluctably wedded to censoring the speech of others, either through deplatforming, harassment, or simply declaring that those on other “axes” don’t have the “lived experience” to credit them with a worthwhile opinion:

The intersectional worldview is obviously incompatible with the basic tenets of life in a liberal democracy. That doesn’t bother intersectional activists, however, because they believe liberalism itself to be an elaborate sham that uses the illusory equality of procedural democracy – free and fair elections, courts, the rule of law, the Bill of Rights – to paper over vast social injustices. In the eyes of the intersectional Left, the very idea of universal rights is fatally flawed – or “problematic,” to use a frequent, lazy phrase – because those rights can benefit the wrong people, such as white supremacists (in the case of free speech), or campus rapists (in the case of due process and the rights of the accused).

There is a creepy authoritarian bent to all of this. For someone really steeped in the intersectional worldview, almost any tactic or behavior can be justified if it serves the purpose of fighting “oppression,” the definition of which is elastic and gets a little more capacious every day. Because many intersectional activists believe that exposing people to harmful ideas can cause them emotional trauma, they view speech as a form of literal violence. For that reason, it is justifiable to shut down opposing voices before they even speak, a tactic called “no-platforming.”

. . . I’m not the first to notice that intersectionality has less in common with an academic school or political movement than a religion. It is a fundamentalist religion, with no tolerance for ambiguity and, like any newly founded religion, it is insecure. People who disagree are blasphemers; people who change their minds are heretics; and the true believer cannot ever rest knowing that out there – somewhere, anywhere – are people who think differently. They must be converted, or destroyed. And, like a religion, intersectionality has its rituals and catechisms. As linguist John McWhorter put it in an incisive essay for The Daily Beast:

The call for people to soberly ‘acknowledge’ their White Privilege as a self-standing, totemic act is based on the same justification as acknowledging one’s fundamental sinfulness is as a Christian. One is born marked by original sin; to be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege.

And the effects on free speech and free exchange:

The whole teetering husk of what we used to call democratic civil society is built on the crucial premise that one can coexist with others with whom one disagrees, even people whose views one finds repugnant. But the protesters at Rutgers, like those at William & Mary and Reed and campuses across the country, made it clear that they can’t. They view free speech, and rights in general, as a one-way street. They are entitled to voice their opinions at any and every moment, but people who hold what they’ve decided are the wrong views are entitled to no opinion at all. Ever.

. . . Actually, the intersectional Left will leave at least one enduring legacy: a generation of university-educated people – “progressive” yet deeply illiberal – whose attitudes toward free expression range from indifference to skepticism to hostility. In a particularly bizarre twist of history, students today regard free speech – once one of the defining causes of the American Left – as a “rightwing” doctrine, and therefore suspect. A woman in my college year explained it to me with chilling clarity: sometimes ensuring “truly fair speech” in “the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’” requires the “temporary dissuasion of opposing rhetoric.” She is now a lawyer.

Now I don’t know exactly what’s inherent in intersectionality that’s caused this, but the connection drawn by Conroy is clearly true. I don’t remember such censorious attitudes coming out of the civil rights movement in the Sixties, the women’s movement that took off at roughly the same time, or the gay rights movement two decades later, but there we dealt with single axes of oppression. Does this happen only when there’s more than one, putting people in synch on one axis but at cross purposes on another? (The classic example is that of feminists who become illiberal when they praise Islamic societies that oppress women.) Don’t ask me; I’m a biologist.

I can only imagine what will happen in the last two sessions, which are these:

November 2, New York Law School: “Is the Left eating itself”, with Bret Weinstein, Angus Johnston, Laura Kipnis, and Brendan O’Neill

November 6, Harvard University: “Is political correctness why Trump won?”, with Wendy Kaminer, Steve Pinker, Brendan O’Neill, and Robby Soave.

Tickets for both events are free and still available; all you have to do is go to the link above and click on “Get your tickets now” for the event you want. I have tickets for the Harvard event, but don’t know if I can make it for sure. I trust the universities will make some effort to stop disruptions.

And even if there are disruptions, you’ll get to see it in the flesh.