Is It Time for America’s Cultural Revolution? (You Can Bet They Hope It Is)

As the country continues to struggle with the lingering effects of the Wuhan virus and related lockdowns, shuttered businesses, unemployment, etc., many on the left are focusing on what’s really important-silencing those who speak out in opposition to current progressive viewpoints.   

A prime example is Professor William Jacobson of Cornell Law School. Professor Jacobson has taught at CLS since 2007 and is the only conservative teacher at CLS. He started his blog, Legal Insurrection, in October 2008.

Professor Jacobson has drawn the ire of progressives at Cornell and elsewhere for recent posts (on June 3^rd and June 4^th) arguing that the Black Lives Matter movement is led by anti-American and anti-capitalist activists who, in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases, have fabricated a narrative of the mass murder of blacks by the police. A few days after the second post, multiple emails from CLS alums were received by the the law school dean demanding that action be taken against the good professor. On June 9^th a letter signed by 21 CLS faculty members was published in the Cornell Sun denouncing unnamed commentators who were attempting to smear BLM. The dean of law school issued a letter calling Professor Jacobson’s posts “offensive” and “poorly reasoned” but declined to otherwise sanction him. See here. 

Lastly, the Black Law Student Association at CLS, supported by the National Lawyers Guild, is organizing a boycott of Professor Jacobson’s classes.

All for not following the party line regarding BLM. 

This “cancel culture” has been going on for several years. For instance, there’s Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist and self-described progressive at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. I should say, former evolutionary biologist at Evergreen State. In a tradition going back to the 1970s, once a year Evergreen State holds a Day of Absence whereby students and faculty who are “people of color” meet off campus in a symbolic gesture based on a Douglas Turner Ward play.

For the Day of Absence in 2017, it was decided that rather than POCs meeting off campus, white students and faculty would be asked to absent themselves from the campus. Professor Weinstein was not comfortable with that idea. He wrote a letter to the school’s … wait for it… wait… “Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services.” Wow. I wonder what that director’s resume looks like. 

Professor Weinstein, who had been at the school since 2003 and supported the Day of Absence concept in years past, felt that it was one thing for an identified group to voluntarily absent itself from the campus, but it was an entirely different matter for one group to require another distinct group to “go away.”

Within days, students were protesting outside his classroom. The school president ordered the campus police to stand down and the police chief told Weinstein he couldn’t guarantee his safety. He held his class in a park off campus. 

Bari Weiss of the New York Times tells the story nicely in an article titled “When the Left Turns On Its Own.”

Weinstein gave his version of events in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He filed suit against Evergreen that year. The case was settled with Evergreen paying Weinstein $500,000 and Weinstein and his wife, also a professor at Evergreen, agreeing to resign their positions. 

Then there is Dr. Leslie Neal-Boylan. She was the dean of the nursing school at UMass-Lowell. On June 2^nd she sent an email to the nursing school community expressing her concern over violence directed at persons of color. In her email she said, “BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS.”

A student posted the email on Twitter, characterizing Dr. Neal-Boylan’s statement as “upsetting.” Through Twitter, the school thanked the student for raising the issue.

She was fired on June 19^th after 10 months as dean.

Now, I’m sure you have heard of institutional racism. And systemic racism. How about “scientific racism?”  That apparently is a “thing” now. Stephen Hsu is a physics professor at Michigan State University. He was also a Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at the school. At least, he was until he cited in his blog a study by another MSU professor that found there was no evidence of widespread racial bias in police shootings in the United States. That did not sit well with some in the MSU community. The Graduate Employees Union circulated a petition calling for Hsu’s ouster from his administrative position because of his scientific racism. Hsu resigned from that position under pressure from the school president (on the same day Dr. Neal-Boylan was fired). He remains a faculty member. See here.

Did I just mention Bari Weiss? I should have said the former New York Times staffer inasmuch as she recently resigned from the old gray lady.  You can read her resignation letter here. She summarizes what it was like working at the Times thusly: “My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’ Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly ‘inclusive’ one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.”

Coupled with the uproar and later resignation of the editorial page editor at the Times after the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed calling for the military to quell the rioting ongoing in several Democratic-run cities, it would appear the some recent Evergreen State alumni/ae are ensconced in the Times newsroom.

But is that surprising? After all, the college students who were outraged by  Halloween costumes,  their oppression by society and offensive food eventually graduated and got jobs, right? Bari Weiss agrees; commenting on the aftermath of Senator Cotton’s op-ed, she said that the “civil war” ongoing inside the Times “between the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country….They told me [the campus culture wars were] a sideshow. But this is why it mattered: The people who graduated from those campuses would rise to power inside key institutions and transform them.”

So, there you have it. The screaming, overwrought, I’ll-hold-my-breath-until-you-do-what-I-say college students of yesteryear are now sitting in newsrooms, teaching in high schools and colleges and rising in positions of authority (and maybe trying to set federal courthouses on fire). These culture wars are not going to end anytime soon. 

What happened to debating ideas with your opponent? Why must people holding opposing points of view be punished for expressing those views? Saying “Everyone’s life matters” is a firing offense? Professor Jacobson’s classes are boycotted because he questions the legitimacy of a Marxist-led organization? Politicians call for the boycott of a minority owned company because its CEO compliments President Trump?

I’m not in the prediction game-I was sure Hillary Clinton was going to win in 2016. But I do believe it’s only going to get worse if President Trump wins reelection. Of course, perhaps there is hope that the culture wars won’t take so many casualties. Trader Joe’s recently became the object of an online petition started by a 17-year-old high school student claiming that the names of some of its ethnic foods were racist. After initially seeming to acknowledge the legitimacy of the claims, Trader Joe’s has announced that the names aren’t racist and they won’t be changing them. Good for Trader Joe’s! I’m going to pick up some Trader Joe’s products to give to a food pantry with my cans of Goya beans.

UPDATE:

This should be interesting. 

A controversy is brewing in South Orange, New Jersey. A parishioner at Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church received a letter/email from the pastor requesting that he not wear a Black Lives Matter t-shirt to Mass when he is acting as a lector (participating in Mass by doing scripture readings on the altar). The pastor said that he had received complaints from other parishioners about the t-shirt. The letter further stated that the parishioner was free to wear anything he wanted to Mass, but that male lectors should wear collared shirts and refrain from wearing clothes that draw attention to the individual, thereby distracting listeners from the readings. The Archdiocese of Newark released a statement confirming that was the policy of the Archdiocese. 

This situation has received local media attention. Let’s see where it goes from here.

UPDATE #2 – September 8, 2020

No recent news on on Our Lady of Sorrows/BLM t-shirt matter. BUT, check out this article on the cancel culture movement as the left attacks one of their own.