Fuming about woke students shutting down right-wing speakers can be a nice little earner, Mari Uyehara points out.

Bari Weiss for instance.

Weiss’s column titled “We’re All Fascists Now” highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a “self-identified” feminist and a “registered” Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers’s more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D’Souza among its past fellows.

If I’ve seen Sommers described (pugnaciously) as a feminist I’ve seen it…several times. It’s her shtick. Sure, she’s a feminist in the most minimal sense, but her whole career now is devoted to disputing and making fun of anything that goes beyond the most minimal. She’s a “feminist” who spends much of her time inciting social media hatred of feminism and feminists.

Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a “factual” one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn’t know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she’s been silent on harassment of women in tech and finance.

Damore memo anyone?

Sommers likes to be no-platformed, because it’s fuel for the fire.

At Lewis & Clark Law School, Sommers found what seems to be her favorite kind of audience: a disruptive one. Prior to the speech, activists handed out flyers labeling her “a fascist,” among other hyperbolic charges familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. When she attempted to give her talk, a handful of students, led by a blonde ringleader in a black “Stay Woke” jacket, disrupted it with chanting about comrades while holding up a cardboard sign that read “No Platform for Fascists.” It was a Ben Shapiro wet dream. As the ringleader yelled, “Black lives matter,” Sommers turned to the camera euphorically grinning from ear to ear. Here it was: the money shot.

…

The number of students who resort to these tactics is fairly small—Sommers regularly gives talks at universities without incident. But the number of publications and prominent journalists willing to cover them is quite high. The news of Sommers’s slightly curtailed lecture was hyped in at least 11 outlets, including Breitbart, the National Review, and two separate opinion pieces in The New York Times. Sommers herself tweeted about the event’s coverage at least 70 times and scored a Wall Street Journal piece out of the ordeal. It’s not difficult to intuit why she beamed at her videographer as the no-platformers chanted.

Andrew Sullivan has written about it many times; so has Jonathan Chait; Bret Stephens and David Brooks chimed in; Weiss has written at least three op-eds on it.

The enthusiasm to defend those [who are] triggering libs makes the Free Speech Grifters uniquely susceptible to right-wing propagandists. In her last op-ed, Weiss featured an obvious parody Antifa Twitter account, run by alt-right trolls, and YouTuber Dave Rubin fell for the same gag. In 2016, Sommers unwittingly did a full hour on a Swedish white-supremacy podcast. And the same year, in a since-deleted tweet, she announced she would be “defending free speech and reason” with Milo Yiannopoulos, who was recently outed by BuzzFeed for working with white nationalists to smuggle their ideas into the mainstream. He also appeared alongside Maher, railing about free speech, on Real Time. This isn’t all complete ignorance. Columbia University College Republicans invited Tommy Robinson of the far-right English Defense League, while the new Canadian free-speech club Laurier Society for Open Inquiry announced white nationalist Faith Goldy as its first speaker. In the National Review, Elliot Kaufman chided fellow campus conservatives for purposely giving the alt-right a platformin an effort to bait the left into doing something “silly and destructive,” so that they could play “martyrs for free speech on campus” and draw media coverage. “The left-wing riots were not the price or downside of inviting Yiannopoulos,” he wrote. “They were the attraction.”

This is what I’m saying. Inviting a Faith Goldy to a university is a kind of entrapment, and it’s dubious because she’s not a scholar or a public intellectual or a legit columnist or anything other than a self-made flamer. Yes, free inquiry is a good; no, a Faith Goldy is not a good example of free inquiry.

As Adam Serwer in The Atlantic and Jamelle Bouie in Slate have pointed out exhaustively, there are many more deeply disturbing threats to free speech, namely those enforced by the state. (Technically, First Amendment protections apply to guarding against the state imposing on the free speech of people, not the battleground of ideas at universities.) Examples include laws that ban positive portrayals of homosexuality in public schools, and police unions urging their members to retaliate against private citizens who have lodged complaints of misconduct. At Trump’s inauguration last year, an anti-capitalist and anti-fascist march called J20 resulted in mass arrests, including of journalists, medics, and legal observers. Originally, 239 people were charged with felony inciting to riot, facing up to 60 years in prison. Houses were raided. The ACLU got involved. And not a peep in an entire year from any of the so-called free-speech warriors. Ditto this past week, when a Wisconsin school administrator was fired for allowing black students to hold a discussion about white privilege in a district that is 90 percent Caucasian. How peculiar.

I think maybe the focus on the woke kids no-platforming comes from the sense that they are in some sense colleagues, while Trumps and cops are not. Maybe not; maybe I’m giving the Sommers types too much credit; but it feels to me like an internecine dispute, while reporting on police crackdowns does not.

According to FIRE, an individual-rights organization with ties to the Koch brothers, from 2000 to 2017, there were anywhere from six to 35 self-reported disinvitation attempts annually and 40 percent of them came from the right, while Heterodox Academy, an organization devoted to increasing viewpoint diversity, finds that the majority of successful disinvites came from the right, not the left. Still, libertarian website Quillette summarized these outbursts as “the psychology of progressive hostility.” Pundits like to characterize online outrage and an aversion to idea diversity as a phenomenon unique to the left, largely ignoring the death threats directed at the teen Parkland survivors for speaking out against a powerful gun lobby or the conservative dictates of Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News. Given the myopic focus on liberals, it would seem that Free Speech Grifters are not actually interested in the free exchange of ideas, per se; they are interested in liberal caricature for clicks, social-media followings, and monetization.

Certainly Peterson has done well out of the monetization thing.

In America, there’s always been a contemptuous crowd thirsty to pick off the extremists in and caricature movements for social change. We see it in the old cartoons painting suffragettes as red-faced old spinsters or black people as shiftless watermelon eaters, and in taunts of anti-war activists as dirty hippies and commie pinkos. SJWs are the new SDS; Stay Woke jackets and BLM T-shirts the new long hair. As young people agitate for much-needed change, be it on racial bias, rampant sexual harassment, or gun control, there will always be behind-the-curve commentators getting paid to do nothing but lecture “Respect First.” The left would do well by not showing up to play character actors in fake free-speech theater. But the Free Speech Grifters never seem to be concerned with exactly whom they are entertaining with their performative indignation and why. It’s kayfabe for those who are perfectly comfortable with enforcing the status quo.

Another free speech – teach the controversy – open inquiry – shut it down – listen and learn Item. Lindsay Shepherd invited a right-wing commentator to debate / speak at Laurier University, there were protests, Laurier declined to stop the event. Once the event got started someone pulled a fire alarm and that shut it down.

The talk was set to start at 7:15 p.m. ET. At approximately 7:20 p.m, a fire alarm was pulled and police evacuated the building, preventing anyone from entering the Paul Martin Centre.

Event attendees then moved to Veterans’ Green park, on the other side of campus, where Lindsay Shepherd, the organizer of the event, announced the talk was cancelled.

Shepherd, the co-founder of the campus group Laurier Society for Open Inquiry, said she’s “super disappointed” at the outcome.

According to Goldy’s Twitter account, the fire alarm was pulled before she was even introduced and presented on stage.

The speaker Faith Goldy tweeted “MARXISTS PULL ALARM” – which seems pretty stupid. Marxists? Not in any sense Marx would recognize.

“My view of these college leftists is more damaged than it used to be,” Shepherd said to CBC News, assuming the person who pulled the fire alarm was someone who opposed the talk.

“I had faith that we’d have a nuanced discussion where people can challenge the speaker at the end — obviously that was too much to hope for,” said Shepherd.

I think this is all a bit of a dog’s breakfast. I mostly share the general fatigue with students wanting to ban every single thing they disagree with, but on the other hand…nuanced discussion? With Faith Goldy? It seems vanishingly unlikely. And more broadly – there just isn’t any necessity to invite racists or misogynists or xenophobes to give speeches in order to find out what they think and have a debate with them. It’s easy to find out what they think, and to dispute it, without summoning them in the flesh. It’s easy to argue with racism or misogyny without face to face confrontations. What’s the point of the in person thing? Why Faith Goldy in particular? Is she a scholar?

Wikipedia doesn’t describe her as one:

She received her formal education at Havergal College and studied at Huron College at the University of Western Ontario. Goldy later graduated in politics and history from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, minoring in philosophy and physics. Goldy also began a Masters of Public Policy at the University of Toronto’s School of Public Policy and Governance.^[12] Goldy is a Christian, of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.^[13]

Goldy has been employed by a number of press and broadcast media organizations, including The Catholic Register, the Toronto Sun, TheBlaze, Bell Media, Zoomer Media, and the National Post. She is a former reporter with the Sun News Network and was employed by The Rebel Media, an online political and social commentary platform, where she presented political commentary in regular YouTube videos and a weekly show called On The Hunt with Faith Goldy.^[14] On August 17, 2017, The Rebel Media fired her for being interviewed on The Krypto Report, a podcast produced by the white supremacist site The Daily Stormer.^[15][16]

She has some graduate education and she worked as a reporter. I can’t really see the need to invite her to talk at a university in order to have a nuanced discussion, just as I don’t see the need to invite Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh to talk at universities.

I guess part (or maybe most or all) of the reason was to make the point that universities should welcome diversity of thought, and choosing someone conspicuously provocative was necessary to that. I think I see the reasoning, but I also think I don’t agree with it. It’s a stretch to call what “personalities” like Goldy do “thought,” so she’s not really a good example of diversity of thought. Shepherd has very good reasons for being sick of people who say “You can’t say that!” but I still don’t think that’s a reason to invite professional trolls to university (or student society) events.

Oh honestly. Men.

First, Joe Biden.

Mr. Biden, speaking at a University of Miami rally to combat sexual assault, said, “A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,’ ” according to an Associated Press report.

That’s not what Trump said though. He said he can grab them by the pussy and he did not say she likes it. He said “they let you do it.” Big, huge difference there. It’s not at all about what she likes, it’s about what he can force on her. It’s weird and depressing that even Biden doesn’t know that. Trump is bragging about being so famous that women are afraid to slap his hand away. He’s bragging about being able to do things to women that they didn’t invite and don’t want.

But that’s not even it.

Mr. Biden was referring to an Access Hollywood audio recording in which Mr. Trump is heard boasting about kissing and groping women without their consent. Mr. Biden continued, “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Oh shut up. One, nobody needs more stupid boasting and chest-beating. Two, really? You sure about that? Three, what would that even prove? Four, you know that will just set him off. Five, shut up, it’s not about you, nobody asked you to make ludicrous historical-fiction woulda coulda ex post facto threats, that’s not what women need.

Oh, and seven – Anita Hill. You left Anita Hill to twist in the wind, so shut up shut up shut up.

Second, Donnie TwoScoops.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!

The sitting president, everybody.

Uh oh. Crops rotting in the fields.

Vegetable prices may be going up soon, as a shortage of migrant workers is resulting in lost crops in California.

Farmers say they’re having trouble hiring enough people to work during harvest season, causing some crops to rot before they can be picked. Already, the situation has triggered losses of more than $13 million in two California counties alone, according to NBC News.

Mind you, when I see those claims I always think they’re leaving something out: Farmers say they’re having trouble hiring enough people at low enough wages. But still, this is also a wholly foreseeable consequence of Trump’s racist war on immigrants.

The ongoing battle about U.S. immigration policies is blamed for the shortage. The vast majority of California’s farm workers are foreign born, with many coming from Mexico. However, the PEW Research Center reports more Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than coming here.

To make the jobs more attractive, farmers are offering salaries above minimum wage, along with paid time off and 401(k) plans, but even that’s not proving enough.

“Even”? The work is backbreaking and often hazardous, and “above the minimum wage” isn’t exactly wealth. But still, for many people it’s both a step up and a ladder up and out for their children. Anyway – this is Trumpland now, so get used to it.

Kris Kobach really doesn’t want to stop suppressing votes.

A Kansas federal judge had sharp words for Republican Secretary of State [of Kansas] Kris Kobach during a contempt hearing Tuesday, accusing him of misleading the court and failing to inform voters whose registrations were previously suspended that they are eligible to vote.

In May 2016, Judge Julie Robinson issued a preliminary injunction ordering Kobach “to register for federal elections all otherwise eligible motor voter registration applicants,” whether or not they have shown a documentary proof of citizenship. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit challenging Kobach’s proof of citizenship law, argued that Kobach was failing to add voters to the rolls, making eligible voters cast provisional ballots, and failing to send voters affected by the preliminary injunction a postcard that would notify them of their registration status.

He didn’t send them or tell the counties to send them; the judge rebuked him for this; he said “But you didn’t tell me to!”

“Why would I order something you told me you’d take care of?” the judge said, according to ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman, who was in the courtroom. “You are under ethical obligation to tell me the truth… that’s why lawyers are licensed.”

And they can be de-licensed aka disbarred if they don’t.

Melania Trump campaigns against cyberbullying.

The jokes write themselves, and so do the exclamations of outrage. If she can’t persuade that monstrosity she’s married to, what sense does it make for her to try to persuade anyone else?

With a particular focus on social media, Melania Trump, the first lady, has long said she wants to curb online bullying and harassment as part of a nascent effort to improve the lives of American children. There’s one problem: Mrs. Trump’s efforts often clash with the president’s longtime habit of using social media to insult people.

A habit which continues even now that he is president of the US, and thus automatically has more power and clout and influence than anyone he insults on social media. He’s a bully three times over.

On Tuesday, Mrs. Trump invited representatives from Facebook, Snap, Google, Amazon and Twitter to the White House for a round-table discussion on the topic. In a speech, she said that she had received letters from children who have been bullied or feel threatened on social media.

“I am well aware that people are skeptical of me discussing this topic,” Mrs. Trump said on Tuesday. “I have been criticized for my commitment to tackling this issue, and I know that will continue. But it will not stop me from doing what I know is right. I am here with one goal: helping children and our next generation.”

Does she know why people are skeptical of her discussing this topic? It’s not random or arbitrary, let alone unfair, so saying it won’t stop her misses the point. Her husband is the world’s single worst cyberbully, and she hasn’t left him, so she’s kind of forfeited the high ground on this subject.

The old “human right” switcheroo:

When Roger Severino tells his story, discrimination is at its heart.

“I did experience discrimination as a child. And that leaves a lasting impression,” he tells me.

Severino directs the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. When I meet with him at his office in the shadow of the Capitol, he talks about his childhood as the son of Colombian immigrants growing up in Los Angeles.

“I remember a white kid coming up, as I was in the pool, [who] said a racial epithet,” Severino recalls. “My response as a kid was — I was confused, in a way. Why would they say such a thing?”

In high school he was steered toward vocational training but he said no thank you, honors classes for me, and on he went to Harvard Law.

But now he’s using civil rights talk as a screen for imposing conservative Catholic dogma on all of us.

Severino — a devout Catholic and political conservative — has put the right to religious freedom front and center in his fight against discrimination in health care.

In public appearances he refers to religious freedom as “the first freedom.” Since coming to HHS he has issued a rule that allows employers to refuse to cover birth control as part of their employee health insurance plans, if employers have a religious or moral objection to contraception.

Rights can be in tension with each other, of course. Rights to equal treatment are in tension with “rights” to treat people unequally. That’s what’s going on here: Severino wants to create and protect a “right” to deny people medical treatment on religious grounds.

And earlier this year he created an entirely new division within the civil rights office — the Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom. Its mission, he says, is to ensure that health care workers and health care companies, are never forced to participate in particular medical services — such as abortion, assisted suicide or gender reassignment surgery — if they object.

…

Just a few weeks after he started at HHS, Severino met with representatives from several different advocacy groups — including Judith Lichtman, senior advisor to the National Partnership for Women and Families.

She says Severino billed the meeting with about 20 people as a “listening session.”

“He opened the meeting telling us his heartfelt story about knowing and understanding discrimination,” she says. “And, frankly, stories will get you just so far.”

Because he was “listening,” Lichtman says, Severino declined to answer questions about his own positions on specific issues. But she believes his actions since then — including creating the religious freedom office — point to a desire to limit women’s access to reproductive health services.

“Abortion is a legal health care service in this country,” Lichtman says. “And if, indeed, what Mr. Severino is intending to do is to undermine protections for women who are seeking a legal health care service, I’d say that’s pretty abhorrent.”

Well, maybe abortion won’t be a legal health care service for much longer. Problem solved?

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on They can’t see what they can’t see.

I get frustrated with the way this debate gets framed. It’s not that the “ideas” that Damore and his ilk promote are “off limits,” as Coyne would have it. It’s that they are such inferior ideas when it comes to explaining our present reality.

I have no quarrel with the abstract notion that women and men may differ, whether biologically or for culture-driven reasons that we don’t wish to change, in ways that mean that not every profession will end up with a 50/50 split of men and women even when we have achieved complete and utter Gender Equality Utopia. Call this the Gender Differences Hypothesis.

What I do quarrel with is the claim (sometimes explicit, sometimes implied) that all observable deviations from a 50/50 split can be explained by the GDH, and therefore we can declare that discrimination is trivial or non-existent and that we are already in Gender Equality Utopia. Not when virtually all of those deviations from a 50/50 split seem, curiously, to fall in such a way that men are disproportionately represented in those professions that are most powerful, well-compensated, and respected. Not when we have all sorts of scientifically rigorous, peer-reviewed research that show that (e.g.) the same behavior that is perceived as strong leadership from a man is seen as bitchy and pushy from a woman, that women somehow got hired more often for symphonies when auditions were made gender-blind, that women professors are discriminated against on student evaluations.

You know — the sort of hard scientific evidence that critical thinking scientists claim to value over feelings and anecdotes and folk legends. Unless those folk legends involve speculation about how women like pink because their evolutionary forebears handled the berry-picking.

Back when the United States passed Title IX and required that colleges receiving federal funds provide equal access to athletic programs for women, there were many who declared that this was absurd because women just weren’t as interested in sports as men, it was obvious, and trying to force it to be otherwise was an exercise in “social engineering.” Well, it turns out that women and girls were a lot more interested in sports than they were generally given credit for. Once those opportunities were provided, college women were interested. And younger girls, given something to aspire to, got interested, too.

Twenty years ago, if asked about these things, I probably would have agreed with the Damores and Blackfords and Coynes of the world. The reason I changed my mind isn’t because I decided to put feelings or abstract utopian goals ahead of cold hard facts; it was that I looked at the cold hard facts and realized that some of my assumptions were wrong.

To circle back to the original point (finally!): the GDH isn’t “off limits” any more than “God did it” is “off limits” as an explanation of the creation and diversity of life forms on this planet. It just comes up short as an explanation.