My Review* of Greg Lukianoff's and Rikki Schlott's "The Cancelling of the American Mind:..."

The New Totalitarians

 

Greg Lukianoff’s and Rikki Schlott’s new book on the totalitarian nature of America’s cancel culture couldn’t be timelier. I would like to state at the outset that freedom of speech is very important to me because in my misspent youth I put myself at great risk for my beliefs.

 

As I write this, we are witnessing a rampage of totalitarian racial Marxists assaulting Jews on our most elite college campuses. It is not an accident that both Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, schools that witnessed among the worst antisemitic rampages in recent days, scored the lowest on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) scores on campus freedom of speech.  Just to note, Lukianoff is the president of FIRE and Schlott is a research fellow there.

 

This book can be considered a continuation of Jonathan Haidt’s and Greg Lukianoff’s 2018 “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Here Lukianoff and Schlott go into example after example of how people are canceled because of their heterodox beliefs. Most of the examples take place on college campuses, but there are telling examples in the publishing and the corporate world. Most of the examples involve the Left on attack with their rhetorical fortress built around the racial Marxist belief that oppressors can do no right and the oppressed can do no wrong. Thus, under their canon Israel defending itself from a wanton terrorist attack is guilty, while the Hamas terrorist dictatorship is innocent. Although Lukianoff considers himself a man of the Left, it fits neatly into Christopher Rufo’s right wing world view as expressed in his “America’s Cultural Revolution.” ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Christopher Rufo's "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything")

 

This book is not only a screed attacking the Left. The Right doesn’t get off easy as well. The authors recount how anti-Trump conservatives were cancelled, books were banned and “anti-woke” laws were put in place in several states forcing professors to walk on eggshells in what they can say on and off campus.

 

Lukianoff’s and Schlott’s solution calls for the creation of a free speech culture on college campuses, easier said than done, eliminating DEI loyalty oaths in the hiring and promotion of faculty, opening up more jobs to non-college graduates, and calling for employers to widen their horizons with respect to schools they recruit at. (i.e., more state schools over the Ivy’s) Indeed Lukianoff himself had to do away with the college degree requirement to hire Schlott.

 

I would go much further. In my view donors that feel the way I do should cut off their contributions to their alma maters, the entire DEI bureaucracy which enforces the cancel culture should be torn up root and branch and government should withhold funding for those institutions who fail to do that.

 

P.S. I received this book as a gift.

*-Amazon has yet to post the review. 11/16.   Amazon rejected this review because of  a "violation of community standards." I slightly edited the review and it appeared on 12/4 at the following URL:  The New Totalitarians (amazon.com)

A Big Week for the Supremes

 The Supreme Court closed it 2022-2023 session with a raft of blockbuster decisions. They buried the so-called “independent legislature theory,” supported the voting rights in Alabama, did away with raced-based preferences in college admissions, undid Biden’s usurpation of Congress’ power of the purse in the student loan case and prevented Colorado from interfering with freedom of expression in allowing a web designer to refuse designing a website for a gay wedding. The last one is a harder call but think of the child of a Holocaust survivor being forced to make a web design for a neo-Nazi group.

 

In my nonlawyer opinion I think all of the above cases were decided correctly. I was especially pleased by the ruling in the affirmative action case where all to many elite universities have been practicing a 21^st Century version of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. What proponents of race-based preferences are really trying to do is to offset the failures of K-12 public education. The reason why African Americans and Hispanics are “under-represented” in elite schools is that public education has failed them with a pattern and practice of state-sponsored child abuse aided and abetted by the reactionary teachers’ unions.

 

One last point on this is that I would hope the Supreme Court will soon accept the case of the odious DEI loyalty oath that is now required for hiring and promotion at many elite universities. There is far less justification for DEI loyalty oaths than there was in the 1950’s where faculty had to pledge loyalty to the United States.