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July 2020

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A Bunch of Lefty Thought Leaders Timidly Dissent From the Mob Daniel Greenfield

By on July 8th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/07/bunch-lefty-thought-leaders-timidly-dissent-mob-daniel-greenfield/

If you expected a moment of courage from liberals, you’ll need to keep waiting because the Harper’s letter isn’t it.

It starts out, in the same fashion as any form of lefty  movement criticism of extremist must these days, with a condemnation of Trump and a warning that the “right” will exploit cancel culture. Except they don’t name it that.

“Resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting,” the letter argues. “While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.”

And then comes the, “we’re living under Stalinsim, but we’re nervous about saying so.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Purifying Publishing The cultural commissars come for conservative books. Bruce Bawer

By on July 8th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/purifying-publishing-bruce-bawer/

Of America’s most powerful and prominent cultural institutions, it’s quick work naming those that aren’t entirely left-wing satrapies. TV? Fox News, although things are looking less and less encouraging there. Colleges? Hillsdale, I guess, though how many Ivy League faculty members would ever admit to having heard of it? Newspapers? The New York Post (sometimes), Wall Street Journal (kind of), and perhaps one or two others from sea to shining sea. Silicon Valley? Nothing. Hollywood? ¡Nada! Big business? Hmm: what is there, nowadays, honestly, other than that My Pillow guy?

One field in which there’s at least a soupçon of ideological diversity is the book trade. Yes, staffers at the major publishing houses are overwhelmingly on the left. Ditto bookstore employees. Plus the people who give out the major book awards. Not to mention that the heftiest advances for political books go to Democrats. Since the turn of the century, the biggest nonfiction book deal, amounting to at least $65 million, was for Michelle Obama’s Becoming (2018) and for an as-yet-unpublished opus by Barack; second – raking in $15 million – was Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004); third – at $14 million – was Hillary’s Hard Choices (2014).

One more thing about the reflexive leftism of the book scene. Thanks to today’s lethal cancel culture, even classics are at risk. Recently, in an article for the School Library Journal headlined “Little House, Big Problem: What To Do with ‘Classic’ Books That Are Also Racist,” Marva Hinton identified both Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as racist. No, she didn’t just say that they contained racist language, which would have been fair enough; she asserted that these two books – both of them key texts in the history of the American struggle against racism – are in fact racist.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Bret Stephens, the Gray Lady, and ‘The Great Awokening’By Noah Carl 

By on July 8th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/07/bret-stephens-the-gray-lady-and-the-great-a
A small piece of advice for anyone preparing a submission to the New York Times: do perform a thorough background check on each and every person you intend to cite.

A spike in the level of outrage on Twitter is by no means a rare event. Regular users are accustomed to glancing over at the “Trending” tab to see who or what has raised people’s hackles that particular day. It is not so common, however, for that type of spike to be generated by something published in America’s newspaper of record, still less an instance of outrage that should prompt the editors of said newspaper to issue a major correction and an “Editor’s Note.”

Many will recall that Twitter went into meltdown on June 3, after the New York Times published a bellicose op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) titled “Send In the Troops.” But this is not what I have in mind. The event to which I’m referring took place at the end of last year, and although it is but one squall in a vast and tempestuous sea of online indignation, I believe it offers some valuable insights into cultural trends in the English-speaking world.

The kerfuffle began when Bret Stephens—whose journalistic career, even before the event in question, had not been completely divorced from controversy—published a column titled “The Secrets of Jewish Genius.” In the column, Stephens argued that the reason Jews have made such outsized scientific and cultural contributions is not that they are smarter than other groups, but rather that they have benefited—over the course of their history—from certain beliefs, practices and traditions. These would include being asked “not only to observe and obey but also to discuss and disagree” and understanding that “everything that is intangible—knowledge most of all—is potentially everlasting.” In fact, the column’s original subheading was “It’s not about having high I.Q.s.” (Stephens even went so far as to say “what makes Jews special is that they aren’t,” suggesting that explanatory coherence was not his primary concern.)

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Reign of Error By Anthony Esolen 

By on July 8th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/07/a-reign-of-error/

What we think about things can be as important as the things themselves, because it forms our moral stance toward the world. But what if our thoughts are in error?

At the end of The Unheavenly City: The Nature and the Future of Our Urban Crisis (1968), Edward Banfield presents a prospect regarding race relations that seems to have been fulfilled since his tumultuous years and ours: a reign of error.

Let me set the stage. America had become the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, and the wealth was making its way to the lower classes also. Thus the main “accidental factor” that had locked Americans in a vicious cycle of white discrimination and prejudice on one side and low standards and attainments for blacks on the other would be largely alleviated. Such prejudice, said Banfield, writing during the years of urban riots, was already in decline.

By any reasonable criterion, he was correct about that decline. Consider, for one example, our nearly universal acceptance of interracial marriage. Such acceptance was unimaginable when “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture of 1967, largely on account of its message (for a much superior and gut-ripping film on interracial marriage, racial animosity, and rank injustice, see 1964’s “One Potato, Two Potato”). More than 1-in-6 new marriages in the United States are interracial. That alone, I had once thought, would suffice to put those animosities to rest, as it had done between other embittered groups.

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