Tarring Steve Pinker and others with Jeffrey Epstein - "I’ve seen people of low character go after Steve Pinker because of his supposed association with accused sexual predator and child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein... But that’s not enough. I see articles where, on no evidence at all, scientists and atheists are tarred because they either knew Epstein or associated with him. This innuendo is meant to imply that those people knew about Epstein’s crimes and either ignored them or, perhaps, even participated in them. In other words, they’re complicit...
'The annoying irony is that I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him, and always tried to keep my distance... Epstein had insinuated himself with so many people I intersected with (Alan Dershowitz, Martin Nowak, John Brockman, Steve Kosslyn, Lawrence Krauss) and so many institutions he helped fund (Harvard’s Program in Evolutionary Dynamics, ASU’s Origins Project, even Harvard Hillel) that I often ended up at the same place with him... last year I was featured in a New York Times op-ed by Jesse Singal called “Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A”; this year I appear to be Exhibit B.'"
Steven Pinker won’t be cancelled – but you could be - "An open letter to the Linguistic Society of America has called for the removal of Steven Pinker from its list of distinguished fellows. It accuses the Harvard professor of using racist dog-whistles, scientific racism and broadly opposing the goals of racial justice. The accusations in the letter have been thoroughly contested and rejected by the likes of Nicholas Christakis, Michael Shermer, John McWhorter and Noam Chomsky, among others. The attempt to cancel Steven Pinker has failed in spectacular fireworks – fitting indeed for the week after Independence Day. But don’t be distracted by the explosions – this letter wasn’t really about Pinker at all. In fact, it has a very specific function – to dissuade lesser-known academics and students from questioning the ideological consensus. The letter says, in not so few words: ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re Steven f***ing Pinker. If you don’t agree with our ideological prescriptions, you don’t belong here.’ The letter is really directed towards you – the unknown academic, the young linguist, the graduate student. And in this particular goal of dissuading dissent, it will undoubtedly be successful. Although the letter has been widely criticised, you are not Steven Pinker, and Noam Chomksy and others probably aren’t going to come to your defence when you get sanctioned for expressing the wrong opinion. Not because they don’t believe in free speech, but because they won’t even be aware of your case... There are 575 people opposing Pinker for his views, and in the small world of academia that signals an extraordinarily high cost to dissent. Fortunately for Pinker, with his huge base of supporters, he is uncancellable. Every academic in North America could denounce him and his career would only marginally suffer. But what about the rest of us? What are we supposed to do? First, we need to stop mindlessly signing petitions. People sign petitions because it has a negligible cost with a moderate reward – 30 seconds of reading and typing for the psychological satisfaction of doing something. It gives you the opportunity to signal to others your moral virtue and the chance to direct the mob away from yourself. Don’t be a pawn for someone else’s ideological move. Second, academics and students must openly support the values of academic freedom and viewpoint diversity"
From 2020
Steven Pinker - The man who refused to be cancelled - "Pinker, a 65-year-old Canadian-American and best-selling author, was accused of “drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence”, “misrepresenting facts” and even “moving in the proximity” of “scientific racism”. The accusations sound terrible; the evidence was thin. The letter quoted just six tweets dating back to 2014 and two words from a book he wrote in 2011 – a classic example of “offence archaeology”... Intellectual curiosity has become a liability; ideas that could be articulated a few years ago could now get someone “in serious trouble, if not fired.” Most of Pinker’s tweets that upset fellow linguists were links to pieces in the *Times* and the *Washington Post*, “two of America’s most liberal papers”... The Society of Linguists might even offer a model of how an institution should act when a valued and trusted member comes under attack: “A number of linguists threatened to resign from the society if they accepted the letter” and the president of the society “didn’t express any sympathy for the letter and the society itself repudiated it.”... “My concern is... for less powerful scholars who are intimidated from expressing opinions that depart from the hard-Left orthodoxy.” Pinker says that one academic friend has received “a hundred letters from junior scholars saying they are intimidated from expressing their opinions. There are many cases of scholars who have been fired often as the result of petition mobs calling for their dismissal on the basis of having attended a conference or appearing on a podcast” – or for having defended the right to articulate an opinion they might not share themselves... “People feel they are infallible, especially when it comes to moral convictions... we are apt to treat dissenting opinions as heresies, that certain thoughts are immoral to think.” Twitter contributes to this sense of certainty, he concludes; it is not pushed, like Wikipedia, towards accuracy, but in the opposite direction, and therefore away from truth... Cancel culture expresses the “same psychology of religion” found in “other episodes of intellectual oppression, such as the Stalinist terror... or McCarthyite repression in the United States...”"
Steven Pinker Will Be Just Fine - The Atlantic - ("The Chilling Effect of an Attack on a Scholar")
"the hundreds of academics who targeted Pinker were not merely reaffirming sensible, widely agreed upon taboos. They were trying to radically narrow the bounds of acceptable speech and inquiry. A closer look at the letter lays bare the specific ideological orthodoxies and political tests that at least hundreds of linguists now feel comfortable openly imposing on their colleagues. The first thing to note is the letter’s acknowledgment that the denunciation itself and its call for the Linguistic Society of America to remove Pinker from its list of “distinguished academic fellows and media experts” are not grounded in any claim about Pinker’s scholarly chops. The signatories have no concern about his “academic contributions as a linguist, psychologist and cognitive scientist.”... the signatories do not accuse Pinker of “scientific racism” with the attendant obligation to substantiate the charge. They merely claim that Pinker tends to “move” in “the proximity” of what one newspaper “called” a revival of scientific racism. These are the same tenuous, abuse-prone, guilty-by-association tactics that the far right has used to tar academics by linking them to communism or Islamism... The second clause, about David Brooks, is doubly remarkable: first, because the signatories imply that publicly supporting the centrist New York Times columnist and best-selling author is somehow beyond the pale for linguists in good standing, and second, because they conflate agreement with a newspaper column with public support for the columnist. Next, the signatories suggest that a linguist who provides expert textual analysis of a criminal statute––which is the service Pinker provided for Epstein, apparently at the behest of Pinker’s Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz––is thereby sullied with the crimes of the defendant. Such an attitude would, of course, interfere with the ability to mount adequate legal defenses and challenge prosecutors. The last clause, about Pinker’s allegedly dubious stances on rape and feminism, points to the feminist Kate Manne’s critiques of the linguist’s comments on the statistical frequency of deadly hate crimes against women, an empirical question, and on whether rape is exclusively about power or partly about sex, a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. The letter’s passage conveys these messages to linguists: avoid anything that could be seen as “moving in the proximity” of problematic beliefs, avoid tweeting links to the work of any newspaper columnist who has any problematic belief or risk being tarred with that belief, avoid giving expert analysis of language in the criminal cases if the defendant stands accused of heinous crimes, and don’t depart from feminist orthodoxies. Already, the signatories have implied a severely constrained, highly ideological view of acceptable behavior, even before their primary critique... a scholar can be guilty of “drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence” not as a result of speaking over anyone or suppressing their speech, but merely by publishing claims of his own. What’s more, the signatories imply that scholars can transgress against professional standards if they speak at the wrong time... this passage stereotypes “people suffering from racist and sexist violence” as if they are a monolith that shares the highly particular views of the signatories. One allegedly problematic Pinker tweet stating “Don’t abolish the police,” in fact, expresses a viewpoint that is shared by a majority of every demographic group in America... Applying the standards the signatories set forth, a linguist may violate professional standards by citing a Black academic, with the core scholarly practice of citation selectively reframed as co-option. The signatories go on to claim that Pinker “misrepresents” the work of that scholar. That is at least the sort of claim that ought to affect the reputation and standing of an academic, but the signatories do not substantiate it... No one engaged in public life could be confident of avoiding speech that might be deemed problematic by the standards used in the Pinker letter... They also made factual errors, as noted by Mother Jones... Charleen Adams, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health who holds a master’s degree in applied linguistics, called the letter’s demands “reactive and authoritarian,” and likened it to a performative ritual by a mob seeking purification. The Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter, an Atlantic contributor, wrote on Twitter, “An organization dedicated to linguistic analysis must punish a leading, brilliant scholar because in the wake of George Floyd's murder, his politics aren't sufficiently leftist? Folks, it’s time to stand this gospel down.” To me, the motivations behind the letter, however well-intentioned or malign, altruistic or power-seeking, quasi-religious or rational, matter less than what the attack reveals about the academy. The desire to significantly narrow the bounds of acceptable speech is not a fringe proposition; it is a project that hundreds of people in a single academic field are willing to pursue openly"
Given that Nature openly said in 2022 that it's going to be politically biased, the madness has not abated
"Conservatives" who claim that academia is biased are just sour that "reality has a known liberal bias"
Steven Pinker Beats Cancel Culture Attack - ""I think to credit rampage shooters as part of a system [of misogyny] is statistically obtuse," says Pinker. He points out that rampage shootings are responsible for a tiny fraction of homicides and consequently he is "opposed to over-interpreting rampage shooters" as evidence that the patriarchy endorses the idea that "innocent women should be murdered by shooters" and is "a rather poor way to understand cultural trends." In fact, a 2019 review of the motivations of mass shooters in the U.S. found that misogyny was the leading factor in only one case—the Santa Barbara rampage. Pinker notes the cultural trends with respect to violence against women in the U.S. are happily the opposite implied by the letter-writers... With respect to the claim that Pinker seeks to "publicly co-opt" the work of a colleague, Pinker responds, "Yeah, in the new Orwellian vocabulary citation is now appropriation." He adds, "Bobo, my colleague and my dean, has presented data showing that fortunately overt racism has been in decline."... "Dogwhistling is an intriguing exegetical technique in which you can claim that anyone says anything because you can easily hear the alleged dogwhistles that aren't in the actual literal contents of what the person says," observes Pinker. "I think that you could replace dogwhistle with auditory hallucination and the accusation would be exactly the same." So what motivated the letter-writers to launch their righteous attack on Pinker? "It is part of a larger movement to try to accuse as many people as possible of various forms of prejudice and bigotry in the belief that is the way to make the world a better place," argues Pinker. His critics are embracing a mindset that "does not see the world as having complex problems that we ought to understand better, the better to diagnose and treat, but rather as a kind of warfare between powerful elites and oppressed masses." "In this mindset," he notes, "analysis, debate and evidence are just tools of propaganda exercised by those in power and that what has to happen is not a deeper understanding of social problems but a wresting of power from elites and redistributing it to disenfranchised." Pinker believes he was targeted as part of a larger movement "seeking monsters to destroy."... "It's also part of these new exegetical tools that woke culture has deployed where disagreement is now labeled 'silencing' and 'drowning out' and 'harm.' Now the false ascription of belief is now the detection of 'dogwhistles'—an intriguing tool of hermeneutics in which you can accuse anyone of saying anything even if they didn't say it because you can always hear the dogwhistle if you yourself are a canine with hypersonic hearing.""
A Letter Accusing Steven Pinker of Racism Applies Familiar Tactics - "It reminded me of some letters written over 60 years ago that my father kept to his dying day. My father was editor of the Chicago Maroon as an undergraduate during the McCarthy Red Scare years. He wrote several columns criticizing various universities for firing tenured faculty for refusing to take loyalty oaths, or for vague and unsubstantiated charges of subversion, without providing them the opportunity to defend themselves in open hearings. The columns were not particularly radical and represented liberal opinion at the time... The Pinker letter doesn’t set out a list of clear charges with the expectation that the accused will have an opportunity to present a defense. The conclusion is described as “inevitable” in the second sentence, before any charges have been mentioned. But the charges are too murky to refute... Guilt by association is a key tactic of this kind of attack, not because it is particularly convincing but because it makes an implicit threat that anyone who disagrees with the letter can be caught up in the smear campaign... It’s not enough to be innocent; you must broadcast your support and denounce others... The letter replaces actual quotes from Pinker with offensive things that his accusers pretend he has written"
Helena Bonham Carter defends JK Rowling and Johnny Depp in controversial interview - "Helena Bonham Carter is facing backlash online for defending JK Rowling and Johnny Depp... Bonham Carter voiced the opinion that 'Johnny certainly went through it'. The 56-year-old accused Heard of having gotten on 'that pendulum' of the Me Too movement. "That’s the problem with these things — that people will jump on the bandwagon because it’s the trend and to be the poster girl for it," Bonham Carter said. She stated she believes Depp has been 'completely vindicated' and is 'totally fine' now. On whether or not JK Rowling deserves to be cancelled, Bonham Carter branded the backlash the author has faced as 'horrendous' and 'a load of b***ocks'... The actor resolved not everyone has to agree on everything because that would just be 'insane and boring' and that Rowling wasn't 'meaning it aggressively' but just 'saying something out of her own experience'. Bonham Carter believes the backlash Rowling has faced is simply a result of jealousy... Bonham Carter also disagrees with other Harry Potter stars having publicly addressed the controversy surrounding Rowling, resolving she doesn't 'agree with talking about other famous people'... Bonham Carter resolved her controversial opinion by questioning: "Do you ban a genius for their sexual practices? "There would be millions of people who if you looked closely enough at their personal life you would disqualify them. "You can’t ban people. I hate cancel culture. It has become quite hysterical and there’s a kind of witch-hunt and a lack of understanding.""
MILO's 'Coming Out Conservative' Event Cancelled by Restaurant Following Protests - "“It is darkly humorous that a restaurant that inhabits the same space as a club as wild as the Limelight now allows itself to be controlled by leftist killjoys who are intent on shutting down gays that don’t agree with them,” proclaimed the post. “The Jue Lan Club chose to buckle under to leftists, which never works in the long run because leftists are never satisfied. Unfortunately for Jue Lan, at some point, the same leftists that threatened to boycott them over MILO‘s Coming Out Conservative event will decide that white guys running a Chinese restaurant is disgusting cultural appropriation and boycott them anyways.”"
They can’t cancel all of us - "popular UCLA professor Gordon Klein was suspended from his university and placed under armed guard at home after refusing to offer special final exam accommodations to potentially ‘traumatised’ black students following the death of Floyd. Away from the hallowed halls and ivy-covered walls of academe, the long-time play-by-play man for the Sacramento Kings basketball team was fired for tweeting out the phrase ‘All Lives Matter’... Perhaps most remarkably, a US soccer star was fired because of un-PC social-media posts from his wife. After his spouse, Tea, posted in Serbian on Instagram, calling all protesters ‘disgusting cattle’ and suggesting that at least looters be ‘killed’, LA Galaxy winger Aleksandar Katai was called on the carpet by his club and almost immediately issued a social-media apology. Katai pledged that not merely he but his whole family would ‘take the necessary actions to learn, understand, listen [to], and support the black community’. This did not suffice to save him: Katai was formally dropped from the squad via a one-sentence statement on 5 June. Going Full Maoist, at least a few Twitter and Facebook commentators argued that Katai – cut from a major-league professional sporting franchise because of someone else’s words – should have avoided punishment by formally denouncing his wife. This sort of thing is, to put it mildly, not good. There are at least three major problems with cancel culture. First, almost anyone could be cancelled, on the basis of the (claimed) standards prevalent on the modern ‘social justice’ left. Secondly, cancellation tends in practice to be a non-random process targeted at political and ideological opponents, rather than a genuine attempt at a new moral standard. Finally, and most importantly, the declaration by wokesters that many conversations are now simply off-limits prevents the communication of important information that would make it possible for citizens better to judge the arguments of movements like Black Lives Matter... the plain fact is that the huge majority of people have probably at some point told an ethnic or regional joke, sent a pornographic or un-PC snap, had sex while intoxicated, used a slur tied to sexual orientation / race / gender online or in the lockerroom, worn a St Paddy’s Day or Cinco de Mayo outfit they would really prefer a mulligan on, or committed other Cardinal Sins against Wokeness. As a result of this, many young people are intently aware that Twitter and Facebook wars involving the unearthing of old content generally end with egg on the face of everyone involved. Caucasian NBA point guard Donte DeVincenzo was humiliated in late 2018 by the revelation that – at age 14 – he had described his hoops handle as ‘ballin’ on these nig*as like I’m Derrick Rose’. He ended up deleting his entire social-media presence. The point of monitoring this sort of thing, for the many people and organisations that do so, is not punishing the tiny minority of real racists and abusers out there so much as keeping normal citizens too terrified by the potential unearthing of past indiscretions to comment lustily on the issues of the day. The fact that virtually anyone could in fact ‘legitimately’ be cancelled leads into extreme partisan hypocrisy... In February 2018, for example, liberal Virginia governor Ralph Northam – nicknamed ‘Coonman’ – escaped any serious censure after he was revealed to have apparently appeared in a mid-1980s high-school yearbook photo wearing shoe-polish blackface... Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was revealed that same year to have worn black- and brown-face several times, and as late as 2001, once apparently painting his entire body to appear in costume as Aladdin at an Arabian Nights revue! He, too, remains solidly entrenched in office today. Humorous hypocrisy aside, however, the censorship of discussion of more serious issues has a real and profound effect on civil discourse. This is especially the case in the context of Black Lives Matter, where many endlessly repeated nostrums about the interactions between police and black communities that turn out to be almost nonsensically false. Despite the claim by power-players like American attorney Benjamin Crump that black Americans are currently experiencing a ‘genocide’ of police and civilian violence, the total number of unarmed black Americans killed by law enforcement officers in the most recent year on record was 15... even the very slight gap between the 13 to 14 per cent black percentage of the US population and the 22 per cent representation of identified black Americans among police-shooting victims vanishes entirely when a simple adjustment is made for crime rate. The many mainstream media outlets that almost invariably refuse to report any of this undisputed information when discussing BLM, and which not infrequently censor those who dare to do so, are contributing to an odd international hysteria... So, what is to be done about poisonous cancel culture? Basically, citizens should make themselves difficult to cancel and absolutely refuse to participate in the cancellation of others. By the first point, speaking here to those who are not completely financially secure, I don’t mean ‘stay silent’, but keep your Twitter account anonymous and your Facebook account limited to real friends. Those with the security of tenure or an independent income should take a different tack: use this ‘privilege’ to calmly and politely tell the truth whenever needed. Most importantly, adult free citizens should refuse as a moral rule to mob other citizens – at least in the absence of any actual evil, which is almost invariably the case online and in youth culture. When mobbing occurs in common forums, such as social-media platforms and comments sections, all those with the time to do so should vigorously defend the ritual victims being attacked, as openly and strategically as possible. It strikes me that 10,000 people posting classic anatomical drawings would be a rather effective rebuttal to a published claim that biological sexes do not exist. If done aggressively, consistently and only in response to unnecessary attacks, this ‘massive retaliation’ strategy really could end cancel culture"
Now cancel culture is coming for children - "The latest Black Lives Matter-inspired fad is for schoolkids to invite other schoolkids to cyberbully their peers because they have been found to have said something racist... the innocence of youth is apparently worthless in the eyes of the ever-growing mob. And the futures of those accused are seen as fair game by those attacking them online. The 16-year-old administrator of one social-media group dedicated to exposing racism at school told the New York Times that she wanted to target those about to go to university because she did not want ‘people like that’ to get jobs through their education. Paradoxically, denying the right to education appears to be a tool of those seeking to ‘educate’... What is most astonishing here is not that children are essentially finding new ways essentially to bully each other — rather, it is the absence of adults who are willing to put a stop to it. Instead, many adults are cheering it on. Skai Jackson is a young celebrity who has been sharing the usernames and schools of alleged racist kids to her 560,000 Twitter followers. Media outlets have fawned over her doxxing of children. Cosmopolitan , for instance, said she was ‘doing the Lord’s work online’ by ‘expos[ing] racist teenagers’. This is terrifying... adults need to recognise that cancel culture is out of control when it is going after children."
Cancel culture is coming for Christianity - "The Christian Institute has been valiantly campaigning for Christians’ freedom of speech since the turn of the millennium when New Labour started working to outlaw hate speech and ‘phobias’ of various kinds – such as homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia. Christian beliefs are often penalised by these laws. But for some reason, a great number of British Christians – particularly in the older Protestant denominations such as the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church – have been asleep to this threat to their free speech. Worse still, some Church of England bishops have even cheered on the banning of Christian preachers. For instance, earlier this year, the bishops of Liverpool and Sheffield publicly supported LGBT campaigners who successfully persuaded various venues around the UK to cancel bookings by US evangelist Franklin Graham because he believes that the Bible forbids homosexual practice. In recent years, Christians have been sacked from their jobs, thrown off university courses, and even arrested for stating the traditional teaching of the Church on sexual morality. I have been covering these issues for some time and am not aware of any occasion in which the current archbishops of Canterbury or York have publicly supported a Christian facing any of these predicaments. The Church of England hierarchy is either passive towards cancel culture or is actively fanning its flames... That desperate desire to keep their own divided house from falling down may explain why the politically correct threat to free speech in Britain is not on the list of social concerns among CofE bishops. But apathy about cancel culture is very damaging to the Christian cause. Christianity is supposed to be spread by persuasion"
Donald Glover says cancel culture is making entertainment boring - "For context, Donald Glover is at the top of the entertainment industry food chain. Many people were introduced to him through Dan Harmon’s Community, but the actor took it a step further with the success of his show Atlanta. Both those gigs aside, Glover played Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars Han Solo spinoff. When this high-profile actor speaks, people listen. Even with this most recent 2 AM tweet thread of his. Glover saw some reviewers sulking about having to review “boring” TV and film"
If you're against "accountability culture', you're a white supremacist
Donald Glover is right — I’m sick of white people canceling things on my behalf - "“we’re getting boring stuff and not even experimental mistakes” in TV and film these days “because people are afraid of getting canceled”. He added that, in order to avoid a social media uproar, people are afraid to make anything other than aesthetic changes in movies and other cultural output. Dave Chapelle recently said something similar, claiming that artists and directors can no longer be creative because of lack of appreciation for comedy and opinion. For the record, I think they’re both right, and I’ve said it before. I once wrote that 30 Rock and NBC should have never deleted their more controversial TV episodes, including one where Jane Krakowski’s character, Jenna, dresses in blackface. Almost as soon as I said it publicly, I started getting told by white people that I was wrong. These same white people then sent me advice on how I needed to change my ways of thinking, as if they could be a better Black man than I could. After that, I had to ask myself, “Will this article potentially, maybe, end my writing career?” before penning something which straightforwardly wrestled with whether “canceling” is always a good idea, just in case white social media warriors came after me. The thing with canceling is that it makes white people feel like they’re doing something useful. But the Black community never asked people to destroy or defund or edit media output which has graced our televisions and our movie theaters and libraries for decades... Equality doesn’t mean anticipating what a group might want at some point in the near future because you’re afraid of a lawsuit or a demonstration in front of your building, and stifling creativity because of it. I don’t need a trigger warning on an adaptation of Gone With The Wind. I need real change in society, and I want TV and film to be able to push boundaries and to make edgy comedy which sometimes makes people uncomfortable. Robert Downey Jr’s character in Tropic Thunder is an example of this: he appears in blackface throughout the film, but he is sending up the industry itself and the allowances it makes for white actors in pursuit of their own, blinkered, egocentric goals. That might not be to everyone’s taste, but I see no reason for such movies to be banned or kicked off streaming platforms. They grapple with complex issues; whether they succeed or not should be up to an audience to decide."
Those People We Tried to Cancel? They’re All Hanging Out Together - The New York Times
"Cancel culture is not that bad or does not exist because some cancelled people have seen an upside, at least to some degree". If one pointed out the same for alleged victims of "racism"...
Cancel culture: How ‘woke’ universities are causing the problem - "Decades ago, the philosopher Allan Bloom famously warned about “the closing of the American mind” on university campuses. In particular, Bloom worried about academia’s growing embrace of moral relativism. “Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power,” he wrote. From our modern vantage point, many of Bloom’s deepest fears about social justice, victimhood culture and political correctness have proven to be prophetic. However, on the matter of moral relativism, Bloom has recently been challenged. Research published in the journal American Sociological Review suggests that we’re actually witnessing the growth of moral absolutism on college campuses instead... The authors believe that the humanities, arts and social science disciplines have become particularly good at instilling absolutist beliefs among impressionable students. These departments, they write, promote “a moral profile characterized by a progressive belief ... accompanied by a conviction that there are definite moral truths.” Moreover, the authors found that the more time a student spends on cloistered campuses, the greater the odds that he or she will exhibit these traits. Relying on a sample of thousands of American youth between 2002 and 2013 from the National Study of Youth and Religion, the report is a striking indictment. It’s worth remembering that “wokeness” hadn’t even entered mainstream consciousness until roughly 2015, which means that today’s students are likely undergoing a significantly more potent strain of moralization. The findings quantify what many outside observers have long suspected. Earlier researchers had documented how a majority of nearly 500 sociology professors believed that their discipline had a “moral mission.” It logically follows that their teaching would be at least somewhat evangelical in nature... the researchers couldn’t find a single conservative in their sample of communications or anthropology departments... an examination of 2022 graduation ceremonies found the disparity between liberal and conservative commencement speakers to be 53:3. Such intellectual homogeneity enshrines groupthink. The problem-child departments are, by now, well-known. Disciplines such as whiteness, gender and women’s studies offer students moral certainty for which activism — not dispassionate inquiry — is the yardstick of truth... students leave school believing that “society must change to remedy historical (and current) injustices.” As always, the tools utilized to resolve such social ills are partisan and one-sided: flourishing progressive policies on campuses today include trigger warnings, microaggressions and implicit bias training, as well as diversity, inclusion and equity mandates. Restricting, rather than enlarging speech, is a direct consequence of such moralization"
‘It’s out of order’: Gen Z speak up for cancel culture and ‘young illiberal progressives’ - "Generation Z has a bad case of the “yips”, according to a new label being applied to a swathe of 13- to 24-year-olds. Close to half of those surveyed from that age range, branded young illiberal progressives (yips), think some people deserve to be “cancelled”, compared with a third of over-25s, and more than a quarter say they have “very little tolerance for people with beliefs I disagree with”... Yet at the same time, the study found they are significantly more progressive than older generations on issues such as gender and multiculturalism... When asked about the findings, Holly Valler, 18, told the Guardian: “Cancel culture has become something where you use it for everything. We just cancel people for the sake of wanting [to set] a trend going and to have some drama.” “I am seeing people cancelled for things they did when they were 15 years old,” said Ruben Otakoya, 19. “It’s out of order.” Georgia, 22, added: “People my age have been subconsciously pushed into a box where they think that the only way to share their opinion is by convincing other people that their opinion is the only correct way … They are confident … because now you can Google something and have facts that back up your opinion … I don’t necessarily blame our generation for being illiberal. I almost blame the environment that we’re in that has caused us to be so confirmed in our thoughts.”... Prof Bobby Duffy, the director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, questioned whether Gen Z would remain illiberal as it aged. “You do have greater certainty that your worldview is correct [when young],” he said. “And then it gets more complex and nuanced as you get older. So there’s likely to be a lifecycle element to that.”"
Progressivism is intolerant, after all
