Mediaboss Marketing

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- For Americans, the stakes in the November election are huge. For Europeans, they may be even bigger.

Thats an exaggeration, but only slightly. Since May 9, 1945, the U.S. has kept the peace and prosperity on the continent, which in the previous three decades had set off wars that killed more than 100 million people. The Europeans themselves deserve immense credit for finally getting off of each others throatsand forming a series of trade and legislativeorganizations that reached its apogee as the European Union.However, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Niall Ferguson wrote on July 19: Europeans like to give the EU credit for the fact Europe is no longer the worlds number one battlefield, but Americans understand that it has been the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the presence of U.S. troops that have really kept the peace.They are rightly proud of that achievement.

Theres not been so much to be proud oflately. The U.S. is clearly the side dragging the transatlantic relationship into the mire. President Donald Trumps words (insultingEuropean leaders,fawning over dictators) and actions (ordering U.S. troops withdrawn from Germany,slapping tariffs on everything from airplane parts to single-malt whiskies) have placed 75years of shared success at risk. How serious is it?To answer that question, I talked to someone witha foot on either side of the ocean:Anne Applebaum, whose latest book is titled,Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.A longtime fixture in Washington foreign-policy circles, first as a columnist at the Washington Post and currently atthe Atlantic, Applebaum lives in Poland with her husband,Radek Sikorski, who was that nations foreign minister from 2007 to 2014.Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion:Tobin Harshaw: Lets start with the $850 billion European Recovery Fund that EU leaders hashed out this week. There were people talking about this as the continents Hamilton Moment. Do you see an eventual United States of Europe?

Anne Applebaum: One of the oddities about the EU is that for all the complaining that its overbearing and that it's telling people what to do, its central structures are really quite weak at least outside of trade, the one area where members have seen it as in their interests to cede power to the European Commission. But the EU doesn't have the ability to run a proper fiscal policy, let alone a foreign policy or defense policy. Because of that, it has a very weak voice in the world.

I dont think we need a United States of Europe, but I would like to see the EU play a bigger role in geopolitics, to represent a set of values, in opposition to the values of Russia and China. I would like it to think about projecting stability and prosperity into its neighboring regions Eastern Europe, North Africa and to play a bigger role in international institutions.

But it is also true that it has to get there through means of consensus and so thats going to take a long time, if it ever happens.

TH: How much desire do Europeans have for that?

AA: It depends whom you ask, and when. But don't underestimate the desire of millions of Europeans for Europe to have a bigger voice in the world. As 27 separate countries, they arent really heard, and there are many who would like that to change.

TH: Do you think that a tighter fiscal union would be the driver in all this?

AA: It may well be that a tighter fiscal union would transfer more power to the European collective, that shared monetary instruments will be the tool that brings countries together. Personally, I would prefer that the EU consolidate around foreign and defense policy, but Europe integrates thanks to crises, and this is the one that we have at the moment.

TH: Governments like those in Poland and Hungary what we call the illiberal regimes are driving a wedge into Europe. Is the illiberal movement an anomaly or a long-term trend?

AA: Its a long-term trend. Hungary is no longer a democracy. I don't believe an opposition political party can win a national election in Hungary the playing field is too tilted. Note that Hungary is now doing deals with Russia and China; I believe the prime minister, Viktor Orban, knows he could eventually wind up outside of the European Union.

TH: And Poland?AA: Poland is more complicated. There are reasons to believe that democracy can be preserved the opposition is very large, independent media still exist, the economy is big and diverse although we'll see what happens over the next three years. But Polands destruction of judicial independence may pose an even greater problem for the EU, which needs its member states to have reliable courts for all kinds of business reasons as well as political reasons. European companies and people need to have faith in the idea that courts will treat you fairly. Polish courts are in danger of no longer meeting that standard.

TH: Are there tangible connections between these countries that have turned illiberal and the populist movements in Western Europe?

AA: Yes. There are connections between the Hungarian ruling party, the Polish ruling party, the far-right in Italy, the far right in France and to a lesser extent the far-right in Spain. All of them have links to the U.S. too, to the Trumpist part of the Republican Party, as well as the online alt-right.

Some of the links are personal: the party members and leaders meet one another and go to conferences together. There are also connections between their followers online. They copy one anothers posts and promote one anothers ideas. They will often fixate, as a group, on one particular incident; after the Notre Dame firelast year, many began posting and tweeting about alleged Muslim responsibility, or using the fire as a symbol for the supposed destruction of Christianity.

TH: There's probably no way to quantify the damage that Trump has done to the transatlantic alliance. But how fixable is it?Or is it permanent?

AA: The idea that America would always be a voice for democracy and for freedom, the idea that America would always be a reliable ally for Europeans as well as Americas partners in Asia is probably gone forever.

TH: Wow. Thats quite a statement.

AA: Of course President Joe Biden would seek to revive these alliances. But unless there's a major change inside the Republican party unless, post-Trump, it is taken over again by people who seem to have genuine interest in America's alliances around the world then I think there will always be the fear, another lost election and we lose America again.

For many, many decades, U.S. foreign policy has maintained a bipartisan consensus around a few issues, and one of them was the alliance with Europe. If that is no longer the case, if the Republican Party is no longer interested in alliances, then Europeans will rightly see that one of the political parties favors them and the other one doesn't, and that it is time to start planning a world without the U.S.

Its beginning to happen already. French President Emmanuel Macron is arguing for a deeper and more integrated Europe partly because he wants Europe to prepare for a world in which the U.S. is, if not hostile, then no longer a friend.

TH: In that case, is there a future for Republicans and conservatives who want to engage with the world and promote democracy so-called Never Trumpers?

AA: It depends on what happens in the election not just whether Trump loses, but how he loses. I think if he loses quite badly, if the Republicans lose the Senate, then perhaps there's a chance for a different kind of Republican leadership to emerge.

If Trump wins, or if he loses but only by a little bit, then Don Jr. or Tucker Carlson or someone else who wants to continue Trumps nationalist politics may well take over.

TH: I'massuming you were being sarcastic about Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson.

AA: No. Tucker Carlson concerns me a lot Trump was proof that you don't have to be a politician to become the party leader or to become president. Now other celebrities will seek to use their popularity and their Facebook followings in politics.

TH: Finally, I had one personal question for you. I'm wondering how being married to a prominent Polish politician complicates your role in writing about these things, and how do you keep your home life and your journalism separate?

AA: This is the main reason why I wrote Twilight of Democracy the way I did. It is not a magisterial political science treatise about illiberalism in Europe and America, its not a piece of third-person reporting or an objective history.Its written in the first person, it includes some elements of memoir or my own experiences and it really tries to explain what my biases might be precisely because I am part of the story.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Tobin Harshaw is an editor and writer on national security and military affairs for Bloomberg Opinion. He was an editor with the op-ed page of the New York Times and the papers letters editor.

2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Here is the original post:
The November Election Could Not Be Bigger for Europe - BNN

In mid-June, on a sunny late afternoon, dozens of protesters led by Indigenous and youth organizers gathered in front of the Albuquerque Museum at the feet of La Jornada, a statue of Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Oate. They called for the statues removal, saying it was a monument to a genocidal colonial history. On the outer banks of the crowd, at least six militiamen from the New Mexico Civil Guard, a civilian militia, flanked the protest in a tight semicircle, some of them shouldering assault rifles.

When some of the protesters began taking a pickax and chain to the statue, a man in a blue shirt later identified as Steven Baca Jr. sprayed a cloud of Mace at them. Then he threw a woman to the ground. Her head hit the pavement with an audible smack, and Baca fled, with protesters trailing him, shouting at him to leave. Baca turned to face a man in jeans and a black hoodie, who tackled him. A bystanders video caught the scuffle that followed: Baca drew a handgun from his waistband and fired four shots. Theres a man down, someone shouted. Theres a man down!

Protesters call for the removal of the statue of Juan de Oate as an armed militia member looks on outside the Albuquerque Museum on June 15 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Throughout the hours-long demonstration, Albuquerque police had waited behind the museum with an armored car, some watching from museum security cameras. Meanwhile, members of the so-called Civil Guard, dressed in Army uniforms and helmets, tried to keep protesters from the statue. They were there, they claimed, to keep peace and enforce the law. After Baca shot the protester three times, the militia surrounded him, protecting him as he sat in the street. The nearby police took four minutes to arrive. The protester, Scott Williams, was eventually taken to the hospital in critical condition.

The shooting at La Jornada, Spanish for the expedition, occurred several weeks after the beginning of #BlackLivesMatter protests in Albuquerque. At those demonstrations, too, a disquieting camaraderie between official police and another militia, the New Mexico Patriots, emerged. Were all here for the same cause, man, an Albuquerque police officer said to a group of body-armored gym-goers and militiamen before a #BLM protest, according to a video taken by a militia member and shared online. Were here to help.

The incidents are in line with the deeper history of the Albuquerque polices behavior during the civil rights movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. High Country News unearthed archival documents from the Center for Southwest Research illuminating a history of police cooperation and cross-pollination with radical right-wing and vigilante groups in New Mexico. According to police and FBI reports, newspaper clippings and the testimony of activists, that cooperation included surveillance, harassment and misinformation campaigns against social justice movements by informants and radical provocateurs.

While community members and activists have long complained about excessive use of force and surveillance at protests and in minority neighborhoods, these documents clearly show that New Mexico law enforcement tolerates and at times embraces white vigilantism. And despite the Albuquerque Police Departments statement condemning the New Mexico Civil Guard after the shooting, militiamen with known white-power affiliations continue to patrol protests with the silent encouragement of law enforcement.

Theres this overlap between the people who populate militias and populate police departments.

THEY ALL TRAVEL in the same circles, said David Correia, associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. Correia has done extensive research on the cross-pollination that occurred between police, radical right ideology and vigilantism during the civil rights movement. These are all former police or former military, or former guardsman or current guardsman. Theres this overlap between the people who populate militias and populate police departments.

Police brutality and political repression flourished in Albuquerque throughout the civil rights movement. A 1974 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documented an array of alleged abuses and found that police in Albuquerque and across the state used unconstitutional and at times violent, even deadly, methods when policing minority neighborhoods and political dissidents, including the Chicano groups Alianza Federal de Mercedes and the Black Berets.

The militant Black Berets regularly faced death threats from the local Minutemen militia as well as misinformation campaigns organized by the anti-communist John Birch Society. According to Beret leader Richard Moore, the group sent an informant to the militias meetings in the late-1960s and created a roster of those who attended, including multiple police departments comprising the secretive Metro Squad, a police intelligence unit. Many members of the right-wing Minute Men [sic] organization were from the sheriffs, the state police, and the Albuquerque Police departments. So making a distinction between the two sometimes wasnt easy, said Moore in 2001. The group gave out the list at a press conference in Santa Fe, including to a New Mexico attorney general, hoping for an investigation. It never came.

In 1968 and 1969, a spate of bombings struck some of Alianza leader Reies Lpez Tijerinas relatives. In May 1968, William Tiny Fellion a paid assassin, demolitions expert and John Birch Society member, as reported by state police just two months earlier blew off his left hand planting a bomb at Alianzas headquarters in Espaola, New Mexico. According to a New Mexico State Police report, Fellion told an officer that he would kill Tijerina and his followers free of charge because he has no use for that type of people. After Fellions botched bombing, tips came in that led both Alianza and the FBI Albuquerque Field Office to believe local police were behind the bombings.

ON THE CLOUDY EVENING of June 1, two weeks before the Baca shooting, members of the New Mexico Patriots met with at least six Albuquerque Police Department officers outside the Jackson Wink Mixed Martial Arts Academy in downtown Albuquerque, before a #BLM protest. If you guys would see something, gives us a holler, an Albuquerque officer told the militia. But take care of each other and, the main thing, take care of the people in Albuquerque.

Jon Jones, an MMA fighter, explained that their goal was to stop protester shenanigans without brandishing their guns.

A lot of these (protesters), they just move from one block to the next block to the next block, an Albuquerque police officer responded. So even just being two blocks away because police are moving there from one side that would be helpful, just right there.

Militia groups regularly coordinate with police.

Emily Gorcenski, a researcher and founder of First Vigil, a group that tracks far-right violence, says that there is an extensive history of armed vigilante groups collaborating with police. Militia groups regularly coordinate with police, she wrote, over Twitter. From Portland to Charlottesville, weve seen armed paramilitaries working directly with police against protesters over and over.

During the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017, police circulated a false white supremacist rumor that antifa planned to inject police with fentanyl. That same year, at a Portland alt-right rally, American Freedom Keepers militiamen helped police arrest counter-protesters, allegedly at police request.

In New Mexico, the NM Patriots and the Civil Guard both claim to coordinate with local police, reported the Albuquerque Journal, while the Civil Guard also says it has current and former law enforcement and military within its ranks.

Members of the New Mexico Civil Guard militia group are apprehended after a protester was shot in Albuquerque in June.

THE ALBUQUERQUE POLICE DEPARTMENT did not respond to requests for comment or to questions regarding its officers potential membership within citizen militias,including the New Mexico Civil Guard a group which APD Chief Michael Geier proposed bestowing hate group designation after the Baca shooting. In an email, a spokesperson from New Mexico State Police said their Investigations Bureau is actively investigating possible NMSP membership within militia ranks.

The Albuquerque Police Department has released few details about the shooting at La Jornada. The departments criminal complaint reported that Steven Baca Jr. acted in a manner in which to protect the statue from the protesters. It failed to mention his violent provocation, and described the crowd ejecting Baca from the scene as maliciously in pursuit of him. Steven was similarly recorded, leaving the area of the statue toward the street interacting with the crowd, the report read. However, his specific type of interaction with the crowd is unknown at this time.

Bacas charge for the shooting was dropped, leaving multiple other battery charges. He was an Albuquerque City Council candidate in 2019 and is the son of former Bernalillo County sheriffs deputy, according to Albuquerque Journal.

Given the departments history, Correia said, It's not clear where the line is between police and right-wing fascist militia in New Mexico.

We know it led to violence directed specifically at individual activists (and) should make us suspicious of the way APD operates today when it confronts social movements like (#BlackLivesMatter), Correia said. Because they've done this before, we shouldn't be surprised if they're still doing it.

After the June 1 meeting between Jon Jones, NM Patriots and the police, thebearded militiaman filming the meeting turned to address the camera directly. Were going to be out patrolling in a little bit,he said. See you guys out there.

Kalen Goodluckis a contributing editor atHigh Country News.Email himatkalengood[emailprotected]g or submit aletter to the editor.

Get our Indigenous Affairs newsletter

Thank you for signing up for Indian Country News, an HCN newsletter service. Look for it in your email each month.

Link:
New Mexico's thin blurred line (The thin blurred line) High Country News Know the West - High Country News

At 37, Jacinda Ardern became the worlds youngest head of state in 2017, as New Zealands Prime Minister. Over the weekend and a little less than three years later, the latest Newshub polls indicate record approval ratings for Arderns Labour party.

The results came in on the same day that Ardern turned 40, and they are recorded as Arderns leadership is being recognised internationally.

Birthday celebrations are being marked by a number creative means. Block Vandal, a Wainuiomata street artist, painted a Lego-styled image of the Prime Minister on a Lower Hutt retaining wall in the Wellington Region in NZ. He took a picture of his work and posted it on social media with a caption: Happy Birthday Jacinda. Hope you had a great day with your family!

Arderns face now accompanies a dozen other Lego faces of superheroes including Batman, Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk.

To mark this significant birthday milestone from one of the worlds most celebrated leaders, were taking a look at just some her incredible achievements since taking the role.

She became the second female state leader to have a baby in office, and challenged expectations

On 21 June 2018, less than a year into her tenure as PM, Ardern became the first sitting New Zealand PM to give birth and the second female state leader to do so in the world, when her daughter Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford was born.

Im sure were going through all of the emotions new parents go through, but at the same time feeling so grateful for all the kindness and best wishes from so many people, Ardern has said.

Ardern had announced her pregnancy on social media, saying, Ill be PM & a mum.

Since then, she has transformed public assumptions about women in leadership. The transparency she offers the world (frequently posting videos, updates and news on social media abodut her role as a parent) has been a welcomed relief from the traditionally opaque obscurity into the private lives of our politicians.

Six weeks after the birth of her daughter, Ardern posted a Facebook Live video about her time off from her duties as a PM and settling into life with new baby daughter, Neve. During the stream, Ardern revealed that the family isdoing really well, but laughingly acknowledges she and partner, Clarke Gayford have no routine to speak of.

I can hear now a chorus of parents laughing at the suggestion that you would ever have a routine with a five-week old baby but were doing really well nonetheless, the Prime Minister joked.

She eliminated COVID-19 in her country

In late April, Ardern announced that there was no longer any undetected community transmission of COVID-19 and that her country had effectively eliminated the virus, with health authorities aware of and able to trace each current case.

We have done it together, Ardern said in a press conference on Monday afternoon, just hours before the country began a phased exit from Level 4 lockdown measures. There is no widespread undetected community transmission in New Zealand. We have won that battle. But we must remain vigilant if we are to keep it that way, she said.

A short while after, New Zealand has since lifted all COVID-19 restrictions except for international border closures, meaning New Zealanders lives can return to normal, or as normal as we can in the time of a global pandemic.

She became the first world leader to bring baby to the UN general assembly and challenged more expectations

Ardern made headlines in 2018 when she brought her daughter into a UN speech after she brought her daughter into a UN General Assembly in New York.

On the global reaction, she said at the time: I love that people have shared in this joy with us, and thats been because I have a really public role and so I accept that means that our family life will be quite public But at the same time, Ive chosen a public life, Neve hasnt.

Ardern appeared with her three-month-old daughter at the UN and was seen playing with her before giving a speech at the Nelson Mandela peace summit.

Ardern told reporters that her partners expenses were paid for out of her own pocket; later, her partner posted a photo on Twitter on Monday of their daughters security pass, which reads first baby, adding I wish I could have captured the startled look on a Japanese delegation inside UN yesterday who walked into a meeting room in the middle of a nappy change. Great yarn for her 21st (birthday).

She banned military-style semi-automatics less than a month after Christchurch shootingsArdern received universal praise for her leadership in the aftermath of the Christchurch shooting, where an alt-right white suprematist killed 51 people and injured 49 in two mosques.

Ardern refused to name the Christchurch terrorist attacker in her public addresses: saying, I implore you: Speak the names of those who were lost, rather than the name of the man who took them. He may have sought notoriety, but we in New Zealand will give him nothing, not even his name.

Just six days after the shootings, Ardern announced gun control measures to ban all types of semi-automatic weapons.

On 15 March [the day of the attack] our history changed forever, she said. Now our laws will too. We are announcing action today on behalf of all New Zealanders to strengthen our gun laws and make our country a safer place.

She became the first NZ PM to march in an LGBTQ+ Pride event

In February 2018, Ardern was the first ever NZ PM to march in a Pride parade. She joined a crowd of more than 25,000 in Auckland that called for more support for LGBTI people with mental illness.

Ardern told TVNZ that the parade was about diversity and inclusiveness. Im really proud of the work the team has done to make that real over the years and in our laws.

But we cant be complacent. As long as there are kids in New Zealand, if they are LGBTQI, if they have high levels of mental health issues or self harm, that tells us that we still have work to do.

She pledged to to provide period products to all girlsEarlier this year, Ardern made a public commitment to end period poverty by giving all school-aged people who have periods free sanitary products. Access to sanitary products and to safe, hygienic spaces in which to use them is not equally distributed and Ardern wanted that changed.

By making them freely available, we support these young people to continue learning at school, she told reporters. We know that nearly 95,000 nine-to-eighteen year olds may stay at home during their periods due to not being able to afford period products.

She promised to spend NZ$2.6m on a scheme that would provide free sanitary products (aka tampons, pads, menstrual cups, etc) to schools in an effort to tackle period poverty.

As NZ heads to the polls on September 19, things are looking positive and certain for this incredible leader. Despite the promising poll figures, Ardern told Newstalk ZBBreakfast host Mike Hosking that she always keeps a healthy skepticism around polls.

We will never be complacent, a lot can change very quickly, she said. We know that we have to continue everyday to earn the support of New Zealanders.

More here:
Jacinda Ardern turns 40. Here are just some of her massive achievements to date - Women's Agenda

In September 1888, an aged Frederick Douglass made his second visit to a tiny abolitionist college in rural southern Michigan. He spoke on the looming presidential election, and his words have uncanny relevance today.

In a Presidential canvass three things are always in order: First, we have to consider the character of the candidate, he said in a typed version of the address that matches descriptions of the ones he gave at the college and elsewhere on that speaking tour. A man in the presidential chair should stand for something more than a lucky and successful politician. He should be one among millionsa model man; one to whom the sons of after-coming generations can be referred as an example to them.

Douglass went on to argue that voters should also consider the past actions of political parties when deciding how to cast their ballots. The past is parent to the present, and it is only by the past that we are able properly to discern the future, he said.

That tiny abolitionist school was Hillsdale College, my alma mater, now sometimes dubbed the conservative Harvard. At its heart Hillsdale is simply a liberal arts college, but its alumni pepper the Trump administration and its various lecture programs, online courses, and D.C. outpost serve as intellectual training ground for the conservative movement.

So when hundreds of Hillsdale alumni signed petitions in June asking the college to condemn historical injustices against black people in response to the George Floyd protests, the school was at a crossroads. Would the college that sent more of its sons to fight for the Union than any other Michigan school vocally oppose state violence against the descendants of slaves? Or would it reiterate, as it had in the past, the danger of the Black Lives Matters movement?

Hillsdale chose to be evasive.

The College is told that it garners no honor now for its abolitionist pastor that it fails to live up to that pastbut instead it must issue statements today. Statements about what? read an open letter from leaders of the college, republished in the Wall Street Journal. It must issue statements about the brutal and deadly evil of hating other people and/or treating them differently because of the color of their skin. That is, it must issue statements about the very things that moved the abolitionists whom the College has ever invoked.

But Hillsdale, like all of America, ought to heed Douglasss advice and take a good, hard look at its past. It must lament the evil and treasure the good. The college has more than abolitionists in its pastlike many other institutions, it has a history of tangled, unexamined, internally competing racial views. Hillsdale has plenty of reasons to join the national reckoning on race.

Podcast July 24 2020

On today's Bulwark Podcast, Bill Kristol joins Charlie Sykes to discuss the conventions, the debate on policy vs. punish...

Hillsdale was founded by abolitionist Baptists in 1844. It was the first college in the nation to prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, or religion in its charter. It fought efforts to segregate its ROTC unit in World War I. Its 1955 football team refused to play in a bowl game that barred its black players from the field.

But Hillsdale was not exempt from the racism that permeated educational institutions in the 20th century.

Hillsdale sat out the civil rights movement, as noted by the preeminent chronicler of the colleges history, Arlan Gilbert. The student newspaper, the Collegian, voiced some support of black protesters in the 1960s but was mostly mum on the topic. It did, however, reprint in 1960 an editorial that ran in the Duke student paper: We would question the appropriateness of protesting against a Southern . . . custom by applying pressure on a private business establishment, it read. While we are for desegregation, we realize that the problem is complex and that no easy solution is possible.

The college then found a president who would use apathy toward civil rights legislation to make it famous. When George Roche III became president of Hillsdale in 1971 at age 35, he was fresh from the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education, which in the previous decade had issued a steady stream of anti-civil-rights commentary of the type that animated the GOPs Southern strategy. FEE authors defended private businesses right to discriminate against blacks, criticized the Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education ruling, argued for a hands-off response to South African apartheid, and saw the civil rights movement primarily as a massive expansion of federal power. Roche echoed these arguments.

The racial problem is still with us (as are innumerable other problems as well) but it ill-behooves us to destroy the American tradition of federalism in the course of attempted solutions to our problems, he wrote in 1967.

The future president of an abolitionist college also questioned whether the Civil War was necessary to end slavery, calling abolitionists do-gooders who pressured the United States into war but did not lead on the battlefield and wondering whether the free market might have averted the Civil War.

National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., a longtime friend of Hillsdale, was on hand to celebrate Roches appointment as president. Buckley in 1957 supported gradual, voluntary change from Jim Crow, because whites were the advanced racea stance he later disavowed.

Roche made a name for Hillsdale. When in 1972 the federal government began to require colleges to track students by their race for the purposes of implementing anti-discrimination law, Roche led the college both to refuse race statistics and to cement its refusal of federal funds. He then trumpeted those refusals around the nation to win conservative praise and donors.

In 1973, under Roches leadership, one of the first editions of the colleges widely circulated digest of speeches, Imprimis, defended minority white rule of Zimbabwe and private discrimination. Imprimis also printed a response from the countrys white prime minister, Ian Smith, who wrote of the backward races and the more sophisticated European and Asian races.

The college continued to keep odious company. Segregationist James Kilpatrick, racist Sen. Strom Thurmond, and racist Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine, spoke at Hillsdale seminars in the following decades. Taylor argued in a college-sponsored lecture that minorities were genetically inferior and more suited to manual labor. Roches statement at the time did not specifically condemn the talk: For 150 years we have prided ourselves on treating individuals on the basis of their own merit and anything that moves from that direction is not keeping with our mission. The college still sells copies of Taylors lecture in its Freedom Library Catalog.

Though many Hillsdale professors are fiercely pro-Union, an odd strain of Lost Cause romanticism lingered at Hillsdale. In 2008, the Hillsdale-published reader for its required American history course included writings by Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. but also introduced an 1891 essay by Confederate apologist Basil Gildersleeve by praising him and saying that his view of the South had universal validity. Gildersleeve argued that the South had fought for states rights and the cause of civil liberty, not to defend slavery; the introduction was signed by a historian who also edited the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan.

In recent years the college has done little to voice sympathy for black Americans protesting police brutality. Imprimis, with more than 5 million subscribers, regularly points to black culture and black-on-black crime as the root causes of any ill treatment from police. For years Hillsdale speakers have pooh-poohed diversity.

Hillsdale as an institution does not endorse the racist alt-right and its hatred. The colleges current president, Larry Arnn, is no Roche; he loves Hillsdales abolitionist legacy, can recite Douglass and Lincoln by heart, and demonstrates his personal care for students of color. In 2016 he led the school to launch the Frederick Douglass scholarships, offering tuition, room and board to first-generation college students from disadvantaged school districts.

But the college has chosen to publicize voices that make the alt-right feel comfortable. For example, the colleges D.C. center last year hosted an excellent symposium with a Howard University scholar on black classical education. Her presentation did not make it into Imprimis, but a speech defending John C. Calhoun and Confederate monuments did.

Meanwhile, Hillsdales colorblindness has made it blind. The college continues to keep no records of students race and awards no financial aid on that basis. But in the 2018-2019 academic year, for example, it did offer four different scholarships to students of Norwegian, Lithuanian, or Polish descent and many more that gave preference to students from predominantly white areas. It also had a handful of scholarships for international studentsfrom China, for exampleand Hispanic students. It had none that explicitly gave preference to black Americans.

What has all this meant for black students at Hillsdale?

Hillsdales graduates are now nearly all white. Many American universities struggle to attract and retain students of color. But Hillsdale has given itself a special challenge and has not done enough to solve it. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a friend of the college, once critiqued conservatives attitude toward race as indifference. He could say the same of Hillsdale.

Since the 1980s Hillsdales black students at any given time have been able to count their total number on two hands, or some years even one. Roche told the Chicago Reader in 1996 that the school was being outbid for black students.

It wasnt always this way. Thirty-one black students attended Hillsdale as it was beginning to parade its federal-tie-cutting in 1976a larger slice of the student population than at many other Michigan schools at the time. The campus Blacks United club had a house, staged events for Black History Month and produced a play about Malcolm Xs life. By the mid-1980s, it disappeared from Hillsdales yearbooks.

Black students in the following decades gave mixed reviews of the school to the Collegian, while recounting a few chilling incidents. In 1991, the same year a Confederate flag hung in the first-floor window of one mens dorm, two black students hung a Nelson Mandela poster on their door. After someone tore it down, they put up a picture of Malcolm X, only to find later the words NS GO HOME scrawled on their door. They reported the incident to an administrator, who in turn told them not to hang anymore posters of black leaders on their door, because it invites racism, the Collegian wrote.

The experiences of recent black alumni have varied. Of the ten black former Hillsdale students I interviewed for this article, three had completely positive experiences at the school. Some might see a lack of diversity and say, Wait theres a problem, but for me I never really had an issue, said Joseph Nchia, class of 2017. Its just one of those things.

Kayla Fletcher, class of 2014, loved Hillsdale and was drawn to the school because it does not consider race in admissions. If I got into a school like Hillsdale, it was just because I was good enough to get into a school like Hillsdale, she said. Thats what mattered to me.

Others describe a painful four years. Christian Campbell, class of 2010, stayed at Hillsdale for financial reasons but grew tired of the constant stares and questions from fellow students about what sport he played, if he could dance and rap, whether they could touch his hair. The stupidity and ignorance just got me, he said.

Some chose to transfer out. Thad Wilson attended Hillsdale in 2006 but left the following year, primarily because of finances but also because of race. While a coach and two professors were kind, he said, one classmate asked him pointed racial questions constantly, such as: You like fried chicken, right?

Not having the ability to really see a black person who was in the same shoes I was in was difficult, he said.

For most of the students I spoke to, Hillsdale was a mixed bag of friends and classes they loved and experiences they wished had been better. Keyona Shabazz, class of 2017, loves Hillsdale but recalled two different students calling her a Negress or n-r on multiple occasions. While Hillsdale gave her a good liberal arts education, she said, it rarely discussed the black experience in America.

Hillsdale has done its populace a disservice by taking itself out of the conversation, Shabazz said. You cant pat yourself on the back for who you used to be.

Shabazzs fellow alumni should look hard at the schools indifference to race. We should question why we have a student body so white that many of the black students feel out of place. And we should think about how the school can show all its students that the good, the true, the beautiful belong to them, and that they belong at the school.

Hillsdale wishes to critique illiberalism on the left, but it will lack the moral authority to do so without critiquing illiberalism and racism on the right. The colleges liberal values should put it at the forefront of the fight to defend Frederick Douglasss vision for America. In the months before his second visit to Hillsdale, Douglass toured the South and witnessed how Reconstruction had failed former slaves. He hoped that his country would change; he hoped that his party, the Republican party, would lead that change.

The national honorthe redemption of our national pledge to the freedmen, the supremacy of the Constitution in the fullness of its spirit and in the completeness of its letter over all the states of the Union alikeis an incomparably greater interest than all others. It touches the soul of the nation, Douglass said in a speech that year. I simply say to the Republican party: Those things ye ought to have done and not to have left the others undone, and the present is the time to enforce this lesson.

With that last sentence Douglass borrowed from Jesus, and likewise Hillsdale should heed the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. The college has a chance to change for the better, to change America for the better, to be better than the whims of the right wing rather than tethered to them. If it does not, many of its alumni will have run out of faith, just as Douglass warned he might with the GOP: If it fails to do all this, I for one shall welcome the bolt which shall scatter it into a thousand fragments.

View original post here:
Hillsdale Must Join the National Reckoning on Race - The Bulwark

Joe Rogan is one of the biggest figures in podcasting. His show, The Joe Rogan Experience, consists of lengthy, often rambling interviews with a diverse array of athletes, academics, actors, entrepreneurs, and more. But you could also say that Rogan has really built his audience through selecting guests who bring their own notoriety to his show, or whose specialist subject is the kind of hot-button issue that will inevitably gain him some streams.

These interviews can take many forms, like getting infamous tech boss Elon Musk to smoke weed on camera, instantly immortalizing the moment in meme form. Or, more esoterically, speaking with pilots who claim to have had close encounters with UFOs. A lot of the time it's harmless (if slightly deranged) fun. And then there are the episodes which, by virtue of Rogan's massive online reach, lend a veneer of credibility to some truly dangerous prejudices.

Take the recent episode with guest Abigail Shrier. During Shrier's conversation with Rogan, in which she promoted her book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Shrier invalidated the lived experience of trans and nonbinary kids and teens, and made numerous dangerous, entirely unsound false equivalencies. She compared transitioning among teenagers to historic adolescent phenomena such as eating disorders, self-harm, and (bafflingly) the occult, calling this age group "the same population that gets involved in cutting, demonic possession, witchcraft, anorexia, bulimia."

She even described wanting to transition as a "contagion" with the potential to infect other children with the same ideas, drawing yet more scientifically baseless parallels with eating disorders. "Anorexics, they are always really careful when they put them together," she said. "They have to be on hospital wards because we know that it will cause it to spread."

Michael S. SchwartzGetty Images

Plenty of savvy producers book guests like this to stir up controversy and accumulate outrage-clicks from their viewers. But was Rogan sitting back as a host and letting Shrier dig her own grave? Nope. He appeared to reaffirm this notion that being trans is something a child can be persuaded into through peer pressure, referring to time spent with "wacky friends" at school. He also mocked Caitlyn Jenner, and described LGBTQ+ activists as people who aren't "looking at all sides of it."

"They have this agenda," he said, "and this agenda is very ideologically driven that anyone who even thinks they might be trans should be trans, are trans, and the more trans people the better. The more kids that transition the better."

For all their talk of self-harm and other issues that teenagers can experience, neither Rogan nor Shrier openly acknowledged that more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered attempting suicide last year. And that wasn't due to "wacky friends" somehow transmitting gender dysphoria; it was due to the prolific, ubiquitous messaging in media that tells them there is something wrong with them, and how they feel doesn't matter.

By alluding to a pro-trans lobby with that aforementioned agenda, Rogan positioned himself and Shrier as marginalized voices in their own righta technique commonly employed by high-profile pundits who believe "cancel culture" is somehow coming for their right to free speech. But Rogan has 283 million active users across his social channels. Similarly, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling tweets her transphobic half-thoughts out to 14.3 million followersmany of whom are the very kids she is attacking. They have huge platforms, and they are using them to actively, willfully spread misinformation and propaganda that will cause very real harm.

"As long as these tactics keep making him money ... he doesn't care who he hurts along the way."

Of course, you could always make the argument that Rogan doesn't actually believe any of the views that he encourages his guests to espouse on his show. Maybe he is just a cultural weathervane, conducting interviews on whatever outrageous topic is making headlines at the time. In one episode, he might endorse Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, or provide a safe space for openly gay strongman Rob Kearney to share his story. But in others, he is guilty of humoring (if not downright enabling) homophobic jokes and alt-right conspiracy theories from his guests.

Which is worse? To expose such bigotry to your millions of subscribers because you genuinely endorse it? Or to have so little conviction that you will knowingly platform hate speech about some of the most vulnerable, persecuted young people in our society to benefit your own career? You be the judge. Both are appalling in their own way.

Rogan likes to put on a furrowed brow and even, pensive voice; the hallmarks of a reasonable man with an inquisitive mind. Someone who is "just asking questions" or "wants to start a debate." In reality, he's an intellectual shock jock who amplifies the voices of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, homophobes, and transphobes in the name of interesting conversation. And it's becoming increasingly clear that as long as these tactics keep making him money and acquiring him followers, he doesn't care who he hurts along the way.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

This commenting section is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page. You may be able to find more information on their web site.

Read more from the original source:
Joe Rogan Is Spreading Transphobic Hate Speech and It's Putting Lives in Danger - Men's Health