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I cant believe Aaron Rodgers has ruined Aaron Rodgers on me. I might never forgive him. He took my favourite quarterback and dragged him into the Covid culture wars. There are no winners here. There is no upside. This is terrible.

A quick primer for the vaguely interested: Rodgers is the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. More than that, the people who know these things - or at least the ones who yak about it on podcasts - have him down as being in or around one of the 10 best quarterbacks in history. Top dozen anyway.

I obviously dont know enough about American football to credibly judge any of that. But I know what I like. And what I like is sitting up on a Sunday night and watching the Packers down six points with a minute-and-a-half left on the clock and one time-out and Rodgers needing to go the length of the field to win. Give me that three times a season and life is peachy.

A game-winning drive by any quarterback is one of the purest pleasures in sport. So much has to go right. Nothing can go wrong. The mental gymnastics involved, the precise calibrations of each play required, the bluff and double-bluff of the opposition defence - all of it is high-wire sorcery, carried out while 17-stone monsters are trying to put you in hospital.

Its the ultimate example of why sport is such a blessed escape from the petty grind of the outside world. You cant spoof a game-saving drive. There are no alternative facts. No conspiracy theories. No Twitter, no Reddit, none of that stuff. There is a winner and a loser and if you dont spend the next 90 seconds showing you are one of a tiny handful of people on the planet who have the goods, the loser is you.

The wonder of Aaron Rodgers isnt just that he has done it so often, its that he has made it all look so unspeakably cool. Theres a casualness in the way he leads his team down the field, an unpanicked control of the situation. Every NFL play is four seconds of whirling violence - threatened and actual - and yet Rodgers always looks like he is thoroughly unruffled by the whole scene.

The American novelist Paul Gallico began life as a sports columnist for the New York Daily News back in the 1920s. In a piece about Jack Dempsey one time he wrote that all the great legends of the ring are built upon the picture that the average man has of himself as he would like to be.

If we could, we would all be gentle, soft-spoken creatures, tender with women, cool and even-tempered, but once aroused - WHAP! - a lightning-like left or right to the jaw. Down goes the truck-driver or footpad or hoodlum. We mentally dust our hands, readjust our cravat, smile pleasantly, step over the body of the prostrate victim, and carry on. Just like that.

Gallico wrote that passage nearly 90 years ago but you wouldnt have had much trouble applying it to the appeal Rodgers has had for most of his career. Famously, in 2014, he told Packers fans to R-E-L-A-X after a patchy start to the season and went on to win 11 out of the next 13 games. That was the Aaron Rodgers you couldnt but love. Clooney in a chinstrap.

And now? Lets check in with Aaron Rodgers now.

Aaron Rodgers invokes abortion, MLK Jr and thanks Joe Rogan in rant over why hes not vaccinated.

Aaron Rodgers Rips Woke PC Culture

Anti-vaxxer Aaron Rodgers spectacular fall from grace happened in record time.

Health care company ends relationship with Packers star Aaron Rodgers.

Ah, Jaysus. No, no, no. Please no. Dont do it, Aaron Rodgers. Please dont drag Aaron Rodgers down into the weeds of all of this.

Too late.

Rodgers, in a move that we really all should have seen coming, decided he was too intelligent to get vaccinated against Covid. Instead, he had a homeopathic treatment and when asked back in the summer whether he had been vaccinated, he replied, Yes, I have been immunised. He made several attempts to get the NFL to accept that his treatment counted as a vaccination but they wouldnt allow it.

All of which is his business, obviously enough. As with Callum Robinson in this part of the world a few weeks back, it doesnt do any of us any good at all to be pronouncing on anyone elses personal health choices. Whether Rodgers is vaccinated, immunised or does a dance around an ancient druids chalice every night to deal with the Covid issue isnt going to make a tuppence of difference to any of our lives.

But the culture wars stuff is enough to make your brain throb. Regardless of whatever side you fall down on, all this point-scoring and nit-picking is so unbelievably tedious. Youve done your own research, Aaron Rodgers? Cool! Enjoy it! Bathe in it as you would a pond of asses milk. Just dont weaponise Aaron Rodgers in a screed against the dreaded woke mob on the basis of it.

This stuff is all so absolutely pointless. The tyranny of woolly language, the online scattergun of vitriol - none of it gets anyone anywhere. Any suggestion that maybe restrictions are a bit much is enough to get you called an anti-vaxxer. Any expression of discomfort with people colouring outside the lines and youre a woke ivory-tower snowflake.

Its Long Covid of the public square, its symptoms baked into public discussion long after the initial sniffle has cleared up. And now Aaron Rodgers has gone and got Aaron Rodgers caught up in it all.

What a dose.

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Why did Aaron Rodgers have to dive headfirst into the Covid culture war? - The Irish Times

John Henry Ramirez is going to die. The state of Texas is going to kill him. The question that came before the Supreme Court this week is whether Dana Moore, his longtime pastor, will be able to lay hands on him as he dies.

Given the grand, even alarmed pronouncements about religious liberty made by the right-wing justices recently, you might think this would be an easy decision. But at the oral argument, several of the conservative justices suddenly became concerned about whether Ramirez is sincere in his religious beliefs, or whether he is simply, in the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, gaming the system.

Justice Samuel Alito shared his fear that approving Ramirezs request might produce an unending stream of variations from other condemned prisoners seeking religious accommodations. Whats going to happen when the next prisoner says that I have a religious belief that he should touch my knee? He should hold my hand? He should put his hand over my heart? He should be able to put his hand on my head? Were going to have to go through the whole human anatomy with a series ofof cases. Similarly, Justice Brett Kavanaugh worried that if the Court ruled in favor of Ramirez, then there will be the next case after that and the next case after that where people are moving the goalposts on their claims in order to delay executions.

Garrett Epps: The machinery of death is back on the docket

Ive heard a lot of slippery-slope arguments in my time, and I confess that the possibility that the condemned might experience a brief moment of comfort before death has to be among the least frightening Ive ever encountered.

As Slates Mark Joseph Stern writes, the conservative justices novel concern with the potential that people might use their religious beliefs to get around the law is particularly jarring, given that these same justices have refused to consider that possibility in other cases. When the issue is businesses of public accommodation discriminating against customers on the basis of sexual orientation, or adoption, or contraception, or even vaccination, the conservative justices have refused to consider whether someone might seek a religious exemption in bad faith. In the conservative commentariat, the mere suggestion that someone might do so is taken as evidence that conservative Christians are being persecuted. With any kind of exemption, theres a chance that someone might try to claim one in bad faith. Its not beyond the pale for the justices to consider that chance; its telling that they do so only under certain circumstances.

Many questions of religious liberty involve two parties who have reasonable claims that a decision one way or the other could violate their rights. Such cases are usually complex. But the extent to which certain justices take such questions seriously appears related to how politically sympathetic they are to a given party. In this case, Ramirez is a convicted murderer who stabbed a man to death during a robbery. He is a far less sympathetic figure to the conservative justices than the owners of Hobby Lobby, whose religious views did not prevent them from accumulating thousands of stolen artifacts from the Middle East. Their skepticism of his motives comes despite the fact that the Ramirez case has no particular partisan valence.

The justices who are so skeptical of Ramirez have not always been eager to question motives. In Ramos v. Louisiana, a case involving nonunanimous juries, Alito fumed at Justice Neil Gorsuch for pointing out that the history of such juries was tied up in an effort to undermine African American participation on juries, whining that the majority opinion, which held that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimous juries for conviction in criminal trials, reflected a modern discourse that attempts to discredit an argument not by proving that it is unsound but by attacking the character or motives of the arguments proponents. That Louisianas 1898 constitution was a consciously racist document that successfully disenfranchised the states Black residents and purposely prevented them from serving on juries was apparently not germane, nor was the origin of Oregons similar law in an attempt to forestall the influence of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities on Oregon juries. Indeed, as Gorsuch wrote, courts in both Louisiana and Oregon have frankly acknowledged that race was a motivating factor in the adoption of their States respective nonunanimity rules. Alitos reaction to the facts of the case was what you would expect from an obsessive Fox News watcher, rather than the apolitical jurist he claims to be.

Read: Samuel Alito and the slippery slope of liberty

Similarly, in 2019, the Trump administration sought to use the addition of a citizenship question to the census to effect a nationwide racial gerrymander, a decision that was quickly challenged in court by voting-rights groups. The scheme was uncovered when the daughter of Thomas Hofeller, the Republican operative who had developed the idea, handed his hard drives over to liberal advocacy groups. The documents, and communication between Hofeller and the Trump administration, made clear that the questions stated purposeto aid enforcement of the Voting Rights Actwas insincere.

The documents came out too late to be considered in the argument about adding the question held before the Court, but they seem to have affected the outcome anyway. In an opinion that was otherwise highly sympathetic to the Trump administration, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the Democratic appointees, ruling against the administration on a technicality that left it without time to implement the scheme. Alito was outraged, however, that anyone would question the Trump administrations motives. In his dissent, Alito thundered that the decision is either an aberration or a license for widespread judicial inquiry into the motivations of Executive Branch officials. Thomas also lamented the din of suspicion and distrust that seems to typify modern discourse, suggesting that the volume of evidence pointing to the Trump administrations dishonesty had used corkboard andwith a jar of pins and a spool of string to create an eye-catching conspiracy web. Not long after the decision, Donald Trump did what he usually does, and confirmed that those who were suspicious and distrusting of the administrations motives were correct. Questioning the motives of Republican officialsbut only Republican officialsis apparently impolite, especially when they are obviously lying.

From 2018 to 2020, civility in politics was a constant theme in conservative media. Such calls for civility were, as I wrote at the time, less a demand for a political discourse rooted in mutual respect than a demand for submission to those currently in power. That the conservative justices would have the same political preoccupations as Fox News is not at all surprising. By the same token, however, the public is not obligated to humor the justices insistence on being seen as apolitical actors while they wage partisan culture wars from the bench.

These justices now echo the refrain that we should not question other peoples motives, that to do so is uncivil and undignifiedexcept when they feel like doing it. As the record shows, holding motives above question is not a standard these justices adhere to; its just one they demand of others. You might ask whether its one they really believe in.

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Conservative SCOTUS Justices Are Religious-Liberty Hypocrites - The Atlantic

Its an idea that appears to be on two tracks. On an actual policy level, Congress and the Biden administration are moving toward requiring women to register for the draft, with the policy changes potentially becoming law by the end of the year. But on a political level, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and other Republicans appear to be seizing on the proposal as their latest weapon in the trenches of the culture war.

Just last week, Hawley introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to strip out language in the annual Pentagon policy bill that would make women subject to registering for the draft. Similar language has already passed the House in its NDAA bill and if both bills get through their respective chambers with the provisions, its almost certain the final version of the legislation would include the new policy.

Which is why Hawley is calling attention to the issue now, in advance of the NDAA hitting the Senate floor in the coming weeks.

It is wrong to force our daughters, mothers, wives, and sisters to fight our wars, Hawley said last week. Our country is extremely grateful for the brave women who have volunteered to serve our country with and alongside our fighting forces. They have played a vital role in defending America at every point in our nations history. But volunteering for military service is not the same as being forced into it, and no women should be compelled to do so.

Hawley is just the latest Republican to pick up the mantle of a man opposed to drafting women into the military. For decades, former Vice President Mike Penceeven before he was an elected officialhas railed against women in the military, using the issue as a cudgel against the left. In 1999, Pence wrote an op-ed claiming that the Disney movie Mulan was trying to trick Americans into thinking that a woman, with all her delicate features and voice, could actually perform well in the military, calling experiments in gender integration in the U.S. military at the time a complete disaster.

But the issue has been gaining steam on Capitol Hill for years. In 2016, then-congressman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) put forward an amendment that would add women to the draft, as a gotcha way to demonstrate that there wasnt broad support for that kind of change. The amendment backfired, however. While Hunter didnt vote for it, many others did, and the proposal has continued to gather votes since.

Fast-forward to todaywhen Democrats control the House, Senate, White House, and Pentagonand theres a real chance that what was once GOP bluster could now become military policy.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was adamant last week that he has no problem opening up the draft to women, noting that if Americans can effectively serve in the military, then they are welcome.

Milley said the country was built upon the idea that everyone is created equal. It doesnt matter if youre gay or straight, or tall or short, rich or poor, he said. If youre willing to shed your blood to defend this constitution, then bring it on.

That speech prompted Hawley, who has never served in the military, to call for Milleys resignation.

Hawley acknowledges that he views this issue more through a political prism than policy one. He told a local Missouri and Kansas outlet, News-Press NOW, that he thought compelling women to register for the draft was really part of the Democrats ongoing social agenda.

But for Democrats, there are good reasons to support opening up women to the draft. The National Commission on Military, National and Public Service recommended last year that women be included in the draft because it is in the national security interest of the United States.

And the Republicans in Congress who are working with Democrats to make this policy a reality seem to be doing so out of national security concerns.

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), the Republican who co-sponsored an amendment to add the selective service language in the House Armed Services Committee, said that if the country did have to resort to a draft, itd be because they need everybody.

Man, woman, gay, straight, any religion, Black, white, brown, Waltz said recently on the House floor, as Roll Call noted in an October report.

The former Army Green Beret teamed up with Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), who served in the military herself for 17 years, to offer the women-in-the-draft language in the House. And the language in the Senate was offered by former Army Majorand current Armed Services ChairmanSen. Jack Reed (D-RI).

Still, theres a reason Hawley is seizing on this issue.

An Ipsos poll from August found that support for opening the draft up to women had actually decreased since 2016, with 45 percent of Americans supporting the proposal now compared to 63 percent five years ago. And Hawley is gambling that his efforts to crystallize opposition to the issue can make it even more toxic.

Which is why Hawleys critics see his accusations that Democrats are playing politics as classic projection.

He argues that those in favor of the bill are trying to impose a certain view of gender roles and relations; so is he, said Lindsay Cohn, a former top Pentagon official, who is now associate professor in national security affairs at the Naval War College. He is trying to maintain a world in which women as a group are kept out of certain roles because they are considered unfit for those roles, or because men (and some women) do not want to have to think about women in those roles.

By leaving women out, its really sending the fundamental message that their service in the military isnt as necessary.

Max Z. Margulies, assistant professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point

Instead of making arguments about military readiness or national security issues, this just looks like the latest opportunity Hawley and some Republican lawmakers are taking to jump into the fray on social issues to prove a point and keep women in their place, said Lory Manning, a retired U.S. Navy Captain.

"Hes just spewing arguments that have been made and made and made, and disproved and disproved and disproved. If we dont want young mothers to go into the military, fine, then Congress just writes that in the law, Manning said. This is the song that social conservatives have been singing since as long as Ive [been in the military] and Ive spent 25 years in the military.

That part is true. Conservatives have consistently attacked issues related to women serving in the military. And some critics believe this is much larger than a political issue.

By leaving women out, its really sending the fundamental message that their service in the military isnt as necessary, Max Z. Margulies, assistant professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told The Daily Beast. I think [that] has pretty damaging implications for gender rights and for how we think about national security.

Hawley says hes worried about mothers being forced to fight Americas wars. But the reality is, if lawmakers move forward on requiring women to register with the selective service, Congress could make guardrails that keep mothers and certain groups of people from being conscripted in case of a draft.

Just registering for selective service doesnt mean somebodys daughter is going to end up in the trenches Congress can decide where these people would serve, Manning said.

Hawleys arguments about trying to keep women out of the draft comes just as he is particularly worried about the purity of masculinity and preserving the image of men as strong and capable. Modern conversations about how men are too aggressive and rambunctious, he said, have resulted in manhood and masculinity withering away.

Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games? Hawley told an audience at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, adding that manliness should be celebrated, not degraded.

Hes just spewing arguments that have been made and made and made, and disproved and disproved and disproved. If we dont want young mothers to go into the military, fine, then Congress just writes that in the law.

Lory Manning, a retired U.S. Navy captain

When it comes to the selective service though, mens rights groups have long argued that the current setup excluding women is an affront to men. The penalties that men face when they dont sign up to serve their country are issues women dont have to confront, making the current selective service situation an unfair arrangement, in their thinking. In a 2019 ruling on the selective service, U.S. District Judge Gray H. Miller labeled the male-only system gender-based discrimination.

Efforts to include women in the draft arent just a part of contemporary culture wars. Discussions about including women in the selective service have been raging for generations. As U.S. allies conscripted women to serve in World War II, proposals to do the same were floated in the United States, with a fair amount of support, Margulies noted.

Unlike this year, those efforts always fell short. Expanding who has to register for selective service looks to be on the fast-track. And despite Hawleys best attempts, the policy has bipartisan support.

The amendment adding the language to the Senate bill was adopted with the support of all but five Republicans on the Armed Services Committee, and other Republicans, in both chambers, have signaled they support changing the military policyeven if its once again cropping up in the culture war.

As Manning said, most people hear a proposal that would subject their daughter to registering for the draft and think: Oh my God, shes going to be in a WWI trench with rats and rapists.

Its used to scare people, Manning said. Its used to keep women in their place.

See more here:
Josh Hawley Will Be Damned if He Allows Women to Get Drafted - Daily Beast

Heres a smart move Democrats start channeling Ronald Reagans famous question in the 1980 presidential campaign: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

If Democrats want to win in the 2022 midterm elections, voters need to hear Reagans question over and over.

Democrats have a great answer.

Yes, Americans are better off economically today than they were ten months ago when there was a Republican majority in the Senate and a Republican in the White House.

The top issue for voters in last weeks race for governor in Virginia was the economy, according to a VoteCast exit survey by the Associated Press and Fox News.

The economy was named the top issue by 35 percent of voters, more than twice the 17 percent who named Covid, or the 15 percent who said education.

And here is the winning economic record the Democrats can talk about right now:

If former President TrumpDonald TrumpFormer Chicago-area CEO sentenced to 30 days in prison for role in Jan. 6 attack Noem formally launches reelection campaign Overnight Health Care Presented by Rare Access Action Project Biden unveils FDA pick MORE was still in office, hed brag that this is the greatest U.S. economy in all history.

In fact, Trump constantly bragged about low unemployment numbers as a measure of his success before the pandemic sent unemployment sky high. Now Biden has cut unemployment drastically despite the pandemic.

All these economic accomplishments by Democrats are locked in.

On top of all that, House Democrats passed a major infrastructure bill late Friday, which Biden is expected to sign into law any day now.

If an even bigger measure aimed at expanding the social safety net passes too, Democrats will have more evidence beyond a roaring economy. They will be able to point to better health care, universal pre-kindergarten and subsidies for child care none of which would have happened without Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill.

The Democrats current economic record is compelling because theyve done it alone.

Most Republicans in Congress refused to work on legislation to help the economy grow and lessen income inequality. But they had no trouble working with Trump to drive up the deficit by passing a big tax cut for corporations and the rich.

Now Democrats must start taking credit for the economy.

Terry McAuliffeTerry McAuliffe10 takeaways from Virginia's election Republicans find a message on race that works; here's how Democrats should respond Kamala Harris a 2024 problem for Biden and the Democrats MORE, the Democratic candidate in the Virginia gubernatorial race, saw his advantage in polls fall away when Republicans shifted the debate away from economics.

The GOP got McAuliffe and enough voters to fixate on the bogus issue of Parents Rights. McAuliffe was trapped in culture wars quicksand created by right wing groups outrage at the idea that schools might enforce mask mandates, talk about racial injustice or be open to new pronouns for transgender students.

Democrats can get back on their feet by recalling the message discipline of four winning campaigns by President Clinton and President ObamaBarack Hussein ObamaOvernight Health Care Presented by Rare Access Action Project Biden unveils FDA pick Washington Post removes large portions of two stories on Steele dossier Manchin opposes Biden FDA nominee MORE.

In Clintons successful 1992 race, his top strategist, James Carville, famously coined the phrase Its the economy, stupid. In 1996, the economic boom carried Clinton to victory.

Obamas 2008 and 2012 campaigns followed the same road.

Obama refused to be thrown off message by far-right culture war attacks. Those jabs began with claims he was not born in the United States the Birther movement and were followed by accusations that he was a radical leftist, seemingly based on the fact that he knew a man who was once in the Weather Underground.

Later, there would be suggestions that the Affordable Care Act would sink the economy. Oh, and dont forget the charge that Democrats backed a War on Christmas.

In the first campaign, Obama focused on ending the 2008 economic crisis. In 2012, he was all about bolstering the U.S. car industry and continuing the steady economic recovery.

But for some reason, todays Democrats are constantly dragged off message by the GOPs bellowing about divisive, culture war issues.

Clintons former strategist, Carville, has a theory about what befell the Democrats in the most recent elections.

What went wrong is just stupid wokeness, Carville told PBS NewsHour last week. I mean, this 'defund the police' lunacy, this take Abraham Lincolns name off of schools.Weve got to change this internally in my view.

Carvilles analysis is correct, but incomplete.

It is important base politics for Democrats to push for racial justice and cultural equality. But be alert it opens the door for the GOP to appeal to white racial grievance. And the overall electorate cares far more about themselves and kitchen table, economic issues.

Thats why Democrats need to wake up and bang one drum loudly Its the economy, stupid!

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Juan Williams: Democrats must fight and win on the economy | TheHill - The Hill

University campuses have long been battlegrounds of ideas, but lately we have seen a sharpened weapon: the claim that ones rivals are suppressing the right tofree speech.

Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamolas Free Speech and Koch Money is an essential analysis of the amped-up culture wars over free speech. It offers a history of conservative philanthropic networks orbiting around the Koch family, who fund right-wing student groups as part of a larger effort to reverse collectivist inroads made by centrists and leftists.

By now, many aspects of the Kochtopus are well-known to observers of the dark money that underpins electoral, judicial and legislative campaigns. That is the nickname given to the American oil dynasty whose wealth is rooted in the fortune of Fred Koch, the founder of a refinery that became Koch Industries, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate later headed by two of Freds sons, Charles and David Koch.

The younger son David died in 2019. Charles Koch, at85, is still feisty as co-owner, CEO and chairman of Koch Industries, a role hes been in since 1967. He also finds time for exhaustive lobbying and philanthropic work, gifting gargantuan grants to conservative and libertarian causes and thinktanks that have proved successful in repealing environmental and worker protections and voting rights over recent decades.

Hence, Kochtopus a term capturing the fact that the familys lavish philanthropic work has spawned a billion-dollar arsenal fighting to suppress the rights and livelihoods of poorer people in America and across the world. For leftists today, the vampire-like nature of the capitalist famously identified by Marx, sucking the lifeblood of workers, has a face, and that face belongs to Charles Koch.

But the term Kochtopus has a longer heritage than many people today might realise, and is not the sole preserve of the left thats one of the valuable points of this nuanced study of ideological splits on the political right. Wilson and Kamola report that Murray Rothbard, for example, used the term during a breach with the Kochs in the late 1970s over the direction of the Cato Institute, which he had co-founded with Charles Koch. Rothbard took issue with the Donor, as he referred to Koch, micromanaging his work and acting like a sort of autocrat, which Rothbard thought undermined his own anarcho-libertarian vision of freedom from all coercive authority.

The end result isnt surprising. Rothbard was kicked out of the Cato Institute. He had challenged the power of richer men, and, as typically happens in the land of the free, the richer men prevailed.

Scholarly attention to this age-old problem the fact that paying the piper enables people with deep pockets to call the tune has been revitalised in recent years across the social sciences as BigMan philanthropy from donors such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros has become a hot political topic. But so far, alot of the academic focus has centred on the explicit goals of donors: Gates claimed intention to improve education in the US at the primary and secondary level, for example, and how the results have often fallen short of initial hopes.

This book, by contrast, looks at the surreptitious money flowing through university campuses, all of it geared to overturning what funders see as leftist biases in teaching and policymaking.

As Wilson and Kamola describe, such funders regard campuses as breeding grounds for future conservative thought leaders, politicians, right-wing pundits and DClobbyists. They spend big to achieve big deliverables when it comes to developing a pipeline of students committed to conservative causes, wording thats not Wilson and Kamolas, but taken directly from a funding proposal submitted by a faculty member at Western Carolina University to the Kochs. When academics at the university voted against establishing a Koch-funded Center for the Study of Free Enterprise, the university trustees overruled them and approvedit.

This isnt unusual in itself: the use of Koch money to seed libertarian research at universities is well documented by writers such as Jane Mayer and Kim Phillips-Fein. What Wilson and Kamola add is a timely focus on a new tool, the provocateur speaker who is invited to campus by well-funded conservative student groups, who then feign shock and outrage when the provocateur attracts a by-now familiar reaction: astorm of student protests. The speaker gets exactly what they wanted: the oxymoronic fame of being spectacularly cancelled.

Its an open secret that for celebrity scholar-pundits across the political spectrum Jordan Peterson, Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, Slavoj iek nopublicity is bad publicity. They want to be reviled, because its better press. If any group comes off looking bad as a result of the highly publicised campus free speech wars, its not the speaker who books a media tour on the back of it, its the students. They appear intolerant: either too fragile to listen to ideas they dont like or, paradoxically, all-powerful magically capable of eviscerating the lives of more powerful men and women with a simplewave of their placards. Neither perception is true, but the publicity surrounding speaker protests suggests otherwise, exaggerating both the sensitivity and the efficacy of campus protests today.

If this seems surprising if a reader is certain that Im wrong, and that all university students today are snowflakes who find their lectures too traumatic to endure and spend much of their time forming human barricades around any approaching guest speaker its because the Kochtopus has achieved its goals and is functioning exactly as intended. The aim is to manufacture and stoke campus culture wars, fuelling public support for a range of right-wing aims such as mandates against teaching critical race theory and severely punishing students who engage in protests on campus. Ironically, funders are often pro-free speech but anti-education, as if teaching is a special type of speech they cant abide.

That, at any rate, is what Wilson and Kamola argue that the free speech wars are financially lubricated by the Koch machine to fuel the impression of left-wing intolerance among students and faculty, thus rationalising donor influence on hiring boards to balance the bias on campuses.

Its a convincing thesis. As the authors put it compellingly, the culture wars are rooted in an anti-democratic power grab organized by a brilliantly conceptualized, deeply integrated and well-funded partisan operation. Following this conclusion, they add an appendix on When and How to Protest a Speaker with tips for, inessence, safer, better, louder speaker protests. Igroaned. The appendix is like counselling a school of fish about the exact size, shape and dangers of the fish hook and then saying: now leap up.

To lay my own cards on the table, Im no fan of noplatforming. Ithink it helps to cultivate solipsistic, insular protest movementsthat tend to alienate rather than enrol wider communities.

My own response to the craven provocateurs is simple perhaps too simple, but its better than throwing oneself again and again on the fish hook. Dont respond. Better to ignore the bastards when they come fishing across university campuses.

Remember the line that Howard Roark offers his enemy in Ayn Rands TheFountainhead (1943) when pressed about what he really thought ofhim? Roark replies with majestic indifference: But Idont think ofyou.

Thats how to beat Peterson or Murray or Coulter. By acting as if they dont matter, they cease tomatter. How will the right respond then? Byforcing and strapping students into seats? So much for free speech.

Linsey McGoey is professor of sociology at the University of Essex and the author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (2015).

Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus CultureBy Ralph Wilson and Isaac KamolaPluto Press, 256pp, 72.00 and 16.99ISBN 9780745343020 and 9780745343013Published 20 November 2021

Ralph Wilson, co-founder and research director of the Corporate Genome Project in Tallahassee, Florida, was born into an itinerant military family but grew up largely in rural Alabama. He studied physics and mathematics at Troy University in Alabama and then Florida State University, where he became involved in years of campus organising and activism against corporate influence. Icame to see how the highly influential donors that flooded our electoral process with money were also present oncampus.

The public needs tobe aware, argues Wilson, that the groups stoking the current crisis [about free speech] are the same groups that have advanced climate change denial and tobacco industry misinformation, and with the same tactics. People should also beware a marketplace of ideas model of the academy, which not only comes loaded with a free-market worldview, but misportrays the function and purpose of the academy while neglecting the presence of power and influenceIt is critical to protect the ability of campuses to regulate themselves and guide their own speech policies.

Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College in Connecticut, was born and raised in Washington state, where his father worked in the timber industry and he spent as much time as possible in the woods. He studied at Whitman College, in rural south-eastern Washington state, and, as a postgraduate student at the University of Minnesota, became active in organising strike support for the clerical workers union and on anunsuccessful graduate student union campaign, experiences that led to a strong sense of how hostile university presidents and trustees are towards their employees.

Asked for advice on handling potential free speech controversies, Kamola urges university administrators to trust your staff, faculty and students to make complicated decisions about what is, and isnt, acceptable on campus. Capitulating to outside groups and their political agendas might spare a few minutes of bad press, but at the expense of sowing distrust on campus and a loss of faith in your institution.

Matthew Reisz

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Free Speech and Koch Money, by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola - Times Higher Education (THE)