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"Free speech is an aberration." So begins a magisterial 2016 essay by David Bromwich in the London Review of Books. Its social or political enshrinement is the exception, not the rule; everywhere, censorship and its primordial revulsion from blasphemy stalk the perimeters of acceptable speech. (In adumbrating the connection between blasphemy and censorship, Bromwich relies on the legal scholar Leonard Levy's Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, From Moses to Salman Rushdie.) Nevertheless, Bromwich goes on to say, "The freedom to speak ones mind is a physical necessity, not a political and intellectual piece of good luck; to a thinking person, the need seems to be almost as natural as breathing."

The claim is historical. The type of person for whom free speech feels like a physical need appeared at a certain time and place, enabled by certain kinds of institutions including, in our time, the university. According to Keith Whittington, today those institutions must be reminded of commitments they've let lapse. As Whittington, the chair of the academic committee of the newly founded Academic Freedom Alliance, explains to Academe's blog, "I suppose the Steven Salaita episode at the University of Illinois was a wake-up call to me on how likely universities were to cave under pressure when faculty speech became the source of a public controversy." (And at the Review, Wesley Yang broke the story of the AFA's founding.)

Not everyone is convinced that organizations like the AFA are necessary. In her essay for this week's Review, Jennifer Ruth argues that, while "we must support the academic freedom of people we disagree with," such groups are stalking horses for the politics of the conservative donor class. She describes an ugly incident at her own institution, Portland State University, in which, as she puts it, two professors "outsourc[ed] the harassment of a colleague" to a mob of online trolls. Other say that the real threat comes not from campus activists but from conservative state governments, which, as our Nell Gluckman describes, seem increasingly willing to interfere in university curricula. (For his part, Whittington, of the AFA, lists "state legislatures considering proposals to restrict what can be taught in a college classroom" as an area of concern.)

The smoke of the culture wars risks obscuring some real differences in principle. As Salaita explained a couple of years ago in "My Life as a Cautionary Tale," "I do question the wisdom of allowing a civil liberty to dominate notions of freedom." On this view, free speech (as expressed in the institution of academic freedom) achieves a range of positive goods (it "preserves democracy," "emboldens research," and "facilitates faculty governance") but should not be seen as an end in itself. Bromwich's "thinking person," for whom "the freedom to speak one's mind is a physical necessity," would presumably disagree. These are fundamental problems; they will not evaporate with the passing of the current campus dust-ups.

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The Review: Cancel Culture; Academic Freedom; and Bullies - The Chronicle of Higher Education

That sounds, err, somewhat unlikely. But it is at least possible. However, it would clearly be impossible for Tesla to dominate the car industry in such a way while its rivals also prosper. And yet that is what the soaring share prices of other EV specialists over the past year and the relatively stable share prices of traditional car markers currently implies. In other words, investors appear to believe there will be no losers from this ultra-competitive race to go electric. Medals for everyone!

Arnott says this is a classic example of the big market delusion, which often happens when a new market is created or an old market disrupted through innovation. All the different players get valued as if everyone will win because nobody knows how things will play out. The cannabis market is another good example.

Of course, Musk would argue that Tesla is not just another carmaker but a software-enabled business that will overturn the old economics of the industry before turning its sights on robotaxis, self-driving trucks, battery technology and more. Indeed, his new job title kind of makes exactly this point.

But the short-sellers who are betting against Tesla arent convinced. Its not that they think Tesla is a bad company or that Musks achievements arent staggering. Clearly the future is electric with western governments calling time on the internal combustion engine, and Tesla has stolen a march on its rivals. But the sceptics believe that the companys share price has gone way beyond a basic appreciation of those facts. And their logic is sound. Theres only one problem.

Read the rest here:
Musk the technoking reigns over the culture wars with feelings not facts - Telegraph.co.uk

As the Republican Party continues to convulse following its loss of the presidency and the violent pro-Trump siege of the Capitol, one voice is beginning to drown out all others: Fox News Tucker Carlson.

The the top Republicans in Congress, Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, are trying to stop a GOP civil war by oscillating between measured criticism of Trumps behavior on January 6th and embracing the former president, his base and his fundraising cachet.

But Carlson is going on the offensive, crafting the message that Trumps base is most open to hearing: that there was no armed insurrection and that white supremacy is not an issue in the Republican Party.

Carlson, who wields a big megaphone thanks to one of the highest rated cable news shows, is also a lead player in the resurgent culture wars now dominating right-wing American politics. Shying away from substantive policy debate, Carlson instead goes big on populist outrage, warning, improbably, that "Biden is changing this country faster than any president ever has." The targets of his vitriol are diverse: from Big Tech censorship to attacking a New York Times journalist, and even denigrating pregnant women in the military.

Carlson regularly ties his culture war commentary back to querying the relevance, if not existence, of white supremacy. The connections are sometimes dizzying.

After he opined that pregnant women "going to fight our wars" make "a mockery of the U.S. military," the Pentagon took the unusual step of pushing back publicly, clearly concerned about an uninformed and unwarranted attack on serving U.S. troops.

Carlson wanted the final word. He refocused his attack, accusing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who has been acting to purge extremists from the military, of skewing the threat assessment to the U.S. based on "wokeness" rather than "winning the next war."

And what is this Defense Department "wokeness"? Apparently it means taking domestic extremism too seriously, or giving any credit to the "domestic extremist" category at all. He railed against the troops still protecting the Capitol against "extremists" (his quote marks), and then declared that the Biden administration was just tagging as extremist "people who voted for the losing candidate in the last election."

He accused Secretary Austin of "hyperventilating about white supremacy" while ignoring the big threat: China.

Just five days after Carlsons Fox News op-ed, a report from the Department for Homeland Security assessed that the most lethal domestic violent extremist threat to America is posed by racially or ethnically motivated extremists, and militias. In other words, white supremacists.

Carlsons constant need to stir provocation causes some strangely convoluted thinking. On the one hand, he declares concern for Americas fighting spirit and its ability to wage war around the world. On the other, he has embarked on a crusade against Congresswoman Liz Cheney for being "a genuine old-fashioned neo-con" who wants an "expanded [U.S.] military presence around the world [and] more wars in the Middle East."

Carlson is, of course, a devotee of the America First isolationism and was an influential voice in the Trump White House against military action against Iran. But what differentiates him from other right-wing opponents of Americas so-called forever wars is how he serially yokes that view to a denial of white supremacism.

Carlsons hostility to Cheney is clearly embedded in her decision to vote for Trumps impeachment. But it is her public statements against bigotry in the GOP that really fires him up not least when she said in February, on Fox News no less, that "We [Republicans] are not the party of QAnon or antisemitism or Holocaust deniers, or white supremacy or conspiracy theories. It's not who we are."

He opined on his show that Democrats, whom he compared to both Joseph Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini, "are fixated on forcing you to agree that yes, January 6 was a racist event," and thus Cheney, who "knows what to say to get what she wants and what she wants" made denounced white supremacy and antisemitism in order to bomb the Middle East: In Carlsons words, Cheney "decided to obey."

Carlsons attack on Cheney for her calling on the GOP to dissociate itself from racism is part of his larger campaign that argues white supremacy in the U.S. is a "hoax"and that the left, liberals and the Biden administration only use the label "white supremacist" to attack and silence conservatives.

Biden, Carlson announced on his first show after the inauguration, "has now declared war [on white supremacy], and we have a right to know, specifically and precisely, who exactly he has declared war on." He went on: "Innocent people could be hurt in this war. They usually are."

Then he defaulted to faux-naivety, using language that intentionally marries the image of Biden as literal and symbolic warmonger: "The question is, what does it mean to wage war on white supremacists? Can somebody tell us in very clear language what a white supremacist is?"

Carlsons hardly alone in hearing a general denunciation of white supremacy and immediately assuming its talking about him or his voters. Senator Rand Paul, who is also vying to be the GOPs ideological banner-waver and Trumps heir apparent, also declared Bidens inauguration speech was "thinly-veiled innuendo calling us white supremacists."

Paul and Carlson are backed by a large faction of Congressional Republicans, who are quick to attack fellow Republicans who step out of line. Its a far cry from the days of Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and George W. Bush, all of whom vehemently denounced white supremacy and racism within the ranks of the GOP and, in a sign of how much has changed, were certainly not taken in bad faith or anathematized.

Attacking immigration is a natural partner for Carlsons xenophobic rhetoric. The GOP has pivoted far to the right since the days of Reagan and Bush: New Reuters/Ipsos polling shows 77 percent want more barriers along the southern border and 56 percent oppose a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Carlson, accurately gauging his audience but also pushing the camp further rightwards, now warns that immigrants threaten "to change this country forever" and that America is becoming a "crowded, ugly and unhappy" country. That language has strong echoes of tentieth-century nationalist thought.

The GOP-Carlson Cheney pile-on is deliberate and selective. Righteous indignation is easy to stir, but dealing with your own in-house dirt is far harder.

The conservative media gives full vent to their fury at Cheney - the Federalists Dave Marcus claimed she "called tens of millions of Trump voters white supremacists" but they lose their tongues when faced with their own representatives actually working with bona fide white supremacists. That would both undermine the outrage narrative against Biden slurring them, and force an acknowledgement that white nationalists are acceptable in the GOP.

The conservative camp has little to say when Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar headlining the America First Political Action Conference hosted by literal white nationalist and virulent Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

They were silent on Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who managed the double header of denying Jan 6th was that significant and that white insurrectionists are, by definition, not threatening (because they "love this country," "respect law enforcement" and would "never break the law") but Black protestors in the same situation would have been both a significant event and threat (because they dont).

The Congressional GOP gave a standing ovation to Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon and antisemitic conspiracy theorist booster.

Its just over two years since former Iowa Congressman Steve King was stripped of his committee assignments by the GOP House leadership for white nationalist comments. But that kind of act, and the unanimity behind it, may be unthinkable now. And Tucker Carlson has a central part in that.

His drumbeat denial of white supremacy, his amplification of white nationalist talking points and his attack on anyone fighting for some kind of ideological hygiene in the conservative movement has made space for the likes of Gosar, Greene and Johnson to get a free pass.

For the Biden administration, their efforts to contend with the very real threat of white nationalism and domestic militias plotting anti-government violence will be met with limited cooperation on the side of the GOP, if the Biden equates Republicans with white nationalists narrative holds.

At the same time, conservative media is busy rewriting the events of January 6th, minimizing its import, whitewashing the Trump camps role and enabling the right to forget, move on and start attacking Democrats.

But there is a possible silver lining for Biden to an increasingly uncooperative and angry Republican base. A culture war that isolates the more extreme pals-with-Fuentes-and-attacking-servicewomen wing of the GOP from the rest of the country could allow Biden to break through the polarization gripping the U.S. and start building even fragile bridges with the surviving moderate elements of the GOP.

Excerpt from:
How Tucker Carlson's white supremacy denialism is taking over the GOP - Haaretz

As a guide to the late twentieth century culture wars, Hartman is unrivalled. War for the Soul of America features incisive portraits of individual players in the culture wars dramas, ranging from legal scholar Robert Bork and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, to dissident feminist Camille Paglia and artist Andres Serrano of Piss Christ fame; cogent discussions of the culture wars' major texts, including The Closing of the American Mind (Allan Bloom, 1987), Gender Trouble (Judith Butler, 1990) and The Bell Curve (Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, 1994); and revealing presentations of the signal culture wars controversies, including the 1985 porn rock congressional hearings spurred on by Tipper Gore, the heady controversy about changes to Stanford Universitys Western Civilization curriculum (students marched and chanted, Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western cultures got to go), and the early 1990s dust up about the Smithsonian Air and Space Museums allegedly offensive-to-veterans curating plans for the display of the Enola Gay Hiroshima bomber plane. If you lived through the 80s and 90s and paid attention to the news (or were anywhere near a college campus), reading Hartman sometimes feels like debriefing with friends after a raucous night out, an experience punctuated by laughter, head-scratching, and moments of regret for the excesses involved.

There are no more genuine culture wars firestorms like those outlined above today, according to Hartman, only passing flare-ups that are more farcical than poignant. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Hartman says, memories of an Ozzie and Harriet normative America had faded. A growing majority of Americans now accept and even embrace the cultural change wrought by the 60s. This argument is attractive, especially if you lean left. New peoplesblacks and other racial minorities, immigrants from strange lands, Catholics, Jews and other non-Christians, atheists, women, gays, lesbians, the disabledlaid claim to the nation, met with fierce resistance but eventually triumphed. The culture fractured but was then reconstituted into a more diverse and inclusive whole.

This explanation is neat but ultimately unsatisfying. In asserting that the culture wars were a temporary adjustment period, Hartman overlooks the extent to which they have been institutionalized into the very fabric of American society. Fox News, for example, has provided a non-stop, 24-hour televised arena for the culture wars ever since 1996. (MSNBC, on the Left, serves a similar, if less influential and pugnacious, function.) Take note also of our political primary system, in which the extremes of both parties have an outsize role in selecting candidates and shaping political platforms. Hartman points to changing attitudes about homosexuality to support his contention that the culture wars are finished. Homophobia is on the wane and public support for gay marriage is up, dramatically so. Hartman is undeniably right that homosexuality is no longer such a divisive subject in our national conversations but it is worth making a distinction between culture wars issues that may be blunted and others that will always be sharp.

Most important of all, arguably, are the controversies that linger in public education. We have a radically decentralized educational system, as historian David Labaree has pointed out, with some 14,000 individual school districts interacting with the local, state, and federal governments. Under these conditions, the capacity for passionate disagreement about what to teach the 50 million children and adolescents enrolled in public school is enormous. As I write, the Louisiana Senate Education Committee is considering the repeal of the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act signed by Governor Bobby Jindal, which gives cover to teach intelligent design [and] creationism. Jindal, who majored in biology at Brown University, said, I don't want any facts or theories or explanations to be withheld from [students] because of political correctness. Last week, aftermonths of rancorous debate,the Acalanes Union High School District school board in Lafayette, California, reaffirmed its commitment to working with Planned Parenthood educators to deliver its high school sex education curriculum. The school board was not swayed by the arguments made by the NOISE (No to Irresponsible Sex Education) Coalition that Planned Parenthood is a business that sells sex. Two months ago, the Oklahoma legislature introduced a bill that would ban funding for AP U.S. History courses in light of the College Boards new curriculum guidelines. The bills author, Republican Representative Dan Fisher, said the redesigned framework emphasized what is bad about America, while neglecting American exceptionalism. Schools are much more than conveyor belts for academic contentthey are also critical sites for the transmission of beliefs and values from one generation to the next. Curriculum disputes in the culture wars idiom are not going away anytime soon.

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War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars ...

Vernon Thorpe on Is the Gospel Hate Speech?

Dana Pavlick on Is Adherence to Logos Anti-Semitism?

E. Michael Jones on Is Christian Anti-Semitism Responsible for the Poway Synagogue Shooting?

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Is Christian Anti-Semitism Responsible for the Poway Synagogue Shooting? by E. Michael Jones. On Saturday, April 27, John Earnest walked into a synagogue in Poway, California and opened fire wounding two people and killing one. Two days later, Israels UN ambassador, Danny Danon, announced: The time for talking and having a conversation is over, and demanded that anti-Semitism be a criminal offense. Earnest clearly agreed with Ambassador Danons assessment that the time for talking and having a conversation is over, and the result was tragic. Soon after the attack, Dr. Michael L. Brown, a Jewish follower of Jesus, exploited Earnests inability to combine white racism and Christianity by blaming the attack on Christian anti-Semitism. If Ambassador Danon has his way and anti-Semitism becomes a crime, any time a person disagrees with a Jew, he will break the law. This will mean the end of free speech in America. It also will be the end of religious freedom because Dr. Brown has made it clear that any Christian who disagrees with his understanding of Scripture as it relates to the Jews is a Christian anti-Semite.$6.99, paperback; $3.19 e-book. Read More/Buy

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