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Concerns about free-speech suppression on campus shouldnt be dismissed out of hand, and liberals should speak out against any excesses within their ranks at colleges and universities. Yet the conservative medias incessant coverage of these controversies undoubtedly inflates their significance, suggesting a systemic problem in higher education that doesnt exist. But the belief that it exists, though largely confined to the right, has consequences for us all.

The conservative narrative about colleges and universities has several common complaints: Theyre inhospitable to conservatives. Liberal professors indoctrinate their students. And left-wing students have become snowflakesbut also militant social justice warriors. In every instance, the evidence against these claims is stronger than the evidence for them.

On the question of liberal professors indoctrinating their students, the consensus is clear. Yes, professors lean left (although with some caveats), Inside Higher Eds Scott Jaschik wrote in February. But much of the research says conservative students and faculty members are not only surviving but thriving in academefree of indoctrination if not the periodic frustrations. Further, the research casts doubt on the idea that the ideological tilt of faculty members is because of discrimination. Notably, some of this research has been produced by conservative scholars.

One such example is last years Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, written by Jon Shields, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, and Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado. As two conservative professors, they wrote in The Washington Post, we agree that right-wing faculty members and ideas are not always treated fairly on college campuses. But we also know that right-wing hand-wringing about higher education is overblown.

Dunn told me he thinks conservative students do face social pressure from their liberal peers. For your average conservative student going about their daily life, he said, my guess is that politics isnt going to come up that often for them, if only because they often choose majors in the hard sciences or in business. He argued the issue is much more salient for sociology or political science majors. At the same time, he cautioned, One thing I think happens is that conservative students go into college expecting the worst. Its just not a healthy attitude in general.

Dunn hopes that schools will take this opportunity to promote intellectual diversity and civil discourse, and that campus conservatives, instead of inviting right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, will bring in more speakers like Princetown professor Robert George, who has joined with Cornel West in promoting healthy debate. I do think that conservative media could help. Of course, its not terribly newsworthy if a speaker comes to campus, gives a talk, people ask pointed but polite questions, and then everyone goes home without a YouTube-worthy video being captured, he told me. People smashing windows makes for better television than an egghead in a frumpy suit giving a talk. But they could do things that highlight how individuals that strongly disagree with one another can nevertheless work to promote civil discourse and even friendship across ideological lines.

Woessner worries about a lack of ideological diversity among faculty, and he is troubled by what he sees as attempts to suppress speakers with alternative points of view. It borders on fascism when we try to use physical threats or attempt to disrupt people from having a conservation that may be unpopular, he said. And yet, he stresses that part of succeeding in higher education is not having a victim mentality, and the right shouldnt create a self-fulfilling prophecy about being discriminated against on campus. The more conservatives overplay the narrative that theyre being persecuted and oppressed, the more they will check out of higher education, and that makes the imbalance worse, he said. I think conservatives have more to gain from higher education than liberals do. Liberals dont have their ideas challenged as often, and that makes it harder for them to grow intellectually.

Kelly-Woessner says liberals need to make changes, too. She said her research shows this generation of young people is more politically intolerant than previous cohorts. At the same time, she said, its a few instances that get blown up and then represent what colleges and universities look like. She notes that campuses dont get media coverage when host conservative speakers without controversy. We dont have the same visceral reaction to conservatives on campus, she said of Elizabethtown. In fact, weve had quite a few on campus, and nothing ever happened.... Of course were going to have slanted perspective on the magnitude of the problem, because nobody reports on the dog that doesnt bark.

The conservative media has painted a distorted portrait of academia, and their customers apparently are adjusting their opinions accordingly. But even if the decline in Republicans regard for higher education is largely attributable to right-wing hysteria and hyperbole, liberals cant afford to ignore it. The Pew poll has serious implications, for instance, for the funding and independence of public colleges and universities, which is increasingly under attack by Republicans. Consider Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and North Carolina Governor Pat McCrorys respective wars on public education in their states. Low public opinion of colleges and universities will only embolden more Republican governors to do the sameand to provide them cover when they do.

The GOPs newfound negativity about academia, Woessner told me, erodes the public support of higher education in state legislatures. If conservatives have a false impression of the state of higher education, and they believe in the open persecution of conservatives, there will be less support for the public financing of higher education. That hurts professors and students of all political stripes.

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Liberals Can't Ignore the Right's Hatred for Academia | New Republic - New Republic

French President Emmanuel Macron will host US President Donald Trump on Thursday and Friday for Bastille Day talks which coincide with the 100th anniversary of US involvement in World War Two. The meeting, between two leaders vastly different in age and political philosophies, will be intriguing for the common ground that they seek to find.

Trump has referred to his great relationship with Macron, and it is true that they share political positioning as perceived insurgent outsiders with a business background. Moreover, the two have a number of shared international objectives, including in countering international terrorism with France, for instance, the second largest contributor to the US-led coalition in Syria.

Yet, while both Macron and Trump have political reasons to court each other, the context for the meeting is the stark policy divergences. Already the two presidents have clashed...

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Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron embody the ongoing war between liberals and populists - Telegraph.co.uk

By Jason Willick By Jason Willick July 12 at 12:21 PM

Jason Willick is a staff writer at The American Interest.

Its anyones guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the Presidents remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trumps liberal critics were revealing and dangerous.

The speech a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism.Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,tweeted the Atlantics Peter Beinart.Trumps speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,read a Vox headline. According the New Republics Jeet Heer, Trumps alt-right speechredefined the West in nativist terms.

Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term alt-right that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate themas distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.

[Trumps visit to Poland was a study in breaking norms]

There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trumps speech: For example, that he shouldnt have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaws recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served Americas interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry.But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.

How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of liberalism and the West.Liberalismis an ideology defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people.The Westis the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.

So to appeal to the West in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the Wests wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.

What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of the West to liberalisms enemies on the alt-right that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of immigration skeptic, or social conservative, but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the Wests greatest achievements.

[On his trip abroad, Trump left American values behind]

As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you evenreadwhat Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed todays conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.

AsDimitri Halikiaspointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the West. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho,Western Civ has got to go)rejects Western Civilizationbecauseit is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilizationonly insofaras it is racist they fashion themselves defenders of the West, but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the Wests principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.

To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trumps speech was his remark that the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the Wests survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.

The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the West into a slur, Trumps critics are disarming. Perhaps the presidents dire warning wasnt so exaggerated, after all.

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The alt-right is an attack on Western values. Liberals shouldn't ... - Washington Post

SHENYANG, China (Reuters) - As the hospital treating Liu Xiaobao says his organs and breathing have begun to fail from cancer, few in China outside a small circle of dissidents know about the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and his lifetime pursuit of liberal democratic reform.

Even other patients at the First Hospital of China Medical University in the northeastern city of Shenyang, where Liu is being treated, seem not to know they are sharing the facilities with a world famous dissident.

When Reuters visited the floor where friends say Liu is being treated, visitors for other patients on the same ward seemed confused and asked why there were new procedures when security questioned them and checked their IDs.

Nothing has appeared in Chinese-language official media since Liu was diagnosed with cancer in late May. Searches for "Liu Xiaobo" on Chinese social media show no results.

China's foreign ministry answers questions from international media at its daily briefing with the standard line: China is a country ruled by law and the case is an internal affair; other countries should not meddle. Even that line is missing from the official transcripts of the briefings on the ministry's website.

The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid published by the official paper of the ruling Communist Party, is the only publication that regularly writes articles about Liu, in English, and usually to rebuff international criticism.

The paper has cast Liu as an outsider marginalized from society whose cause has failed inside China.

It was overseas dissidents" who are the most active in "hyping the issue and are trying to boost their image by deifying Liu, the Global Times said in a Monday editorial. Western mainstream society is much less enthusiastic than before in interfering with China's sovereign affairs, it said.

Liu was the co-author of a pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08, which attracted more than 10,000 signatures online before the authorities deleted the document from internet pages and chatrooms. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, a year after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for inciting subversion.

Charter '08, issued in 2008, reflected an apparent shift in China at the time toward becoming more open to liberal ideals, said Beijing-based historian and political commentator Zhang Lifan. That changed when Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.

"Since (Liu) was sentenced, peaceful transformation as a route for change has essentially been blocked off by the party. Since the new administration came into office, the party is moving in the opposite direction," he said.

Hu Jia, a well-known Beijing-based dissident and friend of Liu's, says few people in China know anything about him or his work.

"The reality is that if you are on the streets of Beijing and you stop a hundred people, to have one know who Liu Xiaobo is would be a great result," he said.

"Chinese society, due to internet censorship and being cut off from the rest of the world, essentially does not get to hear our (dissident) voices. Protesting voices on Weibo are almost not existent these days," Hu said.

But Xi has helped the dissident movement by locking up a peaceful protester and letting him die in detention. "The last state to do that was Nazi Germany," Hu says.

Carl von Ossietzky, a pacifist who died in 1938 in Nazi Germany's Berlin, was the last Nobel Peace Prize winner to live out his dying days under state surveillance.

While China's censorship makes it difficult to assess Liu's support, he is a "hero" for many liberals in China, even if few will speak out for him, a Chinese editor at an online publication said, declining to be named.

"I am really not sure if it's accurate to claim he is unknown to the public, (or if) people are just too scared to show their knowledge (of Liu)," the editor said.

Despite the restrictions, internet posters have written in support of Liu and his cause, using variations on his name to avoid the censors.

"When it comes to freedom, comes to constitutional government, we have talked too much, now we need to act," read one comment on the micro-blogging platform Weibo. "Situations like Liu Xiaobo's are still a worry, but we nevertheless need people to act, bravely face the risk of death and act."

The post echoed something Liu wrote in April 1989 when he returned from studying in the United States to take part in the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square: intellectuals often "just talk", they "do not do".

"He's leaving, but we cannot see, cannot speak, cannot act" said the headline of an article shared as an image on the popular messaging platform, WeChat, a method that can slow down the censors. In the article, three people born in the 1980s were interviewed about Liu.

"I will see him as a very important symbol, (but) people like him fail to get attention from common folk, and given his plight as an unknown prisoner of conscience, there is little to say," one person identified as L said in the article.

Albert Ho, who heads the Hong Kong Alliance organizing protests in Liu's support, said China's efforts to erase Liu from people's memory will fail.

"Don't underestimate the power of the internet ... And don't underestimate the people. I have seen many episodes where suddenly the hero gets degraded into the devil and the devil becomes the hero," he said, referring to previous shifts in China's political system.

"People are not living in an open society in China so you never know," he said.

Additional reporting by Venus Wu in HONG KONG and Beijing news room; Editing by Bill Tarrant

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China's liberals quietly fight efforts to erase Liu Xiaobo legacy - Reuters

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Posted: Jul 13, 2017 12:01 AM

As the Grand Marshal of the Supreme Court assembles the posse of Bailiffs, Trumpeters and Attendants, the Learned Scribes are generating the Official Law Warrant of Justice to arrest Donald Trump Jr. for High Treason, which they will do after marching to the White House on a carpet of rose petals strewn by Fair Maidens.

Or something. Whatever. The Menscian media is in a spazz yet again.

Boy oh boy, maybe this time we can overturn the results of the election

And I admit I almost didn't think it could happen, but things have gotten stupider. Somehow the media and their enablers decided that the worst thing in the world is for someone to be willing to hear negative information about a political opponent from a foreign government, which wasn't a bad thing until Trumps son tried it unsuccessfully. Apparently Putins cunning spies work through chunky music industry gadflies and third-tier lawyers and dont actually have any dirt to give. Who knew?

But hey, collusion or something. Whatever.

Its almost pointless to mention the actions of Hillary Clinton's cats paws regarding Paul Manafort and the Ukrainian government, or further back, Ted Kennedys anti-Reagan conspiracy, because neither counts as this is all posturing and lies. If Hillary thought Lenins embalmed corpse could have provided dirt on Trump, shed have been in Red Square doing CPR.

Surprise! This stupidity drops right after Trump crushes it with a speech in Poland and right after James Integrity Boy Comey was revealed to have been playing the kind of classified materials games he let Clinton slide on.

Yeah, yeah, intent. Whatever.

Its all about liberals retaking power and trying to make sure we normals never get a say in our own governance again. Make no mistake, there are plenty of nominal Republicans who would be happy for that to happen. According to David Brooks, we peasants lack sufficient sandwich savvy for self determination.

None of this is about right and wrong. It's about power - their power, and ensuring we have none.

Let me break down how this is going to end. Liberals are going to gobble yet another Treason Viagra and the hot chick of success is gonna let them buy her a pricy dinner and then smile and say Let's just be friends.

Again.

I would almost feel sorry for them if they werent a bunch of evil, aspiring fascists who want to turn all of America into Evergreen College.

Oh, meanwhile in Iraq, which never mattered to Democrats, the people who were slicing the heads off dudes, tossing gays off buildings, and selling women into sex slavery, have been annihilated. This happened under the tender loving care of Mad Dog Mattis, the guy who Trump put in command of our armies and who refocused our military away from making it more comfortable for people who don't understand that a penis makes you male to killing our civilizations enemies.

You might think that the annihilation of ISIS in Iraq would merit a mention, but no. See, in the middle of a political campaign, a campaign was willing to hear out someone promising negative information about an opponent, which, as we all now know, is the worst thing in the history of ever and is treason or something because thats a useful narrative right this minute. CNN is all over one of these stories. Guess which one.

Go on. Guess.

I feel stupider watching CNN, so I don't. In fact, a lot of people aren't watching it. CNN is getting beaten out by Yogi Bear, a cartoon which provides more reliable information than Fredo Cuomo and the rest generate. In fact, Yogi Bear has had to retract exponentially fewer stories than CNN.

Let me say that again. A cartoon bear whose entire life focus is stealing picnic baskets from tourists is a more popular and more accurate source of information than Cable News Network.

But memes! Whatever.

Do you think this latest nonsense is going to stop Trump, by which I mean the people who support him? Do you think the normal people in America are thinking Gosh, a campaign tried to get negative information about its opponent? I'm shocked and stunned and emotionally ruined. I don't know where to turn or what to do. I guess I better support a bunch of liberal fascists who want to take my money and my power and my guns and who boo God.

Whatever. Now Tim Kaine is channeling his inner Louise Mensch, who seems to be channeling the voices in her head, and is screeching TREASON!!! But we should be forgiving because Tim has an excuse.

He's an idiot.

The liberals are losing and they're going to keep losing. They're going to lose in 2018, despite the Republicans best efforts to fail. And in 2020 well get four more years of Donald Trump and I'm going to laugh during every minute of it. Let all those latter-day converts to McCarthyism working as associate sociology professors at Gumbo State and who drive old Corollas with fading bumperstickers that read Nuclear Freeze Now keep tweeting TREASON in all caps. You go, girls.

Again, whatever.

Let's assume every single thing the liberals postulate is absolutely true. Let's say Donald Trump, Jr., knew that the Russian government was using a crew of goofuses to try to feed him negative information on Felonia von Pantsuit and he went to get it and found out they didn't have any, which is a miracle because if there is one thing in the world there's a lot of, it's negative information about Hillary Clinton.

So what?

This was never some sort of rule acquiring you be fussy about where you dig up your dirt, and to the extent Clinton didn't already break this fake rule, she would've in a heartbeat if she had been presented the opportunity. I don't think I'm going to give up my freedom to honor your bogus principle du jour.

It won't work. Nobody's getting arrested, nobodys getting impeached. You liberals suck and you're going to lose. Again.

MSNBC Reporter Walks Away From GOP Senator When He Mentions Clinton Campaign's Meetings With The Russians

Flashback: That Time Clinton Surrendered American Uranium Mines To Russia

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This Time We Liberals Have Totally Got Trump. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. - Townhall