Required reading from around the web of the best, most interesting, or most though provoking things we’ve read:
Tapson: Springtime for Snowflakes
“A professor’s memoir of the closing of the American mind. In the fall of 2016, New York University professor Michael Rectenwald created an anonymous Twitter account to critique the alarming spread across campuses of an ‘anti-education and anti-intellectual’ social justice ideology. Before long he was outed as the man behind the controversial @antipcnyuprof account, and despite being a leftist himself, became the target of shunning and harassment from his colleagues and the NYU administration. But instead of caving in to the campus totalitarians as so many academics do, Rectenwald declared himself done with the Left, and though still not a conservative, began appearing often in right-wing media to defend free speech and academic freedom, and to expose the ‘bilious animosity and unrestrained cruelty’ he endured from his former compatriots.”
Freitas: Is Portugal Becoming a Bastion of Neo-Marxism?
“Since the dramatic October 4, 2015 legislative election in Portugal, which resulted in the fall of the newly-formed conservative government after less than two weeks, the country has been run by a far-left coalition.
On one hand, this is not surprising, given Portugal’s long-standing socialist tradition; like many European countries, it has managed to balance a free-market economy with heavy government taxation and powerful labor unions.
On the other hand, the ruling coalition now has the contribution of a toxic partner — the “Bloco de Esquerda” (“Left Bloc”) — which has been demanding implementation of its extreme social, economic and foreign policy agenda in exchange for political support. Since its formation in 1999, through the convergence of the neo-Marxists, Trotskyists, feminists and environmentalists, this bloc entered the scene like a political Trojan Horse, and gradually took root in academia and other cultural institutions, to the point at which it now wields actual parliamentary power.”
Read more at Gatestone Institute.
Continetti: ‘Genuine Civil War Potential’
“Willmoore Kendall is profoundly relevant. As I prepared for class the other day, I could not help drawing parallels between the McCarthy era and our own. In political correctness, we see a new, multicultural orthodoxy struggling to be born. […] Kendall might observe that Trump, like McCarthy, found himself involved in a conflict that was already raging. And this conflict, too, goes to our very self-definition as a nation. The difference is that, whereas the McCarthyites understood themselves to be upholding the national consensus against the anti-McCarthyites, today we are fighting over whether “nation” and “consensus” are terms that carry any meaning at all. What Donald Trump did, on the first day of his presidential campaign, was light the fuse of the debate over illegal immigration and national identity. He drew attention to questions that still have not been answered: who belongs within the political community, where are borders to be drawn and ought they to be enforced, what traditions and symbols (the English language, the National Anthem, the flag) are worthy of preservation, deserving of honor.”