Speech policing in the United States, often called “political correctness,” has inspired much resentment and concern along with advocacy. Right now only its advocates have an action plan—which is to institutionalize PC on university campuses through the appointment of administrators responsible for developing and enforcing policies to control expression. Those who object to
Imagine for a moment you’re the male student at Amherst College, who, after a night out drinking with friends, accompanied a fellow student back to her dorm room. While you’re blacked out, she performs oral sex on you. Nearly two years later, she accuses you of sexual assault—and you’re expelled. Before you object:
The Trump family is no doubt canny about the dog-eat-dog landscapes of the Manhattan real estate lagoon. But when the Trumps arrived in Washington, as political novices they entered an entirely new swampland, with which so far they remain unfamiliar. Their transition down the coastal corridor is sort of like leaving a Florida
Contrary to the narrative of Donald Trump’s friends and foes alike, the phenomenon of “fake news” long precedes the 2016 presidential election, even if the moniker is of a fairly recent vintage. To deem an item reported by journalists a piece of “fake news” is not necessarily to say that it is patently
When the Richard Strauss opera "Salome," based on Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name, first premiered in the United States, critics dismissed it as tasteless and boring: nothing but schlock produced for the shock value. The truth, as composer and academic Robert Greenberg observes in his “Great Works” course on “How to
Legal fireworks concerning religious freedom exploded in what some commentators hailed as the most important case of the term, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, decided a week before July 4. Though it’s hard to tell for all the squabbling over the meaning of precedents, the justices’ opinions point to the great themes of
In the ultimate display of irony-averse stupidity, Fraud News Network CNN threatened an American citizen on this fourth of July. The occasion was the now-infamous GIF tweeted out by President Trump, which shows Trump tackling and beating a wrestler on Wrestlemania. Except instead of showing the wrestler’s face, CNN’s corporate logo is substituted.
A couple of weeks ago in this space, I speculated that CNN, the Crackpot News Network, had reached the terminal stage of malevolent implausibility. “[I]t would be a good thing,” I wrote, “were CNN humiliated and sued out of existence. It performs no journalistic function, merely a destructively partisan one.” As usual, I
One wonders why it took the branding of a Muslim as a hater by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for the mainstream media to begin questioning the methodology, criteria, and the partisanship of that once-respected institution. After all, SPLC has been branding mainstream Christian groups as “haters” for many years. Even so,
Last week, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs convened a hearing on political Islam, also called “Islamism.” The committee invited four witnesses: Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, Asra Q. Nomani, Michael E. Leiter, former director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and John Lenczowski, president of the Institute of World Politics.
