Mark Steyn, Free Speech & the Stupid of Berkeley

The Mark Steyn Show with Jordan Peterson

With thanks to the intrepid Vlad Tepes

In this episode of The Mark Steyn Show, Mark explores what Daffy Duck used to call “pronoun trouble”. His guest is Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto whose entire career has been imperiled by his opposition to the new “non-binary” gender pronouns – such as “zhe”. Transgender activists and other politically correct enforcers have determined to destroy him.

In this full-length interview, Steyn and Professor Peterson discuss the Orwellian perversion of language and the totalitarian impulses of social engineering. And Mark asks the big question: Is the jig up for western civilization?

A good analysis by one brave American who went undercover at the Battle at Berkeley with ANTIFA

TRUTH AND FREEDOM ARE THEIR ENEMIES

Tim Blair

At a violent Berkeley demonstration, one protester explains why the left has a problem with free speech.

Via The Daily Californian:

Larry Michaelson and Brett Johnson, two demonstrators who identified themselves as members of Bay Area Antifa, said they were protesting in opposition of white supremacy. According to Johnson, “true Antifa” emphasizes the spirit of nonviolence. Johnson likened the group’s efforts to those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

“Free speech has an air of white supremacy,” Michaelson said.

At another US university, students believe truth is a white supremacist lie:

The students’ letter comes out swinging against the Enlightenment itself, and brands the search for truth – the mission of a liberal arts college – a false, Eurocentric concept that only serves to embolden white supremacy:

“Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth-‘the Truth’- is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”

At yet another US university they don’t even know how to write, as Alice B. Lloyd reports:

A Wellesley News editorial has caught viral flak from civil libertarians, conservatives, copy editors, and other sensible sorts for its clumsy defense of censorship in the name of sensitivity.

In their defense of the modern academy’s responsibility to assimilate the unenlightened, the students distinguish “free speech” from “hate speech.” But their failed experiments in sentence structure, as well as logical leaps none among the uninitiated could easily follow, backfire:

“Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.”

The pronoun “it” floats free, unbound by any antecedent, after the semicolon. The editorialists may have meant the second half of the sentence as a coded message to the world outside their coddling cell: Shutting down rhetoric is hate speech, of course it is! Send help!

A sane and literate friend graduated a year or so ago from Wellesley. Thankfully she survived the de-education process.