Coop Scoop: Confronting the Censors (resend)

Cancel culture has become endemic across the Right and Left.

November 1-2

By Marc Cooper

As of Monday, Maximum Leader Joe Manchin has once again decided to slow down progress on Joe Biden’s Supercalifragilistic Infrastructure Framework. And the Virginia gubernatorial election set for Tuesday looks like it could easily go to the Trumpkins, thanks to the D’s running the tired, uninspiring Terry McAuliffe, the consummate Corporate Democrat.

These two immediate events prohibit me from writing anything about the current electoral panorama as I am assuming a very big and turbulent shift will take place in the next few days. anything today will probably change tomorrow.

I take advantage of this pause to drop you a note about another passionate interest of mine: free speech.

Any regular reader of mine knows that I am pretty much an absolutist on this subject and I firmly reject censorship from the Right as well as from the Woke Political Police (whose demand to comply threatens to flatten out our culture even more.)

I thereby announce that I have joined the Advisory Council of the startup US Free Speech Union. You can see who else is on the Council and what our Mission Statement is here. PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO OPEN THE LINK AND SIGN UP ON IT FOR UPDATES, ALERTS AND ARTICLES FROM THE UNION. NO COST WHATSOEVER BUT WE WANT YOU TO SIGN UP.

As our CEO Benjamin Schwarz, former national and literary editor of The Atlantic, notes in a post today, we are currently watching three incidents of deplatforming at American universities. MIT, Collin College and the University of Florida.

There’s the bizarre fight over at MIT where weak-spined administrators cancelled Dorian Abbot’s Carlson Lecture after some students protested because he has opposed affirmative action. He has, indeed, arguing that it sees and treats ““people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century.” He, instead, proposes that affirmative action should be based on social class, not race. It’s an opinion that many share, including me, but even if you sharply disagree that is no reason to banish him. Here’s the statement and open letter sent from the Union to MIT.

As a nation, we are currently engaged in a life and death struggle to preserve democracy. That’s accomplished, in part, by expanding democracy, not restricting it. Deplatforming those you disagree with impairs your own freedom to think, rethink, challenge and debate. Thanks for reading this. Plse sign up for info from the US Free Speech Union. ++