In which we learn about free speech from political progressives… sort of.

Table of Contents

We are confronted with an endless parade of loud mouths and empty heads (image)

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Voltaire?

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong. Voltaire.

On behalf of the Thomas Carlyle Club for Young Reactionaries (Students Against a Democratic Society): welcome, progressives — as sweet and sunny by any other name!

Welcome Protestants, Puritans, and Patriots! Welcome Roundheads, Radicals, and Red Republicans! Welcome Democrats, Social Democrats, New Democrats, New Deal Democrats, Liberal Democrats — welcome, in a word, all you latter-day Whigs. Welcome Anarchists, Bolshevists, Communists — the ABCs of extortion, robbery and murder (hands off the kulaks, please). Welcome Reds of all stripes, be they Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyist wrecker, Stalinist, Maoist — and let me hear those Tito fans!

Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.

Tonight, you won’t need to send even one. Come on, friends, and join the party!

Nazi humour is harder, but not impossible, to find (image)

I should explain. Regular readers may have noticed that the Carlyle Club is, in general, pretty tough — appropriately tough, I would say — on the global death cult known as “progress.” Progressivism, God knows, must always and everywhere be mercilessly stamped out. But we should also bear in mind that most progressives (exact ratio unknown) are basically decent, honest people. Many are even intelligent. Some of my best friends are progressive! I try not to hold it against them. Sometimes I succeed.

The problem all basically decent, honest, intelligent progressive-type people must eventually face is this: the divine mysteries of progress, when subjected to even the gentlest of probing, begin at once to ooze the most weird and awful things.

I’d like to share an example with you, but before we begin, I want to be clear: our subject really does seem like a perfectly nice guy — yes, intelligent too. I disagree with almost every single thing he believes about the nature and purpose of government, and I think beliefs like his are literally destroying civilization (which I feel is a bad thing), but any mean-spiritedness to follow is, I assure you, directed not at him personally, because that would be just unbelievably tacky, but rather at — the global death cult. (Why poke fun at a global death cult? Sorry: beyond the scope of this discussion.)

“Is the social justice left really abandoning free speech?” Fredrik deBoer, graduate student of rhetoric and composition, would like to know (his link, my emphasis):

It’s a question I’ve played around with before. Generally, the response is something like “of course not, stop slandering us,” or whatever. But more and more often, I find that the answer from lefties I know in academia or online writing are answering “yes.” And that is, frankly, terrifying and a total betrayal of the fundamental principles we associate with human progress. I say this in light of this depressing, maddening report about a UCSB professor who attacked an anti-abortion protest and stole one of their signs. She responded to the incident by saying that she had been triggered by the protesters. In the comments of Gawker, she’s attracted many, many defenders. Several of them have come right out and said that speech they find unpalatable should be banned. I wish this didn’t need to be said, but apparently it does: this is not OK. It is not OK to attack protesters. It is not OK to try to silence people whose views you don’t like. It’s immoral, and it cuts directly against the very human rights that are the foundation of feminism, the campaign against racism, and the campaign for gay rights. That this could be possibly in question among self-defined members of the left demonstrates how unhealthy the left has become. What’s more, it demonstrates the incredible lack of historical perspective among today’s social justice left. It is precisely because we have enjoyed the freedom of expression that feminism, the anti-racist movement, and the gay rights movement have made long and arduous progress.

So: under the racist, sexist, gay-bashing right-wing hate-crime regime, the designated bad guys of Whig history (may contain traces of reality), progressives enjoyed free speech and several other human rights — even though this was clearly not in the evil regime’s best interests. Having defeated said regime, progressives seem unwilling to extend this useful human right of free speech to their enemies. Which of these factions can best be described as (a) “principled” and (b) lacking “historical perspective”?

If we’re going to have this debate, then please, let’s have it. It would be very useful if people who are committed to social justice but opposed to rights of free expression would lay out their preferences directly and clearly. Who gets to define acceptable speech? […] What would be the long-term consequences of further aligning the social justice movement with the violent apparatus of the state? […] What guarantee is there that the public won’t move to ban speech we on the left would like to express?

Interesting questions. I’ll give it a shot: (1) the progressive ruling class; (2) more power for the progressive ruling class; (3) the public will do as it’s told — by the progressive ruling class. They sorta control the universities and the press — dunno if you’ve noticed.

Actually, it appears you have noticed something like that (my emphasis again):

Please believe me when I say: it is not at all unusual, for me, to encounter liberals and leftists who speak out about issues of social justice like feminism and racism and similar who do not believe that controversial speech (what they call hate speech) should be legally expressible. You are free to question how prevalent that view is. But I encounter it all the time, and not just online. Being in a PhD program in the humanities, I have regular exposure to people who feel that the right to free expression does not or should not include racist, sexist, or homophobic ideas. And their definition of racism, sexism, and homophobia tends to be expansive. Indeed, I was motivated to write in large part because I just came from a large, national conference. I met lots of cool people, like I always do, and came away inspired, as I always do. But I was also disturbed, because of the casual way in which some people asserted their belief that people who express beliefs they abhor — that I abhor, that I hope all good people abhor — should be shouted down, should be coerced into silence, should be barred from entry into public forums, should be legally or otherwise prevented from expressing those beliefs. I cannot tell you how small their relative number is. I can only tell you that they exist, in my communities, and they are not alone.

It’s the casualness that’s the tip-off, you see. (I had the same experience recently.)

Academic left-wing culture frequently is a leading indicator of the broader social justice left. I am not at all saying that left-wing ideas only come from college campuses, but there is little doubt that academics help to popularize and spread fashionable political ideas.

You know, I think we might be onto something here. I don’t want to sound all conspiratorial or anything, but maybe, just maybe, the people whose job it is to tell everyone else what to think — have been telling everyone else… what to think.

The Da Vinci Code this ain’t

Progressives hold a variety of, shall we say, nuanced opinions on “free speech.”

The congealing conventional wisdom among progressives now is that the right to free expression has only been abridged if government literally physically prevents you from speaking. Absolutely every other way in which [sic] your right to express yourself is fair game. So when I wrote about a University of California Santa Barbara professor who physically ripped a sign from the hands of another person in an attempt to silence that sign’s message — her quote was literally, “I’m stronger so I was able to take the poster” [here] — it was patiently explained to me by patiently explaining liberals that there was no actual abridgment to free speech, because the government hadn’t sent tanks to silence those protesters. What that professor did was “direct action” and was thus permissible. Why that person using her physical advantage to silence someone amounts to direct action, and a crowd beating up antiwar protesters would not, I have no idea.

Oh, but you must have some idea (his link, my emphasis once more):

Online liberalism, as I’ve said many times, is not actually a series of political beliefs and alliances but instead a set of social cues that are adopted to demonstrate one’s class background — economic class, certainly, but more cultural class, the various linguistic and consumptive signals that assure those around you that you’re the right kind of person and which appear to be the only thing that America’s 20-something progressives really care about anymore. The dominance of personal branding and cultural signalling over political theory means that liberal attitudes change very rapidly and then congeal into a consensus that is supposedly so obviously correct that it does not need defending. In the past year, liberalism as an elite social phenomenon has abandoned first rights of the accused and second the right to free expression. […] So take, for example, this comprehensively awful piece by Salon’s Elias Isquith. It’s a pretty perfect example of cultural and social signals substituting for an actual political position. I’m not saying it doesn’t contain a good argument; I’m saying it does not contain an argument. It’s a mostly-failed attempt to achieve an arch tone married to the blank, undefended assumption that people defending rights on principle are themselves guilty of whatever people invoking those rights are accused of. […] All of this will be good for Isquith’s career, of course. Salon, though it still publishes some good work, has rapidly devolved into a series of progressive dog whistles, a constant, numbing reassurance for its readership that they are good and smart and conservatives are monstrous. […] The question is whether contributing to this progressive impatience with the very idea of rights talk is actually going to help the progressive cause. […] I don’t have the slightest idea how they will be able to defend the right of people to hold controversial, left-wing political ideas when they have come up with a thousand arguments for why the right to free expression doesn’t apply in any actual existing case. How will Isquith write a piece defending a CEO’s right to oppose Israeli apartheid? A sports owner’s right to do the same? I can’t see how he could — unless it really is just all about teams, and not about principle at all.

What, indeed, is it “all about”?

What are these progressive “principles” which make up the great “cause” for which a principled progressive might be expected to sacrifice his career — in, say, academia, journalism or entertainment? When was the last time such a sacrifice was made?

After his blacklisting […] the Trumbo family exiled themselves to Mexico. In Mexico […] Trumbo wrote approximately thirty scripts under pseudonyms and using fronts who relayed the money to him. […] It triggered a discussion in the industry about the propriety of the blacklist, since so many screenplays were being written by blacklisted individuals who were being denied screen credit.

From whom might progressive journalists need to defend “the right of people to hold” these “controversial,” presumably principled “left-wing political ideas”? For one thing, who manufactures the controversy, since it obviously won’t be the same journalists?

“Then around the closing time of 11 p.m., witnesses told the Journal Sentinel, dozens to hundreds of black youths attacked white people as they left the fair, punching and kicking people and shaking and pounding on their vehicles.” “Dozens to hundreds”? When witnesses can’t differentiate between 24 and 100, should we really rely on them to speculate whether a crime was racially motivated?

Whose expert opinions will the journalists cite to shore up their chosen narrative, if not the left-wing academics who “popularize and spread fashionable political ideas”?

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the ‘peer-reviewed literature.’ Obviously, they found a solution to that — take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal.”

And another thing: when does a controversy (i.e., public opinion) turn into de Boer’s “actual, no bullshit suppression of speech”? Because that’s not always the case.

Professor Furr is a professor of medieval English literature, but what has led to all the hullabaloo about him is his decades-long defense of the old Soviet Union. […] What has now created the storm that has made Furr visible are his statements at the recent forum at Montclair, where he called it a “big lie” that Stalin killed millions of people.

At some point, the crowd has to align itself with “the violent apparatus of the state,” either directly: the government sends in the tanks; or indirectly: the government withdraws the protection of its tanks, allowing the crowd to administer a beating.

A Justice Department prosecutor defied his superiors by testifying at a U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearing Friday, where he leveled an explosive allegation: top officials in the department gutted a voter intimidation case against a fringe African American militant group because the suspects were black and their alleged victims were white.

(The latter is what Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny; consult Issue 26.)

Now: does either scenario seem likely, with progressives on the receiving end?

“I just don’t buy that this was a couple of rogue IRS employees,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. “After all, groups with ‘progressive’ in their names were not targeted similarly.” If it were just a small number of employees, she said, “then you would think that the high-level IRS supervisors would have rushed to make this public, fired the employees involved, apologized to the American people and informed Congress. None of that happened in a timely way.”

Tonight: the shocking, yet obvious answers to all these questions and more!

Saul Alinsky, 1909–1972 (image)

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer. Saul Alinsky

And I have always said, the first Whig was the Devil. Samuel Johnson

I thought we might begin by taking a quick look at the roots of the world’s most famous progressive: Barack Obama, of course. Obama is a disciple of one Saul Alinsky. For a brief (and impeccably progressive) introduction, consult the New Republic (2007):

His teachers were schooled in a style of organizing devised by Saul Alinsky, the radical University of Chicago-trained social scientist. At the heart of the Alinsky method is the concept of “agitation” — making someone angry enough about the rotten state of his life that he agrees to take action to change it; or, as Alinsky himself described the job, to “rub raw the sores of discontent.” […] By defining himself as a “community organizer” above all else, Obama is linking himself to America’s radical democratic tradition and presenting himself as an heir to a particular political style and methodology that, at least superficially, contrasts sharply with the candidate Obama has become. […] Alinsky’s contribution to community organizing was to create a set of rules, a clear-eyed and systemic approach that ordinary citizens can use to gain public power. The first and most fundamental lesson Obama learned was to reassess his understanding of power. Horwitt says that, when Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!” Galluzzo shared with me the manual he uses to train new organizers, which is little different from the version he used to train Obama in the ’80s. It is filled with workshops and chapter headings on understanding power: “power analysis,” “elements of a power organization,” “the path to power.” Galluzzo told me that many new trainees have an aversion to Alinsky’s gritty approach because they come to organizing as idealists rather than realists. But Galluzzo’s manual instructs them to get over these hang-ups. “We are not virtuous by not wanting power,” it says. “We are really cowards for not wanting power,” because “power is good” and “powerlessness is evil.” The other fundamental lesson Obama was taught is Alinsky’s maxim that self-interest is the only principle around which to organize people. (Galluzzo’s manual goes so far as to advise trainees in block letters: “get rid of do-gooders in your church and your organization.”) Obama was a fan of Alinsky’s realistic streak. “The key to creating successful organizations was making sure people’s self-interest was met,” he told me, “and not just basing it on pie-in-the-sky idealism. So there were some basic principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in.” […] Obama so mastered the workshops on power that he later taught them himself. On his campaign website, one can find a photo of Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskian methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written, “Power Analysis” and “Relationships Built on Self Interest,” an idea illustrated by a diagram of the flow of money from corporations to the mayor.

Obama teaches Alinsky (image)

Alinsky’s most famous work is, of course, Rules for Radicals (1971), the standard text for “community organizers” — dedicated, as we’ve seen, to Satan. So… what’s up with that? Well, allow me to treat you to an excerpt from Chapter 2: Of Means and Ends.

That perennial question, “Does the end justify the means?” is meaningless as it stands; the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, “Does this particular end justify this particular means?” Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends. The end is what you want, and the means is how you get it. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe’s “conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action”; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of “personal salvation”; he doesn’t care enough for people to be “corrupted” for them.

Alinsky turns to the history books for illustrations:

To us the Declaration of Independence is a glorious document and an affirmation of human rights. To the British, on the other hand, it was a statement notorious for its deceit by omission. In the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Particulars attesting to the reasons for the Revolution cited all of the injustices which the colonists felt that England had been guilty of, but listed none of the benefits. There was no mention of the food the colonies had received from the British Empire during times of famine, medicine during times of disease, soldiers during times of war with the Indians and other foes, or the many other direct and indirect aids to the survival of the colonies. Neither was there notice of the growing number of allies and friends of the colonists in the British House of Commons, and the hope for imminent remedial legislation to correct the inequities under which the colonies suffered. Jefferson, Franklin, and others were honorable men, but they knew that the Declaration of Independence was a call to war. They also knew that a list of many of the constructive benefits of the British Empire to the colonists would have so diluted the urgency of the call to arms for the Revolution as to have been self-defeating. The result might well have been a document attesting to the fact that justice weighted down the scale at least 60 per cent on our side, and only 40 per cent on their side; and that because of that 20 per cent difference we were going to have a Revolution. To expect a man to leave his wife, his children, and his home, to leave his crops standing in the field and pick up a gun and join the Revolutionary Army for a 20 per cent difference in the balance of human justice was to defy common sense. The Declaration of Independence, as a declaration of war, had to be what it was, a 100 per cent statement of the justice of the cause of the colonists and a 100 per cent denunciation of the role of the British government as evil and unjust. Our cause had to be all shining justice, allied with the angels; theirs had to be all evil, tied to the Devil; in no war has the enemy or the cause ever been gray. Therefore, from one point of view the omission was justified; from the other, it was deliberate deceit.

Yes, I imagine that, given accurate information, a man might choose not to leave his wife, etc., to kill and quite possibly die in a war you started, thus illustrating… let me see here… ah, yes: the importance of not providing him with accurate information.

Alinsky continues in this vein:

The fourth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point. The Boston Massacre is a case in point. “British atrocities alone, however, were not sufficient to convince the people that murder had been done on the night of March 5: There was a deathbed confession of Patrick Carr, that the townspeople had been the aggressors and that the soldiers had fired in self defense. This unlooked-for recantation from one of the martyrs who was dying in the odor of sanctity with which Sam Adams had vested them sent a wave of alarm through the patriot ranks. But Adams blasted Carr’s testimony in the eyes of all pious New Englanders by pointing out that he was an Irish ‘papist’ who had probably died in the confession of the Roman Catholic Church. After Sam Adams had finished with Patrick Carr even Tories did not dare to quote him to prove Bostonians were responsible for the Massacre” [John C. Miller, Sam Adams, Pioneer in Propaganda]. To the British this was a false, rotten use of bigotry and an immoral means characteristic of the Revolutionaries, or the Sons of Liberty. To the Sons of Liberty and to the patriots, Sam Adams’ action was brilliant strategy and a God-sent lifesaver. Today we may look back and regard Adams’ action in the same light as the British did, but remember that we are not today involved in a revolution against the British Empire.

Alinsky will later quote (approvingly, of course)

that organizational genius Samuel Adams, at the time when he was allegedly planning the Boston Massacre; he was quoted as saying that there ought to be no less than three or four killed so that we will have martyrs for the Revolution, but there must be no more than ten, because after you get beyond that number we no longer have martyrs but simply a sewage problem.

I refer you to Peter Oliver, Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts Bay, and his Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (1781). First, for a biographical sketch of Alinsky’s hero, Samuel Adams, of the “odor of sanctity”:

I shall next give you a Sketch of some of Mr. Samuel Adams’ Features; & I do not know how to delineate them stronger, than by the Observation made by a celebrated Painter in America, vizt. “That if he wished to draw the Picture of the Devil, that he would get Sam Adams to sit for him:” & indeed, a very ordinary Physiognomist would, at a transient View of his Countenance, develope the Malignity of his Heart. He was a Person of Understanding, but it was discoverable rather by a Shrewdness than Solidity of Judgment; & he understood human Nature, in low life, so well, that he could turn the Minds of the great Vulgar as well as the small into any Course that he might chuse; perhaps he was a singular Instance in this Kind; & he never failed of employing his Abilities to the vilest Purposes. […] He was so thorough a Machiavilian, that he divested himself of every worthy Principle, & would stick at no Crime to accomplish his Ends.

Second, for a specific example of what the “Sons of Liberty” were up to:

In this Year 1765, began the violent Outrages in Boston: and now the Effusions of Rancour from Mr. Otis’s Heart were brought into Action. It hath been said, that he had secured the Smugglers & their Connections, as his Clients. An Opportunity now offered for them to convince Government of their Influence: as Seizure had been made by breaking open a Store, agreeable to act of Parliament; it was contested in the supreme Court, where Mr. Hutchinson praesided. The Seizure was adjudged legal by the whole Court. This raised Resentment against the Judges, Mr. Hutchinson was the only Judge who resided in Boston, & he only, of the Judges, was the Victim; for in a short Time after, the Mob of Otis & his clients plundered Mr. Hutchinson’s House of its full Contents, destroyed his Papers, unroofed his House, & sought his & his Children’s Lives, which were saved by Flight. One of the Rioters declared, the next morning, that the first Places which they looked into were the Beds, in Order to Murder the Children. All this was Joy to Mr. Otis, as also to some of the considerable Merchants who were smugglers, & personally active in the diabolical Scene. But a grave old Gentleman thought it more than diabolical; for upon viewing the Ruins, on the next Day, he made this Remark, vizt. “that if the Devil had been here the last Night, he would have gone back to his own Regions, ashamed of being outdone, & never more have set Foot upon the Earth.” If so, what Pity that he did not take an Evening Walk, at that unhappy Crisis; for he hath often since seen himself outdone at his own outdoings. […] And so abandoned from all Virtue were the Minds of the People of Boston, that when the King’s Attorny examined many of them, on Oath, who were Spectators of the Scene & knew the Actors, yet they exculpated them before a Grand Jury; & others, who were Men of Reputation, avoided giving any Evidence, thro’ Fear of the like Fate. Such was the Reign of Anarchy in Boston, & such the very awkward Situation in which every Friend to Government stood. Mr. Otis & his mirmydons, the Smugglers & the black Regiment, had instilled into the Canaille, that Mr. Hutchinson had promoted the Stamp Act; whereas, on the Contrary, he not only had drawn up the decent Memorial of the Massachusetts Assembly, but, previous to it, he had repeatedly wrote to his Friends in England to ward it off, by shewing the Inexpedience of it; & the Disadvantages that would accrue from it to the english Nation, but it was in vain to struggle against the Law of Otis, & the Gospel of his black Regiment. That worthy Man must be a Victim; Mr. Otis said so, & it was done. Such was the Frenzy of Anarchy, that every Man was jealous of his Neighbour, & seemed to wait for his Turn of Destruction.

But do go on, Mr. Alinsky.

Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times. […] Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, his defiance of a directive of the Chief Justice of the United States, and the illegal use of military commissions to try civilians, were by the same man who had said in Springfield, fifteen years earlier: “Let me not be understood as saying that there are no bad laws, or that grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say that although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed, still, while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed.” This was also the same Lincoln who, a few years prior to his signing the Emancipation Proclamation, stated in his First Inaugural Address: “I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declared that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I made this and many similar declarations and have never recanted them.” Those who would be critical of the ethics of Lincoln’s reversal of positions have a strangely unreal picture of a static unchanging world, where one remains firm and committed to certain so-called principles or positions. In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue. To be consistent means, according to the Oxford Universal Dictionary, “standing still or not moving.” Men must change with the times or die.

“So-called principles” — like telling the truth, keeping your promises, the rule of law, and of course not arresting people who disagree with you. One can only imagine what Alinsky would make of free speech. “Consistency is not a virtue.”

The tenth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments. […] A naked illustration of this point is to be found in Trotsky’s summary of

Lenin’s famous April Theses, issued shortly after Lenin’s return from exile. Lenin pointed out: “The task of the Bolsheviks is to overthrow the Imperialist Government. But this government rests upon the support of the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who in turn are supported by the trustfulness of the masses of people. We are in the minority. In these circumstances there can be no talk of violence on our side.” The essence of Lenin’s speeches during this period was “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” And it was. […] Eight months after securing independence, the Indian National Congress outlawed passive resistance and made it a crime. It was one thing for them to use the means of passive resistance against the previous Haves, but now in power they were going to ensure that this means would not be used against them! No longer as Have-Nots were they appealing to laws higher than man-made law. Now that they were making the laws, they were on the side of man-made laws! […] Again Sam Adams, the firebrand radical of the American Revolution, provides a clear example. Adams was foremost in proclaiming the right of revolution. However, following the success of the American Revolution it was the same Sam Adams who was foremost in demanding the execution of those Americans who participated in Shays’ Rebellion, charging that no one had a right to engage in revolution against us! Moral rationalization is indispensable at all times of action whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means. […] All great leaders, including Churchill, Gandhi, Lincoln, and Jefferson, always invoked “moral principles” to cover naked self-interest in the clothing of “freedom,” “equality of mankind,” “a law higher than man-made law,” and so on. This even held under circumstances of national crises when it was universally assumed that the end justified any means. All effective actions require the passport of morality.

Civil War dead: this is what the passport of morality looks like (image)

“The examples are everywhere,” Alinsky writes. We are treated to a Whig history of the black power — I mean, “civil rights” movement (my emphasis):

In the United States the rise of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s was marked by the use of passive resistance in the South against segregation. […] Passive resistance remained one of the few means available to anti-segregationist forces until they had secured the voting franchise in fact. Furthermore, passive resistance was also a good defensive tactic since it curtailed the opportunities for use of the power resources of the status quo for forcible repression. Passive resistance was chosen for the same pragmatic reason that all tactics are selected. But it assumes the necessary moral and religious adornments. […] The future does not argue for making a special religion of nonviolence. It will be remembered for what it was, the best tactic for its time and place. As more effective means become available, the Negro civil rights movement will divest itself of these decorations and substitute a new moral philosophy in keeping with its new means and opportunities. The explanation will be, as it always has been, “Times have changed.” This is happening today.

Moral posturing was indeed “the best tactic for its time and place” (CounterPunch):

Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement was practically a federal government project. Its roots may have run deep, but its impetus came from the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and from the subsequent attempts to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. […] Eisenhower sent, not the FBI, not a bunch of lawyers, but one of the best and proudest units of the United States Army, the 101st Airborne, to keep order in Little Rock, and to see that the ‘federalized’ Arkansas national guard stayed on the right side of the dispute. Though there was never any hint of an impending battle between federal and state military forces, the message couldn’t have been clearer: we, the federal government, are prepared to do whatever it takes to enforce our will. This message is an undercurrent throughout the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Though Martin Luther King still had to overcome vicious, sometimes deadly resistance, he himself remarked that surprisingly few people were killed or seriously injured in the struggle. The surprise diminishes with the recollection that there was real federal muscle behind the nonviolent campaign. For a variety of motives, both virtuous and cynical, the US government wanted the South to be integrated and to recognize black civil rights. Nonviolence achieved its ends largely because the violence of its opponents was severely constrained. In 1962, Kennedy federalized the National Guard and sent in combat troops to quell segregationist rioting in Oxford, Mississippi. Johnson did the same thing in 1965, after anti-civil rights violence in Alabama.

“More effective means” did indeed become available to the black power movement:

Consider the wave of race riots that swept the nation’s cities. From 1964 to 1971, there were more than 750 riots, killing 228 people and injuring 12,741 others. After more than 15,000 separate incidents of arson, many black urban neighborhoods were in ruins. [The New York Times]

Although the United States has experienced race-related civil disturbances throughout its history, the 1960s events were unprecedented in their frequency and scope. Law enforcement authorities took extraordinary measures to end the riots, sometimes including the mobilization of National Guard units. The most deadly riots were in Detroit (1967), Los Angeles (1965), and Newark (1967). Measuring riot severity by also including arrests, injuries, and arson adds Washington (1968) to that list. Particularly following the death of Martin Luther King in April 1968, the riots signaled the end of the carefully orchestrated, non-violent demonstrations of the early Civil Rights Movement. [NBER]

Try to cram these hate-facts into the official narrative, and confusion reigns:

But do you know what happened just five days after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law? The Watts Riots, a six-day uprising in the largely black Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles. Yes, a major riot in a California city that left at least 34 people dead, 1,000 people injured, and more than 4,000 citizens arrested. How can this be? […] At first glance, the Watts Riots appears to have been one big, violent contradiction, perhaps one of the greatest ironies in American history. At the very height of the Civil Rights Movement, when so much had begun to give way, black communities rebelled, violently and en masse, against white authority. In 1965, many Americans, particularly whites, were shocked and dismayed by what appeared to be random acts of civil disobedience, destruction, and looting by blacks in poor neighborhoods.

I have a Governor Hutchinson on the line with counterinsurgency advice: “A concession has only produced a further demand.” I also have a Chief Justice Oliver: “Timidity, in Suppression of Rebellion, will ever retard the Subdual of it.” Oh, and Comrade Lenin has been shouting through the kitchen window all morning: “It would, of course, be a great mistake to think that concessions imply peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of warfare.” Is any of this getting through, conservatives?

“New moral philosophies” did indeed emerge (Reno Evening Gazette, 1974):

Three Black Muslim youths face life in prison after what the prosecution called random attacks on white men in the name of Muslim teachings. All three were convicted in Sacramento County Superior Court Saturday of first-degree murder in the death of a white man who was on San Francisco Mayor Joseph L. Alioto’s “Zebra murders” list. The list contained the names of 73 persons whose killings in California since September, 1970, were characterized — Alioto said — by the pattern of operations of a Muslim-related Death Angel group. The random attacks in San Francisco, which reached five in one day, were dubbed the Zebra murders after a police radio channel. The trial of four Black Muslims in connection with 13 San Francisco killings and seven assaults is tentatively set to begin Tuesday. In the three-month Sacramento trial, prosecution attorneys contended the three Black Muslims, and a fourth convicted of conspiracy to murder, were motivated by teachings of the Chicago-based Nation of Islam (Black Muslims). They said the Black Muslims hold whites to be devils.

See also Susan Brownmiller, feminist icon (People, 1975):

There is a definite rise in the percentage of interracial rape. […] I think writers like Eldridge Cleaver and Franz Fanon [sic], who tried to give rape an ideological justification, didn’t help. They tried to justify interracial rape as some sort of political act. It’s typical of the left to make a convicted rapist a hero.

Due to “white privilege,” which is definitely a real thing and not at all made up, the following eulogy of Cleaver in the New York Times (1998) cannot possibly exist:

When “Soul on Ice” was published in 1968, it had a tremendous impact on an intellectual community radicalized by the civil rights movement, urban riots, the war in Vietnam and campus rebellions. It was a wild, divisive time in the United States, and Mr. Cleaver’s memoir from Folsom state prison, where he was doing time for rape, was hailed as an authentic voice of black rage in a white-ruled world. The New York Times named it one of its 10 best books of the year. “Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing,” Maxwell Geismar wrote in the introduction to the McGraw-Hill book. […] In one of the book’s most gripping and brutal passages, he wrote: “I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto — in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of the day — and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically — though looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild and completely abandoned frame of mind. “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women — and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact [sic] of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.” There was little doubt, he went on, citing a LeRoi Jones poem of the time which expressed similar rage, “that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats.” […]

LeRoi Jones changed his name to “Amiri Baraka” and became the poet laureate of New Jersey. The poem in question features an explicit “call for black revolutionaries to rape and murder” (The New York Times, 1999): “Come up, black dada/nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape/their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.” A real hero to the left.

Mr. Cleaver was arrested for his rapes, convicted of assault with intent to murder and sent first to San Quentin prison and then Folsom for a term of 2 to 14 years.

Not that anyone cares, because something something “civil rights.” Which is working out so well for Watts, Newark, Detroit and DC. (N.B. These cities used to be quite civilized.)

Watts: this is what civil rights looks like (image)

Now recall that, to Alinsky’s activist, “the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, ‘Does this particular end justify this particular means?’” And in examining the particulars, “he asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.” Well:

The eleventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that goals must be phrased in general terms like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” “Of the Common Welfare,” “Pursuit of Happiness” or “Bread and Peace.” Whitman put it: “The goal once named cannot be countermanded.”

Keep it vague; make it sound appealing; promise the stupid peasants bread; and generally try to pick nominal long-term goals that justify any means whatsoever, including (these are all Alinsky’s examples) insurrection, civil war, foreign war, and mass murder. The revolutionary or “community organizer” never actually achieves his stated goals, of course, either because those goals are impossible (see: equality) or because the revolutionary is a lying scoundrel (see: Alinsky). Not that it matters:

“You want to organize for power!”

And power, for most people, once they grab ahold of it, turns out to be — good enough. (As the great Henry Mencken, Sage of Baltimore, wrote in Minority Report: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”)

For further tips on “community organizing,” we turn to Chapter 7: Tactics.

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and “frozen.” By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. […] One of the criteria in picking your target is the target’s vulnerability — where do you have the power to start? Furthermore, any target can always say, “Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?” When you “freeze the target,” you disregard these arguments and, for the moment, all the others to blame. Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all of the “others” come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target. The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract such as a community’s segregated practices or a major corporation or City Hall. It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system.

Focus that hatred! It’s all for the “good of mankind.”

With this focus comes a polarization. As we have indicated before, all issues must be polarized if action is to follow. The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: “He that is not with me is against me” (Luke 1 1:23). He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative. He can’t weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act. Otherwise there are Hamlet’s words: And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action. Many liberals, during our attack on the then-school superintendent, were pointing out that after all he wasn’t a 100 per cent devil, he was a regular churchgoer, he was a good family man, and he was generous in his contributions to charity. Can you imagine in the arena of conflict charging that so-and-so is a racist bastard and then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as “He is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity, and a good husband”? This becomes political idiocy.

So you see why it’s so important for the “community organizer” to personalize hostility. Really gets things done!

Alinsky is in Rochester, New York — making a scene, of course:

The next question was about my response to a bitter personal denunciation of me from W. Allen Wallis, the president of the University of Rochester and a present director of Eastman Kodak. He had been the head of the Department of Business Administration, formerly, at the University of Chicago. He was at the university when it was locked in bitter warfare with the black organization in Woodlawn. “Wallis?” I replied. “Which one are you talking about — Wallace of Alabama, or Wallis of Rochester — but I guess there isn’t any difference, so what was your question?” This reply (1) introduced an element of ridicule and (2) it ended any further attacks from the president of the University of Rochester, who began to suspect that he was going to be shafted with razors, and that an encounter with me or with my associates was not going to be an academic dialogue. It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes an irrational anger.

And so on and so forth. Mencius Moldbug sums it up for us:

Rules surely belongs on any list of history’s top ten most evil books. I will spare you quotes. The basic message is: as a radical, your enemies rule the world and are completely evil. So if you want to overthrow them, you have to be prepared to be as evil as possible. Lie, cheat and steal, so long as you don’t get caught. Alinsky is a particular fan of hypocrisy and dissimulation, which he recommends as all-purpose perfumes for the aspiring “activist.”

On the other hand, the education editor for the Guardian (2012) assures us that Mr. Alinsky is just some “obscure, long-dead community organiser” who devoted his time to “agitating for better living conditions for the poor in the slums of Chicago and New York” and was interested mainly in “the nuts and bolts of grassroots organisation,” but “has been hoisted into a hate figure” because of “a tenuous link to Barack Obama.”

So there’s that.

Just for perspective: Walter Duranty covers up the (ongoing)

1932–1933 Ukrainian famine in the New York Times (image)

The kind of persons who excite or give signal to such revolutions, — students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions and blowing it into flame, — might give rise to reflections as to the character of our epoch. Thomas Carlyle

Was that not bad enough? All right, how about “free speech” as a communist plot to conquer America? Roger Nash Baldwin, director and co-founder of the ACLU (1934):

I believe in non-violent methods of struggle as most effective in the long run for building up successful working class power. Where they cannot be followed or where they are not even permitted by the ruling class, obviously only violent tactics remain. I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers’ rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies, at home and abroad. I dislike it in principle as dangerous to its own objects. But the Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world. […] While I have some reservations about party policy in relation to internal democracy, and some criticisms of the unnecessary persecution of political opponents, the fundamentals of liberty are firmly fixed in the USSR. And they are fixed on the only ground on which liberty really matters — economic. No class to exploit the workers and peasants; wide sharing of control in the economic organizations; and the wealth produced is common property.

Can we do worse? I feel like we can do worse. Meet the New Left (1967):

It is impossible not to notice that there is a new political Left in America. The struggle for civil rights, while endorsed by liberals and “moderates,” is largely led by young people of radical commitment. The student protests on university campuses derive their fire from young men and women who reject much of American life in the 1960’s. Rent strikers, peace marchers, and Vietnam protestors — all are deeply skeptical of the affluent society. Almost everywhere throughout the country, but especially where masses of young people are thrown together — most notably, of course, at the universities — new organizations, new journals, new movements are emerging, dedicated to restoring a radical voice to the contention of ideas in the United States.

The acknowledged “Father of the New Left” is one Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxism (or multiculturalism), an intensely creepy figure. As briefly as possible, in the words of paleoconservative royalist William S. Lind (2000):

The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning — the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments — all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. […] The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like. […] What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. […] Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity”; that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation. […] These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, “Hell no, we won’t go”; they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. […] Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States. One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order […] repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes — the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do your own thing.”

Actual example: in America’s glorious socialist future, according to Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, “the body would be resexualized,” manifesting in “a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality.” Thus “the body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed — an instrument of pleasure,” which in turn “would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.”

And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good do it,” and “You never have to go to work.” By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, “Make love, not war.” Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left.

He does indeed (yes, we’re back on topic), churning out pages of his patented Marxist-Freudian hybrid sophistry (“the desublimation involved in this sort of self-actualization is itself repressive inasmuch as it weakens the necessity and the power of the intellect, the catalytic force of that unhappy consciousness which does not revel in the archetypal personal release of frustration,” etc., etc.) to prove that political speech and violence are legitimate if and only if they support his politics — “progress” by definition (1965):

I said that, by virtue of its inner logic, withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements, and discriminatory tolerance in favor of progressive tendencies would be tantamount to the ‘official’ promotion of subversion. The historical calculus of progress (which is actually the calculus of the prospective reduction of cruelty, misery, suppression) seems to involve the calculated choice between two forms of political violence: that on the part of the legally constituted powers (by their legitimate action, or by their tacit consent, or by their inability to prevent violence), and that on the part of potentially subversive movements. Moreover, with respect to the latter, a policy of unequal treatment would protect radicalism on the Left against that on the Right. Can the historical calculus be reasonably extended to the justification of one form of violence as against another? Or better (since ‘justification’ carries a moral connotation), is there historical evidence to the effect that the social origin and impetus of violence (from among the ruled or the ruling classes, the have or the have-nots, the Left or the Right) is in a demonstratable relation to progress (as defined above)? With all the qualifications of a hypothesis based on an ‘open’ historical record, it seems that the violence emanating from the rebellion of the oppressed classes broke the historical continuum of injustice, cruelty, and silence for a brief moment, brief but explosive enough to achieve an increase in the scope of freedom and justice, and a better and more equitable distribution of misery and oppression in a new social system — in one word: progress in civilization. The English civil wars, the French Revolution, the Chinese and the Cuban Revolutions may illustrate the hypothesis. […]

Well, sure. Mass murder for “freedom and justice.” Why not.

With respect to historical violence emanating from among ruling classes, no such relation to progress seems to obtain. […] Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: … it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: ‘fire.’ It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. […]

I was wondering when someone was going to bring up theater fires. Yes, the “clear and present danger” — of fascism. To communists. Living in America. In 1965.

The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and ‘philosophies’ can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the ‘end of ideology,’ the false consciousness has become the general consciousness — from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities. It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.

As I said: progressives hold a variety of nuanced opinions on “free speech.”

Herbert Marcuse wants to resexualize your body, girl (image)

As a political movement, the New Left begins with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose plan of attack is outlined in the Port Huron Statement (1962):

From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence. First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently is used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool reveals itself in the “human relations” consultants to the modern corporation, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of “participation” or “belonging,” while actually deluding them in order to further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American politics. But these social uses of the universities’ resources also demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint. These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on. Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness: these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.

In a democracy, it’s certainly important to control the universities (Issue 25). You may or may not have noticed that progressives do, in fact, currently control the universities. How, exactly, did the New Left accomplish their goal? Boy, they must have had really convincing arguments! Appealing, no doubt, to free speech and an open dialogue, rational discourse, possibly civil liberties — something along those lines, anyway.

I mean, it’s not like, I don’t know, maybe violent mobs with crazy demands for a global communist revolution just bused in armed gangs of black supremacists, physically took over the campus, and overthrew the administration using bricks and bottles and bombs. Come on, these are heroes of free speech we’re talking about!

No, that doesn’t sound anything like the way these people are described in the history books. Which, um, they wrote. After literally taking over the education system.

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Still, you know, there are a couple of hints and clues and bits of information pointing in that general direction — like this, the final line of SDS leader Mark Rudd’s famous open letter to Columbia University President Grayson Kirk (1968):

“Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”

He’s quoting LeRoi Jones — and he really, really means it.

Mark Rudd: terrorist (unpunished), now celebrity (image)

Here’s an illuminating case study: San Francisco State (Chronicle).

For nearly five months in late 1968 and early 1969, near anarchy at San Francisco State played out on national television as police thumped striking students with batons and hundreds of students were arrested after throwing rocks and firebombs. […] Black students and the Third World Liberation Front were following revolutions in Africa, Latin America and Asia in leading the strike at what was then San Francisco State College. On Nov. 6, 1968, they called for the closure of the campus until their demands were met, including the rehiring of Black Panther George Murray, a graduate student and instructor who was suspended after he urged black students to bring guns on campus. […] When the strike began, most students went to class. But the strikers quickly spread chaos on the campus, banging on classroom doors and threatening to forcibly remove students and teachers if they did not leave. Strikers also cut electric cords on typewriters, telephones and copy machines in academic offices, while toilets and bathroom sinks were backed up and overflowed into hallways, said San Francisco State Professor Jason Ferreira, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the strike. After a long weekend, campus President Robert Smith called in hundreds of police in full riot gear, and on Nov. 13, police showed up at a student gathering and began to arrest students and other participants, Ferreira said. In response, students began throwing rocks and the battle escalated until Smith decided to close the campus indefinitely. Gov. Ronald Reagan and the California State University Board of Trustees ordered Smith to reopen the campus. He resigned instead and was replaced by Hayakawa, an English professor, who opened the campus Dec. 2 under a “state of emergency,” with a ban on picketing, sound amplification or any other form of protest activity without administrative approval, Ferreira said. The next day, which came to be known as “Bloody Tuesday,” Hayakawa ordered police to remove strikers who had assembled. They chased students around campus, attacking them, Ferreira said. Later, after a rally with prominent black leaders including Carleton Goodlett, editor of San Francisco’s Sun Reporter, Democratic Assemblyman Willie Brown, Berkeley City Councilman Ron Dellums and the Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church, police sealed off the central campus and began “indiscriminately” beating students, faculty, campus staff, community members, medics, photographers and even church officials, Ferreira said.

The use of force? After only a month of insurrection? Those fascists! Gasps all ’round. (If it’s not obvious, this was exactly what the “strikers” were hoping for: enough force to make them martyrs for all time; not enough to actually stop them. See: Alinsky.)

Early in 1969, the university agreed to many of the student demands, including the establishment of the nation’s first and only college of ethnic studies. The strike ended March 20. Retired San Francisco police Lt. George Eimil, who was on campus with about 100 officers every day during the strike, was critical of the students’ tactics. “Did their 15 demands justify the bombings? Hell no,” he said. “They placed a bomb in the administrative offices while school was in session. They were setting fires in the library. They were putting people’s lives in serious danger.” But Laureen Chew, now associate dean of the College of Ethnic Studies and one of nearly 700 students jailed during the strike, said the battle was necessary. As an Asian American, she had faced racism in high school and from customers of her parents’ laundry shop who called her father a “stupid Chinaman.”

Presumably, if I call her what I’m thinking right now, she’ll be elected governor.

Her conservative parents did not know she was involved in the strike until she was arrested. She served 20 days in jail in connection with misdemeanor charges of disturbing the peace, illegal assembly and failing to disperse. “You have to look at all the social justice agendas that have happened in the past 40 years,” Chew said. “We were the first to put many of those on the agenda. You have to fight for those things to be included in the curriculum.” About 500 other colleges and universities have ethnic studies departments or programs, but San Francisco State University is the only one with a college of ethnic studies, said Larry Estrada, president of the National Association of Ethnic Studies and director of American Cultural Studies at Western Washington University. Kenneth Monteiro, dean of San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies, said the strike is taught in the campus’ courses on history, organizing and social justice. He said the strike was a key flash point among similar movements around the world. “When you say Kent State, I think of anti-war protests. When you say free speech, I think of UC Berkeley. If you say multi-ethnic struggles, it is San Francisco State,” Monteiro said. “This was one of the watershed events, that blast that opened the doors. It wasn’t that the other struggles weren’t important, but this was the Normandy.”

And so today, with doors blasted clean off the hinges, we are treated to the following ongoing spectacle at Dartmouth College:

Dartmouth College cancelled classes on Wednesday in order to hold a public forum addressing some students’ concerns that the esteemed member of the Ivy League supports social ills such as sexism, racism and capitalism. The aggrieved students are part of a group called Real Talk Dartmouth that crashed a college recruiting event last week to protest what they believe is a toxic climate on campus. Dartmouth responded by giving in to the group’s demands. [The Daily Caller, Apr. 2013]

Fallout continues at Dartmouth College after a lengthy, enigmatic email appeared in students’ inboxes on Monday threatening “physical action” if administrators do not meet a long list of demands by Mar. 24. The eight-page, grievance-filled email came from a group of discontented students, reports The College Fix. The same group also sent its detailed protest missive to various Dartmouth bigwigs. The message outlines the group’s demands for reparations because of an alleged atmosphere of racism and oppression at the Ivy League school in rural New England. [The Daily Caller, Feb. 2014]

A group of Dartmouth College students staged an overnight sit-in Tuesday at the office of the Ivy League university’s president, demanding a point-by-point response to a list of action items the protesters say will address a variety of issues on the campus. [The Huffington Post, Apr. 2014]

The Wall Street Journal (Apr. 2014) offers sound advice — about fifty years too late:

On Tuesday Dartmouth’s finest seized the main administration building and disrupted college business. The squatters were allowed to remain until Thursday night, when the dean of the college negotiated and signed an exit settlement assuring them the non-dialogue would continue. The demonstrators had a 72-point manifesto instructing the college to establish pre-set racial admission quotas and a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum for all students. Their other inspirations are for more “womyn or people of color” faculty; covering sex change operations on the college health plan (“we demand body and gender self-determination”); censoring the library catalog for offensive terms; and installing “gender-neutral bathrooms” in every campus facility, specifically including sports locker rooms. We rarely sympathize with college administrators but we’ll make an exception for Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon, an accomplished mathematician who for some reason took the job last year. The occupiers filmed their confrontation and uploaded the hostage video to the Web, where Mr. Hanlon can be seen agog as his charges berate him for his “micro-aggressions.” Those are bias infractions that can’t be identified without the right political training. Mr. Hanlon left after an hour and told the little tyrants that he welcomed a “conversation” about their ultimatums. They responded in a statement that conversations — to be clear, talking — will lead to “further physical and emotional violence enacted against us by the racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, transphobic, xenophobic, and ableist structures at Dartmouth.” They added: “Our bodies are already on the line, in danger, and under attack.” If that sounds more like Syria than Hanover, N.H., meet the resurgence of the anti-liberal campus left. The intellectual mentor of the protestors is a history professor named Russell Rickford, who calls Dartmouth “White Supremacy U.” Hostile to free expression, open debate and due process, their politics of anger and resentment can’t be pacified. Reality is not an admissable defense. […] Dartmouth and any other school in this position should tell the students they have an hour to leave the premises, and if they don’t they will be arrested for trespassing and expelled.

Golly, an “anti-liberal campus left” that’s “hostile to free expression”? No kidding.

S.F. State: this is how we got ethnic studies (image)

Once again we see the essential role of mob violence in left-wing politics — violence limited only by practical considerations. It’s certainly easier to paint yourselves as “victims” if you’re “only” throwing rocks (ever been hit by a thrown rock?) and the occasional firebomb — but if they thought they needed guns, you better believe they brought guns. Consider the occupation of Cornell (The Cornell Daily Sun, 1969):

Black Students Seize Straight: Day Hall, Faculty Consider Official Response University officials and faculty representatives were slated to reconvene this morning to continue deliberations over yesterday’s takeover of Willard Straight Hall by about 100 members of the Afro-American Society. Steven Muller, vice president for public affairs, said late last night, “We don’t want to use any kind of police action” to clear out the building. But Muller emphasized that “this does not mean that we will not use police at any time.” About 50 members of Students for A Democratic Society (SDS) kept up a picket line late into the night at the Straight steps in support of the AAS takeover. […] The AAS protest action yesterday followed by one day the burning of a small wooden cross in front of Wari, the COSEP women’s co-op at 308 Dearborn Place.

In fact, “these were acts committed by the militants themselves to win campus sympathy” (Hoover Digest). Sort of like every other campus “hate crime” ever (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc., etc.). But I digress:

Parents Expelled From Straight Hall React With Fear, Relate Events More than 20 parents who were occupying the guest rooms in Willard Straight Hall for Parents Weekend reacted with shock and fright to their expulsion yesterday, although no one was injured. The parents, and a few children, were awakened at 5:45 a.m. by blacks “running up and down the halls hollering that each floor was well controlled, and that people were stationed all over,” according to Mrs. Hayden Humphrey, from Perry, N.Y. “They banged and said, ‘Get out,’” a 14-year-old girl said. “Then they said, ‘You have 10 minutes,’ and then they gave us the countdown.” One woman claimed that “the lower panel in my door was broken in with a crowbar” and that when she went into the hall she met with blacks wielding “steel sticks and crowbars.” Many parents called the Safety Division when they realized what was going on. They said they were told by the officer on duty that “there’s nothing we can do; do what they (the blacks) tell you.” […] As she was being led to the door, one woman said blacks told her that “the black man has risen.” Others claimed they were called pigs and warned: “Your lives are in danger; you had better get out fast.” […] Referring to the SDS pickets outside the Straight, Charles Kopin of Jericho, N.Y. said, “This has been a real eye-opener. It is an overt admission that they (SDS) support outright Communism. If it weren’t this issue they would seize on something else.” After picking up her suitcase, Mrs. Florence Rossi said, “This university is run by a small minority of people, and there isn’t anyone with guts in the whole place.” All the parents involved said they were “terrified” by the blacks. “I think in about three weeks my stomach will stop jumping up and down,” commented one.

Oh, right, we haven’t gotten to the guns yet:

White Attempt to Break In Sparks Dispute Over Cops An attempt by white fraternity men yesterday to establish a foothold in the black-occupied Straight sparked a controversy regarding the role of the campus patrolmen during recent unrest. […] Several of them climbed into the building after breaking a glass pane and unlatching the window. They fought with the blacks inside and retreated after police prevented additional whites from entering the building. The main question in the dispute is whether campus patrolmen allowed the whites to enter originally. […] Eugene J. Dymek, director of the Division of Safety and Security, strongly denied the charges. “That’s absolutely wrong,” he said. Dymek said no patrolmen were near the windows at the time of the entry. As soon as policemen arrived they prevented additional whites from entering. Reporters observed Dymek, Student Code Administration Hartwig E. Kisker and several patrolmen restrain a number of white students who were attempting to enter the building.

“The main question.” You can’t make this stuff up. Black supremacists have occupied the building. The police are hard at work — preventing white students from entering the building. “Controversy” erupts: are police doing enough to help the occupying forces?

At this point, the black militants bring in the guns. Thomas Sowell was teaching at Cornell at the time (Hoover Digest):

No one who was at Cornell University in the spring of 1969 is ever likely to forget the guns-on-campus crisis that shocked the academic community and the nation. Bands of militant black students forcibly evicted visiting parents from Willard Straight Hall on the Cornell campus and seized control of it to back up their demands. Later, after the university’s capitulation, the students emerged carrying rifles and shotguns, their leader wearing a bandoleer of shotgun ammunition. It was a picture that appeared on the covers of national magazines and was even reprinted overseas. What happened behind the scenes was at least as shocking. Death threats were phoned to the homes of professors who had opposed their previous actions or demands. Shots were in fact fired into the engineering building. […] When James Perkins became president of Cornell in 1963, it had an almost totally white faculty and student body. […] Perkins, like other presidents of elite colleges and universities, sought to increase minority student enrollment — and to do so by admitting students who would not meet the existing academic standards at Cornell. The emphasis was on getting militant ghetto kids, some of whom turned out to be hoodlums who terrorized other black students, in addition to provoking a racial backlash among whites. This combustible mixture led to escalating episodes of campus disruptions and violence by black militants, each episode being rewarded by the administration, while fending off faculty demands for punishment with glib pieties and evasions. Black students who complained about threats and violence from the militants could not even get to see university officials, while the militants themselves had easy entry to Perkins, whom they increasingly insulted to his face. There was massive capitulation to militant demands for their own black studies center, free from the academic standards and controls found in other departments and programs — and all this was before the guns-on-campus crisis. The armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall was about reprimands — mere reprimands — received by some members of the Afro-American Society for previous disruptions and violence on campus. It was a demand for exemption from the authority of a duly constituted faculty-student disciplinary body that had dared to slap them on the wrist. Apparently existing de facto double standards were not enough, though such double standards were so well established that, when a parent, evicted from Willard Straight Hall by the students taking it over, phoned campus security, the first question he was asked was whether the students who had evicted him were white or black. When he said they were black, “I was told that there was nothing that could be done for us.”

Success (Ezra Magazine):

Although physical disaster was averted, deep psychological scars were burned into the minds of many on campus. Four decades later, feelings in some quarters are still raw. The university as a bastion of reasoned argument, thoughtful debate and academic freedom seemed to be under siege. Relationships among faculty members were destroyed. Students were torn. An atmosphere of pervasive fear and anxiety gripped the campus and the nation. The AAS students were not punished, outraging some faculty members, students and alumni. […] Only days before the Straight takeover, on April 10, 1969, the Cornell administration had approved $240,000 to create an Afro-American Studies Center and a director, James Turner, had been chosen. “The students wanted an autonomous program; they wanted the center to have control of its own destiny,” says Eric Acree, librarian at the Africana Studies and Research Center.

I have a Governor Hutchinson on the line…

But change did come even more quickly after the takeover. “You now have recognition that other people need to be studied — women, gays and lesbians, Latinos, Asian Americans — all of that is an outgrowth of this movement.”

In other words, critical theory — multiculturalism — cultural Marxism. (Thanks, Marcuse.) And so, today (Campus Reform, May 2014):

More than 100 student groups at Cornell University now must prove they are taking steps to be more “diverse” — such as trying to convince minorities to join — before they can get funding from the school’s Student Assembly (SA) Finance Commission. […] The resolution stresses the importance of “making sure the demographic makeup of the student organization reflects the diversity of the student body.”

Cornell: this is how we got affirmative action (image)

Not only students, but established academics also played an important role in the death of American higher education (The Wall Street Journal, May 2014):

Years ago, when the academic left began to ostracize professors identified as “conservative,” university administrators stood aside or were complicit. The academic left adopted a notion espoused back then by a “New Left” German philosopher — who taught at Brandeis, not coincidentally — that many conservative ideas were immoral and deserved to be suppressed. And so they were. This shunning and isolation of “conservative” teachers by their left-wing colleagues (with many liberals silent in acquiescence) weakened the foundational ideas of American universities — freedom of inquiry and the speech rights in the First Amendment. No matter. University presidents, deans, department heads and boards of trustees watched or approved the erosion of their original intellectual framework. The ability of aggrieved professors and their students to concoct behavior, ideas and words that violated political correctness got so loopy that the phrase itself became satirical — though not so funny to profs denied tenure on suspicion of incorrectness. Offensive books were banned and history texts rewritten to conform. No one could possibly count the compromises of intellectual honesty made on American campuses to reach this point.

The following episode, from Mark Rudd’s own Columbia University, is revealing. Radical students have occupied Fayerweather Hall, and conservative students — athletes, for the most part — decide it’s time to fight back (Up Against the Ivy Wall, 1968):

At a meeting in the gym earlier that day Dean Coleman had promised them that the radical takeover had gone as far as it would go, and that “definitive action” would be taken by the administration that evening. Night had fallen, and now the only definitive action they had seen had been directed by the police and the dean against the athletes themselves. […] About 10:30 knots of athletes began congregating on College Walk. As they talked their determination grew; the situation would have to be resolved tonight. A few tried to organize a Sundial rally but failed. They were joined by other conservative students whose disgust at the demonstrations — and the demonstrators — was great enough to prompt them to violence. […] Talk could no longer dissuade them. The crowd streamed up the steps past Low Library and around to the northeast corner of the campus. They stopped at Fayerweather Hall and tried to force their way into the barricaded building, threatening to drag the demonstrators out limb by limb. The shouting that welled up from Fayerweather penetrated into the Ad Hoc Faculty meeting in nearby Philosophy. A student from inside the occupied building, panting, came running into the lounge to inform the group that Fayerweather was under siege. Several faculty members rushed outside, joining colleagues who had been with the onslaught since its beginnings on College Walk. […] The professors pushed their way to the center of the action, where athletes were trying to break through Fayerweather’s north doors. One faculty member positioned himself on the top step, facing the attack. “I am Seymour Melman,” he shouted in a loud but controlled voice. “Some of you know me. Do not take the law into your own hands. Trust the faculty. One act of violence is not an answer to another.” The pushing had stopped, and other professors began to speak. “Please, please go back,” another yelled. “This kind of action can do nothing but destroy this University.” The athletes were now drawn into a dialogue with the faculty members.

Yep, conservatives always fall for bullshit like that.

“Why don’t you tell them to stop?” a student yelled from the crowd, pointing to the occupied building. “The dean promised us that we’d have ‘definitive action’ tonight!” shouted another, almost in tears. “They’re destroying my University,” one shrieked. Melman tried to answer the conservatives’ complaints, assuring them that the faculty and administration were doing everything they could to solve the crisis. […]

You think Seymour “Anti-War” Melman is a trustworthy friend on the faculty?

Robert Belknap, the quiet, gaunt professor of Russian, made his way onto a ledge overhanging the stoop where the main assault began. Standing in the light of a lamp near the entrance, he introduced himself, “I’m the head of the Humanities-A program here. All of you have taken or will have to take that course while you are at Columbia.” Belknap drew from some of the books read in the Western Literature course, trying to show the angry students outside that the problems they faced were not unique, and that rational discourse is the best way of handling conflict. He did not try to shout down the yelling students, but they soon quieted, straining to hear what he was saying.

You guys know your enemies don’t listen to what you’re saying, right?

Philosophy Professor Richard Kuhns was most successful in persuading the counter-demonstrators that violence was not the proper way of resolving problems. “SDS at least has something to propose,” he challenged. “What are your ideas?” A student in the crowd protested that he liked things fine the way they were.

A philosopher (specializing in psychoanalytic theory of art) distracts you while a stoner hits you with a brick. Ladies and gentlemen: the New Left.

With the action focused on the north face of Fayerweather, desperate faculty members continued their efforts to draw the angry conservatives into dialogue. Finally the athletes were persuaded to send representatives to the Ad Hoc meeting. A small delegation left for Philosophy Lounge to address the professors. The invasion had been turned back.

So much for the “main assault.” (Hey, isn’t an actual invasion still going on?)

The Ad Hoc Faculty meeting reconvened in the lounge, now packed with about 250 professors, as students outside peered in through the dirty windows. Professor Morgenbesser introduced Paul Vilardi, a College senior and leader of the Majority Coalition. “We’ve been asked to cool it,” the dark, square-jawed former outfielder on the baseball team told the group. “And we’re prepared to cool it. We didn’t want them [the Harlem demonstrators] on our campus because they don’t belong here. … We like the way things are. When we want change, there is an orderly process for getting it. … We don’t want amnesty for them [the demonstrators]. These people are turning into animals. … If you can’t stop this, we won’t send our children here, there won’t be any Senior Fund.” By this time many faculty members, unhappy to have to hear out anyone at fist-point, were beginning to take exception to Vilardi’s tone.

Exception to his tone! To his tone! They’re unhappy they have to listen to the students they persuaded to meet with them. I’m laughing so hard, I think I’m going to cry.

Columbia: some asshole sitting at President Kirk’s desk, smoking his cigars (image)

To this day, New York’s academics express similarly subtle takes on “free speech.” Consider Ellen Schrecker (2005) — the word “shameless” springs to mind:

Historically, most classic academic freedom cases involved faculty members fired because of their off-campus (and usually left-wing) political activities.

(We’ll talk more about that later.)

Such dismissals, which tend to lop off an institution’s squeakiest wheels, pose as serious a threat to freedom of inquiry as any limitations on teaching or publication. Not only do they directly violate the individual professor’s First Amendment rights, but they also indirectly constrict the range of acceptable discourse. […] Such dismissals are less likely today, but the current threat to the academy may well be more serious. It reaches directly into the classroom. Appropriating the traditional rhetoric of academic freedom, conservative activists call for a more ideologically balanced campus. Nonetheless, when we unpack their rhetoric — whether it comes from David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights, Columbia’s David Project, or the New York Sun — it turns out to be a demand to impose some kind of external political controls on the academic community.

How dare they appropriate the rhetoric! Oh, the outrage. The outrageous outrage. Schrecker also took on the student group Columbians for Academic Freedom. It seems they were “trying to impose orthodoxy at this University, often in the name of academic diversity.” Imagine that: diversity as a slogan. What will they think of next?

Meanwhile, on yet another college campus (Campus Reform, May 2013):

A student’s bid to become associate vice president of diversity and inclusion at Northwestern University was derailed last Wednesday over accusations that his status as a white heterosexual male would make it impossible for him to perform the position’s duties. […] Ian Coley, a student on the Associate Student Government Diversity and Inclusion Committee, later said white heterosexual males are not qualified to hold the position of associate vice president of diversity and inclusion.

Finally, while it may not be strictly relevant, as long as we’re talking about Columbia University and the rainbow vibrancy of racial diversity, I feel obliged to mention the name “Robert Williams” (see here, listen here). I’m sure you’ve heard all about him. After all, the girl was a journalism student — and aren’t racial hate crimes big news?

The victim said he taunted her, asking, “Do you like people from Africa? Do you like black people from Africa?”

I guess sometimes they aren’t (Issue 18).

Wink! (image)

I thought we’d agreed; I thought we’d talked it out.

Now when I try to speak, she says that I don’t care,

She says I’m unaware, and now she says I’m weak. Madness

As long as we are reaching out to those (however many) true believers in the doctrine of progress who happen also to be basically decent persons (however confused), I think we ought to extend a gentle kitteh-paw to Scott Alexander, psychiatrist and Bayesian rationalist, whose probing of “social justice” has already brought forth prodigies.

Consider the conceptual superweapon (“This is why I find feminism and the social justice community in general so scary”); defense of scoundrels (“The good, righteous people are not used to being argued against”); present trends in bullying (“Notice how incredibly scary this thought pattern is”); concept of a trigger (“This would be a good time to admit that I am massively, massively triggered by social justice”); and current threats to free speech (“I just think this one thing is a really really bad precedent”).

Then we have ‘Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell,’ which (apart from something called a “trigger warning” for something called “racism,” and the 20th century’s mandatory silliness about King Leopold II) is actually not bad:

Western society has been moving gradually further to the left for the past several hundred years at least. It went from divine right of kings to constitutional monarchy to libertarian democracy to federal democracy to New Deal democracy through the civil rights movement to social democracy to ???. If you catch up to society as it’s pushing leftward and say “Hey guys, I think we should go leftward even faster! Two times faster! No, fifty times faster!”, society will call you a bold revolutionary iconoclast and give you a professorship. If you start suggesting maybe it should switch directions and move the direction opposite the one the engine is pointed, then you might have a bad time.

Recently, Mr. Alexander debunked a BuzzFeed emission on false rape accusations, whose figures turned out to be off — by four or five orders of magnitude:

It is commonly said that a lie will get halfway across the world before the truth can get its boots on. And this is true. Except in the feminist blogosphere, where a lie will get to Alpha Centauri and back three times while the truth is locked up in a makeshift dungeon in the basement, screaming. I have been debunking bad statistics for a long time. In medicine, in psychology, in politics. […] Yet the feminist blogosphere is the only place where I consistently see things atrociously wrong get reblogged by thousands of usually very smart people without anyone ever bothering to think critically about them. Like, thirty five thousand feminists — including some who self-identify as rationalists! — saw an article that literally said a guy was more likely to get hit by a comet than get falsely accused of rape, and said “Yeah, sure, that sounds plausible.” So please permit me to keep griping just one moment longer. Be extraordinarily paranoid when dealing with the feminist blogosphere. This may be true of all highly charged political blogospheres, but it is certainly true of feminism. If you go in there with an innocent attitude of “Here is a number, I assume it is generally correct and means what it says it means”, you will get super-burned.

This provoked the wrath of Arthur Chu, an overweight former game show champion and self-proclaimed “mad genius, comedian, actor, and freelance voiceover artist” — not to mention brave warrior for social justice. Does any of this sound familiar?

That post is exactly my problem with Scott. He seems to honestly think that it’s a worthwhile use of his time, energy and mental effort to download evil people’s evil worldviews into his mind and try to analytically debate them with statistics and cost-benefit analyses. He gets mad at people whom he detachedly intellectually agrees with but who are willing to back up their beliefs with war and fire rather than pussyfooting around with debate-team nonsense. It honestly makes me kind of sick. It is exactly the kind of thing that “social justice” activists like me intend to attack and “trigger” when we use “triggery” catchphrases about the mewling pusillanimity of privileged white allies.

This explains “why the catchall term used by people who are frustrated with Scott-like attitudes” — “attitudes” like logic and honesty — “is ‘privilege.’ You know, easy for you to say when you’re not in the trenches.” Trenches! Bullets! War and fire!

Bullets, as you say, are neutral. I am in favor of my side using bullets as best they can to destroy the enemy’s ability to use bullets. Who actually wins depends on who’s better at it, which is why I have a responsibility to become better. It’s not the integrity of my principles that the world is going to test, it’s my competence and skill and power. […] Any energy spent mentally debating how, in a perfect world run by a Lawful Neutral Cosmic Arbiter that will never exist, we could settle wars without bullets is energy you could better spend down at the range improving your marksmanship.

You see, out in the real world of “trenches” and “bullets,” one cannot in good conscience remain firm and committed to certain so-called principles or positions (recall):

I do, in fact, believe the war is very very real and has very very real stakes and the people who stand to be hurt by losing the war matter more than my abstract comfort with my “principles.”

A brave warrior for social justice can’t waste his time on “debate-team nonsense”! He can’t weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act:

“I don’t want to win if I’m wrong.” Well congratulations, you won’t ever have to worry about that, because endless self-criticism about whether your values are in fact right or wrong guarantees that you will lose and someone else’s values will win anyway. You’ll be spared the anguish of knowing whether you made the right decision because that power will be taken away from you.

All issues must be polarized if action is to follow:

I am saying that there are lines in the sand and people beyond those pales are in fact enemies and should be treated as such, and that if you never draw those lines in the sand you will spend your whole life in an agonizing haze of introspection and never do anything. […] I think, to put it bluntly, that when there is a real war going on, yes, search your conscience to decide what side you’re going to be on, but those doubts should be out of your mind by the time you’re actually putting on a uniform and walking onto the field. Otherwise you’ve lost before you’ve begun fighting.

Community organizing — I mean, social justice — used to be so 