JVL: When Snowflakes Attack!

A few weeks ago Wellesley College invited Laura Kipnis to give a talk. Kipnis is not an especially controversial figure. She is a professor of media studies at Northwestern who teaches film and seems to be generally in line with old-guard feminism. Her one deviation was a piece she wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education two years ago blaming modern feminism for creating a climate of sexual paranoia on college campuses.

Modern feminism did not take kindly to this heresy.

As a result, Kipnis has become, like Charles Murray before her, a pariah—an untouchable. When she spoke at Wellesley, the students and faculty did not take kindly to her presence. The students were very concerned about having her on campus. They proved just how concerned they were by crafting a video pre-buttal to Kipnis in which they showcased their nose-rings and used naughty words—can you even imagine how shocked and outraged the evil conservatives must have been by this vibrant display of nonconformity!

Alas, some of the Wellesley professors were concerned that their charges stopped short of going the full-Middlebury. In musing about what the Middlebury students got right, Wellesley political science professor Laura Grattan told the Boston NPR affiliate WBUR, “I think that the protests that are so loud and deafening and raucous as to try to stop a white-supremacist speaker before they start are not only the right of students, but also their effort to say this is the kind of campus and community that we want to have."

The fact that Grattan thinks Charles Murray is a “white supremacist” tells you everything you need to know about the faculty at Wellesley.

Or rather, almost everything. Because the most important fact about the professors at Wellesley is that they were canny enough to use the Kipnis speech as cover to mau-mau all future speakers at the school.

The college’s Faculty on Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity (whatever that means) sent out an email after Kipnis’ visit to campus and put the administration on warning:

Over the past few years, several guest speakers with controversial and objectionable beliefs have presented their ideas at Wellesley. We, the faculty in CERE, defend free speech and believe it is essential to a liberal arts education. However, as historian W. Jelani Cobb notes, "The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of one's liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another."

There is no doubt that the speakers in question impose on the liberty of students, staff, and faculty at Wellesley. We are especially concerned with the impact of speakers' presentations on Wellesley students, who often feel the injury most acutely and invest time and energy in rebutting the speakers' arguments. Students object in order to affirm their humanity. This work is not optional; students feel they would be unable to carry out their responsibilities as students without standing up for themselves. Furthermore, we object to the notion that onlookers who are part of the faculty or administration are qualified to adjudicate the harm described by students, especially when so many students have come forward. When dozens of students tell us they are in distress as a result of a speaker's words, we must take these complaints at face value. What is especially disturbing about this pattern of harm is that in many cases, the damage could have been avoided. The speakers who appeared on campus presented ideas that they had published, and those who hosted the speakers could certainly anticipate that these ideas would be painful to significant portions of the Wellesley community. . . .

First, those who invite speakers to campus should consider whether, in their zeal for promoting debate, they might, in fact, stifle productive debate by enabling the bullying of disempowered groups. We in CERE are happy to serve as a sounding board when hosts are considering inviting controversial speakers, to help sponsors think through the various implications of extending an invitation.

Second, standards of respect and rigor must remain paramount when considering whether a speaker is actually qualified for the platform granted by an invitation to Wellesley. In the case of an academic speaker, we ask that the Wellesley host not only consider whether the speaker holds credentials, but whether the presenter has standing in his/her/their discipline. This is not a matter of ideological bias. Pseudoscience suggesting that men are more naturally equipped to excel in STEM fields than women, for example, has no place at Wellesley. Similar arguments pertaining to race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and other identity markers are equally inappropriate.

Third, faculty and administrators should step up in defense of themselves and all members of the Wellesley community. The responsibility to defend the disempowered does not rest solely with students, and the injuries suffered by students, faculty, and staff are not contained within the specific identity group in question; they ripple throughout our community and prevent Wellesley from living out its mission.

In case your eyes glazed over from all the social justice, here are the takeaways from Wellesley’s Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity:

1) Some speech is less free than the rest because it—or the speaker—is harmful to a privileged class of listeners.

2) The most privileged class is the student body, who must be allowed to determine which speakers are awarded the highest level of free speech and which speakers should be verboten because of the harm they cause.

3) If more than 24 students say they find a speaker harmful, their claim may not be questioned.

4) Anyone wanting to bring a speaker to campus should first consult the Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity and ask for their blessing. Because they speak for the students, somehow.

5) If another untouchable speaker appears on campus, Wellesley’s administration must side with the students against them.

And then, of course, there’s the unstated sixth item: Or else.

Move over, Michael Moore: The new rock star of the left has arrived. She is Naomi Klein, a 38-year-old Canadian writer and journalist whose 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was greeted with rave reviews and became an international bestseller. She has been hailed by British political philosopher John Gray in the Guardian and by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Times. In February, she became the first winner of England's new £50,000 Warwick Prize for Writing. A long, mostly flattering, though occasionally skeptical profile in the New Yorker, published in December, called her "the most visible and influential figure on the American left--what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago."

—Cathy Young, “Reveling in the Financial Crisis,” from our March 30, 2009 issue.

Dennis Saffran: The weather service knowingly lied to you about that “snowstorm.”

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Matthew Continetti: Freedom is eating steak well-done. With ketchup.

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Outside magazine: The best gear for traveling light.

The longer you listen, though, the more likely you are to be pulled under because this is a distraction, it’s a distraction from last night and it’s working, I’m losing track of whatever this is supposed to be distracting us from, not everything is 3D chess, I’m getting tired of this 3D chess stuff, this is classic Trump, this is classic Bannon, I’m not saying this is like the 1930s buuuuut, tfw democracy ends, that we’re even talking about this is insane, this is lit, this is FALSE, he lies, he’s a liar, why don’t they say he’s a liar, if the media spent a little less time hysterical like this and more on actual news, fake news, FAKE NEWS, notice what day it is when this happens, this is the third time that Jared and Ivanka were away, actually if you look at when this happened in 1993, a few thoughts on how this affects Trump’s base 1/x, oh now they care about this, now you pretend like you care, I don’t remember them caring about this when Obama did it, I can remember when Trump cared about this, if these people cared about this in June or October or ever in their lives then maybe I’d take them seriously—and on and on and on.

—Katherine Miller on Trump and America’s nervous breakdown, March 26, 2017

There’s a small movie coming out about Madalyn Murray O’Hair. Unless you’re over a certain age and/or deeply invested in the intersection of the law and religious freedom, this name might not mean much to you. But half a century ago Madalyn Murray O'Hair was reasonably famous. She founded the group American Atheists. And she was the most hated woman in America.

On the one hand, we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But on the other hand, Murray kind of had it coming. If you were being charitable, you’d say she was a piece of work. If you were being more observational, you’d say—well, I’m not going to say. I’ll just give you a brief tour of her life:

Born in Pennsylvania in 1919, O’Hair hated America. By which I mean that she was a socialist who traveled to Europe and attempted to defect to the Soviet Union. The Russians, who know crazy when they see it, denied her entry. So she returned to America and set about trying to (1) destroy the country while (2) getting rich.

O’Hair started filing lawsuits almost as soon as she got back to the states. She was incensed by the religiosity of America and wanted to use the country’s legal system to break its traditions. She sued the public schools because she wanted to prevent them from allowing kids to study the Bible. She sued NASA because wanted to keep the crew of the Apollo 8 mission from reading from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the moon. She sued the state of Texas because wanted to prevent elected officials from swearing belief in a “Supreme Being.” She sued President Nixon to prevent him from having religious services in the White House. She sued the National Park Service because she wanted to prevent Pope John Paul II from celebrating Mass on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

You know, all the perfectly normal concerns that pleasant, well-adjusted people have. It may shock you to learn that, as one of her sons later wrote in a memoir, O’Hair was never quite able to hold down a job because of her unpleasant personality.

Sorry—I almost forgot: When one of O’Hair’s sons converted to Christianity as an adult, she announced, “I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother.”

So she was a real peach. But beating up local governments and suing NASA and trying to postnatally abort her son didn’t pay the bills. So O’Hair founded the group American Atheists. Which she seems to have (allegedly) used to amass a small fortune (via highly-questionable accounting) which was squirreled away in a bank in New Zealand.

There were speaking gigs and interviews with Playboy and flirtations with Larry Flynt and appearances on Donohue and the basic sense one gets is that O’Hair managed to turn her atheism into a racket. By the end it was impossible to tell where the true non-believer ended and the huckster began.

If Madalyn Murray O’Hair really was the most hated woman in America, well, by gum, she earned it.

Before we wrap up, some great news: There are two Substandard podcasts this week!

The one that’s already out now is a micro-episode where we spend a quick ten minutes dissecting the first trailer for the Justice League movie. If comic book movies aren’t your thing, you should tune in anyway. Because it’s the episode where Sonny discovers how to use the mute button. Hilarity ensues.

In the episode coming out tomorrow, we talk about the (not totally terrible) Power Rangers movie and the epidemic of TV shows getting turned into films. Tune in tomorrow morning.

And if you don’t want to miss an episode, be sure to subscribe on iTunes or Google Play. It’s great.

Best,

JVL