rBIO Achieves Crucial Milestone on Mission to Lower the Cost of Insulin by 30% – BioSpace

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Biotech startup has developed a new genetic coding process to synthesize proteins and peptide hormones; rBIO's platform for synthetic insulin achieves success as the team looks to production scale-up and a range of other prescription drugs to target

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- rBIO, an early-stage synthetic biology company focused on reducing the cost of prescription drugs, has announced its first in-lab milestone: synthetic production of human insulin. With its genetic coding platform and process now proven, the company is now poised to upscale production of insulin and to identify other prescription drugs that can be manufactured using rBIO's method for synthetically 'coding' microorganisms.

rBIO's approach applies recent breakthroughs in genetics and recombinant DNA science to design new strains of synthetic life capable of expressing a wide variety of peptide hormones.

"We targeted insulin for our initial model because it checks two boxes: first, it's a specialty drug that is priced too high for many people who depend on it, and second its supply chain is vulnerable," said Cameron Owen, founder and CEO of rBIO. "Our goal is to re-shore insulin manufacturing to the USA and make this crucial hormone available at a lower cost for the millions of Americans suffering from diabetes."

With lab-scale production of human insulin achieved, the next step is to increase insulin yields prior to seeking FDA approval. Looking ahead, rBIO has developed a shortlist of eight drugs that can be synthesized with this unique coding approach. "Our results with insulin clearly demonstrate that our technology works, so we're looking to apply this approach for epinephrine and erythropoietin, among others," added Owen.

"A wide array of biological products can be synthesized with this approach," said Dr. Debanjan Dhar, professor of medicine at University of California, San Diego. "Single-celled organisms like yeast, bacteria, and algae can be exploited to drive the next manufacturing boom of biological products needed to meet patient demand for crucial drugs."

Pharmaceuticals are a major concern for national security, an issue that has received heightened prominence during the current COVID-19 pandemic. According to the FDA, 1,079 facilities worldwide produce the 370 drugs marketed in the US that are on the World Health Organization's Essential Medicines List. However, just 21 percent of those facilities are based in the United States.

About rBIOrBIO is a biotech startup focused on applying recombinant DNA science to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. The company was formed by a team from Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and a team of scientists whose backgrounds include genetics, bioengineering, and bioinformatics. Based in San Francisco, rBIO is privately funded. For more information, visit https://www.rbio.online/.

Contact: tim@zingpr.com

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SOURCE rBIO, Co.

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rBIO Achieves Crucial Milestone on Mission to Lower the Cost of Insulin by 30% - BioSpace

Report: More than 1,300 Medicines and Vaccines in Development to Help Fight Cancer – PRNewswire

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WASHINGTON, Dec. 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Over the last 30 years, significant progress has been made in the fight against cancer. Researchers have expanded their understanding of how cancer develops and how to target medicines for specific cancer types. Since peaking in 1991, the death rate associated with cancer declined by 29%, which translates to 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths. The most recent data shows that between 2016 and 2017 alone, cancer death rates declined by 2.2%, the largest single-year drop ever recorded. Despite the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this momentum continues with biopharmaceutical companies focusing on research and development of innovative cancer therapies.

Still, cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for 21% of all deaths. It is estimated that new cancer cases reached 1.8 million in 2020, increasing demand for earlier screening and diagnosis, as well as new treatments to address substantial unmet medical needs so patients can continue to live long and healthy lives.

To continue the progress and deliver hope to those battling cancer, biopharmaceutical research companies are working to develop more effective and better tolerated treatments.

A new report today from PhRMA finds that more than 1,300 medicines and vaccines for various cancers are currently in development, either in clinical trials or awaiting review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

New medicines have played a key role in cancer survival gains, much of which are driven by advances in molecular and genomic research that have revealed the unique complexities of cancer and changed our understanding of the disease. Examples of the science behind potential new cancer treatments include:

The more than 1,300 medicines and vaccines in development represent an increased recognition among researchers that no two cancers are alike, which has led to further adoption of personalized medicine and the creation of treatments to target cancers specific to a single person. As researchers continue to explore life-saving methods and technologies to fight cancer, it is important we foster an innovation ecosystem that encourages ongoing research and development in this space.

To read the new report on medicines and vaccines in clinical testing for various cancers, click here.

Learn more about cancer at PhRMA.org/Cancer

SOURCE Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)

http://phrma.org

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San Diego’s Locanabio raises $100 million for treatments aimed at degenerative diseases – The San Diego Union-Tribune

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Locanabio, a San Diego gene therapy company focused on treatments for severe neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntingtons and Lou Gehrigs disease, has raised $100 million in a second round of venture capital funding.

The Torrey Pines Mesa company will use the money for further pre-clinical and clinical development of its proprietary RNA-targeting system to fight degenerative diseases including myotonic dystrophy type 1 and retinal disease, along with Huntingtons and genetic ALS.

Locanabios approach is to combine two methods for treating diseases gene therapy and RNA modification. The platform consists of several RNA-targeting systems that are combined with gene therapy delivery to modify dysfunctional RNA.

The capabilities of the platform could allow Locanabio to develop treatments for a wide range of genetic diseases beyond those on its current roadmap.

This financing positions us to accelerate our efforts to advance multiple promising programs into (new drug) studies in 2021 and to further develop our novel RNA-targeting platform, which has the potential to be a major new advance in medicine that can bring hope to patients with many devastating genetic diseases, said Chief Executive Jim Burns in a statement.

Burns joined Locanabio in December 2019 from Casebia, where he served as the chief executive and led the team in developing CRISPR-based therapeutics to treat blood disorders, blindness and heart disease. Before that, he spent the bulk of his career at Sanofi-Genzyme, where he held several leadership roles.

This latest financing was led by Vida Ventures. Other new investors participating include RA Capital Management, Invus, Acuta Capital Partners and an investment fund associated with SVB Leerink.

Prior investors ARCH Venture Partners, Temasek, Lightstone Ventures, UCB Ventures and Google Ventures also participated. Lonanabio previously raised $55 million in May 2019.

As part of the funding round, Rajul Jain, a medical doctor and director of Vida Ventures, will join Locanabios board of directors.

The unique approach in RNA targeting using gene therapy to deliver RNA binding proteins developed by Locanabio represents the next frontier of genetic medicine with the ability to target the root cause of a range of genetic diseases, said Jain in a statement. They have built a strong management team to execute this bold vision, and we are proud to support them.

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San Diego's Locanabio raises $100 million for treatments aimed at degenerative diseases - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Worldwide SNP Genotyping Industry to 2025 – Pharmacogenomics Led the End-user Segment of the SNP Genotyping Market – ResearchAndMarkets.com – Business…

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DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "SNP Genotyping Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecasts (2020 - 2025)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global SNP genotyping market is expected to register a CAGR of 21% during the forecast period.

The analysis of SNPs is widely utilized in different disciplines of genetics and related studies, commonly associated with studying genetic determinants of many complex diseases. SNP technologies are extensively utilized for detection and are beneficial in the etiology of several human diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular, Alzheimer's, and asthma, among others.

Companies Mentioned

Key Market Trends

Pharmacogenomics Led the End-user Segment of the SNP Genotyping Market

Under end users, pharmacogenomics is the leading segment. The large share of pharmacogenomics is primarily due to the increasing pipeline for personalized medicine and novel drug delivery systems, which are extensively exploiting SNP in genetic materials for drug development applications. According to the Journal of Personalized Medicine, up to June 2019, there were around 132 pharmacogenimic guidelines for the available drugs and also, pharmacogenomic information is added in around 309 medication label. Hence, the growing demand for pharmacogenomics is expected to propel the SNP Genotyping market in this segment.

North America had Largest Share in the Global SNP Market, while Asia-Pacific is the Fastest-growing Region

North America is the dominating region in the SNP genotyping market, due to rising commercial research in personalized medicines and animal breeding, among others. In addition, Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing market, due to the rising demand for SNP genotyping in emerging economies like China and India, across different fields, which is largely propelling the market's growth.

Key Topics Covered:

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Study Deliverables

1.2 Study Assumptions

1.3 Scope of the Study

2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

4 MARKET DYNAMICS

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Market Drivers

4.2.1 Miniaturisation of Equipment and Instruments

4.2.2 Increased Multiplexing Capacity Leading to Increased Application

4.3 Market Restraints

4.3.1 Lack of Standardisation in SNP Processes

4.3.2 Privacy Concerns Pose a Threat to Broad Technology Adoption

4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis

5 MARKET SEGMENTATION

5.1 Technology

5.1.1 TaqMan SNP Genotyping

5.1.2 Massarray SNP Genotyping

5.1.3 SNP GeneChip Arrays

5.1.4 Other Technologies

5.2 End User

5.2.1 Pharmacogenomics

5.2.2 Diagnostic Field

5.3 Geography

5.3.1 North America

5.3.1.1 United States

5.3.1.2 Canada

5.3.1.3 Mexico

5.3.2 Europe

5.3.2.1 Germany

5.3.2.2 United Kingdom

5.3.2.3 France

5.3.2.4 Italy

5.3.2.5 Spain

5.3.2.6 Rest of Europe

5.3.3 Asia-Pacific

5.3.3.1 China

5.3.3.2 Japan

5.3.3.3 India

5.3.3.4 Australia

5.3.3.5 South Korea

5.3.3.6 Rest of Asia-Pacific

5.3.4 Middle-East & Africa

5.3.4.1 GCC

5.3.4.2 South Africa

5.3.4.3 Rest of Middle-East & Africa

5.3.5 South America

5.3.5.1 Brazil

5.3.5.2 Argentina

5.3.5.3 Rest of South America

6 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

6.1 Company Profiles

6.1.1 Agilent Technologies Inc.

6.1.2 Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc.

6.1.3 Danaher Corporation

6.1.4 Douglas Scientific LLC

6.1.5 Illumina Inc.

6.1.6 Life Technologies Corp.

6.1.7 Luminex Corp.

6.1.8 Promega Corporation

6.1.9 Thermo Fischer Scientific Inc.

7 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE TRENDS

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/s2295f

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Worldwide SNP Genotyping Industry to 2025 - Pharmacogenomics Led the End-user Segment of the SNP Genotyping Market - ResearchAndMarkets.com - Business...

Potential Weakness in SARS-CoV-2 Discovered Single Protein Needed for COVID-19 Virus to Reproduce and Spread – SciTechDaily

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A single protein that appears necessary for the COVID-19 virus to reproduce and spread to other cells is a potential weakness that could be targeted by future therapies.

The molecule, known as transmembrane protein 41 B (TMEM41B), is believed to help shape the fatty outer membrane that protects the virus genetic material while it replicates inside an infected cell and before it infects another.

The latest finding comes from a pair of studies led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Langone Healths Perlmutter Cancer Center, and colleagues at Rockefeller University and elsewhere.

Published in the journal Cell online December 8, 2020, the studies revealed that TMEM41B was essential for SARS-CoV-2 to replicate. In a series of experiments, researchers compared how the COVID-19 virus reproduces in infected cells to the same processes in two dozen deadly flaviviruses, including those responsible for yellow fever, West Nile, and Zika disease. They also compared how it reproduces in infected cells to three other seasonal coronaviruses known to cause the common cold.

Together, our studies represent the first evidence of transmembrane protein 41 B as a critical factor for infection by flaviviruses and, remarkably, for coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, as well, says the studies co-senior investigator John T. Poirier, PhD.

An important first step in confronting a new contagion like COVID-19 is to map the molecular landscape to see what possible targets you have to fight it, says Poirier, an assistant professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health. Comparing a newly discovered virus to other known viruses can reveal shared liabilities, which we hope serve as a catalog of potential vulnerabilities for future outbreaks.

While inhibiting transmembrane protein 41 B is currently a top contender for future therapies to stop coronavirus infection, our results identified over a hundred other proteins that could also be investigated as potential drug targets, says Poirier, who also serves as director of the Preclinical Therapeutics Program at NYU Langone and Perlmutter Cancer Center.

For the studies, researchers used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to inactivate each of more than 19,000 genes in human cells infected with each virus, including SARS-CoV-2. They then compared the molecular effects of each shutdown on the virus ability to replicate.

In addition to TMEM41B, some 127 other molecular features were found to be shared among SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses. These included common biological reactions, or pathways, involved in cell growth, cell-to-cell communication, and means by which cells bind to other cells. However, researchers say, TMEM41B was the only molecular feature that stood out among both families of viruses studied.

Interestingly, Poirier notes, mutations, or alterations, in TMEM41B are known to be common in one in five East Asians, but not in Europeans or Africans. He cautions, however, that it is too early to tell if this explains the relatively disproportionate severity of COVID-19 illness among some populations in the United States and elsewhere. Another study finding was that cells with these mutations were more than 50 percent less susceptible to flavivirus infection than those with no gene mutation.

Poirier says more research is needed to determine if TMEM41B mutations directly confer protection against COVID-19 and if East Asians with the mutation are less vulnerable to the disease.

The research team next plans to map out TMEM41Bs precise role in SARS-CoV-2 replication so they can start testing treatment candidates that may block it. The team also has plans to study the other common pathways for similar potential drug targets.

Poirier adds that the research teams success in using CRISPR to map the molecular weaknesses in SARS-CoV-2 serves as a model for scientists worldwide for confronting future viral outbreaks.

References:

TMEM41B IS A PAN-FLAVIVIRUS HOST FACTOR by H.-Heinrich Hoffmann, William M. Schneider, Kathryn Rozen-Gagnon, Linde A. Miles, Felix Schuster, Brandon Razooky, Eliana Jacobson, Xianfang Wu, Soon Yi, Charles M. Rudin, Margaret R. MacDonald, Laura K. McMullan, John T. Poirier and Charles M. Rice, 8 December 2020, Cell.DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.12.005

Genome-scale identification of SARS-CoV-2 and pan-coronavirus host factor networks by William M. Schneider, Joseph M. Luna, H.-Heinrich Hoffmann, Francisco J. Sanchez-Rivera, Andrew A. Leal, Alison W. Ashbrook, Jeremie Le Pen, Inna Ricardo-Lax, Eleftherios Michailidis, Avery Peace, Ansgar F. Stenzel, Scott W. Lowe, Margaret R. MacDonald, Charles M. Rice and John T. Poirier, 9 December 2020, Cell.DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.12.006

Study funding was provided by National Institutes of Health grants R01 AI091707, U19 AI111825, R01 CA190261, R01 CA213448, U01 CA2133359, R01 AI143295, R01 AI150275, R01 AI124690, R01 AI116943, P01 AI138938, P30 CA008748, P30 CA016087, R03 AI141855, R21 AI142010, T32 CA160001. Additional funding support was provided by the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation, the BAWD Foundation, and Fast Grants.

Besides Poirier, another NYU Langone researcher involved in these studies is Andrew Leal. Other collaborators included study co-senior investigator Charles Rice and study co-investigators William Schneider, Joseph Luna, Heinrich Hoffman, Alison Ashbrook, Jeremie Le Pen, Inna Ricardo-Lax, Eleftherios Michailidis, Avery Peace, Ansgar Stenzel, Margaret MacDonald, Kathryn Rozen-Gagnon, Felix Schuster, Brandon Razooky, Eliana Jacobson, Xianfang Wu, and Soon Yi, at Rockefeller University in New York City; Francisco-Sanchez-Rivera, Scott Lowe, Linda Miles, and Charles Rudin, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City; and Laura McMullen, at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

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Potential Weakness in SARS-CoV-2 Discovered Single Protein Needed for COVID-19 Virus to Reproduce and Spread - SciTechDaily

Landing of $75M expansion of Texas-based Taysha adds to Triangle’s growing gene therapy hub – WRAL Tech Wire

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK Dallas-basedTaysha Gene Therapiesannounced plans today to invest $75 million in a gene therapy manufacturing facility in Durham that will employ more than 200 people.

Taysha is joining the fast-growing community of cutting-edge gene- and cell-therapy companies setting up shop in the Research Triangle, where decades of investment and workforce training have created a magnet for the discovery and manufacture of sciences game-changers in fighting some of humankinds most fearsome maladies.

Taysha logo

The company is developing gene therapies that use benign adeno-associated viruses (AAV) as vectors, or carriers, to transport genetic corrections to otherwise defective areas of the body. Taysha is initially targeting genetic diseases of the central nervous system, such as CLN1 disease, also called infantile Batten disease, which causes developmental delays in children, and Rett syndrome, a rare genetic mutation affecting brain development in young girls.

Taysha has a partnership withthe University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centernear its Dallas headquarters that accommodates some initial production of its gene therapies. And the company announced a partnership last month to add manufacturing capacity at therapeutics developer CatalentsMaryland-based gene therapy facilities. But the RTP investment is aimed at large-scale manufacturing of Tayshas product line as it evolves.

There are reasons the Research Triangle has become an epicenter for AAV technology, used by most gene therapy companies today. It was developed byJude Samulski, Ph.D.,of Chapel Hill, who holds the first U.S. patent for inserting non-AAV genes into AAV. Samulski is the lead inventor on more than 300 patents in the field of AAV vectors and gene therapy.

Jobs paying nearly $120,000 coming to Durham County in biotech expansion

Samulski was recruited to the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1993 with nearly $250,000 in grant funding from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. He led UNCs Gene Therapy Center for several years and in 2001 co-foundedAsklepios BioPharmaceutical (AskBio)in RTP, which Bayer recently bought for $4 billion.

AskBio itself spun out four gene therapy startups in recent years:NanoCor Therapeutics, Chatham Therapeutics, Bamboo Therapeutics andActus Therapeutics. Chatham was acquired by Takeda, and Bamboo wasacquired by Pfizer.

That base of gene therapy science, coupled with North Carolinas storied life sciences workforce development system and positive business climate, have drawn billions of dollars of investment from gene and cell therapy companies to the Triangle in recent years.

Taysha has had numerous connections with North Carolinas gene therapy community. One of the companys founders, early chief scientific officer Steven Gray,worked in Samulskis labat UNC. Also, several other members of the management team came from AveXis. Swiss drugmakerNovartisbought AveXis for $8.7 billion in 2018 and renamed it Novartis Gene Therapies.

Taysha is all about helping patients, and this investment underlines North Carolinas commitment to help the company achieve that vision, said Bill Bullock, senior vice president of economic development and statewide operations for the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, a partner in Tayshas recruitment to the state.

It also reinforces North Carolinas commitment to providing best-in-class talent to attract these types of investments, and the states position as a global leader in gene therapy manufacturing.

Taysha is a publicly held company trading on the Nasdaq exchange with the symbol TSHA. The company says Taysha is a word in the Caddo Native American language meaning ally or friend.

(C) N.C. Biotech Center

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Track the Vax: What Do We Need to Know About the New Vaccines? – Everyday Health

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The following are some highlights from the edited transcript.

Richard Kuhn: Traditionally, for viruses, we've either taken a virus and inactivated it, and used that as a vaccine, or we've taken a virus and made it less infectious that is, it's attentuated and made that a vaccine; or we've expressed proteins that are on the surface of a virus and used those proteins as stimulants for your immune system. These would be purified proteins that would be injected. The protein self-assembles into something that resembles the virus, but it doesn't have any of the components that allow the virus to replicate. So those are the standard, traditional vaccines.

The technology that Moderna and Pfizer are pushing right now is one in which you use the coding sequence, the information that codes for the viral protein that you're interested in. In the case of COVID-19, we're interested in a surface protein that we call the spike glycoprotein spike for short. This technology basically uses the genetic information that will make this spike protein when you put it into a cell. And that information is encoded in what we call messenger RNA mRNA. That's the vaccine, and it's packaged in a lipid nanoparticle for delivery purposes.

Serena Marshall: That's a ton of information, and I want to unpack it a little. Let's talk about the vaccines of days past, [in which we get] infected with a weakened version, an attenuated version, as you said. A lot of people think, Okay, so when I get this new COVID vaccine, am I going to be getting COVID? That's not the case here.

Richard Kuhn: That's absolutely correct. First of all, there's no infectious material being injected into an individual; you're only making a single protein, but it's the critical protein that your immune system will respond to.

What will happen is, that lipid nanoparticle will be able to enter cells in your body after you've been vaccinated. And that RNA, the messenger RNA, will make a protein, just like all the proteins your cells normally make. The only difference being that once it gets made, other cells are going to recognize it as foreign. And they're going to mount a response against it.

Serena Marshall: Why is it that this virus is able to have that protein and able to have that immune response?

Richard Kuhn: Well, this technology has been around for a few years. In fact, Moderna developed the technology initially against Zika virus. In the case of Zika virus, there was this massive expansion and infection of people in South and Central America, and everybody was very concerned, and then the virus died off. So Moderna had this technology but was never able to go to clinical trials because there was no Zika virus prevalent in the population.

Serena Marshall: So when we hear that this is a brand-new technology that's never been approved before, that's all true. But it's not new research; it actually, as you said, goes back to Zika. But also, [for] decades before they've been looking into this.

Richard Kuhn: The COVID-19 pandemic is the perfect situation for producing a messenger RNA vaccine, because it's very easy to produce in a large scale. Because it's synthetic, you don't have to grow anything in cells, which has been the traditional way that you produce vaccines. So it's very easy, it's very rapid. As soon as you have the genetic information of a virus or a pathogen, you can begin to develop a messenger RNA vaccine against it, which trims off years of very difficult work that we've previously had to do with the older vaccines.

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Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom …

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Three weeks ago, around a quarter of the American population elected a demagogue with no prior experience in public service to the presidency. In the eyes of many of his supporters, this lack of preparation was not a liability, but a strength. Donald Trump had run as a candidate whose primary qualification was that he was not a politician. Depicting yourself as a maverick or an outsider crusading against a corrupt Washington establishment is the oldest trick in American politics but Trump took things further. He broke countless unspoken rules regarding what public figures can or cannot do and say.

Every demagogue needs an enemy. Trumps was the ruling elite, and his charge was that they were not only failing to solve the greatest problems facing Americans, they were trying to stop anyone from even talking about those problems. The special interests, the arrogant media, and the political insiders, dont want me to talk about the crime that is happening in our country, Trump said in one late September speech. They want me to just go along with the same failed policies that have caused so much needless suffering.

Trump claimed that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were willing to let ordinary Americans suffer because their first priority was political correctness. They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety, and above all else, Trump declared after a Muslim gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. I refuse to be politically correct. What liberals might have seen as language changing to reflect an increasingly diverse society in which citizens attempt to avoid giving needless offence to one another Trump saw a conspiracy.

Throughout an erratic campaign, Trump consistently blasted political correctness, blaming it for an extraordinary range of ills and using the phrase to deflect any and every criticism. During the first debate of the Republican primaries, Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked Trump how he would answer the charge that he was part of the war on women.

Youve called women you dont like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals, Kelly pointed out. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees

I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct, Trump answered, to audience applause. Ive been challenged by so many people, I dont frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesnt have time either.

Trump used the same defence when critics raised questions about his statements on immigration. In June 2015, after Trump referred to Mexicans as rapists, NBC, the network that aired his reality show The Apprentice, announced that it was ending its relationship with him. Trumps team retorted that, NBC is weak, and like everybody else is trying to be politically correct.

In August 2016, after saying that the US district judge Gonzalo Curiel of San Diego was unfit to preside over the lawsuit against Trump Universities because he was Mexican American and therefore likely to be biased against him, Trump told CBS News that this was common sense. He continued: We have to stop being so politically correct in this country. During the second presidential debate, Trump answered a question about his proposed ban on Muslims by stating: We could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not, there is a problem.

Every time Trump said something outrageous commentators suggested he had finally crossed a line and that his campaign was now doomed. But time and again, Trump supporters made it clear that they liked him because he wasnt afraid to say what he thought. Fans praised the way Trump talked much more often than they mentioned his policy proposals. He tells it like it is, they said. He speaks his mind. He is not politically correct.

Trump and his followers never defined political correctness, or specified who was enforcing it. They did not have to. The phrase conjured powerful forces determined to suppress inconvenient truths by policing language.

There is an obvious contradiction involved in complaining at length, to an audience of hundreds of millions of people, that you are being silenced. But this idea that there is a set of powerful, unnamed actors, who are trying to control everything you do, right down to the words you use is trending globally right now. Britains rightwing tabloids issue frequent denunciations of political correctness gone mad and rail against the smug hypocrisy of the metropolitan elite. In Germany, conservative journalists and politicians are making similar complaints: after the assaults on women in Cologne last New Years Eve, for instance, the chief of police Rainer Wendt said that leftists pressuring officers to be politisch korrekt had prevented them from doing their jobs. In France, Marine Le Pen of the Front National has condemned more traditional conservatives as paralysed by their fear of confronting political correctness.

Trumps incessant repetition of the phrase has led many writers since the election to argue that the secret to his victory was a backlash against excessive political correctness. Some have argued that Hillary Clinton failed because she was too invested in that close relative of political correctness, identity politics. But upon closer examination, political correctness becomes an impossibly slippery concept. The term is what Ancient Greek rhetoricians would have called an exonym: a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not belong to it. Nobody ever describes themselves as politically correct. The phrase is only ever an accusation.

If you say that something is technically correct, you are suggesting that it is wrong the adverb before correct implies a but. However, to say that a statement is politically correct hints at something more insidious. Namely, that the speaker is acting in bad faith. He or she has ulterior motives, and is hiding the truth in order to advance an agenda or to signal moral superiority. To say that someone is being politically correct discredits them twice. First, they are wrong. Second, and more damningly, they know it.

If you go looking for the origins of the phrase, it becomes clear that there is no neat history of political correctness. There have only been campaigns against something called political correctness. For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting enemy has been a favourite tactic of the right. Opposition to political correctness has proved itself a highly effective form of crypto-politics. It transforms the political landscape by acting as if it is not political at all. Trump is the deftest practitioner of this strategy yet.

Most Americans had never heard the phrase politically correct before 1990, when a wave of stories began to appear in newspapers and magazines. One of the first and most influential was published in October 1990 by the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, who warned under the headline The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct that the countrys universities were threatened by a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform.

Bernstein had recently returned from Berkeley, where he had been reporting on student activism. He wrote that there was an unofficial ideology of the university, according to which a cluster of opinions about race, ecology, feminism, culture and foreign policy defines a kind of correct attitude toward the problems of the world. For instance, Biodegradable garbage bags get the PC seal of approval. Exxon does not.

Bernsteins alarming dispatch in Americas paper of record set off a chain reaction, as one mainstream publication after another rushed to denounce this new trend. The following month, the Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz decried the brave new world of ideological zealotry at American universities. In December, the cover of Newsweek with a circulation of more than 3 million featured the headline THOUGHT POLICE and yet another ominous warning: Theres a politically correct way to talk about race, sex and ideas. Is this the New Enlightenment or the New McCarthyism? A similar story graced the cover of New York magazine in January 1991 inside, the magazine proclaimed that The New Fascists were taking over universities. In April, Time magazine reported on a new intolerance that was on the rise across campuses nationwide.

If you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and newspapers, you find that the phrase politically correct rarely appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than 700 times. In 1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more than 2,800 times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up enemies from a melange of old wars: they compared the thought police spreading terror on university campuses to fascists, Stalinists, McCarthyites, Hitler Youth, Christian fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.

Many of these articles recycled the same stories of campus controversies from a handful of elite universities, often exaggerated or stripped of context. The New York magazine cover story opened with an account of a Harvard history professor, Stephan Thernstrom, being attacked by overzealous students who felt he had been racially insensitive: Whenever he walked through the campus that spring, down Harvards brick paths, under the arched gates, past the fluttering elms, he found it hard not to imagine the pointing fingers, the whispers. Racist. There goes the racist. It was hellish, this persecution.

In an interview that appeared soon afterwards in The Nation, Thernstrom said the harassment described in the New York article had never happened. There had been one editorial in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper criticising his decision to read extensively from the diaries of plantation owners in his lectures. But the description of his harried state was pure artistic licence. No matter: the image of college students conducting witch hunts stuck. When Richard Bernstein published a book based on his New York Times reporting on political correctness, he called it Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for Americas Future a title alluding to the Jacobins of the French Revolution. In the book he compared American college campuses to France during the Reign of Terror, during which tens of thousands of people were executed within months.

None of the stories that introduced the menace of political correctness could pinpoint where or when it had begun. Nor were they very precise when they explained the origins of the phrase itself. Journalists frequently mentioned the Soviets Bernstein observed that the phrase smacks of Stalinist orthodoxy but there is no exact equivalent in Russian. (The closest would be ideinost, which translates as ideological correctness. But that word has nothing to do with disadvantaged people or minorities.) The intellectual historian LD Burnett has found scattered examples of doctrines or people being described as politically correct in American communist publications from the 1930s usually, she says, in a tone of mockery.

The phrase came into more widespread use in American leftist circles in the 1960s and 1970s most likely as an ironic borrowing from Mao, who delivered a famous speech in 1957 that was translated into English with the title On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.

Ruth Perry, a literature professor at MIT who was active in the feminist and civil rights movements, says that many radicals were reading the Little Red Book in the late 1960s and 1970s, and surmises that her friends may have picked up the adjective correct there. But they didnt use it in the way Mao did. Politically correct became a kind of in-joke among American leftists something you called a fellow leftist when you thought he or she was being self-righteous. The term was always used ironically, Perry says, always calling attention to possible dogmatism.

In 1970, the African-American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara, used the phrase in an essay about strains on gender relations within her community. No matter how politically correct her male friends thought they were being, she wrote many of them were failing to recognise the plight of black women.

Until the late 1980s, political correctness was used exclusively within the left, and almost always ironically as a critique of excessive orthodoxy. In fact, some of the first people to organise against political correctness were a group of feminists who called themselves the Lesbian Sex Mafia. In 1982, they held a Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex at a theatre in New Yorks East Village a rally against fellow feminists who had condemned pornography and BDSM. Over 400 women attended, many of them wearing leather and collars, brandishing nipple clamps and dildos. The writer and activist Mirtha Quintanales summed up the mood when she told the audience, We need to have dialogues about S&M issues, not about what is politically correct, politically incorrect.

By the end of the 1980s, Jeff Chang, the journalist and hip-hop critic, who has written extensively on race and social justice, recalls that the activists he knew then in the Bay Area used the phrase in a jokey way a way for one sectarian to dismiss another sectarians line.

But soon enough, the term was rebranded by the right, who turned its meaning inside out. All of a sudden, instead of being a phrase that leftists used to check dogmatic tendencies within their movement, political correctness became a talking point for neoconservatives. They said that PC constituted a leftwing political programme that was seizing control of American universities and cultural institutions and they were determined to stop it.

The right had been waging a campaign against liberal academics for more than a decade. Starting in the mid-1970s, a handful of conservative donors had funded the creation of dozens of new thinktanks and training institutes offering programmes in everything from leadership to broadcast journalism to direct-mail fundraising. They had endowed fellowships for conservative graduate students, postdoctoral positions and professorships at prestigious universities. Their stated goal was to challenge what they saw as the dominance of liberalism and attack left-leaning tendencies within the academy.

Starting in the late 1980s, this well-funded conservative movement entered the mainstream with a series of improbable bestsellers that took aim at American higher education. The first, by the University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom, came out in 1987. For hundreds of pages, The Closing of the American Mind argued that colleges were embracing a shallow cultural relativism and abandoning long-established disciplines and standards in an attempt to appear liberal and to pander to their students. It sold more than 500,000 copies and inspired numerous imitations.

In April 1990, Roger Kimball, an editor at the conservative journal, The New Criterion, published Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education. Like Bloom, Kimball argued that an assault on the canon was taking place and that a politics of victimhood had paralysed universities. As evidence, he cited the existence of departments such as African American studies and womens studies. He scornfully quoted the titles of papers he had heard at academic conferences, such as Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl or The Lesbian Phallus: Does Heterosexuality Exist?

In June 1991, the young Dinesh DSouza followed Bloom and Kimball with Illiberal Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. Whereas Bloom had bemoaned the rise of relativism and Kimball had attacked what he called liberal fascism, and what he considered frivolous lines of scholarly inquiry, DSouza argued that admissions policies that took race into consideration were producing a new segregation on campus and an attack on academic standards. The Atlantic printed a 12,000 word excerpt as its June cover story. To coincide with the release, Forbes ran another article by DSouza with the title: Visigoths in Tweed.

These books did not emphasise the phrase political correctness, and only DSouza used the phrase directly. But all three came to be regularly cited in the flood of anti-PC articles that appeared in venues such as the New York Times and Newsweek. When they did, the authors were cited as neutral authorities. Countless articles uncritically repeated their arguments.

In some respects, these books and articles were responding to genuine changes taking place within academia. It is true that scholars had become increasingly sceptical about whether it was possible to talk about timeless, universal truths that lay beyond language and representation. European theorists who became influential in US humanities departments during the 1970s and 1980s argued that individual experience was shaped by systems of which the individual might not be aware and particularly by language. Michel Foucault, for instance, argued that all knowledge expressed historically specific forms of power. Jacques Derrida, a frequent target of conservative critics, practised what he called deconstruction, rereading the classics of philosophy in order to show that even the most seemingly innocent and straightforward categories were riven with internal contradictions. The value of ideals such as humanity or liberty could not be taken for granted.

It was also true that many universities were creating new studies departments, which interrogated the experiences, and emphasised the cultural contributions of groups that had previously been excluded from the academy and from the canon: queer people, people of colour and women. This was not so strange. These departments reflected new social realities. The demographics of college students were changing, because the demographics of the United States were changing. By 1990, only two-thirds of Americans under 18 were white. In California, the freshman classes at many public universities were majority minority, or more than 50% non-white. Changes to undergraduate curriculums reflected changes in the student population.

The responses that the conservative bestsellers offered to the changes they described were disproportionate and often misleading. For instance, Bloom complained at length about the militancy of African American students at Cornell University, where he had taught in the 1960s. He never mentioned what students demanding the creation of African American studies were responding to: the biggest protest at Cornell took place in 1969 after a cross burning on campus, an open KKK threat. (An arsonist burned down the Africana Studies Center, founded in response to these protests, in 1970.)

More than any particular obfuscation or omission, the most misleading aspect of these books was the way they claimed that only their adversaries were political. Bloom, Kimball, and DSouza claimed that they wanted to preserve the humanistic tradition, as if their academic foes were vandalising a canon that had been enshrined since time immemorial. But canons and curriculums have always been in flux; even in white Anglo-America there has never been any one stable tradition. Moby Dick was dismissed as Herman Melvilles worst book until the mid-1920s. Many universities had only begun offering literature courses in living languages a decade or so before that.

In truth, these crusaders against political correctness were every bit as political as their opponents. As Jane Mayer documents in her book, Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Bloom and DSouza were funded by networks of conservative donors particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife families who had spent the 1980s building programmes that they hoped would create a new counter-intelligentsia. (The New Criterion, where Kimball worked, was also funded by the Olin and Scaife Foundations.) In his 1978 book A Time for Truth, William Simon, the president of the Olin Foundation, had called on conservatives to fund intellectuals who shared their views: They must be given grants, grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and more books.

These skirmishes over syllabuses were part of a broader political programme and they became instrumental to forging a new alliance for conservative politics in America, between white working-class voters and small business owners, and politicians with corporate agendas that held very little benefit for those people.

By making fun of professors who spoke in language that most people considered incomprehensible (The Lesbian Phallus), wealthy Ivy League graduates could pose as anti-elite. By mocking courses on writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, they made a racial appeal to white people who felt as if they were losing their country. As the 1990s wore on, because multiculturalism was associated with globalisation the force that was taking away so many jobs traditionally held by white working-class people attacking it allowed conservatives to displace responsibility for the hardship that many of their constituents were facing. It was not the slashing of social services, lowered taxes, union busting or outsourcing that was the cause of their problems. It was those foreign others.

PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them. Political correctness became a term used to drum into the public imagination the idea that there was a deep divide between the ordinary people and the liberal elite, who sought to control the speech and thoughts of regular folk. Opposition to political correctness also became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era.

Soon, Republican politicians were echoing on the national stage the message that had been product-tested in the academy. In May 1991, President George HW Bush gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan. In it, he identified political correctness as a major danger to America. Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, Bush said. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land, but, he warned, In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behaviour crush diversity in the name of diversity.

After 2001, debates about political correctness faded from public view, replaced by arguments about Islam and terrorism. But in the final years of the Obama presidency, political correctness made a comeback. Or rather, anti-political-correctness did.

As Black Lives Matter and movements against sexual violence gained strength, a spate of thinkpieces attacked the participants in these movements, criticising and trivialising them by saying that they were obsessed with policing speech. Once again, the conversation initially focused on universities, but the buzzwords were new. Rather than difference and multiculturalism, Americans in 2012 and 2013 started hearing about trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, privilege and cultural appropriation.

This time, students received more scorn than professors. If the first round of anti-political-correctness evoked the spectres of totalitarian regimes, the more recent revival has appealed to the commonplace that millennials are spoiled narcissists, who want to prevent anyone expressing opinions that they happen to find offensive.

In January 2015, the writer Jonathan Chait published one of the first new, high-profile anti-PC thinkpieces in New York magazine. Not a Very PC Thing to Say followed the blueprint provided by the anti-PC thinkpieces that the New York Times, Newsweek, and indeed New York magazine had published in the early 1990s. Like the New York article from 1991, it began with an anecdote set on campus that supposedly demonstrated that political correctness had run amok, and then extrapolated from this incident to a broad generalisation. In 1991, John Taylor wrote: The new fundamentalism has concocted a rationale for dismissing all dissent. In 2015, Jonathan Chait claimed that there were once again angry mobs out to crush opposing ideas.

Chait warned that the dangers of PC had become greater than ever before. Political correctness was no longer confined to universities now, he argued, it had taken over social media and thus attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old. (As evidence of the hegemonic influence enjoyed by unnamed actors on the left, Chait cited two female journalists saying that they had been criticised by leftists on Twitter.)

Chaits article launched a spate of replies about campus and social media cry bullies. On the cover of their September 2015 issue, the Atlantic published an article by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. The title, The Coddling Of the American Mind, nodded to the godfather of anti-PC, Allan Bloom. (Lukianoff is the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, another organisation funded by the Olin and Scaife families.) In the name of emotional wellbeing, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they dont like, the article announced. It was shared over 500,000 times.

These pieces committed many of the same fallacies that their predecessors from the 1990s had. They cherry-picked anecdotes and caricatured the subjects of their criticism. They complained that other people were creating and enforcing speech codes, while at the same time attempting to enforce their own speech codes. Their writers designated themselves the arbiters of what conversations or political demands deserved to be taken seriously, and which did not. They contradicted themselves in the same way: their authors continually complained, in highly visible publications, that they were being silenced.

The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-correctness (and anti-anti-political correctness) stories to spread even further and faster than they had in the 1990s. Anti-PC and anti-anti-PC stories come cheap: because they concern identity, they are something that any writer can have a take on, based on his or her experiences, whether or not he or she has the time or resources to report. They are also perfect clickbait. They inspire outrage, or outrage at the outrage of others.

Meanwhile, a strange convergence was taking place. While Chait and his fellow liberals decried political correctness, Donald Trump and his followers were doing the same thing. Chait said that leftists were perverting liberalism and appointed himself the defender of a liberal centre; Trump said that liberal media had the system rigged.

The anti-PC liberals were so focused on leftists on Twitter that for months they gravely underestimated the seriousness of the real threat to liberal discourse. It was not coming from women, people of colour, or queer people organising for their civil rights, on campus or elsewhere. It was coming from @realdonaldtrump, neo-Nazis, and far-right websites such as Breitbart.

The original critics of PC were academics or shadow-academics, Ivy League graduates who went around in bow ties quoting Plato and Matthew Arnold. It is hard to imagine Trump quoting Plato or Matthew Arnold, much less carping about the titles of conference papers by literature academics. During his campaign, the network of donors who funded decades of anti-PC activity the Kochs, the Olins, the Scaifes shunned Trump, citing concerns about the populist promises he was making. Trump came from a different milieu: not Yale or the University of Chicago, but reality television. And he was picking different fights, targeting the media and political establishment, rather than academia.

As a candidate, Trump inaugurated a new phase of anti-political-correctness. What was remarkable was just how many different ways Trump deployed this tactic to his advantage, both exploiting the tried-and-tested methods of the early 1990s and adding his own innovations.

First, by talking incessantly about political correctness, Trump established the myth that he had dishonest and powerful enemies who wanted to prevent him from taking on the difficult challenges facing the nation. By claiming that he was being silenced, he created a drama in which he could play the hero. The notion that Trump was both persecuted and heroic was crucial to his emotional appeal. It allowed people who were struggling economically or angry about the way society was changing to see themselves in him, battling against a rigged system that made them feel powerless and devalued. At the same time, Trumps swagger promised that they were strong and entitled to glory. They were great and would be great again.

Second, Trump did not simply criticise the idea of political correctness he actually said and did the kind of outrageous things that PC culture supposedly prohibited. The first wave of conservative critics of political correctness claimed they were defending the status quo, but Trumps mission was to destroy it. In 1991, when George HW Bush warned that political correctness was a threat to free speech, he did not choose to exercise his free speech rights by publicly mocking a man with a disability or characterising Mexican immigrants as rapists. Trump did. Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic status, the draft-dodging billionaire, son of a slumlord, taunted the parents of a fallen soldier and claimed that his cruelty and malice was, in fact, courage.

This willingness to be more outrageous than any previous candidate ensured non-stop media coverage, which in turn helped Trump attract supporters who agreed with what he was saying. We should not underestimate how many Trump supporters held views that were sexist, racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, and were thrilled to feel that he had given them permission to say so. Its an old trick: the powerful encourage the less powerful to vent their rage against those who might have been their allies, and to delude themselves into thinking that they have been liberated. It costs the powerful nothing; it pays frightful dividends.

Trump drew upon a classic element of anti-political-correctness by implying that while his opponents were operating according to a political agenda, he simply wanted to do what was sensible. He made numerous controversial policy proposals: deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the US, introducing stop-and-frisk policies that have been ruled unconstitutional. But by responding to critics with the accusation that they were simply being politically correct, Trump attempted to place these proposals beyond the realm of politics altogether. Something political is something that reasonable people might disagree about. By using the adjective as a put-down, Trump pretended that he was acting on truths so obvious that they lay beyond dispute. Thats just common sense.

The most alarming part of this approach is what it implies about Trumps attitude to politics more broadly. His contempt for political correctness looks a lot like contempt for politics itself. He does not talk about diplomacy; he talks about deals. Debate and disagreement are central to politics, yet Trump has made clear that he has no time for these distractions. To play the anti-political-correctness card in response to a legitimate question about policy is to shut down discussion in much the same way that opponents of political correctness have long accused liberals and leftists of doing. It is a way of sidestepping debate by declaring that the topic is so trivial or so contrary to common sense that it is pointless to discuss it. The impulse is authoritarian. And by presenting himself as the champion of common sense, Trump gives himself permission to bypass politics altogether.

Now that he is president-elect, it is unclear whether Trump meant many of the things he said during his campaign. But, so far, he is fulfilling his pledge to fight political correctness. Last week, he told the New York Times that he was trying to build an administration filled with the best people, though Not necessarily people that will be the most politically correct people, because that hasnt been working.

Trump has also continued to cry PC in response to criticism. When an interviewer from Politico asked a Trump transition team member why Trump was appointing so many lobbyists and political insiders, despite having pledged to drain the swamp of them, the source said that one of the most refreshing parts of the whole Trump style is that he does not care about political correctness. Apparently it would have been politically correct to hold him to his campaign promises.

As Trump prepares to enter the White House, many pundits have concluded that political correctness fuelled the populist backlash sweeping Europe and the US. The leaders of that backlash may say so. But the truth is the opposite: those leaders understood the power that anti-political-correctness has to rally a class of voters, largely white, who are disaffected with the status quo and resentful of shifting cultural and social norms. They were not reacting to the tyranny of political correctness, nor were they returning America to a previous phase of its history. They were not taking anything back. They were wielding anti-political-correctness as a weapon, using it to forge a new political landscape and a frightening future.

The opponents of political correctness always said they were crusaders against authoritarianism. In fact, anti-PC has paved the way for the populist authoritarianism now spreading everywhere. Trump is anti-political correctness gone mad.

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Proud Boys’ party is over: Trump fans throw tantrums because they’ve lost more than an election – Salon

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In vino veritas, or perhaps more appropriately, in Bud Light veritas: These were the words that came to mind while I watchedSaturday's Proud Boys riot in Washington, D.C.

For years, the Proud Boys have angrily resisted critics who say the group is racist, claiming instead to be for "Western chauvinism."Before the heat got to him and he quit, Proud Boys founder (and onetime Vice co-founder) Gavin McInnes described the group as being "alt-right without the racism." The Boys'insistence that they are absolutely, definitely not a bunch of racistseven led to ugly infighting when a splinter group broke off over the refusal of group leaderstocommit to overtly white nationalistbeliefs.

But on one Saturday night in Washington, fueled by alcohol and rage over Donald Trump's electoral defeat, the pretense that "Western chauvinism" is not a racist ideology collapsed. After hours of drinking and ginning themselves up, the Proud Boys stole Black Lives Matter flags and targeted counter-protesters who were gathered in Black Lives Matter Plaza. A group of Proud Boys dramatically lit a large Black Lives Matter flag on fire, while flashing the "OK" sign, which of late has been appropriated by racists as a "white power" symbol. Vandalismat two historically Blackchurches,Asbury United Methodist Church and Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, is being investigated as a hate crime.Four people were stabbed in altercations between the Proud Boys and counter-protesters.

Saturday's rally was ostensibly about protesting Trump'sloss and claiming that he wasthe victim of a "rigged" election. But with inhibitions loosened by booze, angerand literal (as well as metaphorical)darkness, the truth was illuminated: The rage about Donald Trump's electoral fateis about racism.It's a part of the growing fury taking hold of conservativesastheir control over American culture slips further and further out of their grasp. Trump is just the latest vehicle for this anger, but this story is about a lot more than him. It's bigger even than electoral politics. This is about a more fundamental issue: over Who gets to define America,and the widespreadreactionary outrage over being outnumbered by more liberal, more diverse and more cosmopolitan Americans, and feeling unable to stop the tide of progress.

Trump was able to amass an extraordinary 74.2 million voters with a message of resentment at "political correctness" and "woke" culture, a story about how conservative white people are supposedly being victimized by a changing America. But as much as that campaign whipped up millions of Americans, at the heart of it all was a misdirection. What conservatives really want iscontrol over the culture. Thatisn't something that can be won at the ballot box, and they know it.

If the actual goal of the angry right werecontrol over governance and policy, they should be thrilledby the past year.

Despite Trump's defeat, the GOP has maintained control over the Senate (pending the results of Georgia's runoff elections next month) and gained at least 10 seats in the House, nibbling the Democratic majority down to a bare minimum. They have alsopacked the federal courts so thoroughly that meaningful Democratic legislation may be impossible to enact for at least a generation. Unless Democrats can pull upsets in both of the Georgia races to be decided on Jan. 5,incoming President Joe Biden will be hamstrung by all-too-familiar obstructionist Republicans.

But instead of being happy or at least begrudgingly accepting what was mostly a win for Republicans, the right has exploded inrage. That's because Donald Trump's defeatwas a reminder thatno matter how much Republicans maintain power through a drastically tilted electoral playing field, conservatives are still, culturally speaking, a minority and one that's shrinking rapidly, at that.

This is why right-wingers always act like angry losers, no matter how many political wins they stack up. There's a limit to how much cultural change can be reversed at the ballot box or even in the courts. Of course, thepolicy fights over police reform, reproductive rights, same-sex marriageand immigration matter quite a bit to real people's lives. But even when the right wins on policy, the cultural changes racial diversity, women's increased equality, the mainstreaming of LGBTQ people march on. That's why Proud Boys targetedBlack Lives Matter iconography instead of, say, the offices of Democratic Party leaders or progressivethink tanks.

The same weekend that Proud Boys were throwing a public tantrum in Washington, Cleveland's baseball team finally gave in to longstanding pressure and announced itwould drop its venerable but racist name, the "Indians." The move comesafter the NFL team in D.C. dropped its formername, which was a far more viciousslur against Native Americans. Trump, unsurprisingly, whined about the Clevelanddecisionon Twitter, calling it "Cancel culture at work," even though the team's privateownersmade the decisionand its players will take the field next season as usual. Even in using thatterm, Trump tacitly admittedthat his poweras president, andas massivecultural icon to the right, can do nothing to stop the anti-racist pressure campaign that caused thename change.

Trump's ultimately futile war over the military's move toban Confederate iconography and rename bases currently named after Confederate figuresis similar. That'sa lost cause, and not just because Trump will soon leave office and the military will just proceed with itsplansunder Biden. Military leaders are making these decisions themselves,reflecting changes that have already occurring withinmilitary culture as the services have becomemore racially diverse and more open towomen.

There are any number of otherexamples. Even as the right keeps on railingagainst these cultural changes, it can't help but reflect them. For instance, Saturday's right-wing rally featured an extremely lame hip-hop act, juxtaposing right-wing cultural appropriation with overt acts of racism. But this seeming contradictionis just SOP for Trumpers. Trump himself would dance badly to songs by the Village People at rallies where he'd promise to appoint more right-wing judges to strip LGBTQ people of their rights.

What else are conservativessupposed to do? Have crap music at their events? Even "Western chauvinists" understand thatif they limitthemselves to white, straight,conservative-oriented music, they're doomed to host a lame party. So they borrow very heavily from the samecultures they view as an existentialthreat to "America."

Again, that's why right-wingers eternally act likevictims, no matter how many electoral wins they rack up. "MAGA" was a promise to restore a fantasy version of an American white-bread past. The entire Republican National Convention was a lengthy whine about "cancel culture" and "political correctness," which areright-wing scare terms to demonize shifting social mores that reject open bigotry. The implicit promise was that, by electing Trump for four more years, he would make it socially acceptable to be shitty again. That promiseturned out more than 74 million people.

Make no mistake, Trump did a lot of damage in four years: He wrecked the economy, unleashed a pandemic, made the lives of immigrants miserable androlled back environmental protections the list goeson. But he wasn't able to dothe one thing that his supporters most dearly wanted, which was to remake the culture in their image. He couldn't do that in four years, and he wasn't going to do it in eight. It's not impossible to use political power to do such a thing the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany being the most obvious examples but it generally requires heavy-handed state violence and censorship crackdowns that Trump flirted with but was never remotelyable to implement on the scalenecessary to fulfill those MAGA desires.

None of which is to say that everything will bejust dandy now that Trump is leavingoffice. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other bigotries continue to be a major poison. Systematic racismstill creates majorinequalities in health, wealth and other social markers.To say that the culture is changing isn't to say that it haschanged, and the right-wing assault on human rights is causing real people real pain every day. But none of these realities placate conservatives, who are still enraged that progressives continue to push for and often gain ground, especially in the cultural sphere.

And nowa neofascist movement has been unleashed in the U.S. Trump's failed coup was, for him, about ego and power. For his supporters, however, it was a symbol of their long-term hopes of managing to wrest back control over the culturedespite being both outnumbered and largely incapable of generating attractive cultural touchstones to lure other Americans to their side. The right islosing the culture war, and itsanger over that willcontinue to grow, even asTrump himself is pushed out of the spotlight.

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Proud Boys' party is over: Trump fans throw tantrums because they've lost more than an election - Salon

The Origins of Political Correctness – Accuracy In Academia

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An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind. Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Conservative University at American University

If you enjoy this speech, keep up with political correctness and how it continues to emerge on college campuses by following our Faculty Lounge blog.

Where does all this stuff that youve heard about this morning the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.

We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?

We call it Political Correctness. The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, its deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.

First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted victims groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges some star-chamber proceeding and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.

Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, Wait a minute. This isnt true. I can see it isnt true, the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be victims, and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isnt as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies dont get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.

And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, its Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, its deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that all history is about which groups have power over which other groups. So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that were familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.

But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.

Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments the bourgeois governments because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didnt happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.

Marxists knew by definition it couldnt be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didnt spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didnt support them.

So the Marxists had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, Who will save us from Western Civilization? He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.

Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the latest thing.

In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.

And he says, What we need is a think-tank. Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out its a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.

Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1917, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism. Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology. Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimers views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. Theyre still very much Marxist in their thinking, but theyre effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, Hey, this isnt us, and were not going to bless this.

Horkheimers initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois societys socio-economic sub-structure, and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, Im not reading from a critic here in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.

The stuff weve been hearing about this morning the radical feminism, the womens 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 term is ingenious because youre tempted to ask, What is the theory? The theory is to criticize. 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 cant be done, that we cant imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as were living under repression the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression we cant even imagine it. 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. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

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 thats 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, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromms view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of essential sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined. Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.

Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature. That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. The theme of mans domination of nature, according to Jay, was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years. Horkheimers antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (heres were theyre obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness. In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture. And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his protestagainst asceticism in the name of a higher morality.

How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.

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 couldnt just get out there and say, Hell no we wont go, they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there when the student rebels come into Adornos classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested 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 Marcuses 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 (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), 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 you own thing. 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! Theyre students, theyre baby-boomers, and theyve 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 doesnt 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. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.

In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In hate crimes we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. Its exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now its coming here. And we dont recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that its not funny, its here, its growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.

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The Origins of Political Correctness - Accuracy In Academia

Large Majorities Dislike Political Correctness – The Atlantic

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If you look at what Americans have to say on issues such as immigration, the extent of white privilege, and the prevalence of sexual harassment, the authors argue, seven distinct clusters emerge: progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, the politically disengaged, moderates, traditional conservatives, and devoted conservatives.

According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who dont belong to either extreme constitute an exhausted majority. Their members share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.

Most members of the exhausted majority, and then some, dislike political correctness. Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that political correctness is a problem in our country. Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages.

Youth isnt a good proxy for support of political correctnessand it turns out race isnt, either.

Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness. As one 40-year-old American Indian in Oklahoma said in his focus group, according to the report:

It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.

The one part of the standard narrative that the data partially affirm is that African Americans are most likely to support political correctness. But the difference between them and other groups is much smaller than generally supposed: Three quarters of African Americans oppose political correctness. This means that they are only four percentage points less likely than whites, and only five percentage points less likely than the average, to believe that political correctness is a problem.

If age and race do not predict support for political correctness, what does? Income and education.

While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.

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Large Majorities Dislike Political Correctness - The Atlantic

Political Correctness and the Suicide of the Intellect …

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Political correctness, you all should know, is a term that seems tocome from students, not from faculty. I told my son about the newphrase I was hearing from my colleagues, and he said, "Oh, we usedto say that three or four years ago." Ultimately I supposepolitical correctness comes from the Communist Party, where onepresumes it was not used sarcastically.

Now political correctness is connected to politicization. Theuniversity is politicized, the politicizers say. But they do notrecoil, appalled at their conclusion that every scholar deep downis a politician. Nor do they try to minimize the fact which they'veuncovered. No, they embrace it. They furthermore say, "It'snecessary to replace the politics we've had up to now with ourpolitics, or, rather, my politics." This is a claim oftyranny, somewhat disguised by the demand in the speech ofthe politicizers to democratize everything.

Politicization, therefore, leads to political correctness, thenew orthodoxy to replace the old one. And those who speak of it arequite open about it: We must give scholarship, we must give theuniversity a progressive perspective, an ethnic one, a homophilicone, and so on. Scholarship must not only be inspired by, butinfused with, political correctness.

Now these two things - politicization and PC - are manifest inthree aspects of the universities: first, in the admission ofstudents and recruitment of faculty, and the related question ofaffirmative action; second, in campus life and the demand forsensitivity; and third, in the curriculum and the criticism of thetraditional canon.

Affirmative action I won't discuss, except to mention the twoparts of the questions that I think are raised by thepoliticization of campus life: first, justice; and second,pride.

As to the justice of affirmative action, I think that to mostpeople it's gradually sinking in that two wrongs don't make aright. And as to the matter of pride, affirmative action is theonly government program that's ashamed of itself and that cannotidentify its beneficiaries: "Here is the new affirmative actioncandidate we've just found." That cannot be said, of course,without hurting the candidate's pride.

Affirmative action is perhaps not yet on the run, but I thinkit's on the defensive. It's of course very strong in theuniversities, entrenched in bureaucracy. Everything else will beexcused there, even certain conservative views, if you acceptaffirmative action. But the new Harvard president, I was encouragedto see, has said that the problem of affirmative action is aproblem of supply, of finding sufficient and qualified minorities.The suggestion is, therefore, that it's not a question ofrecruitment. (Of course, the original premise of affirmative actionis that the problem is not supply, but rather in the racism -conscious or unconscious - of the recruiters.) So I think that's aconsiderable advance.

I turn now to the politicization of campus life. We've becomefamiliar with speech codes on the campus that require students andfaculty to avoid speech that may be offensive to certain groups.These have been set up in many universities, not yet at mine,Harvard, which does, however, have regulations on sexualharassment, requiring professors to teach classes "withoutunnecessarily drawing attention to the sexual difference."

What about the use of "he or she"? Would that kind of speech berequired to avoid sexually harassing your audience? That usage tome seems compulsive and ridiculous. Ridiculous because "he or she"is a formula intended to draw attention away from the sexualdifference, and instead it does the opposite. Indeed, this newusage seems to say that there is no impersonal pronoun, and it isbased on the premise of feminism, or at least of the originalfeminism. Everywhere there is a "he" you could put a "she," andeverywhere there's a "she" you could put a "he." In other words, itis based on the interchangeability of the sexes.

It's also compulsive. The most recent example of this I saw wasin a letter from our chairman, in which he spoke of "anyone worthhis or her salt."

"He or she" is, I think, a prime example of politicalcorrectness and the way it works, which is not confined touniversities, or even to ideologues. It's an attempt to create anatmosphere of self-censorship, also known euphemistically as"raising consciousness."

Self-expression at HarvardThere was a sensitivity incident - widely reported - at Harvardthis last spring. A young woman put out a Confederate flag from herdormitory window as an act of self-expression to display herpolitical views. She was attacked as insensitive to the opinions ofothers, and she was defended as giving us an instance of freespeech, which, of course, has been expanded, as we all know,to "free expression." Harvard did nothing to prevent this youngwoman from hanging out her flag. It accepted the reason why she didit. It spoke of the right of free expression, but deplored thisparticular use of it. This was very much, I think, in line with thepolicy of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Question: should conservatives - or, rephrase that: shouldreasonable or sensible people - adopt the ACLU view of this matter?A short-term alliance with them might be all right, but what abouttheir view? I think not. It's time to reconsider the identificationof free speech with free expression. Of course, I'm not the firstto suggest this; Justice Scalia has been making the point for sometime. This identification first began with the Flag Salute cases inthe early 1940s; so it has a history.

Free speech is something necessarily associated with reason;it's offering an opinion containing a reason. When you give areason, you give some common ground, offered to convince orpersuade someone else. It's not me imposing on you. Therefore freespeech implies a community, a common citizenship. The originalpurpose of free speech was to make possible democratic government:How can we get together to decide things if we don't have thecapacity to speak freely before and during our deliberations?

Free speech makes you think of someone else. Even if you have aselfish reason, you must claim that the other person would do thesame. A man comes to a fancy dinner party. A plate of asparagus ispassed around, and he cuts off all of the tips and sweeps them ontohis plate. The lady sitting next to him looks at him in horror andsays, "Why, sir, why ever did you do that?" "Because, madame,they're much the best part."

Now, "free expression," by contrast with this example of sweetreason, is self-centered: You express yourself, and you expressyourself as opposed to others. It's my identity, my roots, myvalues. The Harvard student was from Virginia, and she hung out theConfederate flag to celebrate George Washington's birthday. GeorgeWashington led a movement for secession from Britain, so he wouldhave therefore approved the movement of secession of the South in1860!

The Right to offendWith self-expression you have no duty to placate or appeaseother people. If you do that, you're not being honest to yourself.So self-expression culminates in the right to offend. It doesn'tmatter that this student had so much trouble in identifyingherself, in finding her ethnicity, that she had to go searching inthe Confederacy.

The student was offending black students at Harvard. She didn'tmean to, or so she said, but this wasn't believed. And the blackstudents had a right therefore to take offense at this. One of themput out a Nazi flag. Well, it's hard to see the meaning of that,but it's clear that this student wanted to do her worst. You takeoffense by giving offense.

This is not a recipe for a happy, or even for a stable, society,not to mention a university. Such a system can work only throughthe forbearance of certain groups who give up their right to giveand take offense. Some groups have a right to offend; others don't.And the point of the Confederate flag was to challenge thatarbitrary system.

The ACLU doctrine, the identification of free speech with freeexpression, leads to this result: Do your worst, because you're notfree unless you can carry freedom to an extreme; rather to anunhealthy extreme, indeed, to an admittedly unhealthyextreme.

Besides, the identification of free speech with free expressionis open to the possibility of reversal. Instead of considering theConfederate flag as symbolic speech that is, understandingexpression as speech - you might consider a tirade of racial slursas an expressive act - that is, understanding speech as a deed. Andthen, logically, you could prevent the speech, because it amountsto an offensive action. That's what Brown University did recentlyin expelling a student. Because almost all human actions arecapable of some meaning or some imputation of meaning, it's hard todraw a line between meaningful free speech and a meaningful act.Therefore, I think, it's foolish to throw away the distinctionbetween speech and expression. It's a difficult distinction intheory, but in practice it makes sense.

Academic FreedomAnd another distinction is needed, one between free speech andacademic freedom. The purpose of free speech is to make democraticgovernment possible. The purpose of academic freedom is to furtherinquiry. Inquiry means becoming more aware, not becoming moresensitive, and being "aware" means being open-minded to what isnew, and is reflected in a desire to learn.

Giving and taking offense is especially inappropriate to acampus. It's perhaps part of politics, but certainly not part ofinquiry. Unlimited free inquiry requires courtesy, academicetiquette. Miss Manners made this point recently, and I think verycorrectly. There should be, I think, no right to protest atuniversities. There should be, on the contrary, a duty tolisten. Universities should teach courtesy and require it oftheir students. But, of course, professors should feel free toembarrass the hell out of their students, to shame them for theirlack of knowledge. The end of education is greater awareness,greater openness, not greater sensitivity.

Education is a drawing-out, literally. It doesn't mean findingyour roots in the sense of creating your values. Those things arepre-rational. Too many students nowadays come to universities tofind out where they're coming from instead of where they're going.In education, your goal is more important than your roots.

Academic freedom is more wide-ranging than free speech; inprinciple it is unlimited. Academic freedom, for example, wouldtake up the question whether democracy is a good thing; whether allmen really have been created equal. Under a healthy regime of freespeech, these questions might be taken for granted in a liberaldemocracy.

But academic freedom also requires greater decorum than freespeech in society at large. The right to speak, therefore, must inuniversities be accompanied by the duty to listen.

Now to my third point, the curriculum and the canon. This arisesout of the question of academic freedom. The politicizers speak ofa traditional curriculum - the great books - as a "canon." Whenthey use this term they compare a university curriculum to thedecision of the Catholic Church as to what writings are theword of God. The implication is that the curriculum is anauthoritative decision in favor of certain books that uphold thepower of the decision makers. Living white males require thereading of books authored by dead white males. We should not acceptthis tendentious term, canon. It's an example of what it claims todeplore, an arbitrary and authoritative decision given withoutreason.

There's no need, I think, to defend the traditional curriculumor great books curriculum as untouchable or unchangeable. PaulCantor at the University of Virginia has recently made this point.There are perhaps great authors in our time, even in the ThirdWorld: Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie. William Faulkner, FlanneryO'Connor and

John Steinbeck are American classics, not so long in theirgraves. We should keep an open mind, examine candidates forinclusion, but on the basis of their quality, not of their PC.

There's another reason not to be so touchy about Westerncivilization: All civilization is more or less Western now. Westerncivilization is a relatively new expression, dating, I think, fromthe late 19th century, characteristic of an historical - or,rather, historicist - way of thinking. It makes it seem as if theessence of our civilization is merely its location on the globe,"west of east." The distinction between "west and east" gives ahint of the uniqueness of the West. But it's necessary, especiallynow, to be a little bit more explicit.

It's fashionable today to doubt the value of the great booksbecause they do not promote equal rights against discrimination bysex, lifestyle, and race. Another objection is that they areethnocentric, because they're Western. You can use the secondobjection against the first. In no Eastern classic will theprinciple of equal rights be found. That principle is best arguedin Western classics, authored, generally, by bourgeois whitemales.

Self-criticismLet us define "Western" as having access to the Greeks, whodiscovered philosophy and science. Philosophy and science permitall human beings who know them to be self-critical. Only in theWest does one find such a term as "ethnocentric," such a science asanthropology, or such a philosophy as relativism. Those who accusethe great books of being Western forget that their very accusationis Western. It's impossible for the great books really to reflectWestern values, because Western values are in tension. Westernphilosophy and science are opposed to Western divine revelation,custom, tradition, to whatever resists reason.

One cannot become aware of Western values without realizing thatthey present a problem, rather than furnish a solution. What booksare great is not decided by a local board of censors or by anygovernment, but by common consent of the educated over generationsand across national boundaries as to which books most memorablypose a human problem; for example, justice in Plato'sRepublic, love in Cervantes' Don Quixote.

So the authors of the great books are not agents of oppression.Authors who defend tyranny or lie for a cause soon lose theirfollowing when times change. Many of the great authors, it is true,were not revolutionaries. They were anxious to preserve thecritical stance in all circumstances, and so they did not givetheir hearts to a political ideal, but offered their criticism inthe soft voice of irony.

Indeed, the critics of the great books today are notrevolutionaries either; they merely repeat the dominant values ofour time, those of equal rights, which they often assert with thecomplacent outrage of a newspaper editorial. Such critics seem torisk nothing, neither life nor liberty nor career. In fact, ofcourse, they risk everything. When small critics try to demeanlarge ones, reason turns on itself and the principle of criticismis in danger. That principle is the only friend that equal rightshave ever had.

I recently saw Spike Lee's movie "Do the Right Thing." It's amovie that is full of thought, I was surprised to see. It ends, asyou know, with two quotations from dead black males; one fromMartin Luther King against violence, and one from Malcolm X infavor of violence. One character in the movie says, "You've alwaysgot to do the right thing." But what is the right thing? The movieends with a question mark. And that, I think, is Westerncivilization at its best. I perhaps don't share all of Spike Lee'sopinions, but he isn't politically correct, I'll hand him that.

PC at the universities is the suicide of the intellect. In theWest now we find many intellectuals who take part against theintellect. If you want an example, look at Richard Rorty in theJuly 1, 1991 New Republic. Consider his philosophy ofanti-foundationalism. There is no foundation to things discoverableby the intellect, and no foundation to the things that we believe,no reason to believe them; they're mere assertions. And being mereassertions, they're ultimately political assertions. Activatingyour intellect, using your bean, doesn't help. It doesn't changeanything. The rational merely endorses the non-rational, so theuniversity should merely endorse political views, the correctpolitical views.

The Ivory TowerSoon after I graduated from college, there was a commencementspeaker at Harvard, a famous art historian whose name was ErwinPanofsky, who gave a speech on the ivory tower. Since he was an arthistorian, he was interested in the image, and the history of theimage, of an ivory tower to represent a university. But he alsogave a defense of the ivory tower. It signifies a certain moralsuperiority based on intellectual superiority, and therefore notopen to the usual ills of moral superiority, namelyself-righteousness and intrusiveness. (It's not that professorscould do better at politics than politicians can; they can't. Butpoliticians are looking not for truth, but for power. Professorsare more naive than politicians, not out of ignorance, but becausethey're more knowing.) Now, however, the ivory tower no longerbelieves in the ivory tower, and you wouldn't hear that speech at acommencement these days. This development has a long history. It'sa phenomenon known as "post-modern."

Once upon a time, in the Renaissance, philosophers formed theidea that the intellect would reform and spread civilizationthrough an enlightenment of all mankind. The name for this came tobe "modernity." It was a great project for the relief of man'sestate, as one of the philosophers described it. Now Rousseau wasthe first modern philosopher to question that project, the firstpost-modem. Rousseau was represented in the figure of the noblesavage. The noble savage is not civilized, obviously, buthe's noble; or, rather, he's not civilized, andtherefore he's noble. Rousseau represents modern Westerncivilization in criticism of itself

Rousseau's noble savage could remind you of the multiculturalismtoday, which says that we in the West shouldn't be so proud of ourmechanical, material civilization. It destroys nature, neglectshuman creativity. But there's this difference between the noblesavage and multiculturalism: To be politically correct we dare notcall our noble savage noble, and we dare not call him a savage. Wecan't call him a savage because all civilizations are equal.There's really no such thing as civilization, no such thing asbeing civilized; there are only cultures, and being in a culture isnot the same thing as being cultivated. Cultures have replacedcivilization. You cannot call the Third World uncivilized, butalso, and for the same reason, you cannot call it noble. We wantsomething noble, but we're so far from it as to be unable topronounce the name.

But education is a noble thing. Every society has socialization,but only civilized society has education. Education is the intrepidquestioning and self-criticism of reason: only the West hasinstitutions of self-criticism. Those are our universities. Allother cultures have self-expression only. You don't need auniversity to express yourself; you can do that with an army.

So, self-criticism is our uniqueness and our special nobility.I've been trying to show that the problem of politicization and PCgoes very deep. It has to do with the rise and fall of modernity inWestern politics and Western philosophy.

Our test now is, in part, intellectual - to understand ourpredicament. But, of course, it's also practical; it's to rally indefense of our universities. The universities have to take theirhelp where they can get it, from Washington even, from theAmerican people, who have more and better appreciation of educationthan our educators. And above all, we in the universities must stirourselves; we must begin to oppose things we professors haveallowed to happen at our universities without protest. We mustn'tlet things get by that we know are wrong; we must start to raise alittle hell. We shouldn't despair, because the cause of theuniversity is the highest there is. It's up to us to give it morepower - the power to teach, the power to learn, and the power toquestion.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. is Frank G. Thomsonprofessor of government at Harvard University.

Dr. Mansfield's remarks were delivered to an audience of SalvatoriFellows at a colloquium sponsored by the Heritage Foundation onJune 26, 1991 al the University Club in Washington, D.C.

ISSN 0272-1155. 1991 by The HeritageFoundation.

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Political Correctness and the Suicide of the Intellect ...

Proud Boys versus Antifa: Who are these extremist groups clashing in Washington DC? – The France 24 Observers

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Issued on: 17/12/2020 - 20:53Modified: 17/12/2020 - 20:55

On December 12, two days before the Electoral Colleges formal vote confirming Joe Bidens presidential victory, thousands of protesters rallied in Washington DC in support of President Trumps attempts to invalidate his defeat. As night fell, violent clashes broke out on the streets between two sides known for their mutual animosity: the Proud Boys, a far-right Western chauvinist group, and Antifa, a far-left activist movement. Who are these groups, and what lies behind their repeated clashes?

The 2016 election and the controversial Trump presidency that followed sparked an increase in the visibility and popularity of fringe political groups, with two names emerging from the fray.

The Proud Boys describe themselves as a fraternal organisation promoting anti-political correctness and anti-White guilt and distance themselves from racist alt-right groups. The group was founded in 2016 following President Trumps election. Civil rights groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center have classified the Proud Boys as a hate group due to their anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric, their espousal of white nationalist ideas and their affiliations with known extremists.

Antifa, short for antifascist, is a politics or activity of radical left opposition to the far right, according to Mark Bray, historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Although Antifa isnt an organisation, but a politics that predates the Trump presidency, the emergence of alt-right groups like the Proud Boys sparked the formation of local Antifa groups to confront far-right activities through physical disruption, sometimes combining forces with activist groups like Black Lives Matter.

After clashes during high-profile events like the 2017 Charlottesville rally, the groups came to national prominence in the social movements of 2020, facing off at protests and rallies in cities like Portland and in Washington D.C. following the November election.

Brendan Gutenschwager, an independent reporter, was present at December 12s pro-Trump rally in Washington DC and recorded clashes between the groups. He tells us what he saw:

The Proud Boys had been in the city throughout the day, mostly hanging around the Freedom Plaza, the Supreme Court and the US Capitol. Their presence was meant to support the president and act as a sort of security against agitators or counter-protesters.

A Twitter video from the December 12 rally shows Proud Boys demonstrating in their signature black and yellow colours, chanting F**k Antifa and U.S.A.

As night fell, the Proud Boys stayed out in the streets, while a large group of Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters gathered a few blocks away. Both groups came prepared, some armed with weapons like mace/pepper spray and knives. The groups tried to confront each other, but police intervened, preventing a large-scale brawl.

However, some people managed to make their way over to the other side, and clashes occurred people pepper-spraying and macing each other, swinging sticks and other objects, a few stabbings at one point in one of the larger clashes.

This December 13 Twitter video shows the Proud Boys ganging up on and punching a black man, who stabbed four of his assailants in return. The Proud Boys can be heard yelling F**k Antifa; however, it is unclear if the man was a part of an Antifa group.

In their rampage through the city, the Proud Boys also tore down and set ablaze Black Lives Matter banners belonging to local churches, as seen in the video below. While the banner burned, group members laughed and chanted F**k Antifa.

Clashes aside, Dr. Bray explained that the strategies and confrontations between the groups go beyond the sensational images:

The Proud Boys, like many far-right groups, have tried to distance themselves from aspects of fascist politics that became taboo. They say theyre not racist, theyre Western chauvinists even though they dont disavow racists or white supremacists.

However, theyre still trying to harness discontent with aspects of the culture wars around feminism, queer and trans liberation movements, and what they perceive as the shaming of masculinity. They also try to present themselves as half serious, half a joke (the name Proud Boys was taken from a song in Disneys Aladdin stage musical adaptation). So the group becomes a fun space of sociability for alienated and discontented, predominantly young white men who argue that leftists cant take a joke.

A Twitter video of the December 12 pro-Trump rally shows Proud Boys members wearing yellow kilts flashing the crowd, with the message F**K ANTIFA written on their buttocks.

As for the Antifa movement, Dr. Bray said that antifascists organise to prevent the Proud Boys and other far-right groups from normalising their politics in local communities, whether it be through physical disruption or less showy tactics.

Antifascists may work to shut down events by far-right organisers by calling venue owners and encouraging them to cancel. Boycotts and physical occupation/confrontation have also been used. However, most of their work revolves around researching figures of the far right in order to organise doxxing: revealing their member identities, which increases the social cost of belonging to these groups.

Antifascists have a notion of preemptive self-defence. Even when they physically confront a far-right group, its a facet of a larger strategy to reduce the risk of attacks ever occurring.

A December 12 Twitter video shows frontline Antifa protesters, separated from pro-Trump protesters by a police line, chanting Go home Proud Boys and F**k the Proud Boys.

Confrontational tactics from both sides have caused mainstream politicians of both parties to condemn the groups. After being accused of emboldening the Proud Boys during the first presidential debate, President Trump went back on his word a few days later in a Fox News interview where he condemned the group as well as White supremacists.

Incoming President Joe Biden has condemned Antifa and the use of violence from protesters on the left and the right.

Dr. Bray says that although both sides espouse illiberal and confrontational politics, their vision of political violence differs.

The far right argues that because of the bureaucratic, liberal red tape around the state, state forces cant do their job, so they need to use militia and vigilantes to supplement this deficiency transcending law and order in order to restore it.

Antifa groups are also skeptical of the state as a vehicle for justice, so they delegitimise the police and the state and encourage self-defensive community mobilisation. Its about what kinds of violence people feel comfortable with inside or outside the state and whether they have faith in the sovereignty of the state to deal with problems or not.

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Proud Boys versus Antifa: Who are these extremist groups clashing in Washington DC? - The France 24 Observers

Priti Patel says children abused by grooming gangs were let down by the state in the name of political – The Sun

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PRITI Patel said children abused by grooming gangs were let down by the state in the name of political correctness as she vowed to tackle the problem.

There has been criticism that victims have been failed owing to fears of accusations of racism.

1

High-profile cases have involved men of mainly Pakistani ethnicity.

But the Home Secretary warned there was not enough data to draw conclusions about offenders as research focused on age and sex, rather than race.

The Sun understands the report will be used to draw up a strategy to get better evidence on how race, ethnicity and culture plays a role in abuse.

The research, commissioned by the Home Office, said most group child sex offenders were white, according to current statistics.

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Ms Patel said: Victims and survivors of group-based child sexual exploitation have told me how they were let down by the state in the name of political correctness.

"What happened to these children remains one of the biggest stains on our countrys conscience.

This paper demonstrates how difficult it has been to draw conclusions about the characteristics of offenders.

GOT a story? RING The Sun on 0207 782 4104 or WHATSAPP on 07423720250 or EMAILexclusive@the-sun.co.uk

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Priti Patel says children abused by grooming gangs were let down by the state in the name of political - The Sun

Social Justice Ideology vs. the American Credo of Natural Rights – KMJ Now

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Natural Law is the moral underpinning of all man-made law. It is an unalterable, objective, universally binding and eternally valid set of rules that can never be abrogated.

The Founding Fathers embraced the Natural Law when they agreed to these words in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creators with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Founders went on to explain that governments were instituted to secure these rights, not to grant them. The liberties of the people are natural rights precisely because, as Thomas Jefferson put it, they are a gift of God.

Based on this belief, each American is part of a whole and is bound to our society for the sake of the common good.

When acting for the common good, the state does not ignore the welfare of any person.

However, in the past century, there have been ever-growing numbers in academic and political circles that reject the Natural Law and the common good. For them, transcendent values are to be replaced by fleeting tastes; the common good displaced by raw power.

To fully understand this illiberal phenomenon, I recommend to your reading Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identityand Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.

The authors, who embrace the tenets of liberalism, including limitations on the powers of government, development of universal human rights, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion, reveal the authoritarian tendencies of the cult of social justice and critique its ideological decrees.

These Social Justice warriors, the authors point out, loathe the foundations of Western Civilization. For them, Christianity, liberalism, science and reason, are forms of oppression. They are, in effect, Post-Modernists who reject objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by nave and/or arrogantly bigoted Enlightenment thinkers. . . . They have replaced traditional religious faiths and secular ideologies with a new religion whose members worship at the altars of identity politics,political correctness,cultural relativism, and critical race theory.

For these radical sceptics, knowledge, truth or morality are culturally constructed and relative products of individual cultures, none of which possess the necessary tools or terms to evaluate the others. Hence, no Natural Law.

They also argue that it is impossible to know objective reality because truth is socially constructed through language and language games and is local to a particular culture, and knowledge functions to protect and advance the interests of the privileged.

To improve the lot of marginalized identities in the United States, the Social Justice movement is dedicated to deconstructing invisible systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.

To achieve this end, they censor language and impose a radical relativism in the form of double standards, such as assertions that only men can be sexist and only white people can be racist, and in the wholesale rejection of consistent principles of nondiscrimination.

As for the sexes, they reject biology and objective truth about men and women and hold that gender and sexuality are constructed by an unjust society.

This Social Justice movement began on college campuses. Radical professors, believing teaching is a social act, have been imposing on students their views to facilitate revolutionary political changes.

Courses in Western philosophy and literature have been discouraged or eliminated because such scholarship is complicit with systemic bigotry.

Core curriculums include diversity requirements. There are courses and departments dedicated to post-Colonial Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Feminism and Gender Studies, and Disability and Fat Studies.

Fat Studies, for instance, attempts to portray negative perceptions of obesity as akin to racism, sexism and homophobia, and it explicitly rejects science.

Students are taught that healthism and nutritionism are forms of fat hatred driven by eugenicists. The evidence that obesity harms ones health is dismissed. Obesity is likened to homosexuality and reasons that just as homosexuality has now been recognized as a natural occurring phenomenon, that does not need a cure, so too must obesity be similarly recognized.

People with Social Justice degrees have been invading government and corporate workplaces. They have been hired as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officers empowered to change a given organizations culture. These officers are the architects and enforcers of soft revolutions, they are inquisitors, seeking incidents of bias and imbalance.

Cynical Theories paints a devastating picture of Social Justice advocates. And if these crypto authoritarians are not checked, they will attain the power to betray the idea of our Republic E Pluribus Unum and strip every American of their natural rights.

George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact, and Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy. He is chairman of Aid to the Church in Need-USA. Mr. Marlin also writes for TheCatholicThing.org and the Long Island Business News. Read George J. Marlins Reports More Here.

2020 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

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Social Justice Ideology vs. the American Credo of Natural Rights - KMJ Now

Letter: Dixie State should retain name | Letters to the Editor – Daily Herald

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Dixie State should retain name

I read the article in The Daily Herald, "Utah college votes to nix Confederate-tied 'Dixie' from name" (Dec.14th issue). I personally believe the Trustees of Dixie State University made a grave mistake in voting to remove the name "Dixie" from this well-known landmark academic institution of higher learning.

I have been to St. George and it's a good 300 miles south of Salt Lake City. The name "Dixie" (at least to me) only reminded me of visions of "warm Southern-like weather," not the Confederacy of which Utah never joined. Brigham Young had his winter residence in St. George, the first completed LDS temple was completed in 1877 shortly before the death of Brigham Young.

I have prayed outside of that temple. It reminds me a lot of the Nauvoo temple. About 20 years ago, I drove to St. George and stayed at "The 7 Wives Inn," a bed and breakfast; but originally the home of a man who practiced plural-marriage. I saw the large rocks forming the word "DIXIE" as I entered the town. I was welcomed thoroughly, enjoyed my stay and although I have traveled in "The Deep South" of America, I saw no parallels between the former Confederacy and southern Utah, aside from perhaps, warm climate in winter.

To me, Dixie University should retain its name. "Dixie" is a feminine name with old English and French roots meaning "tenth." I don't think any lady named "Dixie" should change her name either, just for knee-jerk political-correctness.

-- James A. Marples, Provo

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Letter: Dixie State should retain name | Letters to the Editor - Daily Herald

Wokes, pokes, and prods – Newnan Times-Herald

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W.J. Butcher is a Coweta County resident and retired 26-year veteran of the Atlanta Police Department. Send comments, kudos, and criticism to: theprecinctpress@gmail.com .

While at APD, I always thought it important to be constantly learning about my job.

It always disappoints me to encounter people that dont expand their knowledge or enthusiasm about their occupations or life in general.

I remember shopping around for some lime for my pasture and encountered the most country speaking fertilizer salesman I had encountered in a long time. He went on to tell me if he had a dollar to spend on fertilizer or lime, he would buy lime because lime has electrical properties that could actually change the polarity of the ions, activating the nitrogen lying dormant in the soil. Shocked and amazed at his product knowledge, I shouted, Sold, buying two tons on the spot.

I am sorely lacking knowledge on pop culture and todays music for that matter. Music artists, for instance, have lost their unique sound since the days of Molly Hatchet to Brooks & Dunn. But I want to stay up to date on words that fill our airwaves.

One of pop cultures newest is the word woke. When someone is accused of being woke in my conservative circles, it always comes off sounding negative, easily outraged. It is commonly identified with radical identity politics, race-baiting, political correctness, cancel culture and virtue signaling.

First used in the 1940s, the term resurfaced as a concept symbolizing perceived awareness of social issues, most notably the Michael Brown shooting. In years past, that shooting would have the headline, A man was shot by police today. A more woke announcement goes something like, A young unarmed black man holding his hands high in the air pleading, I give up before being gunned down by a white police officer. Maybe too long for a headline, but most certainly found in the first paragraph. Woke is the slang version of Ive been sleeping all my life; now I stay woke.

I find it true that people are far too hypersensitive about common day-to-day events. Words today will get you fired. We have gone to the extent of legislating hate crime laws that tack on an extra charge and jail time if you can get into the subconscious of the suspect as to his underlying motivation or prove their mind crime. Suspects actually have to be careful what they say while they are beating you up these days.

At the police academy, we all received specialized desensitivity training about the gay life style, race relations, foreign cultures and the mentally ill community, just to name a few. The bottom line in all that education is to see various groups as human beings first with perspectives that we dont necessarily share, understand or approve of. We were ingrained with the importance of a persons right to free speech and to actually protect their right to peaceably protest. The local courts unfortunately allowed people to cuss at us (police), with judges saying, Thats all a part of the job of a police officer. But the same words said to a private citizen would be considered fighting words and the speaker charged accordingly.

Look, I have to give you permission to offend me. Sticks and stones, my Mom used to say. We all grew up tough back in the day. Weirdos, idiots and punks run their mouths, and I consider them as much. When you go around looking to criticize, shame and label everyone that doesnt agree with you with some clever catch phrase or -ism because it makes you feel superior, maybe you better get less woke and start seeing the good in people.

Now, give me a big hug, you wokester.

W.J. Butcher is a Coweta County resident and retired 26-year veteran of the Atlanta Police Department. Send comments, kudos, and criticism to: theprecinctpress@gmail.com .

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Wokes, pokes, and prods - Newnan Times-Herald

Ken Jennings will never live up to Alex Trebek’s ‘Jeopardy!’ legacy – New York Post

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Weve lost an icon. And were getting a creep.

Fans of the TV show Jeopardy! are counting down the days until just after Christmas, when the quizzer airs the final pre-recorded episode hosted by the late, great Alex Trebek, whose death in November at age 80 from pancreatic cancer broke hearts all over America and augured the end of his incredible 36-year run at the helm of what is widely considered the greatest televised game show of all time.

But the new year also ushers in the arrival of Alexs troubling interim replacement, Ken Jennings, 46, whose reign as the shows winningest contestant is clouded by a level of flippant cruelty previously unseen on a smart program that, for decades, has delivered a necessary and calming distraction during times of war, recession, social unrest and pandemic.

Jennings weird sense of humor, if you can call it that, reveals more about the guys smarmy core than it does about the vast trove of trivia to which hes devoted his days.

Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair, Jennings wrote in a disturbing 2014 tweet. The uproar over the creepy missive of six years ago might have blown over were it not for Jennings clueless and defensive 2018 response to the backlash over his insensitivity.

I never did a public flogging for this but I did apologize personally to angry/hurt people who reached out personally, Jennings started. It was a joke so inept that it meant something very different in my head [and] I regret the ableist plain reading of it.

Ableist plain reading? (Is there an ableist complicated reading?) It seems that Jennings, a man adept with the English language, chose his words carefully. He presented himself not as genuinely sorry, but as a victim of political correctness. He was asking critics to quit nit-picking. He would have been better off saying nothing.

There was more.

In 2015, after Star Wars fan Daniel Fleetwood made it a point to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens before he died of cancer, Jennings sent out this tweet poking fun at the tragedy: It cant be a good sign that every fan who has seen the new Star Wars movie died shortly thereafter. Ouch.

Three years later, he wrote that an awful MAGA grandma mourning her deceased son was his favorite person on Twitter. It was unnecessary.

And hurtful.

In contrast, Trebeks long reign as king of the quiz show in which a correct answer must be delivered in the form of a question is marked by a dearth of scandal or offense. The Canadian transplant was sassy without being raunchy. Seemingly erudite without being a snob.

The secret sauce is that he always respected his audience, never taking himself too seriously as he gave lessons each weeknight on everything from literature and nuclear fission to the Kardashians.

Though he frequently made cameo appearances in TV shows and movies, Trebek never aspired to play beyond the program he elevated with his presence. He was proud to take a seat in Americas living rooms on weeknights, a treasured part of the family.

This past January, Jennings was crowned the Greatest of All Time player on Jeopardy! He won a $1 million prize in a tournament in which he defeated other top show winners, Brad Rutter and James Holzhauer.

He may have been named the GOAT, but he is a pale imitation. Alex Trebek is the greatest human ever to orbit the Jeopardy! universe.

Too bad his successor is not someone who might live up to his legacy.

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Ken Jennings will never live up to Alex Trebek's 'Jeopardy!' legacy - New York Post

The words journalists use often reduce humans to the crimes they commit. But that’s changing. – Poynter

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Despite a growing movement towards using person-first language when describing people involved with the justice system, even progressive newsrooms that are publicly grappling with their racist history continue to use dehumanizing language when reporting on crime and justice.

Person-first language is a linguistic prescription that puts a persons humanity above other identity labels, with the intent of avoiding marginalization or dehumanization. It first gained traction in the disability rights and medical spheres, where disabilities and diagnoses were often conflated with identities. Advocates began to shy away from labels such as diabetic in favor of person with diabetes.

Person-first language has subsequently been used in many areas of society, including justice reporting. Advocates and some publications have adopted terminology such as formerly incarcerated person and justice-involved youth to replace ex-con, felon, and juvenile delinquent.

From the adoption of person-first language to shifts away from bureaucratic euphemisms, what is considered acceptable language in justice reporting is rapidly evolving. Sometimes it takes a few more words to avoid dehumanizing labels, which can feel uncomfortable for journalists who are taught to eliminate unnecessary words and to simplify their reporting. But experts agree that words have real-world consequences for both public perceptions and peoples behavior.

Advocates arent the only ones saying so. Experts from corrections and academia are sounding the alarm that language can even influence public safety.

Researchers have established a clear link between popular media representation and the perceived threat of specific groups. The superpredator myth is a prominent example of this. Used primarily as a descriptor for young Black men, the term emerged from academic literature during a period when violent crimes committed by juveniles were at a peak in the 1980s and 1990s. The term was popularized by politicians and the press and stoked public fears about violent youth roaming the streets.

But the use of stereotypes and dehumanizing descriptions in the media not only impacts how the public views people involved in the justice system; it also impacts how incarcerated individuals see themselves. Negative stereotypes of people involved in the justice system can also reinforce barriers to employment and housing, which increases the likelihood theyll return to crime.

A large body of research on labeling theory has shown that people internalize negative descriptions, which in turn can shape their behavior. As one young man we interviewed said, If you call me an animal, I will act like an animal.

In August, a Los Angeles Times headline announced that California is releasing some murderers due to COVID-19. There was an outcry from reform advocates on social media and, shortly after, the wording was changed to Amid COVID-19, California releases some inmates doing time for murder.

This example from the Los Angeles Times speaks to how the words journalists use often reduce humans to the crimes they commit. While the publication did change the headline, justice advocates say the problem was that they published it in the first place.

They moved to person-first language, but its still a headline geared towards denigrating a certain group of individuals, said Dyjuan Tatro, government affairs officer at the Bard Prison Initiative, a college-in-prison program in New York state. Tatro is formerly incarcerated and was recently featured in the PBS documentary College Behind Bars.

Los Angeles Times investigative crime writer Richard Winton said there was no major newsroom discussion of the headline in question. The second headline is a better headline, from a professional point of view, said Winton, who shared a byline on the story. It was more clear.

Descriptors are often more clear than labels. Winton said the change was likely made at the copy desk. Its also worth noting that reporters dont always write their own headlines.

The movement toward person-first language in the justice space has been an attempt to address these issues. Despite evidence indicating the benefits, there is resistance. Some equate language change to superficial pandering designed only to appease readers, not motivate substantive change. Emphasizing language usage is seen by some as performative political correctness.

In 2016, the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy research center, became one of the first organizations focused on justice to use person-first language in their own research and policy briefs. They also pushed for a report from the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections which included leading academics, bureau of prison officials, judges, and prosecutors to avoid using terms such as offender and inmate. While it took some convincing, eventually all nine members of the federal task force agreed.

The pushback came from the editorial team. Our professional writers and copy editors were freaking out, said Nancy La Vigne, director of the Urban Institutes Justice Policy Center. Its going to be too long. Its going to sound redundant. Its not going to flow.

La Vigne said she also spoke with representatives of media outlets who were concerned that person-first language would take too many words and didnt really make a difference.

Keith Woods, chief diversity officer at NPR and former dean of faculty at Poynter, said journalists have historically parroted the language of law enforcement, prosecutors and prison officials and thrown it into their journalism. Similarly, WNYC called out the media for embracing euphemisms designed by government to change the subject. They specifically targeted the passive-voice officer-involved shooting, which has taken on new relevance this year with the murder of George Floyd. The phrase was never as precise as the active voice police shot but until a recent reckoning, it was standard practice for journalists to repeat whatever bureaucratic euphemism had been used in official statements.

This has created a pattern where journalists often repeat the dehumanizing language used by the justice system and, in turn, shape public perceptions of crime and criminals. In contrast, by using humanizing language, journalists have the opportunity to more accurately depict those involved in the justice system and to portray them as complex individuals whose identities cannot be reduced to one-word labels.

Last year, proposed legislation in New York sought to amend thousands of pages of state law to replace inmate with incarcerated individual. A few state departments of corrections have also tried to adopt more neutral terminology, such as Oregon referring to its prison population as adults in custody.

John Wetzel is a senior corrections official who has publicly spoken out about the importance of shifting language. After conversations with La Vigne and others, Wetzel, who is secretary of corrections for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, has replaced offender with reentrant. As he wrote in a 2016 Washington Post editorial, the change was more than performative political correctness. As he put it, Frankly, negative labels work against the expectation of success and are inconsistent with what were trying to achieve in our corrections policy: less crime and fewer victims.

Wetzel told Poynter that officials need to use every tool available to them including language to help improve outcomes as people return to their communities. Reentry is difficult enough without negative labels, he said. I dont think there is a context when you use a pejorative term for someone that it benefits them. And to reiterate Woods point, pejorative labels from the justice system work their way into headlines.

In contrast, federal governance under the Trump administration explicitly steered its agencies away from more humanizing language; language guidance published in 2017 advised staff to avoid system-involved or justice-involved youth, and instead instructed them to refer to youth in the system, offender or at-risk youth.

Language evolution that comes from within institutions is powerful, said Adnan Khan, the formerly incarcerated executive director of the nonprofit Re:Store Justice. He said that having a corrections official champion the use of person-first language sends a stronger message than if only advocates are pushing for it. Language changes are often harbingers of culture change, he said.

Person-first language represents a new approach to justice reporting rather than a simple find and replace word substitution. It requires a fundamental shift in how we describe the people on which we report one that emphasizes describing over labeling. I would push journalists to get away from labels of any sort as much as possible and become more insistent on describing, more fully, the people theyre talking about, Woods said.

But where is the line between meaningful change and performative political correctness in language use?

Morgan Godvin, one of the authors of this article, is formerly incarcerated. She used the word inmate as a descriptor of her status while in prison, never considering its dehumanizing intent or the fact that she had a choice. Other people incarcerated with her referred to themselves as felons, criminals and convicts; these labels were stated matter-of-factly. From being shouted and cursed at by correctional officers to being referred to as a number without a name, she was never able to critically analyze language and how it was or was not enabling other mechanisms of institutional dehumanization. Nor did she consider the fact she and those around her were internalizing the language used against them.

It is commonplace for her friends to refer to themselves as felons, especially when citing barriers that are preventing their advancement. Anecdotally, she sees how this process of label internalization causes a feeling of profound resignation and hopelessness, a real-life example of labeling theory. Now having attained an education, she encourages everyone to reject the term felon and all the negative connotations that go along with it. Circumstances especially the lack of higher education in prisons will invariably affect language perceptions and usage.

This tension between how people self-identify and what is widely regarded as the most acceptable term (read: the most politically correct or, in trendier terms, woke) is not confined to person-first language. Latinx has been criticized because though it may be an inclusive term, it is rarely how people self-identify. Unfortunately, emphasizing respectful language that is both inclusive and humanizing while still being accurate and precise is relatively new territory in mainstream journalism. Journalists also want to avoid just parroting advocates.

A 2016 Marshall Project editorial confronted this topic. As journalists we tend to resist the banishing of words, especially words that are accurate, precise, and well understood, wrote Bill Keller, Marshalls founding editor-in-chief. We cringe from euphemisms that amount to badges of political correctness.

He urged descriptors over labels whenever possible. What I tell my staff is to minimize the use of labels when referring to an individual; individuals have names, and nobody should be defined solely by the worst thing he or she has done.

Still, he acknowledged that sometimes and especially within the limited space of a headline it may not be feasible.

Even within labeling, there is a spectrum of harm. Labels that convey an active state while someone is incarcerated such as prisoner and inmate are more tolerated than labels that imply permanent identity status, such as felon or convict. Woods is especially critical of identity status labels because they imply humanity is secondary. The impetus to avoid such status labels is clear when reporting on marginalized people. The use of active-state labels remains murkier and will continue to be something that journalists and society grapple with as a whole. (On a practical level, sometimes its impossible to avoid using inmate when citing official documents.)

Khan sees the adoption of humanizing language, whether by corrections officials or by journalists, as a step in the right direction. But he implored journalists to think beyond language use and into bigger questions that could influence reporting. Has the culture of the newsroom changed? Is it diverse?

Justice reporting is inextricably linked to race and racism. National statistics indicate that a disproportionate number of incarcerated people are people of color, owing to extreme racial disparities within the legal system. Racialized language has a long history of permeating journalism, especially in shaping perceptions of crime. Tatro, Bard Prison Initiatives government affairs officer, reiterated that American racism has deep roots in linguistic tropes, a timely reminder that language has never been neutral.

At a time when newsrooms across the country are reckoning with their lack of diversity, racial disparities have become a part of the conversation within newsrooms.

I think writers, especially white writers, have to realize that they are not immune from stereotypes, Tatro said. Journalists writing about these issues have to be really aware of their positionality. The way we write about individuals comes out of the way that we think about and process the world.

Veteran journalists, people with lived experience, and advocates advised journalists covering justice to center peoples humanity, strive for accuracy and precision, and not reduce people to the worst thing theyve ever done. Person-first language is not mutually exclusive with our journalistic commitment to truth-telling and accuracy.

Journalism has never had the need or even the mandate to label people, Woods said. Our job is to report what happened.

Although the immediate effect of making the switch may not be tangible, researchers, advocates, and some corrections officials say the switch is not superficial. There is a fine line between precise reporting and performative wokeness, but above all, words still matter as a first step towards changing public perceptions. As Woods put it, We can motivate substantive societal change by advocating for humanizing language.

Editors note: Morgan Godvin is a contributor to The Marshall Project. Charlotte West was a 2019 John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Justice Reporting Fellow at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Center on Media, Crime and Justice.

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The words journalists use often reduce humans to the crimes they commit. But that's changing. - Poynter

OPINION | LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Pass covid relief bill | No spine or integrity | Couldn’t say it better – Arkansas Online

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Pass covid relief bill

As an Arkansan and an American, I am outraged that Washington politicians may return home for the holidays without passing any new covid relief. For millions of Americans, this holiday season is starting to look like a nightmare.

Millions of families are struggling more than ever to put food on their tables, and 12 million renters are under threat of eviction when the eviction moratorium ends on Dec. 31. According to Moody's Analytics, the average renter will be $5,850 behind in rent and utilities by January. Some lawmakers have created a bipartisan plan to provide food and rental assistance for the next few months, but Senate leaders are blocking it. They seem perfectly content to let countless Americans fall into financial ruin and potentially even homelessness in the middle of a global pandemic.

Congressman Womack and Senators Boozman and Cotton must not leave Washington without taking action. They must work to pass a new covid bill that includes food assistance, emergency rental assistance, and an extension of the eviction moratorium. I urge everyone who believes as I do to contact our congressional offices and implore them to do the right thing. We cannot in good conscience allow our lawmakers to leave millions of Americans without food or out in the cold over this holiday season.

GAGE REED

Fayetteville

No spine or integrity

Note to the four representatives touting duck hunting in the recent guest column: How about the four of you growing enough spine and faking enough integrity to write what you four and the rest of us know to be the truth about the skunk odor emanating from the White House? Not one Republican elected to national office from this state has shown enough common decency and enough integrity to call out Trump for his denigration of us veterans and other military after we did our jobs for our country and many of us were in hospitals as a result.

As "commander-in-chief," that was as low as any of us could imagine a president stooping, and every last one of you let him get by with it. How I regard you all won't be printed in this paper.

There is much needed to be written about these gutless wonders we have going about in a self-serving manner that is a big embarrassment to those of us who remember Republicans who were both Republicans and statesmen as well.

The problem is not what we're given to read. The problem is what we have no hope of ever being given to read.

KARL HANSEN

Hensley

Couldn't say it better

Rhonda Patton of Roland, your comment Monday in letters was perfect.

KEN WYZGOSKI

Conway

Showing ignorance

First, covid-19 is a terrible disease, killing more than 300,000 people in the U.S. However, the symptom the covid illness demonstrates is our ignorance. As a society we have evolved with science and medical leaders showing and telling us how to combat this illness and hopefully minimize our losses. Instead many listen to a portion of society that believes that masks are an infringement of their rights.

A true example of this was when my wife and I voted in the past election. My wife and I got in line behind a mom and her son (who happened to be wearing MAGA hats) into the church gym, both ending up maskless. We stayed socially distanced as we meandered through the line with voting booths on our right side when a masked elderly woman on oxygen and a walker exited from her voting booth. The look on her face as she looked up at those two will be with me for a while as we backed up to allow her some space to walk behind them. As the couple arrived at voter check-in, the poll worker told them to remove their hats; they immediately asked why. She replied that there was a law against electioneering, which prompted more questions. They finally did remove their hats; the son replaced his with a rebel flag bandana. The sad part of this example is that it probably happened across most if not all Arkansas polling places.

Our elected officials are propagating this in their own misbehavior and lack of action. If Asa really cared about saving lives, he ought to start Biden's 100 days of mask-wearing mandate here in Arkansas in all public places. My current favorite unknown quote: "We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." Only this time, remaining "stupid" causes innocents to die. The societal illness is our ignorance; covid-19 is just one glaring symptom.

ANDY CONNAUGHTON

Vilonia

A new name for team

A suggested new name to consider for the Cleveland Indians that might better describe their bowing to political correctness: The Cleveland Capitulators. A rather long name, but it does seem to fit.

LYNDEL DEAN

Cabot

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OPINION | LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Pass covid relief bill | No spine or integrity | Couldn't say it better - Arkansas Online