The ACLU today: leftism and lies

In our last couple of postings, we’ve been preoccupied with the transformation of the American Civil Liberties Union from an objective defender of free speech and civil liberties into yet another partisan tool for the left. The most prominent critic of this development has been Alan Dershowitz, the high-profile – and liberal – lawyer.

Wendy Kaminer

But Dershowitz hasn’t been alone. In a June article for the Wall Street Journal, Wendy Kaminer – who, like Dershowitz, is a former ACLU board member – cited a leaked memo about the ACLU’s current guidelines for taking on free-speech cases. Under those guidelines, the organization takes into account “the potential effect” of speech limits “on marginalized communities” and the “structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur.” Kaminer shook her head over all this, arguing that such thinking amounts to “a demotion of free speech in the ACLU’s hierarchy of values.”

Megan McArdle

That wasn’t all. On June 26, the Washington Post website ran a piece by Megan McArdle headlined “The ACLU’s divided heart.” McArdle began by paying tribute to the ACLU’s history: “Born out of the prosecutions of antiwar speech during World War I, the American Civil Liberties Union has spent the succeeding decades litigating and lobbying to protect speech rights for everyone, from communists to Nazis. Without the ACLU, Americans wouldn’t have some of the most robust civil liberties in the world.” McArdle also made a point that cannot be considered anything short of vital: “If the ACLU steps back from speech cases, no other organization is ready to pick up the torch, in part because the ACLU is so synonymous with free speech that it attracts much of the donor interest and legal talent in this area.” McArdle then summed up the problematic new guidelines that Kaminer had written about in the Journal.

Nadine Strossen

One might have expected that the leaking of these guidelines to the public would have caused David Cole, the ACLU’s legal director, to miss his stride. But he didn’t. Absurdly, he insisted that these kinds of considerations had entered into decision-making at the ACLU ever since its founding. Nonsense. Nadine Strossen, a former head of the ACLU who has been especially strident lately in her pretense that it’s the same organization it always has been (see, for example, her recent turn on Dave Rubin’s podcast), also stood her ground. But Ira Glasser, Strossen’s predecessor, called B.S. on her: “To deny that this departure from free speech policy is a departure is intellectually dishonest, an Orwellian smokescreen thrown up to obscure what they are doing.” McArdle agreed: the ACLU’s politically drenched new criteria are “inimical to the very ideals the ACLU was founded to protect.” Yep.

Is George Bridges being cowed by student bullies – or covertly directing them?

Bret Weinstein

Today is the last day of our week-long virtual stay at Oregon’s Evergreen State College, the setting of one of the latest – and craziest – episodes demonstrating that student radicalism has gotten way out of hand on many campuses, representing a threat to many people’s freedom of speech and personal safety.

This week’s story of collegiate Cultural Revolution has centered on Bret Weinstein, a professor of biology at Evergreen whose refusal to cooperate with a student initiative he (quite rightly) considered racist – in this case, anti-white – led to his demonization as a racist.

Naima Niambi (Naima Lowe)

Weinstein wasn’t just targeted by students. In a two-hour interview on Dave Rubin’s widely viewed podcast, Weinstein mentioned Naima Niambi (aka Naima Lowe), a fellow professor who during at least one faculty meeting, he said, accused him point-blank of racism. When Weinstein replied calmly that somebody should look objectively into evidence of whether or not he was, in fact, racist, he was chided by the chair of the faculty, who told this this was not the time or place to defend himself from such charges. When Weinstein asked where and when he could defend himself from those charges, Niambi said that he should not expect there to be a venue for such self-defense.

George Bridges

During this entire exchange, the college provost sat silently. So did the college president, George Bridges. Now, during this week we have examined details of this story which suggest that Bridges is the very personification of cowardice, giving way to student demands with pathetic alacrity and actually issuing a statement of praise for them that appeared to break all records for sheer cravenness. But Weinstein, in his conversation with Rubin, suggested that Bridges, far from being cowed by these kids, was, along with Niambi, perhaps the real power behind their movement. But Weinstein wasn’t consistent: he alternated between depicting Bridges as having been intimidated by the students and as directing their actions.

Evergreen State College

Weinstein had more to say about Niambi. At faculty meetings, he told Rubin, she routinely insisted that there is intense racism at Evergreen, and would say “vile” things (he wasn’t clear about what things they were and whom she said them about). When she was doing making these accusations, said Weinstein, fellow faculty members would “reflexively” thank her. After the present chapter began, moreover, Niambi tweeted an explicit threat to Weinstein’s wife, Heather, also an Evergreen faculty member, suggesting that somebody do her harm. So far, Niambi (a B.A. in Africana Studies and an M.F.A. in Film and Media whose so-called academic work consists overwhelmingly of race-fixated “performances,” “exhibitions,” “installations,” and “experimental films”) has apparently received not a whisper of criticism from any college administrator for any of this.

Weinstein talked about faculty members other than Niambi, though he refrained to name names. Some of his colleagues, he noted, had openly turned on him, joining in the chorus of “racist,” either out of sheer lack of guts or for cynical careerist reasons. Others have remained publicly silent while lending him “private support,” too scared to speak out on his behalf. In other words, Evergreen – like so many U.S. college campuses today – is experiencing developments not unlike some of those that have been familiar features of totalitarian nations.

The tyranny of Evergreen’s brats

Bret Weinstein

It’s Day Four of our account of the recent madness at “progressive” Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, was tormented in late May by a radical student group for failing to take part in a “Day of Absence” that would compel white students and faculty to stay off campus for a full day. His criticism of the idea, which he considered racist, led (unsurprisingly) to charges that he was racist. It also led to student harassment of the college’s president, George Bridges, who unlike Weinstein buckled in record time, not only giving in to the students who pressured him but, as we’ve seen, praising them for pressuring him.

Evergreen State College

As we noted yesterday, one of the ways in which Weinstein responded to his demonization was by going on Dave Rubin’s highly popular podcast. As evidence of his lifelong abhorrence of racism, he recalled an event that took place thirty years ago. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, he attended a party thrown by a “wealthy Jewish fraternity” at which the members “enacted a ceremonial rape” of black female strippers using cucumbers and other such objects. Weinstein had been so appalled by this event, which he considered (among other things) profoundly racist, that he wrote a furious op-ed about it in the college paper. This led to a scandal, to a trial at which Weinstein testified, to the banning of the fraternity for a couple of years, and to Weinstein’s own temporary departure from the university, the whole experience having soured him on the place.

Dave Rubin

Since then, as Rubin noted, Weinstein had established a “track record” of fighting racism. But none of this mattered to the livid, out-of-control students who wanted his head for refusing to bend to their authority. Weinstein noted that even though he disliked the idea of compelling whites to absent themselves from campus in accordance with some student initiative (which, he explained, had been conceived of as a response to the election of Donald Trump), he might have along with it, except that, as he put it, “It’s possible that my reaction is different than it might be because I’m Jewish, and alarm bells go off when I’m told I’m not supposed to be somewhere.” Nor did he like the stipulation that any white person who actually turned up on campus on the designated day would therefore be understood to be a non-ally of people of color.

George Bridges, apparently in one of those staged college PR photos

When he circulated a letter complaining, in careful, tactful terms, about this demand, Weinstein was besieged. A group of students materialized out a classroom in which he was teaching and chanted, “Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Bret Weinstein has got to go.” When he tried to talk to them, they told him to resign. When he expressed the opinion that students of color were not being “targeted” at Evergreen, some students erupted in rage. One girl called him “useless” and told him to “get the fuck out.” When he tried to reason with them and elevate the level of the conversation, he was mocked and insulted. “Resign!” one boy insisted.

More tomorrow.

George Bridges: caving in to student terror?

Evergreen State College

This is our third day of recounting the remarkable recent events at Evergreen State College, an institution in Oregon with which we at this site were previously unfamiliar but that acquaintances of ours have described as a choice school for spoiled, privileged kids who are used to being pampered, who don’t want a particularly challenging university experience, and who don’t have very much in the way of serious ambitions. In late May, as we’ve noted, Evergreen made headlines because of the targeting by a vicious student group of a biology professor, Bret Weinstein, who refused to comply with an explicitly black-supremacist demand. After failing to intimidate Weinstein, the student agitators threw themselves at the college president, George Bridges, who proved to be, shall we say, remarkably cooperative.

Among the student demands met by Bridges: he agreed to make the position of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Officer a full-time job. But he didn’t just cave in to a litany of demands. He actually praised the students:

George Bridges

We are grateful to the courageous students who have voiced their concerns. We understand that the demands presented are evolving. We have worked intensely on this in the past two days. Our responses, too, will evolve to ensure we are attending to the needs you present. Our documents must live and be living, changing with additional issues and concerns as they arise. This work never ends.

We have heard from students very clearly that they experience racism on campus that interferes with their education. We acknowledge that the status quo isn’t acceptable. We don’t know all the answers. We want to come together with you to learn from your experience, to build solutions, and to take action. We are grateful for this catalyst to expedite the work to which we are jointly committed.

For a long time, we’ve been working on the concerns you’ve raised and acknowledge that our results have fallen short. We should have done more to engage students in our work on equity and inclusion. This week, you are inviting us into the struggle you have taken up. We share your goals and together we can reach them.

While most of the mainstream media ignored the story – and Bret Weinstein was widely savaged on the left for going on Fox News (even though it was apparently the only national news operation that was interested in talking to him) – Weinstein didn’t let himself be cowed. On May 30, he went on Dave Rubin’s highly popular podcast and spoke for two hours not just about this controversy but about his professional and personal background, many aspects of which underscored the absurdity of labeling him a racist.

More tomorrow.