Promising vaccine trials

The New Neo Posted on by

We could use some encouraging news, and I think this qualifies:

The researchers are calling their experimental vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AZD1222). It combines genetic material from the coronavirus with a modified adenovirus that is known to cause infections in chimpanzees. The phase one trial had more than 1,000 participants in people ages 18 to 55.

The researchers said the vaccine produced antibodies and killer T-cells to combat the infection that lasted at least two months. Neutralizing antibodies, which scientists believe is important to gain protection against the virus, were detected in participants. The T-cell response did not increase with a second dose of the vaccine, they said, which is consistent with other vaccines of this kind.

“The immune system has two ways of finding and attacking pathogens — antibody and T cell responses,” Oxford professor Andrew Pollard said in a release. “This vaccine is intended to induce both…”

For quite a few months, I’ve noticed a lot of skepticism on both left and right about the possibility of developing an effective vaccine. And I mean a lot of skepticism. The criticisms range from general distrust of anything medical – the “evil big pharma” approach – to specific objections that we’ve never been able to develop a vaccine for a coronavirus.

I’m not in either camp. I actually think that for the most part vaccines work and that the companies who develop them are trying very hard to make them safe, and that although they don’t always succeed, they usually do. The potential problem I see with the COVID vaccine development might be inordinate speed, but I also understand why that’s happening, as well.

As for the argument about never having had a coronavirus vaccine before, I don’t see that as a stumbling block either. Here’s the way it’s sometimes stated (the quote’s from about two months ago):

According to [Dr. Bhattacharya’s] assessment, a vaccine is an open-ended question. None of the other coronaviruses that infect humans have one and there is no guarantee this one will.

Technically true but also misleading. Coronaviruses have mainly caused two types of illness. The first is akin to the common cold (also caused by rhinoviruses). Vaccine development is expensive and laborious, and to develop one for colds has never been cost-effective because there are just way too many strains of virus and types of virus involved, and the illness itself is not dangerous. The second type of illness caused by coronavirus in the past has been of the SARS/MERS variety. Scientists were in the process of developing vaccines, but before they got to the final states the viruses petered out and it was no longer cost-effective (or even possible, considering how uncommon the viruses had become in the population) to continue with the development of the vaccines.

That doesn’t mean we’ll have a COVID vaccine soon; there may be stumbling blocks ahead. But it does mean there’s no reason to think we won’t have one – unless the illness becomes so infrequent that testing can’t effectively go on, or wouldn’t be worth the expense. I don’t think I’d weep if that were to happen.

Is it time for the Gods of the Copybook Headings to return?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or perhaps they already have.

I’ve written before about how a course I took in college on Russian Intellectual History stopped me from joining the left in the late 60s. Here’s an excerpt:

It was there I learned – without anyone ever telling me directly – that in the 60s we were reliving those long-past Russian years in a somewhat altered, Americanized form. No, my generation was not unique; that was clear. No, we were not inventing something that had never been tried, going down some wonderful path that had never been trod. We were going somewhere that in the past had led to nothing good.

I could see it for myself; all I had to do was read, and think. If we don’t learn history we are indeed condemned to repeat it. And even if we do learn it, we may be condemned to repeat it anyway.

I’ve thought of that course again lately, for obvious reasons – the parallels are there. One of the many books we had to read and discuss was Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, about the intergenerational conflict between the generations. And that exists today, too.

Lo and behold, here’s a professor with similar thoughts to mine on that score, and who even uses the same book as example (although he apparently hates the right and Trump; he’s got a very fully developed case of TDS).

And that, in turn, puts me in mind of Rudyard Kipling’s chilling poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headlines.” Copybook headings were a now-defunct pedagogical tool by which a student learned both penmanship and maxims for wise living, two subjects which seem to have been cast aside in recent decades:

The “copybook headings” to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, often drawn from sermons and scripture extolling virtue and wisdom, that were printed at the top of the pages of copybooks, special notebooks used by 19th-century British school-children. The students had to copy the maxims repeatedly, by hand, down the page. The exercise was thought to serve simultaneously as a form of moral education and penmanship practice.

Kipling wrote the poem right about World War I, that searing experience that is considered to have been the birth of the modern age, and which brought with it much cynicism and despair:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

I called the poem “chilling” and I meant it literally. I have never been able to read it without the hair on my body standing on end in fear and dread.

[NOTE: The next-to-last verse, which I consider most powerful, draws on this Biblical reference:

“As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” is an aphorism which appears in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible — Proverbs 26:11, also partially quoted in the New Testament, 2 Peter 2:22. It means that fools are stubbornly inflexible and this is illustrated with the repulsive simile of the dog that eats its vomit again, even though this may be poisonous…

In Proverbs, the “fool” represents a person lacking moral behavior or discipline, and the “wise” represents someone who behaves carefully and righteously. The modern association of these words with intellectual capacity is not in the original context.]

Senator Hawley takes a page out of Alinsky and asks the Democrats to live up to Rule #4

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s Alinsky’s Rule 4? “”Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

Even though the Democrats are historically the party of slavery (some would argue it’s the party of ideological slavery today, and I don’t disagree), and the Republicans are historically the anti-slavery party, one of the weird facts of modern life is that this has gotten turned around in many people’s minds. And these days, through mechanisms such as the 1619 Project and the anti-racist movement, the Democrats have been pushing the idea that America was founded on slavery and that it is still very active in our mental lives.

And so it’s certainly of interest that GOP Senator Josh Hawley is pointing out an inconvenient truth, and asking the Democrats to join him in challenging the modern-day slave labor used by China and through which many American companies profit:

The [press release from Hawley] also reminds us, “At least 80 global companies have been tied to forced Uighur labor in China, from sportswear companies like Nike, Adidas, and Puma to tech giants like Lenovo and Samsung.”…

Hawley’s bill — aimed liked a laser at both Communist China and our own “progressive” big businesses — calls the Left to account while rallying patriots sick of getting ripped off by China.

It will be interesting to see whether this bill gets anywhere.

Although other news has tended to eclipse Spygate…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and although I believe that is partly (or mostly) by design, what happened in connection with Russiagate/Spygate is nevertheless extremely dangerous and unconscionable, and should raise alarms with every American.

I know, I know; fat chance.

But here’s more on what went down:

Conald Trump was president for only 24 hours when then-FBI supervisor Peter Strzok sent an angry missive to his boss. A colleague had given the new White House a counterintelligence briefing and hadn’t consulted on how to use the meeting to further the Russia collusion investigation…

“I am angry that Jen did not at least cc: me, as my branch has pending investigative matters there,” Strzok added in his email to Assistant Director for Counterintelligence William Priestap. “This brief may play into our investigative strategy, and I would like the ability to have visibility and provide thoughts/counsel to you in advance of the briefing…

The email exchanges — and others like it made public on Friday — have shocked veteran intelligence experts, who told Just the News that any effort to use official briefings of the president and his White House to spy, investigate or gather information violated the necessary trust for keeping a president apprised of intelligence in a dangerous world.

“It’s unbelievable this kind of stuff was going on,” said Fred Fleitz, a longtime intelligence analyst…”He has to be able to ask difficult questions. You want him and his aides to ask hypotheticals during the briefings as they get up to speed. But if those questions are going to be leaked back to investigators, the president is not going to talk to the experts.”

Fleitz said the new memos show that Obama-era holdovers in the FBI and Justice Department have “used every element of the domestic intelligence services to destroy this president.”

And all of this was despite the fact that the FBI already knew at that point that there was no there there in terms of the dossier and Michael Flynn. They weren’t going to let a few little things like that deflect them from their goal of destruction.

I am so tired of evidence like this mounting and mounting and mounting and being utterly ignored by everyone who isn’t already on the right. That’s every bit as shocking as the actions themselves – at least, it was when it first began to be revealed. It’s no longer shocking at all, really. That’s how far we’ve slid down the slippery slope.

[Hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin.]

[NOTE: Much more here.]

Murder in New Jersey

The New Neo Posted on by

And no ordinary murder, either.

Last night a terrible and heartbreaking story emerged: the family of Esther Salas, a federal judge in New Jersey, was attacked. Her 20-year-old son was killed and her husband gravely wounded. It seemed to be a hit job, perhaps connected with her work.

Then again, some people were pointing out that if there was a hit man who wanted to get the judge, why leave her alive? One answer – that killing her son and leaving her husband for dead may have been even worse torment than killing the judge herself – made a certain amount of sense. But perhaps the husband was the target.

Nothing was clear except that a heinous crime had been committed.

Now we get the news that the suspected killer is alleged to have been neither a disgruntled client of the husband (a defense lawyer), nor a party to a case in which the judge had ruled or was going to rule, but another lawyer.

And that he has killed himself:

Authorities believe an attorney found dead in New York Monday was the shooter who killed a New Jersey federal judge’s son and wounded her husband a day earlier, law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case tell News 4.

The body, identified by sources as a Roy Den Hollander, was found on a property in the Sullivan County town of Rockland, near Liberty, which is in the New York Catskills. One senior law enforcement official says authorities are looking into whether there was a package or envelope addressed to the judge found near Den Hollander, who may have died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds…

They are also investigating whether a gun found at the scene matches the one used to kill Judge Esther Salas’ son and wound her husband, law enforcement sources say.

Den Hollander is a notorious “men’s rights” attorney, whose vitriolic website and book condemn women in rage-filled terms. In one of his books, he specifically blasted Salas by name as “lazy and incompetent.”…

Authorities are also looking into whether Den Hollander is related to the July 11 death of a well-known men’s rights activist in California.

If this is all accurate, it sounds like an unhinged person with a grudge rather than some sort of hit job by a more organized group. However, no doubt conspiracy theorists will differ.

It’s not the same old song

The New Neo Posted on by

Canadian sparrows have changed their tune:

A new bird song is spreading like wildfire among Canadian white-throated sparrows, at a scale not seen before by scientists.

Birds rarely change their chirpy little tunes, and when they do, it’s typically limited to the local environment, where slight song variants basically become regional dialects. New research published today in Current Biology describes an extraordinary exception to this rule, in which a novel song sung by white-throated sparrows is spreading across Canada at an unprecedented rate. What’s more, the new song appears to be replacing the pre-existing melody, which dates as far back as the 1960s…

Traditionally, white-throated sparrows in western and central Canada sing a song distinguished by its three-note ending. The new song, which likely started off as a regional dialect at some point between 1960 and 2000, features a distinctive two-note ending, and it’s taking the sparrow community by storm. What makes the new ending so viral is a mystery to the study authors, led by Ken Otter from the University of Northern British Columbia.

Sparrows learn the songs from other birds, so it is possible for songs to change in this way. The whole thing is rather mysterious, because scientists don’t think the new song has any particular survival benefit. So perhaps the birds just prefer novelty after a while? This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either, because each bird probably only sings one song per lifetime, although there may be a transitional generation that adopts the new tune because of the need for a change.

The whole thing reminds me – of course! – of a sonnet by Robert Frost:

NEVER AGAIN WOULD BIRD’S SONG BE THE SAME

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds’ song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

Old terrorists don’t die, they just go Gramscian

The New Neo Posted on by

And here we are, in a tremendous mess, according to Andrew C. McCarthy. Few on the right would disagree.

I’ve been writing about the Gramscian march through education for well over a decade. Others have been writing for longer. It didn’t stop it from happening; that would have taken an enormous and more widespread consciousness of the problem and action to change things before they got out of control.

When Barack Obama was running for office, I became particularly alarmed about his friendship with Bill Ayers. That was twelve years ago and in some ways it seems as though it was even longer ago. I refer you back to these old posts of mine about Bill Ayers and his influence, as well as this one that links in turn to this City-Journal article by Sol Stern, written in 2006:

Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools.

It hadn’t occurred to Ayers that an ed-school professor could speak or write as an authentic American radical…

Greene told future teachers that they could help change this bleak landscape by developing a “transformative” vision of social justice and democracy in their classrooms. Her vision, though, was a far cry from the democratic optimism of the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., which most parents would endorse. Instead, critical pedagogy theorists nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K–12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus Maxine Greene urged teachers not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.

And so, indeed, they did (the “they” includes Ayers’ wife Bernadine Dohrn, among others I’ve chronicled here) – with greater success than perhaps even they could have imagined, but with the sort of success of which they must have dreamed. It’s not as though the public wasn’t warned, and not just by Sol Stern (or by me). It’s that not all that many people heard the news, and of the ones who did (and I include myself in that group), it wasn’t all that clear what to do about it.

Their influence had started during the 80s – although actually, that was just Ayers and his generation, and the problem had started long long before. But at that point the scope of it was still relatively small. It grew to reach critical mass over time, and has burst forth in the ugliness we see today. Now, nearly everyone is aware, but as with the pod people in some dystopian science fiction film, it’s not at all clear it can be stopped.

The Floyd/Chauvin transcript and what it reveals

The New Neo Posted on by

Till last night I hadn’t realized that a transcript of the police interactions with George Floyd had already been released over a week ago. I would have thought it would have created a far bigger stir than it did, and with an enormous amount of discussion.

Perhaps the coverage was relatively muted because both Floyd and Chauvin – as human beings – have now been largely eclipsed by the reactions that their encounter generated (or for which their encounter was used as an excuse). I feel confident in saying that if their paths hadn’t crossed on that fateful day and in that fatal way, something else would have sparked the conflagration we’ve seen for the last month and a half. That “something” might not have been quite as visually powerful as the Floyd video, but another spark would nevertheless have been found.

But the Chauvin/Floyd visuals were exceptionally useful to the left as a whole and to Black Lives Matter and Antifa in particular. Since the release of the video, I have heard nearly every commentater, and seen nearly every writer, assert some version of “Chauvin was a cold-blooded murderer.” Sometimes it’s “Chauvin was a racist cold-blooded murderer.” And often they add that the video is unequivocal on that score, and that anyone who watches it and doesn’t come to that conclusion is also sadly deficient in reasoning power and empathy.

But I’ve never said that, because I know that videos can give the appearance of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but they can also lead to a false kind of certainty. In a trial they are not enough. And in this case there was (and remains) a lot of missing information.

One piece of important missing information is what transpired between the police apprehending Floyd and his lying on the ground, the life ebbing out of him. Why was he on the ground in the first place, for example? For that and several other important questions, we now have an answer – or at least, a lot more information than we had before. Continue reading →

I probably haven’t watched anything on CBS since Rathergate…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and even prior to that, I don’t think I had watched them for several decades. I watch very little network TV and not much TV at all.

I suppose somebody does, though. And now this:

For those of you not up-to-date on current nomenclature, BIPOC means “black, indigenous, and people of color.” “People of color” is my favorite because it’s most elastic. It includes tons of people who look exactly like me, but it doesn’t include me.

I sometimes wonder whether the people who are into this sort of thing – the left, that is – have fully taken into consideration what this constant and utter emphasis on race does. Could it not backfire on them? I doubt that using a racial bean counter approach to hiring writers, for example, is especially likely to lead to an improvement in the shows that CBS produces and therefore in their audience share. I think, though, that the policy is merely meant to signal some sort of goodwill on the part of CBS, a message to the crocodile that says “please eat me last.”

Until now, only a vanishingly small number of people in America who are in fact defined as “white” thought of themselves as part of a group called “white.” But this constant carping on race, combined with the blaming of whites for nearly everything wrong with America and the world, could certainly have the effect of calling forth a feeling of white consciousness and white victimhood. Does the left really want that to happen?

My answer is “perhaps.” Perhaps they see it as a plus, particularly if some skinheads decide to get violent one day. That would give the left even more ammunition for their campaign about how evil white people are. I don’t know, though. It would depend what form it all took.

The odd thing – or perhaps it’s the ironic thing – is that it seems to me that a lot of the people on the left driving this are white rather than black. A great many black people are upset that they are losing police protection and that violence in their communities has increased rather than decreased (see this, for example). But the leftists in charge really don’t care. The black people who are trying to tell them to stop have lives that truly don’t matter to the left, except as far as they can be used as propaganda to further the cause.

We get too soon old and too late smart

The New Neo Posted on by

It occurs to me, not for the first time, that the older a person is the more historical context that person has for any event. Except for the rare youthful history buff, most young people have little background knowledge to help them process and/or understand current events.

Santayana, anyone? Here’s the whole quote:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

[NOTE: The title of this post is not, of course, from Santayana. It’s a Pennsylvania Dutch proverb.

A must-read interview with Glenn Loury on race and equality

The New Neo Posted on by

I wish everyone in America would read it, but alas, that will not happen.

Highly recommended. As you read the interview, now and then you may notice the influence of Thomas Sowell, if you’re familiar with his work on what he calls Cosmic Justice.

Both Sowell and Loury are black, and both are (in Sowell’s case “were”) economics professors. Loury is in his early 70s and Sowell just turned 90. Here’s an excerpt from the Loury interview:

I happen to be suspicious about the assertion of authority based upon personal identity, such as being black. Let’s take this example. Were the actions we’ve all seen of the police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, expressions of racial hatred? I happen to think that we have no reason to suppose that about him, absent further evidence. There are plenty of alternative explanations for his actions that could be given, from negligence to him just being a mean son of a bitch…

You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying, “you’re not black.”…How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? How much weight should my declarations in such an argument carry, based on my blackness? What is blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social-class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in housing projects, too. There are lots of different life experiences.

I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative-authority move when it’s played. It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute.

Please read the whole thing. And send the link out to others if you like it.

The left will not allow you to abstain from the anti-racist (that is, new sort of racist) movement

The New Neo Posted on by

Professor William Jacobson reports from the frontlines at Cornell:

The new activism surrounding race is completely at odds with the traditional goals of the civil rights movement — that all people be treated with dignity and afforded the protections of our laws without regard to race…

Not being racist is not enough. One must be “antiracist,” a term famously used in the book “How to Be An Antiracist,” suggested summer reading by Cornell University’s President Martha Pollack:

“As a campus community, we have a collective responsibility to engage in difficult but critical conversations – to listen genuinely to, and learn from, one another. To help bring focus to these conversations, I invite all of you to participate in a Community Book Read of “How to Be an Antiracist,” by National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi. We will soon provide all students, faculty, and staff with information about how to access an electronic copy of the book, along with a schedule of virtual discussions which will take place over the summer. I hope you will choose to read the book and to join in the conversation.”

President Pollack has additional “suggestions” for the Faculty Senate at Cornell to take up ASAP (apparently, Cornell is such a hotbed of racism that there can be no delay):

Development of a new set of programs focusing on the history of race, racism and colonialism in the United States, designed to ensure understanding of how inherited social and historical forces have shaped our society today, and how they affect interactions inside and outside of our classrooms, laboratories and studios. All faculty would be expected to participate in this programming and follow-on discussions in their departments. The programs would complement our existing anti-bias programs for faculty, such as those from the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity, the Cornell Interactive Theatre Ensemble, Intergroup Dialogue Programs for Faculty, and the Faculty Institute for Diversity…

Launch an institution-wide, themed semester, during which our campus community will focus on issues of racism in the U.S. through relevant readings and discussions.

I like the use of that word “expected” for faculty. Not required, of course; just “expected.” And if you refuse – well, that’s a nice little job you had there you, you RACIST! Because anyone who is anti the anti-racist program – which is the most utterly racist thing I’ve seen since Governor Wallace stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama in that year of ancient memory 1963 – is of course a racist.

The left used to be against loyalty oaths, as I recall. That’s ancient history. In fact, anyone in favor of free speech was against loyalty oaths. Ancient history as well.

Speaking of ancient history:

The Levering Act was a law enacted by the U.S. state of California in 1950. It required state employees to subscribe to a loyalty oath that specifically disavowed radical beliefs. It was aimed in particular at employees of the University of California. in January 1950, 750 faculty members had approved a resolution to oppose the university’s regents and create a committee to coordinate legal action against the university should an oath be required. Several teachers resigned in protest or lost their positions when they refused to sign the loyalty oath…In August 1950, the regents fired 31 faculty members who refused to sign the oath. Those who were terminated sued, and by 1952 had been rehired when the university declined to pursue its case against them in court.

At least, back then loyalty oaths merely required swearing that the person wasn’t a member of certain radical groups. Now, loyalty oaths require that people actively teach and promote racist theories designed to (among other things) foster racism, this time against white people.

Ah, how far we’ve come!

By the way, this was the oath the Levering Act was requiring back in 1950, as a result of Cold War fears of Soviet infiltration (justified, I might add):

do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of my office according to the best of my ability; that I do not believe in, and I am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government, by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means, that I am not a member of the Communist Party or under any oath or a party to any agreement or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath.

I’m not in favor of loyalty oaths. Among other things, people such as Communists, who are actually working to destroy the US as we know it, can just plain lie. Oaths mean very little to them. I also really do favor free speech. If a university hires a Communist or anarchist (and it sometimes seems these days that universities hire nothing but) I’d like to know upfront that’s what we’re dealing with.