The aims of leftist labeling and censoring of conservative pundits as extremists

The New Neo Posted on by

For a while, the phenomenon of leftist censorship of the right concentrated on potential speakers at college campuses. The mechanisms were boycotts, demonstrations, disruptions, and demands that they not be allowed to speak there at all because it was too disturbing, because it was hate speech, because they were fascists and bigots, and because people would be triggered—the whole panoply of accusations from leftist activists.

Lately, de-platforming and/or de-monetizing from various social media and internet sites such as YouTube is all the rage, and it’s driven not so much by students at a particular university but by those who control the sites. In the buildup to the 2020 election,this seems more important than ever.

Regarding YouTube:

On [June 5], YouTube announced a sweeping ban on all content it deems “hateful” or “supremacist,” resulting in a reported “thousands” of channels being shut down. The announcement came the same day that YouTube demonetized conservative comedian Steven Crowder — one of the most popular independent content creators on the platform — after a writer for Vox complained that he had repeatedly mocked him for his identity…

“YouTube has always had rules of the road, including a longstanding policy against hate speech,” the company announced Wednesday in a statement. “Today, we’re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.”…

But conservatives have noted a pattern by YouTube, along with other dominate social media platforms, of focusing mostly on voices from the right —and often lumping in mainstream conservatives with the far-right. Among those blasting YouTube over ideological bias is outspoken conservative Dana Loesch, who declared the progressives pushing for deplatforming as “the modern day book burners.”…

“YouTube’s statement on [Steven Crowder]: OK, we admit he didn’t violate our standards, but people were mad at us, so we just backfilled a rationale for demonetizing him with Orwellian doublespeak,” [Ben] Shapiro tweeted Wednesday. “This is essentially YouTube admitting that they exercised the heckler’s veto. They can’t point to how [Crowder] broke their rules, so they just made up new rules based on the fact that a bunch of people whined to them.”

Here’s what Andrew Klavan has to say about the phenomenon:

On Sunday, just as YouTube was threatening to pull down thousands of “hateful” (i.e. conservative) videos, The New York Times printed a breathless and idiotic piece supposedly charting a YouTube viewer’s descent into right-wing radicalism…

This suspiciously timed piece — clearly designed to give cover to YouTube’s censorship plan — featured a collage of faces of right-wing radicals. These included such raving hate-filled alt-right evil-doers as mild-mannered gay centrist Dave Rubin and of course Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro — whom various left-wing outlets have repeatedly identified as the one and only orthodox Jewish Nazi in all the universes!

But while branding Dave and Ben alt-right may be absurd, it’s not unintentional. It is part of a strategy. 1. Convince people that hate speech should be silenced. 2. Define hate speech as alt-right. 3. Label powerful mainstream conservatives “alt-right.” 4. Silence powerful mainstream conservatives…

…[A]s 2020 approaches and Trump continues to expose our corrupt press and reach the people, panic is beginning to set in and the next phase of Operation Don’t Speak is in play: a massive and collusive move to define mainstream right-wing speech as hateful and shut it down.

There’s another point that is a bit more subtle. Once a news outlet or a periodical or a pundit gets labeled as extreme right-wing or alt-right, and therefore (fill in the blanks) a purveyor of hate speech, a racist, a bigot, a religious zealot, a wild and crazy conspiracy theorist, etc., then even if that person isn’t actually blocked by the site, the hope is that people will react to the labeling itself by shunning that person’s work.

So one of the goals isn’t just actual blocking by the sites, but a de facto censorship by the individual consumer, in which people refuse to listen or read the work of a certain person because it’s been labeled extreme and hateful. Why waste time reading the work of someone bigoted or crazy or stupid? Don’t you have better things to do with your time?

That way it’s easy to keep the maximum number of people insulated and protected from any ideas on the right that are factually and logically correct and might even persuade a person to change a long-held idea—or, in some cases (such as that of left-to-right political changers) to change one’s mind politically in a more fundamental way. That’s why it’s even more important to label the more moderate, thoughtful conservatives as extreme and offensive than the ones who actually are extreme and offensive, because an open-minded reader or listener will probably be able to find out and decide on his/her own which pundits and writers really are extreme and offensive, and which ones are making good points. It’s that latter group the left and the MSM is most afraid of—the ones who could change the opinions of a lot of people, if they were to be given a forum and listened to with an open mind.

A favorite course at Oberlin…

The New Neo Posted on by

…appears to be Shoplifting 101. It goes a ways towards explaining some of the elements of the Gibson Bakery case.

And before you get too shocked by the seemingly high rate of shoplifting committed by Oberlin students, it appears they’re not atypical of society as a whole. Shoplifting is rampant in the US. And it’s done equally by men and women, and is not just the province of teens—75% of shoplifters are adults.

What’s more, there’s this:

Shoplifters are usually poor and/or uneducated? Not so fast. A 2008 study by Columbia University concluded that shoplifting was actually more prevalent among people with higher education and income, which made them conclude there were more psychological factors and less financial motivation that made people steal.

One of the items people steal most often (not at Oberlin, but in general)? Chewing gum.

And in 17th Century England, shoplifting was punishable by death. It certainly didn’t stop the phenomenon.

Franco Zeffirelli has died at 96

The New Neo Posted on by

Franco Zeffirelli died Saturday at the venerable age of 96. But to me, he was and always will be the director of the 1968 film “Romeo and Juliet,” a movie that breathed extraordinary life into Shakespeare. The sweep, color, costumes, music, and pageantry were wonderfully matched—and even bested—by the youthful energy and passion of its astoundingly gorgeous and age-appropriate leads, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting.

Zeffirelli accomplished a great deal more in his life—including a stint fighting with partisans during WWII. But if he never did another thing but “Romeo and Juliet”, that achievement still would have been more than enough to have made him a great director.

I wrote about the film previously, here. An excerpt:

…[W]hen I saw the Zeffirelli film version of “Romeo and Juliet,” I marveled at the [meeting] scene as it was acted out with suitable hand gestures (oh, so that’s the way it works!) by the achingly-young Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. If you’ve never seen that film, please take a look. Yes, it was roundly criticized for leaving at least half the play on the cutting-room floor and changing a few of the more archaic words here and there. And for including nakedness (as I recall, a rear shot of Romeo during the post-wedding rendezvous in Juliet’s bedroom). And for casting unknown actors who were so young they lacked the requisite Shakespearean gravitas.

But for me, the film made the play come alive. You believed they loved each other. You believed their desperation. And in the death scenes, you could not help but cry at the waste of these two beautiful young lives.

Here’s their meeting scene:

And here they are, close to fifty years later, talking about the film and the director:

RIP, Franco Zeffirelli. And thanks.

Happy Father’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Friendship: who needs it?

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading this Althouse thread about friendship, I was struck by a few things, particularly in the comments.

There seem to be some rather sharp divides between groups of people on the nature and value of friendship. There are the loners, some of whom seem proud that they don’t want or need friends (they’re not “people who need people), versus those who freely admit to relying on and valuing friends and being sad when they don’t have enough of them.

I’m one of the latter group; friendship is very important to me.

Another divide is between those who prefer light friendships based on fun and activities, and those who need to be able to confide in their friends about the deeper things in life and are eager to give emotional support and get it.

I value and feel the need for both kinds of friends, and the best friends of all are those rarer ones who combine the two functions.

Does this reflect—at least somewhat—a natural man/woman divide? Perhaps. It’s not a strict divide, to be sure, but I think a sexual differentiation is probably at least a tendency.

There’s also the issue of how to end a friendship when it’s played out, and how to decide when that’s happened. I tend to hang on, for several reasons. The first is that I think friends can be important even if there are many flaws in the relationship, especially if the friend is one I’ve had for a long time. There’s something to be said for a shared and lengthy history—people who knew me when, who knew my parents and my old boyfriends, and who can understand my references to all those things. I don’t require some sort of perfection in friendships, or anything close to it.

That may be in part because I’ve lost some good, true friends because they died. That’s extraordinary painful for me, and I don’t have all that many friends to spare any more. What do they say about old age—there are no enemies, only survivors?

Some people see getting older as a chance to pare down, not just possessions but friendships as well, and to keep only the essential. That’s not my philosophy on people, although I’m trying to do it with the possessions. Of course I haven’t stayed in touch with every friend I’ve ever had; there’s a kind of natural attrition that does occur, and not just from death. But I don’t drop friends for capricious or trivial reasons,and certainly not previously good friends.

And if I ever were to drop a really good friend, I don’t think I’d do it by ghosting—that is, not calling or writing, and if the person tries to get in touch, not returning calls or responding to emails. I think that’s a cowardly way to do it, although it happens that way more and more these days. If the friendship ever meant anything, if you respect the past friendship, I think you owe it to that person to explain, even if the explanation is just something like “sorry, but I think we’ve grown apart and even though we were good friends in the past it just doesn’t seem to be that way anymore.” Acknowledge what’s happening, so they’re not left to wonder and to feel completely abandoned. And don’t tell yourself that the feeling of wanting to end the friendship is actually mutual, just in order to save yourself the trouble of making the break explicit.

My template for friendship seems to be my parents, who had a ton of friends. I couldn’t even begin to count how many, but probably a hundred good friends and hundreds more who were casual friends. They kept in touch, too—but it was easier because my parents and most of their friends had been born in the same community and lived there for virtually all their lives. They were a crowd of friends, and they had a lot of fun, too. They liked to get together in groups, to dance, play cards, and talk, talk, talk.

I suppose that sort of thing still exists in some places, but I’ve never been part of a community like that, and I think it’s far more rare now in general than it used to be.

Legalizing marijuana has not ended the black market

The New Neo Posted on by

Au contraire:

Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level—legalize the drug everywhere, advocates suggest, and the black market will go away. But California’s experience suggests otherwise. The state’s pot market has struggled because illegal growers are undercutting the price of legal weed, which must account for the cost of a license, taxes on sales, and the financial burdens of complying with state health regulations. As a result, legal growers want the state to step up enforcement against illegal operations. “We are the taxpayers. No one else should be operating,” one licensed grower told the New York Times. A big problem, officials note, is that growers who are reluctant to go legal, with all the attendant costs and procedures, don’t disappear—they just continue doing business the old way. As a result, production of illegal pot is increasing.

The law of unintended consequences seems to be at work.

And there’s a reason it’s hard for authorities in California to crack down on the illegal pot industry—yes, you guessed it; it’s SJWs, Jake:

Complicating the issue is that legalization was sold to voters as a social-justice imperative, to stop the war on drugs in minority communities. California officials say that they’re reluctant to crack down on the black market because that would represent a return to heightened enforcement in minority communities.

Addiction is a huge factor in homelessness

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of articles on homelessness focus on factors such as unaffordable housing, and zoning laws that make it hard to build in certain cities. Weather’s certainly important, too, as well as permissive laws that make living in tent encampments on the streets non-actionable.

But an enormous factor in homelessness is addition to drugs such as fentanyl:

Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl…For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder.

The obvious question is how do all these addicted homeless people find the money to support their habits? The obvious answer:

…[T]he average heavy-opioid user consumes $1,834 in drugs per month…West Coast cities are seeing a crime spike associated with homeless opioid addicts.

The article goes on to point out that if a city would deal with its growing homeless population it needs to stop denying the enormity and centrality of the drug problems of the homeless. But many West Coast cities are engaged in such minimizing.

But even if those in charge of these cities were to freely acknowledge the scope of the problem, it’s not as though we know how to treat drug addiction with enormous success, particularly in this population, which also has high degrees of mental illness, and alcoholism as well.

I have to say it’s a tremendously depressing situation. I ordinarily go to the West Coast at least once a year, and it’s disturbing and painful to see what’s happened there, and extraordinarily difficult to even think of a solution that might actually work. But it seems to me that the first step is not closing our eyes to the reality, and yet that’s what appears to be happening to a great extent.

Here’s a brave person

The New Neo Posted on by

As part of the series of #WalkAway videos on YouTube, here is a trans woman who discovered a lot about the left when she decided to voice the idea that maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump wasn’t the devil incarnate. She ended up Walking Away, and here is part of her story (I’ve cued it up for what I consider to be the most interesting section, which is just a couple of minutes long):

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is leaving

The New Neo Posted on by

Too bad, although understandable. Talk about stressful jobs! I thought she was one of the better press secretaries.

Sanders held the job of press secretary under Trump for nearly two years. That’s a long time in this day and age, when under constant harassment from the Trump-haters.

“Remember: for the left, all politics is personal,” Higgins responded, adding that there was an effort to “delegitimize” Sanders’ voice as well as other female figures who support or work for Trump.

“It basically tells you that it’s OK to treat people who disagree with you with disdain and contempt and sort of write them out of the picture,” she said. “And that’s all driven by a very different worldview of who we are as people and what to expect.”

By the way, today is Trump’s birthday. He turns 73. By the standards of today’s politics—what a young’un!

And by the way, when I Googled “Trump birthday” just now to get a link, I had to scroll down quite a bit to find one that wasn’t mocking him or berating him.

The latest media hysteria about Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

You can read about it here as well as here and here.

From the latter:

As Trump told Stephanopoulos, there is nothing wrong with listening to information that anyone, foreign or domestic, might have that is relevant to a presidential candidate. But what is blindingly obvious, yet absent from every Democratic Party news account feigning horror at the ABC interview, is that the Hillary Clinton campaign didn’t just receive “foreign dirt” on the Trump campaign. It paid for foreign sources to fabricate lies about Trump, which it then disseminated to the press. Listen to “foreign dirt”? The Clinton campaign paid for it!

This is just one more example of why no sensible person takes “news” sources like the Washington Post seriously.

Ah, but many people must not be sensible then, and I seem to know an awful lot of them.

I sometimes feel I ought to write something about every single brouhaha that takes center stage for a day and then fades away. And sometimes I do add my 2 cents into the mix. But sometimes I just shrug and think that, unless I have something at least somewhat clever or insightful to contribute, why bother? Because the repetitiveness and the trivia of it all wearies me.

And yet these things do matter. I don’t dismiss them, because the media still affects and influences a great many people. Most people are not new junkies. Most people just read headlines or the first paragraph of a story, or listen to it for a moment or two with half an ear while double-tasking. The MSM knows that, and they know that they can influence people by the steady drumbeat of negative news and analysis. And they do.

Oberlin will fight the Gibson verdict

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I just learned that Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, who’s been following this story in-depth from the start, will be on Tucker Carlson’s show tonight at 8 PM ET to discuss the Oberlin judgment.]

Oberlin says the Gibson award isn’t the end, and it’s not even the beginning of the end, it’s just the end of the beginning (apologies to Churchill):

The President of Oberlin College, Carmen Twillie Ambar, just sent this blast email:

Dear Members of the Oberlin Community,

By now many of you will have heard about the latest development in the Gibson’s Bakery lawsuit, a jury’s declaration of punitive damages against Oberlin. Let me be absolutely clear: This is not the final outcome. This is, in fact, just one step along the way of what may turn out to be a lengthy and complex legal process. I want to assure you that none of this will sway us from our core values. It will not distract, deter, or materially harm our educational mission, for today’s students or for generations to come…

We are disappointed in the jury’s decisions and the fragmentary and sometimes distorted public discussion of this case. But we respect the integrity of the jury, and we value our relationship with the town and region that are our home. We will learn from this lawsuit as we build a stronger relationship with our neighbors.

I doubt it.

I also was struck by this phrase: “It will not distract, deter, or materially harm our educational mission, for today’s students or for generations to come.” The “educational mission” of Oberlin and many many other colleges today, in fact the majority of them, has become the indoctrination of America into leftism.

Oh, they have other missions, to be sure. To raise money. To give a lot of administrators and professors a livelihood among simpatico others in an atmosphere of culture. And yes, to impart some information to its students about things such as literature, science, and history, along with the leftist ideological slant that pervades everything.

The email burns with its own outraged self-righteousness and a bit of fake humility at the end. Oberlin, like many colleges set in towns that are not entirely of the same mind or demographics as the denizens of the school, has a town/gown problem that has seemingly escalated, and administrators have become aware of the fact that there might be negative consequences to the college itself when townies [* see NOTE below] are harmed by something the college has done. It behooves Oberlin the school to make nice to Oberlin the town to avoid future incidents spilling over in a way that can negatively impact their bottom line.

Do I sound cynical about this? If so, that’s because I am.

I also think that Oberlin will be successful on appeal in getting the award reduced, and that it will end up being just a little bump in the road for the college. The award itself won’t hurt enough. What will hurt more—if it occurs—is a big drop in enrollment in the future.

[* NOTE: Re “townies”—that was the word typically used when I was of college age, long long ago. I haven’t checked with the PC police to see if that’s still an okay word to use; is it?]