How Liberal Censorship Works

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a documentary focusing on the struggle of moderate Muslims to battle the forces of Islamofascist extremists would be a natural for PBS’s “America at a Crossroads” series.

But you would be wrong.

PBS has decided that the documentary “Islam vs. Islamists” produced by a group including conservative defense advocate Frank Gaffney, Jr. was too extreme and too one-sided to be shown on PBS.    

In other words, a documentary that compellingly portrays what happens to moderate Muslims when they dare to speak up for and participate in democracy, thus defying the Islamists and their champions, is not fit for public airwaves — even in a series specifically created to bring alternative perspectives to their audience.

Not that that ever worried PBS when they had a lefty documentary to show.

And that was the least of it.  PBS also:

• Tried to get Gaffney removed as an executive producer for the show
• Allowed “a series producer with family ties to a British Islamist to insist on sweeping changes to its "structure and context" that would have assured more favorable treatment of those portrayed vilifying and, in some cases, threatening our anti-Islamist protagonists.” 
• Hired, as an advisor to select the documentary films, an admirer of the Nation of Islam—which gets money from the Saudis to set up black Wahhabi mosques.  But this Saudi assistance is a feature of Gaffney’s documentary.  Talk about a conflict of interest.

More interesting than the he-said-she-said accusations is the bigger issue.  What exactly do these liberals think they are doing by covering for radical Islam?

Maybe it’s because that’s what liberals do for a living.  You identify a victim class worthy of support by compassionate and enlightened people.  Then you defend it from mainstream America—which all enlightened people know is racist and bigoted.

Up to now this approach to politics has worked a treat for liberals.  Over the last century they have successively identified workers, blacks, women, gays, illegal aliens as helpless victims.  Then they translated support for these victim groups into political power.  Hey, if it works...

But you wonder if that liberals haven’t gone a bridge to far by cozying up to radical Islam.

Let's Abolish Adolescence

Did you know?  They don’t have adolescence in most societies.  At some point children go through a coming-of-age ritual and they become adults.

Now Robert Epstein in The Case Against Adolescence argues that we should abolish adolescence.  Instapundit Glenn Reynolds is interested. 

Epstein’s new book argues that adolescence is an artificial and unnecessary part of life that people are better off without.

An argument against adolescence is made also by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption. Harris asks why we are throwing teenagers together in adolescent-only institutions like high school and college if we want them to conform to our adult culture.

By herding teenagers together we allow them to achieve strategic concentration and combine against us.

There are additional links on Epstein’s book here and here.

We at Road to the Middle Class are all in favor of adultifying teenagers, for a number of reasons.

The advocates of the welfare state have insistent that their compulsory education and child labor laws were all for the children.

But underneath the mask of concern is a reality of self-interest.  Ever since government education got started the educationists always want to extend the period of compulsory education.

And labor unions have an obvious interest in making the low-wage competition of teenagers illegal.

The thing is: parents and children should have the right to control their own destinies, and not be ordered around by government experts.

Remember, adult literacy in the United States has not changed in the 150 years since the dawn of compulsory government education of children.  What does that tell you?

Freeman Dyson: Optimistic Rebel

Physicist Freeman Dyson makes a cameo appearance in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins takes him to task for accepting an award from the pro-Christian Templeton Foundation. Dawkins makes it clear that organizations like the Templeton Foundation should be named and shamed. They should not be allowed to appropriate the authority of an eminent physicist.

Now Freeman Dyson has a book out, The Scientist as Rebel, and he talks to Benny Peiser at TCSDaily.

Asked about the growing pressure on scientists to follow the “scientific consensus,” he replies:

Certainly the growing rigidity of scientific organizations is a real and serious problem. I like to remind young scientists of examples in the recent past when people without paper qualifications made great contributions.

For instance there’s the mule-driver who ended up as astronomer and second-in-command to Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory.

But don’t worry about the future, Dyson advises.

Amateurs and small companies will have a growing role in the future of science. This will compensate for the increasing bureaucratization of the big organizations. Bright young people will start their own companies and do their own science.

Then he talks about a new development in genetic science, a gene sequence called Human Accelerated Region 1.

In “the genomes of mouse, rat, chicken and chimpanzee” it is strictly preserved. But in the human genome it “appears grossly modified with eighteen mutations.” What is going on here?

And get this. He attributes the current gloom-and-doom mood to the British class system. No, not the division between the bosses and the workers. We are talking about the class war in the middle class!

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.

Yes. Margaret Thatcher, grocer’s daughter. There must be some mistake!

And the worst of it is that the British welfare state, the only child of the academic middle class, is self-destructing as we speak.

Go on. Read the whole thing!

John Edwards' Two Americas

Conservatives and Republicans like to go to bed at night secure in the knowledge that liberals are not the sensitive compassionate people of a thousand puff pieces but snobs and rich bitches.  And not just that but mean and stingy, as Arthur C. Brooks suggests in his Who Really Cares.

But our objective media seldom satisfy our deepest yearning.

Which is odd, when you think about it.  Imagine the circulation potential in “liberal hypocrite” stories!

But at last we have hit pay dirt. We have Elizabeth Edwards and the “rabid, rabid Republican” story.  And it couldn’t be better.

Now Leah Friedman of the Chapel Hill News & Observer has been to see Monty Johnson, the rabid, gun-toting neighbor of the high-flying, presidential campaigning Edwards family.

"I’d just like to know why she has such hard feelings to me," he said. "They say they’re for poor people."

Monty, according to the story, is a 55-year-old retired landscape gardener, and when reporter Friedman caught up with him he was on his way home with a cooler full of catfish. 

What got his goat, he says, was Edwards’ calling his 42-acre property "slummy."

Actually, you could make a reasonable argument that when the ambulance-chasing lawyers move in it is they who are lowering the tone of the neighborhood.

Anyway, the Edwards won’t have Monty Johnson around much longer.  Edwards has his “slummy” property up for sale.  And he’s open to offers from the Edwards.  No hard feelings in that department.

But Johnson would like an apology.

Liberal Censorship! Oh No!

In the age of talk radio it has become much more difficult to bury egregious examples of liberal censorship.

It’s always been a major national problem.  But hitherto the power of the mainstream media meant that liberals could always squash anything that made them looke like the bad guys. 

Liberals are all in favor of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable as long as no liberal oxen are gored.  But you’d better not try afflicting comfortable liberals!

So now PBS has “censored” a documentary piece about moderate Muslims versus the extremists because, as Jennifer Harper reports:

the film would "demonize Islam" and promote public fear of Islamic organizations.

Of course, conservative super-hawk Frank Gaffney Jr. of the Center for Security Policy is associated with the film “Islam vs. Islamists,” and that is bound to promote public fear—among liberals, anyway. 

But think of all the liberal documentaries down the ages that have demonized people.  Think of the granddaddy of them all, CBS’s “Harvest of Shame” back in the 1960s.  Think of how that landmark documentary demonized farmers and promoted public fear of farming organizations.

And what about all those helpless Southern racists demonized by documentaries about civil rights?

Of course, it’s perfectly OK to run features demonizing Wal-Mart, or the notorious right-wing militia movement.  That’s different.  Why, Wal-Mart is in danger of promoting public fear of high prices.  And that would never do.

But the biggest problem in the United States was unearthed by Bolce and De Maio in The Public Interest years ago.  Liberals hate Christian fundamentalists.  They hate them with a passion that Bolce and De Maio measured using generally accepted social science interview techniques. 

So PBS should really be worrying about documentary films that demonize Christians and that encourage secular liberals in their dangerous anti-religious bigotry.  Because much of what passes for liberal journalism promotes public fear of the ordinary evangelical Christians next door.

A Liberal Mourns His Favorite Republican

Just what was it about John McCain that liberals loved so much?  Was it because he ran against the Republican Party base in 2000?  The way columnist E.J. Dionne remembers it:

He spoke out too forcefully in 2000 for campaign finance reform and against "the demands of big-money special interests." He condemned the "self-appointed" leaders of conservative groups — a rather influential constituency — and singled out Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "the agents of intolerance."

Really?  McCain is against big-money special interests?  No kidding! First I’ve heard of it.  I imagine that he’d also be against incumbent protection acts.

Yet everything that “right-wingers” loathed about McCain is “what his party most needs now.”

His reform enthusiasms stand as the perfect antidote to the corruption of the past Republican Congress.

It’s telling, isn’t it.  Dionne’s idea of a good Republican is one that would make the party take its medicine.

But Dionne has got it wrong.  We folk in the Republican base don’t like McCain because we don’t like his truckling to the liberal media.  We don’t like his attack on the First Amendment.  We don’t like his corporative approach to commerce.  We don’t like his government-comes-first approach to tax cuts.

And we don’t like him joining the liberal linebackers piling onto Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. 

The liberal half of this nation has a serious problem with anti-religious bigotry.  The last thing the nation needs is presidential candidates taking pot-shots at religious leaders—even if many of them are just as flawed as our political leaders.

The Social Work Bullies at Missouri State

This would be funny if it weren’t so sad. The president of Missouri State University, Michael T. Nietzel, recently publicized a report on the university’s School of Social Work, saying that the report was “as negative a review of an academic program as I have ever seen.”

In the report, according to Anne D. Neal,

the external auditors describe a “toxic environment” in which students are bullied, discriminated against because of their faith, and coerced “into certain belief systems regarding social work practice and the social work profession.”

 Don’t be too quick to blame the school, writes Neal.  What about the accrediting agency, the Council on Social Work Education?

Policy Section 4.2 requires that CSWE-accredited programs “integrate social and economic justice content grounded in an understanding of distributive justice, human and civil rights, and the global interconnections of oppression.” 

Yes, a highly academic approach to the concept and practice of social work.

But let us read between the lines.  Who are the students likely to be studying at the MSU School of Social Work?  Not white males, obviously.  And probably not to many white females, either.  Social Work lacks the prestige it enjoyed a couple of generations ago. 

No.  What you can expect is that most of the students in a modern School of Social Work will be minority females.

And that is who the thugs of the bullying class are coercing.

There’s a temptation for conservatives to take the Leninist line about all this.  What do we care about nasty goings on in the nether regions of the liberal bureaucracy?  The worse the better.

But it won’t do.  Because the thugs of the bullying class are beating up on our fellow Americans.  And conservatives just don’t like that.

We want all Americans to be free and independent, even the dupes and the victims of the bullying class, even people who will never vote for a conservative or a Republican in their lives.

A liberal, they say, is someone who wants to be paid to help people.  A social worker, apparently, is someone who demands to be paid to bully people.