{"id":10877,"date":"2015-08-10T06:51:11","date_gmt":"2015-08-10T11:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10877"},"modified":"2015-08-10T06:51:11","modified_gmt":"2015-08-10T11:51:11","slug":"liberals-and-the-new-mccarthyism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10877","title":{"rendered":"Liberals and the New McCarthyism"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/08\/10\/liberals-and-the-new-mccarthyism\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Liberals and the New McCarthyism<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>It\u2019s easy enough, some sixty years after the fact, for us to cluck our tongues at the cowardice and stupidity of those who went along with McCarthyism. It\u2019s especially easy for liberals and academics to say that had they been alive back then,\u00a0<em>they<\/em>\u00a0would certainly have had the courage to stand up for discourse and to stand up for those being blacklisted. That\u2019s partly because universities like to present themselves as bastions of free thought and discourse, where students, faculty, and guests discuss the most important issues of the day. Liberal academics especially like to present themselves as encouraging of these discussions.<\/p>\n<p>Bullshit.<\/p>\n<p>A new McCarthyism\u2014complete with blacklisting\u2014has overtaken universities, and discourse in general, and far from opposing it, liberal academics are its most active and ardent perpetrators, demanding a hegemony of thought and discourse that rivals the original.<\/p>\n<p>For the past decade or so, deplatforming\u2014the disinvitation of a speaker at the insistence of a special interest group\u2014and blacklisting have been, to use the word of an organization that tracks the erosion of academic freedom through the increased use of deplatforming, \u201cexploding.\u201d Between 2002 and 2013, disinvitations from universities went up six times. And no longer are the primary blacklisters the capitalists (as was the case in the 1950s) or the pro-Israel lobby (as it has been for the past few decades). The pro-Israel lobby is still blacklisting like mad, but it\u2019s been overtaken these days in the anti-free-speech sweepstakes by those who often consider themselves the brave heirs of Mario Savio: the liberals and leftists. And the targets of the liberals and leftists are not confined to the right (although they do certainly target right-wingers as well).\u00a0<span class=\"Apple-style-span\">Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges was recently deplatformed because he speaks out against prostitution as exploitative of women. Only outcry by women forced the college to reinstate him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Liberals and the New McCarthyism It\u2019s easy enough, some sixty years after the fact, for us to cluck our tongues at the cowardice and stupidity of those who went along with McCarthyism. It\u2019s especially easy for liberals and academics to say that had they been alive back then,\u00a0they\u00a0would certainly have had the courage to stand [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3313,4997,7972,5493,7973,7974,6214,7970,7971],"class_list":["post-10877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-academia","tag-blacklisting","tag-colleges","tag-counterpunch","tag-deplatforming","tag-hegemony-of-thought","tag-liberal","tag-mccarthyism","tag-new-mccarthyism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10878,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10877\/revisions\/10878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}