If you are even remotely interested in campus speech and debates about critical race theory, cancel culture etc. this is essential listening.
TLDR: the language may have changed slightly, but we already had this debate in the 1990s podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/you…
Key elements of the 1990s moral panic about political correctness hold today:
*unrepresentative and misleading anecdotes ✅
*conservatives and powerful portraying themselves as victims✅
*donor-funded conservative setting the narrative for mainstream media✅
*Dines D'Souza✅
The biggest difference between the 1990s PC moral panic and today is that the attacks on campus are no longer rhetorical; conservative legislators are more comfortable using state power to act on this nonsense, praising free speech while shutting it down
This is not to say that legislators in the 1990s saw themselves as above the fray - but my sense is there is not the same wave of copycat legislation where the take control of governance of campus speech that we see today.
If it were me, and my political career included a scandal about using a tax-funded private plane for trips as short as 24 miles, I would simply avoid connecting the topics of "politicians", "private planes" and "hypocrisy" urbanmilwaukee.com/2018/08/23/op-…
On the other hand, Walker's post gubernatorial career is full of such conflicts:
He took money to complain that Dems are seeking unfair redistricting packages when he oversaw possibly the worst gerrymander in the United States politico.com/story/2019/03/…
The easiest way to understand the trend toward the criminalization of protest is that the Republican Party has grown increasingly comfortable in using state power to tamp down dissent - in other words it has become more authoritarian. 2/ washingtonpost.com/business/2020/…
Apart from criminalizing protest, some other salient measures of current GOP authoritarianism:
*unwillingness to punish actual attacks on democracy
*seeking to overturn elections
*constraining voting rights
*state policing dissenting speech at universities and schools
Not quite ready for those who will proclaim the verdict to be a miscarriage of justice, but you know it's coming and you know why they will say it.
You, a fool: Hmm - the carceral state maintains structures of power by using state resources to target historically marginalized groups.
Michael Tracey, a genius: actually the carceral state is any punishment of state actors who murder members of marginalized groups.
None of these clout chasers are going to come out and say that it's ok to murder someone in broad daylight. No, no. They are just concerned about due process in the criminal justice system. About media coverage being fair. Thats all it is.
FL, where the state:
*has made it easy to turn protest against police action into a felony conviction, which will cause protestors to lose voting rights
*the police instruct you how to vote
*you can't talk about this in a classroom because critical race theory is banned
FL, where the state (ok, really the GOP):
*overrode a referendum that saw two-thirds of the public say former felons should get voting rights back but God forbid you talk about race and power in a classroom
If you are a faculty in a university, a proposed new law will survey your political beliefs, and encourage students to record you what you say. The state is narrowing, policing and in some cases criminalizing dissent against abuses of state power.
This is really great: USCIS is seeking public input on how to minimize administrative burdens for immigrants. Please share widely! federalregister.gov/documents/2021…
If you've been paying any attention to immigration over the last few years, you know the Trump admin has been using administrative barriers to make even legal processes impossible to access. See, for example, work by @crampellwashingtonpost.com/opinions/lette…
See also this piece by @stillsarita: While the Trump admin emphasized the need for legal immigration, they did everything they could to shut down those legal processes under a mountain of red tape. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…
Journalism is partly about framing what is and is not important. We have some journalists who have made a whole beat on stories of excess campus wokeness, but its hard to think of anyone who has done the same on stories of state power policing campus speech, which are more impt
There are journalists who report on, for example, bills that restrict speech on campus, but who do not see their job as critiquing them. And there are some academics who try to make sense of these trends and explain the risks to free speech, e.g.
Some opinion people will write on this topic occasionally, but it's not their main beat, e.g. @michelleinbklyn@zackbeauchamp. But there isn't a whole cohort of writers/podcasters on the topic of state threats to campus speech in the way there is for the anti-wokeness brigade.