“Free speech” is a favored cause for the right wing, but they don’t really believe in it: it’s a sound bite, a meme, a tool they can use to silence others. The latest example comes from Niall Ferguson, you know, this Niall Ferguson, the well known academic whose views are so totally suppressed by PC culture:
Ferguson himself is well-known for his conservative views. He made headlines in March for organizing a conference of 30 white male historians.
…
In 2013, for instance, he stated that acclaimed economist John Maynard Keynes did not care to consider future generations when discussing current affairs because he was gay. Ferguson later apologized for the statement.
He has also been criticized for his outspoken support of colonialism and the British empire.
We must have missed him in the bloody purge of right-wing assholes from university campuses. That happened, right? Anyway, he was an advisor to some abomination called the Hoover Institute, the conservative think-tank with an endowment of almost half a billion dollars and the mission of spreading capitalist propaganda on college campuses; he also has connections to Turning Point USA, which has the same mission, buckets of money, and a reputation for brain-dead stupidity that ought to persuade any kind of respectable academic to avoid them.
But not Niall Ferguson!
Even worse, some of his private emails were leaked — they were accidentally forwarded to someone not in his trusted circle of wingnut associates — and it’s been revealed that he and various organizations on the Stanford campus weren’t really interested in promoting the free discussion of controversial ideas. It was all about baiting their ideological opposition and crushing their left-wing critics.
As The Stanford Daily reported on Thursday, newly public emails show that Ferguson’s eagerness to fight off what he saw as encroaching political correctness led the historian to some bizarre extracurricular activity. Ferguson teamed up with a group of student Republicans, led by John Rice-Cameron, to wage a covert political battle against Michael Ocon, a student they viewed as excessively left-wing. In the e-mails they refer to Ocon as “Mr. O” and talk about ways to discredit him. “Some opposition research on Mr. O might also be worthwhile,” Ferguson wrote. Ferguson’s research assistant Max Minshull was tasked with the job of collecting the dirt on Ocon.
“Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee,” Ferguson wrote in another email. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” Rice-Cameron, the son of Barack Obama’s former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, was equally grandiose. “Slowly, we will continue to crush the Left’s will to resist, as they will crack under pressure,” Rice-Cameron crowed in an email, showing he has a great future ahead of him doing Darth Vader cosplay.
Further, it was clear that they brought in the repulsive Charles Murray simply to piss off the campus left. The whole charade is an exercise in antagonism — this is why the Murrays and the Dinesh D’Souzas and the Ann Coulters still thrive on the right. It’s not because they bring in fresh insights and challenge conventional ideas — they are the tired old hatreds of the status quo — but because they are good at inflaming and posturing and aggravating with lies. We should be aware of exactly what they are doing.
It’s a kind of power game. The goal isn’t to vindicate the abstract right to free speech but to assert the right’s power and influence over campus discourse — to force the campus mainstream into a choice between allowing vile ideas to spread or looking hostile to free speech.
The Ferguson emails are an unusually clear admission that this is what’s going on. Digging up dirt on a student in an attempt to silence their activism isn’t about “free speech” — it’s about suppressing left-wing speech. The entire framing of the Cardinal Conversations in the emails positions the initiative, which Ferguson ran, as part of a broader war on “the Left” and “SJWs.”
You know, I’ve been part of many conversations over the years about who should be invited to give campus talks — I’ve never heard anyone suggest that we ought to bring in X because they’d set the College Republicans on fire, or crush the Right. We invest in speakers who have stimulating ideas and good stories to tell. When we factor in the response of the reactionary right at all, it’s to suggest that Speaker X might help them learn.
I can’t imagine suggesting that we need to do “opposition research” on individual students at the university. There are some terrible people enrolled at any school, but all we have to do is wait for them to do something stupid in public (although we’d rather they didn’t, and just wised up). But I guess if you’re a professor with appointments at Stanford and Oxford you don’t have to be a responsible educator anymore.
Since I am old enough to remember Richard Nixon, I thought this has been mainstream Republikan modus operandi since before Reagan? Only, they did not have email.
That explains the April 22 Stanford news release
The Hoover Institute is a mixed bag of serious scholarship (it does have a very good archive) and conservative think tank. The latter is far quieter than in the Reagan era when the then director of Hoover had an open and ongoing quarrel with the president of the university.
This is just factually wrong.
1. Keynes was bisexual. He married a woman and lived with her for decades until he died.
He had no children but it might well have been not because he didn’t want any, but because of a medical condition of his wife.
Wikipedia The union was happy, with biographer Peter Clarke writing that the marriage gave Keynes “a new focus, a new emotional stability and a sheer delight of which he never wearied”.[37][166] Lydia became pregnant in 1927 but miscarried.[37]
2. It’s an ad hominem attack, a simple minded fallacy thousands of years old.
Whether Keynes was gay, straight, asexual, bi, trans etc. with 0 or 10 children has zero bearing on whether his academic economics works were valid.
3. There is no evidence that LGBTQ people and people without children have any less interest in the future than anyone else.***
For a Stanford and Oxford academic, this is very substandard thinking.
Explain for me again, why white males are the smartest people in the room.
***3. There is no evidence that LGBTQ people and people without children have any less interest in the future than anyone else.
The current group trading short term gains for long term losses is the GOP. Those tax cuts aren’t going to pay for themselves.
They will drive up the deficits and the National Debt.
And they will make fighting the next recession harder.
You are supposed to cut taxes during a recession not at the top of a boom era.
When the next recession does hit, cutting already too low taxes is going to be difficult or impossible.
This will make the next recession longer and deeper.
It’s the same with the tariffs and trade wars.
The last time we did that, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, they made the Great Depression worse.
And didn’t last long and were repealed by Franklin Roosevelt.
Trump might well economically hurt Canada, Mexico, the EU, and China.
They might well hurt us back in their defense.
It’s a global economy whether he likes it or not.
FWIW, Niall Ferguson is wrong about Keynesian economics as well.
1. Right wingnuts hate Keynesian economics for some reason.
2. They favor supply side economics.
Which fail every time they get the chance to apply them.
That is what happened with Brownback in Kansas, in Wisconsin, etc..
That failed for Bush and will fail for Trump.
3. Keynesian economics has stood the test of time and is the
current favored theory.
With modifications of course, the world changes and economic theories change and grow with time.
PS Niall Ferguson leaves Stanford role after ordering ‘opposition research’ on a student in free speech row
Hmm, looks like he got that wrong as well.
Quite a record of being wrong here.
Raven @3,
Ferguson’s claim about Maynard Keynes is clearly in response to his famous quote, “In the long run we are all dead.” However, the quote doesn’t express a lack of caring about the future. The quote is in response to economists who make predictions about the market in equilibrium. Keynes points out that the market may never reach equilibrium in our lifetimes. Keynes wasn’t saying that we shouldn’t care about the future, he was saying that we should care about the present.
The idea that queerness is about rejecting the future actually has some presence in queer theory. But there’s really no reason to attribute that view to Keynes.
In my many years involved in atheist student groups, I’m trying to think if there was ever a time when we talked about getting a speaker just to piss off our opponents. It’s so bizarre to even think about it. Like, do you even stand for anything, or are you just being pointlessly contrarian at that point?
I guess the closest thing was when we idly discussed getting Sam Harris. Some people were saying, but he’s a terrible person, and one defense was, we may not agree with him but he would definitely bring attention to our group (and I would have to agree). Not that getting Sam Harris was ever remotely feasible, the guy charges exorbitant speaker fees.
I just spent a few minutes reading the Amazon.com summary.
It looks like gibberish written by a crackpot.
The claim, or theory, or hypothesis, that LGBTQ people are less concerned for the future than straight people, is a factual claim that can be tested by collecting data.
That science and reality thing.
I know of no data that supports that.
I even put some terms into Google and didn’t come up with anything.
At this point it is the usual. As assertion without proof or data that may be dismissed without proof or data.
It’s up to those making the claim to provide the proof, data, or evidence.
@Raven:
The point is not whether there is data, it’s whether is sounds right to a small prejudiced semi-rational simple mind: If you’re gay, you won’t have kids. And if you won’t have kids, you won’t think of the future.
Straight line, non-complex, non-empathetic, conservative.
Raven @8,
Lee Edelman is one of the foundational authors in queer theory, and Wikipedia lists him between Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam. I think the idea makes a little more sense than you’re giving it credit for, although I’m not particularly interested in defending it. I heard of him because someone I know was assigned to read that book a class… and was complaining about it.
I just find it funny that Niall Ferguson inadvertently endorsed an idea from critical theory.
And even that is wrong.
Quite a few LGBTQ people have….children.
It’s 17% for same sex couples.
and
According to census.gov, 2 to 3.7 million children have an LGBTQ parent.
Census.gov says there are 10.7 million LGBTG people in the USA.
A simple minded calculation says roughly 25% of LGBTQ’s have had a child.
****************************************************************************
And BTW, the vast majority of childless people in the USA are…straight heterosexuals!!!
For women, lifetime childlessness in the USA is 15%.
Wikipedia voluntary childlessness
“The proportion of childlessness among women aged 40-44 was 10% in 1976, reached a high of 20% in 2005, then declined to 15% in 2014.”
Also covered on Pervert Justice.
Fergusson and his conservative clique actively discussed preventing progressives from being heard, in a couple different contexts. They were, to use a phrase, engaged in the very “no platforming” which they happily decry in other contexts where public discussions about “is this speaker worth our time and resources” include opinions that some conservative speakers aren’t actually worth a university’s time and resources. But for Fergusson, open discussion of university resources and the desirability of certain speakers is unethical while schemes to actually act “intimidating” toward all people with views he doesn’t like is the height of morality.
:puke:
Well, okay. But that requires assuming that all QTs*1 are single parents of a single child, partnered with a straight person and having only one child, or partnered with another QT and having 2 children between them. Another simple minded calculation says that the percentage is down around 3% if most of the QTs that have children were members of Quiverfull before coming out and thus the QTs that do have children have an average of 10 children each.
I’ll take the previous estimate of 17%, as outdated as it may be.
==============
*1: Yes, it stands for “Queer folk & Trans folk” but say it out loud. : )
I’m hoping that Michael Ocon and other like-minded students will band together and fight back as hard as they can. They should try to bring in progressive speakers to counter the regressive ones. They should loudly call the campus conservatives out when the conservatives lie and cheat. They should talk to the administration about potential consequences when the right wingers try to pull shit like what Ferguson and his cronies were doing.
The right talks about the need for free speech while scheming to suppress those who don’t agree with them. We need to expose these frauds for what they are.
+1 to emergence’s comment.
When we factor in the response of the reactionary right at all, it’s to suggest that Speaker X might help them learn.
See, that is one of the many things that piss them off. I mean, how dare you?
Hmm… <quote> didn’t work. :(
It’s “blockquote” in angle brackets around these parts.
I registered to leave this comment, because I have been wanting to put this on the Internet for a long time. Not having children may actually mean that you care about ALL children equally rather than just your own. It may actually be a good thing. Because sometimes having your own children may mean you will want to maximise their chances at happiness, success, wealth, at the expense of everyone else’s children. I know I would (be tempted to).
Sounds just like the alt-right position to me.
“…outspoken support of …. the British [E]mpire”
As a some-time Briton who was born a mere one hundred and ten miles from the very Heart of Empire (for about four months in 1947), I feel I should also say something in its support and in his, at least for this particular point
…….Damn! Now I forgotten what it was.
Never mind.
@lalala #19, good point. Take the zero sum parts (such as accumulating personal wealth) from parents’ concerns about the future, and what’s left may we well be less than or equal to concerns of others.
@21 richardelguru: Also as a some-time Brit, in my case born and resident in part of the Empire for a decade, I completely sympathize, and wish to add that this was doubtless the deep psychological reason that I only spent about three years (total, including he time spent waiting for the authorities to process my Green Card) in the UK after graduating from university in 1970 before settling (sort of) in Santa Cruz, California. I did like my Green Card, which certified me as an alien, so I was sad when they took it away and replaced it with a mere statement of revised nationality, or whatever they called it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLrpBLDWyCI