Should We Keep Sacred Cows, or Slaughter Them?

I say slaughter. But hey, it's a free country. Or is it?

On my way out of town for a story yesterday, I read “My Brush With Trump’s Thought Police” in the New York Times. Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz described having his publicly funded lecture on “The Road to Freedom: Economics in a Good Society” canceled:

A core element of freedom is the ability of each person to live up to his or her potential. A liberal education is essential for this to happen, because it helps students develop their skills and capabilities to the utmost, frees them from shibboleths and enables them to think critically. But this kind of approach is threatening to authoritarianism, which wants to impose particular views on a nation’s citizens.

In the case of the Danish lecture series, simply discussing diversity, equity and inclusion was apparently deemed threatening to the administration, which asserts that those qualities, by their very nature, are discriminatory against a majority of the population. But Mr. Trump’s “1984”-ish thought police have not stopped at D.E.I. Climate change and gender are other terms that are being expunged.

I almost spit out coffee at the last line. Probably no three terms in the English language are more associated with groupthink-truisms or “shibboleths” than D.E.I., climate change, and gender.

We saw (and are still seeing) a generation of people be censored or lose jobs or careers for failure to properly salute those terms. Seemingly half now write on Substack. Matt Yglesias was bounced from a site he co-founded, Vox, because he was one of 150+ people to sign the Harper’s Letter on open debate alongside gender villains J.K. Rowling and Jesse Singal. Biologist Colin Wright, Canadian psychologist Kenneth Zucker, Princeton classics Professor Joshua Katz, the black former DEI director for De Anza Community College Tabia Lee, data scientist David Shor (fired for tweeting a study questioning the efficacy of violent protest), and countless academics forced to write “diversity statements” (the most potent and outrageous symbol of the mandated-thought era) only begin the list of other casualties. You could fill a congressional district with people punished for lack of fealty to DEI and gender “shibboleths.”

As for climate change, see the punchline below. It’s incredible that the New York Times would have the gall to talk about someone else acting as climate change “thought police.”

The Denmark lecture episode, which as Stiglitz notes is news over there, is a textbook example of why the snowballing pile of Trump constitutional controversies is more complicated than is being let on. Some administration developments are genuinely terrifying. Kristi Noem saying habeas corpus is a “constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people” was legit pucker-inducing. Speaking of Denmark, Donald Trump probably shouldn’t be musing about seizing Greenland (even though, again, I can’t help find the level of trolling involved in sending J.D. Vance there funny). Trump and Marco Rubio should probably compare notes before giving contradictory answers about who is and isn’t entitled to due process. On the other hand, some of the alleged “attacks on free speech” turn out upon closer inspection to mean the opposite of what’s been represented, as in this case: