Canadian Cincinnatus

A bad week for academic freedom

Last week, there were two nasty incidents where academic freedom got trampled by our bohemian-barbarian elites.

First up is Niall Ferguson, the distinguished Harvard historian who had remarked at an investor conference that the patron saint of stimulus, John Maynard Keynes, didn’t care about the future when he said “that in the long run we are all dead”, because he was a homosexual. This, of course, brought howls of outrage (such as this hysterical piece) from the usual suspects. As Jonah Goldberg points out, Ferguson’s argument was perfectly acceptable not that long ago. For instance, the great economist Joseph Schumpeter said, on Keynes death, “he was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.” The fact is, it is a matter of record that Keynes’ philosophy is short run, as the balance sheets of governments who have adopted his proscriptions can attest to. If this is the case – and it is, is it not legitimate to inquire into the personal motivations that led him to hold such destructive goals?

Particularly when the Queer Studies departments of universities promote things like: “’Queer Gardens,’ which ‘examines the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces.’” The difference, of course is that Queer Studies crowd only study the positive influence. Ferguson mentioned, in passing, a negative aspect of homosexuality. Say, if one can only debate one side of an issue, doesn’t the debate then become bogus? Shush your mouth.

Do I agree with Ferguson’s assessment of the role homosexuality played in Keynes’ intellectual life? Actually I don’t. It seems to me that Keynes, like many English gentlemen of the era, went from a homosexual youth to a heterosexual adulthood. Another example is Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited, who transitioned from a young homosexual aesthete into a happily married, devoutly Catholic conservative (he hated Vatican II) who produced four daughters and three sons. But changing from homosexual to heterosexual is another one of those taboo topics polite people are not supposed to talk about.

Predictably, Ferguson issued a grovelling apology for what he said. Of course, I, nor anybody else, I suppose, believes the sincerity of that statement. It positively reeks of fear. But that’s the point. He - a world renowned historian - has to be punished to encourage the others. 

The case of Jason Richwine is even worse. In case you missed the brouhaha, Richwine was one of the co-authors on a Heritage Foundation study, which argued that the cost of the illegal amnesty, currently going through Congress, would be $6.3 trillion. Since facts like this could derail the current effort to import more Democratic voters, something had to be done, especially since they weren’t able to effectively challenge the study’s actual facts and logic. The Obama black-ops people hit pay dirt when they uncovered Richwine’s Harvard PhD thesis, which argued that Latinos have lower IQ’s than non-Latino Americans. Now, not only do the skirt-clutching PC crowd want to revoke his degree, but they want tenure revoked for the academic-all-star committee members who signed off on it, including the distinguished left-of-center sociologist Christopher Jencks.

My God. If these goons get away with that, then there really will be no more freedom to debate issues in American academia any more. As Charles Murray puts it:

“In resigning, Dr. Richwine joins distinguished company. The most famous biologist in the world, James D. Watson, was forced to retire from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2007 because of a factually accurate remark to a British journalist about low IQ scores among African blacks. In 2006, Larry Summers, president of Harvard, had to resign after a series of attacks that began with his empirically well-informed remarks about gender differences. These are just the most visible examples of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse: If you take certain positions, you will be cast into outer darkness. Whether your statements are empirically accurate is irrelevant.

In academia, only the tenured can safely write on these topics. Assistant professors know that their chances of getting tenure will be close to zero if they publish politically incorrect findings on climate change, homosexuality, race differences, gender differences, or renewable energy. Their chances will not be much higher if they have published anything with a distinctly conservative perspective of any sort. To borrow George Orwell’s word, they will have proved themselves to be guilty of crimethink.”

Read the whole thing. BTW, the James D Watson referenced by Murray is the Watson who co-discovered DNA, the single most important biological discovery in the 20^th century. And they forced him out over a comment? Fie!

What about the issue itself? Andrew Sullivan, the erratic blogger (who went from War on Terror cheerleader to Sarah Palin’s gynecologist), has presented the issue eloquently (when he is on, he is on):

“But the idea that natural selection and environmental adaptation stopped among human beings the minute we emerged in the planet 200,000 years ago – and that there are no genetic markers for geographical origin or destination – is bizarre. It would be deeply strange if Homo sapiens were the only species on earth that did not adapt to different climates, diseases, landscapes, and experiences over hundreds of millennia. We see such adaptation happening very quickly in the animal kingdom. Our skin color alone – clearly a genetic adaptation to climate – is, well, right in front of one’s nose.

But what the Harvard students are saying is worse than creating a straw man. They are saying that even if it is true that there are resilient differences in IQ in broad racial groupings, such things should not be studied at Harvard because their ‘end result can only be furthering discrimination.’ You can’t have a more explicit attack on intellectual freedom than that. They even seem to want the PhD to be withdrawn.”

Again, read the whole thing. Hat tip Steve Sailer for both comments.

As I have said before, this hostility to honest debate is a relatively new thing in our society. It did not exist in the 1970’s, when people were fond of saying things like, “it’s a free country”. (When was the last time you heard that in casual conversation?) The intolerance of non-PC diversity is repellant and it is incompatible with a free society. We need to fight this intellectual and political pox with all our might.

About that $3.1 billion in anti-terror funding that the Federal government lost

In the spirit of bipartisanship, my comments on the federal scandal over the $3.1 billion in anti-terror funding that the Auditor General can’t find are pretty much the same as my comments on the Ontario Liberal government’s cancellation of the natural gas plants. One involves the Ontario government, the other the Federal government; one centers on electrical power, the other security; one implicates a Liberal administration, the other a Conservative. But in spite of these differences - and in spite of the fact that, in both cases, the loyal opposition is blaming the same wrong thing: inept management – the root cause is the same: governments in Canada have become too damn big.

When governments get as bloated as the Ontario government or the Federal government, the organization structure is too large to be effectively managed in a top-down, hierarchical fashion. Private businesses with this kind of a corporate structure go bankrupt, or radically restructure to survive; think GM and IBM. The same organizational limits apply to governments, but without market feedback. There simply are not enough hours in the day for our elected officials to adequately supervise everything that goes on in the organizations they are responsible for. As much as partisan hacks on the other side would be loath to admit it, scandals based on government waste will be par for the course as long as our governments remain supersized with top-down structures – regardless of which party controls parliament. 

If you want efficient, nimble government, you need small government, one that has been reduced to its core mission, and which is not pavilioned with superfluous bells and whistles enacted by over-promising politicians from elections past. 

This gives Stephen Harper an opening. Losing $3.1 billion is bad. He must do something about it. No matter how true the foregoing analysis is, it does not excuse stuff like this. If the public were to routinely forgive such blunders, even more will surely follow.

So how does my diagnosis help out the Prime Minister? Answer: by giving him a path to follow where the opposition parties cannot tread. If Harper merely pointed out that some of this waste happened on the Liberal watch (after all, the anti-terror spending started on 9/11), he would sound partisan and evasive – and not like somebody genuinely looking for answers. If the buck doesn’t stop with him, who does it stop with? The Chretien-Martin Liberals have already been punished at the polls. 

But if Harper were to point out that this kind of waste is endemic to large public institutions in general - regardless of who controls them - and that the real, substantive solution is to pare the government down to its essential functions, he would be able to turn the table on the opposition. By balking at his remedy without offering any real recommendations of their own, they transform themselves into defenders of the status quo. And by championing the status quo, they assume ownership of it. Trudeau and Mulcair will tie themselves in knots defending government bloat in general while damning this one particular instance of it. As icing on the cake, if they identify the source of the problem as merely the bad apples on top, they will have laid out a trap for themselves. For what they would in effect be saying is that if they had been in charge but everything else remained the same, things would go better. If, down the road, they find themselves in power, they will have nowhere to go when the inevitable news story of government waste surfaces.

In politics, sticking to the status quo is usually wrong. To be successful in the long term you must approach challenges dynamically. Opportunities can be found in many difficult situations, like this one. It is just that they are hidden.

What if your candidate gets in trouble with the Thought Police, what do you do?

All the political candidates getting clipped in the British Columbia provincial election by the Thought Police has got me thinking: what do you do if you are the leader of a political party in an election campaign and one of your candidates makes a politically incorrect faux pas?

The traditional solution, favoured by successful small-c conservative politicians is to lock your candidates down so much that they can’t blow themselves up. Does this work? It has, so far, for Stephen Harper.

For less successful conservative leaders such as Preston Manning, who don’t have a hammerlock on their more rebellious and ‘effervescent’ candidates, ‘Nazi eruptions’ are a fact of life. Manning’s solution was to apologize after the fact, sometimes disciplining or even firing an MP or candidate. 

The problem with the Manning approach is obvious. What is said cannot be unsaid. In the language of thermodynamics, public speaking is an irreversible process. It also meant that Manning was always off balance. No sooner had he put down one ‘Nazi eruption’ when another erupted – to the delight of Jean Chretien.

The Harper approach works better, but has its problems. For starters, backbenchers don’t like being stifled. Nor should they. As one disgruntled Conservative backbencher recently put it, “speaking is what we do here.”  Even worse, as Political Correctness metastasizes and the parameters of acceptable discourse keep shrinking, locking down your candidates becomes ever more difficult to do. After all, they have to speak on something.

I have a third approach: impose all the discipline you want on your people - behind the scenes. But if a ‘Nazi eruption’ does happen, unless that person really said something legitimately wrong - which they probably didn’t - embrace them. Wrap yourself around the flag of free speech and turn one person’s unguarded moment into a crusade for civil liberty.

If you did that, I think you would be pleasantly surprised by how many people will rally to your cause. People right across the political spectrum, including people from demographic and interest groups who normally wouldn’t be dead voting conservative, would perk up, because everybody is fed up with this constant oppression and need for doublethink.

More Fear and Political Correctness on the campaign trail in British Colombia

I thought I was finished with the topic of provincial candidates imploding over gamey comments in the BC election, but I was wrong. There is also the case of Ian Tootill.

When I first heard that a BC Conservative candidate had made a Hitler comment, I winced. I thought, among all the candidates knocked out unfairly for comments that would be considered perfectly commonplace in a healthy body politic, here we have one guy who legitimately stepped over the line.

But no. I was wrong:

‘Mr. Tootill is a freedom-loving libertarian, a first-time political candidate whose candour and outspokenness were what drew the BCCP to him in the first place.’

‘A consummate grouser and rabble-rouser, the Vancouver resident and driver’s rights advocate was recruited to the party earlier this year.’

‘His causes included but were not limited to: Slow-moving cars and trucks; photo radar; bicyclists who wear helmets; bylaws aimed at smoking, drinking and excessive noise; prohibitions on drugs such as marijuana; and what he’s described as Vancouver’s “do-gooder, controlling types.”’

Sounds like a great guy to me. But trouble awaited the outspoken candidate:

‘On Wednesday, the Vancouver Sun hauled from the Twitter vault some “controversial” Tootill posts.

“Who’s really to blame,” Mr. Tootill had typed in October, “Hitler or the people who acted on his words?”

Hitler references are trouble. Like dynamite. But Mr. Tootill wasn’t hailing the Führer or anything like that.

He said Wednesday that he can’t recall the precise context in which he invoked the name, just that it had something to do with bullying. Indeed, the record shows he was claiming that some folks are too “thin-skinned” for their own good, that they should not allow mere “words” to hurt them.

Among the responses his Tweets received was this: “The Malleus Malifecarum was ‘just words’ but led to more deaths than ‘Mein Kampf… again, ‘just words’.”

Mr. Tootill replied with his Hitler comment. He still sees nothing wrong with it.’

He shouldn’t. There isn’t anything wrong with what he said. And I am glad he is unapologetic. We have too many people in our society apologizing for things they have no need to apologize for.

What we need less of are prissy nanny staters like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who head for the fainting couches every time they hear something disagreeable; and more of plain speaking politicians, who can identify social ills with clarity, candour and fearlessness.

Ian Tootill for Prime Minister!

Free speech, synagogues and the York Regional Police

Another free speech outrage, this time in the greater Toronto Area, to go with all the fear and loathing on the BC campaign trail. According to Ezra Levant, Pamela Gellar has been banned from speaking at a synagogue north of Toronto because the York Regional Police don’t like her. Levant describes her as a “New York liberal.” This is not quite true. She is a libertarian and an Objectivist, Personally I find her a bit overwrought, but she is a fearless opponent of Islamic fundamentalism, which may be why the Thought Police are concerned about her:

“Which is why she was invited to speak in north Toronto next weekend, at a Jewish synagogue.

But then Insp. Ricky Veerappan of the York Regional Police got wind of Geller’s speech. Veerappan is with something called the diversity, equity and inclusion bureau of that police force.”

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Bureau? My God, what an Orwellian sounding institution. It sounds like something from a distopian sci-fi novel, but here is their web site. I say Orwellian, because the word ‘diversity’ is in their name even though they are in the business of squashing opinions that are, how shall I put it, actually diverse.

First, there was the Human Rights Commissions, and now this. How many other star chambers do we have hidden in the bowels of various Canadian governments?

“You’d think he’d want to meet Geller, to learn about honour killings. Geller’s a bit of an expert in that.

But Veerappan didn’t want to meet Geller. 

Nor did he want anyone else to meet her. He contacted the rabbi at the synagogue, and told him to cancel Geller’s speech — and that if he didn’t, the rabbi would lose his position as a police chaplain. The rabbi caved.

What crime did Geller commit?

Veerappan was happy to tell QMI Agency: “Some of the stuff that Ms. Geller speaks about runs contrary to the values of York Regional Police and the work we do in engaging our communities.”

Really? Like what — offering a proper burial for girls killed in honour killings? Standing up for women’s rights, against shariah law? Warning against terrorism? But even if her values were “wrong,” what business is that of a cop? Do guest speakers at synagogues now have to register their opinions in advance with the police?” 

Values of the York Regional Police? Their first, last and only value should be to keep the public peace in York Region by enforcing the law objectively, evenhandedly and reasonably. Full stop. Interfering in the peaceful internal debates of a religious institution violates all three of those criteria.

Perhaps Inspector Veerappen should acquaint himself with Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing.

Of course, one could argue that it is, or should be, the business of the police to monitor mosques who promote Islamic Jihad. And you would be right, but that does not conflict with the legitimate goals of policing. The key word is ‘peaceful’. There is nothing peaceful about those preaching violent insurrectionists. Then again…

“As I write this, a student group not affiliated with the University of British Columbia is scheduled to host a conference on campus with a guest speaker, named Leila Khaled, appearing via Skype.

Unlike Geller, Khaled doesn’t believe in peace and security. Khaled is a Palestinian terrorist, convicted of hijacking planes, twice.

That’s Canadian “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Our police will bully a Jewish rabbi into cancelling a speech from a Jewish New Yorker whose chief contribution to our country was to give Aqsa Parvez a proper gravestone.

But a convicted terrorist? No problem! Help yourself to our leading universities, paid for by public tax dollars. Maybe police will even provide security — to keep out any troublesome Jews.”

These two stories illustrate two troubling aspects of our society:

1. A significant segment of Canada’s ruling class is morally perverse and unmoored from reality.

2. The core principle of free political speech is under direct and sustained assault.

Normally, in cases like this, I like to focus on root causes rather than the direct agents of folly. But doing this to the exclusion of ignoring the punishment of malefactors is counterproductive. Ideally, our legal system should be constructed so that officials who interfere with free speech go to prison.

Until that happy day, all patriotic Canadians have got to roll up their sleeves and start holding their corrupt politicians to account.

Fear and Political Correctness on the campaign trail in British Colombia

Perhaps it is because I am based in Ontario, but I apologize for coming late to this story. According to the National Post:

New Democratic leader Adrian Dix accepted the resignation of Kelowna-Mission candidate Dayleen Van Ryswyk, saying she made unacceptable comments in Internet postings involving the compensation for First Nations.

On the 2009 forum, a user named Dayleen wrote in a thread entitled “Strip Them of the Status Card.”

“It’s not the status cards, it’s the fact that we have been paying out of the nose for generations for something that isn’t our doing. If their ancestors sold out too cheaply, it’s not my fault and I shouldn’t have to be paying for any mistake or whatever you want to call it from MY hard earned money.”

Another one of the posts compares the benefits afforded to aboriginal people with claims other abused groups could be making. 

“I don’t think anyone is saying that wrongs didn’t happen (incredible wrongs). You could have almost any race, group or ethnic people tell you horrible haunting stories of what happened to them. If someone did me wrong, it’s my right to sue … as it is everyone else’s.

“Again, how many Jewish, Polish, Russian, Dutch, etc. walked into a gas chamber, were gunned down, raped, tortured and starved to death. . . tell me how many Germans do you know that are handing over a (portion) of their paycheck EVERY month for what happened NOT very long ago. . . ”

Oh dear. Where to begin?

First of all, while those posts were undeniably worded undiplomatically, so what? As The Great Barack Obama once observed, “politics isn’t beanbag.” And what was so racist about what she said? That she disagrees with the Indian Act? All she did was complain about the waste of taxpayer money, and the handing out of official privileges based on race and historical grievance. What is racist is the Indian Act, not complaining about it. But according to PC calculus, the racism of an affirmative action program gets automatically transferred to its critics once they open their mouths.

Look, I have no illusions about Dayleen Van Ryswyk. In all probability, as an NDP candidate, she is a lefty loon and the Indian Act is about the only thing we would agree upon over a beer. But you know what? If free speech is to mean anything, it can’t just apply to people we like. For her fate, I am not blaming the NDP leader, Adrian Dix, for abandoning her. He has to do what he has to do in order to climb the greasy pole to the Premier’s Office. The larger problem here is the cult of Political Correctness which circumscribes the parameters of debate with ever more restrictive boundaries.

Political Correctness is a truly pernicious disease because its sole purpose is to limit public discussion. It exists because the left cannot win arguments any other way. (By left, I am not speaking about the official agents of the partisan left, the NDP in this case, but in left-wing doctrine as a whole.)  It is all very nice to be able to muzzle your critics and stifle dissent, but it does not make for a healthy democracy. For this reason, PC must be stamped out wherever it is found and it is the duty of every small-c conservative to do that.

Which brings me to problem number two: Christy Clark. According to the Post:

“The B.C. election got off to an ugly start today even before the campaign was officially declared as the Liberals demanded NDP Leader Adrian Dix fire one of his candidates for comments she made in an online forum.” 

Under Gordon Campbell, the BC Liberal party was the de facto conservative party in BC; and under him, they did a passably good job. But I guess the BC Liberal Party has entered the Kim Campbell stage of its devolution.

Going after the NDP like this is an example of the kind of short-term opportunism that makes Red Tories such public policy disasters and electoral losers. They trade fundamental principles for cheap shots and wonder why nobody likes them. After all, they’re moderates, and who doesn’t like moderates?

I thought I was finished with the subject of PC in BC, when my eye caught this item:

“B.C. Conservative Leader John Cummins says his party has done the best it could with the resources available to screen candidates, after dropping its third candidate since the campaign began.

The provincial Tories dismissed Mischa Popoff in the Boundary-Similkameen riding over comments he made in newspaper columns in the area.

Popoff  lost his position Thursday night after The Vancouver Sun revealed statements from him deriding the Missing Women Inquiry as a waste of time and criticizing single mothers for having children ‘without a man by their side.’ 

“Cummins says some of the comments were insensitive and disrespectful, to women and single mothers in particular.”

Never mind that there is sociological data by the bushel basket indicating that single motherhood correlates with a host of social ills; and never mind that one of the most effective ways society corrects its problems is via ridicule and criticism.

Oh sorry. We don’t correct antisocial behaviour any more with humour and censure. Instead, we celebrate ‘diversity’.

Why Jason Collins came out of the closet

So the mystery is over. The gay professional athlete long rumoured to be coming out of the closet turns out to be Jason Collins, a 34-year-old NBA player on the downslope of a mediocre basketball career.

Why would he do it now? Steve Sailer has a theory:

"More skeptically, perhaps Jason Collins is trying to pressure the NBA into giving him one more year just to prove they aren't homophobic? Or this announcement could be calculated to help him do well on the public appearance circuit in his onrushing retirement. He can now look forward to several years of being paid to accept awards for his "bravery." Maybe this will get him a shot at a TV gig."

How much do you want to bet Collins was in danger of being canned next season?

Well played Jason, well played.

Somebody else gets who the moderate voter is

According to conventional wisdom, the body politic is a one-dimensional universe, with voters on a continuum from ‘left’ to ‘right’, with most found in the middle. Therefore, if a right-wing politician wants to win, he must ‘moderate’ his message, typically by axing policy positions, starting with those that are the most ‘right’ until he achieves 50% of the vote plus one. (Notice how the call to moderate is never given to left-wing candidates, who are labelled inspiration and visionary, but never extreme.) 

This strategy rarely works. The only visible result is that the moderating politician’s base, which has already been seething below the surface, now openly revolts. The ensuing acrimony further alienates moderates. This phenomenon I call the Red Tory/RINO death spiral.

It happens because politicians usually misunderstand the nature of ‘moderates’. These people are not in the middle because they are ‘moderate’, but rather because they don’t care. Clayton Cramer, of PJMedia, explains:

“Here is the problem: low-information voters are a big chunk of the electorate, especially in the Democratic Party, but the Republican Party isn’t free of them either. These are the voters who could not tell you if the national debt is $16 million or $16 trillion. They don’t know anything about the criticisms of how our government handled Benghazi. Ben Ghazi? Isn’t he an actor? Fast & Furious is a movie, not a scandal. They know that gay marriage is a good thing because all their favorite actors and musicians think it is so cool! And “assault weapons” are those guns they see in movies, firing hundreds of rounds a minute.

I hope by now that you are beginning to get the picture of what defines an LIV: he or she does not read PJ Media or, for that matter, the Huffington Post or any political publication, left or right. The better-informed LIVs read Us or People. Most of an LIV’s knowledge of economics, politics, and history comes from watching movies, television shows, The Daily Show, and stuff that one of his leftist friends posts on Facebook. You know why President Obama won the election? He was doing local radio shows and The View. He was being promoted by rap musicians and actors.” 

What a wonderful term: low information voter. The low information voter doesn’t care about policy. Right-wing, left-wing, who cares? Pass the chips.

You can’t woo the low information voter with policies. This is why the left never tries. What to do instead?

“The left knows this. They are not just running political ads during campaigns; they are running a continuous campaign through movies, television, news organizations, and entertainment media.Instapundit has pointed out that for a few million dollars, conservatives could buy up some of the women’s websites that get enormous audiences, and subtly change the political spin. It is a slow process, but over time this approach alters the basic assumptions that many LIVs have about the world. Think about the movie Death Wish (1974): do you think it played a part in changing popular perceptions of civilians engaged in armed self-defense?

Movies, music, and television are other areas where the left has been promoting their message for decades, and when they are subtle about the message, they actually make money at it. Lots of money. We can do it too — in fact, we might even make more money at it, because there are a lot of Americans who are still fundamentally on the right. Look at The Passion of the Christ (2004): more than $611 million in revenues worldwide. Act of Valor (2012) has brought in more than $81 million worldwide — considering what it cost to make, that’s spectacular.”

While he is right, it is unreasonable to expect Tim Hudak or Stephen Harper to become a movie mogul or tabloid magazine impresario overnight. But there are many things retail politicians can do. For starters, they can target low information voters with cues that they actually will respond to: those that are visual and emotional, not cerebral. Use policies to secure your base. Do both things and both groups of voters will cheer you on.

DIY: how-to advice for combatting campus thought police

If you are at all politically active in conservative circles, you will have likely been around when the subject of young people has come up, specifically how to attract young people to conservatism. At this point, I usually roll my eyes at the lame-o suggestions bandied about, which involves for the most part adding some ‘golly-gee’, ‘whiz-bang’ into conservatism to appeal to the ‘MTV generation’, or some such thing. These guys sound about as with-it as old people in the 1960’s, who fretted about teenagers shooting up with marijuana.

In reaction, I point out that today’s youth (and indeed all youth since the 1960’s) lean left because they are indoctrinated that way by our schools. To undo that, we must eliminate the practice of left-wing indoctrination in the school system. At this point, my listeners – all those guys hot to trot for the ‘MTV generation’ - recoil in horror, because they understand what I am proposing is a knock-out, drag-em-out fight with one of the left’s strongest power bases: academia.

But not everybody is so lily-livered. In the US, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has rolled up its sleeves and is doing precisely that. In this article, FIRE offers six pieces of good advice on promulgating free speech on campus: 

“1. Tie Speech Protections to Federal Funding.”

In Canada, the universities are regulated by the provinces, so substitute in the phrase ‘provincial funding’. In Ontario, Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives have a good chance at overthrowing the rudderless, post-McGuinty Liberals. Recently, Tim has made favourable noises on a lot of conservative issues. We need to push him on this point.

“2. Legally End the Slippery Debate about What "Harassment" Really Means.” 

Harassment is one of those words whose definition the left likes to keep ambiguous: a narrow term, describing genuinely indefensible behaviour, when selling their anti-harassment agenda to the public, and a broad definition, that covers almost everything under the sun, at enforcement time. The word ‘racism’ works similarly.

“3. Litigate Aggressively.” 

I particularly like this point. And no, I am not a lawyer. But people who make it their business to mess with free speech need to feel pain. If they don’t, they will not modify their behaviour. And this goes double for people paid to mess with free speech.

“4.  Make Colleges Certify Free Speech Protection.

5. Not Just Sticks: Provide Carrots to Colleges that Behave.

6. The Broader Job: Let's Work to Change the Culture.”

FIRE is an American organization. In Canada, this struggle is being waged by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. At the recent Manning Center Networking Conference in Ottawa, I spoke to a bunch of conservative university students at the JCCF booth who are fighting the good fight at our universities as we speak. In addition to winning some important court victories, they are systematically rating Canadian universities on their free speech performance.

If you want to do something about the left-wing indoctrination of the youth, you can start by donating some money to them. I have.

Punching back twice as hard against the thought-police

According to the Washington Times:

“A West Virginia teen who was arrested and suspended for wearing a National Rifle Association T-shirt to school returned to class Monday wearing the same shirt that got him into trouble. 

Jared Marcum, 14, was joined by about 100 other students across Logan County who wore shirts with a similar gun rights theme in a show of support for free speech.”

“Ben White, the Charleston lawyer representing the Logan eighth-grader, said the Sons of the Second Amendment, a gun rights group, purchased and distributed the shirts.

Jared, a student at Logan Middle School, was arrested and suspended Thursday after he was pulled from a cafeteria line and told to remove or turn his shirt inside-out an order he refused.”

“School officials told the eighth-grader Monday that his one-day suspension was appropriate because he was being disruptive.

Mr. White said Jared was exercising his right to free speech and did not disrupt anything.

‘I think the disruption came from the teacher,’ Mr. White said.”

If you want to advance The Cause, you have to stand your ground and fight – hard and unapologetically. Appeasement, apologies and ‘not making waves’ is for Red Tory losers.

Way to go, kid!

 

Hat tip Instapundit.