By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
In the Wall Street
Journal last week, two influential billionaires — former New York City
mayor Michael Bloomberg, a very moderate Republican, and Charles Koch, the
libertarian chairman and CEO of Koch Industries — wrote an op-ed piece decrying
the suppression of free speech taking place at almost every American college
and university.
You have to salute their good intentions. But as
well-intentioned and accurate as their critique is, the Bloomberg-Koch column
is largely useless.
Why? Because it assiduously avoids identifying who or
what is causing our universities to mimic fascist institutions — ruining
dissenters’ careers, penalizing dissenting students, not hiring dissenting
professors, disinviting some among the few invited speakers with whom the
majority differs, shouting down dissenting speakers, allowing students and
faculty to take over and forcibly occupy college administrators’ offices, etc.
The Bloomberg-Koch column is like going to your doctor
and getting back a fully accurate report that you are dying — without hinting
at why you are.
Why do Bloomberg and Koch not mention the word “Left” (or
“Progressive” or “liberal”) even once? The entire deterioration of the American
university (and the high school and elementary school) is the result of leftist
influence. How could they not mention it?
One hint at an explanation is the one example Bloomberg
and Koch give of shutting down a speaker at a campus — that of former secretary
of state Madeleine Albright, a liberal. The ratio of left to right speakers
invited to American campuses is about a hundred to one. And of the thousands of
liberal-left speakers, you would be hard-pressed to come up with five examples
of them being shouted down and driven from the microphone. Yet the authors’ one
example of a silenced speaker at a university was of one of the few liberals
ever shut down.
So why did they choose this outlier as their example?
Lest, God forbid, a reader infer that the suppression of free speech on
American college campuses is overwhelmingly the Left suppressing the Right.
The Left is destroying the foundational values of this
country — including, but hardly limited to, free speech. The Los Angeles Times actually announced
that it will not publish a letter to the editor — presumably no matter how
pre-eminent the scientist who wrote the letter — that challenges the
anthropocentric-global-warming-leading-to-worldwide-destruction hypothesis.
Likewise, Popular Science announced
it would not even allow such opinions in the comments section on its website.
Yet, with all the damage it does — including, of course,
its destructive impact on universities — the Left is almost never mentioned by
name. Not just by Bloomberg and Koch, but by all Republicans and conservatives.
Republicans and conservatives have spent seven years
attacking Barack Obama. For good reason, to be sure: The case can and should be
made that he has done more harm to America than any president in American
history. But all the harm he has done — massively increasing the national debt,
weakening the American military, withdrawing from a pacified Iraq and enabling
ISIS to replace America there, worsening race relations, alienating American
allies, aiding America’s enemies such as Iran and Cuba, and much more — is a
function of his being a man of the Left. No more, no less. Joe Biden, Nancy
Pelosi, Harry Reid, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and virtually any
Democratic senator would have tried to do similar damage to America.
But Republicans focus their ire on individuals — Barack
Obama, and now Hillary Clinton — as if they individually, not the Left and
leftism, are the problem.
Think, for example, about how much conservatives attack
Political Correctness. They are, of course, right to do so. But all these
attacks are almost meaningless, since they never mention the source of
Political Correctness — the Left. In fact, the very definition of “politically
correct” is “that which is acceptable to the Left”; and the definition of
“politically incorrect” is “that which is unacceptable to the Left.”
In other words, virtually no one — from Bloomberg and
Koch to the entire conservative and Republican worlds — connects the dots. If
Donald Trump becomes, as is expected, the Republican nominee, he will probably
never mention the Left. He may not even know that it is a factor, let alone the
factor, in America’s decline from the greatness he wishes to restore.
Our colleges have been ruined, free speech is
increasingly suppressed, the economy is stagnant and the debt doubling, young
Americans no longer see America as in any way exceptional — all because of the
Left. But almost no one dares mention the word. Why?
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