By Taylor Schmitt
Friday, April 03, 2015
I have some confessions to make: I am a liberal. I am
pro-choice. I favor the legalization of gay marriage and marijuana. Given
supreme authority, I would drastically cut our military budget and use the
money to institute a single-payer healthcare system (certainly not something
many of my colleagues at the Claremont Independent would agree with). I even voted for
Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in the last presidential election.
However, despite my overwhelmingly liberal political leanings, the progressive
movement – particularly as I’ve seen it manifested on college campuses – has
made me embarrassed to identify myself as a liberal.
A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that Fox
News spends only 45 percent of its airtime on factual reporting, while it
spends 55 percent of its airtime on opinion pieces and commentary. It was
unsurprising that a news source frequently lampooned as opinion-driven and
biased spends the majority of its time reporting opinion pieces. But why is Fox
News considered such a horrible and untrustworthy network when the same study
showed that the liberal MSNBC network spends a whopping 85 percent of its
airtime on opinion segments and only 15 percent on factual reporting? If Fox’s
penchant for focusing on opinion is worthy of criticism, doesn’t MSNBC’s more
egregious example of the same sin merit even more? The contempt for Fox I hear
coming from liberals coupled with a lack of criticism towards MSNBC suggests
that many within the liberal movement don’t want factual journalism at all, but
rather opinionated journalism with a liberal bent. In fact, though they would
have you believe they merely support truth in journalism, many liberals openly
disregard the truth – and criticize those who don’t – when it conflicts with
their worldview.
The most recent example that comes to mind is the death
of Michael Brown in Ferguson. My fellow liberals decided from day one that Darren
Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Brown, was in the wrong. Before
autopsy results were released, without reading the eyewitness testimony, and
with no regard for forensic evidence, the left prejudged Wilson as guilty.
Although I personally prefer to hear evidence before forming an opinion, I can
understand why –especially in light of the slanted media reporting on the case
– many people would leap to the conclusion that Wilson was guilty. What was
appalling to me, however, was that when the evidence that was released proved
far from sufficient to suggest Wilson’s guilt, the vast majority of the left
was still calling for Wilson to be punished. Protests predicated on the
assumption of Wilson’s guilt, like the march to Claremont City Hall, were held
nationwide after a grand jury failed to indict Wilson, seemingly unconcerned
with the fact that the evidence against him was inconclusive at best.
Campus liberals acted similarly in the case of Emma
Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who has vowed to carry a mattress
around campus with her until her alleged rapist leaves the school. Rallies in
support of Sulkowicz were held at college campuses across the nation, including
here in Claremont. Despite the fact that criminal charges were never filed and
the man who ostensibly assaulted her was found not responsible by Columbia,
supporters of Sulkowicz have continued to refer to him as her “rapist” and
harass him on and off campus (have they never heard of the Scottsboro Boys?).
The Columbia Spectator decided to print the name of the accused despite the
fact that the university had not found him responsible for any wrongdoing (did
the Spectator learn nothing from the media’s handling of the Duke Lacrosse
case?). This uproar will affect the man for the remainder of his time at
Columbia and will continue to follow him for the rest of his life. Because the
alleged assault fit into campus liberals’ dominant narrative on sexual assault,
the overwhelmingly liberal students of Columbia, the Claremont Colleges, and
other elite institutions were eager to risk ruining a potentially innocent
man’s life by naming him a rapist, even as new evidence emerges, all of which
seems to support the alleged attacker’s innocence.
To question the guilt of Darren Wilson was to be a
racist, and to question the veracity of Sulkowicz’s story was to be a sexist
rape apologist. Doing either of these things would almost certainly get you
branded as a conservative. As a liberal who did both of these things, I have
been appalled by the irrational mob mentality displayed by my fellow liberal
students at events like the Ferguson protest and the “Carry That Weight” march
in support of Sulkowicz. I am struggling to come to terms with this new reality
wherein sticking to an objective view of the facts is considered a conservative
trait. The campus left’s complete unwillingness to adjust their opinions of
these cases to fit with the facts shows a thought process completely devoid of
reason. Facts are apolitical. To question prevailing liberal thought on
Ferguson and Columbia because of the evidence (or lack thereof) is not a
conservative position. It is a realistic one. To question prevailing liberal
thought on Ferguson and Columbia is not to deny the existence of racism in law
enforcement or sexual assault on college campuses, but to acknowledge that not
every individual case fits those patterns.
Ferguson and Columbia are unfortunately just the tip of
the iceberg when it comes to college liberals privileging (if I may appropriate
one of their favorite words) narrative over evidence: As it turns out, trigger
warnings (well-intentioned though they may be) actually do more harm than good,
and controlled exposure to trauma can lead to a quicker recovery from
depression and post-traumatic stress disorder than complete avoidance.
According to the founder of the Trauma Studies program at King’s College,
London: “You cannot get a person to avoid triggers in their day-to-day lives.
It would be impossible…Instead of encouraging a culture of avoidance, [the
media] should be encouraging exposure…Most trauma survivors avoid situations
that remind them of the experience. Avoidance means helplessness and helplessness
means depression. That’s not good.”
Women do not make $0.77 for every dollar men earn for the
same work. When controlling relevant variables such as profession and hours
worked (seemingly obvious measures conspicuously missing from the original $0.77
study), the wage gap almost completely disappears. Childless women in their 20s
actually make as much as 8 percent more than their male counterparts.
President Obama hesitates to refer to the Islamic State
as an Islamic extremist group and makes an effort to downplay what are actually
alarmingly high levels of sympathy for extremist movements in Muslim
communities worldwide.
It is most likely untrue that 1 in 5 female college
students is sexually assaulted. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
the number may be closer to 6 in 1000 . This data, collected over the course of
18 years and with a response rate of 74 percent, is much more reliable than the
1 in 5 study, which sourced its data only from two large schools, had a
response rate of 43 percent, and did not even take into account whether or not
the people being surveyed felt that they had been assaulted (a similar study
found that 49 percent of women classified as having been raped did not think
they had been, while only 47 percent did). The author of the 1 in 5 study
himself said “We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative
statistic.” The list goes on and on.
The fact that my fellow liberals seem so unconcerned with
evidence makes it hard for me to sympathize with their cause. Although I may
agree with them on many issues, the way in which we arrive at those conclusions
differs drastically. I thoroughly believe that most of the liberals here at the
Claremont Colleges do what they do with good intentions; as liberals we should
help the disadvantaged and strive to create positive social and political
change. However, what is stereotypically “liberal” is not always right, and
what fits most cleanly into our belief systems is not always true.
Unwillingness to listen to opinions differing from the mainstream and
attempting to silence opposing viewpoints (including the destruction of print
issues of the Independent around campus) is completely illiberal and is an
insult to the campus Free Speech Movement that liberal students championed 50
years ago. Silencing minority viewpoints does not prove them wrong and says
more about those doing the silencing than those being silenced.
The only rational way to approach divisive political
issues is to base your opinions off of the facts that are available to you.
Liberals and conservatives have always disagreed on how those facts are to be
interpreted, and we should be glad for it. Neither conservatives nor liberals
are correct 100 percent of the time. However, it seems lately that evidence has
become a nonissue for many on the left.
Unless my fellow liberals learn to stop shoehorning every
situation to fit the narrative they are trying to construct, the left of
tomorrow will be made up of individuals who are unable to distinguish their
beliefs from reality. Those of us who can make this distinction will not want
to associate with the liberal movement any longer. Where will we go?
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