The Power of “No”

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Kurt Schlicter over at Townhall makes good points:

For way too long, too many conservatives and other normal people have failed to deploy our most potent weapon in the defense of free thought and expression – the utter refusal to go along with the demands of the carnivorous left. As has been said before by me and others, we need to introduce these spoiled brats to the concept of “no.”

. . .

But a larger, more comprehensive information operation is still ongoing, one in which a bunch of pampered SJW stormtroopers, aided and abetted by the weak and frightened elder caste of liberals occupying the heights of the establishment, are attempting to define the tolerable range of ideas and expression within our culture. In a shocking turn that would surprise only stupid people, the tolerable range of ideas and expression they wish to establish corresponds exactly to the ideas and expressions they agree with. The Venn diagram of what they think and what they allow to be thought is a single circle.

The rest of us are expected to shut up, and thereby concede and recognize their mastery over us.

We could do that, sure. 

Or we could tell them “no.”

The first four of his bullet points for effectively saying "no" are:

• ·         Never apologize.
• ·         Reject their demands. 
• ·         Speak truths they want suppressed. 
• ·         Laugh at them.

Read the rest here.

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Constitution Day and Citizenship Day

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Today is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, and “the act mandates that all publicly funded educational institutions, and all federal agencies, provide educational programming on the history of the American Constitution on that day.” Er, one day out of the year? Nevertheless, Salena Zito reports some encouraging news:

"We must not be afraid to be free," Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black famously said in a dissent defending free expression. That appeal is germane today, especially on college campuses, professor Daniel Cullen argues.

Cullen, a professor of political science at Rhodes College, is working to engage liberal arts college students on the critical importance of the First Amendment and free speech. It's part of a program at 30 colleges and universities across the country [which] will be marking Constitution Day on September 17, the 231st anniversary of its signing.

“It is a critical moment in American society and culture to deeply reflect First Amendment traditions as they relate to the Constitution,” said Cullen of the initiative sponsored by the Jack Miller Center.

. . .

“There was a survey recently done by the Knight Foundation that found a majority of American college students today either believe incorrectly that the First Amendment prohibits hate speech, or if it doesn't, then it ought to,” he says.

Simply put, it is an entire generation forgetting that one of the proudest achievements of American democracy is that we agree to tolerate the speech we hate.

“Nevertheless it's that proposition that a majority of college students no longer accept. They don't think it's something to be proud of. They think it's an error so the question is, ‘Why?’ And I think the best answer is that they, especially the iGen generation have become highly sensitized to the harm that speech can do and the offensiveness that often goes along with speech,” he said.

. . .

Yet Cullen remains hopeful, “What we do is we try and separate truth from falsehood and truth from error, and students remain naturally intellectually curious. They want to hear the arguments for important moral viewpoints, even arguments for viewpoints that strike them as fundamentally wrong.”

Read the rest here.

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Tomi Lahren 's snowflakes

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Tomi Lahren may not have Jeff Foxworthy's trademark delivery, but her "Final Thoughts" on snowflakes (The Blaze via YouTube) are worth a quick look.

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American education standards and today's electorate

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Anyone who can stand to watch Fox’s Watter’s World on-the-street interviews with low-information voters, or those who remember similar candid camera interviews on Jay Leno’s Tonight show, are probably aghast at the dumbing down of the American culture, media, and education. We're talking about young adults who do not recognize an image of George Washington and cannot name the sitting Vice President. Who are the young voters who are part of the electorate?

This past week, I came across two opinion pieces that examined the educational decline in our country. The first was by Bruce Deitrick Price (K-12: Parent X Takes On Principal Zero) at the American Thinker blog, about a parent who had attempted on numerous occasions to register concerns with the principal of her daughter’s school:

My complaints were elevated to the new principal.  I met with him at least seven times; several times I was accompanied by a member of the school board.

Finally the principal, aggravated and arrogant, told me schools no longer believe in academic excellence because demanding subjects no longer appeal to the mainstream student or to his parents.

He proclaimed that his program, his syllabus, his teachers were all fully in compliance with local, state, and federal standards, and he wasn't going to change a single thing to accommodate me or my daughter.

He said proudly he is a "Progressive," he has a Ph.D., and he had "helped" develop and design many of those standards, and he believed in them.  He said any kid who wants a higher-level education for a professional career will have to get it somewhere else. 

He was emphatic that neither I nor the school board member could change anything.

This parent decided to home-school her daughter. But the principal’s attitude and his unashamed statement that academic excellence is a thing of the past is more than a little alarming. The rest of that short report is here.

A longer analysis of the collapse of America’s educational standards is by a Canadian contributor to PJ Media, David Solway:

What we see today, then, universities as centers of leftist indoctrination, the shutting down of intellectual debate (cf. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind), a generation of “snowflake” students who are preoccupied with frivolities like trigger warnings, microaggresssons, transgender bathrooms, and “safe spaces” where they will never be exposed to an unfamiliar or conflicting idea, and the sniveling infantilization of the entire academic cohort—flows directly from [John] Dewey and his followers. 

These pedagogical dissidents prepared the ground for the subversive agenda of the Frankfurters by engaging in an act of cerebral softening, that is, promoting the student over the teacher, the child over the man (or woman), and feeling over thought—hence the continuing prominence of the “self-esteem” movement that slashed-and-burned its way through the educational landscape.

Scary stuff. This is a much longer read and very thought-provoking, but it may be of interest to conservative voters who have an opportunity to discuss the upcoming election with family and friends. Be forewarned: the essay is rather depressing, but it does a good job of tracing the history of how we got to where we are and why it's an uphill battle. If you are interested, it’s here.

The key for me when attempting discussions on politics with liberals is that the facts and logic don’t seem to matter – at least most of the time. It’s all about feel-good emotions. If you find Mr. Solway’s observations perceptive, you might also want to take a look at Diana West’s book-length treatment, The Death of the Grown-Up. It’s available on Kindle and discounted hardcovers (as low as 1¢). It’s a good read and goes fast.

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