House arrest special. Enjoy.
Day: July 16, 2020
Cancel Culture Is Real — a harrowing account
As a conservative blog-owner, he’s used to being criticized. But Black Lives Matter criticism is another matter.
I am a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School (CLS). In January 2008, I founded the Cornell Securities Law Clinic, focusing on investment disputes, a popular and important niche for students seeking to work in the corporate world.
In October 2008, I founded the Legal Insurrection, a conservative law and politics website. My non-left-wing politics, though separate from my teaching, sometimes led to attacks on my job. There were threats, harassment and demands I be fired for the first several years of the website, but those always came from off campus — until now.
That all changed when I wrote two blog posts the first week of June 2020, criticizing BLM as riots and looting spread around the country after the death of George Floyd. Now, I am facing cancel culture from within the law school.
What did he say?
In one blog post, I documented how the “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” founding narrative of BLM was fabricated after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. Even the Obama Justice Department found that Brown was shot after attacking a police officer, and did not have his hands raised in surrender or say, “Don’t shoot.” Yet to this day, I pointed out, BLM protesters chant, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
I wrote a second blog post harshly criticizing the riots and looting. I argued that such violence reflected a movement “led by anti-American, anti-capitalist activists … [who] have concocted a false narrative of mass murder of Blacks at the hands of police, when the statistics show otherwise.” I called on the federal government to track down “people who helped coordinate the violence.”
Agreement is not what he expects. The air is poisoned beyond that.
The response was a paradigm of cancel culture. There was a coordinated email and petition campaign by alumni to get me fired. [Fired!]
A group of 21 of my colleagues in the clinical program [colleagues!] then denounced me in a letter to the Cornell Daily Sun student newspaper. While my name was not used in the letter, it was shared with students in advance of publication as a denunciation of me. The letter falsely accused me of supporting “institutionalized racism and violence” and threatened to “continue to expose and respond to racism masquerading as informed commentary.”
Taking no prisoners.
Not one of the 21 signatories, some of whom had been my colleagues for more than a decade and I considered friends, [friends!] approached me with any concerns before running to the school newspaper and sharing their letter with students. It was reminiscent of so many revolutionary movements, where friends and neighbors rush to denounce each other.
Sickening.
The dean of CLS also denounced me in an institutional statement that promised no adverse employment action because of my academic freedom and job security, but gratuitously found that my writings “do not reflect the values of Cornell Law School” as the dean has “articulated them.” The administration never gave me an opportunity to be heard on that damaging accusation, much less a process to challenge it. That statement serves as a warning to unprotected faculty, staff and students who may disagree with BLM to keep their views to themselves.
Totalitarian mentality. Students jumped in, of course, smelling a conquest.
I offered to publicly debate a student representative and a faculty member of their choice, but that offer was rejected. They don’t want to criticize me. They want to silence criticism of BLM.
He has
“quiet” support among students, but that they are afraid to speak up for fear of the professional or social consequences. Cancel culture has created this atmosphere of fear and intimidation.
The world we are living in, for now at least.
Not just bias but whole-cloth creation in this NYT story, sayl Liberty U. in its $10-million suit . . .
Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University slaps New York Times with $10M suit for ‘made up’ COVID-19 story
by Paul Bedard, Washington Secrets Columnist |
| July 15, 2020 03:34 PM
Virginia’s conservative Liberty University today filed a $10 million defamation suit against the embattled New York Times for a “made up” and damaging story that falsely charged that students returning from spring break became infected with the coronavirus because the school stayed open.
In a 100-page suit, with exhibits, filed in Virginia’s Lynchburg Circuit Court, the 49-year-old school also charged that New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson and photographer Julia Rendleman ignored “No Trespassing” signs to tour the campus at a time when the school was trying to keep outsiders, who could potentially be infected with COVID-19, away.
The long-threatened suit stems from a March 29 viral story that suggested several students were infected after returning from spring break. In fact, no student, staffer, or faculty member on campus was, or became, infected.
When will those kids at the Times ever learn? (Sigh.)
The case against Dr. Fauci . . .
Dr. Anthony Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.
In late January, when I was making the case on behalf of the president to take down the flights from China, Fauci fought against the president’s courageous decision — which might well have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.
When I warned in late January in a memo of a possibly deadly pandemic, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was telling the news media not to worry.
When I was working feverishly on behalf of the president in February to help engineer the fastest industrial mobilization of the health care sector in our history, Fauci was still telling the public the China virus was low risk.
When we were building new mask capacity in record time, Fauci was flip-flopping on the use of masks.
And when Fauci was telling the White House Coronavirus Task Force that there was only anecdotal evidence in support of hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus, I confronted him with scientific studies providing evidence of safety and efficacy. A recent Detroit hospital study showed a 50% reduction in the mortality rate when the medicine is used in early treatment.
Now Fauci says a falling mortality rate doesn’t matter when it is the single most important statistic to help guide the pace of our economic reopening. The lower the mortality rate, the faster and more we can open.
After looking around the web for comments etc. more than I intended to, I (a) commend Navarro for putting these accusations out there, (b) concede the nuances involved while still suspicious on my own about a 36-year veteran of the Washington morass who is obviously well practiced at minding his p’s and q’s diplomatically and politically, and (c) (always make it a-b-c, all beyond that has reader giving up) I did find this below appearing at end of an extended USA Today interview last February, when Dr. F. was asked:
Q. We see everyone walking around in masks. Do they work?
A. A mask is much more appropriate for someone who is infected and you’re trying to prevent them from infecting other people than it is in protecting you against infection. If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn’t really do much to protect you. And for example, people start saying, should I start wearing a mask? Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.
What a difference five months make.
I’m gonna copy that to the lady at church who has several times bugged me about my non-wearing of the mask while praying at daily Mass, after I’d worn it as the sine qua non of being allowed past the angels guarding the door.
Second thought, I won’t do that, saving it as a last resort to combat her misguided zeal.
Blithe Spirit 