30 April 2007 @ 6:47PM >> Two writers for National Review have commented on the film Indoctrinate U. Stanley Kurtz wrote:

Last week I attended the premiere of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary about campus political correctness. It’s a fun and powerful piece of work that deserves a wide audience. The film features plenty of encounters between Maloney and college officials who, after being embarrassed by Maloney’s questions, invariably summon police to have him evicted. These confrontations are entertaining, but the real force of this film flows from Maloney’s recounting of a series of incidents of campus political correctness. I had never heard of any of these cases. Yet each of them is remarkable.

[...]

The end result of this torrent of outrages is that foes of campus PC have grown jaded. That’s where Indoctrinate U comes in. This film hits you in the gut, in a way that no column or blog post can.

Meanwhile, Carol Iannone called Indoctrinate U “a terrific must-see” and added:

It is sound, shocking—even to someone who knows a lot about political coercion on today’s campuses—and also, amazingly, highly entertaining. It is both amusing and sobering at once. It deserves widespread distribution in theatres across America.

27 April 2007 @ 4:46PM >> David Hogberg of The American Spectator attended one of the media screenings for Indoctrinate U at the Tribeca Film Center earlier this week. His review, along with some quotes from his interview with me, is now online at the Spectator website.

26 April 2007 @ 7:15PM >> Well, I was moderately aware that classroom indoctrination inspired a movie, but until now, I didn’t realize that it also inspired a high-energy rock song.

Thanks to The Right Brothers for volunteering to put up a special page to make their song freely available for Brain Terminal readers.

25 April 2007 @ 9:35PM >> Well, not quite Cops...better.

Michael J. Totten’s latest dispatch from Iraq, “Meet the Iraqi Police in Kirkuk,” contains a compelling four-minute video taken after Iraqi police arrested the driver of a vehicle whose passenger was shooting at a crowd. The video is half-way down the page, embedded in one of Totten’s characteristically vivid reports.

Totten is a groundbreaking reporter—calling him a blogger seems to diminish the stature of his work—who writes (and now films) from all over the Middle East thanks to contributions from people who find his work valuable. If you think as highly of his work as I do, please dump a few coins in the tip jar at the end of his post.

24 April 2007 @ 2:23PM >> Oleg Atbashian has an intruiging piece over at Pajamas Media speculating on whether the Cho murder rampage at Virginia Tech was inspired by the ideology that dominates education these days.

Among Cho’s rants was evidence that he was motivated by class envy:

You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.

For my children, for my brothers and sisters that you fuck, I did it for them.

Atbashian theorizes:

Why is it that in the previous decades, when life was tougher, guns were just as available, and the ratio of mental disorders was about the same, mass shootings were unheard of? Some would say that those people had not yet been corrupted by moral relativism, desensitized by Hollywood’s fantasy violence and glorification of crime, nor addicted to gory point-and-shoot videogames. All valid points - yet one major reason for this hardly gets any notice. I mean, of course, the dehumanizing effect of the so-called “progressive” education.

The truth is that the radical “progressive” ideology (a broad term embracing many offshoots of Marxism) dehumanizes people more effectively than any violent point-and-shoot video game ever could. It pits various groups of people against one another by cultivating envy and grievances that are mostly imaginary and second-hand. In the politically correct book of “progress,” man is no longer judged by the content of his character - but by the color of his skin, class, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other secondary attribute. The trick is that when a secondary attribute becomes the primary one, man loses his unique individuality and becomes a mere social function, a drone in a collective, a peg in the machine, a sacrificial animal on the altar of “progress.”

23 April 2007 @ 8:44AM >> In this Front Page Magazine interview, I discuss the inspiration behind my first video, Protesting the Protesters; politics, human rights, the global Jihad & the Middle East; McCain/Feingold and Michael Moore (there is a connection!); the one-party state of Hollywood and academia; and, finally, my upcoming film Indoctrinate U.

19 April 2007 @ 9:03PM >> Satire and mockery are legitimate tools when engaging in political debate. Using humor illustrates points that the logical mind might otherwise ignore.

On college campuses, such forms of argument resonate with students. Snark appeal is one of the main reasons for the popularity of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, two people who are very effective at conveying political messages wrapped in satire.

It’s no surprise, then, that students will often use satire and mockery to make political points. You see this when students hold “affirmative action bake sales,” where students sell pastries as different prices depending on the race of the buyer. The purpose is not to engage in racial discrimination, the purpose is to condemn the racial discrimination used in the college admissions process. And yet, in many cases, the very schools that proudly discriminate based on race when determining who gets an acceptance letter will not allow students to illustrate it by engaging in the exact same behavior.

By deciding that burning the American flag was protected by the First Amendment, the Supreme Court made a powerful statement that action can constitute political speech. And on public university campuses, courts have routinely held that the First Amendment applies without restriction.

So why, then, has the University of Rhode Island—a public university—not stopped the de-funding and de-recognition of the College Republicans for engaging in protected political speech?

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is on the case:

For months, the Student Senate has demanded that the group publicly apologize for advertising a satirical $100 “scholarship” for white, heterosexual, American males. [...]

“Neither the Student Senate nor anyone else at URI has the power to force the College Republicans to say things against their will,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “As bad as it may be to tell people what they cannot say, it is still worse to tell them what they must say. The Supreme Court has long recognized that compelled speech is not compatible with free societies. It is stunning that URI’s student government would show such contempt for fundamental rights, especially after URI’s own president explained it to them.”

The College Republicans student organization first advertised the satirical “White, Heterosexual, American Male” “scholarship” in November, 2006. The scholarship consisted of a nominal $100 to be awarded to someone fitting those criteria who submitted an application and an essay on the adversities he has faced. College Republicans President Ryan Bilodeau explained that the point was to use satire to protest scholarships awarded on the basis of race, gender, or nationality. Over 40 URI students applied for the “scholarship,” many submitting equally satirical application essays.

In a meeting on February 19, the Student Senate’s Student Organizations Advisory and Review Committee (SOARC) prohibited the College Republicans from disbursing the money. The group agreed that it would not give out the $100, but SOARC decided that even advertising the satirical “scholarship” violated URI’s anti-discrimination bylaws and demanded that the group publish an apology in the campus newspaper. Unwilling to apologize, Bilodeau appealed SOARC’s decision. The Senate denied that appeal.

FIRE wrote to Senate President Neil Cavanaugh on March 13, stating that because the Student Senate derives its authority from a public university, it must comply with the First Amendment prohibition on compelled speech. The Student Senate, however, in a memo to the College Republicans on March 27, ruled again that the College Republicans must publish an apology and claimed authority to force them to do so. That sanction was later reduced to an “explanation” to be published in the campus newspaper and a mandatory apology to be sent to all of the students who applied for the scholarship.

[...]

“URI’s student government thinks it is above the law—that it can take fees extracted from students by a state university and yet ignore the constitutional obligations that come with them. It is sadly mistaken,” Lukianoff said. “President Carothers must act now to stop this rogue organization from conducting these unlawful acts under the aegis of the university.”

In academia, it’s not only legitimate but legal to award scholarships based purely on one’s group identity, but to protest that by doing the exact same thing is somehow out of bounds. What seems boundless is academia’s capacity for double-standards.

18 April 2007 @ 9:35PM >> New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine suffered severe injury in a car accident last week, and I wish him the quickest, most pain-free recovery possible. I feel for the friends and relatives forced to watch him suffer through his treatments as the doctors try to repair the damage. A car accident of that magnitude is a horrific trauma for anyone to go through, much less someone who must do so while under the media’s microscope.

It’s a bit crass to use a human tragedy to make a political point. But I’ve noticed no commentators mentioning the Obvious Unsaid of this case. Corzine, who governs a state with a seatbelt law and a strictly-enforced speed limit, disobeyed both. Plenty of us violate traffic laws, so I’m not criticizing Corzine for that.

When we have laws that regulate every minor detail of our lives, we break them. That’s not shocking. But having such laws in the first place corrodes the authority of all laws by encouraging disrespect for the law in general. If we assume that most people break minor laws, can we assume they will always obey major laws? And if we have a legal system that encourages us to distinguish between the laws we’re allowed to break and those we’re not, doesn’t that leave a lot of room for untrustworthy people to interpret things in a way we’d rather they didn’t?

The problem isn’t that Corzine was in a car going 91 miles an hour, it’s that the car was being driven by a member of the very police force that penalizes his state’s citizens for doing the exact same thing. And in a car going at that speed, the officer driving the car allowed Corzine to ride without a seatbelt after his state announced a “click it or ticket” crackdown on seatbelt scofflaws.

Again, I am not criticizing Governor Corzine for doing something that most of us also do at times. If he wants to drive around like that, then my biggest hope for him is that he gets home safely.

My problem is not with the governor or his actions, it’s with the Nanny State mentality that politicians like Corzine, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Spitzer promote. Once we start giving government the power to regulate the manner in which we conduct one part of our personal lives, it becomes much easier for the next politician to argue that people should also support banning his pet irritant.

We’re already seeing that happen. First it was smoking, then it was foie gras, soft drinks, trans-fats, incandescent lightbulbs and aluminum baseball bats. The list of things politicians want to ban is growing at an alarming rate, and nothing seems to be standing in the way.

We don’t live under prohibition anymore, but the mentality that spawned it is alive and well. Today, it’s a prohibition on the margins of life, a prohibition of a thousand cuts. And for each new flag planted by the Nanny Staters, it becomes ever easier to seize additional territory.

And to add insult to injury, the people who set these rules always seem to avoid them.

That’s how we end up with politicians like Al Gore and John Edwards scolding middle-class Americans for their energy use while they occupy energy-guzzling mansions with multi-car garages that dwarf my apartment.

Hey, if they earned it, they deserve it. I won’t begrudge them their palaces if they’re willing to pay for them. But it would be nice if they took a break from acting like the enlightened ones who are going to save the world by telling everyone else how to live.

Oh, and one other thing...they can pry my incandescent bulbs from my cold dead fingers.

17 April 2007 @ 9:16PM >> After Columbia delivered wrist-slaps to the students who stormed the stage and shut down speaker invited by the College Republicans, a friend of mine sent this letter to Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger. I thought it was well put, and he has allowed me to post it here:

Mr. Lee C. Bollinger
President
Columbia University
535 West 116th Street
202 Low Library, Mail Code 4309
New York, NY 10027

Dear President Bollinger:

As a member of the Board of Advisors of the Columbia Political Union (CPU), I was saddened and dismayed today to read that your office has decided to impose an empty and symbolic punishment to the students who forcefully prevented a representative of the “Minutemen Project” from speaking at a forum last October.

Although I did not attend the forum, I took great comfort from your swift assurances that no one at the school would have “the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers” and that your office would investigate the matter thoroughly. I was therefore chagrined to learn today that the offending students quietly were given the lightest possible punishment for a mere violation of the University’s Rules of Conduct; a gentle warning that will reportedly expire from the students’ transcripts in a short time.

It is a sad day when one of our city’s most prestigious institutions, one that I feel a strong connection to by virtue of my association with the CPU as an inaugural member of its Board of Advisors, would view an assault to the right of others to express their views as a minor case of disorderly conduct. I agreed with you when you stated that “we must speak out to deplore a disruption that threatens the central principle to which we are institutionally dedicated, namely to respect the rights of others to express their views,” and urge you to remain committed to these ideals by action rather than by words.

I have no interest in defending anything that the featured speaker might have said at the forum and am not writing to express whether or not I agree or disagree with these views. I’d like to believe that anyone who is invited to your campus to speak should be able to do so without fear or intimidation, regardless of the severity of my personal disagreement with those views, and I pray that I never allow myself to become inconsistent in the administration of that standard. Free societies are not made stronger by the ability of one group to censor another but rather by the free exchange of ideas and dissent.

As a First Amendment scholar, you surely would agree that demonstrating, organizing forums featuring opposing viewpoints, and even the occasional heckling to spoken words are perfectly acceptable ways to display disagreement and dissent. Taking action to prevent words from being spoken, however, is another matter altogether. Frankly, the ad hominem behavior of your students was a disservice to those who might share their disagreement with the invited speaker’s positions and Columbia University’s appeasement of their recalcitrance is an utter disgrace.

Unfortunately, one could easily perceive that your administration is content to allow violence and intimidation on its campus to silence those whom a few believe do not have the right to be heard. It is your obligation to protect these rights, as you had previously committed to doing, and thereby avoid setting a vague and highly arbitrary precedent that presages an atmosphere where similar thuggery will be allowed to prevail and thrive.

With best wishes.

Sincerely,

Marcus Cederqvist

8 April 2007 @ 6:15PM >> London’s Telegraph reports on more bias at the BBC:

Amid the deaths and the grim daily struggle bravely borne by Britain’s forces in southern Iraq, one tale of heroism stands out.

Private Johnson Beharry’s courage in rescuing an ambushed foot patrol then, in a second act, saving his vehicle’s crew despite his own terrible injuries earned him a Victoria Cross.

For the BBC, however, his story is “too positive” about the conflict.

The corporation has cancelled the commission for a 90-minute drama about Britain’s youngest surviving Victoria Cross hero because it feared it would alienate members of the audience opposed to the war in Iraq.

I wonder if the BBC has ever cancelled a project because it might alienate people who support the war in Iraq.

Call me cynical, but for some reason, I doubt it.

4 April 2007 @ 8:59AM >> Just last year, Yale University was engaged in what it portrayed as a valiant fight against discrimination. You see, the school wanted to receive federal tax dollars, but it did not want the federal government’s military recruiters to have the same access to graduating students that private companies have.

Their rationale was that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy enacted by the Clinton Administration voilated the school’s non-discrimination policy by preventing gays from serving openly in the military. But rather than stand on principle and reject the federal funding, the school wanted to take the money and to tell the military to take a hike at the same time. So Yale fought the government all the way up to the Supreme Court (and lost).

Still, let’s give Yale the benefit of the doubt and assume that they really are concerned with discrimination. If that’s the case, then why is Yale thinking of opening up a satellite campus in the United Arab Emirates? Not only is it a country that won’t even allow Israeli citizens to set foot within its borders, but it bans homosexuality by law. In the U.A.E., gays are arrested, imprisoned, subject to therapy and even hormone treatments.

Certainly, that’s quite a bit more discriminatory than the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, but standing on principle against the U.A.E. is apparently not nearly as satisfying to the folks running Yale as grandstanding against the U.S. military. Hence the school’s evasive explanation for why it is proceeding with its plan. The Yale Daily News reports:

Other universities have been wary of dealing with the United Arab Emirates. The University of Connecticut’s plans to open a satellite campus in Dubai were set aside recently because of concerns about discrimination against Israeli citizens.

[Deputy Provost Barbara] Shailor said Yale is taking these concerns seriously, but that they have not stopped the University from moving forward with its talks with Abu Dhabi’s government.

“There are lots of issues,” Shailor said. “Certainly if you think about our interactions with China or with India, one could express some more concerns across the board. So what one would do is to look at all of these concerns, see exactly to what extent they seem to be justified, and then to weigh the positive aspects of having a relationship and building a relationship with not having a relationship.”

Well, at least now we know the truth: Yale doesn’t give a damn about discrimination. They just wanted an excuse to give the middle finger to our military.

3 April 2007 @ 11:38PM >> A Reuters article entitled “Bush success vs. al Qaeda breeds long-term worries” starts out by saying:

Even as al Qaeda tries to rebuild operations in Pakistan, experts including current and former intelligence officials believe the group would have a hard time staging another September 11 because of U.S. success at killing or capturing senior members whose skills and experience have not been replaced.

And to illustrate this seemingly positive news, columnist David Morgan quotes a few experts, such as a guy who claims that al Qaeda is delighted to be on the receiving end of this “success”:

“If you’re looking at it from the cave, or wherever al Qaeda is hiding at the moment, you have to be pretty happy with the way the world is moving,” [former CIA agent Michael Scheuer] said.

Yes, the world rarely looks more sunny than from deep within a cave.

Morgan notes that although “Islamist groups have killed about 1,600 people in 53 attacks overseas since 2001,” the current trend is encouraging: “The number and lethality of the attacks have fallen off since 2004.”

So naturally, Morgan concludes the article on a positive note:

But IntelCenter chief executive Ben Venzke said the chance of an al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil has grown based on the militant network’s increasing references to the American homeland in public messages.

“Our leading thinking is that we are closer now to an attempt at a major attack in the United States than at any point since 9/11,” Venzke said.

As James Taranto points out:

There is no denying Venzke is right. If an al Qaeda attack is in the future, then it is closer now than at any point since 9/11. Venzke has stumbled onto something profound: the linear and sequential nature of time.

There are other disturbing implications as well. If you survived 9/11—and this is true no matter who you are—you are more than five years closer to death now than you were then.

2 April 2007 @ 9:19AM >> Germany’s Der Spiegel asks “Does Germany already Have Sharia Law?“

And in another piece, the widely-read pan-European magazine looks at anti-Americanism in German society, noting that Germans now “believe that the United States is a greater threat to world peace than Iran.” Perhaps part of the reason Germans don’t perceive Iran as a threat is that the country, like the rest of Europe, has carefully avoided inflaming Iran for decades:

The German political establishment, which will no doubt loudly lament the result of the poll, is largely responsible for this wave of anti-Americanism. For years the country’s foreign ministers fed the Germans the fairy tale of what they called a “critical dialogue” between Europe and Iran. It went something like this: If we are nice to the ayatollahs, cuddle up to them a bit and occasionally wag our fingers at them when they’ve been naughty, they’ll stop condemning their women to death for “unchaste behavior” and they’ll stop building the atom bomb.

That plan failed at some point — an outcome, incidentally, that Washington had long anticipated. Iran continues to work away unhindered on its nuclear program, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reacts to UN demands with an ostentatious show of ignorance. The UN gets upset and drafts a resolution.

[...]

For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq.

[...]

Iran is a different story. The last time someone made a joke on German TV about an Iranian leader, the outcome was not pleasant. Exactly 20 years ago, Dutch entertainer Rudi Carell produced a short TV sketch portraying Ayatollah Khomeini dressed in women’s underwear. Carell received death threats. The piece, which lasted all of a few seconds, led to flights being cancelled and German diplomats being expelled from Tehran. Carell apologized. Jokes about fat Americans are just safer.

Fast forward to the Cartoon Intifada, the rioting, the burning embassies, and the death toll that arose out of cartoons in a newspaper, and you can see why the trembling Europeans are reluctant to say anything critical about Iran or radical Islam. But they might not see Iran as a threat, much in the same way that a compliant gradeschooler doesn’t see the local bully as a threat as long as he hands over his lunch money whenever he’s asked.

Say what you want about the Americans, though, because your head won’t get chopped off as a result. So it’s easy, although shortsighted, for you Europeans to direct your anger at the United States. There are no consequences for it. We’ll still come to your defense when your cities start falling to your own home-grown Jihadists in a generation or two, just as we provided for the common defense of Europe for the half-century bounded by World War II and the fall of the Soviet Empire, allowing you to spend next to nothing on your own defense and build up your lavishly unproductive welfare states.

But by engaging in this ostrich act whenever confronted with reality, Europe is not only postponing the inevitable, but making it inevitably worse. Because today’s schoolyard bully doesn’t have a nuclear weapon...yet. But it may soon, no matter how many worthless pieces of paper the U.N. issues. So when the bully graduates to mass murder of unspeakable proportions, there will be those of us who said we told you so. And we’ll remember all those nasty words you said about us. And then we’ll help, because this is our fight too.

We just wish you’d wake up and see it for yourselves.

1 April 2007 @ 8:22PM >> The European Union appears to be under the delusion that by denying reality, it will simply go away:

The European Union has drawn up guidelines advising government spokesmen to refrain from linking Islam and terrorism in their statements.

Brussels officials have confirmed the existence of a classified handbook which offers “non-offensive” phrases to use when announcing anti-terrorist operations or dealing with terrorist attacks.

Banned terms are said to include “jihad”, “Islamic” or “fundamentalist”.

The word “jihad” is to be avoided altogether, according to some sources, because for Muslims the word can mean a personal struggle to live a moral life.

One alternative, suggested publicly last year, is for the term “Islamic terrorism” to be replaced by “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam”.

[...]

“This type of newspeak shows that the EU refuses to face reality,” [British politician Gerard Batten] said. “The major world terrorist threat is one posed by ideology and that ideology is inspired by fundamentalist jihadi Islam.”