RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/20/how-californias-paradise-become-our-purgatory/

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/what-does-the-student-intifada-want

With few exceptions, college and university presidents were slow and ineffective in responding to the protests and encampments on their campuses this spring. Their passivity calls to mind the character Gottlieb Biedermann in Max Frisch’s play The Fire Raisers, who, hearing about a series of local arsons, refuses to believe that the men who manipulated their way into occupying his attic could be the perpetrators. Deceived by feelings of guilt, Biedermann is unwilling to throw the men out or believe that they are dangerous—even when they tell him exactly what they are doing. Remaining in denial to the end, he hands them the very matches they use to incinerate his home.

Too often, when faced with the fervent demands and outlandish behavior of student demonstrators, university officials allowed them to violate institutional policies, disrupt academic life, and harass Jews. When presidents finally acted, many negotiated with the protesters and capitulated to their demands. Even those who rightly called the police often failed to impose serious consequences on the disrupters. In the end, few protesters face meaningful sanctions for their extended violations of campus policies and, in many cases, the law.

Yet, the protesters and their allies complained about “authoritarian” crackdowns, betrayals of democratic values, and free-speech violations as their camps got cleared away. Their complaints can be attributed partly to ignorance; a student speaker at Harvard University’s commencement, for example, proclaimed to a cheering crowd that the university had violated students’ “right to civil disobedience,” a right she genuinely seemed to believe that they had. One poll showed that more than half of those who said they supported chanting “From the river to the sea” were unable to name the river and the sea to which the chant referred. When a young woman at New York University was asked what she wanted the university to do, she turned the question to her friend: “Why are we protesting?”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/19/conformity-is-the-enemy-of-free-speech/

The Gaza solidarity encampments that spread across US universities earlier this year showed that free speech is under threat from all sides. Intolerant ‘pro-Palestine’ students wanted to exclude Zionists, Jewish students and anyone not fully committed to their cause from campus. They were happy to disrupt university life and to prevent classes and lectures from taking place. At the same time, some on the pro-Israel side called for these protests to be forcibly shut down, for demonstrators to be arrested and for Israelophobic speech to be censored or punished. Those who are consistent in their support for free speech are becoming rarer by the day.

Greg Lukianoff – president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the need for a radical revival of free speech. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Where does the left-right divide currently fall on the question of free speech?

Greg Lukianoff: One of the reasons I’m worried about the future of freedom of speech, in the United States and beyond, is that there used to be a contingent of the left that unapologetically defended free expression. These people were always in tension with those totalitarians who believed that, if society was governed by enlightened people like them, censorship would be justified. For the most part, I grew up at a time when freedom of speech was actually considered a left-wing value. But with totalitarian thinking winning on the left and the rise of the populist right, there’s no natural constituency for free speech today other than the centre.