Cruel Summer: The Fight To Preserve Freedom Of Speech

 

This week the Good Fellows are joined by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson. The gentleman farmer from Selma, CA (and the author of The Case For Trump) is not known for pulling his punches, and this discussion is no different. The Good Fellows consider the recent resignation by New York Times editor Bari Weiss, the open letter published in Harper’s Magazine supporting free speech,  the scourge of cancel culture in the academy and the media, as well as some ideas for enhancing higher education to make it more relevant for today’s society. And yes, Hanson proffers some unsolicited advice to the current occupant of the Oval Office about how to win in November.

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  1. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    Very interesting discussion, smart people, but they don’t have any answers either.  We end up  wanting the Feds to fix matters because nobody else has the authority to fix things because the crazy left dominates everything, but we can’t increase Federal power, the lefts goal.    Perhaps just cut, leftist dominated states first, but all of them eventually.  We’ve created such deficits we’ll have to raise taxes, but first cut and cut deeply.  States won’t be able to raise taxes without blow back so will also cut.

    • #1
  2. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    Most people don’t attend college to be educated. They attend because employers require a degree. What that degree entails is irrelevant to the fundamental value. Students might also desire to be educated, but they are encouraged to seek knowledge within the formal government-backed system. 

    Universities can be good systems for intensive education in the hard sciences. But even some scientific professions could qualify applicants by other means if professional guilds, tort lawyers, and their affiliated legislators did not require degrees to practice. 

    That universities continually reduce prerequisite standards to maximize their range of consumers shows that college is now just a for-profit extension of the federally mandated grade school system. Any high school graduate with financial means, typically by debt, is universally expected to “continue” one’s education. College attendance is now so common that advanced degrees serve the purpose that a Bachelor’s once did. 

    Significant correction would require cooperation of parents, corporations, and politicians. Parents must seek alternatives to help young adults to career paths. Corporations must relax degree requirements and favor competence over formal crediting. Politicians must reduce or eliminate licensing restrictions and reduce the threat of litigation with tort reform. I don’t see any of that happening. Degree factories will continue as a normal phase in American professional life. 

    The more imminent threat at this point is the rapidly growing confidence of managers in all industries to censure and ban people for rejecting the Left’s whimsical edicts and nonsensical mantras. Conservatives have a very short time to break that momentum before we lose too much power to preserve the institutional pillars of freedom.

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  3. James Anderson Inactive
    James Anderson
    @JamesAnderson

    This was excellent.

    • #3
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