The Same Unneurealism Exists on the Left - Chapter 25, webpage 4, continued...

Chapter 5
Intolerance 201

The phrase "free speech zone" should be jarring to any American. The entire country is, and should be, a free speech zone. Yet on many college campuses, the public expression of views is relegated to tiny spaces requiring university preapproval for use. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), one in six of America's four hundred top colleges has so-called "free speech zones." The University of Cincinnati's (UC) free speech zone accounted for just 0.1 percent of the campus. Students were required to register ten days in advance of their planned expression of free speech, and if they failed to do so could be charged with trespassing. The university abandoned their anti-free speech policy only after the campus branch of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), a conservative student activist group, successfully sued the university with the help of FIRE.

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It seems absurd, except to the illiberal left, that on a college campus, sharing ideas, handing out flyers, even distributing copies of the Constitution, has to be relegated to a limited space controlled by university administrators. Free speech zones ostensibly exist to create a "safe" environment for the expression and exchange of ideas. In reality, they serve as tools to regulate and discourage dissent and free speech. These bureaucratic roadblocks dissuade students from engaging in peaceful expression and protest, both of which should be regular occurrences on college campuses. According to FIRE "many students must wait five to ten business days to use a free speech zone." At many colleges, including Boston College, the dean of students has the authority to choose the time and place of any such demonstrations. In 2014, students at the University of Central Florida noticed that their free speech zone, which previously included the entire patio in front of the Student Union, had been reduced to a tiny area of inclined grass.

Courts have repeatedly held that a "free speech zone" on a public campus is unequivocally unconstitutional. Yet these zones continue to proliferate on the campuses of taxpayer-funded institutions like the University of Cincinnati, which had been warned beginning in 2007 that their speech regulations were unconstitutional. They changed their policy only after a court ordered them to cease from their violations of the First Amendment. FIRE has determined that there are seventy schools in the United States that currently have unconstitutional "free speech zones." Greg Lukianoff, the Stanford Law School graduate who runs FIRE, says that sometimes it seems as though for every "free speech area" the courts strike down, another one pops up.

Private universities are not legally barred from establishing "free speech areas," but you would think that institutions that brag about their openness to debate and the importance of diversity would shun the hypocrisy of free speech zones. But to the illiberal left, "debate" and "diversity" are not so broad as to include ideas with which they disagree.

Many of the incidents involving "free speech zones" would be funny if they weren't so chilling. A student at Modesto Junior College in

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California was denied the right to hand out copies of the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day by campus police. He was informed by a clerical staffer in the Student Development office that there was no room in the "free speech area," which the staffer referred to as "that little cement area." Apparently two other students were expressing free speech that day and our budding free speech activist was informed the next available date for him to hand out U.S. Constitutions was several days hence, which obviously would no longer be Constitution Day.

The U.S. Constitution seems to be a particular target of the illiberal left busybodies who dominate taxpayer-funded schools. In April 2014, two students sued the University of Hawaii at Hilo for preventing them from distributing the Constitution.  A few months later at Penn State, members of Young Americans for Freedom set up a table to hand out Constitutions. The administration, which had violated its own previous commitment to dismantle the zones, told the YAF students that their use of a table to hand out material violated a university policy against unregistered structures. I wonder what Ben Franklin would think of this? 

In 2014, at Miami-based Broward Community College, a conservative activist was ordered to go to the campus "free speech zone" by a campus security guard after asking a student if "big government sucks." When the activist explained such zones were unconstitutional, the guard informed her, "If you just want to hang around I have a supervisor coming." The activist walked away, at which point the guard demanded to see her identification. She refused to provide it, because it is neither illegal to ask people questions nor is the United States yet the bureaucratic equivalent of East Germany. So what did the security guard do? He called the police, who showed up within minutes. The police politely asked her to leave, saying she was trespassing. Her group ultimately launched a Change.org petition asking Broward College to remove its "unconstitutional" free-speech zone.

Unfortunately, if students want to exercise their right to free speech they often have to go to court against their own college or university. And it is not just students our colleges and universities aim to silence, it is anyone with an opposing point of view.

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COMMENCEMENT SHAMING

It is becoming sadly predictable that whenever a prominent conservative, or even an insufficiently leftist liberal or moderate Democrat, is invited to be a campus commencement speaker, that speaker is often forced to withdraw because of student or faculty protests. I call it "commencement shaming." What is intended to be an honor ends up in humiliation for the invitee.

In 2014, for example, protests from lefty students and professors compelled two of the most accomplished women in the world - former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde - to withdraw from delivering commencement speeches to Rutgers, and Smith College, respectively.

At Harvard's Graduate School of Education, students, alumni, and faculty protested to demand the university rescind its commencement invitation to Democratic State Senator Mike Johnston of Colorado, because they disagreed with his policies on school reform. They questioned Johnston's claim to have been inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders and said they believed the Democratic senator's "vision and policies have been informed far more by conservative economists... "  Johnston saw what the students and faculty missed: an opportunity for dialogue. He offered to meet with the protesters. Twenty-five protesting students showed up for the meeting, and in the end his speech received a standing ovation.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, delivering the 2014 commencement speech to Harvard University, noted the alarming trend on America's college campuses of silencing commencement speakers on the basis of protests, often by a vocal minority. Bloomberg - who himself had been the target of protests demanding his invitation to speak be withdrawn - hit on the irony at the root of this phenomenon: it's "open- minded" liberals who are leading the charge to limit the expression of viewpoints on college campuses. Is this liberal doublethink?  He said, "In each case, liberals silenced a voice [of] individuals they deemed politically objectionable. That is an

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outrage." He added, "Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species."

Bloomberg continued: "Like other great universities, [Harvard] lies at the heart of the American experiment in democracy. Their purpose is not only to advance knowledge but to advance the ideals of our nation. . . . Tolerance for other people's ideas and the freedom to express your own are inseparable values at great universities," Bloomberg noted. "Joined together, they form a sacred trust that holds the basis of our democratic society. But that trust is perpetually vulnerable to the tyrannical tendencies of monarchs, mobs, and majorities. And lately, we've seen those tendencies manifest themselves too often both on college campuses and our society." How do you like those neurorealities?

As explained in chapter one, the free-speech advocacy group FIRE has noted that in the six years from 2009 through 2014, the number of protests resulting in speech cancelations equals those from the previous twenty-two-year period at 62 instances each. Clearly this is an accelerating trend. But liberals should not assume that they are safe from this roving campaign of intolerance. One of the 2014 commencement speakers felled by protesters was Robert J. Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley - a man of impeccable liberal bona fides - who was invited to speak at Haverford College. But Haverford students and several professors complained about his leadership during a 2011 incident when UC police used force on students protesting college costs.  According to the Philadelphia lnquirer, Birgeneau received a letter stating that if he wanted to speak at the commencement, he must "meet nine conditions including publicly apologizing, supporting reparations for the victims, and writing a letter to Haverford students explaining his position on the events and 'what you learned from them."' Birgeneau understandably declined to meet their chilling demands and withdrew from providing the commencement speech.

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Chapter Eight

Illiberal Feminist Thought Police

The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed – would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper - the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

George ORWELL, 1984

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ILLIBERAL FEMINISTS AGAINST FREE SPEECH

When men disagree with illiberal feminists, a favored silencing tactic is to accuse them of "mansplaining." The term grew out of a fairly brilliant 2008 essay by feminist writer Rebecca Solnit, who described the exquisitely annoying feeling of having a certain type of man condescendingly lecture a woman on a topic about which he knows very little - in this case Solnit's own book. This is certainly a phenomenon I and millions of other women have experienced, and it can be maddening. But the illiberal feminists have

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forged the notion of "mansplaining" into a weapon to silence any man who expresses an opinion at odds with feminist orthodoxy.

How it works is relatively simple. A "pro-life" man who talks about abortion with a "pro-choice" woman is "mansplaining." (But a "pro- choice" man agreeing with a "pro-choice" woman is not.) The Atlantic accused Texas Governor Rick Perry of "classic mansplaining" after he criticized Wendy Davis's thirteen-hour filibuster to prevent a vote on a bill that would have placed restrictions on abortion. His offending comment? He noted, "It's just unfortunate that she hasn't learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters."  Perry was referencing the fact that Davis had experienced an unplanned pregnancy while a teenager, which resulted in the birth of her first daughter.

Marin Cogan at GQ accused Mitt Romney of trying to "mansplain [his] way to the White House" during his 2012 presidential run. The examples she raised - his complaints about bureaucratic red tape or criticism about how security was being handled at the London Olympics - were standard political fare recast as "mansplaining." New York magazine accused Republican Senator Ted Cruz of "mansplaining" to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein when he made a conservative point about the Second Amendment during a hearing. Salon.com accused Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin of "mansplaining" to incoming Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin when he told a local paper, "Hopefully I can sit down and lay out for her my best understanding of the federal budget because they're simply the facts," he told the Chippewa Herald. "Hopefully she'll agree with what the facts are and work toward common sense solutions."

Illiberal feminists turn simple ideological disagreements, whether about the federal budget or the Second Amendment or anything else, into excuses to engage in character assassination, dismissing their opponents as sexists. Conservatives are their favorite targets, but any dissident can land in their crosshairs.

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A scheduled 2014 Oxford University debate was canceled following illiberal feminist outrage that two men would be allowed to debate the topic of whether "abortion culture" was harmful to society. The event hosted by Oxford Students for Life was to feature Tim Stanley, a historian who writes for the Daily Telegraph and Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked and a columnist for the Australian. Stanley was to argue that abortion was harmful to society; O'Neill, who considers himself a left leaning libertarian, would oppose that notion. O'Neill has written, "The right to choose frees a woman from official prying into the decisions she makes about her body and her life; it increases her humanity, it makes her a fuller, more independent human being."

The delegitimizing started with a bang. A group called "Oxrev fems" set up a webpage called, "What the f-ck is Abortion Culture?”

Protesters were urged to attend the event with some "non-destructive but oh so disruptive instruments to help demonstrate to the anti-choicers

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what we think of their debate." Around three hundred people signed up to protest an event that was expecting around sixty attendees. Oxford University's Student Union Women's Campaign put out a statement saying, we "condemn OSFL for holding this debate.... By only giving a platform to these men, OSFL are participating in a culture where reproductive rights are limited and policed by people who will never experience needing an abortion."

Ultimately, they won. The venue, Christ Church, informed Students for Life they would have to find another venue for their event, which they were not able to do on such short notice. Oxford undergraduate Niamh Mclntyre, gloated in an Independent piece headlined, "I helped shut down an abortion debate between two men because my uterus isn't up for their discussion." She argued that, "Feminists are all too used to encountering. . . [the] indignant assertion that 'Free speech is a vital principle of a democratic Society’” She argued that the "pro-life" groups could find another platform to express their views, so there was no infringement on free speech. But she added, "The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups."

O'Neill wrote in response, "Orwell must be kicking himself in his coffin for not thinking of putting such doublespeaking words in the mouths of his tyrannical characters in 1984. Doublespeak is newspeak doublethink. Just as they insisted that 'war is peace,' so today’'s Big Sisters on campus claim 'censorship is freedom.'"

Slate’s Will Saletan, a liberal and pro-abortion rights supporter, has experienced the same kind of demonizing from illiberal feminists. His heresies include writing articles exposing lax oversight at abortion clinics and suggesting that abortion might not be the most ideal outcome for a pregnant woman. For writing articles like this, Saletan has been described as "anti-choice" and "misogynist.”

"The mere fact you are a male instantly disqualifies you," Saletan told me in an interview. "If a man disagrees with them, they ascribe it to the fact he is a man and doesn't understand the woman’s perspective. They

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complain about sexism rightly and then apply it by instantly dismissing men." He notes, "Some of these people weren't even born yet when I was carrying signs for the Equal Rights Amendment on the Louisiana border. It's laughable that they think they represent feminism and I don’t."

For liberals, free speech is a fundamental value. Debate is a good thing. So is tolerance of differing viewpoints. But the illiberal feminists and the illiberal left reject the ideas of free speech and tolerance. They believe that views that don't align with their ideology should be silenced.

Johns Hopkins University freshman Andrew Guernsey was exposed to this hostility when he sought to establish a "pro-life" campus group in 2013. Voice for Life would provide "sidewalk counseling" at abortion clinics and hand out "pro-life" literature on campus. The Student Government Association (SGA) promptly denied the request and compared Voice for Life to white supremacists.  The SGA claimed that sidewalk counseling would violate undergraduate anti-harassment policies, even if it were off university property. An SGA member told a reporter that anti-abortion rights demonstrations made her feel "personally violated, targeted and attacked at a place where we previously felt safe and free to live our lives."

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Another SGA leader told a reporter that, "We have the right to protect our students from things that are uncomfortable.... Why should people have to defend their beliefs on their way to class?

There was no evidence that anyone would ever be asked to "defend their beliefs" any more than an anti-abortion rights student might have to "defend their beliefs" by passing a pro-abortion rights demonstration. Students shouldn't be "protected" - to use the SGA leaders' term - from beliefs that upset them. A true liberal would say that it is by debating our beliefs that we come together to reason and seek the truth. Isn’t that what universities are supposed to be about?

A Baltimore Sun article quoted a female student complaining that with Voice for Life, "group members would be approaching students and talking to them about how abortion is immoral. That's an impingement on someone's personal beliefs." Here, at one of the nation's most elite universities, a student truly believes that another person expressing a viewpoint with which another person disagrees is impinging on someone's personal beliefs. Actually, it's called "dialogue" or "free speech" or "debate."

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If the illiberal feminists were truly confident in their views, they would welcome disagreement and dissent. It's interesting to note that anti-abortion student groups on college campuses aren't afraid of debate. They are willing to face hostility to express their point of view. It is the illiberal left and the illiberal feminists who fear debate, who seek "protection" from opposing points of view, and who want to simply ban ideas they don't like.

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When three Duke lacrosse players were accused of gang-rapirg an exotic dancer at their fraternity house in 2006, the illiberal left convicted them in the court of public opinion. Following their indictment, the students were banned from Duke's campus by the college president. Even after they were exonerated of the charges, the accused found their lives substantially altered. One of the accused players, David Evans, had his job offer with J.P. Morgan Chase rescinded following his 2006 indictment. The other two accused students ended up transferring to other universities.

Even members of the lacrosse team who weren't accused of being involved in the incident saw their lives turned upside down. Their season was canceled; their coach forced to resign. One lacrosse player, who sent an

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e-mail the day of the alleged incident referencing the film American Psycho, was subsequently vilified in the press. According to a 2014 Vanity Fair article, he has had trouble finding gainful employment ever since. A complaint brought  by nearly forty members of the Duke lacrosse team against the university outlined what life was like for them after three of their teammates were accused of rape: "For 13 months in 2006-2007 these students were reviled almost daily in the local and national media as a depraved gang of privileged, white hooligans who had hired a black exotic dancer to perforrn at a team party had brutally gang raped and sodomized her in a crowded bathroom, and had joined together in a 'wall of silence' to hide the truth of their heinous crimes. But it was a vile and shameful lie, and it caused the plaintiffs tremendous suffering and grievous, lasting injuries."

Zerlina Maxwell isn't interested in such things. She says, "The cost of disbelieving women [who make false accusations] . . . signals that women don't matter and that they are disposable. . .." No, it signals that we believe that people are innocent until proven guilty, that an accusation is not the end of the conversation, but the beginning. It signals that we are not an authoritarian society that punishes people without due process. Any person with a son, brother, nephew, husband, or a passing interest in the humanity of men in society should be deeply alarmed by the callous dismissal of the basic rights of men to be presumed innocent.

During the Duke lacrosse rape case, feminist writer Amanda Marcotte called people defending the accused "rape-loving scum" and characterized legitimate questions about the case as akin to saying, "Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair." She accused columnists David Brooks and Kathleen Parker of writing "rape apologies" when they raised issues about the case. A mob of Duke students banged pots and pans outside the house of Provost Peter Lange, who eventually came out to engage them. As the students harassed him, he repeatedly urged respect for due process, saying, "We don't know the facts of what happened in the house." "Bullshit!" a protestor cried out immediately in response.

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In New York Magazine, Kurt Anderson blasted the New York Times' biased coverage for abetting the rhetorical lynch mob and quoted one Times reporter saying "I've never felt so ill" as he did about the paper's slanted treatment of the story. The story was just too perfect to resist, let alone investigate fairly: white, privileged men were abusing a black single mother. So facts be damned and saddle up the bias nag, we're riding herd! Anderson recounted how one Duke associate professor, Wahneema Lubiano gleefully blogged about how the lacrosse players "are almost perfect offenders." Why? Because they are "the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy. . .and the dominant social group on campus." So, "regardless of the 'truth'.... Whatever happens with the court case, what people are asking is that something changes."A Duke University Women's Studies and English professor named Karla F. C. Holloway was a primary persecutor of the accused students. Holloway, who also is a professor at Duke Law School, penned an article for the 2006 summer edition of a Barnard College Scholar and Feminist Online webjournal, in which she demonized the lacrosse players as privileged white men who deserved a presumption of guilt. She accused the players of engaging in the "debasement of other human beings" and alleged that their "presumption of privilege that their elite sports' performance had earned seemed their entitlement. . . to behaving badly and without concern for consequence." She wrote, "In nearly every social context that emerged following the team's crude conduct, innocence and guilt have been assessed through a metric of race and gender. White innocence means black guilt. Men's innocence means women's guilt." Holloway is still employed by Duke University.

In a letter to Duke University, Houston Baker, a professor now at Vanderbilt, was quick to demonize and convict the lacrosse players. Their actions were the natural conclusion of Duke's culture of "white, male, athletic violence." He accused the University of the "blind-eyeing of male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain." He wasn't the only one. After

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the case first broke in 2006, Wendy Murphy, a lawyer and adjunct professor at the New England School of Law went on a tear against the players in various interviews, arguing, "To suggest [the indicted players] were well behaved: Hitler never beat his wife either. So what? She speculated about the accused players, "I bet one or more of the players was, you know, molested or something as a child." And then this: "I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth."

But there was no truth in the accusations. Eventually all charges were dropped against the students and the district attorney who brought the case was fired and disbarred for his actions. Few, if any, apologies were forthcoming from the members of the illiberal mob who harassed and slandered anyone who refused to leap to a presumption of guilt against the players. After North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared the three accused students "innocent," Dr. Julianne Malveaux - incoming president of Bennett College, an all-women's school - told National Public Radio that the students were hooligans and "bad apples" and "don't deserve an apology."

Remember, the same illiberal feminists who think it is no big deal to kick an innocent man out of college, trash his reputation, and harm his future job prospects on the basis of false accusations are also likely to think that if a woman has to walk past an anti-abortion demonstration on campus she has suffered grievous harm. Oh ya, doublethink.

The neurorealities of the illiberal Left as described above are quite far from actual reality. Consider earlier mentioned the neurorealities of Einstein in his theories of relativity (1905, 1915), Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution (1859) and in 1620 Francis Bacon’s description of the scientific method of thinking and his statement of confirmation bias - Chapters 9 and 22. These are key perceptions of reality as they really exist, they are truth, and they are real. Let’s call their perceptions neureal, in these areas Einstein, Darwin and Bacon are neurealists, they think neureally, their neurorealities are examples of neurealism and the neureal. As far as the illiberal Left’s perceptions of reality as described above, they are unneureal, the illiberal Left are unneurealists, they think unneureally, their neurorealities are examples of unneurealism and the unneureal.  And as mentioned in Chapter 21, so does 30% of the current US population who are adamantly illiberal Left.

In the extraordinarily complex society of today, the instinctive cognitive biases, the resulting confirmation bias, argumentative theory and the tribe mentality stoked by the warrior ethos may very well be present in the 100 billion neurons in our brain helping to generate someone’s perception of reality, someone’s neuroreality, and as proposed by Andersen in Fantasyland, as well as by Powers in The Silencing, and expanded upon by myself, that neuroreality may not always reflect true reality, it may be unneureal. It’s in our genes, it’s been in our genes for a very long time: cognitive bias probably developing over the course of 200,000 million years of mammalian evolution including Australopithecus; to conformation bias in Homo habilis; to argumentative theory, where truth doesn’t matter, winning the argument and gaining tribal power does in Homo erectus; and to the warrior ethos, an extension of the tribal ethos, that lead Homo sapiens out of Africa 70,000 years ago to dominate the world.

What can we do about our neuroreality as a Nation?  Read Chapter 26 and find out.