Defeating Cancel Culture

One imagines that the free market is going to defeat the diversity mania. And yet, on a sober note, companies and schools across the country have hired a boatload of diversity administrators, and, if we fire them all, what are they going to do?

Unfortunately, when a nation goes about producing armies of social justice warriors it finds itself facing the prospect of finding employment for them.

As far as the entertainment industry goes, from Hollywood to the advertising business, you will have noticed that it has gone all-in for diversity. The message is constant. It counts, as Peggy Noonan once said, as moral harassment. You are not good enough to have a diverse garden party. You are not good enough to have an interracial marriage. All that stands between you and an interracial paradise is-- your bigotry.

Someone should suggest that we meld the words equity and inclusion together and arrive at-- iniquity. 

Of course, Hollywood is perfectly capable of reading the ratings. Of late it has discovered that harassing people over race and gender causes them to switch the channel. Doesn’t Netflix provide us with shows from around the world, most of which do not suffer the same cultural mania, and most of which are far better than the lame products that Hollywood produces. 

The same applies to advertisers. Where did anyone get the idea that insulting one’s prospective customers is a good way to sell detergent. 

One believes, based on some evidence, that Hollywood will soon by transitioning into less woke products. It will certainly be for the better. It will be a rousing testimony to the superior wisdom and consummate virtue of the free market.

So, as you know, the intellectual world has recently been consumed with a debate over the Red Guards who now attend Stanford Law School. As you know, said students mounted something like an insurrection-- but, don’t call it that-- to shut down a speech by federal judge, Kyle Duncan. 

The students received the full throated and whole hearted support of a university diversity officer, by name of Tirien Steinbach. Together they made it impossible for Judge Duncan to speak. 

As you also know, Stanford’s law dean, Jenny Martinez wrote a manifesto about free speech. And Dean Steinbach is now on leave.

Of course, we are beyond disagreement. We are certainly beyond reasoned discussion and debate. We have arrived at the point where certain groups of students believe that they are morally obligated to silence anyone who professes incorrect political opinions. Apparently, Judge Duncan had crossed a line when he refused to call a transgender person by his birth sex.

What is driving these Red Guards? Evidently, they do not believe in the due process of law. They believe in getting their way, in throwing tantrums and in forcing other people to do what they want them to do. This means that they are overgrown children and that they need therapy. 

If one wanted to be less charitable, one would add that they are effectively the products of an overdose of therapy, not just the therapy provided by school counselors and teachers, but the therapy that infects the culture today. 

Our young Red Guards have stopped trying to be courteous and respectful. They are happy to express their inchoate emotions, regardless. They are unwilling to engage in debate or to allow their ideas to be judged by reality. Were they to do so they might discover that they have been brainwashed into holding delusional beliefs. And they will do serious damage to you before they will risk that.

I mention this point to emphasize that these young Red Guards are not merely opposed to what Justice Holmes once called the free trade in ideas. They are staunchly opposed to any effort to test their ideas against reality. If a human organism considers itself a male it does not matter that it has trillions of XX hormones. 

This being the case, the only obstacle to the full flowering of trans identity is bad thoughts. Not the thoughts of the trans individual, but the thoughts of everyone else. Once everyone accepts fully that you can be whatever you want to be, one must insist that everyone accept the belief, as a higher truth. 

If you do not conclude from this madness that we are royally screwed-- not in the good sense of the term-- you have not been paying attention.

Anyway, writing in the Wall Street Journal Gerard Baker proposes that the student Red Guards should be effectively shunned from the legal profession. They should not get clerkships and should not be hired as junior associates or even corporate counsel. 

He explains:

Employers should stop employing these jackals and make it clear that anyone who has been actively involved in blocking people from expressing a legitimate opinion won’t be hired. We are by now used to the way in which employers scour social media for indiscretions that doom job applications. Do the same for these campus extremists.

He continues, proposing that we should rise up against intolerance. Differences of opinion are obviously acceptable. Forcibly silencing differences of opinion are not.

I am not urging intolerance of diverse ideas in the workplace. On the contrary, you are perfectly entitled to be a radical and to express yourself openly. What you can’t do is bar viewpoints you don’t like.

For a long time we tolerated campus behavior much as we used to tolerate the behavior of toddlers. They’ll grow out of it, we thought, when they enter the real world. But the joke was on us. They graduated into the real world and started to impose their views on it. Weak-kneed managers, eager to protect their privileges and preserve a quiet life, couldn’t face the hostility they’d get from their employees and a media of the same ideological mindset always willing to air the grievances.

Yes, indeed. The American business world is infested with Red Guards. One feels compelled to mention, as a sobering sidenote, that most of the Red Guards do not want to grow up to join law firms, major corporations or the federal bench. Most of them want to become college administrators-- the rumor has it that Stanford has thousands-- in order to help implement a diversity and equity agenda.

In truth, we have known for years that diversity programs do not work. They damage universities by dumbing down instruction and by producing self-segregation. The flood of administrators is merely a way to avoid facing the truth of the failure. It also provides less-than-gainful employment for the products of those programs.