The Left is Treading on Thin Ice by Going After What People Wrote Years Ago

Should you lose your job for retweeting a political post in 2008 from someone who it turned out also said things sympathetic to white nationalists that you were unaware of? What about agreeing to take a selfie with someone at a conservative event who you found out later had attended a white nationalist meeting? Are you responsible for spending hours researching everyone’s history you encounter on the internet before you repost anything by them? This is where society is headed with the cancel culture. No one is going to be safe from the false cries of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc.

Right now, most of us heave a sigh of relief when we hear about it happening to someone else, glad it wasn’t us. But hardly anyone is safe for long. Since the left can’t substantively refute our political arguments, they are resorting to drastic measures to silence us. This latest tactic is a gold mine for them because most people have a history on social media going back years. Years of things you’ve said every day to comb through. Who hasn’t said something in a stage of rage or while taking some medication or alcohol, that could be misinterpreted as offensive? If you make your account private, they can find a way to pretend to be someone who knows you and sneak in. Or maybe it’s a former friend who turns on you. If you delete your account, they can go to archive.org where tweets are stored forever. If you post under a pseudonym, they often have ways of figuring out who you are.

You might think, “No, never done any of that, I’m safe.” But the line of what constitutes racism, sexism etc. keeps moving further and further out, so what was considered perfectly acceptable in 2010 won’t be in a few years.

People in high-profile positions are the most vulnerable. If the left views you as influential, whether through well-reasoned political debate or financially well off, you’re a prime target. And frankly anyone involved in conservative politics is at risk. They want to silence us, so the more you post on social media, the more you stand out and make yourself a target.

The left’s hypocrisy can be seen in the way it’s now treating the Founding Fathers. The left claims the moral high ground with the advantage of 20/20 hindsight. But their moral high ground is still changing. What they found perfectly acceptable merely 20 or 40 years ago is now morally repugnant.

Yet they give their own a free pass. They’re forgiven, but conservatives aren’t. The late prominent Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was a member of the KKK who organized and led a 150-member chapter, but they don’t care today. You don’t hear about people flipping out over the 23 buildings and roads his name is inscribed on. Only one inscription has been removed. Nothing has been destroyed or defaced. The only reason the left hasn’t started going after people descended from slaves is that they are predominantly Democrats, since it was mostly Democrats who owned slaves.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama once strongly defended marriage as between a man and a woman, as recently as 2008. But the left gives them a free pass now -- they’re never attacked for being homophobic -- while those on the right who have Biblical objections to homosexuality are.

The right has only had a small amount of success pointing out statements made by those on the left in the past, mainly by going over journalists’ tweets. Some are disciplined by their employer and even fired. But they’re the minority. MSNBC talk show host Joy Reid made not just one, but two rounds of tweets ridiculing gays. She apologized, and predictably, the responses to her apology divided down party lines. MSNBC did nothing and she is still a host there. In fact, she appears to have been promoted recently, now hosting The ReidOut, a new Washington-based weeknight show in the key 7 p.m. Eastern time slot.

This nasty practice isn’t going away unless people start pushing back. How many of us lie in bed at night wondering how far down the road someone is going to dig and discover something we wrote years ago? Twitter fortunately only goes back to 2006, with its first growth spurt of people joining beginning in 2007. But more and more of the early internet is becoming easier to find and access. What you wrote on some 1990s listserv will soon be easy to find. The first website you ever created? Your posts on IRC? The younger generations may be in trouble now since they were coming of age and less cautious when they first ventured on social media. But eventually everyone will be susceptible except the rare few who have stayed off the internet.

This is a Pandora’s Box. The question is how to put the genie back in the bottle. Do we fight back by exposing all the improper or supposedly improper things that leftists have said in their pasts? Since they’re less likely to be constrained by Judeo-Christian values, they will have far more writing full of profanity and offensive statements. Or, since they have shown that they will give their own a free pass most of the time, do we attempt the difficult process of ending the practice? Regardless of what we do, this is merely part of a broader problem. The left is going to continue to get those on the right fired for things they say today, by pretending it’s racist or even forging screenshots to make us look racist.

So far it looks like the black conservatives who are speaking up are having some success with the pushback. They’re tired of having their businesses destroyed by violent white Antifa. They’re tired of being called coons and worse things by leftists. And more blacks are becoming conservative. Tellingly, a friend of mine in Kenya told me that 85 percent of the population supports President Trump. They see through the false cries of racism and wish they had the privilege to live in the U.S. Radical black activists claim they want to move to Africa because the racism is so bad here. But they rarely do, because while white-black racism is rare in most countries there; it’s tribalism that is prevalent, and if you aren’t part of a tribe, you are going to have a really hard time functioning in society.

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12-year-old suspended after teacher spots toy gun during virtual class

A 12-year-old boy in Colorado got a five-day suspension for flashing a toy gun across his computer screen during an online art class, according to a report.

The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office said although the teacher thought it was a toy gun authorities still did a welfare check on Isaiah Elliott without parental notification.

“It was really frightening and upsetting for me as a parent, especially as the parent of an African-American young man, especially given what’s going on in our country right now,” Curtis Elliott, Isaiah’s father, told KDVR.

He said his son, who has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and has learning disabilities, wasn’t aware the gun was shown on screen in his distance learning.

“He was in tears when the cops came. He was just in tears. He was scared. We all were scared. I literally was scared for his life,” said Curtis Elliott.

“The virtual setting is not the same as the school setting,” the dad added. “He did not take the toy gun to school. He’s in the comfort of his own home. It’s a toy.”

The toy gun was neon green and black with an orange tip featuring the words on the handle: “Zombie Hunter.”

Reports said the school district, the Widefield District #3, refused to give the Elliott family the recording of the online class, but authorities showed the family a video of the class from a recording from a police body camera.

The boy’s mother said the punishment didn’t fit the crime.

“For them to go as extreme as suspending him for five days, sending the police out, having the police threaten to press charges against him because they want to compare the virtual environment to the actual in-school environment is insane,” said Dani Elliott.

She said she wishes the teacher had reasoned with the parents before condemning the boy.

“If her main concern was his safety, a two-minute phone call to me or my husband could easily have alleviated this whole situation to where I told them it was fake,” said Dani Elliott.

The school won’t apologize for its discipline.

The Grand Mountain school said in a statement: “We follow all school board policies whether we are in-person learning or distance learning. We take the safety of all our students and staff very seriously. Safety is always our number one priority.”

The parents are looking to enroll their son in a charter or private school.

“I definitely feel they crossed the line,” said the mom. “They were extreme with their punishment, especially sending the police out and traumatizing my son and my family.”

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In Foreboding Ruling, Appeals Court Says Transgender Students May Use Restroom of Choice

A federal court decided last week that schools can’t ban students from using the restroom that matches their desired gender identity, in what BuzzFeed News called “a significant legal win for transgender rights.”

The 2-1 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit comes five years after Gavin Grimm sued the Gloucester County School Board for refusing to allow Grimm, then a high school student, to use the boys’ bathroom despite being a biological female.

Judge Henry Floyd, an Obama nominee, wrote the majority decision for Gavin Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, and it’s practically a transgender manifesto.

“At the heart of this appeal is whether equal protection and Title IX can protect transgender students from school bathroom policies that prohibit them from affirming their gender. We join a growing consensus of courts in holding that the answer is resoundingly yes,” Floyd wrote.

His logic is flawed and foreboding. We will see more of these kinds of opinions in the years to come as the transgender movement sweeps through high schools and universities, especially now with the Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, ruling acting as a booster.

“Neither the 14th Amendment nor the Bostock ruling requires, let alone justifies, this activist ruling from the 4th Circuit. Biologically based single-sex private facilities are good law and sound policy,” Ryan T. Anderson, the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told me in an email.

Throughout his opinion, Floyd argued that being transgender is just like being black in America, and thus deserving of the same constitutional protections, free of discrimination.

“The proudest moments of the federal judiciary have been when we affirm the burgeoning values of our bright youth, rather than preserve the prejudices of the past,” the judge wrote, citing both Dred Scott v. Sandford and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, landmark Supreme Court cases about racial segregation.

The Gloucester County School Board maintained that its policy was hardly discriminatory because it applied to everyone, and the single-stall restroom was simply there at Grimm’s leisure—it wasn’t mandatory that the student use it.

Floyd vehemently disagreed, writing:

But that is like saying that racially segregated bathrooms treated everyone equally, because everyone was prohibited from using the bathroom of a different race. No one would suppose that also providing a ‘race neutral’ bathroom option would have solved the deeply stigmatizing and discriminatory nature of racial segregation; so too here.

Anderson said in his email that he believes this argument is flawed:

The judge doesn’t realize the logical consequences: a prohibition on all single-sex facilities. After all, that’s precisely what racial equality required: the abolition of ‘white’s only’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams.

And, of course, that was justified, because our skin color is irrelevant to what we do in a bathroom or on an athletic field. But our bodily differences as male and female are precisely why we have single-sex private facilities and athletics.

And yet, by comparing this to racial segregation, the judge has embraced the logic of androgyny. According to his simplistic logic, just as equality required the end of racial segregation, so too does equality require the end of any sexual distinction. But this ignores the ways in which sex differences make a difference.

Grimm’s case is pivotal to understanding the origins of this movement in schools. It is really the original transgender bathroom case that sparked the debate over a problem that seemed wholly contrived as LGBTQ theater.

Grimm was born female. By freshman year, the student decided to transition to male. As a student at Gloucester High School in Gloucester, Virginia, Grimm asked to use the boys’ bathroom, received permission, and did so for a while until parents complained. The school board then banned Grimm from using the boys’ bathrooms, but created special single-stall bathrooms.

Still, as is nearly always the case, this proved not to be enough and Grimm—feeling “stigmatized and isolated”—insisted that only the boys’ restroom would do.

Since that wasn’t an option, Grimm sued the school system with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. The case went to the Supreme Court, but was kicked back to the lower courts after President Donald Trump rolled back the “protections” for transgender students that the Obama administration had mandated.

This latest ruling demonstrates that the ACLU is determined to force a legal ruling about transgender individuals and bathroom use. These lawsuits are not taken on for kicks and giggles, they are taken on to further a specific cause and extend the concept of equality as far as it will go—and then some.

The ramifications of Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, in which the Supreme Court found workplace discrimination based on sex, covered both sexual orientation and gender identity.

The 4th Circuit applied the justices’ ruling to education. Grimm’s case—where the school banned Grimm’s use of the boys’ bathroom on the basis of gender identity, per the new reading of the Supreme Court in Bostock, would qualify as “sex-based” discrimination.

Should the case go to the Supreme Court again, it’s hard to see how the justices could not also decide in Grimm’s favor, opening a can of worms that can never be put back.

This ruling portends the possibility that anyone can use any bathroom based on their said identity, wreaking havoc on basic, societal norms, such as using the restroom. This would put an end to privacy and safety for women, girls, and even boys, as well as raise a myriad other issues.

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Left needs saving from its own self-righteousness

TREVOR PHILLIPS

What Americans might call the “bullshit detector” of comedy has always been part of our defence against extremism. Targets have not been exclusively right-wing. Monty Python’s depiction of the split between the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, and the oft-forgotten Popular People’s Front of Judea, was aimed squarely at the narcissism of small differences on the left that helped destroy Jim Callaghan’s Labour government. In the long struggle that brought New Labour into being, the slogan “Splitters!” became a rallying cry for centrists.

Today, it is the left rather than the right that needs to have its prejudices pricked; not to defeat us, but to rescue us from our own self-righteousness. We can, of course, make a joke of ourselves without any assistance. A professor of African and Caribbean studies who has benefited from years of advancement based on her lived experience of “blackness” admitted this week that she is, in fact, white, Jewish and grew up in a Kansas City suburb. Here, a student union plans to ban “mocking” drag parties. Leaving aside the question of whether drag itself ridicules all women, who will draw the line between “mocking” and “celebrating” trans?

These events are not one-offs. They lie in a continuum. At one end sits a supposed defence of the oppressed; towards the other extreme, censorship by Extinction Rebellion and ultimately the murderous retribution meted out to the journalists of Charlie Hebdo for making jokes. It has been sickening to witness much of the establishment slide into capitulation to XR’s recent assault on our free press and the quiet apologias for the Charlie Hebdo murders. Those who claim to “understand” extremist frustration appear willing to defend dogma and doctrine to the death – presumably someone else’s rather than their own. Reminder: there is no human right not to be offended.

We should constantly be encouraged by the brightest and the best to question our beliefs. Yet higher education today seems to be populated entirely by zealots, whose witless response to dissent from orthodoxy is to “cancel” it. If XR and critical race theorists represent the intellectual challenge to capitalism, the plutocrats are safe for a while yet.

Forty years ago, as a moderately left-wing president of the National Union of Students, I faced a challenge from an undergraduate called Chris Hamel-Smith, now a distinguished lawyer in his native Caribbean. Paradoxically, the seriousness of Chris’s campaign lay in his sense of humour. He championed hedonism, demanding rum punch along with the student grant and proposed restoring student union finances by betting on Red Rum in the 1977 Grand National. He lost the vote, which was a shame because the horse won. But more importantly, he highlighted the fact that the left was devoting more attention to solidarity with Chile than to making sure that students had affordable accommodation and decent teaching. He shamed us into moderation.

He also recently reminded me that he had to be rescued from a group of outraged ultra leftists who thought that his broad Trinidadian accent was mocking black people, specifically me. The joke was that, being a white West Indian, he sounded like I looked, and I looked like he sounded. According to Chris, I grabbed the mike and explained that where we came from, pretty much everybody, of every race, talked like him; it was I, born in London, who was the odd man out. The Trots slunk back to their seats, deprived of both a victim and a target.

Chris now protests that he had no mischief in mind. But his humour worked because it carried a grain of uncomfortable truth; he wanted to make the point to my would-be saviours that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Leftist puritans now label women who stand up for their own sex as transphobic. Others accuse anyone, whatever their colour, not wholly obsessed by race of being white supremacists. And the supposedly moderate left, cowed by the noise, daily surrenders its principles of justice and freedom of expression to extremists; as Churchill warned, feeding the crocodile in the hope it will eat us last.

In so doing, we are alienating the very people whose interests we should be promoting. The progressive cause desperately needs a good dose of Wodehouse-style puncturing to bring our balloon back to earth.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.
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