Political correctness is humbug. Wishing goodwill to all is not an insult.
By Henry E. Brown, Republican congressman from South Carolina • USNews
Earlier this month, as I recorded a message to our troops and sent Christmas cards to family and friends, I found myself hesitating before using “Merry Christmas” to wish those important to me a blessed holiday. I was brought up in a Christian home where we celebrated Christmas and its many traditions. Until recently, I had never thought twice before wishing others “Merry Christmas.” Communities across the country are abuzz with the “acceptable” way to observe this holiday season, but why should those who celebrate Christmas feel pressure to say “Season’s greetings” or “Happy holidays,” reluctant to express traditional Christmas words of good cheer?
I am troubled by the sentiment that the phrase “Merry Christmas” is not appropriate and concerned by the limits placed on the expression of the traditions and symbols associated with this national holiday. For me, Christmas is one of our most important holidays, not only because of Christianity’s influence on our nation’s founding but also because of the Christmas message of “peace on Earth, goodwill to men.” To downplay this holiday can only be construed as an attempt to minimize its origin. While the commercialization of the Christmas season floods our cities with beautiful light displays and decorations of Santa and his reindeer, we must not forget that the true meaning and significance of Christmas is the birth of Christ. Continue reading
The University of Tennessee at Knoxville warned students to not throw Christmas parties because someone might somehow be offended.
by Robby Soave • The Daily Beast
Another holiday, another opportunity for college administrators to trample students’ free expression rights as part of some comically misguided effort to prevent offense. Last week, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville issued a breathtakingly Scrooge-ish (Scrooge-ian? Scrooge-esque?) piece of advice: “Ensure your holiday party is not a Christmas party in disguise.”
The diversity officers who wrote this instruction must have a lot of extra time on their hands, because eradicating secret Yuletide gatherings doesn’t exactly seem like a pressing higher education issue.
The university, thankfully, has since re-discovered its Christmas spirit, but not before inspiring bewilderment and anger among some students, as well as quite a few Republican politicians who hysterically interpret any slight against Christmas as an attack on Christianity itself. U.S. Republican Rep. John Duncan had this to say: Continue reading
By Jonah Goldberg • National Review
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia . . . could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln
The winning streak enjoyed by campus activists this fall was violently interrupted by the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Some activists were sufficiently annoyed by their ejection from the limelight that they took to Twitter to complain under the hashtag “F***Paris.”
The most obvious irony stemmed from the fact that some of the same protesters who griped about media coverage of their antics — even declaring First Amendment-free zones — suddenly whined when the cameras turned to bloodshed in the heart of Europe. Continue reading
By Blake Hounshell • Politico
News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, in a discursive speech Monday evening, blasted Secretary of State John Kerry and attacked the left for creating an “identity crisis” that he charged has undermined American strength and fostered terrorism around the world.
And he drew a connection between U.S. foreign policy and domestic culture, arguing that “in recent years, there has been far too much institutionalization of grievance and victimhood.”
The Australian-born media mogul, a naturalized U.S. citizen, also touched on the Republican presidential primary, which he said “has articulated a deep distaste for the slow descent of our country.” Continue reading
by Dr. Everett Piper, President • Oklahoma Wesleyan University
This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love. In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.
I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims. Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”
I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience. An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad. It is supposed to make you feel guilty. The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization. Continue reading
The Left’s highly selective application of today’s standards to yesterday’s heroes.
By Victor Davis Hanson • National Review
The latest round of condemning the past on the moral criteria of the present started with banning the Confederate flag from public places. Now it is on to airbrushing away progressive old white guy Woodrow Wilson, in Trotskyized fashion, from public commemoration.
But do those on the Left realize that they are rapidly becoming captives to the consequences of their own ideology? Their current effort to rewrite the past is doomed to failure for a variety of reasons.
Left-Wing Hypocrisy
First, this damnation of memory is not a balanced enterprise, but predicated on today’s notions of politics, race, and gender. No one is insisting that the great work of Martin Luther King Jr. be dismissed from the pantheon of American heroism because he was a known plagiarist and often a callous womanizer who did not live up to our current notions of gender equality. The racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger is still a saint. Continue reading
In Paris, it’s easier to battle a climate crisis than confront jihadists on the streets.
By Bret Stephens • Wall Street Journal
Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.
Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy. Liberal advocacy groups routinely claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country where the poorest counties have the highest rates of obesity. The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation from a dubious Agriculture Department measure of “food insecurity.” But the line gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have nots. Continue reading
by Eric Owens • Daily Caller
The Cal State Northridge professor is Robert O. Lopez.
The taxpayer-funded university’s office of equity and diversity conducted a secret, 245-day investigation against Lopez, a tenured associate professor of English and classics.
When Lopez was finally presented with the secret charges against him, school officials permitted him to defend himself in an interview with Susan Hua, Cal State Northridge’s Title IX Coordinator. Continue reading
by Kurt Schlichter • Townhall
Please don’t tell the students at University of Missouri and Yale and all the other throbbing pustules of academia to stop their insanity. Instead, encourage and provoke them to turn the turmoil up to 11, a number most of these students can’t count to without taking off their Nikes. No, we want the campuses to echo with the whiny cries of the Children of the Safe Space Revolution.
And we will sit back and point and laugh as the weak-willed, spineless liberal losers of academia abase themselves before their whimpering student bodies. This is just great. As Napoleon observed, never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake. Now, mentioning Napoleon probably a microaggression because, in the unlikely event that the gender studies and Marxist interpretive dance majors of Yale and Missouri recognize the name, he’s a cis-het dead white male – and he was not actually differently abled despite being vertically challenged. Still, his advice has merit – just pretend for a moment that he is trans woman-identifying being of color of some sort. Continue reading
by Monica Showalter • Investors Business Daily
Having gone to Columbia University myself, the vast majority of students seeking to mind their own business and complete their own courses of study, rather than spend time protesting, does have the ring of reality. The demanding workload in every department of the university — including journalism — leaves little choice. Continue reading
By George F. Will • Washington Post
Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, also is the time for The Post and other sensitivity auditors to get back on — if they will pardon the expression — the warpath against the name of the Washington Redskins. The niceness police at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have won court approval of their decision that the team’s name “may disparage” Native Americans. We have a new national passion for moral and historical hygiene, a determination to scrub away remembrances of unpleasant things, such as the name Oklahoma, which is a compound of two Choctaw words meaning “red” and “people.”
Connecticut’s state Democratic Party has leapt into the vanguard of this movement, vowing to sin no more: Never again will it have a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. Connecticut Democrats shall still dine to celebrate their party’s pedigree but shall not sully the occasions by mentioning the names of two slave owners. Because Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners have long been liturgical events for Democrats nationwide, now begins an entertaining scramble by states’ parties — Georgia’s, Missouri’s, Iowa’s, New Hampshire’s, and Maine’s already have taken penitential actions — to escape guilt by association with the third and seventh presidents. Continue reading
By Alan M. Dershowitz • Boston Globe
A great debate is underway regarding the nuclear agreement with Iran — and the Obama administration is losing. Unhappy with the growing opposition to his legacy deal, President Obama is trying to stifle the debate by attacking the personal motives and public-communication methods of those who oppose the pact.
He recently derided some prominent opponents as “the same columnists and former administration officials that were responsible for us getting into the Iraq war.” Those comments followed last month’s characterization of deal critics as “talking heads and pundits, and folks who are not going to be making sacrifices, if in fact you end up in a conflict, who are reprising the same positions we saw during the Iraq war.”
Obama has also decried the millions spent by organizations in opposition, saying they have been “putting the squeeze” on members of Congress with TV ads and lobbying campaigns. These groups, he claims, are backed primarily by “billionaires who happily finance super PACs” and are “opposed to any deal with Iran.” In a July 18 address, he seemed particularly hostile to the influence of AIPAC; speaking a day after the pro-Israel lobbying group came out against the deal, he urged Congress to evaluate the agreement “based on facts . . . not based on lobbying.” Continue reading
by Joel B. Pollak • Breitbart
SB 432, introduced by State Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia), removes the term “alien,” previously defined as “any person who is not a born or fully naturalized citizen of the United States.” It also removed the state’s preference for hiring U.S. citizens on public works projects during periods of unemployment.
The bill passed the State Senate unanimously. Mendoza said at the time the State Senate approved the bill that the term “alien” was “offensive,” adding: “It has no place in our laws and should not be the basis of employment hiring.” Last month, as the State Assembly added its approval, he said: “Alien is now commonly considered a derogatory term for a foreign -born person and has very negative connotations.” Continue reading
by Scott Greer • Daily Caller 
So a comedian talks to a journalist and wonders what’s the deal with political correctness.
“That’s not funny!” screams the politically correct as they demand the comic keep his thoughts to himself.
The lack of tolerance here serves as the punchline.
When Jerry Seinfeld told an ESPN reporter that he’s troubled by how insufferably PC college campuses have become, it seemed like he was stating a matter of fact.
by Thomas Sowell
Someone summarized Barack Obama in three words — “educated,” “smart” and “ignorant.” Unfortunately, those same three words would describe all too many of the people who come out of our most prestigious colleges and universities today.
President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again. Economic equality?
That was tried in the 19th century, in communities set up by Robert Owen, the man who coined the term “socialism.” Those communities all collapsed. Continue reading