[Peace-discuss] [Peace] Read the 'Harper's letter': it's right

Karen Aram karenaram at hotmail.com
Sat Jul 11 17:39:28 UTC 2020 

David, your below statements might be worthy of Counterpunch given their support for the likes of Proyect, another faux Marxist supporting imperialism.


> On Jul 11, 2020, at 10:37, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jul 11, 2020, at 10:08, David Green <davidgreen50 at gmail.com <mailto:davidgreen50 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Anthony DiMaggio, like many Counterpunch writers during what is the decadent phase of the website/newsletter's existence, post-Cockburn, suffers from 2 fundamental symptoms: 
>> 
>> Obviously Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), which allows him not to see that the majority of the working class, and the vast majority if you exclude blacks, has been rejected during the past 3 decades by the Democratic Party, and has for lack of a better alternative migrated to the Republican Party, or simply checked out of the political process. Thus, for DiMaggio, Trump voters must be "racist" and therefore not worthy of their objective working class position in our current political economy--as opposed to the worthy academic such as himself .
>> 
>> Second, DiMaggio remains blissfully uncritical of progressive neoliberalism, whom he describes as being from liberal to progressive to radical. That is, he remains uncritical of the Woke identity politics that now defines the "Left," embodied by the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC), including the black PMC (Hannah-Jones, Coates, Kendi on down). He pretends that they have somehow been excluded from mainstream discourse, when in fact they are now in the catbird's seat of mainstream (NPR, MSNBC, NYT, WP) media. DiMaggio's articles on Counterpunch in recent years, especially his analysis of Trump supporters' "white nationalism" and "white supremacy" would have found a perfect home on any of these mainstream Woke platforms.
>> 
>> DiMaggio is defensive about accusations regarding "cancel culture," something that is very real and disturbing, which the open letter accurately and rightly addresses. Of course some of the signatories are hypocritical if not depraved, including Cary Nelson and Bari Weiss, especially regarding Israel/Palestine. But the larger point remains, and applies not just to mainstream outlets, but to allegedly alternative ones like the Intercept, and indeed to Counterpunch itself, which has, with exception of Rob Urie, excluded "anti-Woke" voices (I'm not talking about myself, at least not yet), while promoting a Woke identitarian-Marxist asshole like Louis Proyect and his support for the wretched 1619 Project.
>> 
>> DiMaggio lives within a Woke academic world which is a clusterfuck of category errors regarding identity, oppression, liberation, etc. Those who attempt to address this sorry state of affairs on campuses will indeed be "cancelled" in various ways. Meanwhile, he narcissistically worries about not being able to publish his "Gramscian" perspectives in academic journals, for crying out loud.
>> 
>> In the post-Sanders, post-George Floyd, BLM/trans era, we are entering a very dangerous situation, which will be characterized by "loyalty oaths", purges, and a Maoist style culture war around identitarian issues. There will be moral panics aplenty, such as we are experiencing now. There will be many casualties, as the Woke Left will attempt to gain control of the Democratic Party in coalition with both neoliberals and neoconservatives, neither of whom the Woke PMC have any fundamental problems with; and we can clearly see the neolibs/neocons strategically accommodating themselves to the repressive demands of the Woke, such as what occurred at the NYT and their editor. The DP will continue to exploit its remaining machine "base," which consists only of black voters, but no longer includes labor unions in terms of voting loyalty (the DP basically began its abandonment of the unions with McGovern in 1972).
>> 
>> We have seen a microcosm of this process and these emerging developments locally in recent years, both on campus and in the county-city context, in relation to both trans and "pro-immigrant" movements, and the rise of a racialized, domineering political machine in the Democratic Party. Neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and Wokeness get along just fine. Yes, let's have trans people, especially black trans people, in the military. And during the pandemic, let's have our public health official (Julie Pryde) supporting unsafe and illegal public gatherings, because "racism is a virus," with no local pushback at all from our "right-wing" newspaper. That's just perfect.
>> 
>> Teachers and teachers' unions are going to be under the gun in terms of racialized, white-shaming "re-education." It's going to get messy, it already has, when the two superintendents kowtow to the notion that "silence is violence." But the teachers are in a relatively advantageous, unionized labor position, and we may see genuine struggle, and perhaps even some light rather than heat regarding our education system and our children's future; for example, if our districts try to implement the 1619 Project, there will be pushback, at least from me. And there promises to be many comedic moments as our teachers are required by Human Resources to examine their "white fragility."
>> 
>> There's much more to say, but suffice it to say that DiMaggio's contribution to a necessary debate regarding free speech, cancellation, and Wokeness is utterly ungrounded in any coherent analysis of our situation, and absolutely tendentious; given his track record, all of this is unsurprising.
>> 
>> DG
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 8:40 PM Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
>> John, I know what Carl means by “deceased equine.” 
>> 
>> But since when did we stop beating the drums of truth. 
>> 
>> Correction on my first communique: I referred to “fly zone,” I meant to say “no fly zone.” 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jul 10, 2020, at 18:26, John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com <mailto:jbw292002 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 7:21 PM C. G. Estabrook via Peace <peace at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Much of what DiMaggio says is a bodily assault on a deceased equine. 
>>> 
>>> What Carl means here is that DiMaggio is beating a dead horse.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> It's as if he’s just discovered the situation, and is shocked that it’s affected his career so much.
>>> 
>>> Surely he can’t just be discovering that "U.S. media and educational institutions have never been committed to the free exploration of competing views, at least not for those who question corporate power. The sooner we stop pretending this landscape represents a free and open exchange of ideas, the better.” 
>>> 
>>> Who does?
>>> 
>>> Who engages in this pretense about the U.S. media and educational instititutions being committed to the free exploration of competing views?  That the 'landscape' represents a free and open exchange of ideas?  Practically everyone.  Including, of course, the media, and virtually everyone who makes his living in academia.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> Best, CGE
>>> 
>>> 
>>> > On Jul 10, 2020, at 6:50 PM, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com <mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com>> wrote:
>>> > 
>>> > I never said the letter was “wrong,” but Di Maggio’s statements taken out of context are those I tend to agree. I’m not an academic, but I didn’t like the letter as much as I should. My revulsion at those promoting it, not all, I like Chomsky, is related to the liberal assumption that Di Maggio refers to below:
>>> > 
>>> >  “ I think it’s warranted to focus on the ways in which “free speech” is being weaponized in this case, and in contemporary American discourse, to empower reactionary voices, under the façade of a free exploration of ideas.”
>>> > 
>>> > "One of the main problems with this sort of lofty rhetoric is that it misrepresents the severely deficient reality of American political discourse. We live in a period when the rise of neoliberal capitalism and untrammeled corporate power have cheapened “public” political discourse to serve the interests of plutocratic wealth and power, while assaulting notions of the common good and the public health. Idealistic rhetoric about exploring diverse views falls flat, and is a mischaracterization of reality to the deficiencies in U.S. political discourse under neoliberal corporate capitalism, when debates are perverted by political and economic elites who have contempt for the free exchange of ideas.”
>>> > 
>>> > "The “let’s engage in a diversity of competing views” position sounds great until one realizes that we do not, and have never lived in, that sort of pluralistic democracy. We live in a political culture that, on its face, is committed to free speech protections for all, in which through the respectful exchange of ideas, we arrive at a better understanding of truth, to the benefit of all. But we don’t really live in that society. Ours is a reactionary culture, which celebrates ideas that service political and economic power centers. In this society, views that are elevated to being worthy of discussion include milquetoast liberal values that are sympathetic (or at least not antagonistic) to corporate power, apolitical content that’s aimed at mindless entertainment and political diversion, and reactionary authoritarian views that border on fascistic, but are vital to demonizing immigrants, people of color, and other minorities, and reinforce a white patriarchal corporate power structure. Radical lefties, or even progressive-leftists, need not apply to be included in this circumscribed discourse. Their views are routinely blacklisted from the mass media, and are increasingly marginalized in higher educational institutions.”
>>> > 
>>> > "Despite complaints about a pervasive liberal bias in higher education, available evidence reveals the opposite. As I’ve documented <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/news-on-the-right-9780190913533?cc=us&lang=en& <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/news-on-the-right-9780190913533?cc=us&lang=en&>> through my own comprehensive analysis of hundreds of national opinion polling questions on Americans’ political and economic values, there’s virtually no empirical evidence to suggest that increased education in the U.S. is associated with increased likelihood of holding liberal attitudes. The reason for this non-link between education and liberalism is obvious to those leftists who have struggled to carve out a space in the increasingly reactionary American university: there’s very little commitment to progressive or leftist values in the modern corporate collegiate “experience”-oriented schooling system.”
>>> > 
>>> > "Reflecting on my own experiences within this system, the very notion of academics serving as public intellectuals has been under systematic assault by the rise of a “professionalization” culture that depicts political engagement as “biased,” “unprofessional,” and “unacceptable.” Whatever lingering commitment to higher education as a public good was rolled back decades ago with the rise of corporatized academic “professional” norms. Scholars are now primarily concerned with publishing in esoteric, jargon-laden journals that no one reads, and almost no one cites, while elevating a discussion of the methods of how one does research over a discussion of the political and social significance of our work. In this process, there’s been a suppression of any commitment to producing active citizens who see themselves as having an ethical or moral responsibility to be regularly politically engaged.”
>>> > 
>>> > "The reactionary “professionalization” that’s celebrated in the ivory tower is relentlessly promoted at every step of the process through which academics develop and are socialized: in the graduate school experience, in the job hiring, tenure, and promotion processes, and in the process of peer review for academic publications. Those who don’t get with the program are filtered out at some point in this process. Very few who are committed to challenging professionalized academic norms make it through PhD programs, and fewer still obtain tenure-track jobs and tenure. It is a rare to find academics who learn how to effectively hide their political values in grad school, and who then actively draw on those same values in their scholarship once they’ve secured an academic job.”
>>> > 
>>> > "In my more than two decades in higher ed, I can say there’s no such thing as a fair hearing for the progressive-radical left when it comes to academic publishing. Thinking of my own research, I see zero interest in elite academic publishing houses – the Oxfords, Princetons, and Cambridges of the world – in making space for openly leftist frameworks of analysis, let alone for the sort of applied Gramscian and Marxian empirical research that I do on media propaganda, hegemony, indoctrination, and mass false consciousness. Neither do any of the reputable journals in most social science disciplines express interest in this sort of research.”
>>> > 
>>> > "Considering the research I do focuses on social movement protests, media propaganda/fake news, and inequality studies, one might think these timely topics would draw a large number of requests for university speaking engagements. These are, after all, defining political issues of our time. But this isn’t at all the case. The academy remains as reactionary as ever in terms of sidelining and blacklisting leftist ideas and frameworks for understanding the world. There’s little interest in prioritizing high-profile campus speaking events for such topics in the neoliberal corporate academy. Considering the utter contempt for such scholarship, it’s difficult for me to focus my limited time and energy lamenting campus attacks on authoritarians like Milo Yiannopoulos, or whatever other reactionary pseudo-intellectual flavor of the week who has been disinvited from paid speaking engagements that I and other leftist scholars couldn’t dream of receiving in the first place.”
>>> > 
>>> > "I won’t shed a tear for reactionaries who seek to appropriate dwindling university resources for their own personal publicity and self-aggrandizement, considering that their ideology actively supports gutting the very institutions that they so shamelessly take advantage of. The reality of the matter is that there’s no First Amendment “free speech” right to be invited to numerous campus engagements, to be paid a generous speaking fee, or to have campus security resources devoted to protecting arch-reactionary authoritarian speakers in light of the large student protests that are mobilized against these campus events.”
>>> > 
>>> > "We should recognize that the recent wave of laments against PC “cancel culture” from the right reinforce a specific power dynamic in American society. It is one in which reactionaries have initiated an assault on what little remains of independent and critical thinking within the media and higher ed. They have done so by draping their contempt for free and critical inquiry in the rhetoric of “free speech.” But U.S. media and educational institutions have never been committed to the free exploration of competing views, at least not for those who question corporate power. The sooner we stop pretending this landscape represents a free and open exchange of ideas, the better.”
>>> > 
>>> > 
>>> > On Jul 10, 2020, at 16:28, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com <mailto:carl at newsfromneptune.com>> wrote:
>>> >> 
>>> >> Yeah, I read DiMaggio’s piece in CP this morning. CP has published him fairly often, but I never particularly liked his stuff.  
>>> >> 
>>> >> But “Ideas aren’t responsible for the people who believe in them,” right? 
>>> >> 
>>> >> In this case, if I have to choose between his ideas and those of the Harper’s letter, I’ll take the latter.
>>> >> 
>>> >> That’s what we should be talking about. 
>>> >> 
>>> >> Where, specifically do you think DiMaggio is right and the letter is wrong?
>>> >> 
>>> >> 
>>> >>> On Jul 10, 2020, at 6:19 PM, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com <mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com>> wrote:
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> True, but look what I just came across: An article supporting my instincts of aversion in reference to the “Letter.”
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> JULY 10, 2020
>>> >>> Free Speech Fantasies: the Harper’s Letter and the Myth of American Liberalism <https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/free-speech-fantasies-the-harpers-letter-and-the-myth-of-american-liberalism/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/free-speech-fantasies-the-harpers-letter-and-the-myth-of-american-liberalism/>>by ANTHONY DIMAGGIO <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/anthony-dimaggio/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/anthony-dimaggio/>>Facebook <https://www.counterpunch.org/#facebook <https://www.counterpunch.org/#facebook>>Twitter <https://www.counterpunch.org/#twitter <https://www.counterpunch.org/#twitter>>Reddit <https://www.counterpunch.org/#reddit <https://www.counterpunch.org/#reddit>>Email <https://www.counterpunch.org/#email <https://www.counterpunch.org/#email>> <https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/free-speech-fantasies-the-harpers-letter-and-the-myth-of-american-liberalism/print/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/free-speech-fantasies-the-harpers-letter-and-the-myth-of-american-liberalism/print/>>
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
>>> >>> Harper’s Magazine’s July 7th “Letter on Justice and Open Debate <https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ <https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/>>” is making its rounds in popular political discourse, and takes aim at the “PC” “cancel culture” we are told is being fueled by the most recent round of Black Lives Matter protests. This cancel culture, we are warned, is quickly and perniciously taking over American discourse, and will severely limit the free exploration of competing viewpoints.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> The Harper’s letter signatories run across the ideological spectrum, including prominent conservatives such as David Brooks and J.K. Rowling, liberals such as Mark Lilla and Sean Willentz, and progressives such as Noam Chomsky and Todd Gitlin. I have no doubt that the supporters of the letter are well meaning in their support for free speech. And I have no interest in singling out any one person or group of signatories for condemnation. Rather, I think it’s warranted to focus on the ways in which “free speech” is being weaponized in this case, and in contemporary American discourse, to empower reactionary voices, under the façade of a free exploration of ideas.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> The ideas established in the Harper’s letter sound just fine in principle, and when examined in a vacuum. The supporters embrace norms of “open debate” and “toleration of differences,” and opposition to “dogma[s],” “coercion,” and “intolerant climate[s]” that stifle open exploration of competing views. The letter’s supporters celebrate “the free exchange of information and ideas,” which they deem “the lifeblood of a liberal society,” contrary to a rising “vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” The letter elaborates <https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ <https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/>>:
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> “But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.”
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> Appealing to Americans’ commitment to civic responsibility for open dialogue, the Harper’s letter warns, “restriction of debate” “invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> One of the main problems with this sort of lofty rhetoric is that it misrepresents the severely deficient reality of American political discourse. We live in a period when the rise of neoliberal capitalism and untrammeled corporate power have cheapened “public” political discourse to serve the interests of plutocratic wealth and power, while assaulting notions of the common good and the public health. Idealistic rhetoric about exploring diverse views falls flat, and is a mischaracterization of reality to the deficiencies in U.S. political discourse under neoliberal corporate capitalism, when debates are perverted by political and economic elites who have contempt for the free exchange of ideas.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> Numerous passages in the Harper’s letter create the impression that U.S. political discourse is characterized by a vibrant and open exploration of diverse and competing views. The letter includes <https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ <https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/>>:
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> + A lament that the emerging “cancel culture” threatens to “weaken our norms of open debate and toleration.”
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> + The claim that the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.”
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> + The assertion that American discourse is characterized by institutions that “uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.”
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> + The call “to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.”
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> All of these claims are romanticizations of American life. They obscure the reality that progressive left and radical dissident views are routinely blacklisted from “mainstream” political, economic, and social discourse by the media and by mainstream academic institutions.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> The “let’s engage in a diversity of competing views” position sounds great until one realizes that we do not, and have never lived in, that sort of pluralistic democracy. We live in a political culture that, on its face, is committed to free speech protections for all, in which through the respectful exchange of ideas, we arrive at a better understanding of truth, to the benefit of all. But we don’t really live in that society. Ours is a reactionary culture, which celebrates ideas that service political and economic power centers. In this society, views that are elevated to being worthy of discussion include milquetoast liberal values that are sympathetic (or at least not antagonistic) to corporate power, apolitical content that’s aimed at mindless entertainment and political diversion, and reactionary authoritarian views that border on fascistic, but are vital to demonizing immigrants, people of color, and other minorities, and reinforce a white patriarchal corporate power structure. Radical lefties, or even progressive-leftists, need not apply to be included in this circumscribed discourse. Their views are routinely blacklisted from the mass media, and are increasingly marginalized in higher educational institutions.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> I don’t draw these conclusions lightly. My understanding of how the mass media operates is based on extensive personal experiences, and those from countless left intellectuals I know. Many of us have struggled (and mostly failed) to break into “mainstream” discourse because of the limited space in corporate news devoted to marginalized perspectives. With this marginalization comes the near erasure of critical views, including those seeking to spotlight record (and rising) economic inequality, repressive institutions that reinforce racial, gender and transphobic systems of repression, the corporate ecocidal assault on the environment, the rise of unbridled corporate power and plutocracy, the rising authoritarianism in American politics, and the increasingly reactionary and fascistic rhetoric that has taken over the American right.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> Despite complaints about a pervasive liberal bias in higher education, available evidence reveals the opposite. As I’ve documented <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/news-on-the-right-9780190913533?cc=us&lang=en& <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/news-on-the-right-9780190913533?cc=us&lang=en&>> through my own comprehensive analysis of hundreds of national opinion polling questions on Americans’ political and economic values, there’s virtually no empirical evidence to suggest that increased education in the U.S. is associated with increased likelihood of holding liberal attitudes. The reason for this non-link between education and liberalism is obvious to those leftists who have struggled to carve out a space in the increasingly reactionary American university: there’s very little commitment to progressive or leftist values in the modern corporate collegiate “experience”-oriented schooling system.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> Reflecting on my own experiences within this system, the very notion of academics serving as public intellectuals has been under systematic assault by the rise of a “professionalization” culture that depicts political engagement as “biased,” “unprofessional,” and “unacceptable.” Whatever lingering commitment to higher education as a public good was rolled back decades ago with the rise of corporatized academic “professional” norms. Scholars are now primarily concerned with publishing in esoteric, jargon-laden journals that no one reads, and almost no one cites, while elevating a discussion of the methods of how one does research over a discussion of the political and social significance of our work. In this process, there’s been a suppression of any commitment to producing active citizens who see themselves as having an ethical or moral responsibility to be regularly politically engaged.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> The reactionary “professionalization” that’s celebrated in the ivory tower is relentlessly promoted at every step of the process through which academics develop and are socialized: in the graduate school experience, in the job hiring, tenure, and promotion processes, and in the process of peer review for academic publications. Those who don’t get with the program are filtered out at some point in this process. Very few who are committed to challenging professionalized academic norms make it through PhD programs, and fewer still obtain tenure-track jobs and tenure. It is a rare to find academics who learn how to effectively hide their political values in grad school, and who then actively draw on those same values in their scholarship once they’ve secured an academic job.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> In my more than two decades in higher ed, I can say there’s no such thing as a fair hearing for the progressive-radical left when it comes to academic publishing. Thinking of my own research, I see zero interest in elite academic publishing houses – the Oxfords, Princetons, and Cambridges of the world – in making space for openly leftist frameworks of analysis, let alone for the sort of applied Gramscian and Marxian empirical research that I do on media propaganda, hegemony, indoctrination, and mass false consciousness. Neither do any of the reputable journals in most social science disciplines express interest in this sort of research.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> Considering the research I do focuses on social movement protests, media propaganda/fake news, and inequality studies, one might think these timely topics would draw a large number of requests for university speaking engagements. These are, after all, defining political issues of our time. But this isn’t at all the case. The academy remains as reactionary as ever in terms of sidelining and blacklisting leftist ideas and frameworks for understanding the world. There’s little interest in prioritizing high-profile campus speaking events for such topics in the neoliberal corporate academy. Considering the utter contempt for such scholarship, it’s difficult for me to focus my limited time and energy lamenting campus attacks on authoritarians like Milo Yiannopoulos, or whatever other reactionary pseudo-intellectual flavor of the week who has been disinvited from paid speaking engagements that I and other leftist scholars couldn’t dream of receiving in the first place.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> I won’t shed a tear for reactionaries who seek to appropriate dwindling university resources for their own personal publicity and self-aggrandizement, considering that their ideology actively supports gutting the very institutions that they so shamelessly take advantage of. The reality of the matter is that there’s no First Amendment “free speech” right to be invited to numerous campus engagements, to be paid a generous speaking fee, or to have campus security resources devoted to protecting arch-reactionary authoritarian speakers in light of the large student protests that are mobilized against these campus events.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> We should recognize that the recent wave of laments against PC “cancel culture” from the right reinforce a specific power dynamic in American society. It is one in which reactionaries have initiated an assault on what little remains of independent and critical thinking within the media and higher ed. They have done so by draping their contempt for free and critical inquiry in the rhetoric of “free speech.” But U.S. media and educational institutions have never been committed to the free exploration of competing views, at least not for those who question corporate power. The sooner we stop pretending this landscape represents a free and open exchange of ideas, the better.
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >>>> On Jul 10, 2020, at 16:09, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com <mailto:carl at newsfromneptune.com>> wrote:
>>> >>>> 
>>> >>>> I used to say on News from Neptune, “Ideas aren’t responsible for the people who believe in them.” 
>>> >>>> 
>>> >>>> I think that’s true - and I don’t disagree with you about the people you name from the list of signers.
>>> >>>> 
>>> >>>> But the important thing is what the letter says. And I think it’s more or less right. That’s what we should be debating.
>>> >>>> 
>>> >>>> Hope you’re keeping well in the current craziness. —CGE
>>> >>>> 
>>> >>>> 
>>> >>>>> On Jul 10, 2020, at 4:37 PM, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com <mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com>> wrote:
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>>> Carl
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>>> I’m very fond of Harpers, given I read their publications monthly during the late sixty’s and seventy’s, they were the one publication offering sanity at the time, and still do. However, this letter, excellent it is, nonetheless has signatories that are as duplicitous as Trump, only much more professional, polished and knowledgable. That does not however make them any less guilty of the crimes of war they supported with lies and propaganda, during the Obama Administration. 
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>>> Anne Applebaum, Anne Marie Slaughter, David Frum, Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukiyama, the list goes on, all contributed to where we are today with the Trump Administration and certainly would not be on my list of those demanding/urging truth in US institutions or government.
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>>> Anne Marie Slaughter urged a fly zone over Libya to support the “rebels,” against Jeremy Scahill’s sound advice, given we didn’t know who the rebels were, they likely are ISIS, and a fly over zone means bombing everything in the area, a very large area.
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>>> Anne Applebaum, who once deleted you from her website conversation, represented a particularly egregious organization/NGO/ fomenting a color revolution in one of the nations in Africa, now writes for the Washington Post. Sorry, I’m weak on details, given I’m writing from memory.
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>>> I didn’t mention David Brooks, who sometimes is good given his specialty is “culture,” but is another one with a hidden agenda.
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>>>> On Jul 10, 2020, at 12:05, C. G. Estabrook via Peace <peace at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
>>> >>>>>> 
>>> >>>>>> https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ <https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/>
>>> >>>>>> 
>>> >>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>> >>>>>> Peace mailing list
>>> >>>>>> Peace at lists.chambana.net <mailto:Peace at lists.chambana.net>
>>> >>>>>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace <https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace>
>>> >>>>> 
>>> >>>> 
>>> >>> 
>>> >> 
>>> > 
>>> 
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