Trump, Carson and anti-PC crowd bed down with white supremacists, women haters, race baiters

[marmar]

(Salon) Some of those waging war against college-campus political correctness have good intentions and productive things to say; the trouble is that they also attract ideological bedfellows who fuel some of the nastiest vitriol in U.S. politics. Apart from those with genuine interest in the mental and intellectual well-being of college students, a good chunk of the culture-wars front of the anti-P.C. campaign belongs to an unsavory mélange of white supremacists who fear a minority majority and a multiculturalist “agenda,” and “pick-up artists” and “men’s rights activists” who view educators with ordinary human sensitivities as “cucks” and “wimps.”

This theater of the anti-P.C. crusade doesn’t make it into the New York Times, but it rages on social media and online message boards parallel to the sanitized forms it takes when uttered by Donald Trump or President Obama. Thus, the anti-P.C. position manifests in two very different ways and in two very different segments of U.S. political culture: it’s respectable politics, even politically correct to be against political correctness; but it’s also a signal to bigots and misogynists that the real problem all along has been man-hating “feminazis” and white-hating people of color and heterophobic gays and their wussy (“wussy” is a euphemism) liberal enablers. This is why it’s so crucial for the serious critics of campus political correctness not to oversell their positions by portraying a world in which society’s least powerful are suddenly the oppressor class. It’s sensible to critique the excesses of political correctness, but dangerous to feed anger with distortion.

The reality remains that censure and censorship are still primarily the tools of the powerful, not the marginalized, and not exclusively the “SJWs” of the left. Recent events in the P.C. culture wars reflect as much. In Philadelphia, for example, an adjunct professor was suspended by her college for participating in a protest against police with other #blacklivesmatter activists. At Duke University, a Christian student refused to read a too-graphic graphic novel assigned in class because he believes viewing explicit sexual images is immoral.

And at Wesleyan University, where left-leaning student activists did attempt to defund the college newspaper because they found its coverage of the #blacklivesmatter movement insensitive, the University administration and the newspaper editorial staff affirmed the importance of free speech and ruled against the demands of the protesters even as they acknowledged the importance of the protesters’ concerns. Indeed, the conduct of the Wesleyan administration and the newspaper editorial staff in responding to the protesters is an outstanding model for how to be sensitive and amicable while ultimately upholding free speech. ...............(more)

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/20/cucks_wimps_and_feminazis_trump_carson_and_anti_pc_crowd_bed_down_with_white_supremacists_women_haters_race_baiters/