Barry Arrington wrote thoughtfully yesterday about how law schools have changed:
Law professor Ilya Shapiro was invited to speak at the U.C. Hastings Law School. The event had to be cancelled because every time Shapiro attempted to speak, fascist students banged the table and shouted him down. After enduring these Brownshirt tactics for an hour with no help from the university, Shapiro gave up and left. The fascists won. Read further here.
UC Hastings Dean Morris Ratner was present and did not lift a finger to stop the fascists. More shocking still – and this is the moment that brought clarity – UC Hastings Professor Rory Little actually encouraged the fascists. He is reported to have banged the table as they shouted and was caught on video saying, “I’m all for the protest here.” When a student asked him to repeat that, he doubled down and said, “I’m all for it.”
I went to law school in the 1980s. In those days the progressive rot was advancing, but it had not advanced to the point where progressives could risk letting their “liberal” cover slip and expose their true totalitarian colors. Those days are over. Progressives like Professor Little appear to believe they no longer need to pretend to be liberal, that encouraging fascist tactics is perfectly OK so long as the right people are being silenced.
A similar change can be observed in legacy mainstream media.
Journalists were never especially virtuous people so none of what I am about to say should be seen as pining for the good old days. They weren’t ever that good. Even so, when the rules change, it’s often not an improvement.
The traditional journalist tended to support free speech. Chances are, he worked for a family owned newspaper that earned its keep from local advertising and subscriptions. He knew lots about the misdeeds of pols, crats, and tycoons. His right to just say it sometimes — with impunity — was his protection. And their fear. He didn’t have to say it but if he did, some people wouldn’t be running for re-election, would be retiring early, or would be shuffled out in some corporate shake-up.
The new electronic media world was not kind to traditional media. For one thing, the old media didn’t understand the new media, were late adopters, and got into financial trouble as a result.
In Canada, the government essentially put the old establishment media all on welfare, converting them into little pravdas. That has become strikingly evident in recent years, and especially during the Convoys period.
In the United States, they became part of megacorps whose real interest might be the Chinese market. Or something.
One outcome is that media people today see freedom of speech in a much more hostile light. During the Convoy response to the COVID crazy here in Canada, we were explicitly given to understand that freedom of speech is a “right wing” value. That view is now widely shared.
It would certainly have surprised generations of liberal-minded journalists. But if we ponder the matter for a moment, we can see what drives the change of view. Media funded by the government via money coerced from taxpayers — taxpayers that those media may largely despise — simply don’t have the same needs as the older generations did. They certainly aren’t going to punch a hole in their own breadbasket. One senses the same thing with U.S. corporate media. They know that their market is not as important to their bosses as the Chinese market is.
One difference between establishment media and law schools, of course, is that people are tending to interact less and less with establishment media, so the way they must warp things matters less. One wishes one could say the same for law schools.
Anyway, keep up with the freedom convoys here. Find out who your independent media are and support them.