Tag Archive for: Ben Shapiro

America’s most left-wing university launches ‘Journal of Right-Wing Studies’

A band of academics from America’s most left-wing university have just launched a new journal for “right-wing studies”. What could possibly go wrong?

If one were to write a detailed chronology of the cancel culture phenomenon, the University of California, Berkeley, would feature prominently.

This fact is somewhat ironic given UC Berkeley’s pivotal role in the 1960s Free Speech Movement.

Nevertheless, a parade of conservative and other non-woke figures have been harassed, harangued and otherwise driven off UC Berkeley’s campus since the late 2010s. Deserving or not, Milo Yiannopolous, Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro are among its more prominent victims.

Given the university’s penchant for progressive censorship, it is refreshing to note one of its on-campus think tanks is launching a journal to study the rise of left-wing illiberalism.

Oh wait, sorry… I mean right-wing illiberalism.

Yes, UC Berkeley’s Center for Right-Wing Studies (CRWS), founded in 2009 in the wake of the Tea Party movement, has just announced the launch of its Journal of Right-Wing Studies.

Skewed perspective

Chaired by the centre’s founder Dr Lawrence Rosenthal, CRWS is part of Berkeley’s Institute of the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI). The new journal will continue the research unit’s ostensible mission, which is “the study of right-wing movements in the 20th and 21st centuries”. Dr Rosenthal is the journal’s Editor in Chief.

As one writer for the California Globe put it, “all of Berkeley is one giant leftist science experiment”, so it makes sense the campus would launch a journal “to study the ‘right wing’ as if peering at Ebola under a microscope.”

In fairness to CRWS, that same writer noted that it is not just another politically-biased institute being run on the taxpayer’s dime: the centre has only one part-time employee and its expenses are covered by private donations.

The California Globe also praised the CRWS for acknowledging “that its staff could not be even remotely described as ‘right wing’ and therefore they understand their own bias”.

Even so, the bias is unmistakable.

Rosenthal has justified the journal’s launch by claiming we are in “a period of extraordinary right-wing mobilization across the globe”.

He warns of “militant movements” cheering for autocracy in Western nations, whose focus is “on maintaining ethnic, religious, gender, and racial hierarchies in the name of ‘traditional’ values versus the imposition of the ‘woke” agenda’. Rosenthal continues:

Such a government has come to power in Italy. Red states in the USA are copying the model of Hungary’s Orbán government by institutionalizing in law restrictions on voting, on education, on the independence of the judiciary, and even on corporate behavior.

Absent from Rosenthal’s analysis is any mention of government censorship, workplace and campus speech codes, cancel culture, job loss for political dissidents, mandated medical treatments, or the prohibition of movement for healthy citizens.

And why would he mention such trends, since they have been driven almost exclusively by the political left?

Strawmen

Indeed, the rights of the individual, once enshrined in a host of mid-20th century declarations and aspired to globally, are under immense threat predominantly from one side of politics — and not the side Rosenthal thinks.

So one-eyed is Rosenthal and his Centre for Right-Wing Studies that he claims “the magnitude and political successes of this new right is not paralleled by successes of an extreme left”.

Antifa, anyone? Black Lives Matter? The trans cult? Activist school teachers, sporting bodies and CEOs? Censorious social media platforms? The prestige media’s expulsion of woke critics? A weaponised Federal Government and spy apparatus?

“If others see it that way,” Rosenthal sneers, “a CLWS [Centre for Left-Wing Studies] would be an appropriate vehicle”.

For further evidence of the journal’s bias, consider various quotes from the Roundtable section of its inaugural edition.

The Republican Party, writes one contributor, which was formerly merely conservative, has “transformed into a fully-fledged far-right party”.

Another opines that:

The right’s racist, sexist, xenophobic, heteronormative, corporate-capitalist nostalgia for some imagined earlier version of the nation is cataclysmic for the socially vulnerable and threatens the loss of our democracy. Misinformation campaigns rampage over mass and social media, allowing ignorance and amnesia to reign. The courts are packed and systematically deleting human rights, electoral districts have been [re]drawn, the right is heavily armed and talking about violence against the left.

Or consider a 2019 conference held by the Centre for Right-Wing Studies, co-sponsored by the notorious Southern Poverty Law Center. Its speaking topics essentially cast the entire conservative movement as a haunt for alt-right, women-hating white supremacists:

  • Be Rough, Be Violent, Don’t Drop Her On the Floor: The Christian Right’s Enactment of Female Purity through Evangelical Ballet Technique.
  • A Time of War: The Rhetoric and Reality of the Theocratic Far Right’s Anti-Abortion ‘Crusade’
  • Klandidates: American Politics and the Ku Klux Klan
  • Forging Fascism: Authoritarian Populism, Apocalyptic Aggression, and Scripted Violence
  • My Girlfriend Became Neo-Nazi: The Right’s Presence and Activity in the Internet

In short, Rosenthal’s CRWS tends to view the “Right Wing” in light of its most extreme elements. Almost entirely absent in his centre’s new journal is any discussion of conservatism’s philosophical underpinnings — whether Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Willmoore Kendall, Whittaker Chambers or Russell Kirk.

Rosenthal is right. A ‘Journal for Left-Wing Studies’ is sorely needed — if for no other reason than to study Rosenthal’s centre like Ebola through a microscope.

But it will have to find a different home.

It would be singularly unwelcome at UC Berkeley.

AUTHOR

KURT MAHLBURG

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate architect, a primary school teacher, a missionary, and a young adult pastor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Hillary Clinton Lies… A Lot

Ben Shapiro does another video on Hillary Clinton and her history of lies. According to Shapiro’s website:

Hillary Clinton says that she is the most transparent woman in American politics. There’s just one problem – Hillary Clinton lies… a lot. Ben Shapiro takes a trip in the way back machine to look at a few of the more egregious examples.


TRANSCRIPT:

Hillary Clinton is the most transparent woman she knows. She said so in 2008:

I think I’m probably the most transparent person in public life…I feel you know a lot more about me than you know about anyone else. Much of it untrue, but nevertheless, it’s all out there.

Unfortunately, Hillary is a liar. When news emerged this week that Hillary had set up a private email server the day before her nomination as Secretary of State, and had used her private email address for her entire tenure as Secretary of State so that there were no government records of those emails, and that her aides also used private email addresses, and that her server had the capacity to fully delete emails, and that hackers could have hacked her emails…no one should have been surprised. Of course she did.

Let’s take a trip in the wayback machine.

When Hillary Clinton was 27, back in 1974, she worked for the House Judiciary Committee, which was investigating Richard Nixon. According to her boss, Democrat Jerry Zeifman, Hillary met with Teddy Kennedy’s chief political strategist – a violation of House rules. She then manipulated the system to avoid investigating Nixon, hoping he’d stick around long enough to sink Republican election chances in 1976, letting her boy Teddy into the White House.

According to the guy who shared office space with Hillary, John Labovitz, Hillary gave “erroneous legal opinions” and tried to “deny Nixon representation by counsel.” Zeifman said that Hillary wrote a “fraudulent legal brief” and “confiscated public documents.” Zeifman fired her and wouldn’t give her a letter of recommendation. Zeifman later wrote a book stating that “Hillary Clinton is ethically unfit to be either a senator or president.”

Hillary’s now in the White House, and there’s a big search going on for a memorandum written by a former presidential aide regarding the firing of members of the White House travel office. They go missing for two years. At the same time, documents regarding Hillary Clinton’s work at the Rose Law firm in Arkansas – specifically, regarding a savings and loan company run by the Clintons’ business partner in the Whitewater land venture – go missing for two years.

Then, in January 1996, they miraculously appear. The Rose Law firm documents magically show up. A White House aide finds them. In the White House. In a storage area in the third-floor of the White House – the private residence of the President and First Lady. And the long-lost memo shows up just a couple of days later. How miraculous. Hillary’s lawyers said that she had no idea the documents were there. Except that the FBI found Hillary’s fingerprints on the documents. Oopsies. Hillary is still the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI.

All that was before the rise of email. But the Clintons loved email, because it was so much easier to hide emails than to track down every copy of every document for destruction. And hide those emails they did. According to Judicial Watch, Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s hatchet woman helped prevent the Clintons from turning over 1.8 million emails to Judicial Watch, Congress, and federal investigators. 1.8 million emails. When a White House computer contractor tried to reveal this, White House officials allegedly told her to “keep her mouth shut.” Cheryl Mills. You may remember her. She ended up being in charge of document production for Hillary’s State Department in the Benghazi investigation.

When she was Secretary of State, over and over again, document requests to the State Department were rejected, because they didn’t have the documents – Hillary did, on her private server. The Associated Press hit a stonewall. So did Judicial Watch. So did Gawker.

All a big coincidence, of course. It was all a big mixup when Clinton hit man Sandy Berger stole documents from the National Archives and stuffed them down his pants, too. And now Hillary has assured us via Twitter that she wants the State Department to release all her hidden emails.

We should believe her. After all, she’s the most transparent woman in American history. At least, the most transparently corrupt.