Our Miniature Stasi — “I Refuse”

I recently was informed in writing that some members of the local community are pouring over my personal webpage to find objectionable opinions. They are calling into question my fitness to serve in my current job. This is not the first time this has happened: Watch what you write, one sympathetic soul warned me. “Be careful.” But that was almost three years ago. Well, the crows are back to hang on and haunt my website. The language police have arrived. I and my words are being scrutinized. The numbers of such have never been large, but they are there. They are watching.

I knew something was up. The stats on visitors to my webpages had gone up considerably in recent days. Usually the visitors to my personal webpage are very multinational. Now they were almost all from local IP addresses. That got my attention. And these visitors were all looking at only a few of my pages that held content which could be considered controversial. I might be dumb, but I’m not stupid. I was waiting for the shoe to drop. The next day it did. 

Ironically, as I process these facts I read the following this morning in the NY Times about what adults supposedly don’t understand about the lives of today’s teenagers:

“What quickly became clear in our latest Times Opinion focus group, and what may have accounted for some tentativeness, is that several of the teenagers felt worried about being ‘judged’ about what they said. No matter if the answer was their opinion — some were worried about saying the ‘wrong’ thing. ‘If you’re not super educated on a topic, it’s scary to put your opinion out there, because you don’t want to be wrong,’ Charlotte said at another point in the focus group.”

By Patrick Healy and Lulu Garcia-Navarro 12 Teenagers on What Adults Don’t Get About Their Lives

This weasley spirit of self-conscious fear of saying the wrong thing which all too often leads to self-censorship is a blight on the land, in my opinion. It is a cowardly stance which cramps the intellect and gets in the way of genuine learning. But it is understandable. I see students in class hesitant to make an argument, for fear of censure. They are afraid. I see adults all too ready to find fault in others. They are angry. The fear is real: the language police are watching. One wrong step, and there could be denunciation and negative consequences for your reputation. Emotions run high.

It is pathetic to watch these overwrought scolds, usually online via social media, get into a proper fit of pique. You would think these people have something better and more productive to do. But no.

We Americans are supposed to be a free people. We are guaranteed under the law the right to free speech, and yet so many of us live in fear of our speech. Fear of what others might say if we say what we really think and feel. Fear of the condemnation of others. Fear. 

I recently watched the fabulous 2006 movie “Das Leben der Anderen” directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It tells the story of an East German writer just before the fall of the Berlin Wall living in fear of the secret police – “the Stasi” – who had the power to ruin him and anyone else in that country. The East Germans were looking over their shoulder in fear of what others might think – fear, fear, fear. You can see this writer craving a place where he can practice his craft without the fear of being investigated and ruined. His discipline of writing needs – demands – intellectual freedom. He doesn’t have it.

Of course, the people in East Germany were living under a communist dictatorship. They did not have the legal rights we supposedly have in the United States: the ability to speak one’s mind, the freedom to write without fear – the precious open space to create bravely and incisively. We have the 1st Amendment to protect us here in the United States.

Or do we?

Increasingly anyone who wants to speak on a complicated, controversial topic has to watch their back.

And younger Americans, who are the most plugged into the social media world of “canceled” and “cancellers,” are the most sensitive to this form of language policing and social shaming – and are also the most eager to blame and shame.

So the intellectual landscape in the United States begins to look like a battlefield of explosive “culture war” topics where instead of allowing differing opinions and free exchange of ideas, one encounters “culture warriors” who divide the country into “allies” and “enemies” – you are with us, or you are against us. They won’t agree to disagree and go their own way. To be in the middle is most likely to get pushed around by both Left and Right. Look at this cartoon –

This is the polarized political world we live in: them versus us, with a precarious, shrinking political middle. Both the Left and the Right want to drive the other side into the wilderness and remove them from the dialectic. It is politics as a form of combat. It is about power and control. There are real penalties for making perceived linguistic missteps and being on the wrong team. In short, it is this: If you are not with us, you are against us.

And so are we surprised when nobody says what they really think and feel? Where people live in fear of saying the wrong thing? And so thought becomes stale and cramped? Angry and intolerant?

Enough already.

I refuse to live this way.

The writer in the movie lives in fear of what the Stasi will say about his books, and how he chooses to live. They can give almost his whole life a “thumb’s up” or a “thumb’s down.” He lives in communist East Germany.

And we give this power to social media trolls and the like here in the United States?

My fellow Americans, take a good look at the people who make up these Internet mobs. Do they look like the types who would take way more pleasure in tearing down the lives and ideas of others than in developing any worthy ideas of their own? Is there a militant intolerance to their thinking? Do they have the air of the fanatic about them? Are they not zealots? Ideologues?

Beware, beware. Because they are reading your blog. They are paying close attention to what you say in your college class or at the writers’ conference. They might be recording it secretly with their iPhone. They pour over the posts from years ago in your social media accounts. They are looking for cues. They are drawing lines about what is acceptable in America and not, and they are flexing to exert cultural power to punish those who do not tow that line. They are looking for ammunition to shoot you with.

This is not what America should be about. 

Some might say that the 1st Amendment only covers government suppression of speech, and that anyone else can decry the ideas of someone else and call for them to be shunned from the public space and/or fired from their job. 

True enough.

Anyone can call for someone to be fired for their words and ideas.

But others have the right to ignore such a call.

Americans have a right to their opinion.

Or do they?

It’s a free country?

Or is it?

Look at the below video from Yale Law School where two weeks ago a coterie of our contemporary young Red Guards sought to turn an academic conference on free speech into a “struggle session” Chairman Mao would approve of –

You can read Jonathan Turley’s description of the events therein, but it is disturbing. It is also not all that unusual. I read last week an editorial in the University of Virgina student newspaper that former Vice President Mike Pence must not be allowed to speak on campus because his mere physical presence would literally “threaten the lives” of UVA students. Their physical security and mental health would be put at risk by any speech Pence might make there; he, and people like him, are an existential threat. “The LGBTQ+ individuals Pence has attacked, the Black lives he refuses to value and the successful stories of immigration he and the former president hope to prevent — these very people are our peers, our neighbors and our community members. We refuse to condone platforming Pence.” He must therefore not be permitted to be on campus or to speak there — “deplatformed,” as the practice is called. Pence, or anyone like him, is persona non grata. The students seek to give themselves this power. This is at a university founded by Thomas Jefferson to foster free inquiry and expression. 

Actually, it is not all the students at the University of Virginia but a small and vocal minority – the illiberal left of the student body, a faction which is not as small as you might think. (Imagine being a convinced ideologue almost before you can legally buy alcohol?) Such “social justice activists” often have more than a little of the air of zealotry about them and can intimidate the others. (Do you want to disagree with them in public and be denounced as a “racist”?) You step in to take a closer view and they begin to look like a cult. Check this out, for example:

A student theater club at Fordham University in New York has created a whites-only “safe spaces for white allies to educate themselves and actively fight against racism.” The White Anti-Racist Working Group says it excluded people of color to free them from “responsibility for white people’s education,” as white students “seek to uncover the depths of their internalized racist superiority.”

The Week magazine, March 22, 2022 edition on page 5

You want to know who are the types to denounce me and my wepbage, dear reader. Well, that is it, that is them. They are not that many of them, relatively speaking. But they are loud and forceful. You are their “ally” or their “enemy” – you are with them, or against them (I want nothing to do with them). Theirs is a secular religion of “anti-racism.” It has its true believers, you bet. They don’t brook any argument. This same hysterical paranoia in American history was seeking out hidden witches to hang or burn, or hidden communists to investigate and blacklist, long before it sniffed out hidden racism to denounce and deplatform. Nowhere are they more active than online. The nouveaux Red Guards are watching and waiting. They are looking for something to attack you with; they are sniffing out heresy. Social media is their battlefield; public opinion is their cudgel. The trolls arrive on Twitter and the struggle session has started.

These wannabe arbiters of acceptable conversation (ie. the “language police”) are actively appeased and even supported by administrators in too many schools and colleges around the country, in my opinion. These centers of learning in American life are supposed to be dedicated to the disinterested search for truth, wherever that might lead. Instead schools are too often controlled by political activists posing as educators who let the most extreme campus elements run amok. I often suspect university administrators are afraid to stand up to the online mob for fear they will be targeted next: moderate Democrats, who usually are in charge of schools, live in fear of being “canceled” by Progressive Democrats, and those even more extreme than that. Anyone right of center is going to have an even more difficult time. You might claim this kind of ideological line-drawing and fear of denunciation is an exaggerated problem in America today. Not if you work in a school or a university, it isn’t. Not if you work in a liberal milieu.

The Left has long used the language police to seek to frame political stances (“social justice”) in a way which they want (“intersectionality”). One would be right to be concerned about the improper insertion of liberal politics into a supposedly nonpartisan American public school system, in my opinion. I see it almost everyday in Ventura, California. Too often politically tendentious liberals deliver an education tinged with indoctrination, at the very least, to a captive audience. It is a real problem, in my experience, during this latest pandemic and for several years before.

But now recently those on the Right are seeking to use those same tactics in locales where they have the preponderance of power. Conservatives seek to ban books they find controversial and regulate the political speech of teachers – supposedly to combat the overreach of liberals in education. They want to fight fire with fire. Some have proposed a ban on Toni Morrison’s masterpiece “Beloved” – an act of madness. In Virginia the Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin set up an email for anonymous tips to report any local schools or teachers who teach “inherently divisive concepts, like Critical Race Theory and its progeny.” They have made it actionable in the Republican-ruled state of Florida for K-3 teachers to talk about gender and homosexuality in class. At least ten states – all Republican ones – are contemplating making it mandatory for teachers to post their lesson plans and teaching materials publicly a year in advance so that parents might know and complain about the political content. 

What’s next? Will they put cameras in classrooms to record all audio and video taking place there? The Right is taking the execrable “Big Brother” tactics of the Left and running with them. It is equally as bad when the Right uses it as when the Left does. That social justice activists are often trolls online does not excuse trollery from those on the opposite side of the political spectrum on the Internet. You can’t have “free speech for me but not for thee.” That won’t work. The hard Left and far Right begin to resemble one another in their sociopolitical paranoia and searching out of “enemies” who require denunciation. Have the heretics fired from their jobs, deplatformed from the public square, and maybe even brought up on charges. Use their words against them and… DRIVE THEM OUT INTO THE WILDERNESS! Blame and shame. Discredit and ruin.

Beware, beware.

This petty censoriousness over language and politics is a symptom of a community in crisis, and it highlights our inability to live-and-let-live. It bodes poorly for our future. What is at play here? Fear. Survival. A culture with a lack of trust which highlights the fact people are afraid. Combat. Civil war.

The amygdala ramping up for a “fight or flight” reaction.

The brain cramping up.

Bad thinking. Even poorer judgment.

For my part, it is easy. I refuse. I will seek to say what I think, critics be damned.

If you don’t like my blog, don’t read it.

You small-minded scold.

Leave me and my website alone, and I will afford you the same scope of creative freedom.

A final anecdote:

Back in 1998 I was investigated by the Stephen Wise Temple where I worked as a teacher. A handful of concerned parents had printed out almost the entirety of my personal webpage, and they objected to this passage in one place or what I had to say somewhere else. Their complaints went all the way up the chain of command until the head rabbi heard them. She read some of my webpage, and she ruled that it did not make me persona non grata at Milken Community High School. I kept my job. One mother objected to a claim I made in my wepbage that I “enjoyed a woman in a men’s button-down dress shirt – and nothing else.” The head rabbi laughed when she heard that. I was 32-years old at the time. I was unmarried.

Her final word to those who objected to my webpage after they spent untold hours reading it: “They need to get a life!”

I say the same thing now twenty-three years later to those scouring my blog to find dirt to sully me with –

GET A LIFE!

unrelenting daily confrontation is a tool that is freely available to all of us well within the bounds of the law. it is not only your right, but your fucking duty, to make it as socially uncomfortable as possible to espouse views that lead us down the road to total fascism. https://t.co/XiVXU4FFmF

— molly conger (@socialistdogmom) May 15, 2022