CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 1 Dear Friends, I've included several readings below that I think provide important examples of the "cancel culture" at work. But there is a lot of reading, so please don't feel obliged to read everything! If you are short of time, I suggest just reading those selections that interest you the most. I will summarize the issues in each set of readings before we begin to discuss them so you won't miss out if you haven't read everything. Be well until next Tuesday and I look forward to seeing you all again. Best, Sandy

A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury Liberals must defend the right of conservative students to invite speakers of their choice, even if they find their views abhorrent. Peter Beinart | The Atlantic | Mar 6, 2021 My fellow liberals, please watch the following video. It suggests that something has gone badly wrong on the campus left. The events leading up to the video are as follows. One of the student groups at Middlebury College is called The American Enterprise Club. According to its website, the Club aims “to promote … free enterprise, a limited federal government, a strong national defense.” In other words, it’s a group for political conservatives. This year, the AEI Club invited Dr. Charles Murray to speak. That’s crucial to understanding what followed. When leftists protest right-wing speakers on campus, they often deny that they are infringing upon free speech. Free speech, they insist, does not require their university to give a platform to people with offensive views. That was the argument of the people who earlier this year tried to prevent ex-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley. And it was the argument of those who opposed Murray’s lecture at Middlebury. “This is not an issue of freedom of speech,” declared a letter signed by more than 450 Middlebury alums. “Why has such a person been granted a platform at Middlebury?” The answer is that Middlebury granted Murray a platform because a group of its students invited him. Those students constitute a small ideological minority. They hold views that many of their classmates oppose, even loathe. But the administrators who run Middlebury, like the administrators who run Berkeley, consider themselves obligated to protect the right of small, unpopular, minorities CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 2 to bring in speakers of their choice. Denying them that right—giving progressive students a veto over who conservative students can invite—comes perilously close to giving progressive students a veto over what conservative students can say. If it is legitimate for campus progressives to block speeches by Milo Yiannopoulos or Charles Murray, why can’t they block speeches by fellow students who hold Yiannopoulos or Murray’s views? Some of Murray’s views are indeed odious. Twenty-three years ago, he co- authored The Bell Curve, which argued that differences in intelligence account for much of the class stratification in American life, that intelligence is partly genetic, and that there may be genetic differences between races. Critics called Murray’s argument intellectually shoddy, racist and dangerous, and I agree. (Before I began working there full-time, my old magazine, The New Republic, published an excerpt of the book, along with rebuttals, and thus gave it a legitimacy it did not deserve). But if conservative students cannot invite speakers who hold what I and many other liberals consider reprehensible views, then they cannot invite many of the most prominent conservative thinkers and Republican politicians in the United States today. Like many liberals, I consider it bigoted to oppose gay marriage. I consider it bigoted to support voting restrictions that disproportionately impact African Americans and Latinos. I consider it bigoted to deny trans students the right to use the bathrooms of their choice. I consider it bigoted to claim that Islam is inherently more violent than Judaism or Christianity. I consider it unconscionable to oppose government action against climate change. Yet on the American right, these views are all mainstream. If conservative students can’t bring Charles Murray to Middlebury, how can they bring Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich or Clarence Thomas? (Indeed, Yiannopoulos and Murray aren’t the only right-leaning speakers who have sparked mass student protest in recent years. So have Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde). In fact, Middlebury students did not only object to Murray because of The Bell Curve. Some also objected to his most recent book, Coming Apart, which analyzes the struggles of the white working class. (And about which Murray was scheduled to talk). Coming Apart, declared a group called White Students for CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 3 Racial Justice, “uses largely anecdotal evidence to blame poor people in America for being poor, attempting to explain economic inequality through a perceived gap in virtue” and thus proves that Murray is “classist.” The point is this. What’s considered morally legitimate at Middlebury differs dramatically from what’s considered morally legitimate in large swaths of America. When colleges like Middlebury are considering whom to honor, they have every right to apply their own ideological standards. But if they use those standards to determine which speakers conservative student groups can invite, they will make it hard for those groups to function on liberal campuses at all. And in an era in which Americans are already ideologically cocooned, that would be a disaster. To appreciate the ugliness of what transpired at Middlebury, however, one needs to look not merely at the principles involved, but at the specific sequence of events. In its letter to the campus explaining its invitation to Murray, the AEI club declared that it “invites you to argue.” It invited a left-leaning Middlebury professor, Allison Stanger, to engage Murray in a public conversation following his talk, thus ensuring that his views would be challenged. In his introduction to Murray’s speech, a representative from the AEI club implored his fellow students to debate Murray rather than shouting him down. But they did shout him down. As Murray approached the podium, dozens of students in the audience turned their backs, loudly read a prepared statement, and then began chanting “Hey, hey ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go,” “Your message is hatred, we cannot tolerate it” “Charles Murray go away, Middlebury says no way” and finally, “Shut it down.” After close to twenty minutes of this, a university representative came on stage to announce that, if the students did not relent, Murray and his interlocutor, Professor Stanger, would move to a secret location, from which their conversation would be broadcast. Professor Stanger then took the microphone and asked the students, “Can you just listen for one minute.” Many in the audience replied, “no.” She added that, “I spent a lot of time preparing hard questions.” Finally, she conceded that, “You’re not going to let us speak.” As the university representative announced that Murray and Stanger would move to a different location, the crowd began shouting, “Where are you going?” CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 4 Somehow, they found out. Because when Murray and Stanger finished their dialogue, they found themselves surrounded by protesters. The protesters— some of whom were wearing masks and may not have been Middlebury students—began pushing them. When Stanger tried to shield Murray, according a Middlebury spokesman, a protester grabbed her hair and twisted her neck. Murray, Stanger and their escorts made it to a waiting car, but the protesters “pounded on it, rocked it back and forth, and jumped onto the hood,” according to The New York Times. One took a large traffic sign, attached to a concrete base, and placed it in front of the car to prevent it from leaving. Finally, Murray and Stanger got away. They had planned to eat dinner at a local restaurant, but, upon learning that the protesters planned to disrupt their meal, left town altogether. Stanger later went to the hospital, where she received a neck brace. This is not a tale of university cowardice. To the contrary, the Middlebury administration took extraordinary measures to ensure that Murray could speak. And in a letter following the incident, President Laurie Patton, declared that in their response to Murray’s speech, some Middlebury students “failed to live up to our core values.” She publicly apologized to Murray. Still, that’s not enough. College policy declares that, “Middlebury College does not allow disruptive behavior at community events or on campus.” Many of the students protesting Murray’s speech clearly violated that policy. I hope they are punished. If they are, perhaps progressive students will think twice before shouting down a conservative speaker the next time. Liberals may be tempted to ignore these incidents, either because they are uncomfortable appearing to defend Charles Murray, or because, in the age of Donald Trump, they’re worried about bigger things. That would be a mistake. If what happened at Berkeley, and now at Middlebury, goes unchallenged, sooner or later, liberals will get shouted down too. To many on the campus left, after all, Zionism is a racist ideology. Drone attacks constitute war crimes. Barack Obama was the deporter-in-chief. Hillary Clinton supported a racist crime bill. Joe Biden disrespected Anita Hill. There will always be justifications. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 5 Professor Allison Stanger is a liberal. Last week she ended up in a neck brace merely for being willing to ask Charles Murray hard questions. She should serve as an inspiration, and a warning of things to come. ▪

Bodies on the Gears at Middlebury Why are freedom of speech and academic freedom so absolute for Charles Murray yet so conditional for students, asks John Patrick Leary, who writes in defense of the protesters at Middlebury College. John Patrick Leary | Inside Higher Ed | Mar 7, 2017 In response to the forced retreat by Charles Murray, the right-wing scholar and author, from a planned public lecture at Middlebury College due to student demonstrations, we need to put first things first: the incident has nothing to do with the First Amendment or academic freedom. Before we can understand why those concepts are so routinely abused in public discussion of campus protest, we must define what they mean. The First Amendment forbids Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” As many people have repeatedly pointed out, the Constitution does not guarantee you a respectful audience for your ideas, whether those ideas are odious or not. Murray is co-author of The Bell Curve, which argues that racial inequality is largely shaped by nonwhite people’s genetic inferiority, and the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies him a white nationalist who peddles “racist pseudoscience.” As for academic freedom, it generally refers to institutional intrusion upon faculty’s freedom of teaching and research. According to the American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, “Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties …. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter that has no relation to their subject.” Charles Murray is employed by the American Enterprise Institute, a public-policy think tank. If the AEI believes in the principle of academic freedom for its CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 6 researchers, then all inquiries about Murray’s academic freedom should be directed to the AEI. Middlebury undergraduates couldn’t deny Murray’s institutional academic freedom even if they tried. Middlebury’s students do, however, have every right to shout him down, and by all accounts they accomplished this end. Murray’s address in a campus auditorium was disrupted by students chanting and turning their backs to the lectern; he was compelled to give a live-streamed discussion from another location on the campus. He left campus under protests so heavy that a professor with him, political scientist Allison Stanger, injured her neck in the scrum outside. Comparing the tumult after Murray’s address to a scene from the foreign- espionage thriller Homeland, Stanger said in a statement that she was deliberately attacked by protesters in the crowd -- something that never should have happened. However, a group of Middlebury students argued that the chaotic atmosphere Stanger describes was aggravated by belligerent campus security, and their statement suggested that her injury may have simply been an accident. “Protesters did not escalate violence and had no plan of violent physical confrontation,” the statement read. “We do not know of any students who hurt Professor Stanger; however, we deeply regret that she was injured during the event.” “So much for safe spaces,” Reason.com quipped. (Believe it or not, others made the same joke.) Others called the protesters a “mob.” In The Washington Post, law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh lamented “another sad day of brown- shirted thuggery,” arguing that it “undermines the opposition to Murray’s claims, rather than reinforcing them.” He elaborated, sort of: “Once it turns out that arguments such as the ones in The Bell Curve can’t even be made without fear of suppression or even violent attack, then we lose any real basis for rejecting those arguments.” Obviously, one strong basis for rejecting The Bell Curve is that it is racist. But aside from that, Volokh’s strange presumption -- that disruptive opposition strengthens, rather than weakens, one’s opponents, that bad arguments somehow get stronger the less they are heard -- does not bear much scrutiny. Indeed, Murray’s claims have not gotten any better since the weekend. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 7 One might well ask: Are college kids today fragile snowflakes cowering in their “safe spaces,” or are they brown-shirted, left-wing authoritarians? Which caricature will it be? Dissent, for many critics of campus protest, can be tolerated as long as it is nondisruptive and officially sanctioned. The protests at the University of California, Berkeley, that chased Milo Yiannopoulos off the campus last month were unruly and damaged property, but they also may have hastened the much- deserved disgrace of a racist and sexist demagogue. In 2015, during a free speech controversy at Yale University concerning racist Halloween costumes -- which introduced “safe spaces” into the nation’s anti-student lexicon -- The Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf criticized young activists’ “illiberal streak” and their tendency to “lash out” with intolerance. Such incivility suppressed campus debate and inquiry, he argued. Even as Friedersdorf called out students protesters as intolerant of discomfort, however, he held them responsible for the sin of making others uncomfortable. Discomfort, it seems, is a scholarly virtue for some, but not for all. Another example came in 2014, when Robert J. Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, during the suppression of Occupy protests there in 2011, withdrew from his role as commencement speaker at Haverford College’s graduation. He did so after students at the college signaled their intent to disrupt his speech. The students were widely criticized for suppressing free speech and open dialogue -- even though Birgeneau was the one who withdrew, in a pre-emptive strike against a protest that hadn’t even happened yet. How can we hold simultaneously to a view of free speech as the circulation of disagreement while denouncing communication whose tone is disagreeable? Why are freedom of speech and academic freedom so absolute for Charles Murray yet so conditional for Middlebury students -- who surely have the academic freedom not to be told they are genetically deficient at their own college? Finally, why are higher education institutions so regularly churned through this dull meat grinder of journalistic free-speech sanctimony? One simple answer may be the alma mater nostalgia of middle-aged journalists and academics who graduated from such institutions and, like many elders in CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 8 every generation, scorn the passions of the next. The bigger issue, though, has to do with how we think about education -- or more to the point, how we fantasize about it. As Corey Robin has written, in American politics, educational institutions are often treated as laboratories for social transformations we are reluctant to pursue in society at large. “In the United States,” he writes, “we often try to solve political and economic questions through our schools rather than in society.” College campuses, especially elite ones like Middlebury, are an interesting example of this thesis: they are treated both as laboratories for transforming society, and as leafy sanctuaries from it. Colleges are asked to model a fantasy version of society in which profound social cleavages -- racial, partisan, economic -- exist only as abstract issues that we can have a “conversation” about, rather than material conflicts that may need to be confronted. And most educational leaders and administrators, Robin writes, are basically conflict averse -- they want to “want to change words, not worlds.” Isn’t politics really just the contest of the best ideas, they seem to ask, rather than a conflict of resources and power? If presidential politics tells us anything, the answer is clearly no. But on campuses, this persistent fantasy -- of social change in which no one raises their voice -- is what critics often misidentify as academic freedom. But what if black or Latino Middlebury students don’t want to have a conversation about their human dignity? What if they prefer to assert it? If they did so, they’d be participating in a long tradition of campus free-speech defense that many critics overlook. They’d only be doing what Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, famously advised in 1964: putting their “bodies on the gears” of an apparatus they call unjust. “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes you so sick at heart -- that you can’t take part,” Savio said. “And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” ▪

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 9 A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning A white high school student withdrew from her chosen college after a three- second video caused an uproar online. The classmate who shared it publicly has no regrets. Dan Levin | New York Times | Dec 26, 2020 LEESBURG, Va. — Jimmy Galligan was in history class last school year when his phone buzzed with a message. Once he clicked on it, he found a three- second video of a white classmate looking into the camera and uttering an anti- Black racial slur. The slur, he said, was regularly hurled in classrooms and hallways throughout his years in the Loudoun County school district. He had brought the issue up to teachers and administrators but, much to his anger and frustration, his complaints had gone nowhere. So he held on to the video, which was sent to him by a friend, and made a decision that would ricochet across Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling. “I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right. Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit. It later circulated among some students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr. Galligan attended, but did not cause much of a stir. Mr. Galligan had not seen the video before receiving it last school year, when he and Ms. Groves were seniors. By then, she was a varsity cheer captain who dreamed of attending the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose cheer team was the reigning national champion. When she made the team in May, her parents celebrated with a cake and orange balloons, the university’s official color. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 10 The next month, as protests were sweeping the nation after the police killing of George Floyd, Ms. Groves, in a public Instagram post, urged people to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jimmy Galligan, who posted a video online of a classmate using a racial slur, said he had been mocked by students with that language. Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times “You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word,” responded someone whom Ms. Groves said she did not know. Her alarm at the stranger’s comment turned to panic as friends began calling, directing her to the source of a brewing social media furor. Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon. Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, where furious calls mounted for the University of Tennessee to revoke its admission offer. By that June evening, about a week after Mr. Floyd’s killing, teenagers across the country had begun leveraging social media to call out their peers for racist behavior. Some students set up anonymous pages on Instagram devoted to holding classmates accountable, including in Loudoun County. The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 11 pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public. “They’re angry, and they want to see some action,” an admissions official told Ms. Groves and her family, according to a recording of the emotional call reviewed by The New York Times. Ms. Groves was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

After the video Mimi Groves had sent to a friend when she was 15 was shared publicly, people on social media said the University of Tennessee should revoke her admission. Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times In one sense, the public shaming of Ms. Groves underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.” But the story behind the backlash also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, where Black students said they had long been subjected to ridicule. “Go pick cotton,” some said they were told in class by white students. “It was just always very uncomfortable being Black in the classroom,” said Muna Barry, a Black student who graduated with Ms. Groves and Mr. Galligan. Once during Black History Month, she recalled, gym teachers at her elementary school organized an “Underground Railroad” game, where students were told to run CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 12 through an obstacle course in the dark. They had to begin again if they made noise. The use of the slur by a Heritage High School student was not shocking, many said. The surprise, instead, was that Ms. Groves was being punished for behavior that had long been tolerated. A ‘hostile learning environment’ Leesburg, the county seat of Loudoun County, lies just across the Potomac River from Maryland, about an hour’s drive from Washington. It was the site of an early Civil War battle, and slave auctions were once held on the courthouse grounds, where a statue of a Confederate soldier stood for more than a century until it was removed in July. The Loudoun County suburbs are among the wealthiest in the nation, and the schools consistently rank among the top in the state. Last fall, according to the Virginia Department of Education, the student body at Heritage High was about half white, 20 percent Hispanic, 14 percent Asian-American and 8 percent Black, with another 6 percent who are mixed race. In interviews, current and former students of color described an environment rife with racial insensitivity, including casual uses of slurs. A report commissioned last year by the school district documented a pattern of school leaders ignoring the widespread use of racial slurs by both students and teachers, fostering a “growing sense of despair” among students of color, some of whom faced disproportionate disciplinary measures compared with white students. “It is shocking the extent to which students report the use of the N-word as the prevailing concern,” the report said. School system employees also had a “low level of racial consciousness and racial literacy,” while a lack of repercussions for hurtful language forced students into a “hostile learning environment,” it said. In the wake of the report’s publication, the district in August released a plan to combat systemic racism. The move was followed by a formal apology in September for the district’s history of segregation. Heritage High School officials did not respond to interview requests. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 13 Mr. Galligan recalled being mocked with a racial slur by students and getting laughed at by a white classmate after their senior-year English teacher played an audio recording of the 1902 novella “Heart of Darkness” that contained the slur. During that school year, Mr. Galligan said, the same student made threatening comments about Muslims in an Instagram video. Mr. Galligan showed the clip to the school principal, who declined to take action, citing free speech and the fact that the offensive behavior took place outside school. “I just felt so hopeless,” Mr. Galligan recalled. Swift and relentless backlash Ms. Groves said the video began as a private Snapchat message to a friend. “At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it because I was so young,” she said in a recent interview, adding that the slur was in “all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.” Ms. Groves, who just turned 19, lives with her parents and two siblings in a predominantly white and affluent gated community built around a golf course. On a recent day, she sat outside on the deck with her mother, Marsha Groves, who described how the entire family had struggled with the consequences of the very public shaming. “It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth,” Mimi Groves said of her video. “How can you convince somebody that has never met you and the only thing they’ve ever seen of you is that three-second clip?” Ms. Groves said racial slurs and hate speech were not tolerated by her parents, who had warned their children to never post anything online that they would not say in person or want their parents and teachers to read. Once the video went viral, the backlash was swift, and relentless. A photograph of Ms. Groves, captioned with a racial slur, also began circulating online, but she and her parents say someone else wrote it to further tarnish her reputation. On social media, people tagged the University of Tennessee and its cheer team, demanding her admission be rescinded. Some threatened her with physical violence if she came to the university campus. The next day, local media outlets in Virginia and Tennessee published articles about the uproar. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 14 For the University of Tennessee, the outrage over Ms. Groves followed a string of negative publicity over racist incidents at its flagship campus in Knoxville. Last year, Snapchat photos of students wearing blackface and mocking the Black Lives Matter movement went viral, shortly after a student was suspended by her sorority for referring to Black people with a racial slur in an online video. In 2018, swastikas and other hateful messages were painted on campus, months after white supremacists hosted an event during Black History Month. Public universities are limited in their ability to expel students for offensive language. They have more leeway with incoming students, who are not yet enrolled, though many state schools try to avoid officially revoking admissions offers over speech issues. The day after the video went viral, Ms. Groves tried to defend herself in tense calls with the university. But the athletics department swiftly removed Ms. Groves from the cheer team. And then came the call in which admissions officials began trying to persuade her to withdraw, saying they feared she would not feel comfortable on campus. The university declined to comment about Ms. Groves beyond a statement it issued on Twitter in June, in which officials said they took seriously complaints about racist behavior. Ms. Groves’s parents, who said their daughter was being targeted by a social media “mob” for a mistake she made as an adolescent, urged university officials to assess her character by speaking with her high school and cheer coaches. Instead, admissions officials gave her an ultimatum: withdraw or the university would rescind her offer of admission. “We just needed it to stop, so we withdrew her,” said Mrs. Groves, adding that the entire experience had “vaporized” 12 years of her daughter’s hard work. “They rushed to judgment and unfortunately it’s going to affect her for the rest of her life.” ‘You taught someone a lesson.’ In the months since Mr. Galligan posted the video, he has begun his freshman year at Vanguard University in California and Ms. Groves has enrolled in online CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 15 classes at a nearby community college. Though they had been friendly earlier in high school, they have not spoken about the video or the fallout. At home, Ms. Groves’s bedroom is festooned by a collection of cheer trophies, medals and a set of red pompoms — reminders of what could have been. Her despair has given way to resignation. “I’ve learned how quickly social media can take something they know very little about, twist the truth and potentially ruin somebody’s life,” she said. Since the racial reckoning of the summer, many white teenagers, when posting dance videos to social media, no longer sing along with the slur in rap songs. Instead, they raise a finger to pursed lips. “Small things like that really do make a difference,” Mr. Galligan said. Mr. Galligan thinks a lot about race, and the implications of racial slurs. He said his father was often the only white person at maternal family gatherings, where “the N-word is a term that is thrown around sometimes” by Black relatives. A few years ago, he said his father said it aloud, prompting Mr. Galligan and his sister to quietly take him aside and explain that it was unacceptable, even when joking around. Shortly after his 18th birthday in July, Mr. Galligan asked his father, a former law enforcement officer, what he thought about white privilege. “The first thing he said to me is that it doesn’t exist,” Mr. Galligan recalled. He then asked his father if he had ever been scared while walking at night, or while reaching into the glove box after getting pulled over by the police. He said his father had not. “That is your white privilege,” Mr. Galligan said he told him. One of Ms. Groves’s friends, who is Black, said Ms. Groves had personally apologized for the video long before it went viral. Once it did in June, the friend defended Ms. Groves online, prompting criticism from strangers and fellow students. “We’re supposed to educate people,” she wrote in a Snapchat post, “not ruin their lives all because you want to feel a sense of empowerment.” For his role, Mr. Galligan said he had no regrets. “If I never posted that video, nothing would have ever happened,” he said. And because the internet never forgets, the clip will always be available to watch. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 16 “I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” he said with satisfaction. “You taught someone a lesson.” ▪

Think Tank in the Tank I spent two decades writing for City Journal, and I cherished it and the Manhattan Institute’s independence. Then came the Trump era. Sol Stern | DemocracyJournal.org | Jul 7, 2020 In June 2015, as Donald Trump descended the gilded escalator to declare his candidacy for President of the United States, I was completing my second decade as a senior writer for City Journal, the flagship publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute. Trump’s announcement hardly registered on our magazine’s radar screen. We dealt only with serious issues. This wasn’t serious. After Trump improbably emerged as a leading contender for the Republican nomination, City Journal took notice with a scathing review by Heather Mac Donald, perhaps our most talented and prolific writer. “While the Republican establishment deserves its comeuppance, the fallout to the country at large of a Trump presidency would likely be as dire as his critics predict,” Mac Donald wrote. “Trump is the embodiment of what the Italians call ‘maleducato’— poorly raised, ill-bred. Indeed, judging by the results, his upbringing seems to have involved no check whatsoever on the crudest male instincts for aggression and humiliation.” I assumed that other critiques—including mine—would soon appear in the magazine. I pitched an article about Trump’s hate-filled campaign rallies to our editor Brian Anderson. “We’re steering clear of that now,” he responded, no explanation offered. Thus, as the candidate least tethered to the free-market principles the Manhattan Institute was founded on surged toward the Republican nomination, he became almost unmentionable in the pages of City Journal. It was baffling to me, but I decided to shrug it off and, instead, published pieces at the Daily Beast and New York Daily News warning about the destructiveness of Trump’s grievance-based, populist movement. Since there was virtually no CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 17 chance Trump would actually win the presidency, I consoled myself that this too would pass. After the shock of the election results sunk in I assumed that City Journal couldn’t just ignore the danger to the country now emanating from the highest office in the land. Once again I was naïve. Writers who wanted to sound the alarm about the new President were still muzzled; in fact, the magazine published a number of articles welcoming the Trump ascendancy. Even Heather Mac Donald now allowed that, bad character and all, Trump was doing the right thing on important issues like law enforcement and immigration. At this point I became convinced there was editorial interference coming from the boardroom. Two suspects came to mind. The first was the Manhattan Institute’s chairman, Paul Singer. The hedge fund billionaire was the Board of Trustees’ biggest yearly donor ($525,000 in 2016) as well as one of the Republican Party’s most generous and influential funders. During the primary season Singer went all in for Marco Rubio, even warning that if “[Trump] gets elected president it’s close to a guarantee of a global depression.” Singer then secretly bankrolled an anti- Trump opposition research project conducted for The Washington Free Beacon by Fusion GPS, the same firm that later was hired by the Clinton campaign and produced the infamous Steele dossier. The November electoral earthquake forced Singer to make amends. He contributed $1,000,000 to the Trump inauguration and paid an atonement visit to the White House. After the meeting, President Trump thanked Singer “for being here and for coming up to the office. He was a very strong opponent, and now he’s a very strong ally.” Singer then began contributing to Trump’s political war chest. Second, the number two donor among the trustees ($450,000) was Rebekah Mercer, daughter of another hedge-fund billionaire, Robert Mercer. Ms. Mercer was the principle funder of Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, the country’s most prominent media purveyor of coy white nationalism. Breitbart once launched a vicious attack on Manhattan Institute board member William Kristol, calling him a “renegade Jew.” Meanwhile Rebekah Mercer called Bannon “one of the greatest living defenders of liberty.” CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 18 After initially supporting Ted Cruz, Mercer switched Republican horses. She and her father poured more than $15 million into the Trump campaign—twice as much as the next highest donor. After the party convention she advised Trump to dump Paul Manafort as campaign chairman and hire Steve Bannon—a strategic move that some observers thought helped carry Trump to victory in November. Bannon became a senior advisor to the President, and Mercer was named to a key position on the executive committee for the Trump transition. I could see the writing on the wall. It wasn’t the first time that I was blocked from writing about some issues because of pressure from donors. But this was different. The board’s top two funders were now entangled with a presidency that I believed was a national catastrophe in the making. To remain at City Journal would mean accepting that my once cherished magazine had moved from standing on the sidelines while Trump captured the Republican Party— troubling enough—to legitimizing the new President’s disruptive right-wing populism. Since I had no way of protesting City Journal’s capitulation to Trump from within the ranks, I decided to break ranks. In October 2017, I submitted my letter of resignation to Brian Anderson and to the Manhattan Institute’s president Larry Mone, with copies sent to six of the magazine’s veteran writers. The action I was taking, I wrote, “now seems to be the only way for me to protest the magazine’s intellectual abdication on the most urgent crisis facing the nation today; the election of an unfit, dangerous man to the presidency.” I also protested the role of Rebekah Mercer on the Board of Trustees, calling her “an accomplice in one of the most malignant political movements in the country [who] has weaponized what Steve Bannon calls his ‘killing machine,’ now wreaking havoc inside the Republican Party and trying to destroy the decent conservatism that first drew me to City Journal.” Almost three years later, I find myself locked down in the midst of an American public health emergency turned far more deadly because of President Trump’s character flaws, his serial dishonesty, and his self-dealing, exacerbated by his Administration’s demonstrable incompetence. Anyone can easily review the tapes to see that Trump first poured gasoline on the flames of the pandemic by denying its seriousness and then launching a brazen disinformation campaign to CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 19 convince the American people that everything he did (or declined to do) was “perfect.” Donald Trump came to Washington promising to “drain the swamp.” Instead he drained the federal government of talent and institutional memory (see Michael Lewis’s prescient book, The Fifth Risk) while turning the White House into a sewer of corruption. Americans looking for a competent national government to lead the response to the pandemic discovered that (apologies to Gertrude Stein) “there is no there there.” It’s useless to continue blaming Trump alone for the country’s predicament. He is who he is, which is exactly who he was and will always be. The same 22-year-old who dodged the draft by lying about his medical status went on to become the commander-in-chief who went AWOL during a dire national emergency. Trump’s lack of fitness for the presidency was entirely predictable. What was unforeseen was the moral collapse in the face of the gathering storm by conservative activists and intellectuals. The Trump seduction happened at so many distinguished conservative thought centers and magazines that it led some Never Trumpers like Max Boot to conclude retrospectively that there was something amiss in the DNA of American conservatism that made the movement susceptible to a repellent figure like Trump. Others conservative opponents of Trump have argued that Trump’s conquest of their movement is a historical aberration and continue to hope for the revival of decent conservatism. I will leave it to future historians to fully explain Trump’s success in high jacking American conservatism. What follows is, instead, the story of what I witnessed at one reputable conservative institution, a think tank where donor money weighed heavily and writers were prohibited from writing about certain subjects—which culminated in my former colleagues’ intellectual surrender to Trumpism. The Manhattan Institute for Policy Studies opened its doors in midtown Manhattan in 1978. The founders were an odd pair: a wealthy former Battle of Britain fighter pilot and businessman named Antony Fisher and Wall Street powerhouse William Casey (who soon became Ronald Reagan’s CIA director). Fisher was a disciple of Friedrich A. Hayek, author of the classical economics tract The Road to Serfdom. He established a British think tank promoting Hayek’s ideal of a rules-based, international order of free market, open societies. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 20 Partnering with Bill Casey, Fisher had the audacity to launch a version of the Hayekian think tank in the belly of the beast of modern, welfare-state liberalism. My own journey to the Manhattan Institute likewise followed a somewhat unusual path. In 1965 I was a UC Berkeley graduate student caught up in the campus Free Speech Movement. I then abandoned my doctoral studies to join the radical muckraking magazine Ramparts, where I wrote about the counter-culture and the anti-war movement, and covered the riotous 1968 presidential campaign. My biggest hit for the magazine was an investigative piece exposing the CIA’s secret funding of the National Student Association that garnered the George Polk award for journalism. After an internal coup at Ramparts the new editors steered the magazine even closer to the radical left. They made common cause with Tom Hayden, the firebrand anti-war leader who met with the Vietnamese communists and was now urging the protest movement to “bring the war back home.” That was a bridge too far for me, and I drifted away from the magazine. Continuing my career as a freelance journalist, I wrote frequently for The New York Times Magazine in the 1970s and reported for the paper on the Yom Kippur war from the Golan Heights. I also served as the Israel correspondent for the New Statesman. In the 1980s I was a regular contributor to The Village Voice. The Voice had a deserved reputation as one of the more provocative and radical publications in New York journalism, but in my day it was also admirably open to diverse points of view. I was among the more politically centrist of its writers, sometimes even criticizing the liberal pieties of the other regulars at the paper. In my writing I was gradually evolving toward a moderate conservatism. For my tastes, my old comrades on the left had now turned too anti-anti-communist and unjustly critical of Israel. In 1996, I published a long-form essay in City Journal about the success of the city’s Catholic schools. The piece argued for expanding school-choice programs, including vouchers, that would allow poor children stuck in failing public schools to attend parochial schools that worked. My article was excerpted in The Wall Street Journal, and New York Times columnist John Tierney soon wrote that I had “started the current debate” over school choice in New York City. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 21 Within a few months I became a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and contributing editor of City Journal—the first time since leaving Ramparts that I was getting a regular paycheck for my journalism. At the institute’s gala fundraising dinner later that year, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Roger Hertog, cited my writing on education as an example of the contributions the institute’s “scholars” were making to the city. City Journal gave me a second life in journalism and apparently I was even having some influence. Because of my reporting on the city’s awful labor contract with the teacher’s union, I was asked to serve as an informal adviser to the Giuliani administration as it prepared to negotiate a new agreement with the United Federation of Teachers. I knew my articles were having an impact when union president Randi Weingarten denounced me as a “demagogue” in the UFT newspaper. I attributed a lot of my success to Myron Magnet, City Journal’s editor during my first decade at the magazine. With his side whiskers, horn-rimmed glasses, and impeccable striped suits, he looked like a character out of Dickens. He was the best editor I ever had, exacting in his standards while nevertheless encouraging me to take on almost any subject that piqued my interest. I cherished our magazine’s lively editorial meetings with talented writers and public intellectuals such as Heather Mac Donald, Kay Hymowitz, Fred Siegel, and Steve Malanga. Half the writers and editors around the table had PhDs or J.D.s, and the sessions sometimes felt like a graduate-school seminar in the history of ideas. Magnet was fiercely protective of City Journal’s editorial independence. One year, at the magazine’s holiday party, held at the luxurious east side home of a Manhattan Institute trustee, our editor gave a little talk in which he cited one of my articles criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stewardship of the city’s public schools. The problem was that the mayor had been invited to the party and was standing within earshot of Magnet. Bloomberg asked for his coat and left in a huff. The scuttlebutt after the party was that some members of the institute’s Board of Trustees were not thrilled that our editor had dissed the richest man in New York. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 22 The Manhattan Institute’s annual budget ($22 million by the time I resigned) came almost entirely from conservative foundations or our wealthy trustees, all receiving hefty tax deductions under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. I assumed that the big donors would have some influence on the general direction of the institute. It didn’t occur to me that this might also extend to the editorial content of City Journal. During Myron Magnet’s tenure it never did—at least I didn’t see any evidence that it did. Then, one day in 2007, without any warning, Magnet was out of the editor’s chair. His abrupt dismissal at a time when City Journal was flourishing felt ominous, in part because it was never explained or even officially announced by the Manhattan Institute’s management. Yet it was common knowledge among the senior writers that Magnet’s relations with some of the trustees had soured, apparently because he had fought too hard to maintain the magazine’s independence. Magnet himself declined to discuss the affair. He was kept on as a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, was still listed as editor at large on the masthead, and continued writing for the magazine. But he never showed up again at our monthly editorial meetings. Brian Anderson, Magnet’s deputy, was immediately appointed as City Journal’s new editor. The erosion of City Journal’s editorial independence might be dated from Magnet’s dismissal, but it didn’t happen overnight. Anderson had apprenticed under Magnet, was a serious public intellectual and writer in his own right, and seemed as committed as his mentor was to the magazine’s tradition of freedom for its writers. Our new editor was soon tested on that score. For the Winter 2008 issue, he gave me the green light to write a long, somewhat revisionist essay on education reform titled “School Choice Isn’t Enough.” I reported on the mounting evidence showing that poor kids in urban districts with robust voucher programs hadn’t made the academic gains we had hoped for. I urged the school reform movement to get behind a grade-by-grade, knowledge-based curriculum such as the one championed by the education theorist E.D. Hirsch. The Manhattan Institute’s President Larry Mone had a small temper tantrum after the article was published. It wasn’t that Mone objected to my piece on the merits, CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 23 but according to two staff members I spoke with, he was rattled by the phone calls he received from donors expressing concern that the institute was backing away from all-out support of voucher programs. Sharply critical letters, some accusing me of apostasy, arrived at the magazine from leading figures in the school-choice movement. Anderson handled the matter deftly. He posted my original article as well as all of the critical letters, plus supporting letters from Hirsch and the education historian Diane Ravitch, as well as my own extended response on the magazine’s website. I thought this was exactly what a magazine of ideas was supposed to do—engage in a serious conversation about serious issues. Anderson’s judgment appeared to be vindicated when I was contacted by New York Times education reporter Jennifer Medina. She told me she was writing about the reaction to my City Journal article within the school reform movement. Naturally I was delighted, and we set a time and place for an interview. Larry Mone wasn’t happy at all. He told me he was worried that further coverage of the school-choice debate would stir the pot again and remind the donors about my heretical ideas. Mone even tried, unsuccessfully, to coax me into backing out of the scheduled meeting with Medina. The Times’s profile turned out to be complimentary, describing me as a “contrarian” whose ideas on education were “heard” at Mike Bloomberg’s City Hall. But it was also good for the Manhattan Institute, or so I thought. After all, the country’s leading liberal newspaper was showcasing a conservative think tank honoring its principles, allowing its writers the freedom to have second thoughts and engage in relevant debates about important public policy issues. Once again, I felt somewhat reassured about City Journal’s editorial independence. But the feeling didn’t last very long. The following year I received the go-ahead from Anderson to write a review essay focused on Charles Murray’s recently released book, Real Education. My proposed article seemed like a no-brainer because Murray was a legendary figure at the Manhattan Institute. His first book, Losing Ground, written while he was a senior fellow at the institute in 1984, had a big impact on the national debate about welfare policy and also helped establish the new think tank’s reputation. (The Manhattan CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 24 Institute declined to back Murray’s next controversial book, The Bell Curve, but that’s part of another story.) I thought Murray’s new book deserved attention because it challenged the “educational romanticism” behind many current reform ideas (including school choice) for improving schools. In commenting on Murray’s analysis, I reiterated my view that it was unrealistic to expect that voucher programs alone would magically transform American K-12 education and reduce the racial achievement gap. Anderson did a final edit on my piece, pronounced it “very powerful,” and scheduled it for the Winter 2009 issue. A few days before the magazine was set to go to print, I received an e-mail from Anderson informing me that he was getting “a nervous reaction from higher-ups, which could cause some problems,” and that he was being summoned to an urgent meeting with Larry Mone. In Anderson’s office the next day I was informed by Howard Husock, the Manhattan Institute’s vice president for research and a former Harvard professor, that my article had been spiked. He told me that the article was too pessimistic and that “M.I. is for vouchers and school choice,” full stop. Five years later, I hit another pothole, this time over a book I’d written defending the Common Core education standards. Even though the institute had nothing to do with my arrangement with the publisher, several high-level staff members obtained the galleys prior to the book’s publication in order to scrutinize it for another possible act of heresy. They discovered that my text criticized some conservatives who had reflexively rejected the Common Core standards on the dubious grounds that they had been forced on America’s schools by the Obama Administration. Executive Vice President Vanessa Mendoza was disturbed that one of the critics I took issue with was conservative icon George Will. In a telephone conversation, Mendoza told me that since Will had been “a good friend” of the institute, I should cut or change the passage. I refused to make the change. Two months later, I was removed as a Manhattan Institute senior fellow without any explanation. I stayed on as a City Journal contributing editor and continued CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 25 to write for the magazine and the website. Not, however, on school choice. And never about candidate Trump or President Trump. The Winter 2017 issue of City Journal came out a few days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The lead article, by the military historian and classicist, Victor Davis Hanson, was titled “Trump and The American Divide.” In my view, the essay was a clever exercise in historicism in which Trump’s emergence as tribune for millions of culturally besieged Americans living in the heartland appears almost inevitable. Trump is rendered morally legitimate, despite his personal flaws, because he is propelled by a historic resurgence of American populism. As in Hanson’s more polemical defenses of Trump, he sprinkled his City Journal essay with learned references to major figures in Greek and Roman antiquity—Theocritus, Virgil, Thucydides, Cicero, Plato, and the Pythagoreans—intended to steamroll less erudite readers into accepting Trump’s rise in the aura of precedence. Hanson’s essay was certainly worthy of further debate. But, by this time, there was no discussion allowed in City Journal about this critical issue for the country. The historical validation of Trump thus became our magazine’s default position. For a journal of ideas, this was a dereliction of duty. Nobody asked me, but if I had been asked, I would have said that this also represented a betrayal of the Hayekian principles that the Manhattan Institute was founded on. F.A. Hayek abhorred populist movements of both the left and right. The good society, he insisted, was built on property rights, free markets, and free trade. Beyond these essential economic arrangements, Hayek stressed the need for the rule of law, freedom of expression, and the slow, steady process of parliamentary give and take. Hayek also happened to be a confirmed globalist. Not exactly the values that Donald Trump was bringing to the White House. For the next few months, I agonized about what to do about the conspiracy of silence at my magazine. I expressed my displeasure a few times directly to Brian Anderson and a few other writers, but with no apparent effect. As President Trump continued to demonstrate his lack of fitness for office, I knew I had to make a more forceful statement. In my October 2017 resignation letter I expressed hope that there might still be an internal conversation about City Journal’s political direction in the Trump era. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 26 Three of the senior writers whom I copied on the letter appeared to agree. In an e-mail one writer said, “I hope your letter will spark the internal debate you seek, which is long overdue.” Another said, “That is a very powerfully expressed letter, which I am sure will get no response.” The third writer echoed my complaint about the lack of debate on Trump and sent links to two articles mildly critical of the President that hadn’t been allowed in the magazine. Larry Mone didn’t answer my letter, but the institute’s vice president, Howard Husock, responded in an email: “I don’t think City Journal has ever really been an overtly political journal and would not help matters much today by becoming one.” This was news to me, since a good part of my own writing for the magazine consisted of sharp political criticism of mayors, governors, and presidents (most of them Democrats). And even as City Journal stayed out of the fray over Trump during the 2016 election, it had continued to savage President Obama. In a thoughtful response, Brian Anderson defended the magazine’s stance on Trump: “Conservative fusionism now must include a populist dimension, along with libertarians and the religious right. There were a lot of alienated Americans whose concerns were being ignored, and worse, they found themselves being sneered at contemptuously by elite culture. Conservatives need to figure out how to bring those people back into the argument, without embracing irrational and destructive policies.” I welcomed Anderson’s candor. I agreed that elite conservatism tethered to the interests of Wall Street had become increasingly out of touch with the plight of ordinary Americans, including the working class. I would have welcomed a serious debate in our magazine about whether an unscrupulous character like Trump could lead a healthy populist revival within the Republican Party. But any chance of continuing the conversation was shattered when my resignation became public. (I hadn’t intended that, at least not yet, but I had forgotten that everything leaks these days.) Bari Weiss, a staff writer for The New York Times opinion page, called me and announced that she had my letter and intended to write about similar disputes over Trump at several conservative think tanks. I agreed to be interviewed about my resignation. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 27 Weiss’s article, titled “The Trump Debate Inside Conservative Citadels,” cited several unnamed staff writers who agreed with my complaints about suppressing debate at the magazine. But rather than acknowledging that City Journal had moved somewhat toward supporting Trump and defending his brand of conservatism, Larry Mone dissembled to the Times. “When we think the administration is right, we write about it. When we think they are wrong, we write about it.” I had some sympathy for Brian Anderson’s predicament. He wasn’t the source of the censorship I was subjected to over my education articles, and I understood that he was walking a tightrope on the Trump issue. He could ill afford to provoke our two powerful trustees now heavily invested in the Trump presidency. He was feeling heat from the Manhattan Institute’s managers (the “higher-ups,” as he called them during the Charles Murray affair) who in my view were more preoccupied with fundraising and public relations than with defending City Journal’s independence or the institute’s founding principles. To make matters worse, Paul Singer had now jumped into the fray. Several sources at the magazine told me that the board chairman was pressuring Larry Mone to tighten control over City Journal and its writers. Some staff writers were told that they had to submit articles intended for publication in other outlets for review by management first, and they were warned to “steer clear” of sensitive issues, including criticism of President Trump’s tax cuts or corruption within the Administration. One writer was discouraged from submitting an article only marginally critical of Trump to another publication. “Larry would melt down,” the writer was told. Another staff member wrote to me in an email, “You have no idea how bad it’s gotten. Every word is now parsed by committee before being published anywhere…all they see is Trump!” Another subject deemed taboo for City Journal’s writers was gun control. After a surge of deadly mass shootings at schools, shopping malls, and places of worship, there was widespread debate in the media about reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. According to two sources, it was Paul Singer who blocked any discussion of gun control as a remedy for the American carnage. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 28 In retrospect, it wasn’t entirely surprising that our board chairman would intervene in the editorial content at an enterprise like Manhattan Institute. Singer is one of the world’s most feared “activist” investors, someone who takes an ownership stake in a public company and then pressures the firm’s management into making changes that boost his own or his clients’ returns. Journalists across the political spectrum, from Greg Palast on the left to Rod Dreher and Tucker Carlson on the right, have described Singer’s investment strategy as “vulture capitalism.” Financial reporters for The New Yorker and Fortune revealed one case after another in which Singer’s hedge fund went to what both magazines described as ethically questionable lengths to achieve its financial goals. In fairness, it should be mentioned that there is another, more charitable side to Paul Singer. In 2018 he received the William Simon prize for Philanthropic Leadership from the Philanthropy Roundtable. The award cited Singer’s support for many good causes, including his commitment to “enhancing and protecting intellectual diversity and the marketplace of ideas on college campuses.” Yet I detected no evidence of Singer’s support for “intellectual diversity” at City Journal. Instead I saw an “activist” donor who intervened in the editorial decisions of the magazine and often got his way on issues important to him, including gun rights, tax cuts, and fealty to the President of the United States. Nine months after my resignation, Larry Mone abruptly announced he was leaving the Manhattan Institute. After a six-month search, Paul Singer announced that Reihan Salam, a wunderkind of conservative journalism and the executive editor of National Review, would be the institute’s next president. Salam was a serious public intellectual who had written two well-received books, one on immigration and one on the Republican Party (co-authored with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat). That put Salam in an altogether different league from his predecessor, who had no record of intellectual accomplishment and was an easy pushover for Singer and other influential donors. I dared hope that Salam’s appointment signaled some overdue changes in the governing culture at the Manhattan Institute. I was even more intrigued after reading Salam’s declaration on his website that, as a National Review editor, he had commissioned articles “from libertarian conservatives, cosmopolitan libertarians, centrist neoliberals, national CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 29 developmentalists, and egalitarian nationalists who hold clashing opinions.” Salam’s statement that he actually valued “clashing opinions” made me think that something finally had to give. (After my resignation I had moved on, doing some writing for other magazines and working on a long delayed memoir. But I still had a journalistic interest in how my old colleagues would respond—indeed if they ever would respond—to the unraveling of the Trump Administration.) Unfortunately, during Salam’s first year, I didn’t notice much change. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. government’s response to the worst national emergency since World War II. Surely, I thought, City Journal’s editors and writers would now have to take a critical look at the Trump Administration’s performance, to fairly assess whether the President had fulfilled his constitutional obligation to protect the nation. City Journal’s coverage of the health crisis was massive. As of the end of June, as many as 80 articles had been published on the website, plus a special issue of the print magazine devoted entirely to the pandemic. Many of the articles were incisive. However, in the entire collection, there was hardly a mention of President Trump’s role in the crisis. Only one piece, written by an outside contributor, cited the President’s slow response to the crisis. Yet even that minor criticism was rendered moot when the writer falsely claimed that Trump’s performance was no worse than that of any other world leader. The special issue carried the title “World War Virus” on the cover and was blurbed by Manhattan Institute’s publicity department as “of historical importance.” If this was history it was Orwellian history, as if a group of editors and writers had produced an account of America without assessing the role of the nation’s commander-in-chief at the height of World War II. It wasn’t that the writers lacked the appropriate vocabulary to evaluate President Trump’s leadership during the health crisis. An article by associate editor Seth Barron blasted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s performance during the crisis as “a daily exercise in justification, accountability denial and self- aggrandizement. Never shy about trumpeting his insipid accomplishments as the city teeters on the edge of disaster, the mayor has assumed an alternating tone of paternalism, victimhood and self-righteous vindication.” CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 30 City Journal’s savage takedown of Gotham’s mayor was published on May 13. By that date, everyone in the country except for Trump’s tribal loyalists could see that the President’s briefings on the coronavirus had also become “a daily exercise in justification, accountability denial and self-aggrandizement.” Indeed, the briefings became so embarrassing that they had to be scrapped. And soon afterward President Trump decided to ignore the virus entirely. In the first week of June, City Journal shifted its coverage away from the pandemic toward the outbreak of urban unrest sweeping the country after the police killing of George Floyd. The magazine covered every aspect of this second American crisis, but once again never mentioned the President’s response. No comment about the Trump Administration’s use of force against peaceful protesters in front of the White House, or the Hollywood-style photo-op of the President posing as a Roman emperor holding up a bible instead of a scepter. Not a word about the dangerous rift between the U.S. military establishment and the White House. Yet in the midst of these ongoing crises, contributing editor Judy Miller opined in City Journal on the dangers of “woke” culture and self-censorship. “The impulse to self-censor, however powerful in such politically polarized times, is deadly to any vibrant culture, no matter how seemingly compelling its justification. It must be resisted,” Miller concluded. Everything in my old friend’s indictment of liberal cancel culture rang true to me. Unfortunately, my former City Journal colleagues, both writers and editors, were among those unable to resist the impulse to self-censorship. They were now bound by a code of silence on an American President’s out-of-control behavior during a national emergency. This was an act of intellectual betrayal that further damaged the cause of principled conservatism—or whatever’s left of it in the era of Trump. ▪

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 31 Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D. Jill Biden should think about dropping the honorific, which feels fraudulent, even comic. Joseph Epstein | Wall Street Journal | Dec 12, 2020 Madame First Lady -- Mrs. Biden -- Jill -- kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the "Dr." before your name? "Dr. Jill Biden" sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title "Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students' Needs." A wise man once said that no one should call himself "Dr." unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc. I taught at Northwestern University for 30 years without a doctorate or any advanced degree. I have only a B.A. in absentia from the University of Chicago -- in absentia because I took my final examination on a pool table at Headquarters Company, Fort Hood, Texas, while serving in the peacetime Army in the late 1950s. I do have an honorary doctorate, though I have to report that the president of the school that awarded it was fired the year after I received it, not, I hope, for allowing my honorary doctorate. During my years as a university teacher I was sometimes addressed, usually on the phone, as "Dr. Epstein." On such occasions it was all I could do not to reply, "Read two chapters of Henry James and get into bed. I'll be right over." I was also often addressed as Dr. during the years I was editor of the American Scholar, the quarterly magazine of Phi Beta Kappa. Let me quickly insert that I am also not a member of Phi Beta Kappa, except by marriage. Many of those who so addressed me, I noted, were scientists. I also received a fair amount of correspondence from people who appended the initials Ph.D. to their names atop their letterheads, and have twice seen PHD on vanity license plates, which struck me as pathetic. In contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities, calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league. The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally, at any rate outside the sciences. Getting a doctorate was then an CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 32 arduous proceeding: One had to pass examinations in two foreign languages, one of them Greek or Latin, defend one's thesis, and take an oral examination on general knowledge in one's field. At Columbia University of an earlier day, a secretary sat outside the room where these examinations were administered, a pitcher of water and a glass on her desk. The water and glass were there for the candidates who fainted. A far cry, this, from the few doctoral examinations I sat in on during my teaching days, where candidates and teachers addressed one another by first names and the general atmosphere more resembled a kaffeeklatsch. Dr. Jill, I note you acquired your Ed.D. as recently as 15 years ago at age 55, or long after the terror had departed. The prestige of honorary doctorates has declined even further. Such degrees were once given exclusively to scholars, statesmen, artists and scientists. Then rich men entered the lists, usually in the hope that they would donate money to the schools that had granted them their honorary degrees. (My late friend Sol Linowitz, then chairman of Xerox, told me that he had 63 honorary doctorates.) Famous television journalists, who passed themselves off as intelligent, followed. Entertainers, who didn't bother feigning intelligence, were next. At Northwestern, recent honorary-degree recipients and commencement speakers have included Stephen Colbert and Seth Davis. I sent a complaining email to the school's president about the low quality of such men as academic honorands, with the result that the following year the commencement speaker and honorand was Billie Jean King -- who, with the graduating members of the school's women's tennis team, hit tennis balls out to the audience of graduating students and the parents who had paid $70,000 a year for their university education, or perhaps I should say for their "credential." Political correctness has put paid to any true honor an honorary doctorate may once have possessed. If you are ever looking for a simile to denote rarity, try "rarer than a contemporary university honorary-degree list not containing an African-American woman." Then there are all those honorary degrees bestowed on Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose and others who, owing to their proven or alleged sexual predations, have had to be rescinded. Between the honorary degrees given to billionaires, the falsely intelligent, entertainers and the politically correct, just about all honor has been drained from honorary doctorates. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 33 As for your Ed.D., Madame First Lady, hard-earned though it may have been, please consider stowing it, at least in public, at least for now. Forget the small thrill of being Dr. Jill, and settle for the larger thrill of living for the next four years in the best public housing in the world as First Lady Jill Biden. ▪

The Making of a Misogynist What’s up, doc? Joseph Epstein | Commentary Magazine | Feb 2021 The misogynist of my title, as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary, c’est moi. I became America’s most notable one on Saturday morning, December 12, upon the release of an 800-or-so-word op-ed I wrote in the Wall Street Journal published under the title “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not If You Need an M.D.” I had written the piece to get what I thought a minor pet peeve off my chest: the affectation of the president-elect’s wife in calling herself, and insisting that everyone else refer to her as, “Dr. Jill Biden.” She is not a physician; rather, she was awarded a degree by a graduate school of education. What I thought was a fairly light bit of prose whose intentions were chiefly comic set off a forest fire of anger toward, abuse of, and outright hatred for its author. It proves you can be a naïf even at the age of 83. Nearly 5,000 readers wrote online to the Wall Street Journal to argue about my op-ed. My name “trended,” as they say, number one on Twitter. The New York Times published a full-blown article about it, as did the Guardian in England. My local (that is, Chicago) press and television channels ran stories about it. It was discussed on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, and on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, where Mrs. Biden deplored “the tone” and said, “One of the things I love most is my doctorate…. I worked so hard for it.” Meanwhile, the English Department at Northwestern University, where I taught for 30 years, flushed me down Orwell’s memory hole by taking my name off its website and sending out an online message disassociating itself from my “noxious” and “misogynistic” views. Fifty or so new reviews of my most recent book have appeared on Amazon since December 12, nearly all of them attacks on the book and on me personally (“Self- important, sexist, and droll.”) My entry on Wikipedia has also been radically CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 34 altered. Where before it was straightforward and neutral, it now features me as a right-wing lout, with an entire paragraph given over to my Wall Street Journal op- ed. The entry suggests that my 23 years as editor of the American Scholar, where I thought I had a fairly good run, was one of constant baiting of liberals and liberal causes such that everyone at Phi Beta Kappa could not wait to be rid of me. These items and others suggest that these vigilante wokesters, whose work this is, travel in packs and like few things better than placing snakes under every rock one is likely to turn over. Jill Biden was defended from my dastardly depredations by both Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. I was also chastened by Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten. One of Martin Luther King’s daughters chimed in, in defense of the use of “doctor” for non-physicians. Jill Biden took what these days passes for the high road by writing that during her husband’s administration, “we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished.” Kamala Harris’s husband wrote on Twitter: “Dr. Biden earned her degrees through hard work and pure grit. She is an inspiration to me, to her students, and to Americans across this country. This story would never have been written about a man.” Then there was the hate mail or, more accurately, hate email. Where else but on and through the Internet can you insult a person using the vilest possible language and not even have to go to the expense of a postage stamp to do so? At a rough estimate, I received more than 200 pieces of hate mail. The quality and nature of it is worthy of a bit of attention. First, though, here is a not uncharacteristic sample from someone named Jennifer Irwin: A woman who gets a doctorate in education you suggest to drop the doctor?! You petty, pathetic, let’s be real misogynistic f—k! You shouldn’t be teaching other humans. We need more Jill Bidens and less bitter f—king Aholes like you in the world! Not all my hate email was this obscene, though I couldn’t help notice that my female antagonists went in for such coarse language more than did the men who wrote chiefly to insult me. “You’re A Prick” was the subject line from one Tricia CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 35 Maher-Miller. “F—k you” is the entire message from a Jamie Nestor, to whose email I responded by writing “Gesundheit!” Most of the insults claimed I was envious—the phrase “degree-envy” came up more than once—of Jill Biden’s academic attainments, that I was unfit to teach, that I was ancient and out of it (the phrase “old fart” came up a time or two), and in general a disgrace to the human race. While I received no death threats, quite a few of my hate-mailers spoke of their longing for me soon to depart the planet (“Wishing you the best of health in the last 1% of your underwhelming life”). A number of people wrote to complain of my referring to Mrs. Biden as “kiddo.” This I did in my first sentence: “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think a not unimportant matter.” Anyone not blinded by anger would recognize that this sentence was built on the notion of increased intimacy of address. But my hate-mailers, not close readers, thought the phrase was condescending and thereby sexist. One sent me an email consisting of the word “kiddo” repeated perhaps a hundred times. There is of course nothing sexist or even sex-related about the word “kiddo,” since one uses it freely to address both men and women. Yet to the TV host Keith Olbermann on Twitter, “As the use of ‘kiddo’ underscores, misogyny and authoritarianism are baked in @wsj; this 83-year old turd polisher’s hatred goes back to a homophobic piece in 1970; and his degree envy is just pathetic.” But Keith, as the 46th president of the United States might say, “look, here’s the deal, I myself use the word ‘kiddo’ all the time”—which he does, or at least did, until this brouhaha. Ah, me, another rainy day in the Old Republic of Letters. I also received more than a few psychoanalyses explaining to me the reasons behind my wretched views (not enough mother love, don’t you know). In this connection, my genitals were sometimes mentioned, the presumption being that their inadequacy would explain my harsh and hateful views. Many lectured me on the true meaning of the word “doctor” and its history, lectures usually nicely larded with insults. One such closed: “While you are free to denigrate non- medical doctoral degrees to your malignant heart’s content, you will NOT stop the colleges and universities of the world from conferring doctoral degrees of all types. You are just another self-hating kvetch.” Only one piece of hate mail featured anti-Semitism. I’d not before now been called, as I was by this charming correspondent, a man signing himself Neil Thompson, a “kike c—t.” CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 36 Another batch featured accounts by women, or in some cases stories about women told by their husbands, of their own arduous acquisition of advanced degrees. Many of these letters, though their authors seemed unaware of it, were really little more than accounts of their own virtue—virtue, let there be no question about it, impossible that a lowlife like me could ever hope to attain. They were written only partly to insult me, but in greater part to exhibit their own self- congratulation. These were examples of the virtucrat in action. The word “virtucrat,” one of my few contributions to the English language, is “a man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply, morally righteous into the bargain.” I have, at the time of writing, had only three phone calls from angry strangers. The first arrived at 1:25 a.m. the day of publication of my op-ed. A man’s voice wakened me to announce, “You put me through your article. In return I’m putting you through this phone call,” whereupon the caller hung up. The second, also from a man, arrived at midday and was short and snappy, if not happy: “You Joseph Epstein.” “Yes.” “You dick.” Another hang-upper. The third came from a woman who went on a bit longer, calling me “an old geezer” who she hoped would soon be dead. She, too, ended the call without awaiting an answer. Not much interested in dialogue, my telephone interlocutors. Yeats’s famous lines, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity” have proved only half true in my case. Alongside all this egregious email, I have also received a good deal from people approving my WSJ op-ed and saying generous things about the pleasure my writing generally has given them over the years. Included among them was a cheering word from a much admired historian of America, whose name I shall not mention lest he be tainted by my current infamy, remarking on my sense of humor and the sad fact that “there is no room left for humor in our current culture.” Above all, I am pleased, and more than a little proud, of the Wall Street Journal coming to my defense in the form of Paul Gigot, the editor in charge of the paper’s opinion pages, writing an op-ed of his own defending my column in his paper and cogently suggesting reasons for the tumult it has caused: “The Biden media team elevated Mr. Epstein’s work in what was clearly a political strategy.” Senator Tom Cotton sent me an email about my op-ed, contrasting the WSJ’s courageous stand in my defense to the cowardice of the editors of CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 37 the New York Times in connection with the piece he published there in the summer of 2020 in which he argued for sending in troops to support police where riots had broken out in American cities. Its publication caused the paper to fire its editorial-page editor for allowing it to run. All the boxes against me, then, have been ticked: sexist, check; racist, check; homophobe, check; snob, check; elitist, check; out-of-it old fart, check. But above all and everywhere, I was most clearly a misogynist, a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women. I hope word of this doesn’t leak out to my wife of nearly 45 years or to my two elegant and accomplished grown-up granddaughters. Nor to all the women who sat in my classes at Northwestern over the years, four of whom wrote to me in my defense, one of whom noted, “I have continued to defend you in the comments and always will. The piece was hilarious, and no one at NU ever went to bat for me like you did.” On the charge of misogyny, I now have direct experience of the fact that, under the current malevolent and humorless reign of political correctness, anything mildly critical written or said about any woman, African American, homosexual, or any other minority group (excluding Jews and Asians) will automatically earn one of those condemnatory labels that have replaced thought for so many in our day. Perhaps nowhere is this more prevalent than in our universities and media. I gently chide Jill Biden on the pretentiousness of her calling herself doctor, and Mika Brzesinski, on her television show, calls me “petty, elitist, and misogynist”— the “trifecta,” as her partner Joe Scarborough added. My criticism of the use of the doctor title for anyone who is not in the healing trades reminded me that the Johnsonian scholar Donald J. Greene was opposed to people referring to Samuel Johnson as Dr. Johnson, because the honorary doctorate from Oxford had been bestowed upon him only after Johnson had produced his Dictionary, and Greene felt it tended to portray the man as pompous and grumpy in a way he never was. I stand by my view that today to call oneself “doctor” if one is not involved in physical or mental healing is generally a comic affectation, and I see nothing in the least sexist in saying so. As for Jill Biden’s Ed.D., many people who acquire that degree chiefly turn out to be school superintendents. As Nicholas Clairmont wrote at Tablet: “An Ed.D. degree is 90 or so years old, as a concept, and it is not really comparable to a CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 38 Ph.D. It’s not a welding certificate, but it is perhaps closer to welding than comparative literature. It’s an occupational license, the possession of which allows teachers and education administrators to become about a third better paid. It is a professional training certification, not a scholarly project committed to enlarging the scope of human knowledge.” Clairmont adds that “Jill Biden is not a Ph.D. stealing the valor of physicians. She is a technical school student stealing the valor of Ph.Ds.” Nor do education departments represent the intellectual heights at any university. In 1997, my alma mater, the University of Chicago, literally disbanded its Department of Education, founded in 1895 by John Dewey, due to the diminution in its quality. What is usually taught in these departments is generally a hodgepodge of sociology, political science, conventional wisdom, and whatever else happens to be at hand. (I have not read Jill Biden’s dissertation, but for a blistering attack on its quality, see Kyle Smith’s “Jill Biden’s Garbage Dissertation, Explained,” National Review, December 17, 2020.) When I was in school, I took a single education course, thinking that a teaching certificate might come in handy if my desire to become a writer didn’t turn out. Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist, is supposed to have said in response to a student’s far-off answer to a question he posed, “That’s not even wrong.” The education course I took was not even dull. I have read articles in which people have argued that a good part of the problem with much public schooling today is owing to the offerings in contemporary education departments. In any case, an Ed.D. is far from an unambiguous accomplishment and may not be a degree one wishes to flaunt. Some of my hate-mailers have asked why I haven’t written to attack the right- wing firebrand Sebastian Gorka, who also refers to himself as “Doctor.” I didn’t because he is not sufficiently prominent for me to do so, though let me say here that I think his referring to himself as Dr. Gorka a ludicrous bit of pretentiousness and pomposity. Others have asked why I haven’t attacked Condoleezza Rice or Henry Kissinger for their self-doctoring. Rice, best I know, does not call herself doctor; she has too much serious learning and good sense to stoop to need to do so. Henry Kissinger, I’m told, only took to wishing to be referred to as doctor when he went into public life to avoid the deadly title of Professor. When I am referred to as Professor, as I occasionally still am, I usually remark that I much CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 39 prefer to be addressed as Mister, Professor being what you call the man who plays piano in the bordello. (“Hit it, Professor!”) Something there is heavily Teutonic about the nonmedical use of “Dr.” before one’s name. All this conferring of doctor upon oneself by academics is said to have had its origin in Germany. An old joke has a ship filled with German Jews making port at Haifa, and before the ship unloads, someone from the deck calls out “Doktor,” at which point every passenger rushes to the railing in response, and the ship sinks. In America, the academic affectation of calling oneself Dr. is more than a little motivated by the hope of garnering some of the prestige of physicians. I had an acquaintance, a Ph.D. in anthropology, who always phoned in his dinner reservation under the name Dr. Newman, hoping he would get a better table and perhaps greater respect through the title. Whoopi Goldberg, on television, cited Jill Biden as “an amazing doctor” and thought she would make a fine surgeon general. I have had people write to tell me that until my op-ed they thought Jill Biden a physician. Endless are the sad jokes about academics booking flights under the title of Dr. and then being called upon for their help when another passenger has a heart attack. Finally, there is something snobbish, un-American even, like the ennobling prefix von, about someone not in medicine referring to him- or herself with an honorific doctor. ______COULD ALL the hubbub occasioned by my op-ed really have been about anything so minor as calling out Jill Biden on flaunting her degree or referring to her jokingly as kiddo? Or was something else going on? The true theme of my op-ed, after all, is the sad state, one might almost say the decay, of the contemporary university in America. This devolution of higher education (always excepting science and engineering training) has been underway for a good while. In 2002, I published a book on the subject of snobbery, in which I noted that where one or one’s children went to college had become perhaps the prime source of contemporary snobbery in America. The title of the book’s chapter on the subject is “A Son at Tufts, a Daughter at Taffeta.” Colleges, like designer clothes, I argued, had become less about the quality of their education than about their branding, with Harvard the Armani, Yale the Christian Dior, and CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 40 Princeton the Ferragamo of higher education; and, like these clothes, vastly overpriced and not all that elegant, or, in the case of our putative great universities, all that educative. The leaching since 2002 of today’s politics into much of the social science and humanities curricula, along with the new humorless and nervous-making stringencies brought on by political correctness, has made matters worse. Might it be that many of the people who wrote such vile things to me, or pronounced upon my op-ed on social media or in actual media, were in fact offended by my pointing up the degradation of the contemporary university? Might it be that my even partially describing this degradation of higher education, and the subsequent devaluation of its degrees, ordinary and honorary, on which they feel that their prestige depends offended them more than a thousand kiddos? By mocking the state of the university, did they feel I was attacking the foundation on which their own lives have been built? Might R.R. Reno, writing about my op-ed in First Things, be on target when he writes: “That Epstein should note the obvious—that credentials are the cheap cellophane in which elites wrap themselves when they lack real achievements and nobility of soul that win respect—galls them.” This would suggest that my 800 words constituted a rhetorical grenade thrown in the class war, where the status conferred by educational degrees, like those of nobility in an earlier day, is crucial to those who went to great expense of time and money to attain them. All this hatred directed at me touched a nerve in their otherwise fairly empty lives because my words hit them where they live: in their status. “I don’t believe the butt of Epstein’s piece was women,” Nicholas Clairmont writes, “but rather credentialism—which is the hornet’s nest one cannot kick today. Oh boy, you do not want to piss off the people whose sense of self hangs in a frame on their wall.” Sad when the supposedly highly educated are among the crudest, most fragile, and easily unhinged people in the country. But I guess that’s the way it is, kiddo. ▪

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 41 Harry Potter Fans Reimagine Their World Without Its Creator A slice of fandom divides itself from J.K. Rowling. Julia Jacobs | New York Times | Jun 12, 2020 When J.K. Rowling was accused of transphobia about two years ago for “liking” a tweet that referred to transgender women as “men in dresses,” much of the Harry Potter fandom tried to give their beloved author the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it really was just an accident, a “clumsy and middle-aged moment,” as Ms. Rowling’s spokesperson said at the time. Then people noticed that Ms. Rowling followed commentators on Twitter who described transgender women as men. In December, she made her personal views more clear when she expressed enthusiastic support for a British researcher who filed a lawsuit against her former employer, claiming that she had been discriminated against for her “gender critical” views (i.e. her stance on the fixity of one’s sex at birth). “It felt like we were waiting for the other shoe to drop,” said Melissa Anelli, a veteran leader in the Potter fandom who co-owns the Leaky Cauldron. This week, it did. First, Ms. Rowling took aim at an article that referred to “people who menstruate,” suggesting that it was wrong to not use “women” in a misguided attempt to include trans people. When she received negative response to this, she then published a 3,700-word essay on gender, sex, abuse and fear: “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators.” Across the Potter fandom — the first book was published 23 years ago, making it one of the online world’s most enduring fandoms — a conversation began. Some discussions were tense, when fans who sympathized with Ms. Rowling’s views clashed against fans who found them to be odious. Others felt that they could simply turn away from the politics of the real world and focus on what’s happening in the wizarding world. Among the fans who vehemently reject Ms. Rowling’s views, the discussion is on how to distance or separate themselves from the author who created a fantasy world that animates their lives on a daily basis. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 42 ‘We Created the Fandom’ They listen to chapter-by-chapter podcasts, get tattoos with the Hogwarts crest or Deathly Hallows symbol, and attend Potter conferences like LeakyCon, which draws thousands of fans every year. Some have even built their careers on it. Over the past week, some fans said that they had decided to simply walk away from the world that spans seven books, eight movies and an ever-expanding franchise. Others said that they were trying to separate the artist from the art, to remain in the fandom while denouncing someone who was once considered to be royalty. “J.K. Rowling gave us Harry Potter; she gave us this world,” said Renae McBrian, a young adult author who volunteers for the fan site MuggleNet. “But we created the fandom, and we created the magic and community in that fandom. That is ours to keep.” The essay was particularly gutting for transgender and nonbinary fans, many of whom found solace in the world of “Harry Potter” and used to see the series as a way to escape anxiety. Rori Porter, a writer and digital designer who started the books about two decades ago, at age 10, had been listening to the audiobooks as a way to relax and fall asleep — until the Rowling controversy bubbled up in December. Ms. Porter, who is a transfeminine woman, which, to her experience, means she was assigned male at birth but identifies with a feminine gender, stopped listening in the middle of “Prisoner of Azkaban” and has not started again. The series no longer felt grounding and nostalgic, but stress inducing. Ms. Porter said she needs a break from the series (and doesn’t plan on giving Ms. Rowling a cent ever again), but she thinks she may revisit the audiobooks one day. “I don’t want to give J.K. Rowling the satisfaction of taking away from me something that I loved as a kid,” she said. For Talia Franks, who is nonbinary and works with an activist group called the Harry Potter Alliance, Ms. Rowling’s comments were disturbing and demoralizing. But they said that they won’t have a problem continuing to write their fan fiction (where queer characters abound), attend Wizard Rock concerts CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 43 and participate in the online Black Girls Create community, where they often discuss “Harry Potter.” “I don’t need J.K. Rowling at all,” Mx. Franks said. Fan organizations that serve as repositories of niche news, providing updates on plans for the “Fantastic Beasts” film series and regional Quidditch award results, are now searching for ways to affirm to transgender and nonbinary fans that they are welcome in those communities. Fandom leaders are teaming up to present a unified statement condemning Ms. Rowling’s comments, said Kat Miller, MuggleNet’s creative director. It helped boost morale when a series of Harry Potter actors spoke out to affirm transgender identities, including Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry; Emma Watson, who played Hermione; Rupert Grint, who played Ron; and Katie Leung, who played Cho. (Ms. Rowling has also received a recent bout of criticism for the character Cho Chang, whose name is as weak as her characterization.) Other Potter lovers are thinking about ways to keep delving into the series without spending money that might make its way into Ms. Rowling’s bank account. On Twitter, “The Gayly Prophet Podcast” — which describes itself as an intersectional, queer “Harry Potter” podcast — encouraged fans not to attend the theme park, see the “Cursed Child” play or even rent the movies. The hosts of the podcast, Jessie Blount and Lark Malakai Grey, are already quite comfortable with criticizing the series and its author while pointing out where things get, in their view, problematic (for instance, the underdevelopment of black characters). The intention is to enjoy the art while still holding the artist accountable, Mr. Grey said. Proma Khosla, a 29-year-old Ravenclaw, who has been going to “Harry Potter” conventions since age 15, also read the Cormoran Strike crime series that started with “The Cuckoo’s Calling” in 2013, which Ms. Rowling published under a pen name. The fifth book in the series is expected to be published in September, but because of Ms. Rowling’s anti-transgender comments, Ms. Khosla said that she has no intention of purchasing it (“I’m fine to not know how it ends,” she said). CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 44 Karter Powell, another Harry Potter Alliance volunteer, has a bedroom filled with Potter merchandise, from Potter bedsheets to a Slytherin scarf to a wand from the Universal theme park — but they don’t plan to buy that kind of merchandise ever again. Even if the fandom presented a united front, which of course it cannot, it’s unlikely it could “cancel” an author who created a multibillion-dollar franchise. “We can say we’re going to cancel her, but she’s going to get money for the rest of her life,” said J’Neia Stewart, host of “The House of Black Podcast,” which looks at the series through a social justice lens. Each fan must make her own choices for herself then. Ms. Anelli, 40, who is also the author of the book “Harry, a History,” had planned to buy her nephew the books in the series for his 7th birthday this past week. But she decided that she couldn’t go through with it during the same week that Ms. Rowling again captured the attention of the internet with her anti-transgender tweets. “I’ve been looking forward to this for seven years, and it was going to be this week,” she said. “I couldn’t do it, and it broke my heart.” “I did buy him the ‘Percy Jackson’ series,” she added. J.K. Rowling and the Case of the Bathroom Trope Ms. Rowling’s essay, which was published on Wednesday, rails against the term T.E.R.F., or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, describing it as a slur used to silence women like herself on the internet. She repeated a number of pieces of misinformation that are common talking points for this loose association of people, and made the claim that the “movement” led by transgender activists is eroding the notion of womanhood and “offering cover to predators like few before it.” As a sort of explanation for that fear, Ms. Rowling recounted memories of a sexual assault in her 20s. “When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman,” she wrote, “then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.” CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 45 The idea that allowing trans people to use bathrooms that align with their identities endangers other people — subjecting them to a greater risk of assault and privacy violations — has been voiced most prominently by conservative lawmakers to stop gender-inclusive legislation from passing. There is no evidence to back up their claims. Researchers have found that young trans and nonbinary people face a greater risk of sexual assault when they are denied use of appropriate restrooms or locker rooms. In a 2017 survey of L.G.B.T.Q. students, the organization GLSEN found that students said the bathroom was the most avoided and most unsafe space for them. Ms. Rowling also tweeted that “I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.” Her timing was also questioned. Many people wrote that they were exasperated by Ms. Rowling’s decision to post such a self-focused essay at a time when the United States is consumed by discussions about racism and police brutality that are changing institutions including the media, police departments and schools. ▪

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues J.K. Rowling | jkrowling.com | Jun 10, 2020 This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity. For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t. My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 46 On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain. All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began. Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased. I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them. What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross- section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 47 worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well. I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF. If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so- called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women. But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species). So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down? Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up. Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 48 things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender. The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both. The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump. The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families. Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers. The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said: ‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender- identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’ Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 49 of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’ Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans. The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’ The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred. When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’ CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 50 As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are. I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this. We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn- saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re- CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 51 educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else. I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves. But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating. Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism. I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead. I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 52 I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching. If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self- restraint of my attacker. I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men. So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth. On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 53 dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety. Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand. It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.” Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence. But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 54 The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades. The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people. All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse. ▪

How J. K. Rowling Became Voldemort The backlash against the Harry Potter creator is a growing pain of her fandom. Helen Lewis | The Atlantic | Jul 6, 2020 It has taken two decades, but I am finally ready to admit that I was the world’s most annoying teenager. My parents are Catholic, and I used to delight in peppering them with trollish questions, preferably several hours into a long car journey. “Why does the Mass service refer to God as ‘he’ and ‘father’?” was a favorite. “Does God have a Y chromosome, then? Does God have, like, testicles?” I was openly dismissive about transubstantiation, by which the CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 55 host is consecrated, and according to Catholic doctrine, literally turns from mere bread into the body of Christ. “But all the atoms stay the same!” I would insist. “That makes no sense!” My parents humored me, but predictably, I didn’t find their responses satisfying. Realizing that your omniscient parents are, in fact, just regular, flawed humans is a vital part of growing up. So is learning that their values are different from yours—that they are products of a particular time and place. Ideas and beliefs that they accept without question make no sense to you, and vice versa. As the 20th century ended in the liberal West, the tenets of feminism seemed irrefutable to me: Of course I would go to university and get a job. A family would come later, if at all. (My mother, by contrast, had her first child at 25.) Gay rights were the same: Why on earth couldn’t two men get married? In my 20s, when The God Delusion came out, I bought it immediately. I was proud to call myself an atheist. Religion was nothing but a tool of patriarchal oppression. Younger Millennials—those born around 1990, the same time as Harry Potter’s lead actors Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson—feel just as strongly about transgender rights. To many of them, it is the social-justice cause, their generation’s revolutionary idea. They see little difference between the objections of some older left-wing feminists to the idea that individuals alone decide their gender, and those of social conservatives: Both groups are reactionary, trapped in outdated concepts of what it means to be a man or a woman. And Millennials dominate the Harry Potter fandom, a community large enough to have spawned hundreds of thousands of pieces of fan fiction. So it is unsurprising that two major fan sites, The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet, have distanced themselves from the books’ author, J. K. Rowling, after she argued last month that “woman” should remain a biological category. The two sites announced last week that they will remove her photograph from their sites, stop linking to her website and writing about her other endeavors, and tag Twitter posts that include news about her with the hashtag #JKR, so users can filter out triggering content from their social-media feeds. To preserve their love of Harry Potter, its fans must erase its author. Rowling, like Voldemort, is so evil that even mentioning her violates a taboo: She Who Must Not Be Named. (Dumbledore would not have approved of this practice. As he tells Harry in The CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 56 Sorcerer’s Stone, “Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”) What can account for the level of anger now directed at Rowling? If an eighth Harry Potter book were to be published, we could call it Harry Potter and the Desperate Desire for Things to Be Simple. Fans are discovering that someone they once treated as omniscient, someone they loved with a ferocious, possessive, childish love, is an entirely different person, with different values from their own. It is almost a cliché at this point to note that the average Millennial is notching up the markers of adulthood more slowly than their parents did. (My mother, a few months ago: “I still think of you as my baby. But when I was your age, I had three children.” I have none.) Middle-class kids born after 1990, the kind whose parents bought them books and movie tickets, entered the workforce in the postcrash decade, when a comfortable adult life began to seem like an unachievable dream. Much of this generation grew up alongside Harry Potter, and many kept shipping Harry and Draco into their 20s, in between Instagram posts about how “adulting”—cooking a meal, say, or doing laundry—was hard. And they weren’t entirely wrong, because adulting, for them, was hard: Many bright, book-loving college graduates who could have expected to walk into secure jobs 10 years earlier were instead trapped in precarious work and tiny apartments. Want to buy a home in a big city? Good luck saving for a down payment. Want to start saving into a pension? You’ll need stable employment for that. The difficulty of adulting also includes the acknowledgment that people are fallible, and the world is complicated. Parents, and heroes, have feet of clay. Call it a loss of youthful idealism, or call it pragmatism, it is what allows us to survive in the adult world. And this is the struggle facing Harry Potter fans. They have long resented Rowling’s continued involvement in the Potter universe, which pollutes their pristine childhood memories of the work. There was disquiet when she only retrospectively made the original books more inclusive—announcing that Dumbledore was gay—and when she referenced “Native American wizards” in a story on Pottermore. Both incidents forced fans to confront the fact that the series is the product of Britain in the ’90s, a time and place whose unquestioned assumptions were different from those of the here and now. The first book was CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 57 published in 1997, when British popular culture was startlingly white, the legalization of gay marriage was more than a decade away, and the country’s most popular newspaper carried a picture of a topless woman on its third page every day. At the time, the Potter books—with their well-rounded female characters and their rejection of the idea of aristocracy—were progressive. Now they are historical. The acres of Harry Potter fan fiction have allowed its Millennial audience to rewrite the stories to fit their own values, easing their discomfort (while still luxuriating in the nostalgic setting of the British private-school system, an institution designed to perpetuate elitism). Rowling’s newer work in the Potter universe reminds them, however, that none of this is canon—that, in the language of the internet, their fave is problematic. This fan-creator relationship is a peculiarly modern one, a mixture of entitlement and intimacy: In their lifetimes, Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl were not troubled by consumer revolts over their personal opinions or their plotlines. (Dahl had a history of making anti- Semitic statements, and Blyton’s books are studies in casual racism.) They didn’t live long enough to see complaints about the whiteness and straightness of their books, or to upset their readers with unguarded tweets. Rowling’s views on gender, although compassionate, are undoubtedly challenging to the cherished beliefs of her Millennial fandom. Her post raised questions about sexual violence, early transition, and the climate of intimidation that surrounds discussions of these topics. She argued that her own experience of domestic violence had taught her the value of single-sex spaces, but also wrote about her sympathy for transgender victims. This counted for little to her critics. In Vogue, Raven Smith characterized the author’s post as “a long scroll of rhetorical emotion usually confined to those long-ass breakup texts from your ex.” In Vox, Aja Romano called it “a profoundly hurtful piece of writing, riddled with hand-wringing, groundless arguments about villainous trans women, outdated science, and exclusionary viewpoints. Especially gutting was the essay’s self-centeredness.” Romano, who uses both they and she as pronouns, recounted how she had removed Rowling’s books from her shelves, unable to reconcile her Potter fandom and her nonbinary identity. It is understandable that transgender people feel weary and harassed; their identities and their bodies have been conscripted into a culture war. Many CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 58 feminists who support Rowling feel the same. But a ceasefire isn’t possible without confronting, and resolving, the questions Rowling posed. Instead of a respectful discussion, though, we get Watson, who played Hermione Granger, offering empty pieties: “I want my trans followers to know that I and so many other people around the world see you, respect you and love you for who you are.” Radcliffe’s statement was longer, but also offered no advice for navigating this legal and cultural thicket. “Transgender women are women,” he wrote. “It’s clear that we need to do more to support transgender and non-binary people, not invalidate their identities, and not cause further harm.” Some of the social-media reaction to Rowling has been vicious, and many of the most outraged posts have shown a notable lack of interest in her disclosure of sexual assault. Hurt feelings have trumped Rowling’s physical injuries. Admitting that Rowling’s views are influenced by her status as a survivor of male violence—and admitting that many women have similar experiences— complicates the easy division of oppressor and oppressed. “Victim blaming” is taboo among progressive activists, but so is questioning someone’s gender identity. Instead of being confronted, though, this conflict was made simply to disappear. Again, this is part of a desire for the world to be simple. The Millennial generation has grown up in a world shaped by the gains of the ’80s, when a rainbow coalition of queer activists, feminists, and left-wingers took on the establishment and religious right: AIDS denialists, golf-club sexists, segregation sympathizers, and televangelists ranting about Sodom. The lines are not so easily drawn now, and the modern left finds it hard to parse clashes between two oppressed groups, such as conservative Muslim parents and LGBTQ-friendly school curricula. Much of the fan commentary following Rowling’s article has focused on what the Harry Potter series was “really about,” and whether its author has betrayed those principles. To outsiders, these discussions can seem bizarre—arguments about fascism and eugenics play out with references to goblins and Polyjuice Potions—but they are a reflection of how deeply some Millennials have been shaped by Rowling’s world. This emotional synthesis of reader and writer happens only with books we love when we are young. (I am sad, but strangely relieved, that my own beloved Terry Pratchett is safely dead.) On The Leaky CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 59 Cauldron, one commenter argued against presenting “sanitized news coverage in the way the ministry and news media do in light of Voldemort’s return.” Another replied that Voldemort demonized mudbloods and muggles for not inheriting wizarding ability: “Guess who else is demonising people for not having the correct blood to be who they say they are?” Rowling gave these fans the tools they use to think about the world. Now they are having to unstitch themselves from her universe, and discover where Harry Potter ends and they begin. It’s a wrench at least as big as leaving home. As for me, these days, there are no more fraught car journeys with my parents. I’m still an atheist, but I see now what I couldn’t then: that their religion guided them toward a moral life. When I was growing up, they volunteered in soup kitchens, and our Christmas dinner table often had a seat for someone who would otherwise have been alone. In the past few months, my mother has agonized over her regular visits to the sick and dying in hospital, worried she might bring COVID-19 into the ward. (Never mind the fact that she is 75.) My questions about my parent’s beliefs are still legitimate: It shouldn’t be taboo to ask them. My criticisms of organized religion are too. But you can’t live by doctrine at the expense of humanity. Adulting is hard because the world isn’t Dumbledore’s Army versus the Death Eaters, and Rowling hasn’t morphed into Voldemort overnight. You may disagree with what she writes about sex and gender, but she is still a rare multimillionaire who pays the same tax rate as you and me, a tireless campaigner for single parents, the founder of a charity to spare children from living in orphanages, and the woman whose response to the pandemic was to give away £1 million. Those who feel rejected and disoriented by that should look for comfort in the character who is the true moral center of the Potterverse. It was never Harry, the boy who happened to live, whose luck always holds, whose mistakes are minor. It is Severus Snape, who was made miserable by Harry’s father and took it out on Harry, who loved Harry’s mother and betrayed her friends, who redeemed himself with a morally repugnant act. A bully, a victim, a villain, and a hero: a human. ▪

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 60 Who Is Marie Yovanovitch? Former Ambassador Testifies in Impeachment Hearing The ousted ambassador to Ukraine recounted how she became the target of a smear campaign by President Trump’s personal lawyer and the right-wing media. Sheryl Gay Stolberg | New York Times | Nov 15, 2019 WASHINGTON — Before President Trump fired her as his ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch was an anonymous career diplomat who served in the kind of unglamorous posts — Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and eventually Ukraine — typically reserved for civil servants because political donors and friends of the president don’t covet them. Now Ms. Yovanovitch, known as Masha to her friends and colleagues, is a hashtag on Twitter (#GoMasha) and a reluctant public figure, vilified on the right and lionized on the left. On Friday she told her story publicly for the first time — even as Mr. Trump attacked her in real time on Twitter. In an impassioned defense of the State Department and the career Foreign Service officers who work — and sometimes give their lives — to advance the interests of the United States, Ms. Yovanovitch recounted how she became the target of a smear campaign by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and the right-wing news media. She wondered aloud how Mr. Giuliani could have succeeded in working with a corrupt prosecutor in Ukraine to oust her, a decorated 33-year veteran diplomat, even though her bosses said she had done nothing wrong. “How could our system fail like this?” she asked. “How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government?” As Mr. Trump began tweeting, Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, began reading them aloud, including one missive in which the president asserted that “everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad.” He asked Ms. Yovanovitch how that made her feel. “It’s very intimidating,” she testified. Mr. Schiff replied that Congress would take any attempt at witness intimidation very seriously — an apparent warning to the president. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 61 Her testimony, as the latest witness to appear in the growing impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump, included discussion of the July 25 telephone conversation that has set off a political crisis for the president, in which he told Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, that Ms. Yovanovitch was “bad news.” “She’s going to go through some things,” the president said. Ms. Yovanovitch had already been removed by the time of that call; she learned of it after the president made a reconstructed transcript public as part of the impeachment inquiry. During a private deposition, Ms. Yovanovitch told investigators that she felt “threatened” by Mr. Trump’s remark, and that she still feared retaliation — remarks she reiterated in her testimony on Friday. “I couldn’t believe it,” she testified, describing herself as “shocked, appalled, devastated that the president of the United States would talk about any ambassador like that to a foreign head of state.” “It didn’t sound good,” she said of the president’s remark that she would “go through some things.” She added, “It felt like a vague threat.” Ms. Yovanovitch’s dismissal followed a campaign of attacks against her, led by Mr. Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, who was circumventing State Department diplomats in a shadowy effort to get Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals. Mr. Giuliani branded her a “stooge” and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, called her “a joker.” Fox News personalities jumped in, accusing her of being disloyal to the president by criticizing him in private conversations. Among their complaints: A former Ukrainian prosecutor claimed in an interview with The New York Times that Ms. Yovanovitch had blocked his team from getting visas to the United States to deliver damaging information about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter to the F.B.I. Ms. Yovanovitch testified that she did indeed block the former Ukrainian prosecutor because he was corrupt. And she pointedly denied some of the conspiracy theories that Mr. Giuliani and his allies spread, including allegations that she was speaking ill of President Trump. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 62 She said no one in the State Department believed them, but told lawmakers that efforts by her colleagues to have Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issue a supportive statement about her were fruitless, because of “concerns up the street” — a reference she took to mean the White House. “Our Ukraine policy has been thrown into disarray, and shady interests the world over have learned how little it takes to remove an American ambassador who does not give them what they want,” she told the lawmakers, adding that actions like her removal would only embolden America’s adversaries, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. In earlier congressional testimony, Ms. Yovanovitch said her father fled the Soviet Union and then the Nazis; her mother grew up “stateless” in Germany. She said that background gave her a special empathy for those who had endured poverty, war and displacement. A native of Canada who moved to Connecticut at age 3 and became an American citizen at 18, Ms. Yovanovitch has spent 33 years with the State Department and is known for her professionalism. She grew up speaking Russian, graduated from Princeton and joined the State Department six years later. She has worked for presidents of both parties: President George W. Bush appointed her ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, then to Armenia. President Barack Obama named her ambassador to Ukraine in 2016. There, she pushed for a variety of changes, including ending the immunity enjoyed by legislators accused of crimes. After her ouster, she returned to Washington, and is now a senior State Department fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. ▪