Hitler Learns About the New Campus Unrest

Hitler Learns About the New Campus Unrest

Power Line - Sunday November 22, 2015

by Steven Hayward

(Steven Hayward)

It must be miserable to be a liberal on campus right now, because you can’t keep up with the leftist demands for political correctness that you have no foundation for resisting (since comtemporary liberalism amounts to epistemological disarmament).

Witness the witless Prof. Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago writing yesterday in the Puffington Host:

After all, if Woodrow Wilson is to be obliterated from Princeton because his views about race were backward and offensive by contemporary standards, then what are we to do with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom actually owned slaves? What are we to do with Abraham Lincoln, who declared in 1958 that “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” and that “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people”?

What are we to do with Franklin Roosevelt, who ordered the internment of 120,000 persons of Japanese descent? With Dwight Eisenhower, who issued an Executive Order declaring homosexuals a serious security risk? With Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act? With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage?

And what are we to do with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once opined in a case involving compulsory sterilization that “three generations of imbeciles is enough”? With Leland Stanford, after whom Stanford University is named who, as governor of California, lobbied for the restriction of Chinese immigration, explaining to the state legislature in 1862 that “the presence of numbers of that degraded and distinct people would exercise a deleterious effect upon the superior race”?

And what are we do with all of the presidents, politicians, academic leaders, industrial leaders, jurists, and social reformers who at one time or another in American history denied women’s right to equality, opposed women’s suffrage, and insisted that a woman’s proper place was “in the home”? And on and on and on.

A slow learner, apparently. “And on and on and on” is exactly the point of leftist campus agitation. Stone adds:

Not having any personal connection to Princeton (other than my affection and respect for its current president), I don’t really care one way or the other whether Princeton erases Woodrow Wilson from its history…

That’s the problem right there. People like Stone are gutless wimps. Who needs them? Especially since he’s utterly unable to give a serious account for why these demands should be resisted at all.

So obviously someone needed to do “Hitler Learns About the New Campus Unrest,” and naturally that person was me:

  

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