Legal Insurrection readers may recall my recent review of Jack Cashill’s most recent book that ties personal history into current events, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities.
The work is a fascinating amalgam of biography and interviews that chronicle how Cashill, his family, and childhood friends were fully invested and working too hard to thrive in Newark, New Jersey communities, only to be driven out by crime and the rapid deterioration in the quality of life.
Cashill was supposed to make an appearance to promote Untenable on September 9 at a library in Fredonia, New York. However, it was canceled.
The Darwin R. Barker Library told Cashill last week that it no longer was interested in his signing and discussion about “Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities,” according to “The Post-Journal” of Jamestown, N.Y. The event was to have been held in early September.“Long accused of racism and ‘white flight,’ the ethnic Americans driven from their homes and neighborhoods — the author included — finally get the chance to tell their side of the story,” is how Amazon describes the book.
Apparently, it took a few phone calls from thought bullies for the library officials to cave. Cashill, who was introduced to the librarian who first organized the event through his wife Joan, offers this timeline of events that led to the cancellation:
A friendly librarian had taken a liking to my first book, a novel, and placed it on the shelves. Upon seeing it, Joan recommended that I thank the librarian. I did. One thing led to another, and she invited me to come speak about my new book.In an email to Joan from an acquaintance, a member of the library board, I learned what happened next. “So, very soon after our website posting which announced Jack’s appearance at the Barker,” he wrote, “we began to receive numerous correspondence ranging from general disbelief to adverse protestations from within the local community.”Now for the fun part: “Oddly, all of this response came from women. Even odder is that I was unaware that Jack was your husband.” There was nothing “odd” about the female skew on the response. We call these whiners “Karens” for a reason.Joan, a recently retired and much-honored professor of English, uses her maiden name for professional reasons. What surprised this fellow, I assume, is that a professor could have a husband who sees the world differently than professors typically do.
It would be interesting to review the complete collection of the Darwin R. Barker Library to determine if works that might be controversial to a more conservative audience (e.g., Gender Queer, An Inconvenient Truth) are found on its shelves.
After Cashill dared to question the cancellation, a library official responded to praise…. the institution’s diversity.
We believe that the diversity of perspectives is crucial in creating a rich and informative dialogue at our library events. Recent developments have led us to re-evaluate the suitability of your views and opinions for our diverse audience, as well as the potential impact they might have on the inclusive and welcoming atmosphere we strive to foster within our library community.
Perhaps those at the Darwin R. Barker Library should open a dictionary sometime and review the definition of “diversity.” I’ll help: Diversity – the condition of having or being composed of differing elements.
The officials were also afraid of “conflict and confrontation.”
Sadly, in todays world, situations such as this can rapidly escalate from controversy and result in confrontation and conflict. In this specific case, we have elected to not to not expose our patrons and employees to the threat of any of it.
I am trying to imagine the scale of protest that Cashill’s appearance might have led to, and I can’t imagine more than a few shouting idiots who could then be escorted out by security. If the library couldn’t handle a few unpleasant progressives, perhaps it is not the bastion of thought freedom its administrators think it is.
However, to defend the insanity of their decision, the board members ginned up their fears about having a “Salman Rushdie” attack. As a reminder, Indian-born British-American novelist Salman Rushdie, who was under a fatwa for his Satanic Verses, was stabbed multiple times in 2022 as he was about to give a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York.
One board member summed up their “brave” decision thusly:
“We haven’t silenced him, we uninvited him.”“He is free. He can sit outside right now and call any of his followers or fans.”
It appears that Cashill is under an American-style thought fatwa issued by Karens.
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