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Political Correctness Tag

I am thrilled to be able to be able to share some of my "cultural appreciation" experiences with our Legal Insurrection friends. In fact, this idea came from a response I was going to make during the social justice brouhaha over 18-year old Keziah Daum's Chinese cheongsam prom dress. I, too have such a dress.

The American Alliance of Museums (AAM), with an annual budget of some $10 million, serves as an advocacy group for museums, including setting core standards. AAM is having its 2018 Annual Meeting in Phoenix on May 6-9, 2018. A reader forwarded me an announcement from AAM with regard to a new Code of Conduct applicable to attendees at the Annual Meeting. That Code of Conduct amounts to a speech code restricting acceptable speech in ways that reflect how deeply identity politics has permeated even the museum industry.

The College of Holy Cross, a Catholic school, has decided to drop its knight mascot and change the name of the school paper because it links them to the horrible violence that occurred during the Crusades. Because, you know, only the Christians did horrible things during the Crusades.

Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager have partnered to make a documentary film about political correctness and the danger it presents to comedy and free speech, particularly on college campuses. The film is called "No Safe Spaces" and will be released this fall.

President Trump has an amazing knack for pushing leftist buttons.  His trolling of the media is epic; they always bite, chasing his squirrels and making genuine donkeys of themselves in the process. The latest example of this involves a "saying 'Merry Christmas' again" tweet and an ad released by America First Policies.  The left is, predictably and hilariously, melting down.

Alex Kozinski was perhaps the most well-known member of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and was its former Chief Judge. It's hard to characterize Judge Kozinski in terms of the political conservative/liberal split. He was nominated by Ronald Reagan, but because he was on the 9th Circuit, popular opinion tends to treat him as a liberal. Libertarian probably is a better descriptor, and he was known as a defender of individual rights:

An excellent Open Letter to the President of the Vassar College from a Vassar alumnus, published in the student newspaper, is a must read as to what happened when I spoke at Vassar on "hate speech" and free speech. President Elizabeth Bradley's response is here. That letter exchange was the subject of my post, Alum to Vassar College President: “You owe Professor Jacobson a public apology”, which has even more detailed background. That letter exchange also caused me to go back and look at a letter from the Executive Board of the Vassar Student Association (the student government) to Vassar's President, demanding my appearance be cancelled. After lodging a series of accusations against me, the VSA letter concluded:

A recently published monograph by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA) offers a sobering example of how biased teaching materials about the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history and practice of Islam were used for years in the curriculum of two public high schools in Newton, Massachusetts. As we highlighted in a post which reviewed the book, CAMERA’s important new study meticulously analyzes hundreds of highly skewed materials used by the Newton Public Schools system in its two high schools to teach 9th and 10th graders about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Islamic history and culture.

The Biloxi school district has pulled Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird from its 8th grade syllabi because it contains the "N-word." This kind of thing drives me straight up the wall.  What on earth makes the left think that hiding, banning, and otherwise destroying our nation's history and culture will achieve anything positive or good?  Not only do we need to know where we came from to know how far we've come as a nation, but we also need an historical and literary reference for some of the left's politically-correct mandates. Black rappers, athletes, comedians, politicians, pundits, et al. are the only ones who can use the "N-word" because they are "reclaiming it" and "taking back its power."  That's all well and good, but we're raising a couple of generations who will have no idea from what they are reclaiming the word or what its power once was and why it needed to be taken back in the first place.