The reactions to the attack on Charlie Hebdo highlight the odd affinity between the left and radical Islam and also draw attention to the unsung—and Augustinian—champions of liberal democracy: Satirists. Continue Reading »
As a student at the Sorbonne in my early twenties, back in the mid 1990s, every Wednesday before hitting the subway I would buy Charlie Hebdo. I was young, I was studying French literature in the course of becoming a teacher, and Charlie Hebdo was a weekly break from the classics. I didn’t pay much attention to the politics, which were far left. My friends and I would discuss the drawings, our favorite part of the magazine: “This one is perfect!” “Right on!” “And this one! Poor [insert name of politician]! They really got him!” “But Charb exaggerates in this one—it’s just mean.” Continue Reading »
An assault on free speech at an institute of higher education highlights both the power of rhetoric and the convenient philosophical inconsistency of identity politics.
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It may seem hard to get upset that the Ninth Circuit recently demanded that YouTube take down The Innocence of Muslims, a poorly made, maliciously offensive, and aesthetically nil film that was the proximate cause for rioting and murder overseas. Little as I will miss it, the ruling has troubling . . . . Continue Reading »
The good news is that more people are paying attention to the bad news. In the past year there has been an encouragingly widespread discussion of the role played by Politically Correct (PC) opinion on American campuses. Sundry “speech codes” aimed at limiting free expression and adopted in the . . . . Continue Reading »
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