Melania Trump set off a nationwide eye roll when she announced she would fight cyberbullying as first lady.
Taking a hammer to the tweeter in chief’s smartphone would certainly send a message.
.. In this first major push, Trump isn’t expected to unveil proposals but, rather, to ask the companies how they’re addressing problems such as trolls and promoting kindness, according to people invited to the meeting.
.. I’m not hopeful that anybody — even the first lady — can control the president’s name-calling Twitter persona. But her experience as a mother, her life in the spotlight as a model and even the nastiness emanating from her own White House certainly give Trump a unique vantage point on bullying.
Here are five ideas the first lady could get behind.
.. Focus on bystanders. America might be able to learn from Finland. There, a national anti-bullying education program called KiVa has been shown to greatly benefit the students who experienced the most bullying. Its secret: a focus on increasing the empathy of bystanders, who can keep bullies from gaining status and power.
KiVa asks students to use role-playing exercises and computer simulations to think about how they would intervene to reduce bullying. Anti-bullying programs usually seek to reduce the overall rates of bullying, but KiVa’s focus on bystanders showed a significant mental health boost — reducing depression and improving self-esteem — for the victims of bullying.
Why I could no longer serve this president
I resigned because the traditional core values of the United States, as manifested in the president’s National Security Strategy and his foreign policies, have been warped and betrayed. I could no longer represent him personally and remain faithful to my beliefs about what makes America truly great.
.. These policies are purportedly being pursued to make good on nativist campaign rhetoric that resonated with many legitimately aggrieved Americans. But I know many of these voters. They are not “deplorables.” They deserve better. They deserve enlightened and informed debate about the true nature of the globalized economy, automation, and the need for education and reimagined job-skills programs to keep us competitive.
.. Moreover, policy options based on fear and hashtags will only offer us a false dichotomy... immigration issue cannot be debated rationally when the president routinely encourages division and disparages today’s migrants with the same hateful language deployed a century ago to excoriate my Irish and Italian ancestors... My goal is to create the conditions for respectful and nonconfrontational dialogue between supporters of the president’s immigration policy and the full panoply of migrants
‘We Need Bullies’: Chris Rock Speaks Truth to Weakness in Tamborine
Near the outset, Rock recalls attending a high-school orientation session for one of his daughters that promoted the kind of touchy-feely wish-based thinking that infects education these days. Noting that the kids were told, “You can be anything you want to be,” he thought, “Why are you lying to these children? Maybe four of then can be anything they want to be. But the other 2,000 better learn how to weld.” He imagines a more truth-based approach to pedagogy: “You can be anything you’re good at, as long as they’re hiring. And even then it helps to know somebody.”
.. A zero-tolerance policy for bullies? Please. When he heard about that, “Right then I wanted to take my daughter right out the school. . . . School is supposed to prepare you for life. Life has a**holes and you should learn how to deal with them as soon as possible.”
.. Rock has previously been guarded about his 2016 divorce, from his wife Malaak Compton-Rock, which was caused by his own admitted infidelity. He speaks at length about his regrets here, making a plea to put commitment first and forget about the self-actualization: “I’m talking from hell, you don’t want this s***. You got somebody you love, hold tight. That’s right, hold f***ing tight. Commit.” Being a voracious consumer of pornography didn’t help him bond with his wife either. “I was addicted to porn,” he says. “I was 15 minutes late everywhere.” When he speaks about the destructiveness of porn he sounds like Ross Douthat. “When you watch too much porn, you know what happens? You become like sexually autistic.” You develop problems relating to real people. You can no longer handle eye contact or verbal cues. “You get desensitized,” he says. “When you start watching porn, it’s like any porn’ll do. It’s like, ‘Ahh, they’re naked. Whoo-hoo!’” After far too much of this, only gratification of an extremely specific fetish would bring satisfaction.
.. I’ve never heard a woman in my life say, ‘You know, after he got laid off, we got so much closer.
We All Live on Campus Now
When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well.
If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.
.. The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect.
.. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency
.. Polarization has made this worse — because on the left, moderation now seems like a surrender to white nationalism, and because on the right, white identity politics has overwhelmed moderate conservatism.
.. Trump plays a critical role. His crude, bigoted version of identity politics seems to require an equal and opposite reaction.
.. there’s a huge temptation to respond in kind.
.. anger is rarely a good frame of mind to pursue the imperatives of reason, let alone to defend the norms of liberal democracy.
.. Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures.
.. the impulse to intimidate, vilify, ruin, and abuse a writer for her opinions chills open debate.
.. An entirely intended byproduct of this kind of bullying — and Roiphe is just the latest victim — is silence.
.. only a member of a minority group can speak about racism or homophobia, or that only women can discuss sexual harassment.
.. The only reason this should be the case is if we think someone’s identity is more important than the argument they might want to make
.. left-feminists are not just interested in exposing workplace abuse or punishing sex crimes, but in policing even consensual sex for any hint of patriarchy’s omnipresent threat.
.. In the struggle against patriarchy, a distinction between the public and private makes no sense.
.. There’s a reason that totalitarian states will strip prisoners of their clothing. Left-feminists delight in doing this metaphorically to targeted men — effectively exposing them naked to public ridicule and examination because it both traumatizes the object and more importantly sits out there as a warning to others.
.. Besides, if they’re innocent, they’ll be fine!
.. can anyone justify why the POSSIBLE innocence of men is so much more important than the DEFINITE safety and comfort of women?”
.. we now have a “gender editor” at the New York Times, Jessica Bennett
.. Does she understand that the very word intersectional is a function of neo-Marxist critical race theory? Is this now the guiding philosophy of the paper of record?
.. At The Atlantic, the identity obsession even requires exhaustive analyses of the identity of sources quoted in stories. Ed Yong, a science writer, keeps “a personal list of women and people of color who work in the beats that I usually cover,” so he can make sure that he advances diversity even in his quotes.
.. there is no art that isn’t rooted in identity.
.. I don’t doubt the good intentions of the new identity politics — to expand the opportunities for people previously excluded. I favor a politics that never discriminates against someone for immutable characteristics
.. what we have now is far more than the liberal project of integrating minorities. It comes close to an attack on the liberal project itself. Marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still Marxism — and it’s as hostile to the idea of a free society as white nationalism is.
.. the core concepts of a liberal society —
- the individual’s uniqueness,
- the primacy of reason,
- the protection of due process,
- an objective truth
— are so besieged, this is one of the reasons.
.. The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke. You see: We are all on campus now.
.. prudence that worries about unintended consequences; that values thrift; that tries to insure itself against future risks; that takes the responsibility of government seriously; that worries about extreme rhetoric; that balances the budget; that insists on constantly taking pains to protect inconvenient constitutional norms; that defends existing institutions. I could go on. It all began with Burke’s recoil from the French Revolution.
.. Is there any institution in the West that is currently less conservative than the GOP?
.. No institution that is integral to our liberal democracy is immune from attack. This includes law enforcement (the FBI), the Justice Department, an independent and free press, the prerogatives of the opposition party, and regular order in the Congress.
It is a party that would impeach a State Supreme Court rather than give up its gerrymandered districts.
.. its cult leader never misses an opportunity to deepen racial divides and to inflame the gender wars.
.. Whatever else this record is, it is an open and outright assault on any concept of prudence, responsibility, or moderation. Which is to say it is an assault on conservatism itself.
.. If there is any future for the conservative soul and mind in America, it will have to start with the wholesale destruction of the current Republican Party. I made that case more than a decade ago now.