In the “notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment,” fascist Democrats committed a true atrocity when “poor black men were allegedly infected with syphilis without their knowledge.” No such experiment ever occurred, as David explains: “Rather men, who already had syphilis were deceived into thinking they were being treated for their illness.” If President Trump sometimes blurts out questionable facts, one comes away from Gordon’s review believing that next to Goldberg, the Donald is a practitioner of scientific method.
Let me note that such inexcusably sloppy editorializing posing as scholarship has becoming increasingly characteristic of the conservative movement as a media phenomenon.
.. Sometimes the errors can be easily corrected, for example, when Weekly Standard and National Review ascribe almost exclusive responsibility for World War I to a premeditated German plan to conquer Europe. The Craft of International History by the distinguished diplomatic historian Marc Trachtenberg shreds this utterly unfounded view. Not insignificantly, Trachtenberg’s learned tome was published by Princeton University.
.. an exchange of equally uninformed views by talk show host Dennis Prager and Dinesh D’Souza, on the subject of the fascist worldview. The question was whether one could prove that fascism was a leftist ideology by examining the thought of Mussolini’s court philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944). Gentile defined the “fascist idea” in his political writings while serving as minister of education in fascist Italy.
.. Hey, but that’s no big deal for such priests of the GOP church as Prager and D’Souza. They zoom to the heart of Gentile’s neo-Hegelian worldview in thirty seconds and state with absolute certainty that he was a “leftist.” We have to assume that Prager, D’Souza and the rest of their crowd know this intuitively, inasmuch they give no indication of having ever read a word of Gentile’s thought, perhaps outside of a few phrases that they extracted from his Doctrine of Fascism.
.. Gentile proves that “fascism bears a deep kinship to today’s Left.” After all, “Democrat progressives, in full agreement with Gentile, love and push for a centralized state, which manifests itself in stuff like recent state expansion into the private sector.” Among the questions that are left begging are these: “Do the modern Left and Gentile agree on the purpose and functions of the state?” “Would Gentile and Mussolini, who glorified Roman manliness, have rallied to the present Left in its support of feminism and gay marriage?” Did Gentile back in the 1920s favor the kind of “the stuff’ the administrative state is pushing right now?” The answer to all these questions, which of course wouldn’t be acceptable at Prager University, is an emphatic “no.” Control of the national economy by the Italian fascist state, down until its German-puppet version was established as the Italian Social Republic in September 1943, was about the equivalent of that of New Deal America.
.. He then went on to compare the Catholic counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre to a black feminist advocate of affirmative action, because both associated human beings with the national identities into which they were born. Apparently anyone who views others in terms of their ethnic origin, no matter at what point in history, is a certified leftist.
.. Goldberg had no idea that political camps in 1800 were different from what they are now.
Is the Ivy League’s Admission Bias a ‘Trade Secret’?
In 2006 Jian Li filed a complaint with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights after he was denied admission to Princeton University. Mr. Li, who emigrated from China at age 4, had a perfect score on the SAT and graduated in the top 1% of his high school class. He alleged that Princeton violated civil-rights laws banning discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin.
.. The judge in that case has ordered Harvard to turn over six years of admissions records, and Mr. Blum suspects that the data will show that Harvard is unlawfully capping Asian enrollment.
.. America’s Asian population has exploded in recent decades, and Asian attendance at highly selective schools with colorblind admissions, such the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, reflects this demographic trend. At Harvard, however, the percentage of Asian undergrads has remained remarkably consistent for an institution that claims race is not a determining factor in who is admitted. Mr. Blum suspects that Princeton engages in similar shenanigans
.. The school also maintains that releasing the data would compromise student privacy, and it likened its admissions process to “trade secrets” that, if exposed, would put Princeton at a competitive disadvantage in attracting students.
.. Asians have long been the forgotten victims of liberal affirmative-action schemes, subject to unwritten “just for Asian” admissions standards that recall the treatment of Jews in the first half of the 20th century.
How to Bring Neighbors Together with a Block Party
The Princeton legal scholar on America’s refugee policy, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and his ‘I told you so’ moment with liberal friends over the recent flood of executive orders
.. Princeton University professor Robert George hasn’t been surprised by the flood of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in his first month in office. For more than 30 years, the conservative legal scholar and political theorist has worried about what he sees as the dangerous expansion of executive power... The procedures for vetting refugees were “much more rigorous and extensive than I would otherwise have known,” he says. “Most Americans are not aware…of the rigor of the procedures, and most Americans have had their perceptions shaped by the [terrorist] events in Europe.”.. He doesn’t believe that the U.S. should prohibit the entry of people from particular countries. “We shouldn’t be trying to fight terrorism by closing our doors to the victims of terrorism,” he says. At the same time, he thinks that the U.S. should use its military, diplomatic and economic clout to help create safe places for refugees within the Middle East, closer to their homes... Both he and Mr. Gorsuch embrace the idea of natural law—the view, most fully developed in Catholic thought, that there are clear moral standards governing human behavior and that these can be discovered by the use of reason... Dr. George argues that the American founders had natural law in mind when they created the Constitution, but he doesn’t think that judges should invoke natural-law principles that are not set forth or clearly implied in the Constitution to strike down legislation, especially in ruling on such controversial issues as abortion and gay marriage... He says that Prof. West once said to him, “Brother Robby, you and I have got to be the two most misunderstood brothers in the country.” What he has in common with these colleagues, whatever their political disagreements, is “the idea of intellectual fallibility,” he says. “It’s the idea that I have something to learn from people who disagree with me.”
Princeton and the Fight Over Woodrow Wilson’s Legacy
Earlier this fall, the B.J.L. plastered Princeton’s lampposts and building walls with posters of Wilson’s face accompanied by quotations of his that made plain his racism and pro-segregation views. (“The white men were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the south, to protect the southern country,” one read.) The sit-in was intended as the next step in the group’s campaign to ignite a conversation about Wilson’s legacy at Princeton.
.. She presented the students who remained with a choice that seemed like a kind of Catch-22: if they stayed any longer, they would face disciplinary action for trespassing; if they left, no one would be allowed back into the president’s office the following day.
.. Wilson, Painter said, was, in fact, exceptional for the influence of his racism–even for his era. “He segregated the federal work force,” Painter said, “and segregation meant expulsion, so he fired a bunch of people and made it extremely difficult for educated black people in Washington to get jobs.” Wilson’s racism extended to his scholarly work, including “A History of the American People,” published in 1902, in which he wrote glowingly of the cause of the Ku Klux Klan.
.. Wilson was not only an alumnus of Princeton; he was its president. Anthony Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton, told me that, by raising the level of instruction and the quality of the faculty, Wilson reawakened intellectually what had previously been known as the “drunken brother” of the Ivies. “Wilson really accelerated the process of turning Princeton from a small, fairly backward college in New Jersey into a serious university,” Grafton said.0
.. “There’s this perception that we protest because it’s fun and because we get some kind of sick kick out of protesting instead of preparing for interviews, doing our homework, participating in extracurricular activities, and graduating from this institution with a respectable G.P.A.,” he said.
.. Crocket argued that, at a place like Princeton, “where nuance and critical thinking is the norm, or at least should be, we can’t lionize any one particular figure without criticism.”
.. An hour later, as the group slowly began to disperse, Princeton’s Department of Public Safety sent out an e-mail warning all members of the Princeton community of a bomb threat made “in reference to a student protest on campus.” Owusu-Boahen said that the bomb threat changed how he thought about the sit-in.