Jason Riley, of the War Street Journal Editorial Report, was joined by the rest of crew, on Fox News, to swank about being invited and disinvited to speak across the nation’s left-liberal campuses. The rest, Bret Stephens, Mary Kissel, Mary O’Grady, all expressed disinvitation envy.
Following Allan Bloom’s impressive Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987), neoconservatives have been quite good at addressing multicultural political correctness in the modern academy, the replacement of the Western canon with bogus disciplines—political constructs, really—devoted to relativism, anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-elitism studies. They were good at pointing out that “current works promoting multiculturalism written by women and minorities had replaced the classics of Western civilization written by the DWEMs, Dead White European Males,” to quote Phyllis Schlafly, in “Advice To College Students: Don’t Major in English.”
On freedom of speech, neocon establishment circuit speakers limp along as well (although you won’t hear them introduce the deciding variable: private property. Where? On whose property do you wish to speak?)
For the rest, neocons seldom challenge students on matters racial (except to blame Democrats and left-liberals for the plight of blacks), on foreign policy (some liberals actually like American military interventionism as much as the neocons), on Islam (OK, except for a few bad Abduls) or on immigration (a net positive).
Jason Riley should try never having been invited in the first place to speak to those campus “conservatives.”
I guess he could argue the marginalized Old Right is just not as smart as he and his neocon buddies. Paul Gottfried’s learned scholarship on American conservatism exposes the neocons as not very smart at all.
Donald Trump has certainly run rings around them.