As usual, there is a lot of recent news and views to comment on.  Let’s start with

My Bill Maher Report

I didn’t have any comments on Bill’s last show (June 26) before his July break.  But I thought I would share MSNBC commentator Tiffany Cross’s 3-minute critique of Bill’s show, starting with Bill’s reaction to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s apology, which I featured in my previous blog.

Republican Thought Police

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new law that will require the more than 3 dozen Florida colleges and universities to survey annually students and faculty in order to assess “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity.”  Calling colleges and universities “hotbeds for stale ideology,” DeSantis said they could lose funding if they are found to be “indoctrinating” students.

Of course, a key question is who decides what ideologies are “stale” and what “viewpoint diversity” and “indoctrinating” means?  The governor?  The legislature?  At the moment, in most colleges and universities in the U.S., it is faculty and, to some extent, lower-level administrators like department chairs, who decide on faculty hiring.  A recent notable exception was the University of North Carolina’s Board of Trustees decision not to grant a tenured faculty position to Nikole Hannah-Jones, despite the recommendation of faculty and administrators, because she. was associated with the 1619 Project and critical race theory.  The Trustees were pressured to reverse their position and they did.

I don’t mean to imply that normal university hiring decisions are objective or politically neutral.  I remember the case of Florida State University where I used to teach.  Their Department of Economics accepted substantial money from the Koch Brothers Foundation which many argued was used to hire right-wing faculty.  The Koch Brothers have funded many colleges and universities to this end.  But ideology can enter into university decision with more subtlety.  When I started teaching in the mid-1970s, I saw faculty committees not grant tenure to a lot of left-wing candidates who had been hired in the late 1960s, despite their objectively high performance.  I remember a magazine article of that era, titled “Could Karl Marx Teach Economics in America?,” about similar conservative biases at Harvard University and elsewhere.

Of course, now, the Right is concerned that the university is too liberal.  Their bottom line perhaps is that too many college-educated people vote Democratic, which is something they want to change.  There is no correct or perfect way to safeguard academic freedom, but having State governments decide what is indoctrination and what diversity of thought means is frightening and will have a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

DeSantis, in his bid to become a contender for President or Vice-President, also recently signed a bill promoting a public school patriotic civics education to teach the evils of communism.  People forget, but in the early 1960s, Florida initiated a required high school course on Americanism vs. Communism that wasn’t eliminated until the mid-1980s.  Joy Reid, MSNBC commentator, likens the current effort in Florida and elsewhere to China’s “patriotic education” campaign instituted after the Tiananmen Square revolt.

Back to Critical Race Theory

DeSantis and Florida joined 21 other states in passing laws to stop critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools.  Never mind the fact that, in general, it isn’t being taught anywhere.  The Right seems very frightened of CRT.  Tucker Carlson, Fox news commentator, calls it “scary” and “creepy.”  Carlson went after General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who defended paying attention to CRT at West Point with Tucker saying ”he’s not just a pig, he’s stupid.”  Laura Ingraham, another Fox commentator, wants to defund the military for this and many on the right want Milley fired.  Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz calls CRT a “bigoted lie, every bit as racist as Klansmen in white sheets.”  The Wall Street Journal calls it “indoctrination.”

My daughter is a psychologist, and she points out to me how much of the Right’s critique is always projection.  It is really they who want to indoctrinate students — with a “patriotic” education, with a white-washing of history that downplays the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, or Jim Crow.  While CRT cannot be summarized here, its perspective that racism is systemic and that American society is racist – indeed, as is too true around the world – frightens and is abhorrent to the Right.  While people can and do disagree with these fundamental views, they clearly offer a valid perspective that should be taught and discussed in public school classrooms.

American Marxism

Fear-mongering is brought to new heights by Fox commentator Mark Levin on his weekly show “Life, Liberty, and Levin.”  I’ve caught pieces of his show before, but last week was the first time I watched a whole show (June 27).  Levin sits there surrounded by a poster and a copy of his about-to-be-released book titled American Marxism with a hammer and sickle on the cover in the colors of the American flag.  Levin says the book already has 150,000 pre-orders.

What is American Marxism?  Levin starts his show by calling CRT, LatCrit, and critical gender theory Marxist movements. (LatCrit is a respectable academic theory applying CRT to Latinx populations.  I’ve never heard of critical gender theory, but it seems to relate to Levin’s fear of non-binary views.)  The Marxism comes in, according to Levin, because these theories were founded by or based on the works of supposed Marxists like Derrick Bell (the noted civil rights advocate) and Herbert Marcuse (the well-known philosopher of what is known as the Frankfurt school of critical theory, which Levin calls the Franklin School of Berlin).

Levin objects to the history of the U.S. being portrayed as imperialism and colonialism leading to its founding by White Protestant Europeans – which I think is a fair depiction.  Levin adds the Green New Deal to the Marxist takeover.  Critique of capitalism as embodied in Bernie Sander’s democratic socialism is also anathema.  For Levin, it sounds like the entire Democratic Party is now run by what he is calling American Marxists.  Marxism and communism have been scare words in the U.S. since the McCarthy era.  Levin paints this as a new Revolutionary War where people have to be galvanized and mobilized to “Save our republic, our society” (peacefully he adds).

In the past, I generally avoided Fox news except for short stints to see how incredible they are – presenting this alternate reality to millions of viewers.  For my blog, I now am paying more attention, but it is not pleasant.  As for Levin, I really don’t want to read his new book, but I offer him this challenge.  Read my book, The Conscience of a Progressive, and I will read American Marxism, and we can have a debate, or perhaps even a conversation.