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.

Today, for my second blog, I want to briefly comment again on Bill Maher’s show Real Time and then look at some media moments and stories that have been circulating this past week.

My Bill Maher Report

Bill is good on many issues – conspiracy theories like QAnon, the Big Election Lie, the border wall, women’s reproductive rights, and more – but should be called out when he is off-base.  My problem with last Friday’s show (June 18) centered again on how Bill deals with racial issues, wokeness, and the twitter crowd. Bill spent a lot of time on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s apology for the casting of his new film, In the Heights, a very well-reviewed musical look at life in a Latinx neighborhood in Manhattan.  Miranda had been criticized for colorism, with most of the actors light-skinned when many in that neighborhood are dark-skinned Afro-Latinos.  Bill was outraged that Miranda had been critiqued for this and that he felt the need to apologize, pointing out that in creating the play, Hamilton, Miranda had taken a very progressive stance by representing our founding fathers as Black and Latino.  Bill asked, “Is nothing ever good enough for these people?” and saying, “This is why people hate Democrats.”

Bill is just wrong on many levels.  First, this is a valid criticism.  Colorism, prejudice and discrimination against darker-skin people, is a general feature of racism that is present everywhere, even in Black and Latinx communities.  Reading some of the criticisms of In the Heights, you can tell they were heart-felt, they highlight an important aspect of racism, and have long been applicable to Hollywood.  Bill opined that Miranda probably apologized to avoid the hassle but reading his and other responses from the film’s associates, it was clear to me that they took the criticisms seriously.

Bill said, “At some point, we need to stand up to these bullies,” but the critics I read were not bullies.  All social media criticism is not cancel culture, even if Bill is right that some or maybe much of it goes too far.  Critique turns into cancel culture when it turns nasty.  Miranda was not being cancelled.  Critics still said they thought the film was good.  And maybe the answer to Bill’s question above is that nothing is ever good enough. There is always room for improvement.

The Crime Wave

Bill’s show and most media outlets have been talking a lot about the rise in gun violence.  All the coverage has probably contributed to making this a hot issue for the public.  I wonder how much homicides have really risen and why.  To some extent, the yearly rise statistics must be misleading, since a year ago, withs so many places on lockdown and fears of contagion high, homicide rates may have been much lower than usual.  With pandemic fear waning and the explosion of activity, maybe there is sort of a backlog of homicides as, for example, street gangs become more active?  I doubt the violence is caused by the concerns with policing, as argued on Fox news, and it certainly is not a result of immigration, also as Fox news likes to infer.  And, at bottom, gun violence is caused in this country – at rates way higher than all other industrialized countries – by the ubiquitous presence of guns and the ease of getting one.

Housing Prices

With fears of inflation, there has been a lot of attention to housing prices, with people trying to explain the crazy market (where, for example, many houses are selling for much higher that they are listed for).  But I think the explanation is pretty simple.  The pandemic postponed a lot of people’s plans to purchase a new home, and so there is a huge pent-up demand.  Add to that, the pandemic stopped a lot of businesses from hiring people and a lot of people from moving to new locations, so this is a source of another huge pent-up demand for new housing too.

Other Media Moments

Fox news remains the bastion of the far right.  This week, it has been pushing the astonishing accusation that the FBI may have been behind the January 6 insurrection.  Since the FBI has been known to infiltrate right-wing extremist groups, perhaps they instigated these groups to attack the Capitol?  There is not a shred of evidence that this happened, but that doesn’t stop Fox commentator Tucker Carlson from whining something like, “How do we know this FBI scenario is not true?”  Of course, this absurd question can never be answered.

Tucker also interviewed a “scientist” who says there is no evidence of appreciable global warming.  An ever-present Fox news story this week has been the almost daily showings of migrants crossing our border with Mexico.   But perhaps most ubiquitous is the continued attack on critical race theory.  A recent study reported that Fox news referred to critical race theory about 1300 times since March!

Controversy over Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory has become a hot button issue.  Twenty-two states have passed or are considering legislation banning the teaching of CRT in public schools.  There is a lot that can and should and is being said about how awful this is.  Today, I only want to highlight two things.  First, while not wanting to be too simplistic about the origins of this controversy, one right-wing former documentary filmmaker, Christopher Rufo, has had enormous influence in bringing this about, as detailed in The New Yorker.  He got ahold of some bias training documents used in some Seattle city government departments that referenced CRT, and he started writing about it for a publication of the right-wing Manhattan Institute.  Tucker Carlson had Rufo on his show last September, Trump saw it and that led to an Executive Order limiting how race could be talked about in Federal training programs.  Rufo went on to prominence, talking to Congress and others about how he saw CRT and its evil doings.

Yesterday (June 23), Joy Reid, one of my favorite MSNBC commentators, had Rufo on her show and showed a series of 3 tweets Rufo sent last March.  It is worth reading them.

“The activists are realizing that their ideas, once put into practice, are generating discontent.  Their racial coalition is also breaking apart – Asian-Americans in particular, are revolting against CRT, which punishes them more than any other group.  We have successfully frozen their brand – critical race theory – not the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.  We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.  The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.”  We have decodified the term and recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Very scary!  Rufo proudly told Joy that his “strategy had been enormously successful.”  And it has.  One survey said that 64% of Americans have heard of CRT, and have heard mostly negative things.

This blog is getting long, but I wanted to conclude by sharing with you the response of General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when asked by Rep. Matt Gaetz about CRT in the military.  Milley said:

“I do think it’s important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.  And the United States Military Academy is a university. And it is important that we train and we understand – and I want to understand white rage. And I’m white …. So, what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.  I’ve read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding? Having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend? And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States Military – our general officers, our commissioned and noncommissioned officers – of being ‘woke’ because we’re studying some theories that are out there.”

As I said in my previous blog, there is nothing wrong with being “woke” either, but it is great to see a military perspective offer some sanity to the discussion.  More on all this next time!

This is my first blog on my new, The Conscience of a Progressive, website.  For those of you familiar with my academic work, I may occasionally write about issues of education, economics, and international development.  However, I plan to focus this blog on my reactions to popular media, especially television news shows, with particular attention right now to Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO.

My Bill Maher Report

I have long been a fan of Bill Maher.  I’ve watched his shows – religulously, he might say – for years and have seen him do stand-up in person a few times.  I’m less of a fan now that Trump has gone, and Bill has moved a little more to the right than he used to be – although I still think his satire can be very funny.  But — in my view, of course — he is wrong-headed about many things.  Most of what he is wrong about these days is his criticism of left/progressive views.  Bill was very positive about Bernie Sanders for much of the 2020 presidential campaign.  While not always agreeing with Bernie’s positions, Bill now would likely agree with much fewer.

Bill was pretty crazy on his show last Friday (June 11) about seeing people outdoors still wearing masks.  He said it (the pandemic) is over, you can’t hide forever, stop cowering, life is a risk, and those who are outside wearing masks are morons.  This is wrong in so many ways.  The pandemic isn’t over, we still don’t know what the future holds, if you are not vaccinated, you should wear a mask, and even if you are vaccinated, a mask can’t hurt and might help.  CDC guidelines are just best guesses about what is needed, and there is nothing wrong with people still being worried about variants and spread.  Why such anger and hostility, Bill?!  You’ve never been so angry and hostile about the morons who refused to wear masks during the high points of the pandemic when – in the unbelievable name of freedom – they were endangering us all!

But this is really a small issue.  Bill is off base on some much bigger issues.  He often finds rather extremist, very minority views on the left and treats them as widespread and as examples of what’s wrong with holding a left, progressive perspective.  On Friday’s show, he made fun of two such views.  One by a councilperson in Seattle who supposedly wanted to “decriminalize crime.”  First, decriminalizing many current crimes is not a bad idea (Bill would agree with some, like marijuana possession).  The person Bill cited sounded like he or she was way overboard, but Bill used it to repeat his criticism of the defund-the-police slogan.  While this slogan may lose votes for the Democrats, most people who argue for it are not extremists – they don’t want to get rid of the police entirely, but just want, among other things, to switch some police funding to social services to prevent some of the problems police currently deal with.  While Bill prides himself on having debates, I haven’t seen him invite a sensible defund-the-police perspective on his show.

This last was just a passing remark for Bill on last Friday’s show.  He spent much more time on making fun of what he saw as another extreme view by the left – that racism today in the U.S. is worse than it has ever been. His evidence for this view was a quote from Kevin Hart, the comedian, that said something like “you’re witnessing white power and white privilege at an all-time high.”  Bill then goes on and on about how, of course, the era of slavery and Jim Crow was much worse than today.  Few people, if any, disagree with Bill’s point that there has been progress on racism and other social problems he mentions like sexism and homophobia. (Hart responded to not take him literally – Hart’s point might be and mine would be, in our current historical era where racism is named and shamed, white power and white privilege are still so pervasive, and openly so in this Trump-deranged era.)  Bill’s point on this show and others is what exactly?  That we should be grateful for progress?  Of course, most everyone on the left is – but progress is slow, and racism is still virulent.  Bill ended with “We’ve come a long way baby…even if we can’t declare mission accomplished.”  Bill seems to want them all to talk about the progress we have made when they rightly focus on how far we still have to go!

Bill does this on a lot of shows – finds some rather extremist, off-the-wall view and uses it to critique the vast majority of what are very reasonable left progressive perspectives.  The off-the-wall views are good for comedy but are not at all representative.  Bill has been particularly dismissive of critical race theory (CRT), mischaracterizing it, having many guests — finding Black guests especially — who are critical of CRT without ever having a guest who defends it.  CRT makes a lot of sense – Bill and many others don’t want to see American society as racist, but it is a very reasonable position to hold – and it is contrary to one of Bill’s Friday concluding remark, that “racism is not everywhere, it’s not in my house, it’s not in most of yours” (talking about his audience).  You would think that the right’s attack on CRT in schools across the U.S. would give Bill some pause to think that, given how scared the right seems to be of it, that there might be something to it.

Bill’s big issue underlying this is his decrying of “wokeness.”  But wokeness is not the extreme minority views Bill always highlights.  CRT has very sensible points and advocates.  Thinking about the Palestinian-Israeli situation, contrary to Bill’s view, issues of apartheid, racism, and CRT can be seen as very relevant.  Bill, there are many guests you could have who would explain this.  Thinking about free vs. “politically correct” speech, which Bill has harped on forever, there is a sensible perspective – not composed of “snowflakes” – that there are sensible positions that talk about the need to circumscribe some speech in some settings.  Shouting fire falsely in a crowded theater or directly inciting violence is not the only exception as libel laws and restrictions on hate speech in other liberal democracies like Germany evidence. It should give you pause that even the ACLU, a staunch defender of free speech, recognizes this as you said on Friday’s show.  It should also give Bill pause that the right is going on and on about wokeness, perhaps there is something to it.

Bill, you need to find guests on the left who challenge your view – too many of your guests, when not conservatives, are idiosyncratic oddballs – who agree with you on the critique of wokeness and the left.  Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and other progressives are not the problem with today’s Democratic party, despite your quoting James Carville on this.  We need a left, progressive view much more strongly if our society, the U.S., the world is to survive, let alone thrive!  Read my book, The Conscience of a Progressive!