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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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President Trump has called “fake news” reporters “enemies of the people.”  This writer will take it one step further and call them co-conspirators as the enemies of truth.

In a now-infamous case, Harvard University essentially admitted they discriminate against whites and Asians in the admissions process.  They do so claiming that diversity is essential to the educational experience.  A federal judge has agreed with the university.  Part of their argument was that they embrace other types of diversity, including political beliefs.  This is hogwash.

At Harvard, more than 64% of the student body describe themselves as “liberal” while only 10.2% describe themselves as “conservative.”  The same trends are seen at other elite universities like Yale.  At Harvard, more than 84% of the students have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.  This mirrors the faculty at Harvard where one survey found that 88% of that faculty have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.  In fact, that same survey found that 73% of the Harvard faculty voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.  That is “political diversity” in the minds of the Harvard elite.

Over at the New York Times, editor Andrew Marantz penned an article titled “Free Speech is Killing Us.”  He meant it literally.  Arguing against “unchecked free speech,” he gleefully notes that such innocuous characters as Milo Yiannapolis and Alex Jones have lost their platforms.  He cites high-profile incidents like Christchurch and Charlottesville to promote censorship.

In 2016, Google created an algorithm to detect “hate speech” on its platforms.  Something strange happened along the way.  That algorithm detected more “hate speech” and toxic comments among black people than white people.  Surely, something was wrong as the results returned the opposite of what the elite predicted.  The solution to this “problem” was simple: the algorithm was racially biased and scrapped.

Bias in the media when it comes to free speech is a constant.  But the problem extends to college campuses.  A 2018 survey found that in general terms, students support the concept of free speech.  But when the questions get more specific, fewer and fewer students really believe in free speech.  For example, 57% of those surveyed believe colleges should discipline students if they make “hurtful comments.”  Another 77% believe students who make “hurtful” comments should be excluded from campus activities (i.e., ostracized and shunned).

There is an old saying: “The truth sometimes hurts.”  That is the gist of the problem.  The recent Leftist attacks on free speech are, in many cases, an attack on inconvenient truths.  A perfect example is recent FBI crime statistic reports that show that blacks are eight times more likely to commit murder than whites.  This is a stark, truthful statistic.  But because it works to the disadvantage of the favored group, the reports which make up that statistic must be wrong.  It must be biased.  Therefore, in the minds of the Left, the stark truth is an “untruth.”

Eric Levitz of The New Yorker declared in 2018 that colleges do not need more Republican professors.  He laid out an indictment of the Republican Party accusing it of (1) politicizing law enforcement, especially with respect to immigration, (2) being authoritarian, (3) restricting access to the ballot, (4) stigmatizing dissent, (5) demonizing vulnerable populations, and (6) vilifying higher education.

These are audacious claims given the truth.  Bloggers and commenters who deviate from the Leftist dogma are deplatformed or demonetized on social media while Antifa thugs get free reign.  He claims that conservatives are intolerant creatures.  But one survey showed that Democrats and/or liberals are more than three times more likely to “unfriend” or “unfollow” you on social media for your political beliefs.  This is a fact, or truth if you will.

Regarding access to the ballot, there are many restrictions on suffrage with citizenship and age among them.  There are no conservative plans to expand the list of restrictions.  There are efforts to enforce the voting laws to avoid fraud which is a greater threat to American democracy than Russian Facebook ads.  Levitz talks about “equality before the law.”  Admittedly, that is a legitimate claim but not for the reasons he proffers.  Instead, the scales of the law have been tilted to favor the latest victim group du jour.  Harvard is a perfect example in that they favor certain groups over others in admissions all in the name of “diversity” and the courts (that is, the law) agrees.

Now, what if you provide empirical evidence that there exist differences between the races, ethnic groups, or cultures?  What happens if you dare even express the notion that there are differences?  That whole field of inquiry is verboten in higher education.  For the few brave souls who do study the issue, they are vilified by the press, higher education, and the Twitter lynch mob.

Amy Wax, a law professor at Penn, noted a truth: she knows of no black students at their law school who graduated in the top 25% of the class.  She came under such intense criticism and accusations that she made up the fact that she considered suing Penn for defamation.  Charles Murray, a Harvard alumnus, was to speak on campus.  But student outrage prevailed and although allowed to speak, he was interrupted by protesters on several occasions fearful of inconvenient facts, or truths.

Outside the STEM fields (and even there now in some cases), higher education does not investigate the truth.  Instead, they instill an orthodoxy and assign an opinion and that opinion is “the truth.”  And the quickest path to success in these areas and the resulting elitism is a belief in absolute equality among cultures.  The goal is to remake America as one huge multicultural blob.

At one time, perhaps it was easier to seek the truth, argue, debate, and respectfully disagree with one another online.  YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have banned innocuous characters like Alex Jones.  Yet Hasan Piker, a host of “Young Turks” declared that America “deserved” the terrorist strikes on 9/11 and remains without even a strike on his record.

If it is harder on social media now, it has become impossible on college campuses.  Colleges were supposed to seek out the truth wherever that truth led.  They are not supposed to bury their heads in the sand and shout down legitimate lines of inquiry.  And the media plays along because the media is dominated by graduates of the very schools burying their heads in the sand.

As such, the media and higher education are not “enemies of the people,” but something far worse.  They are the propagators and disseminators of untruths.  As such, they are the enemies of the truth.