A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury

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CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 1
Dear Friends,
I've included several readings below that I think provide important examples of the "cancel culture" at
work. But there is a lot of reading, so please don't feel obliged to read everything! If you are short of
time, I suggest just reading those selections that interest you the most. I will summarize the issues in
each set of readings before we begin to discuss them so you won't miss out if you haven't read
everything. Be well until next Tuesday and I look forward to seeing you all again.
Best,
Sandy

A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury
Liberals must defend the right of conservative students to invite speakers of their
choice, even if they find their views abhorrent.
Peter Beinart | The Atlantic | Mar 6, 2021
My fellow liberals, please watch the following video. It suggests that something
has gone badly wrong on the campus left.
The events leading up to the video are as follows. One of the student groups at
Middlebury College is called The American Enterprise Club. According to its
website, the Club aims “to promote … free enterprise, a limited federal
government, a strong national defense.” In other words, it’s a group for political
conservatives.
This year, the AEI Club invited Dr. Charles Murray to speak. That’s crucial to
understanding what followed. When leftists protest right-wing speakers on
campus, they often deny that they are infringing upon free speech. Free speech,
they insist, does not require their university to give a platform to people with
offensive views. That was the argument of the people who earlier this year tried
to prevent ex-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at the University
of California at Berkeley. And it was the argument of those who opposed
Murray’s lecture at Middlebury. “This is not an issue of freedom of
speech,” declared a letter signed by more than 450 Middlebury alums. “Why has
such a person been granted a platform at Middlebury?”
The answer is that Middlebury granted Murray a platform because a group of its
students invited him. Those students constitute a small ideological minority. They
hold views that many of their classmates oppose, even loathe. But the
administrators who run Middlebury, like the administrators who run Berkeley,
consider themselves obligated to protect the right of small, unpopular, minorities

to bring in speakers of their choice. Denying them that right—giving progressive
students a veto over who conservative students can invite—comes perilously
close to giving progressive students a veto over what conservative students can
say. If it is legitimate for campus progressives to block speeches by Milo
Yiannopoulos or Charles Murray, why can’t they block speeches by fellow
students who hold Yiannopoulos or Murray’s views?
Some of Murray’s views are indeed odious. Twenty-three years ago, he co-
authored The Bell Curve, which argued that differences in intelligence account
for much of the class stratification in American life, that intelligence is partly
genetic, and that there may be genetic differences between races. Critics called
Murray’s argument intellectually shoddy, racist and dangerous, and I agree.
(Before I began working there full-time, my old magazine, The New Republic,
published an excerpt of the book, along with rebuttals, and thus gave it a
legitimacy it did not deserve).
But if conservative students cannot invite speakers who hold what I and many
other liberals consider reprehensible views, then they cannot invite many of the
most prominent conservative thinkers and Republican politicians in the United
States today. Like many liberals, I consider it bigoted to oppose gay marriage. I
consider it bigoted to support voting restrictions that disproportionately impact
African Americans and Latinos. I consider it bigoted to deny trans students the
right to use the bathrooms of their choice. I consider it bigoted to claim that Islam
is inherently more violent than Judaism or Christianity. I consider it
unconscionable to oppose government action against climate change.
Yet on the American right, these views are all mainstream. If conservative
students can’t bring Charles Murray to Middlebury, how can they bring Ted Cruz,
Newt Gingrich or Clarence Thomas? (Indeed, Yiannopoulos and Murray aren’t
the only right-leaning speakers who have sparked mass student protest in recent
years. So have Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary Fund
head Christine Lagarde).
In fact, Middlebury students did not only object to Murray because of The Bell
Curve. Some also objected to his most recent book, Coming Apart, which
analyzes the struggles of the white working class. (And about which Murray was
scheduled to talk). Coming Apart, declared a group called White Students for

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 3

Racial Justice, “uses largely anecdotal evidence to blame poor people in America
for being poor, attempting to explain economic inequality through a perceived
gap in virtue” and thus proves that Murray is “classist.”
The point is this. What’s considered morally legitimate at Middlebury differs
dramatically from what’s considered morally legitimate in large swaths of
America. When colleges like Middlebury are considering whom to honor, they
have every right to apply their own ideological standards. But if they use those
standards to determine which speakers conservative student groups can invite,
they will make it hard for those groups to function on liberal campuses at all. And
in an era in which Americans are already ideologically cocooned, that would be a
disaster.
To appreciate the ugliness of what transpired at Middlebury, however, one needs
to look not merely at the principles involved, but at the specific sequence of
events. In its letter to the campus explaining its invitation to Murray, the AEI club
declared that it “invites you to argue.” It invited a left-leaning Middlebury
professor, Allison Stanger, to engage Murray in a public conversation following
his talk, thus ensuring that his views would be challenged. In his introduction to
Murray’s speech, a representative from the AEI club implored his fellow students
to debate Murray rather than shouting him down.
But they did shout him down. As Murray approached the podium, dozens of
students in the audience turned their backs, loudly read a prepared statement,
and then began chanting “Hey, hey ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go,” “Your
message is hatred, we cannot tolerate it” “Charles Murray go away, Middlebury
says no way” and finally, “Shut it down.”
After close to twenty minutes of this, a university representative came on stage to
announce that, if the students did not relent, Murray and his interlocutor,
Professor Stanger, would move to a secret location, from which their
conversation would be broadcast. Professor Stanger then took the microphone
and asked the students, “Can you just listen for one minute.” Many in the
audience replied, “no.” She added that, “I spent a lot of time preparing hard
questions.” Finally, she conceded that, “You’re not going to let us speak.” As the
university representative announced that Murray and Stanger would move to a
different location, the crowd began shouting, “Where are you going?”

Somehow, they found out. Because when Murray and Stanger finished their
dialogue, they found themselves surrounded by protesters. The protesters—
some of whom were wearing masks and may not have been Middlebury
students—began pushing them. When Stanger tried to shield Murray, according
a Middlebury spokesman, a protester grabbed her hair and twisted her neck.
Murray, Stanger and their escorts made it to a waiting car, but the protesters
“pounded on it, rocked it back and forth, and jumped onto the hood,” according
to The New York Times. One took a large traffic sign, attached to a concrete
base, and placed it in front of the car to prevent it from leaving.
Finally, Murray and Stanger got away. They had planned to eat dinner at a local
restaurant, but, upon learning that the protesters planned to disrupt their meal,
left town altogether. Stanger later went to the hospital, where she received a
neck brace.
This is not a tale of university cowardice. To the contrary, the Middlebury
administration took extraordinary measures to ensure that Murray could speak.
And in a letter following the incident, President Laurie Patton, declared that in
their response to Murray’s speech, some Middlebury students “failed to live up to
our core values.” She publicly apologized to Murray.
Still, that’s not enough. College policy declares that, “Middlebury College does
not allow disruptive behavior at community events or on campus.” Many of the
students protesting Murray’s speech clearly violated that policy. I hope they are
punished. If they are, perhaps progressive students will think twice before
shouting down a conservative speaker the next time.
Liberals may be tempted to ignore these incidents, either because they are
uncomfortable appearing to defend Charles Murray, or because, in the age of
Donald Trump, they’re worried about bigger things. That would be a mistake. If
what happened at Berkeley, and now at Middlebury, goes unchallenged, sooner
or later, liberals will get shouted down too. To many on the campus left, after all,
Zionism is a racist ideology. Drone attacks constitute war crimes. Barack Obama
was the deporter-in-chief. Hillary Clinton supported a racist crime bill. Joe Biden
disrespected Anita Hill. There will always be justifications.

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 5

Professor Allison Stanger is a liberal. Last week she ended up in a neck brace
merely for being willing to ask Charles Murray hard questions. She should serve
as an inspiration, and a warning of things to come. ▪

                     Bodies on the Gears at Middlebury
  Why are freedom of speech and academic freedom so absolute for Charles
  Murray yet so conditional for students, asks John Patrick Leary, who writes in
                defense of the protesters at Middlebury College.
             John Patrick Leary | Inside Higher Ed | Mar 7, 2017
In response to the forced retreat by Charles Murray, the right-wing scholar and
author, from a planned public lecture at Middlebury College due to student
demonstrations, we need to put first things first: the incident has nothing to do
with the First Amendment or academic freedom.
Before we can understand why those concepts are so routinely abused in public
discussion of campus protest, we must define what they mean. The First
Amendment forbids Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the
press.” As many people have repeatedly pointed out, the Constitution does not
guarantee you a respectful audience for your ideas, whether those ideas are
odious or not. Murray is co-author of The Bell Curve, which argues that racial
inequality is largely shaped by nonwhite people’s genetic inferiority, and the
Southern Poverty Law Center classifies him a white nationalist who peddles
“racist pseudoscience.”
As for academic freedom, it generally refers to institutional intrusion upon
faculty’s freedom of teaching and research. According to the American
Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic
Freedom and Tenure, “Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in
the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other
academic duties …. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in
discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their
teaching controversial matter that has no relation to their subject.”
Charles Murray is employed by the American Enterprise Institute, a public-policy
think tank. If the AEI believes in the principle of academic freedom for its

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 6

researchers, then all inquiries about Murray’s academic freedom should be
directed to the AEI. Middlebury undergraduates couldn’t deny Murray’s
institutional academic freedom even if they tried.
Middlebury’s students do, however, have every right to shout him down, and by
all accounts they accomplished this end. Murray’s address in a campus
auditorium was disrupted by students chanting and turning their backs to the
lectern; he was compelled to give a live-streamed discussion from another
location on the campus. He left campus under protests so heavy that a professor
with him, political scientist Allison Stanger, injured her neck in the scrum outside.
Comparing the tumult after Murray’s address to a scene from the foreign-
espionage thriller Homeland, Stanger said in a statement that she was
deliberately attacked by protesters in the crowd -- something that never should
have happened.
However, a group of Middlebury students argued that the chaotic atmosphere
Stanger describes was aggravated by belligerent campus security, and
their statement suggested that her injury may have simply been an accident.
“Protesters did not escalate violence and had no plan of violent physical
confrontation,” the statement read. “We do not know of any students who hurt
Professor Stanger; however, we deeply regret that she was injured during the
event.”
“So much for safe spaces,” Reason.com quipped. (Believe it or not, others made
the same joke.) Others called the protesters a “mob.” In The Washington Post,
law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh lamented “another sad day of brown-
shirted thuggery,” arguing that it “undermines the opposition to Murray’s claims,
rather than reinforcing them.” He elaborated, sort of: “Once it turns out that
arguments such as the ones in The Bell Curve can’t even be made without fear
of suppression or even violent attack, then we lose any real basis for rejecting
those arguments.”
Obviously, one strong basis for rejecting The Bell Curve is that it is racist. But
aside from that, Volokh’s strange presumption -- that disruptive opposition
strengthens, rather than weakens, one’s opponents, that bad arguments
somehow get stronger the less they are heard -- does not bear much scrutiny.
Indeed, Murray’s claims have not gotten any better since the weekend.

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 7

One might well ask: Are college kids today fragile snowflakes cowering in their
“safe spaces,” or are they brown-shirted, left-wing authoritarians? Which
caricature will it be?
Dissent, for many critics of campus protest, can be tolerated as long as it is
nondisruptive and officially sanctioned. The protests at the University of
California, Berkeley, that chased Milo Yiannopoulos off the campus last month
were unruly and damaged property, but they also may have hastened the much-
deserved disgrace of a racist and sexist demagogue. In 2015, during a free
speech controversy at Yale University concerning racist Halloween costumes --
which introduced “safe spaces” into the nation’s anti-student lexicon -- The
Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf criticized young activists’ “illiberal streak” and
their tendency to “lash out” with intolerance. Such incivility suppressed campus
debate and inquiry, he argued. Even as Friedersdorf called out students
protesters as intolerant of discomfort, however, he held them responsible for the
sin of making others uncomfortable. Discomfort, it seems, is a scholarly virtue for
some, but not for all.
Another example came in 2014, when Robert J. Birgeneau, the former chancellor
of the University of California, Berkeley, during the suppression of Occupy
protests there in 2011, withdrew from his role as commencement speaker at
Haverford College’s graduation. He did so after students at the college signaled
their intent to disrupt his speech. The students were widely criticized for
suppressing free speech and open dialogue -- even though Birgeneau was the
one who withdrew, in a pre-emptive strike against a protest that hadn’t even
happened yet.
How can we hold simultaneously to a view of free speech as the circulation of
disagreement while denouncing communication whose tone is disagreeable?
Why are freedom of speech and academic freedom so absolute for Charles
Murray yet so conditional for Middlebury students -- who surely have the
academic freedom not to be told they are genetically deficient at their own
college? Finally, why are higher education institutions so regularly churned
through this dull meat grinder of journalistic free-speech sanctimony?
One simple answer may be the alma mater nostalgia of middle-aged journalists
and academics who graduated from such institutions and, like many elders in

every generation, scorn the passions of the next. The bigger issue, though, has
to do with how we think about education -- or more to the point, how we fantasize
about it. As Corey Robin has written, in American politics, educational institutions
are often treated as laboratories for social transformations we are reluctant to
pursue in society at large. “In the United States,” he writes, “we often try to solve
political and economic questions through our schools rather than in society.”
College campuses, especially elite ones like Middlebury, are an interesting
example of this thesis: they are treated both as laboratories for transforming
society, and as leafy sanctuaries from it. Colleges are asked to model a fantasy
version of society in which profound social cleavages -- racial, partisan,
economic -- exist only as abstract issues that we can have a “conversation”
about, rather than material conflicts that may need to be confronted. And most
educational leaders and administrators, Robin writes, are basically conflict
averse -- they want to “want to change words, not worlds.” Isn’t politics really just
the contest of the best ideas, they seem to ask, rather than a conflict of
resources and power? If presidential politics tells us anything, the answer is
clearly no. But on campuses, this persistent fantasy -- of social change in which
no one raises their voice -- is what critics often misidentify as academic freedom.
But what if black or Latino Middlebury students don’t want to have a conversation
about their human dignity? What if they prefer to assert it? If they did so, they’d
be participating in a long tradition of campus free-speech defense that many
critics overlook. They’d only be doing what Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley
Free Speech Movement, famously advised in 1964: putting their “bodies on the
gears” of an apparatus they call unjust.
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes
you so sick at heart -- that you can’t take part,” Savio said. “And you’ve got to
indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re
free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” ▪

A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning
A white high school student withdrew from her chosen college after a three-
second video caused an uproar online. The classmate who shared it publicly has
no regrets.
Dan Levin | New York Times | Dec 26, 2020
LEESBURG, Va. — Jimmy Galligan was in history class last school year when
his phone buzzed with a message. Once he clicked on it, he found a three-
second video of a white classmate looking into the camera and uttering an anti-
Black racial slur.
The slur, he said, was regularly hurled in classrooms and hallways throughout his
years in the Loudoun County school district. He had brought the issue up to
teachers and administrators but, much to his anger and frustration, his
complaints had gone nowhere.
So he held on to the video, which was sent to him by a friend, and made a
decision that would ricochet across Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor
of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought
an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s
landmark ruling.
“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr.
Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate
who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it
publicly when the time was right.
Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera
and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016,
when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit. It later
circulated among some students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr.
Galligan attended, but did not cause much of a stir.
Mr. Galligan had not seen the video before receiving it last school year, when he
and Ms. Groves were seniors. By then, she was a varsity cheer captain who
dreamed of attending the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose cheer team
was the reigning national champion. When she made the team in May, her
parents celebrated with a cake and orange balloons, the university’s official color.

The next month, as protests were sweeping the nation after the police killing of
George Floyd, Ms. Groves, in a public Instagram post, urged people to “protest,
donate, sign a petition, rally, do something” in support of the Black Lives Matter
movement.

Jimmy Galligan, who posted a video online of a classmate using a racial
slur, said he had been mocked by students with that language. Alyssa
Schukar for The New York Times

“You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word,” responded
someone whom Ms. Groves said she did not know.
Her alarm at the stranger’s comment turned to panic as friends began calling,
directing her to the source of a brewing social media furor. Mr. Galligan, who had
waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that
afternoon. Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter,
where furious calls mounted for the University of Tennessee to revoke its
admission offer.
By that June evening, about a week after Mr. Floyd’s killing, teenagers across the
country had begun leveraging social media to call out their peers for racist
behavior. Some students set up anonymous pages on Instagram devoted to
holding classmates accountable, including in Loudoun County.
The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed
from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 11

pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of
emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.
“They’re angry, and they want to see some action,” an admissions official told
Ms. Groves and her family, according to a recording of the emotional call
reviewed by The New York Times.
Ms. Groves was among many incoming freshmen across the country
whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after
videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

                    After the video Mimi Groves had sent to a friend when she was 15 was
                   shared publicly, people on social media said the University of Tennessee
                    should revoke her admission. Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

In one sense, the public shaming of Ms. Groves underscores the power of social
media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times
including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.” But the story
behind the backlash also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for
generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest
counties, where Black students said they had long been subjected to ridicule.
“Go pick cotton,” some said they were told in class by white students.
“It was just always very uncomfortable being Black in the classroom,” said Muna
Barry, a Black student who graduated with Ms. Groves and Mr. Galligan. Once
during Black History Month, she recalled, gym teachers at her elementary school
organized an “Underground Railroad” game, where students were told to run

through an obstacle course in the dark. They had to begin again if they made
noise.
The use of the slur by a Heritage High School student was not shocking, many
said. The surprise, instead, was that Ms. Groves was being punished for
behavior that had long been tolerated.
A ‘hostile learning environment’
Leesburg, the county seat of Loudoun County, lies just across the Potomac River
from Maryland, about an hour’s drive from Washington. It was the site of an early
Civil War battle, and slave auctions were once held on the courthouse grounds,
where a statue of a Confederate soldier stood for more than a century until it was
removed in July.
The Loudoun County suburbs are among the wealthiest in the nation, and the
schools consistently rank among the top in the state. Last fall, according to the
Virginia Department of Education, the student body at Heritage High was about
half white, 20 percent Hispanic, 14 percent Asian-American and 8 percent Black,
with another 6 percent who are mixed race.
In interviews, current and former students of color described an environment rife
with racial insensitivity, including casual uses of slurs.
A report commissioned last year by the school district documented a pattern of
school leaders ignoring the widespread use of racial slurs by both students and
teachers, fostering a “growing sense of despair” among students of color, some
of whom faced disproportionate disciplinary measures compared with white
students.
“It is shocking the extent to which students report the use of the N-word as the
prevailing concern,” the report said. School system employees also had a “low
level of racial consciousness and racial literacy,” while a lack of repercussions for
hurtful language forced students into a “hostile learning environment,” it said.
In the wake of the report’s publication, the district in August released a plan to
combat systemic racism. The move was followed by a formal apology in
September for the district’s history of segregation.
Heritage High School officials did not respond to interview requests.

Mr. Galligan recalled being mocked with a racial slur by students and getting
laughed at by a white classmate after their senior-year English teacher played an
audio recording of the 1902 novella “Heart of Darkness” that contained the slur.
During that school year, Mr. Galligan said, the same student made threatening
comments about Muslims in an Instagram video. Mr. Galligan showed the clip to
the school principal, who declined to take action, citing free speech and the fact
that the offensive behavior took place outside school. “I just felt so hopeless,” Mr.
Galligan recalled.
Swift and relentless backlash
Ms. Groves said the video began as a private Snapchat message to a friend. “At
the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context
behind it because I was so young,” she said in a recent interview, adding that the
slur was in “all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.”
Ms. Groves, who just turned 19, lives with her parents and two siblings in a
predominantly white and affluent gated community built around a golf course. On
a recent day, she sat outside on the deck with her mother, Marsha Groves, who
described how the entire family had struggled with the consequences of the very
public shaming.
“It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth,” Mimi
Groves said of her video. “How can you convince somebody that has never met
you and the only thing they’ve ever seen of you is that three-second clip?”
Ms. Groves said racial slurs and hate speech were not tolerated by her parents,
who had warned their children to never post anything online that they would not
say in person or want their parents and teachers to read.
Once the video went viral, the backlash was swift, and relentless. A photograph
of Ms. Groves, captioned with a racial slur, also began circulating online, but she
and her parents say someone else wrote it to further tarnish her reputation. On
social media, people tagged the University of Tennessee and its cheer team,
demanding her admission be rescinded. Some threatened her with physical
violence if she came to the university campus. The next day, local media outlets
in Virginia and Tennessee published articles about the uproar.

For the University of Tennessee, the outrage over Ms. Groves followed a string
of negative publicity over racist incidents at its flagship campus in Knoxville. Last
year, Snapchat photos of students wearing blackface and mocking the Black
Lives Matter movement went viral, shortly after a student was suspended by her
sorority for referring to Black people with a racial slur in an online video. In
2018, swastikas and other hateful messages were painted on campus, months
after white supremacists hosted an event during Black History Month.
Public universities are limited in their ability to expel students for offensive
language. They have more leeway with incoming students, who are not yet
enrolled, though many state schools try to avoid officially revoking admissions
offers over speech issues.
The day after the video went viral, Ms. Groves tried to defend herself in tense
calls with the university. But the athletics department swiftly removed Ms. Groves
from the cheer team. And then came the call in which admissions officials began
trying to persuade her to withdraw, saying they feared she would not feel
comfortable on campus.
The university declined to comment about Ms. Groves beyond a statement it
issued on Twitter in June, in which officials said they took seriously complaints
about racist behavior.
Ms. Groves’s parents, who said their daughter was being targeted by a social
media “mob” for a mistake she made as an adolescent, urged university officials
to assess her character by speaking with her high school and cheer coaches.
Instead, admissions officials gave her an ultimatum: withdraw or the university
would rescind her offer of admission.
“We just needed it to stop, so we withdrew her,” said Mrs. Groves, adding that
the entire experience had “vaporized” 12 years of her daughter’s hard work.
“They rushed to judgment and unfortunately it’s going to affect her for the rest of
her life.”
‘You taught someone a lesson.’
In the months since Mr. Galligan posted the video, he has begun his freshman
year at Vanguard University in California and Ms. Groves has enrolled in online

classes at a nearby community college. Though they had been friendly earlier in
high school, they have not spoken about the video or the fallout.
At home, Ms. Groves’s bedroom is festooned by a collection of cheer trophies,
medals and a set of red pompoms — reminders of what could have been. Her
despair has given way to resignation. “I’ve learned how quickly social media can
take something they know very little about, twist the truth and potentially ruin
somebody’s life,” she said.
Since the racial reckoning of the summer, many white teenagers, when posting
dance videos to social media, no longer sing along with the slur in rap songs.
Instead, they raise a finger to pursed lips. “Small things like that really do make a
difference,” Mr. Galligan said.
Mr. Galligan thinks a lot about race, and the implications of racial slurs. He said
his father was often the only white person at maternal family gatherings, where
“the N-word is a term that is thrown around sometimes” by Black relatives. A few
years ago, he said his father said it aloud, prompting Mr. Galligan and his sister
to quietly take him aside and explain that it was unacceptable, even when joking
around.
Shortly after his 18th birthday in July, Mr. Galligan asked his father, a former law
enforcement officer, what he thought about white privilege. “The first thing he
said to me is that it doesn’t exist,” Mr. Galligan recalled. He then asked his father
if he had ever been scared while walking at night, or while reaching into the glove
box after getting pulled over by the police.
He said his father had not.
“That is your white privilege,” Mr. Galligan said he told him.
One of Ms. Groves’s friends, who is Black, said Ms. Groves had personally
apologized for the video long before it went viral. Once it did in June, the friend
defended Ms. Groves online, prompting criticism from strangers and fellow
students. “We’re supposed to educate people,” she wrote in a Snapchat post,
“not ruin their lives all because you want to feel a sense of empowerment.”
For his role, Mr. Galligan said he had no regrets. “If I never posted that video,
nothing would have ever happened,” he said. And because the internet never
forgets, the clip will always be available to watch.

“I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” he said with satisfaction.
“You taught someone a lesson.” ▪

Think Tank in the Tank
I spent two decades writing for City Journal, and I cherished it and the Manhattan
Institute’s independence. Then came the Trump era.
Sol Stern | DemocracyJournal.org | Jul 7, 2020
In June 2015, as Donald Trump descended the gilded escalator to declare his
candidacy for President of the United States, I was completing my second
decade as a senior writer for City Journal, the flagship publication of the
conservative Manhattan Institute. Trump’s announcement hardly registered on
our magazine’s radar screen. We dealt only with serious issues. This wasn’t
serious.
After Trump improbably emerged as a leading contender for the Republican
nomination, City Journal took notice with a scathing review by Heather Mac
Donald, perhaps our most talented and prolific writer. “While the Republican
establishment deserves its comeuppance, the fallout to the country at large of a
Trump presidency would likely be as dire as his critics predict,” Mac Donald
wrote. “Trump is the embodiment of what the Italians call ‘maleducato’— poorly
raised, ill-bred. Indeed, judging by the results, his upbringing seems to have
involved no check whatsoever on the crudest male instincts for aggression and
humiliation.”
I assumed that other critiques—including mine—would soon appear in the
magazine. I pitched an article about Trump’s hate-filled campaign rallies to our
editor Brian Anderson. “We’re steering clear of that now,” he responded, no
explanation offered. Thus, as the candidate least tethered to the free-market
principles the Manhattan Institute was founded on surged toward the Republican
nomination, he became almost unmentionable in the pages of City Journal.
It was baffling to me, but I decided to shrug it off and, instead, published pieces
at the Daily Beast and New York Daily News warning about the destructiveness
of Trump’s grievance-based, populist movement. Since there was virtually no

chance Trump would actually win the presidency, I consoled myself that this too
would pass.
After the shock of the election results sunk in I assumed that City Journal couldn’t
just ignore the danger to the country now emanating from the highest office in the
land. Once again I was naïve. Writers who wanted to sound the alarm about the
new President were still muzzled; in fact, the magazine published a number of
articles welcoming the Trump ascendancy. Even Heather Mac Donald now
allowed that, bad character and all, Trump was doing the right thing on important
issues like law enforcement and immigration.
At this point I became convinced there was editorial interference coming from the
boardroom. Two suspects came to mind. The first was the Manhattan Institute’s
chairman, Paul Singer. The hedge fund billionaire was the Board of Trustees’
biggest yearly donor ($525,000 in 2016) as well as one of the Republican Party’s
most generous and influential funders. During the primary season Singer went all
in for Marco Rubio, even warning that if “[Trump] gets elected president it’s close
to a guarantee of a global depression.” Singer then secretly bankrolled an anti-
Trump opposition research project conducted for The Washington Free
Beacon by Fusion GPS, the same firm that later was hired by the Clinton
campaign and produced the infamous Steele dossier.
The November electoral earthquake forced Singer to make amends. He
contributed $1,000,000 to the Trump inauguration and paid an atonement visit to
the White House. After the meeting, President Trump thanked Singer “for being
here and for coming up to the office. He was a very strong opponent, and now
he’s a very strong ally.” Singer then began contributing to Trump’s political war
chest.
Second, the number two donor among the trustees ($450,000) was Rebekah
Mercer, daughter of another hedge-fund billionaire, Robert Mercer. Ms. Mercer
was the principle funder of Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, the country’s most
prominent media purveyor of coy white nationalism. Breitbart once launched a
vicious attack on Manhattan Institute board member William Kristol, calling him a
“renegade Jew.” Meanwhile Rebekah Mercer called Bannon “one of the greatest
living defenders of liberty.”

CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 16 | Page 18

After initially supporting Ted Cruz, Mercer switched Republican horses. She and
her father poured more than $15 million into the Trump campaign—twice as
much as the next highest donor. After the party convention she advised Trump to
dump Paul Manafort as campaign chairman and hire Steve Bannon—a strategic
move that some observers thought helped carry Trump to victory in November.
Bannon became a senior advisor to the President, and Mercer was named to a
key position on the executive committee for the Trump transition.
I could see the writing on the wall. It wasn’t the first time that I was blocked from
writing about some issues because of pressure from donors. But this was
different. The board’s top two funders were now entangled with a presidency that
I believed was a national catastrophe in the making. To remain at City
Journal would mean accepting that my once cherished magazine had moved
from standing on the sidelines while Trump captured the Republican Party—
troubling enough—to legitimizing the new President’s disruptive right-wing
populism. Since I had no way of protesting City Journal’s capitulation to Trump
from within the ranks, I decided to break ranks.
In October 2017, I submitted my letter of resignation to Brian Anderson and to
the Manhattan Institute’s president Larry Mone, with copies sent to six of the
magazine’s veteran writers. The action I was taking, I wrote, “now seems to be
the only way for me to protest the magazine’s intellectual abdication on the most
urgent crisis facing the nation today; the election of an unfit, dangerous man to
the presidency.”
I also protested the role of Rebekah Mercer on the Board of Trustees, calling her
“an accomplice in one of the most malignant political movements in the country
[who] has weaponized what Steve Bannon calls his ‘killing machine,’ now
wreaking havoc inside the Republican Party and trying to destroy the decent
conservatism that first drew me to City Journal.”
Almost three years later, I find myself locked down in the midst of an American
public health emergency turned far more deadly because of President Trump’s
character flaws, his serial dishonesty, and his self-dealing, exacerbated by his
Administration’s demonstrable incompetence. Anyone can easily review the
tapes to see that Trump first poured gasoline on the flames of the pandemic by
denying its seriousness and then launching a brazen disinformation campaign to

convince the American people that everything he did (or declined to do) was
“perfect.”
Donald Trump came to Washington promising to “drain the swamp.” Instead he
drained the federal government of talent and institutional memory (see Michael
Lewis’s prescient book, The Fifth Risk) while turning the White House into a
sewer of corruption. Americans looking for a competent national government to
lead the response to the pandemic discovered that (apologies to Gertrude Stein)
“there is no there there.”
It’s useless to continue blaming Trump alone for the country’s predicament. He is
who he is, which is exactly who he was and will always be. The same 22-year-old
who dodged the draft by lying about his medical status went on to become the
commander-in-chief who went AWOL during a dire national emergency.
Trump’s lack of fitness for the presidency was entirely predictable. What was
unforeseen was the moral collapse in the face of the gathering storm by
conservative activists and intellectuals. The Trump seduction happened at so
many distinguished conservative thought centers and magazines that it led some
Never Trumpers like Max Boot to conclude retrospectively that there was
something amiss in the DNA of American conservatism that made the movement
susceptible to a repellent figure like Trump. Others conservative opponents of
Trump have argued that Trump’s conquest of their movement is a historical
aberration and continue to hope for the revival of decent conservatism.
I will leave it to future historians to fully explain Trump’s success in high jacking
American conservatism. What follows is, instead, the story of what I witnessed at
one reputable conservative institution, a think tank where donor money weighed
heavily and writers were prohibited from writing about certain subjects—which
culminated in my former colleagues’ intellectual surrender to Trumpism.
The Manhattan Institute for Policy Studies opened its doors in midtown
Manhattan in 1978. The founders were an odd pair: a wealthy former Battle of
Britain fighter pilot and businessman named Antony Fisher and Wall Street
powerhouse William Casey (who soon became Ronald Reagan’s CIA director).
Fisher was a disciple of Friedrich A. Hayek, author of the classical economics
tract The Road to Serfdom. He established a British think tank promoting Hayek’s
ideal of a rules-based, international order of free market, open societies.

Partnering with Bill Casey, Fisher had the audacity to launch a version of the
Hayekian think tank in the belly of the beast of modern, welfare-state liberalism.
My own journey to the Manhattan Institute likewise followed a somewhat unusual
path. In 1965 I was a UC Berkeley graduate student caught up in the campus
Free Speech Movement. I then abandoned my doctoral studies to join the radical
muckraking magazine Ramparts, where I wrote about the counter-culture and the
anti-war movement, and covered the riotous 1968 presidential campaign. My
biggest hit for the magazine was an investigative piece exposing the CIA’s secret
funding of the National Student Association that garnered the George Polk award
for journalism.
After an internal coup at Ramparts the new editors steered the magazine even
closer to the radical left. They made common cause with Tom Hayden, the
firebrand anti-war leader who met with the Vietnamese communists and was now
urging the protest movement to “bring the war back home.” That was a bridge too
far for me, and I drifted away from the magazine.
Continuing my career as a freelance journalist, I wrote frequently for The New
York Times Magazine in the 1970s and reported for the paper on the Yom Kippur
war from the Golan Heights. I also served as the Israel correspondent for
the New Statesman. In the 1980s I was a regular contributor to The Village
Voice.
The Voice had a deserved reputation as one of the more provocative and radical
publications in New York journalism, but in my day it was also admirably open to
diverse points of view. I was among the more politically centrist of its writers,
sometimes even criticizing the liberal pieties of the other regulars at the paper. In
my writing I was gradually evolving toward a moderate conservatism. For my
tastes, my old comrades on the left had now turned too anti-anti-communist and
unjustly critical of Israel.
In 1996, I published a long-form essay in City Journal about the success of the
city’s Catholic schools. The piece argued for expanding school-choice programs,
including vouchers, that would allow poor children stuck in failing public schools
to attend parochial schools that worked. My article was excerpted in The Wall
Street Journal, and New York Times columnist John Tierney soon wrote that I
had “started the current debate” over school choice in New York City.

Within a few months I became a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and
contributing editor of City Journal—the first time since leaving Ramparts that I
was getting a regular paycheck for my journalism. At the institute’s gala
fundraising dinner later that year, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Roger
Hertog, cited my writing on education as an example of the contributions the
institute’s “scholars” were making to the city.
City Journal gave me a second life in journalism and apparently I was even
having some influence. Because of my reporting on the city’s awful labor contract
with the teacher’s union, I was asked to serve as an informal adviser to the
Giuliani administration as it prepared to negotiate a new agreement with the
United Federation of Teachers. I knew my articles were having an impact when
union president Randi Weingarten denounced me as a “demagogue” in the UFT
newspaper.
I attributed a lot of my success to Myron Magnet, City Journal’s editor during my
first decade at the magazine. With his side whiskers, horn-rimmed glasses, and
impeccable striped suits, he looked like a character out of Dickens. He was the
best editor I ever had, exacting in his standards while nevertheless encouraging
me to take on almost any subject that piqued my interest.
I cherished our magazine’s lively editorial meetings with talented writers and
public intellectuals such as Heather Mac Donald, Kay Hymowitz, Fred Siegel,
and Steve Malanga. Half the writers and editors around the table had PhDs or
J.D.s, and the sessions sometimes felt like a graduate-school seminar in the
history of ideas.
Magnet was fiercely protective of City Journal’s editorial independence. One
year, at the magazine’s holiday party, held at the luxurious east side home of a
Manhattan Institute trustee, our editor gave a little talk in which he cited one of
my articles criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stewardship of the city’s public
schools. The problem was that the mayor had been invited to the party and was
standing within earshot of Magnet. Bloomberg asked for his coat and left in a
huff. The scuttlebutt after the party was that some members of the institute’s
Board of Trustees were not thrilled that our editor had dissed the richest man in
New York.

The Manhattan Institute’s annual budget ($22 million by the time I resigned)
came almost entirely from conservative foundations or our wealthy trustees, all
receiving hefty tax deductions under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue
Code. I assumed that the big donors would have some influence on the general
direction of the institute. It didn’t occur to me that this might also extend to the
editorial content of City Journal. During Myron Magnet’s tenure it never did—at
least I didn’t see any evidence that it did.
Then, one day in 2007, without any warning, Magnet was out of the editor’s chair.
His abrupt dismissal at a time when City Journal was flourishing felt ominous, in
part because it was never explained or even officially announced by the
Manhattan Institute’s management. Yet it was common knowledge among the
senior writers that Magnet’s relations with some of the trustees had soured,
apparently because he had fought too hard to maintain the magazine’s
independence.
Magnet himself declined to discuss the affair. He was kept on as a Manhattan
Institute senior fellow, was still listed as editor at large on the masthead, and
continued writing for the magazine. But he never showed up again at our monthly
editorial meetings. Brian Anderson, Magnet’s deputy, was immediately appointed
as City Journal’s new editor.
The erosion of City Journal’s editorial independence might be dated from
Magnet’s dismissal, but it didn’t happen overnight. Anderson had apprenticed
under Magnet, was a serious public intellectual and writer in his own right, and
seemed as committed as his mentor was to the magazine’s tradition of freedom
for its writers.
Our new editor was soon tested on that score. For the Winter 2008 issue, he
gave me the green light to write a long, somewhat revisionist essay on education
reform titled “School Choice Isn’t Enough.” I reported on the mounting evidence
showing that poor kids in urban districts with robust voucher programs hadn’t
made the academic gains we had hoped for. I urged the school reform
movement to get behind a grade-by-grade, knowledge-based curriculum such as
the one championed by the education theorist E.D. Hirsch.
The Manhattan Institute’s President Larry Mone had a small temper tantrum after
the article was published. It wasn’t that Mone objected to my piece on the merits,

but according to two staff members I spoke with, he was rattled by the phone
calls he received from donors expressing concern that the institute was backing
away from all-out support of voucher programs. Sharply critical letters, some
accusing me of apostasy, arrived at the magazine from leading figures in the
school-choice movement.
Anderson handled the matter deftly. He posted my original article as well as all of
the critical letters, plus supporting letters from Hirsch and the education historian
Diane Ravitch, as well as my own extended response on the magazine’s
website. I thought this was exactly what a magazine of ideas was supposed to
do—engage in a serious conversation about serious issues.
Anderson’s judgment appeared to be vindicated when I was contacted by New
York Times education reporter Jennifer Medina. She told me she was writing
about the reaction to my City Journal article within the school reform movement.
Naturally I was delighted, and we set a time and place for an interview.
Larry Mone wasn’t happy at all. He told me he was worried that further coverage
of the school-choice debate would stir the pot again and remind the donors about
my heretical ideas. Mone even tried, unsuccessfully, to coax me into backing out
of the scheduled meeting with Medina.
The Times’s profile turned out to be complimentary, describing me as a
“contrarian” whose ideas on education were “heard” at Mike Bloomberg’s City
Hall. But it was also good for the Manhattan Institute, or so I thought. After all, the
country’s leading liberal newspaper was showcasing a conservative think tank
honoring its principles, allowing its writers the freedom to have second thoughts
and engage in relevant debates about important public policy issues.
Once again, I felt somewhat reassured about City Journal’s editorial
independence. But the feeling didn’t last very long. The following year I received
the go-ahead from Anderson to write a review essay focused on Charles
Murray’s recently released book, Real Education. My proposed article seemed
like a no-brainer because Murray was a legendary figure at the Manhattan
Institute. His first book, Losing Ground, written while he was a senior fellow at the
institute in 1984, had a big impact on the national debate about welfare policy
and also helped establish the new think tank’s reputation. (The Manhattan

Institute declined to back Murray’s next controversial book, The Bell Curve, but
that’s part of another story.)
I thought Murray’s new book deserved attention because it challenged the
“educational romanticism” behind many current reform ideas (including school
choice) for improving schools. In commenting on Murray’s analysis, I reiterated
my view that it was unrealistic to expect that voucher programs alone would
magically transform American K-12 education and reduce the racial achievement
gap.
Anderson did a final edit on my piece, pronounced it “very powerful,” and
scheduled it for the Winter 2009 issue. A few days before the magazine was set
to go to print, I received an e-mail from Anderson informing me that he was
getting “a nervous reaction from higher-ups, which could cause some problems,”
and that he was being summoned to an urgent meeting with Larry Mone.
In Anderson’s office the next day I was informed by Howard Husock, the
Manhattan Institute’s vice president for research and a former Harvard professor,
that my article had been spiked. He told me that the article was too pessimistic
and that “M.I. is for vouchers and school choice,” full stop.
Five years later, I hit another pothole, this time over a book I’d written defending
the Common Core education standards. Even though the institute had nothing to
do with my arrangement with the publisher, several high-level staff members
obtained the galleys prior to the book’s publication in order to scrutinize it for
another possible act of heresy. They discovered that my text criticized some
conservatives who had reflexively rejected the Common Core standards on the
dubious grounds that they had been forced on America’s schools by the Obama
Administration. Executive Vice President Vanessa Mendoza was disturbed that
one of the critics I took issue with was conservative icon George Will.
In a telephone conversation, Mendoza told me that since Will had been “a good
friend” of the institute, I should cut or change the passage. I refused to make the
change.
Two months later, I was removed as a Manhattan Institute senior fellow without
any explanation. I stayed on as a City Journal contributing editor and continued

to write for the magazine and the website. Not, however, on school choice. And
never about candidate Trump or President Trump.
The Winter 2017 issue of City Journal came out a few days before Donald
Trump’s inauguration. The lead article, by the military historian and classicist,
Victor Davis Hanson, was titled “Trump and The American Divide.” In my view,
the essay was a clever exercise in historicism in which Trump’s emergence as
tribune for millions of culturally besieged Americans living in the heartland
appears almost inevitable. Trump is rendered morally legitimate, despite his
personal flaws, because he is propelled by a historic resurgence of American
populism. As in Hanson’s more polemical defenses of Trump, he sprinkled
his City Journal essay with learned references to major figures in Greek and
Roman antiquity—Theocritus, Virgil, Thucydides, Cicero, Plato, and the
Pythagoreans—intended to steamroll less erudite readers into accepting Trump’s
rise in the aura of precedence.
Hanson’s essay was certainly worthy of further debate. But, by this time, there
was no discussion allowed in City Journal about this critical issue for the country.
The historical validation of Trump thus became our magazine’s default position.
For a journal of ideas, this was a dereliction of duty.
Nobody asked me, but if I had been asked, I would have said that this also
represented a betrayal of the Hayekian principles that the Manhattan Institute
was founded on. F.A. Hayek abhorred populist movements of both the left and
right. The good society, he insisted, was built on property rights, free markets,
and free trade. Beyond these essential economic arrangements, Hayek stressed
the need for the rule of law, freedom of expression, and the slow, steady process
of parliamentary give and take. Hayek also happened to be a confirmed globalist.
Not exactly the values that Donald Trump was bringing to the White House.
For the next few months, I agonized about what to do about the conspiracy of
silence at my magazine. I expressed my displeasure a few times directly to Brian
Anderson and a few other writers, but with no apparent effect. As President
Trump continued to demonstrate his lack of fitness for office, I knew I had to
make a more forceful statement.
In my October 2017 resignation letter I expressed hope that there might still be
an internal conversation about City Journal’s political direction in the Trump era.

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