BTW, in case people do not understand how much fascism is wrapped up in gender politics, I present this absurd article:

https://www.21cir.com/alexander-dugin-ukrainians-are-collective-transgenders/

I think you give the game away when you ask if I know what ‘important rights’ are, so much so that everything in your comment before and after is best interpreted as a kind of nihilism, not a real attempt to grapple with the rights or principles in play, on the merits.

No, actually, I was just being sarcastic, about the incredibly limited imaginations of privileged people who cannot conceive of actual right violations, so instead they glom on to 'Someone said something and other people got angry'.

Being invited to speaking at a university is not a right at all. No one has a right to be platformed by the government. At all. Ever. It's a privilege.

Now, the government is indeed also forbidden from discriminating based on viewpoints in how it hands out privileges (Something to remember when we're talking about visa.), but if we are going to judge _this_ sort of viewpoint judgement on government platforms as a right violation, we need to understand that this happens near continuously, in literally every context that the government platforms a speaker.

In fact, 'guest speaker at a college' is one of the few circumstances where content of their speech is not the determining factor to their platform in the first place! Usually the government explicitly platforms someone because they knew exactly what that person would say.

There is something very suspicious this specific form of platforming is the violation of someone's right. Surely the fact that a person _invited to give the commencement speech_ is going to talk only on topics the school wants and is picked because of of holding that position is even more discriminatory based on viewpoint!

Surely we should be complaining about that! I'm not sure how to make it fair, there are practical time limitations, but perhaps everyone who wants could enter their name and we randomly select half a dozen speakers to do five minutes. (You may notice that something like this is how it works in the very few places that the government does, without restriction, platform people, like city council meetings.)

See how dumb this is? There is no free speech access to a government platform.

You can make coherent arguments that colleges should platform people with various political positions as part of academic freedom and exposing students to ideas. But you cannot make that argument they have a _right_ to be platformed on any coherent first amendment grounds.

It is not “illegal”. However as a condition to entering this country we make immigrants sign legal docs saying they don’t support terrorism.

We do not. We make them sign documents that say they do not provide material support to terrorists, and that they are not member of terrorist groups. Material support, in case it is unclear, is providing money or other resources.

There is absolutely no legal prohibition on expressing support for terrorists on people entering the United States.

As we can tell by the fact these people have not been detained and their visas and green cards were not revoked by claiming this.

We know what part of the law they were removed under, one of the questioned (I mean, literally, courts have questioned it, just never have grounds to remove it) clauses where the US government can remove people because they cause political complications for the US government.

Not because they support terrorism.

They are not being removed for supporting terrorism, and it is absurd we are talking as if that is the question. The US government is claiming that in _press conferences_, and then claiming other things in actual legal documents, and we really, really, REALLY need to start understanding that when Trump makes legal claims in press conferences and then doesn't make them in court, those legal claims were utterly baseless.

That should be the default behavior after over a decade of Trump: If he says something related to the law, but then goes to court and say something else, we need to stop pretending the legal thing he said before going to court has any meaning at all! That's not a real thing! He made it up!

A decade of this, people!

...did you just compare firing this guy to 9/11?

Like, that's the only logical way to read what you said, right?

American's actions in the middle east is to 9/11 as this guy writing an column is to this guy getting fired

This is astonishingly trite, but also, wow. That's really where you're going with that, huh?

Yes, Jaybird, actions that people do can cause other people to do things to them. Weirdly, that doesn't mean that all responses are justified by all actions, or that all actions are justified.

Why do you think supporting terrorism via _speech_ is illegal and the government can punish people for that _speech_? Also, would you like to explain exactly how that is defined in such a way that the government cannot simply declare anything it wants as terrorism?

There are people in this country running around with flags indicating support of an unlawful government that illegally seized control of part of America in furtherance of an ideology that enslaved and terrorized a population for centuries, and then, for the next century, proceeded to commit acts of terror against that same population, and anyone who supported them.

Do you think we should deport those people? I know I've joked about having the National Guard called out to carefully detain those people and explain the Civil War is over and they need to lay down their muskets, but that was a joke.

Also, and just to be clear: Chuchill did not support terrorism, in any manner, although it's unclear what you even would hypothetically think that means. He pointed out that 9/11 was basically a logical outcome of US foreign policy, have if we're going to keep bombing them, they're eventually going to start bombing us, a thing that quite a lot of people at the time pointed out.

He just did pointed that out without carefully rephrasing, in every sentence, how it was still some horrific tragedy that should not have happened and he is in no way saying it was justified. This was apparently the required standard at the time, and he didn't do it.

But he did not, at point, say 'You should give them money or material support or go join them' or anything like that.

It’s among the reasons that trying to treat everything from FedSoc judges or jurists to conservative provacateurs to just normal liberals who don’t toe the line on some issue or another as safety threats was so self evidently a mistake from the outset. Anyone with a memory longer than a nat could see where this was going. People at these places are reaping what they spent 15 or so years sowing.

People at college protesting speakers for the content of their speech is not, and never will be, even vaguely in the category of the US government revoking visas and detaining people for the content of their speech.

The fact 'for the content of their speech' is in both those doesn't make them the same thing. Protesters at a university are the sort of the entities that have speech rights, like the right to protest others, under the constitution, whereas the US government is the entity that is restricted under the constitution.

People like him and numerous pro-Palestinian/Israel skeptical types were in many ways the OG victims of 21st century cancelation campaigns.

So, to be clear: The thing that happened for the past 20 years is that people that the left disagreed with were 'canceled', in the sense that sometimes they were not given a specific large platform, or a platform at a college. This rarely actually happened, and generally what happened is protestors tried to stop it but failed. But some of them did, manage to heckler veto things, at which point those people were generally given much larger platforms talking about how they were canceled.

Meanwhile, we have Ward Churchhill, someone who did lose his job, because, fun fact, when the right attacks you, you do actually lose your job. We also have Canary Mission running around making sure that anyone with pro-Palestine positions, or that merely criticism the behavior of Israel, do not get jobs.

Somehow you've even managed to mention FedSoc judges in there. I feel this is extremely obvious, but judges are not canceled. They are, indeed, in position of authority in society. It's the opposite of being canceled. The fact people are complaining about them is not harm.

This entire discussion is just willful inability to look the _actual results_ of the behavior of the sides, and notice that one side actually is able to get people 'canceled' in a meaningful sense, as in ruin their life, and the other is mostly able to get universities to hire slightly more security people and very rarely force people to change venues for their massive speaking engagements.

The irony about the Niemoller quote that’s the subject of this piece is itself head spinning. When was the last time someone worked up about the current environment prominently stood up for the rights of someone they disagreed with, just on the principle of the thing?

...There is an idea, among conservatives and a bunch of liberals too, that the only rights of people are being able to spew their ideas in whatever location they want, into the faces of people who are already there. Maybe that is a right, I don't know, and I don't particularly care.

But if it is a right, it's a pretty unimportant one, as opposed to the all the people who think it is The Most Important one. Because conservatives seem to think that is where rights start and end. Mostly because literally no other rights of theirs have ever been threatened. The worst thing that ever happens to them is people get mad when they say things. And sometimes get mad enough that those people try to stop them! Oh noes!

Do you know what actual important rights are? Things like not having your healthcare forbidden by law, and the ability to get housing and jobs despite who you are, and not being shot by the police. Oh, and ability to vote, that's also important. Those are all more much important than having the ability to make a speech in one specific place and not having people yelling over them, especially when they can literally just go somewhere else and give that speech. (Unlike the other side, which gets detained and eventually deported for op-eds.)

You may notice there's no consideration of whether or not those people agree or disagree with me politically in there, because the thing under discussion is nothing to do with political beliefs. I don't know their political beliefs!

In fact, in any sort of rational politics, what people want from the government is what we talk about, not the political beliefs of the people who want those things.

You think being undone by the courts means the Trump Administration isn't fascism?

Fascism currently slightly constrained by other parts of the government from doing individual actions is still a fascist administration.

I have little respect for “process” arguments because we wouldn’t apply them in other situations.

It really boggles the mind how we are in a world where Canary Mission is getting students kicked out of school and deported for writing this op-ed:

https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj

and you are standing there pretending this is something that would normally get students kicked out of school if it was about anyone but Jews. At least, that is what I understand you are saying.

When in reality, it wouldn't get anyone kicked out of school _except_ pro-Palestinian people. Who _are_, in the actual world, getting deported.

Is Columbia and Trump’s crackdown of the pro-Palestinians the ‘Canary in the coalmine’ (link at bottom, their answer is “yes”) or is it a lot more reasonable?

Why are we asking about canaries when the Trump administration has asserted the right to detain people and ship them to foreign gulags without a trial of any sort?

If they can assert that someone, with no evidence or court proceeding, is not an American citizen and is a gang member, and ship them to an El Salvadorian gulag, then we are actually at fascism, we do not need to argue it is coming. In fact, even if they _aren't_ allowed to do that, even if the court stops them, it is still fascism. It is just a fascist executive that is very slightly constrained by courts.

And I frankly could care less watching Columbia actively destroy itself and every single ounce of respect anyone ever held for it. Because, frankly, it never deserved any of that to start with.

You want to talk about academic freedom, let's talk about it for the colleges that _don't_ instantly and cowardly cave.

The thing is, there was not one German far-right movements. There were multiple ones. Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Revolution#Currents

I will try to summarized a very complicated thing I barely understand.

There were the Young Conservatives, which seemed to just be...anti-modernism in the sense they were anti-democratic and pro-authoritarianism. Often very corporatism, often harken back to Divine Right. Think Peter Thiel and all the other techbros that seem very sure the best system of government is one where someone Really Smart is eternally in charge.

There were National Revolutionaries, who embraced modernity and just wanted a revolution for some reason, after which they were sure we'd be happy people with modern technology but simple lives. These guys eventually argued _against_ the Na.zis. There's not really an analog here. Honestly, these guys do not sound too far from modern 'normal' conservatives except they were slightly anti-capitalist.

And there was the group I focused on, the Völkisch, who came up with the base-level horrific part of Na.zi ideology, the idea that German blood belonged to German land, and vis versa, and everyone was not 'volk' was the problem. And part of volk was an understanding of gender roles.

But, anyway, to the question: The far-right didn't really care about queer people in the 1920s. They were much more into ultra-nationalism and nativism.

No one actually cared about them. Yes, there were laws against them, laws that at various times and places were implemented or ignored, but no one actually _cared_. Berlin was incredibly gay. You want to be gay in some small German town...well, people would probably pretty strongly suggest you move to Berlin.

I can't find any real information about how the rest of the German right felt about this, I suspect logically the Young Conservatives saw that as part of the modernity they despised, but I don't think they really did anything.

And same with the rest of the world, who were increasingly seeing queer people as an oddity, not a threat. The acceptance of gay people isn't a slope, it's a cycle. Indeed, the entire cycle would cycle, during the Great Depression, going back to presenting queer people as dangerous.

The Völkisch were _out of cycle_. Like I said, they were a reactionary movement, at least partially in reaction to social rules about gender loosening, which had just sorta hit Germany at the end of WWI.

The exact same reactionary movement that, once integrated into Na.zism, resulted death camps.

Like, there's a hypothetical Germany without the Völkisch, where the left falls to infighting and ultranationalism still takes over and they go to war again because of their war debts, but they _aren't_ genocidal lunatics. The Völkisch are the thing that makes fascism _fascism_, and not just general totalitarianism.

Incidentally, and with the intent of hopefully restricting it to just this thread and not the entire discussion: The lesbian I didn't mention, because it would dominate the discussion and also she was about a century earlier than when I was talking about, was Susan B Anthony.

Let's go, people. Fight me. But Google it first.

Thanks, and I really do have an essay in my head about how entangled feminism and gay rights have been over a century and a half, and a lot of the recent assertation about trans people versus women's right are absurdly ahistorical and seem to have an understanding of feminism that stopped in the 1920s, and they even managed to get _that_ wrong.

The problem is that I almost feel that's going to require me stepping through the entire history of feminist thought, explaining each wave of it and possibly also all of queer history and everything with it, so it's rather daunting.

I am desperately trying to figure out how to break those into pieces. Hopefully shorter than this, which was actually too long by like five paragraphs, but I really felt I needed to be overly sarcastic for a couple of paragraphs at the end just in case people missed the point somehow.