Journalists are enabling extremism by 'both-sides-ing' free speech row

[Nevilledog]

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/free-speech-stanford-law-school-kyle-duncan-controversy/

Having earned a Master’s and a PhD at Stanford University, I’m under no illusion that the place is a bastion of progressivism.

After all, Condoleezza Rice was the university’s provost from 1993 to 1999. She later returned to Stanford after her tenure as a warmongering villain in the George W Bush administration, and now heads its conservative Hoover Institution. And that same institution gave a lovely sinecure in 2007 to Donald Rumsfeld, Dubya’s former defence secretary and one of the handful of people even more directly responsible than Rice for the heinous torture and human rights abuses carried out by the US in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay.

In recent years, Stanford has been responding to concerns about political polarisation in the US by pushing notions of “intellectual diversity” (sometimes also called “ideological diversity” or “viewpoint diversity”), which essentially means taking extraordinary measures to make conservatives feel more included. Rice has played an important role in the relevant discussions at Stanford.

But polarisation has been fomented primarily by the increasingly uncompromising and authoritarian right, with bad-faith actors taking advantage of journalists’ impulse to treat ‘both sides’ of any controversy as legitimate. The resulting false equivalence that characterises the elite public sphere has led to the dangerous normalisation of extremism. It’s resurgent authoritarianism, rather than political polarisation, that represents the fundamental threat to democracy and human rights in the United States, and when institutions go out of their way to accommodate authoritarians, they undermine what legitimate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives do – levelling the playing field by by extending influence and representation to underrepresented groups.

Diversification of leadership in terms of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality and disability tends to bring with it a diversity of viewpoints that is lacking among powerful elites in a white man’s world. Calls for “intellectual diversity”, then, represent a coded reactionary effort to reclaim power by the beneficiaries of white patriarchal domination, who may feel oppressed by authentic diversification even though they are not.

*snip*