“He did nothing wrong. He was afraid for his life. I commend him for his actions.” The essence of this opinion, about ex-McKinney, Texas, police officer Eric Casebolt, has been expressed by many, including talk-radio giant Mark Levin. But the verbatim quotation above was in reality authored by high-school principal Alberto Iber (shown).
Actually, make that former high-school principal — Iber was just fired for rendering his opinion.
Iber’s view, posted on Facebook, certainly isn’t the politically correct one. It may not even be the correct one — that’s a matter for debate. But some might say removing him from his position as head of North Miami Senior High school smacks of the same mentality that calls for criminal charges against climate realists. We already have supposedly “settled science,” based completely on the very unscientific thing called consensus. Do we also now have “settled” positions on perhaps poorly understood current events, so settled, in fact, that deviation from them should mean career destruction?
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Ironically, it seems that consensus is precisely what did Iber in. As GOPUSA wrote, citing an official commenting on Iber’s removal, “‘Judgment is the currency of honesty,’ said Superintendent of Schools Alberto Carvalho. ‘Insensitivity — intentional or perceived — is both unacceptable and inconsistent with our policies….’ At North Miami Senior High, 99 percent of students are minorities. A majority of residents in the city of North Miami, in Northeast Miami-Dade, are black.”
Given that different people have different “perceived sensitivities,” does Superintendent Carvalho’s comment imply that his response to Iber’s opinion might have been different if the district were 99 percent white? Is this merely mob rule dressed up as justice?
It should be noted that Iber’s comments contained neither racial epithets nor profanity, yet school officials nonetheless said his “behavior” did not represent “the school district’s core values.” But what would these include? That an employee may not soberly express a minority interpretation of a news story during his private time?
And this minority opinion isn’t unheard of among minorities. Just consider the following Facebook post by black talk-show host Benet Embry, who is local to the McKinney area:
The day after posting the above, Embry appeared on Fox News’ Hannity and again contradicted the McKinney demonstrators’ racial narrative. The result?
“Activists” are now demanding he be fired by his Dallas-area video-broadcast station.
Perhaps Embry is “insensitive,” too, and sensitivity is all the rage. Or is it? It certainly wasn’t the same priority in the case of assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies Saida Grundy. It was discovered last month how she’d tweeted that undergraduate white males are a “problem population” and that “slavery is a *YALL* [white] thing”; and that she lamented she couldn’t avoid spending money in white-owned businesses on Martin Luther King Day. Even more damnably, it was later learned that she had viciously and mercilessly taunted a white rape victim on Facebook. The response of her new employer, Boston University?
While its president said he was “disappointed” by her tweets, he defended her “right to hold and express her opinions.” And she’s still scheduled to begin her B.U. professorship July 1.
So, too, with the case of Jacqueline Warwick, a professor of musicology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was revealed early this year that at a panel discussion at the university she stated that men should not be “allowed to speak first” in class. She also is still employed and is deemed fit to mold young minds.
Of course, that different schools, regions, and countries will impose different “core values” is accepted. Or is it? This certainly wasn’t the case with San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and the Catholic schools he oversees. Earlier this year he expressed his desire to “codify a long-standing, commonsense expectation that Catholic schoolteachers in his diocese uphold and display public integrity regarding Catholic teachings on a wide variety of topics,” as Lifesite News wrote. But the idea that Catholic schools would be Catholic was shocking to many. Lifesite also reported that because of the move, “[g]ay activists, politicians and dissident Catholics have launched an all-out media attack campaign against the archbishop.” This included an official resolution by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors condemning the Catholic standards as “contrary to shared San Francisco values,” and a threat of legal action by the city. In addition, eight California legislators penned a letter stating that the Catholic standards conflicted “with settled areas of law”; and were “discriminatory,” intolerant, “divisive,” and constituted a violation of “civil rights.”
So what’s the common thread in all these cases of teachers and their tongues? It’s not respecting institutions’ right to impose their own “core values,” as there’s an effort to deny this even to private schools (not to mention Christian bakers and florists). It’s not academic freedom or freedom of speech, as this has been denied to Alberto Iber and others. Nor is it tolerance or inclusiveness. These principles are only trotted out when it serves a certain end.
That would be the real common thread: Enforcement of a left-wing orthodoxy.
This is increasingly evident everywhere. It’s why former Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran was terminated for expressing the traditional Christian view of sexuality, why ex-Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was forced to step down for supporting marriage, why the Red Cross expelled a 20-year volunteer for opposing faux marriage, and it’s why a Swedish man was fired from his job simply for opposing immigration anonymously online.
What’s going on here? National Review’s Ian Tuttle put it well when commenting on Embry and others persecuted in the wake of the McKinney incident, writing:
This is not about “justice”; it’s about crushing the enemy beneath their [leftists] holy heel. Progressives have chosen an ideology of total warfare. They aren’t satisfied with compromise. They aren’t satisfied with surrender. They aren’t satisfied until they are roaming the conquered countryside shooting survivors.
And since progressives’ battle lines are always bounding forward, eventually everyone will end up in the crosshairs.
And this accords with the history of leftism. French Revolution instigator Maximilien Robespierre — one of the first modern leftists (the political terms “left” and “right” originated with the French Revolution) — started killing so many people who disagreed with him that former allies, fearing their own demise, eventually sent him to the guillotine. Later in history, this absolutist spirit was well articulated by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who said, “We will destroy every enemy, even if he is an Old Bolshevik, we will destroy his kin, his family. Anyone who by his actions or thoughts encroaches on the unity of the socialist state, we shall destroy relentlessly.”
This is no doubt why atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, hardly a traditionalist, once warned, “Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.”
And today, in America, liberal institutions reign.
