> Luckily, another co-author on the book has spent a lot of time pondering inclusion, women’s rights, children’s rights, and free speech. Her name is Nadine Strossen and her credentials run deep. She served as the first female President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), America’s largest and oldest civil liberties nonprofit, from 1991 to 2008. When she stepped down as President, three Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell luncheon (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter). Strossen is a Professor Emeritus at New York Law School and currently an advisor to the EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the ACLU, and Heterodox Academy. She is the author of the widely acclaimed books HATE: Why we should fight it with speech not censorship (2018) and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (1995). She has far too many awards, publications, and prominent appearances to name.
A credential sheet of PC accolades long enough to whip a horse shouldn't be required to publicly disagree with the ideology of Google and ACLU without being fired.
It shouldn't be, but it surely helps to not be eaten by piranhas immediately. Somebody without this kind of shield - especially somebody, say, having a misfortune of being a male and of European descent - might be. I personally have been told many times that I do not get to have opinion about cancel culture and ideology because of my identity. Having credentials that even PC zealots can't deny surely helps to make it harder to dismiss her.
> I do not get to have opinion about cancel culture and ideology because of my identity
That works both ways, you can ignore them back because they are of a different identity (as they insist) and they are biased against your own identity.
I have already begun to doubt the papers of woke scientists in the last year. If they are not inclusive they are not worth my time. For example a researcher raising scandal on racial bias had a paper where she excluded the Asians, not even a mention. She was only watching for her own and the token whites for baseline. Why should I take her seriously? She's not fighting for my good. It would have been a different story if she was including everyone's good in her agenda.
Well, as a private matter I am certainly going to ignore their claims that my identity somehow automatically makes my opinions invalid. The sad truth, however, is that they have much more clout currently in many of our society's institutions - like the academia, the education, the press, the administrative state - that people, who, like myself and many other, smarter and more prominent people in the past, thought that identity is not what defines right or wrong. Now, in many cases, it does, at least when the political and institutional power is concerned.
> Why should I take her seriously?
You and I may not. But people who distribute grants, academic positions, book deals, who compose curricula and who make political decisions - would. That's the problem. And until the cultural norm is forged to make this not happen, the problem will continue.
I don't think academics like this one somehow convinced wealthy donors to support their work and starve all other work. I think the people who have come into wealth recently are pushing their agenda for political reasons independent of what academics discover.
> I personally have been told many times that I do not get to have opinion about cancel culture and ideology because of my identity.
Yeah, what's up with that? I guess people are supposed to shut up, stop thinking about this stuff and just accept whatever they say as gospel because they are right and just and can do no wrong.
Working with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is definitely not a “PC allocade”. They are the main organization that tries, from a legal perspective, to protect people from being canceled for their speech at colleges in the US.
Nor is heterodox academy (I'd categorize it as essentially the opposite). She's certainly well credentialed, and worth listening to, but not, at all, because she's "PC".
Yup I recently donated to FIRE as they're an organization that seems more important now than ever. If anyone else is interested go to thefire.org/donate.
A credential sheet of PC accolades long enough to whip a horse shouldn't be required to publicly disagree with the ideology of Google and ACLU without being fired.