Today’s blacklisted American: Chief editor on Oklahoma State U’s student newspaper forced to resign for holding a dissenting opinion
No freedom of speech allowed at
Oklahoma State University.
The new dark age of silencing: Maddison Farris, the editor-in-chief for Oklahoma State U’s student newspaper The O’Colly was forced to resign her position after she wrote an op-ed opposing any mask mandate on campus and her fellow editors ganged up on her, demanding she leave.
Two days after publication the newspaper’s editorial board issued “a correction”, essentially condemning Farris’s op-ed. They followed this up two days later with a meeting where they demanded Farris resign.
Farris submitted a letter of “forced resignation,” explaining that she had been called into a September 13 meeting with the rest of the editors and pressed into leaving her post.
Farris told Campus Reform that although most students at Oklahoma State support free speech, but there is a “portion of students who value free speech until it makes them uncomfortable.”
More details here. It appears Farris wrote her op-ed as a result of being forced to leave a classroom because she would not wear a mask, even though the law apparently allows her to do so.
The second link also shows a screen capture of a subsequent letter, written by a teacher and published in The O’Colly and then quickly wiped from its website, that not only criticized Farris for her opinion but argued that she really doesn’t have the right to have one. Instead, she must bow to the opinions of others who think masks somehow protect you from COVID, though there is no science research that shows this.
Once again, this story illustrates starkly the oppressive future coming to America. It was the students at Oklahoma State who forced Farris to resign because they could not handle her opinion. And they were able to behave so intolerantly because they had the endorsement of the university faculty, including their teacher advisor, who apparently endorsed their decision to push Farris out because she had written something they disagreed with
In five to ten years these students will have entered society as full citizens having been taught that it is acceptable to blacklist someone for expressing opinions you disagree with. They have also been taught by the school that having a closed-mind is a good thing. Do not expect them to change significantly in the coming years. If anything, expect them to become more intolerant.
Once again I ask, why is the state of Oklahoma funding a school that teaches these oppressive ideas? Both houses in the state legislature as well as the governor are controlled by Republicans. Why are they all sitting on their hands and allowing such blacklisting to take place? They could very quickly take steps to stop it.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
No freedom of speech allowed at
Oklahoma State University.
The new dark age of silencing: Maddison Farris, the editor-in-chief for Oklahoma State U’s student newspaper The O’Colly was forced to resign her position after she wrote an op-ed opposing any mask mandate on campus and her fellow editors ganged up on her, demanding she leave.
Two days after publication the newspaper’s editorial board issued “a correction”, essentially condemning Farris’s op-ed. They followed this up two days later with a meeting where they demanded Farris resign.
Farris submitted a letter of “forced resignation,” explaining that she had been called into a September 13 meeting with the rest of the editors and pressed into leaving her post.
Farris told Campus Reform that although most students at Oklahoma State support free speech, but there is a “portion of students who value free speech until it makes them uncomfortable.”
More details here. It appears Farris wrote her op-ed as a result of being forced to leave a classroom because she would not wear a mask, even though the law apparently allows her to do so.
The second link also shows a screen capture of a subsequent letter, written by a teacher and published in The O’Colly and then quickly wiped from its website, that not only criticized Farris for her opinion but argued that she really doesn’t have the right to have one. Instead, she must bow to the opinions of others who think masks somehow protect you from COVID, though there is no science research that shows this.
Once again, this story illustrates starkly the oppressive future coming to America. It was the students at Oklahoma State who forced Farris to resign because they could not handle her opinion. And they were able to behave so intolerantly because they had the endorsement of the university faculty, including their teacher advisor, who apparently endorsed their decision to push Farris out because she had written something they disagreed with
In five to ten years these students will have entered society as full citizens having been taught that it is acceptable to blacklist someone for expressing opinions you disagree with. They have also been taught by the school that having a closed-mind is a good thing. Do not expect them to change significantly in the coming years. If anything, expect them to become more intolerant.
Once again I ask, why is the state of Oklahoma funding a school that teaches these oppressive ideas? Both houses in the state legislature as well as the governor are controlled by Republicans. Why are they all sitting on their hands and allowing such blacklisting to take place? They could very quickly take steps to stop it.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Bob: You are on point.
Now, I’m off point and I probably missed this being mentioned. Here is a link to a community mask study with over 340,000 participants.
https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/the-impact-of-community-masking-on-covid-19-a-cluster-randomized-trial-in-bangladesh/
Gary H: I looked at this study already, and found it very unconvincing. Note too that it is not peer reviewed.
I understood that it is in the process of being peer reviewed, but of course that is an easy claim to make and one that might be questioned when the results are already released to the public.
Their conclusions are pretty close to no finding in that cloth masks didn’t do much, surgical masks may have a 10% benefit and N-95 were not studied. Now, when you look at the mass non-compliance, the difficulty of obtaining good information and accounting for all other variables, it is amazing that they are able to say much at all about the results.
So, follow the science seems to point in many different directions, even when we aren’t discussing geology on Mars. This makes for a good subject for discussion in a school environment. For the left.. whoever this might be, this isn’t about opinion, or discussion. It is about control. Of course, you have pointed this out since you first discussed masks.
Robert asks: “Why is the state of Oklahoma funding a school that teaches these oppressive ideas? Both houses in the state legislature as well as the governor are controlled by Republicans.”
One answer is that they are cowards, but this is not the whole story.
At a deeper level, my suspicion it that despite everything that has happened in the last two years, most of them still haven’t a glimmer that we are in the midst of a Gramscian revolution / cultural civil war, and conservatives are losing. Moreover, as this is a battle of epistemology and first principles, they fail to understand that it is the very concept of free speech and its value in a free and open society that warrants such a fierce attack. Likewise — and. this is critically important — they see no connection between the radical left’s unrelenting attack on the foundations of American / Western civilization and today’s partisan politics. Free speech is under attack at our university? Well, *why* is that important, and why should we care about that? As opposed to, say, budgetary issues, it just doesn’t seem to be of much concern.
Unlike those who espouse the policies of the radical left, most of these “conservative” Republican legislators probably have no grounding in or real adherence to the foundational principles that they claim to represent, and they are thus all too happy to go along to get along until such time as they themselves are carried out by the mob. And even then, many of them still won’t “get it.” Indeed, in conversations with fellow Republicans, many of them seem strangely disconnected from any thought of the nexus between means and ends, as though their role is to promote only practical “pocketbook” issues to a dumbed down electorate*, and any mention, let alone support, of the underlying values that animate free societies is verboten.
*Who, they believe, are barely bright enough to connect rising gas prices with Biden Administration polices, and they have no attachment at all to the American Experiment, love for their country, or a desire to act as responsible citizens. For more along these lines, see Victor Davis Hanson’s new book:
https://www.amazon.com/Dying-Citizen-Progressive-Globalization-Destroying/dp/154164753X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&hvadid=78477809790249&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=victor+davis+hanson+books&qid=1633448120&sr=8-1
In World War II and the Cold War, most people had a pretty good idea of the salient differences between their society and the kind of civilization that their enemies were planning for them, and that understanding was enough to spur vigorous opposition. In the legislative chambers of Oklahoma, I would posit that such an awareness of dangers of the radical, anti-American agenda of the left are hardly even whispered about, and such things as the attack on free speech hardly merit a lifted eyebrow. When I was in high school, in addition to a real civics course (Gasp!), another of our required courses was called “Americanism versus Communism.” Even though it was as predictably biased / tendentious as it sounds, it did provide a nice introduction, for anyone paying attention, to comparative forms of governance and the manifold differences between competing systems. And — the insight that the Oklahoma legislators don’t seem to have — that these differences matter and are worth fighting for.
One interpretation is that the entire Trump phenomenon was a popular response to Republican indifference — cf, the Republican primary process — to the foundations values that they claimed to espouse but in practice increasingly ignore. The major irony in all of this is that despite Trump’s actual conservative policy agenda, he was terrible at explaining his actions in terms of the fundamental values that his supporters believed in. (In practice, many people seemed to grok his intentions well enough — a sort of conservative radar — but his ego and his mannerisms didn’t endear him to a lot of other voters, thus providing plenty of fodder for the media presstiutes to exploit.) Instead, he gave interminable, “laundry list” speeches touting his accomplishments, but devoid of any meaningful — or memorable — connections to the kind of society, and values, that the Founders sought to bequeath to us.
Sadly, most Oklahoma legislators would seem to emulate Mr. Trump’s lack of rhetorical skills to articulate *why* the preservation of free speech might “matter” to their constituents, but — far worse — they don’t even seem to have his intuitive grasp of first principles (however poorly expressed) that would impel them to try to protect it at the state’s universities.
Are there any Donald Trumps — or Ronald Reagans — in the Oklahoma legislature? Or, if asked, would many of its members know who Edmund Burke might be?