Bari Weiss
Common Sense with Bari Weiss, July 10, 2022
“You have all sat in classrooms, posted on social media, and applied to college and felt the pressure at each stage to promote an ideology you disagree with.”
Before I begin, I must recognize that we are currently sitting on the ancestral home of the Apache and that my pronouns are she, her and hers. Also I am a cis–gendered woman, a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, generally able-bodied though my eyesight is less than 20/20 and I can’t run more than half a mile. Also, my own family was displaced by Cossacks at some point in the mid-1800s in what is now called Poland and we’re still waiting for an apology.
I’m older than you guys, so I remember a time when the sentences I just uttered would have been incomprehensible outside of a critical theory class with a couple dozen people. That was back when the idea of “staying woke” was a lyric Lead Belly sang. That was before the phrase cancel culture was a thing.
I distinctly remember the first cancellation I heard about, though we didn’t call it that then. It was 2014. The school was Brandeis–a school founded on the notion of religious freedom, a school with the motto “truth, even unto its innermost parts”—and the school had extended an honorary degree to the magnificent Ayaan Hirsi Ali only to withdraw it. It was a scandal. I remember reading dozens of stories about it.
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