Guest Column: Real Privilege

Today's guest column is by Ed Fenstermacher, an MIT classmate of mine who has four previous guest columns to his credit here since 2014.  Ed is a regular reader of this site, and along with being a long-time leader in Scouting, he is a nuclear engineer by profession -- and a very thoughtful commentator on life and society.

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We have heard a lot in the last few years about the notion of privilege.  We’ve heard about "white privilege", "male privilege" and "Christian privilege."
 

Certainly, white privilege was a part of this country when it was founded.  Even following the reconstruction amendments, segregation and Jim Crow laws persisted until Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race in most public settings and in voting.
 

The 19^th Amendment gave women in the US the right to vote in 1920, and Title IX gave women equal opportunity in education in 1972.  Now, more women than men are actually enrolled in higher education, and more are getting degrees.  Boy Scouts are admitting girls, and the main objections are coming from the Girl Scouts.

Christian privilege has never been enshrined in law, except perhaps in "blue laws."  Certainly, there has been private religious discrimination in areas such as club memberships, but even that seems to be dying away.  A series of court cases has removed nearly all overtly Christian practices from government at all levels -- if anything, the preferred religion of the U.S. Government is now atheism, in the form of "secular humanism."

But nature, and human culture, abhor a vacuum.  White, male and Christian privilege don’t exist anymore, to anything like the degree they did fifty years ago.  What has replaced them?  They have all been replaced by a new form of privilege, one infinitely more pernicious than the others.  That is leftist privilege.

Leftist privilege is the tacit assumption, everywhere and in all things, that the leftist viewpoint is not only self-evidently correct but also the only moral position, to where arguing against it is immoral.  That viewpoint is nearly universally held by Democratic politicians, university professors, and people who claim journalistic credentials in the major news media.  Given that viewpoint, it is logical to believe that shouting down anyone who speaks against the leftist orthodoxy is not only allowable, but also a moral imperative.  Leftism is to liberalism what the Inquisition was to Catholicism -- the imposition of absolutism without limit.  All that is missing are the tools of torture.  In this country, for now.

Examples of leftist privilege surround us, and new ones appear every day.  Within the last year, we have had armed mobs of leftists wearing black hoodies and masks trying to keep conservatives such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter from speaking.  These riots were at the University of California at Berkeley, the home of what is now laughingly called “The Free Speech Movement."  Charles Murray was shouted down and prevented from speaking at Middlebury College in 2017, and Professor Alison Stanger, who was supposed to have interviewed him, was hospitalized with a concussion and a neck injury from the “peaceful” protestors.  

Leftists, however, can say anything they want in any forum without risk of retribution.  Shortly after the recent death of Barbara Bush, Fresno State professor Randa Jarrar sent out a nasty tweet, accusing Barbara Bush (with no supporting evidence) of being a racist and the mother of a war criminal.  You can be sure no one will show up to prevent her from speaking in class, and that her tenured position is safe.

Leftist privilege is particularly evident in the way the law is being applied in this country.  When Hillary Clinton was investigated for the potential misuse of a private server for classified e-mail, the FBI investigation was led by Peter Strzok, under the direction of Andrew McCabe and with assistance from Lisa Page.  Strzok and Page were strong anti-Trump partisans, as evidenced by the later release of their e-mails. 

McCabe’s wife had received campaign cash from Governor McAuliffe of Virginia, a Clinton ally.  There was apparently no thought of recusal, which was clearly warranted.  The conclusions from the investigation were predetermined, prejudged and written before Hillary Clinton was even questioned. 

When she was interviewed, she wasn’t put under oath, which is always done in such cases.  Many members of her staff, including her lawyer, were also present and given immunity, which is normally done only if an individual agrees to furnish negative information about the principal, which they did not.  During this time, we also had the tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch, calling the objectivity of the Justice Department into question.  

After this sham of an investigation, Director Comey held a press conference in which he laid out what, in other circumstances, would have been evidence leading to a certain indictment of Hillary Clinton.  He then inexplicably stated that no U.S. Attorney would bring charges in such a circumstance, effectively closing down the investigation and taking it out of the hands of the Justice Department, which he had no authority to do.

Contrast this treatment to the treatment of President Trump and the allegations of “collusion” with Russians.  First, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself because of incidental meetings he had had with the Russian ambassador.  Then his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appoints Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor, with a set of powers that even now have not been fully disclosed. 

So far, he has not uncovered any collusion with Russians, but has caught General Michael Flynn in a perjury trap, and is going after Paul Manafort for financial dealings, preceding the Trump campaign by a decade.  What does this have to do with his charge from Rosenstein?  Clearly, it is nothing except an attempt to get Manafort to flip on President Trump.

It goes without saying that when one group is treated differently under the law than another, Justice is no longer blind.  The concept of equal justice under law supposedly traces back to Pericles, and is a foundational value of the United States.  Freedom of conscience goes back to Roger Williams and is another foundational value of our country.  If we don’t stop the march of leftist privilege and restore viewpoint balance, we will be the last generation to live with these values.

Original content copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton and T. E. Fenstermacher
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