On Campus: Minority Priorities

by Douglas Murray • April 4, 2017 at 5:00 am

Like so many leaflets before them, these talked about the scourge of "privilege". And whom did these pamphlets identify as the people with the most privilege?
At present, the people who preach tolerance in America and Canada are turning out to be the least tolerant.
And the people who complain of discrimination turn out to be leading practitioners of the oldest discrimination of all.

Activist and writer Milo Yiannopoulos, who is gay but has been rude about aspects of transsexualism, was supposed to speak at the University of California, Berkeley on February 1. That evening, a mob of 150 people, who opposed to Yiannopoulos' presence, proceeded to riot, smash and set fire to the campus, causing more than $100,000 of damage. (Image source: RT video screenshot)

The free speech wars on North American campuses appear to have arrived at their inevitable endpoint. For years, American and Canadian students have played around with a new form of morality in education. It is based not on a traditional concept of searching for truth or investigating and analysing ideas, but rather on the concept that the veracity of an opinion can be discerned by the person uttering it.

In this way, a considerable number of people have apparently decided that a variety of "privileges" exist that make some speakers vital to listen to and others unnecessary, unless they agree to mouth a set of pre-ordained platitudes.

This concept, coupled with the idea that minorities require special protection from speech, have now finally delivered the moral breakdown that was always waiting for it. The warning signs have been there for years.

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Is Europe Choosing to Disappear?

by Giulio Meotti • April 4, 2017 at 4:00 am

A sterile Europe apparently thought that civil liberties could be bargained away in exchange for a temporary peace. Everything became negotiable.
As British author Douglas Murray has asked, why were workers not brought in from European countries suffering high unemployment, such as Portugal, Italy, Greece or Spain?
A clear-eyed U.S. Congressman, Rep. Steve King, correctly said recently that, "You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else's babies." He instantly drew that white-hot fire reserved for people who tell truths that threaten treasured fantasies (think Giordano Bruno or Galileo).

The new data released by Italy's National Institute for Statistics for 2016 sounds again like a death knell. There has been a new negative record of births: 474,000 compared to 486,000 for 2015, which had already fallen to historic lows. There were 608,000 deaths in 2016. In one year, Italy lost 134,000 people -- the equivalent of a city of the size of Ferrara or Salerno.

The demographic "illusion" is kept only by the influx of immigration (135,000). If one needs an idea of what Italy would be without immigrants, look at Emilia-Romagna, one of Italy's most populated and affluent regions: in 2035 it will have 20% fewer residents.

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