Bloomberg blasts liberal censorship
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg blasts what he calls silencing of ideas
- Bloomberg says liberals often silence voices “deemed politically objectionable”
- At Harvard commencement, he also blasts impasse between Republicans and Democrats
(CNN) — Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, delivering Thursday’s commencement speech at Harvard University, criticized what he described as a disturbing trend of liberals silencing voices “deemed politically objectionable.”
“This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw — or have their invitations rescinded — after protests from students and — to me, shockingly — from senior faculty and administrators who should know better,” Bloomberg said.
The billionaire former mayor cited an October speech during which his ex-police commissioner, Ray Kelly, was shouted down by students at Brown University. The university canceled Kelly’s speech when protesters opposed to the police department’s stop-and-frisk policy shouted down and interrupted Kelly.
Bloomberg noted other universities have had speakers back out. He pointed to Rutgers, where former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew amid protests, and Smith College, where International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde withdrew after a student petition.
“In each case, liberals silenced a voice — and denied an honorary degree — to individuals they deemed politically objectionable. This is an outrage,” Bloomberg said to applause.
An even more glaring example of failing to listen to the opposing side, Bloomberg said, was the longstanding impasse between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, where every major question facing the nation is decided “not by engaging with one another but by trying to shout each other down.”
Bloomberg, who in April pledged $50 million to gun control groups he helped organize, spoke about Washington politicians’ handling of gun issues, noting Congress has barred the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting studies of gun violence, a prohibition that was recently extended to the National Institute of Health.
“What are they afraid of?” he asked.
“Do you really want an answer Mr. Bloomberg, or is all this a prelude to your campaigning for President? If in fact you really want an answer, I’ll give you my perspective; Unless you’re a “die-hard” Liberal Leftist, the very idea of the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducting research about gun violence screams bias. The Leftist/Marxist/Socialist tyrannical force has already determined the outcome of that study. All they want is to get their deceptive hands on the money to do the research. You see, Mr. Bloomberg, most of America is smarter than you and your Leftist comrades think we are. Any more questions?” JB
The Senate this year delayed a vote on President Obama’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, because the Harvard physician “had the audacity to say gun violence is a public health crisis that should be tackled,” Bloomberg said to applause.
“Let’s get serious: When 85 Americans are killed with guns every single day, and shootings regularly occur at our schools and universities, including last week’s tragedy at Santa Barbara, it would be almost medical malpractice to say anything else,” Bloomberg said.
“Mr. Bloomberg sir? Please show us the FACTS that back up your quote of 85 Americans being killed with guns everyday?” JB
The former mayor, who received honorary degrees from Harvard along with seven others — including former President George H.W. Bush and music icon Aretha Franklin — spoke of the role of universities as places where people of all backgrounds and beliefs can freely debate ideas without that “sacred trust” being threatened by the “tyrannical tendencies of monarchs, mobs and majorities.”
He recalled when protesters came out several years ago against the development of a mosque a few blocks from ground zero in lower Manhattan.
“We protected their right to protest,” Bloomberg said. “But they could not have been more wrong. And we refused to cave in to their demands. The idea that government would single out a particular religion, and block its believers — and only its believers — from building a house of worship in a particular area is diametrically opposed to the moral principles that gave rise to our great nation, and the constitutional protections that have sustained it.”
“BECAUSE IT IS AN INSULT TO EVERY PERSON THAT WERE MURDERED THAT DAY, AS WELL AS THEIR GREIVING FAMILY MEMBERS. Islam ALWAYS erects a Mosque on, or near the grounds of any of their conquest. THAT’S WHY, sir!” JB
He added, “If you want the freedom to worship as you wish, to speak as you wish, and to marry whom you wish, you must tolerate my freedom to do so — or not do so — too. What I do may offend you. You may find my actions immoral or unjust. But attempting to restrict my freedoms in ways that you would not restrict your own leads only to injustice.”
“There is hope for you yet, or is that the last smoldering vestiges of your one time conservative beliefs?” JB
Bloomberg compared the intolerance of ideas prevalent in the country today to “McCarthy’s Red Scare” in the 1950s and its destruction of thousands of lives. In the 2012 presidential race, he said, the overwhelming majority of campaign contributions from Ivy League faculty went to Barack Obama.
“Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species,” he said. (“AGREED!” JB)
After the speech, Sarah Surrain, who completed her master’s degree in education, said Bloomberg was bold to criticize universities as too liberal.
“I thought it was really thoughtful,” she said of the speech. “It was nice that it wasn’t just platitudes.”
Harvard Law School graduate Jared Nicholson said the speech was “a great message … about tolerance of different ideas and diversity of opinions.”
Greg Silverberg, an engineering school graduate, said he welcomed the former mayor’s viewpoint.
“He gave some interesting perspectives on conservative views in universities that I hadn’t heard before coming from a liberal undergraduate institution myself,” he said. “It was eye-opening for a lot of people.”
Before the speech, Cary Williams, president of the Association of Black Harvard Women, questioned why Bloomberg was selected as speaker, because, she said, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program “disproportionately has targeted people of color in New York.”
“It’s basically racial profiling,” junior Keyanna Wigglesworth said of the New York policing policy under Bloomberg. “And so it’s unsettling to me, (for) someone to speak who advocates a racist policy when you want students of color on campus to feel comfortable. It’s confusing and I don’t think its what Harvard stands for.”
SEE CNN TELEVISED REPORT HERE:
CNN’s Laura Dolan and Dana Garrett contributed to this report
Authored by 
What Did You Say? 
Why have liberals become so intolerant? They think nothing of denying someone as prominent as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from speaking on a college campus. They embrace activists who shut down speakers. They publicly shame people for the slightest deviation from liberal orthodoxy.
For them everything from science to the law is “settled” once they get into power. Progress is a one-way street. Their mindset is the very definition of closed-mindedness.
The easy answer would be “they are all bad people.” But frankly that’s a cop-out. Not all liberals are bad people, any more than all conservatives are angels. No doubt among the fevered minions of liberal activists there are people with, shall we say, psychological issues, but that doesn’t explain why so many otherwise reasonable people are so beholden to liberalism as an ideology.
The short answer is that it pays. A lot of people in and out of government benefit. Liberalism also makes people feel good. Whether you are politician dispensing government benefits or the citizen receiving them, liberalism hides the self-interest and sometimes even greed that motivate people.
But the devolution of liberalism into something now openly illiberal has causes far more complex than these familiar explanations provide.
For one thing, liberalism is no longer mainly about ideas. It is about power—as in who has it and who doesn’t. Believing they already know the answers to all questions, liberals view politics and governing as mopping up operations.
Second, liberalism today is not the liberalism of yesteryear. It’s not Franklin Roosevelt’s or John Kennedy’s liberalism. It’s not even the liberalism of Bill Clinton. It has become something much more radical. Bill Clinton talked about the “era of big government” being over.
Today, there is virtually no government program that liberals won’t embrace. Clinton had his Sister Souljah moment when he repudiated extremism in his party. Today liberals can’t get close enough to the “black lives matter” movement.
Third, liberals have surrendered to (some would say created) the nasty culture of intolerance that infuses our popular culture. To this extent, they are not at all different from some self-proclaimed right-wing people who do the same. But the difference is—or at least is supposed to be—that liberals profess to be the party of the open mind. They have become anything but.
Now that they control so many of our institutions—our universities, high-tech corporate board rooms, the entertainment industry, and increasingly even mainstream churches—they are closing the door behind them, making sure that no one, especially conservatives, will sneak in the back door.
Finally, liberalism has become hostile to open inquiry. Liberal intellectuals used to love open-ended debates because they thought they could win people over with their intelligence and wit. No more. Today’s liberal intellectuals are much more interested in stifling debates than having them. After all, who needs debates when all the big questions have been answered by their ideology? Liberals are no longer the scruffy radicals of Washington Square, but a tenured Mandarin class hotly competing for government research grants.
As I argue in my forthcoming book, “The Closing of the Liberal Mind,” to this Mandarin class:
There’s an old saying, he who controls knowledge controls power. Liberals get this adage instinctively. They treat truth not as wisdom—as something to be discovered—but as a will to power to be imposed by law and governmental fiat.
In this quest for power, they have become masters at controlling not only knowledge, but popular culture. For example, when Americans watch entertainers like Jon Stewart, they don’t see an ideologue channeling liberal clichés. They see just a really funny guy. The ideology is completely buried. Young people respond in lockstep not because they were indoctrinated by some boring Maoist, but because they think the whole thing is great fun.
What we have here is nothing less than a new and highly attractive form of illiberalism—an illiberal liberalism, if you will. Intolerance is championed in the name of tolerance, closed-mindedness in the name of open-mindedness, and hatred in the name of compassion. It’s classic double-think, and the deception is precisely the danger. Americans don’t expect liberals to be authoritarian wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are not prepared to be on guard all the time because liberals are supposed to be the good guys—the guardians of freedom of speech and the like.
Alas, they are not. Just ask Condi Rice or anyone else who has been denied the opportunity to speak on an American campus.