Rich Lowry, Editor of National Review, was on Megyn Kelly’s podcast a couple of days ago. He started to say something about Haitian migrants, and stumbled over the word “migrant,” saying “mig” like you do with immigrant, then corrected himself. Leftists, starting with Media Matters, made the absurd claim that Lowry had said the “N-word,” which he obviously did not.
The demand for racism vastly exceeds the supply, which is why leftists are reducing to making idiotic charges like this one. But while the behavior of leftists is not surprising, the conduct of at least two non-left wing organizations is disheartening. Rich wrote about it here:
I was scheduled to speak at Indiana State University in a couple of weeks, but the university has scrapped my appearance “in light of recent developments and following the advice of our public safety officials regarding campus and community safety concerns.”
This is a classic pretext, often used by university officials to dispense with speakers they find inconvenient. …
Like all cancelers, the university wants you to believe that this is just an exception to its scrupulous fair-mindedness: “It is important to stress that this cancellation is not intended to limit our neutrality on different political viewpoints.”
Uh-huh. Taking the side of a woke online fringe and giving it what it wants on the basis of an almost certainly nonexistent security threat doesn’t speak to political neutrality.
To be fair, it is almost impossible for a university to disappoint our expectations. The second instance is more surprising:
It pains me to say I’ve also been canceled by the Badger Institute, the right-of-center think tank in Wisconsin. The president called on Tuesday to ask me to withdraw from an address at an upcoming dinner, and when I refused and asked him what I’d done wrong, he only said something or other about “the environment.” When I flatly asked him whether he was disinviting me, he said, “Yes.”
Shockingly, that narrative is correct, as Mike Nichols, President of the Badger Institute, confirmed. I know Mike Nichols and consider him a friend. His organization and mine have collaborated on a couple of occasions. But it is sad for a conservative group to be so timorous as to knuckle under to the most feeble–not just feeble, but downright false–smears of the Left.
This is a depressing episode, but the real takeaway is that the Left is so devoid of legitimate ammunition that this is how far they have to go to create a diversion.
This morning, Rich Lowry was a guest on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, and they discussed this incident:
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