Just Who The Heck is Professor "Kessler" [sic]?

It was bad enough that Newsweek talked about Professor Kesler giving "props" to Obama. Badder still last year when City Journal referred to Professor Kesler as "Kessler."

But Salon also messed up his name. Well, in any event, here's his point about how the Republican party has some work to do to persuade people once again of the virtues of conservatism.

Charles Kessler[sic], professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books, told me by phone from California that some conservatives had lost touch with core principles because of a mistaken belief that they've already won the battle for the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens. "Both the party and the conservative movement have bought into the notion that this is a center-right country, that the majority of the country is already conservative, that we don't have to persuade them to be conservative because they already are," said Kessler. "That may have been true when Reagan was president, but it's not a permanent truth and it doesn't seem true to me now. I don't think Bush or the party tried to really persuade people toward conservatism."

. . .

"It's quite possible that this could be a scenario like 1964 or other years like that when a quick Republican resurgence is possible," said Kessler, who co-edited with the late William F. Buckley Jr. a volume of essays on conservative principles. "But I wouldn't bet on that necessarily ... I think the wilderness period will last a little bit longer because conservatives need to find their way."

I'm inclined to agree with Professor Kesler on the need for our time in the wilderness. I suppose the only question now will be who will be our Moses and lead us back to the Promised land of conservatism and right thinking.

Mari Matsuda To Come Debate "Free Speech" at Pomona College

Professor Mari Matsuda of Georgetown Law will be coming to Pomona College to debate Ms. Nadine Strossen of the ACLU as part of Pomona Student Union's series on February 12. The topic that they will be debating, incredulously enough, is "free speech." (I'm not quite sure how one would have a debate on "free speech," but I'll entertain the idea if only for its comedic value. One wonders how meta this "debate" will be.)

Ms. Strossen was former president of the ACLU and like Professor Matsuda, a committed leftist.
Together they authored a book titled, What Price Tolerance? Can the Regulation of Hate Speech Be Justified in Light of the United States' Constitutional and Principled Commitment to the Value of Free and Unfettered Speech? (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Arlin M. Adams Center for Law and Society, Susquehanna University 2003).

For those of you who are unaware, Professor Matsuda is a leader of the Critical Race Theory movement and her book, Words That Wound, was instrumental in the drive for campus speech codes in the 1970s and 1980s. In that book and elsewhere, Professor Matsuda has argued that free speech ought to exist only for minority students or for protected classes. (Not surprisingly, these speech codes have been ruled unconstitutional everywhere they have been brought to court.) I'll have more written on Professor Matsuda's curious -- and in California, at least -- illegal views on speech later.

In a dialogue with Ms. Strossen about their book, Professor Matsuda's views were recorded.

• Where there is no progress on equality, there is no hate speech, no backlash, no Ku Klux Klan.
• It's the assertion of the quality, the demand for personhood, that brings about the tension from which erupts the ugly words. The good news is we have no quietude because our unique status as a country of the many, a country bold enough to travel the road to equality is still intact. The bad news is that it is a very long road.
• This is not a debate that we come to as a matter of abstract legal principles. It's a debate that we are brought to inevitably as we move to full and equal citizenship for all.
• Humans who harm humans operate from a world view under which the harm is valorized. This is why I take speech seriously. It forms the social world that makes harm possible. There is no genocide without supporting propaganda. There is no rape without misogyny; there is no gay bashing without homophobia. There is no lynching without the "N" word. This is not a poem; I mean it as a statement of fact. Without the language that says, 'this is not a person,' it is typically not possible for human beings to harm other human beings.
• If people are not heard because structures of racism or sexism or homophobia or poverty make it harder for them to project their voices into the national conversation, we do not have all the ideas we need in the marketplace. If people do not participate because they lack the means, the education, the access to effective self-governance, we have a weakened democracy. Equality promotes speech, inequality limits it.
• I support limited restrictions on hate speech on campus because of what I've learned from students - their right to an education, their right to participation, is infringed when hate speech is considered free speech on college campuses. (bolding mine)
  

Such views run afoul of California's Leonard Law which guarantees the same protections on California's private and public universities as they would have on the street corner of Main Street. It will be interesting to see how Professor Matsuda defends this position.