Mediaboss Marketing

In the spring of 1844, the Latter-day Saints received a curious visitor to Nauvoo, Illinois.

Josiah Quincy, future mayor of Boston and the son of the president of Harvard, had traveled to Nauvoo with his cousin, Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, to tour the Mississippi River. During their stay in Nauvoo, the travelers met with Joseph Smith and toured the city. Some years later, Quincy published his observations of Smith and the Latter-day Saints for a literary magazine in New York. Among the many anecdotes he captured, one has particular salience today.

Quincy describes surveying a beautiful grove with Joseph Smith where there were seats and a platform for speaking. Smith explained that the Latter-day Saints held services in the grove at which point a Methodist minister traveling with the group said, I suppose none but Mormon preachers are allowed in Nauvoo.Joseph Smiths response was perhaps surprising: On the contrary, he replied, I shall be very happy to have you address my people next Sunday, and I will ensure you a most attentive congregation.

What! do you mean that I may say anything I please, and that you will make no reply?, the minister queried, according to Quincys account.

You may certainly say anything you please; but I must reserve the right of adding a word or two, if I judge best. I promise to speak of you in the most respectful manner.

What strikes us about this story is Joseph Smiths willingness to allow for the expression of differing opinions even potentially hostile opinions in an environment of respect.

In the past week a public campaign has gathered momentum, seeking to encourage Southern Utah University to rescind its invitation to Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to provide the keynote address for the Commencement ceremony in conjunction with the institutions 125th anniversary year. And just last month, two hours before the concert was scheduled to begin, Pensacola Christian College cancelled a performance of The Kings Singers because of concerns with the sexual identity of one or more of the groups members.

These kinds of cancellations and petitions have increased markedly in the last decade against professors and other speakers on campus, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and its work to compile episodes where somebody tries to block or prevent a speaker from being featured on a college or university campus. Their Disinvitation Database also confirms a pressure to cancel coming from both the left and the right, with 28% of commencement disinvitations in the last two decades coming from pressure on the right and 63% from pressure on the left (with another 9% from unspecified sources).

Among other examples, intimidation from the political right led to cancellations against Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright, Richard Dawkins, and Chelsea Manning while intimidation from the political left led to cancellations of Ann Coulter, Ben Carson, Ben Shapiro and Ivanka Trump.

Weve both had our own experiences with pressure campaigns including a recent university cancellation. New York Times JournalistThomas Edsall quotesJonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings, explaining some of the larger forces behind these growing instances of public outrage among students. Among other things, he notes: Universities are consumeristic these days and very image-conscious, and so they have trouble withstanding pressure from their customers, e.g., activist students.

Rauch, a respected writer who identifies as gay, also adds that activists have figured out that they can have disproportionate influence by claiming to be physically endangered and psychologically traumatized by speech that offends them. In the same article, Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard recounts how activists have learned to deploy skillfully the language of hurt as in I dont care what the speakers intentions were, what the speaker said has hurt my feelings and ought therefore to be prohibited.

But intention really does matter. In the case of Elder Holland, his full remarks make clear that his intent was to call for more robust efforts to defend his faith tradition and teachings not to attack a particular community, and certainly not to justify physical violence.And as many know well, Elder Holland has gone out of his way over the years to cultivate friendship and build bridges across differences. Even so, some heard what he said as unsupportive of people who identify as LGBTQ. When meaningful differences in perspective like this exist, those disagreements should be an invitation for more dialogue and discussion, not less.

We know how it feels to express opinions, sometimes even controversial opinions, and be met with some version of cancellation or deplatforming, rather than further opportunities for dialogue and exchange. Tom recently had an invitation withdrawn to address a university audience. And organizations have been pressured to rescind invitations for Jacob to speak.

Identity disagreements can be especially challenging. As one professor shared with us recently, How do we deal with the fact that many people in our campus communities think that particular (usually conservative) viewpoints shouldnt be expressed because another person feels they are a threat to their identity?

Yet as weve learned in our own friendship, its possible to disagree about identity and other important questions, and still love, respect, admire and support each other. And we unitedly push back on the idea that disagreements about identity, marriage or politics means we cannot still hear each other with respect. That is simply not the case even if growing numbers insist it must be.

Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy went on to encourage leaders on campus to become much more skeptical and tough-minded when encountering the language of hurt so as to avoid incentivizing those who deploy the specters of bigotry, privilege and trauma to further diminish vital academic, intellectual and aesthetic freedoms. Its also worth noting that online petitions are open to widely disparate communities far removed from the local institution in question becoming a measure, perhaps, of a particular groups enthusiasm rather than broadly representative of those with an immediate stake in the question.

The good news is that in more than half of documented instances of public pressure campaigns to convince a university to cancel a speaker or event, universities stood firm and refused to cancel.Analyst Zachary Greenberg told us that once a school takes a strong stand against censorship and for free speech, it may deter attempts to persuade that school to disinvite speakers. Conversely, university acquiescence to disinvitation demands encourages more demands.

In our view, the point of a university education is not simply the essential engagement with conflicting ideas, but also regularly practicing the life skills necessary for individual growth at any age, in any setting.

Being willing to assume a speakers good intentions, and even good-heartedness, does not require a listener to agree with a given speaker.But it does require that we willingly expose ourselves to the discomfort of hearing our conclusions challenged.And it requires that we extend to those with whom we disagree the grace we ourselves hope to find.

This group of SUU students, much like Elder Holland expressed to BYU employees, rightly sees convocation as a visible demonstration of the core values of an educational institution.Yet by making space for a diversity of perspectives, we are walking the talk of inclusion and belonging.

We hope all institutions conservative or liberal, religious or secular will be more courageous, willing to trust the ability of those in the audience to weed out what is not valuable to them.We hope that SUU and its entire student body, faculty and staff will show the courage many other institutions lack and will listen with respect, if not agreement, to the insights of wise and wonderful people like a methodist minister in an open-air grove in 1844 or a Latter-day Saint apostle in a Southern Utah University auditorium in 2023.

Tom Christofferson is the author of That We May Be One and A Better Heart. Jacob Hess is the author of Youre Not as Crazy as I Thought (But Youre Still Wrong) with Phil Neisser and with Carrie Skarda, Kyle Anderson and Ty Mansfield, hes the author of The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints.

Utah First Lady Abby Cox, from left, Sister Patricia Holland, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a member of the Hollands security team stand on stage as Jeffrey Holland is awarded the Rural Legacy Leader award at the One Utah Summit 2021 at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah on Tuesday, October 5, 2021.

Nick Adams, for the Deseret News

See the rest here:
We've witnessed campus cancellation campaigns. Elder Holland ... - Deseret News

It isnt only Donald Trump tossing out the insults these days.

Racism, sexism and ageism have already raised their ugly heads and the presidential campaigns have barely begun. And, sadly, it seems most of the recent insults and derogatory remarks have been directed at the female candidates.

One of the latest flaps was Don Lemons snarky comment about Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley on CNN.

Talking about her suggestion that all presidential candidates over the age of 75 should be required to pass a cognition test to make sure their intellectual capacities have not diminished, Lemon said of the 50ish Haley, Nikki Haley isnt in her prime. Sorry. When a woman is considered to be in her prime is her 20s and 30s maybe 40s.

As you can imagine, it all hit the fan.

Lemon later apologized and CNN Chairman Chris Licht told his staff Lemons comments were upsetting, unacceptable and unfair.

Reaction from New Jersey former Gov. Dick Codey, after Republican State Chairman Bob Hugin insulted Democratic Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, was a lot stronger.

The language and the attitude are classless and inexcusable. Chairman Hugin should resign immediately, said Codey after Hugin called Sherrill a piece of sh-- congresswoman after she defeated his candidate in Somerset County.

Sherrill shrugged off the insult and Haley used the offense against her to launch a fund-raising campaign.

But it isnt only men picking on the women.

On ABCs The View, host Sunny Hostins comments about Haley were blasted as a racist attack. She went off on a rant about the former UN ambassador, saying she was using a fake name to hide her Indian heritage. Haleys birth name is Nimrata, but shes been known as Nikki since grade school.

Ironically, Hostin also uses a nickname, claiming she calls herself Sunny because undereducated Americans dont know how to pronounce Ascunsion.

Then conservative pundit Ann Coulter weighed in. Nastily, as always. On the Mark Simone podcast, she made several xenophobic comments about Haley. Although the former South Carolina governor was born in the United States to Indian immigrants, Coulter taunted, Why dont you go back to your own country?

Haleys not going to have it easy on the campaign trail. Nor will Kamala Harris, Marianne Williamson or any of the other women considering a run for the White House. But Im certain that wont deter them. After a short time in public life, you build up callouses to prevent your feeling wounded when you are deliberately or inadvertently insulted.

Things have undoubtedly improved for female candidates. There were six major contestants for the White House in 2020 and there may be even more this year. Not long ago Christie Whitman was a sensation as a female governor; now there are 12 in states and a few more in American territories.

However, as an editorial in this newspaper said only a short time ago, New Jersey still lags in electing women. Sometimes it is indeed the old boys network that selects mostly male candidates, but as often it is because women are unable or unwilling to put in the work necessary to climb the political ladder.

Women undoubtedly have the knowledge to seriously address public issues, and Rutgers has a program on navigating the politics of becoming known and trusted by both party decision-makers and voters.

The Institute for Womens Leadership at Rutgers University offers excellent training to potential candidates, and I recommend that any woman interested in public affairs should enroll. Unfortunately, theyll probably need to continue teaching the girls how to ignore an insult for some time to come.

A former assemblywoman from Jersey City, Joan Quigley is the president and CEO of North Hudson Community Action Corp.

Submit letters to the editor and guest columns at jjletters@jjournal.com.

See the original post:
Insults in the political world continue and theyre aimed at women | Quigley - NJ.com

According to the latest census data, the foreign-born share of the American population is close to a historic high. In 2021, approximately 13.6% of the population was born outside of the U.S.second only to 14.8% in 1890.

Some Americans are wary of this upward trend. Still, U.S. history should teach us that the new arrivals in our country will only work to our cultural benefit.

The Irish diasporanow tightly interwoven into the fabric of American culture faced many of the same challenges, suspicions, and stereotypes as todays immigrants.

This is important because a common line of the modern immigration-skeptic argument is that previous waves were fundamentally different from the current one because those immigrants had positive attributes that todays new arrivals lack. This creates a separation between the imagined good immigrant of previous centuries and the bad immigrant of the 21st century.

For example, in attempting to differentiate recent Hispanic migration from that of older groups, political scientist Samuel Huntington favorably quoted Lionel Sosas description of Hispanic cultural traits as: mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; low priority for education; acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven. More recently (and more crudely), Ann Coulter authored a book centered on this premise.

This description is eerily similar to characterizations of 19th-century Irish immigrants. In his book The Boston Irish: A Political History, historian Thomas H. OConnor notes that the majority of Irish Catholic immigrants were perceived as being deeply clannish, parochial, and suspicious of enterprise and innovation, on the whole more influenced by the appeals of continuity and tradition than calls for change and innovation.

Despite this dire prognosis, the Irish in America, made their way up the economic ladder into the middle class within two generations. Indeed, in his book Wherever the Green is Worn, historian Tim Pat Coogan notes that by the late 1990s, up to 30% of all American Fortune 500 CEOs were of Irish descent. This begs the question: why should we believe that identical cultural claims made against the current groups of immigrants will prove correct?

The purported political inclinations of immigrants and their descendants have also been perceived through a determinist lens. On the left, some expect these changes to usher in a new era of progressive dominance. On the right, it is often taken as a given that these trends will strain social cohesion and fundamentally alter the nature of American politics.

Still, fears (or hopes) that immigrant groups will irreversibly tilt the country towards one party are unfounded. OConnor writes that it took several decades and great reluctance for the Irish to organize into a cohesive political front. Today, other leading experts on Irish in America argue that the Irish vote is split between the parties, with some arguing that there is no longer a distinctively Irish American bloc. Indeed, Coogan bemoans that the robust Irish-American diaspora has not worked to Irelands benefit regarding U.S. foreign policy.

Whats more, the one-size-fits-all mentality regarding immigrant political inclinations has proven patently false, as the Irish test case can demonstrate. Even during their heyday as consistent Democratic voters, many Irish-Americans clashed with their party on social issues, most famously in the case of racially integrated bussing programs. Today, many newer immigrant groups are assumed to be a liberal constituency, when much like the Irish immigrants before them, they are often more moderate than progressive voters.

As recent trends in Hispanic and Asian voting patterns demonstrate, immigrant voters and their descendants cant be neatly tied to any one partyand as history has taught us, likely never will be.

The largely negative and often misguided stereotypes assigned to the Irish diaspora could easily have stymied their experience inand contributions tothe U.S., had they not worked hard to disprove these preconceived notions. The similarities between these 19th century stereotypes and those used to describe todays new immigrants in the U.S. is nothing short of jarring. If we should learn anything from the Irish experience, its that immigrant groups are not a monolith, and treating them as such undermines the myriad benefits they can bring to American society.

Visit link:
What the Irish immigrant experience can teach us about todays ... - Niskanen Center

AT FIRST GLANCE, Florida House Bill 999, recently introduced by State Representative Alex Andrade in response to Governor Ron DeSantiss Stop WOKE Act, which was passed by the legislature in 2022, represents a new stage in the rights conflict with the university. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, most conservative activists embraced a civil libertarian position on campus free speech. They targeted so-called political correctness, arguing that speech codes and other measures infringed on the First Amendment rights of conservative students. With Bill 999, Florida Republicans have gone on the offensive, openly attempting to fire or silence liberal professors.

If passed, the bill will ban programs in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems in state universities. It will also grant boards of trustees complete control over faculty hiring decisions and allow them to strip faculty of tenure. Six of the 13 members of the Florida State University Board of Trustees are appointees of the governor, which effectively gives Republicans veto power over who teaches in Florida postsecondary institutions. Tellingly, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a civil liberties organization (which notably receives funding from libertarian groups) that has defended conservative students since 1999, has pledged legal action against Bill 999, complaining that its measures are unconstitutional.

Floridas tactics, however, also reaffirm an authoritarian stance on higher education that has guided movement conservatism since its inception in the early 1950s. Much of Bill 999 closely echoes a foundational text of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr.s God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951), which complained that most of the humanities and social science faculty at the authors alma mater seek to subvert religion and individualism. He called on the universitys president to fire all faculty who did not agree to adhere to Christian and free-market orthodoxy. This orthodoxy, he insisted, should be defined by the president and board of trustees, who represented the conservative views of the universitys customers: the parents who paid to send their children to Yale, and the alumni who were taught there and expected the institution to reflect their values.

Like contemporary conservatives, Buckley believed that the academy had been taken over by liberals, and he wanted conservative intellectuals to reclaim it. This political demand informed the magazine that he founded, National Review, and indeed the entire postwar conservative movement. This movement has been and continues to be fueled by a sense of grievance: conservatives anxiety that they have been locked out of the academy, media, and government by a triumphant liberal establishment. As Ann Coulter complained in her 2003 book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, They have the media, the universities, the textbooks. We have ourselves.

Buckley, in other words, is not interested in presenting students with conservative ideas to balance out the alleged liberal bias of Yales faculty, allowing them the freedom to choose between rival political philosophies. Rather, he discounts the very idea of education as a process of testing ideas. As a conservative, he believes that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. From his perspective, atheists and economic collectivists are enemies who must be defeated because they have strayed from already settled truths; otherwise, they will corrupt the youth.

If left-wing ideas are to be taught at all, they must be introduced by right-wing educators who will guide students to perceive those ideas as dangerous heresy. The classroom, he writes, should be considered the practice field on which the gladiators of the future are taught to use their weapons, are briefed in the wiles and stratagems of the enemy, and are inspired with the virtues of their cause in anticipation of the day when they will step forward and join in the struggle against error. Writing at the height of the Cold War, Buckley developed a pedagogical model that mirrored the totalitarianism he attributed to the Soviet Union.

This conception of education informs Bill 999. It explains the documents attack on faculty governance and carte-blanche canceling of critical race theory and gender studies courses. These courses offer dangerous errors that must be expunged. It also explains the bills seemingly contradictory attempt to establish and regulate general education courses that must promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization but may not suppress or distort significant historical events or include unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content. Setting aside the bills racist insistence that students only learn about the West, the notion of exploring Western civilization while excluding the unproven and exploratory seems bizarre to anyone who studies history. This exclusion only makes sense once we realize that, for the bills authors, the underpinnings of Western civilization are self-evident, a series of received truths ultimately derived from God.

This is the central fantasy of authoritarian governments that target universities as centers of political dissent: they believe they can continue to foster the technically educated class essential to a postindustrial economy without creating a socially or politically critical citizenry. After the conservative educational revolution, American universities will still produce competent doctors, nurses, engineers, and nuclear physicists. They will just stop producing left-wing ideologues who ask uncomfortable questions about the nations history, the divinity of Christ, or the distributive justice of unfettered markets. In other words, the principle of rigorous and skeptical testing, which is at the core of the scientific method, can be safely walled up within the technical fields, where it will do no harm to the beliefs and values of young people.

There are at least two problems with this fantasy. First, as sociologist Alvin Gouldner argued in his 1979 book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, every university discipline nourishes and is nourished by a shared culture of critical discourse that de-authorizes all speech grounded in traditional societal authority. Destroying this culture in one discipline starves all the disciplines around it. For example, trying to run a nursing program while circumscribing all discussions of gender and race as forbidden speech will lead to substandard healthcare, even for white male Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Alex Andrade. Second, the bill opens the door for legislators to place other topics out of bounds. Bill 999, in its current form, does not prevent faculty from teaching anthropogenic climate change or evolution. Conservative activists, however, will certainly pressure legislators to introduce a bill that does so. The current bill, if enacted, will undoubtedly lead talented teachers, researchers, and students to pursue jobs and educational opportunities in other states, where they will not be subject to a government that dictates what topics are safe for them to discuss in the classroom.

As both God and Man at Yale and Bill 999 highlight, movement conservatives are paradoxically dependent on the academy they seek to devitalize and conquer. William F. Buckley Jr. wrote his book to debunk his alma mater, revealing to outsiders the extent of its departure from the religious conservatism of its Congregationalist founders and the business interests of its private-sector funders. The book, however, was enabled by Buckleys Yale education, especially by the argumentative give-and-take with liberal and conservative scholars like Buckleys faculty mentor Willmoore Kendall.

Buckleys signature accomplishment after completing his degree was to found National Review, a magazine that presented itself as the conservative intellectual antidote to the liberal academy, even as it drew most of its expertise from tenured professors such as Kendall, James Burnham, and Hugh Kenner. Today, measures like Bill 999 make it look like Republican lawmakers want to transform public universities into reliably conservative institutions such as Liberty University. That is not, however, the education that fashioned the Republican elite. Ron DeSantis, like many members of the American upper class, benefited from the Ivy League, liberal education he received at Harvard University.

Go here to see the original:
The Perils of Orthodoxy and Florida House Bill 999 - lareviewofbooks

Known for movies

Fahrenhype 9/11 (2004)as Herself

Hannity (2009-2017)as Herself / Herself - Author / Herself - Panelist

Comedy Central Roast of Rob Lowe (2016)as Herself - Roaster

I Am JFK Jr. (2016)as Herself

Ann Coulter is quite a multi-talented persona she is not only a conservative social and political commentator, but also a writer as well as a columnist and a lawyer. She is probably best known for her sharp tongue and bitter criticism which she has presented in several of her best-selling books, such as Adios, America! and In Trump We Trust. However, Ann Coulter is also widely recognized for her frequent on-camera appearances and radio commentaries, and is quite active on social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook, on which shes amassed a total of more than 2.6 million fans altogether.

Upon completing her education, Ann relocated to Kansas City, Missouri, where she began her professional career, serving as a law clerk of Pasco Bowman II, who was a Senior US Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. She then moved to New York City where she briefly worked in private practice, specializing in corporate law. After the 1994 Republican (Gingrich) Revolution and their takeover of the US Congress, Coulter landed a job within the US Senate Judiciary Committee, working under Senator Spencer Abraham, handling crime and immigration issues. In the course of the next several years, she became the litigant for the Center for Individual Rights as well.

Since her on-camera debut at the MSNBC in 1996, Ann Coulter has frequently appeared on several big networks such as Fox News and CNN. She has also made memorable appearances in popular television talk shows such as The Fifth Estate, American Morning, The OReilly Factor as well as in The Mike Gallagher Show, The Today Show, Fox and Friends and HARDtalk among plenty of others.

Over the years, Ann Coulter has added a dozen of books to her, already abundant, professional portfolio, which have sold several millions of copies combined. Her debut book High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton hit the shelves in 1998 and soon appeared on The New York Times Bestseller list. Four years later the second one, named Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right followed, and was a New York Times non-fiction bestseller. In 2004 Crown Forum released a collection of her columns under the title How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter. Some of her more recent publications include Adios, America!: The Lefts Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole released in 2015, and In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! released in 2016 both peaking on The New York Times bestseller lists.

No, Ann is not married and has never been married. However, she has engaged in several relationships to this day; prior to dating American far-right conservative commentator and author, Dinesh DSouza, Ann Coulter was in a relationship with Bob Guccione Jr. who is best known for being the founder of the music magazine Spin. Between October 2007 and January 2008, she dated liberal Democrat and the former president of the New York City Council, Andrew Stein. For the past decade, Coulter has been rumoured to be in a long-term relationship with one of her security guards.Image source

Have you ever wondered how much wealth this controversial media personality has accumulated so far? How rich Ann Coulter is? According to authoritative sources, it is estimated that the total of Ann Coulters net worth, as of mid-2018, revolves around the impressive sum of $8.5 million, primarily acquired through the commercial success of her publications and other writings. Anns wealth includes several valuable assets such as a condominium in New York Citys borough of Manhattan, as well as an apartment located in Los Angeles, California, and a house in Palm Beach, Florida.

View post:
Where is Ann Coulter today? Her Bio: Husband, Net Worth ...