We cannot allow our solution to the problem of illiberalism to depart from liberal principles
by Daniel Hannan, Conservative Home:
Every time you think woke students can’t get any more pompous, risible or absurd, they surpass themselves. The latest madness is a campaign by the “Birkbeck Students Anti-Racism Network” to remove Eric Kaufmann from his position at their college. Dr Kaufmann is one of the most original and brilliant political scientists of our age. He writes a great deal about identity issues, basing his work on original research and polling rather than on woke pieties.
His very rigour enrages his detractors. A lengthy charge-sheet is levelled against the Vancouverite professor, much of it in what Orwell called duckspeak: “He’s indistinguishable from the institutions that create, legitimise and perpetuate the ways of thinking that ultimately serve to install and preserve capitalism and colonialism alongside the social systems that sustain it: the patriarchy and white supremacy…”
Among other things, Kaufman has apparently committed the abominable sin of being “associated with Quillette, UnHerd, Spiked and many other far-right & bigoted magazines”. He is, hilariously, accused of being a white supremacist – I say “hilariously” because Kaufmann is of mixed Chinese, Latino and Jewish heritage. Worst of all, he is apparently engaged in “cancelling ‘cancel culture’.”
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