Like the guy in Seattle who's headed into the Army, I find NRO to be an essential lifeline. You see, I'm a grad. student in an Ivy League English Department, and well...you can imagine what atrocities I see and hear every day.
Unlike the other guy, I won't be headed into the military in order to say "thanks" to all of you--I'm already a veteran. But I'll be headed for the trenches dug deep within the Ivory Towers of Academia to fight for the cause of Conservatism.
Wish me luck, or rather, keep me in your prayers.

I'm doing a little segment on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" tomorrow. I'm supposed to come up with the "Turkeys of the Year." Light-hearted and amusing yet ideologically defensible suggestions welcome. You know, the sort of thing David Brooks would come up with. Please put "Turkeys" in the subject header.

This might get Stan Kurtz et al. all wiggy, but I've got to get this off my chest. Lots of college kids and other anti-PC warriors have been emailing me to take exception to my cavalier attitude toward campus speech codes and the like. They point to these codes -- which include rules against hate speech, hate crimes etc. -- as a sign that, in fact, speech is not as free as I claimed.

Well, first, let me be clear. I think all of this PC stuff on college campuses is absurd, dangerous and awful. But not necessarily for the same reasons many of my conservative friends believe. I have no problem, in principle, with the idea of speech codes on college campuses. Using profanities in the classroom, screaming nigger or kike etc. in the cafeteria, making false or disrespectful accusations at professors: these are things I would prohibit were I a university president. And, in grandpa's day, these things were prohibited by the honor codes of most universities. So, the question really isn't one of whether or not there should be total free speech on college campuses. There shouldn't be.

The question is, What kind of speech should be prohibited? Aging and mentally dessicated campus radicals on faculties and in administrations want to ban inconvenient speech. And that is outrageous. They want to give a free hand to their political disciples to say whatever they want and prohibit those they dislike from making arguments and persuading people. So the politically incorrect need reeducation while the politically favored can burn newspapers and shout people down and administrators turn a blind eye. They have an Orwellian approach to politics which says that history and language needs to be owned by only one side of the argument. I think that's shameful and in violation of the basic rules of academia which were designed to encourage free inquiry and debate, not necessarily free speech for its own sake.

But, conservatives sometimes miss this. First, they argue as if universities don't have a right to prohibit or regulate certain speech on campuses, which is absurd from the conservative perspective (unless you want to drag in the issue of federal dollars for higher ed). Second, they claim the problem has nothing to do with the content of the speech, but solely on the principle. This may be tactically necessary in terms of persuading liberals but factually, it's just not true. And third, by concentrating on free speech rather than the relentless war on Western and traditional values, conservatives devote their energies away from the heart of the enemies forces.

In the run-up to his presidential campaign then Vice-President George Herbert Walker Bush made the tactical decision to go after the -- objectively -- liberal media. It was a calculated ploy and it worked. Something similar seems to be going on with the Democrats these days. First Tom Daschle goes after Rush Limbaugh for reasons that can only have to do with the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party. Now, Al Gore gives this bizarre interview to the New York Observer which Kathryn posted below. Gore claims that the media is dominated by rightwingers. Call me crazy, but I bet you rank-and-file Democrats, the ones who vote in primaries, spend a lot of time fuming at Fox News. They are also staggered and bewildered that they are on the losing side of American political history and are in deep denial about it. So perhaps this is a theme that tests extremely well in Democratic focus groups. If so, expect a lot more of it.

My original complaint against Canada and Canadians was that they are too concerned with what America thinks about them and obsessively preoccupied with being different than us. I criticized them in a G-File for making a huge deal out of a throwaway line by Pat Buchanan on MSNBC about "Soviet Canuckistan."

Determined to hammer home my point for me, the Canadians have gone into a tizzy about, of all things, the program Crossfire. Last night, Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister, discussed the program by name. In the last 24 hours there have been dozens of news stories in Canada about the program I appeared on. Some of the stories make it seem the "moron" government spokeswoman finally got the heave-ho because of that segment. Now, look, CNN sends me a paycheck and all that, but I don't think I'm diminishing Crossfire -- or myself -- much when I say that particular discussion was abysmal and even if had been great, serious governments of serious countries with serious press corps do not go batty about such things.

"Hate crimes against Muslims and people who are or appear to be of Middle Eastern descent soared to record levels last year," reports the AP in the New York Times today. Factually, this is true. It did soar. From a teeny-tiny, eensy-weensy number to simply a really, really small number. From 28 crimes in 2000 to 481 in 2001 -- out of millions of Muslim, Muslim-looking and Middle-Eastern looking people. With the definitions of "crime," "hate," "Muslim" and "Middle Eastern-looking," fairly loosey-goosey. Anyway, if you've read anything I might have missed on the anti-Muslim "backlash" that never took place, let me know. I want to do a syndicated column on it.

From last night's Crossfire segment about the Saudi-terrorist-money story:

BOB NOVAK: Mr. May, I wonder if we can cut through all of this because I've been around this town a long time. I've never seen such an attack on Saudi Arabia. Isn't this all part of a plot that is hatched in Israel that, what you do is you attack Iraq, you get the oil supplies from Iraq, that means you don't have to -- the United States doesn't have to rely on the Saudi Arabian oil supplies. You destabilize the Saudi Arabian government, change the balance of power in the Middle East, and you change the ratio of oil politics? Isn't that what is going on

A reader writes to say that her daughter (in second grade) was taught that earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other such phenomena were examples of "Mother Earth fighting back against people who had been bad to her".

Suddenly Al Gore is beginning to look sort of mainstream.

There's a bizarre piece on the Miss World saga in, naturally, Monday's Guardian. The key extract is as follows:

"As contestants flee to London, and Nigeria counts its dead, it is almost impossible to retain the idea that an annual parade of female flesh is just an innocent quest for universal beauty acceptable to all reasonable people."

Eh? This doesn't make much sense unless one believes that the murderous rioters in Nigeria were in some way "reasonable people". Well, here's an update: they weren't.

I'm getting an unusually hefty dose of hate mail from Gore worshippers because of last week's column. These are clearly not my usual readers, so I assume I've been linked at some Gore or Democrat fan site. I'd ask these people where they heard about my column but people who theorize extemporaneously about by skulls fecal content and insist that my mother will burn in hell tend not to answer such queries.

Anyway, the interesting thing to me is that so much of the really nasty email seems to be from women or men who talk like old ladies. Lots of stuff about how I'm just jealous of Gore for his smarts and looks and good manners etc. A couple actually said I need to have my mouth washed-out with soap for saying such "mean" and "nasty" things about Al Gore. During the Clinton years, this sort of thing was very common and not just in my email. I was consistently amazed by the number of female C-SPAN callers who would talk about Bill Clinton as if he were their husbamd, lover or beautiful son (statistically, of course, the lover thing was theoretically possible).

We are way out into conjectural orbit here, but I think this is a symptom of the feminization of the Democratic Party and the feminization of liberalism generally. I'm not the first to say it, but liberal women increasingly see the Federal Government as a surrogate husband or father who therefor must provide security and comfort. Regardless, all of this outrage is a sign that I'm doing something right.

A belief in alien abduction must rank as one of the stupider credos even in mankind's long - and depressing - collection of superstitions. Expect it to gain a boost from a new Spielberg-produced show, Taken, set for the Sci-Fi channel in December and discussed in today's New York Times. There's an, ahem, enlightening quote from John Mack, the Harvard Medical School professor briefly famous for having appeared to embrace the notion of alien abduction back in the early 1990s. The writer of the piece notes that Dr. Mack has backed off from saucer and probe narratives of abduction (to be fair, he did so a long time ago), and then allows Mack speak for himself.

"...I believe these people have encountered some kind of intelligence by an opening of consciousness to a whole other level of reality. Philosophers are starting to think of a third zone - some kind of intermediate reality - that enters this reality. They are having an experience that is experientially real but the beings are not necessarily physically or materially real..."

So that's all clear now.

While we are on the topic of history, it's worth noting that Winston Churchill has now pulled ahead in the BBC's 'greatest Briton' contest, thanks in part to North American support and, now, the crucial endorsement of footballer ('soccer player') David Beckham.

And while on the topic of Churchill, it's impossible not to recommend Roy Jenkins' epic new biography of the hero of 1940. It's an astonishing and - to this Brit - frequently very moving read.

Like Churchill himself, Jenkins' book is also often highly amusing. Rod, however, will be disappointed to discover that the great man may well not have been much of a Crunchy Con. Here is what he had to say in a letter of July 14, 1940:

"Almost all the food faddists I have ever known, nut-eaters and the like, have died young after a long period of senile decay...The way to lose the war is to try to force the British public into a diet of milk, oatmeal, potatoes etc, washed down on gala occasions with a little lime juice."

More news from the education system: a reader writes to say that, driving his daughter to college somewhere in the South down a Jefferson Davis Highway, he happened to ask her who Jefferson Davis was. She had no idea. He then repeated the same question to a bunch of college graduates - they had no clue either, which is extraordinary. Whatever one may think about the guy, Davis was a major figure in this country's past, and, I suspect, far from the only one currently being forgotten.

The death of history teaching is one of the ironies of an age supposedly so interested in culture, authenticity and heritage. British politician Enoch Powell once described history as 'a nation's collective memory'. When it is gone what is left?

Responding to the earlier post on the greening of geography teaching, a reader e-mails me with horror stories from his 'cultural geography' class and dubs the whole thing 'greenography'. I never thought that I'd miss my old geography teachers and their curious collective obsession with the York, Notts and Derby coalfield, but now I do.

Meanwhile someone else writes to say that PC has invaded the geology syllabus, but doesn't, sadly, provide any examples.

Equal rights for quartz?

The Justice Department has announced that, subject to certain exceptions, visitors who arrived in the US prior to September 30 (and plan to stay beyond January 10 2003) must register with the government if they are citizens of the following countries: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the UAE and Yemen. The other countries already on this list are Iran, Libya, Sudan and Syria.

Needless to say, there is no mention of 'Saudi' Arabia.

For a gloomy and unathletic individual such as myself, a newspaper's obituary section is the equivalent of the sports pages. Saturday's New York Times featured a few paragraphs dedicated to Helen Travis, a veteran left wing activist who died the other day at the ripe old age of 86. One phrase caught my attention:

"A student trip to the Soviet Union in 1934 impressed her with the promises of socialism..."

1934? In 1934 the Soviet Union was a savage totalitarian dictatorship characterized by mass graves, concentration camps and the Stalin cult. The genocidal Ukrainian famine was a recent memory and the economy was in ruins, wrecked by years of socialist mismanagement. To have been "impressed" by that gargoyle state, Travis must have been wicked, deluded or terribly, terribly stupid.

The Financial Times has long specialized in recycling the tired orthodoxies of the liberal establishment, but the patronizing and, ironically, sexist drivel contained in one editorial from this weekend's edition takes some beating:

Here's an extract:

"In an era when businesses must pay attention to much more than just short-term profit [investment banks] need to promote those who can balance many different objectives at once - something women have done through the ages. As Mr Spitzer continues his clean-up after the bubble he might consider adding one more demand to his list of remedies. Insist that every investment bank appoints a woman to at least one of the three top jobs."

Pathetic.