The Thought Police Strike Again

by Giulio Meotti • September 15, 2017 at 5:00 am

This politically correct nonsense highlights even further the infantilization of our culture -- such as the demand for "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings". It may look like a comedy, but its effect is deadly serious.
Groupthink is a debilitating force. in any civilization It undermines one's ability to resist the real enemies of democracy and freedom: it makes us blind to radical Islam and jihadi terrorism, and it gives the impression that our society is a joke.
Instead of being intellectually diverse, universities are trying their utmost to impose homogeneity of thoughts and ideas. So-called "right wing newspapers" are banned from certain universities. Recently, at the City University of London, the student union, devoid of irony, fascistically voted to ban some conservative tabloids in order to "oppose fascism".

Headlines every day proclaim the new religion: political correctness, cultural vandalism and censorship -- not from Islamic emirates such as Saudi Arabia, but in Western cities right here.

The Writers Union of Canada, for instance, recently apologized for a magazine editorial that defended the right of novelists to create characters from a backgrounds other than their own.

Just think of that: a writer defending the right to use one's imagination?! What an insult! At least, to "the new Stalinists" it is.

"In my opinion anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities," Hal Niedzviecki, who was the editor of the union's magazine, Write, defended freedom in an editorial. The Union then announced that Niedzviecki had resigned.

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Norway's Bewildering Election

by Bruce Bawer • September 15, 2017 at 4:00 am

Norway is the happy beneficiary of North Sea oil; yet for decades, oil profits have piled up a government fund while Norwegians have paid the highest gasoline prices in the world.
For years, Statistics Norway, the government agency charged with producing reliable data on every imaginable social and economic metric, has refused to make public certain "sensitive" information relating to Norway's Muslim population, such as the actual numbers of immigrants entering the country through "family reunification."
Is there any hope that a second Solberg government including FrP will accomplish any more in the way of curbing immigration than the first Solberg government did? At the moment, there seems little reason for hope.

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg. (Image source: European People's Party/Flickr)

Those of us who are concerned about Norway's rapid Islamization took great hope from the 2013 parliamentary election. What mattered was not that it resulted in the formation of a right-wing coalition government. What mattered was that the coalition government, for the first time ever, included the Progress Party (FrP).

From its founding in 1973, FrP was an outlier among Norway's major parties, of which there many. A quick survey: The Labor Party (Ap), the most powerful party during the postwar era, is the home of the cultural establishment; LO, Norway's equivalent of America's federation of trade unions, the AFL-CIO, is essentially a branch of Ap, and NRK, the government-owned broadcast corporation, is often described by critics as the voice of the Labor Party.

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