Conservative Views Defended in Harvard Speech by… Mike Bloomberg?
The large soda grabbing, pro-gun control Mike Bloomberg? Yes, if you can believe it.
Colin Campbell of Business Insider reported.
Michael Bloomberg Blasts Ivy League For Liberal ‘Censorship’
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg accused the entire Ivy League of liberal political bias during a particularly fiery commencement address at Harvard University Thursday.
“It is just a modern form of McCarthyism,” Bloomberg said of university “censorship” of conservatives. “Think about the irony: In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left wing ideas. Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species”
“And that is probably nowhere more true than it is here in the Ivy League,” declared Bloomberg.
Bloomberg cited campaign contributions from Ivy League faculty members during the 2012 presidential race in order to press his point. Bloomberg, an independent, endorsed President Barack Obama’s re-election. However, in his speech, he said he found it troubling that so many university employees were on the Democratic side of the race.
Here’s the video.
Michael Bloomberg Blasts Ivy League For Liberal 'Censorship' (Business Insider)
Comments
It is just a modern form of McCarthyism … In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left wing ideas.
A curious spin.
In those halcyon days, the studio heads were trying to prevent members of the Communist Party of the US from dominating the Screenwriter’s Guild and turning Hollywood into a propaganda mill for the Soviet Union. This was the “blacklist” and it wasn’t about ideology, but rather the moguls’ fear that ticket sales would plummet.
Congress was investigating attempts by the CPUSA to assist Soviet espionage aimed at expensive American research in useful things like rockets, jets, atomic bombs, guidance systems, etc. This was what the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee were about. And those Reds weren’t herrings; it’s common knowledge, then as well as now, that the Soviets had an embarrassingly effective and efficient espionage program.
And McCarthy was concerned about actual Communist (which at that time basically meant Soviet) infiltration of the US government. Although McCarthy was something of a weasel, he wasn’t fundamentally wrong about the infiltration. We now know that the USSR did indeed have agents almost as high as the Cabinet.
None of which is really about “right wing” suppression of mere ideas.
A commenter on Powerline said this about Bloomberg’s speech:
“This seems to always happen too conservatives. We tend to believe that Progessive leadership is only a mugging away from seeing the light. And one well crafted speech is a show of depth.”
Personally I think Nanny Bloomberg was still(and justifiably) ticked off by the incident a few months ago when his police commissioner Ray Kelly was prevented from speaking by the Jacobins and unwashed rabble of Brown University. I would not read any more into Bloomberg’s speech as any sort of epiphany.