Reason never Defeats Hate

Steve Bannon is coming to University of Chicago to perform "reasoned debate." John Warner writes:

Zingales says, “Hate cannot be defeated by hate, but only by reason.”
Huh? Perhaps hate cannot defeat hate, but does this mean our only alternative is “reason?”
I’m trying to think of a single instance in recorded history where hate was defeated by reason and I’m coming up short. Did the reason of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation end the Civil War?
Did Martin Luther King Jr. reason the cattle prod out of Selma sheriff Jim Clark’s hands?
The faith Zingales puts in the power of “reasoned debate” is essentially magical, an all-powerful remedy for whatever ails you.

That's a good point. 

I believe in this case, the University of Chicago’s commitment to the free exchange of ideas is more symbolic and performative than substantive. Inviting Steve Bannon is an attention-grabbing symbol that says, “Hey, open-minded people over here!” but it’s an inch-deep commitment to the values they claim to hold dear. Meanwhile, they've got some academic messy academic freedom issues where they seem less reverent of full and free reasoned debate.

Performative.

As a second example, Bannon’s invite also led to the ultimate resignation of Samantha Eyler-Driscoll as a member of the University of Chicago Stigler Center publication ProMarket. After her objections to the Bannon invitation were overruled by the board and her request to be personally recused from promoting the event was not fully respected, she was informed by human resources that as staff, unlike Zingales and Bannon, she was not “protected under the University’s stated principles of freedom of expression…and perceived insubordination could be grounds for termination of my employment.”

In her resignation from the board, Eyler-Driscoll observes, “My situation is only the latest example of the ubiquitous reality in this country whereby the de jure notion of an absolute right to freedom of expression conceals a de facto reality in which the right to free expression of the powerful is enforced at the expense of that of their subordinates.”

This is a point I'm interested in -  staff don't have academic freedom, even when they operate in intellectual capacities.

Watching carefully.

- An academic staffer.

Bannon on Mental Health: Spank Your Children More

Steve Bannon's long history promoting sexist, antisemitic, and racist views are very much in the news right now, appropriately. I've been saying it's the first major test/fight of the President Trump era. He can place this man in the heart of American power. There's no Congressional approval. But here is where we find out if the media has learned anything from its normalizing of Trump during the long campaign, if the GOP has any qualms, if the Democrats can learn to fight.

Let's talk ableism, because where you find one (or more) form of oppression, you tend to find others, but ableism doesn't always track with partisan divides the way racism/sexism do. GOP ableism tends to be in the form of 1) disabled people are lazy 2) people with invisible disabilities are spoiled 3) disability supports are mostly vehicles for fraud 4) Defunding programs that keep people alive or out of institutions.

Here's what I've got on Bannon so far. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network put out a statement on Bannon which highlighted this passage from The Hill: 

In December 2015, weeks after Ryan became Speaker, Bannon wrote in an internal Breitbart email obtained by The Hill that the “long game” for his news site was for Ryan to be “gone” by the spring.

In the Dec. 1 email, Breitbart’s Washington editor, Matt Boyle, suggested to Bannon via email that a story promoting Ryan’s planned overhaul of the mental health system would be a good way to “open a bridge” to Ryan.

Bannon wasn’t keen on the idea.

“I’ve got a cure for mental health issue,” Bannon wrote to Boyle. “Spank your children more.”

This comment was made in the context of trying to get Bannon behind the "Murphy Bill," a bill I do not support. I have been persuaded by experts, as I wrote here, that stripping away rights in favor of incarceration of people with mental disabilities will in fact not radically improve mental health outcomes and will lead to increased stigmatization and loss of basic human rights.

But although I don't especially want Bannon to back it, the slur is telling. For him, mental health is just about spoiled children. The solution is violence and abuse.

Keep in mind that there are millions of Americans who have various forms of mental illness [note: ableist jokes mean I'll ban/block you] or have family members who do, including lots of Republicans. Many of them likely lack appropriate services. Trump just appointed someone making fun of them to the White House. Will they care? Will Republicans speak against this particular slur?

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I searched Breitbart for terms related with disability and found mixed results, often leveraging anti-ableist rhetoric in order to attack the left. Search, for example, for the word "retard," and you'll find article after article detailing lefties of various sorts using the word "retard" or related stigmatizing language. What you won't find, though, is anything on Anne Coulter's consistent use of the word, or, of course, Trump's many instances of using that word.

Other searches yielded claims that Social Security programs are vehicles for fraud and should be defunded. And then there's this defense of the eugenicist Center for Immigration Studies. Their eugenic ideas detailed here from the Anti Defamation League.

On mental illness, the site has no consistent ethic, as it both wants to blame US gun violence on mental illness while trying to blame Islamic terrorism on Islam, decrying attempts to blame it on mental illness (sometimes).

I mostly left the Serge Kovaleski story out of this search. It's whole different set of epistemologies. Disability is a space where, unlike other forms of bigotry, even the racist right is uncomfortable using pejorative language in public. That's why they spent so much energy denying that Trump mocked the disabled reporter (he did) and trying to claim that Clinton mocked disabled children as First Lady of Arkansas (she did not).

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What I find significant about Bannon's nasty slur is that it reflects broader GOP epistemologies surrounding disability. There's a tendency to divide disabled people into the "good disabled" - people with obvious conditions such as Cerebral Palsy and Down Syndrome - and the "bad disabled" - including people with invisible disabilities. Policies reflect suspicions that people who need benefits are just faking it or (to use the UK term) are scroungers. GOP pro-disability policies tend to reflect the needs of white, affluent, parents of kids with disabilities, but even there under highly limited contexts.

Bannon's "spank your children more" is just a quip, but it's a quip that leads us into a nasty place where people are denied care and subject to abuse.