Liberal “McCarthyism” and Censorship of Conservatives Condemned by… Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg is a liberal, but his liberalism is fairly old-fashioned compared to left-wing radicals like Bill de Blasio. It’s not altogether surprising that he wouldn’t be on board with left-wing censorship.

It’s somewhat surprising that he used a prestigious platform like this to call out the left for it. And that he did it this vehemently.

Delivering the main speech at Harvard’s 363rd commencement in Cambridge, Mass., Bloomberg complained that campuses have become citadels of “modern . . . McCarthyism”

“In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left-wing ideas. Today, on many campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species,” he said.

“And that is probably nowhere more true than it is here in the Ivy League.”

Bloomberg pointed to controversies at other campuses that forced speakers to bow out, including the withdrawal of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from delivering the commencement address at Rutgers amid protests over her role in the Iraq War.

“Perhaps nowhere is that more true than here in the Ivy League. In the 2012 presidential race, 96 percent of all campaign contributions from Ivy League faculty and employees went to Barack Obama. That statistic, drawn from Federal Election Commission data, should give us pause — and I say that as someone who endorsed President Obama. When 96 percent of faculty donors prefer one candidate to another, you have to wonder whether students are being exposed to the diversity of views that a university should offer. Diversity of gender, ethnicity and orientation is important. But a university cannot be great if its faculty is politically homogenous.”

“Today, if tenure is going to continue to exist, it must also protect conservatives whose ideas run up against liberal norms. Otherwise, university research will lose credibility. A liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism.”

“There was more disagreement among the old Soviet Politburo than there is among Ivy League donors.”

This sounds more like Newt Gingrich than Bloomberg. I had to do a double take when I first read it. This isn’t the kind of speech that mainstream Republicans would give… and Bloomberg was never even a real Republican. Not even a real RINO.

“If you want the freedom to worship as you wish, and speak as you wish, and marry as you wish, then you must tolerate my freedom to do so,” Bloomberg said. “Attempting to restrict my freedoms in ways you would not restrict your own leads only to injustice. We can’t deny others’ rights and privileges that we demand for ourselves. And that’s true in our cities, and it’s no less true [at our educational institutes].”

That seems like a nod toward the Eich case and gay intolerance.

Bloomberg directed this advice toward recent reports of commencement speakers being asked to shy away from appearances at schools this season due to protests based on their political or personal beliefs.

He said in each of these cases—Brandeis University and Smith College included—a person’s voice was silenced and they were denied an honorary degree because they were deemed politically controversial. “This is an outrage and we must not let it continue,” Bloomberg said, adding that it’s critical that censorship and conformity—the enemies of freedom—don’t win out. “Isn’t the purpose of a university to stir discussion, not silence it? It’s morally and pedagogically wrong to deny other students from hearing a speech.”

“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,” he said.

So what is Bloomberg up to?

1. He’s clearly angry over the way his police commissioner was treated at Brown and his own commencement address was protested by lefty students.

2. He was treated badly by De Blasio and his people. Giuliani gave more respect to Dinkins and certainly didn’t use the proceedings to carry on personal attacks against his predecessor. Bloomberg is angry at Social Justice and Class Warriors. He seems himself as a philanthropist who spent much of his time and money to try and work to improve New York City only to be thrown out like yesterday’s trash by the very people who benefited.

3. Bloomberg used this part of the speech to switch into promoting gun control, global warming and the Ground Zero Mosque. (The 3 G’s.) He probably thinks that he can win over some Republicans on the issues he really cares about by reaching out to them. It’s the sort of thing actual liberals used to do. We’ve just forgotten that over the Clinton/Obama years.

4. Bloomberg had post-mayoral national ambitions. But the idea of him as V.P. was laughed off by Democrats and he didn’t hit it off with Obama. Now he’s once again doing the Third Way thing. The attack on liberal censorship is an explicit attack on the Two Party political roadblocks in D.C.

Is he egotistical enough to be contemplating a Third Party run in 2016? Or a V.P. slot for the Dems or GOP? It’s possible. And not entirely inconceivable. With utterly terrible candidates on both sides, someone may decide that he has credibility on the economy. Sure it’s unlikely, but remember Joe Biden. Every V.P. in decades has been either an unlikely choice or a miserable embarrassment.

  • American Patriot

    At Warren Wilhelm, Jr.’s inauguration, it was mainly certain people like the so-called “public advocate”, Letitia James; and a couple others of her ilk who were bashing the soda-obsessed nanny-state former mayor. When the now-mayor gave his speech that day (New Year’s Day, 2014), he only praised his predecessor that day. If State Senator Danny Squadron had won the public advocate primary, he still would have supported the modern left’s agenda in New York, but he is not as extreme as James. In fact, Squadron won more votes in Manhattan than James during the public advocate runoff race. The fact is that New York has many different types of left-wingers that they all come in varieties. Hence, nanny-states advocates bash one another for not being in complete compliance with each other.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      Red Bill wasn’t so far gone as to say it himself, but his people knew what was going to be said. It was part of their agenda

      Squadron and James are both terrible. James is worse, but past a certain point the lesser of two evils doesn’t matter much

  • DogmaelJones1

    If one catches an enemy uttering something completely rational and proper (as opposed to his usual inanities), look for an ulterior motive. Read between the lines. Daniel has found ulterior motives in Bloomberg’s Harvard speech, and has read between his lines. And, what’s so important about a “diversity” of opinion? Should we automatically grant as a legitimate point of view the ravings of a lunatic (name your favorite liberal or Marxist). And, in the 1950′s, “right-wingers” weren’t trying to “repress” left-wing ideas. They were on a campaign to “out” respected lefty intellectuals and Hollywood directors, actors, and writers.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      that brand of opinion diversity is another liberal folly, but it’s one the left now opposes

      also consider who might have written that speech for Bloomberg, might have been a rational conservative

  • liz

    Whatever his motives were, at least he said it.
    I cannot fathom how the same man who believes in such freedom could at the same time be in favor of letting the most oppressive haters of freedom and diversity on earth build a mosque at Ground Zero, to glorify their own hatred and violence against the free world.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      bloomberg is an older generation liberal, he’s still a control freak, but wary of letting the left have full sway

      he thinks of himself as common sense

      • American Patriot

        Bloomberg may be an older generation “liberal”, but he is no Hubert Humphrey nor Henry “Scoop” Jackson, both of who were real classical liberals, or modern conservatives. And the nanny-state former mayor is certainly no Ronald Reagan, who was another classical liberal. Bloomberg definitely views himself as the “third way”, similar to other third party politicians in certain ways.

        • Daniel Greenfield

          I didn’t say that older generation. He was born in the 40s, a little too early to be a Baby Boomer, but not by that much.

          People like that often avoided the New Left even when they were otherwise liberal. But Bloomberg funded a lot of left-wing causes.

          He probably feels angry and hurt over the way the left treated him over reasonable middle of the road policies, e.g. policing

          • American Patriot

            The same left that criticized good policing policies are the ones who praised the Crown Heights riots as an “uprising” and probably view Dinkins (who was Ed Koch’s fourth term) as a “saint” and a “peace advocate”. The truth was that Dinkins was a racist, anti-Semite who simply didn’t care about New York at all. His first police commissioner, Lee Brown (who eventually became mayor of Houston-I still can’t comprehend how the people of Houston could elect that guy mayor after his disastrous record as NYC’s police commissioner), is another racist and anti-Semite who was one of the city’s worst police commissioners in history. Dinkins eventually made the right decision when he appointed Ray Kelly as the city’s police commissioner upon Brown’s exit from the job. At that point, crime did go down a little bit. But Dinkins and Brown had increased tensions in the city, but the left was okay with that because high crime= totalitarianism, which the left obviously enjoys.

          • Daniel Greenfield

            Sure, the left, the real unsanitized creature, is out to wreck society on a large scale. It believes in waging war on the middle class by making cities unlivable.

            Bloomberg is nowhere near that range. Bill de Blasio is dead center inside it, but also a canny pol

  • Race_Dissident

    How was the speech received, Greenfield? I’m assuming no standing O on this one.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      seemed to be some applause, but really how is any Bloomberg speech received

      he’s not a great speaker or an appealing personality

      • Abberline

        Correct. Giuliani handed him a city that was in spite of 9/11 in pretty good shape and he did not screw it up. That’s about the best you can say about Nanny Bloomberg and compared to Comrade Bill de Blasio he is La Guardia. However he is apreening, pompous, little dictator with an annoying voice and he has a personality that can peel paint combined with an annoying and condescending aura of noblesse oblige. He claimed he endorsed Barack Obama despite the fact the he admitted that Romney was superior on the economy because of Obama’s stand on global warming – I kid you not.

        • Daniel Greenfield

          arguably he did screw it up, the financials are scary and he admitted as much

          But he didn’t screw it up like Red Bill

          • Abberline

            Yes it is a matter of degree. I think Herman Badillo a former Democrat who was his Republican primary opponent in 2001 would have been a better mayor but I am not sure he could have been elected as he did not have any where Bloomberg’s money.

  • David

    I have criticized Bloomberg in the past but I commend him for having the courage to say this. This is definitely something that needs to be said over and over again. One thing I would like to point out is that we who oppose the censorship of conservative ideas on campus need to do is to find a consistent label for those who engage in tactics such as: heckling, shouting down, threatening, and otherwise intimidating conservative speakers on colleges. The Students for Justice in Palestine and other BDS groups are notorious for this. I suggest we refer to these people and tactics as “Brownshirts”. I would like it to get to the point where most public conservatives refer to Brownshirts and everybody who reads it knows what happened. For example, the next time Ann Coulter or any Pro-Israel speaker is harassed in this way, every person on the right and some on the moderate left who describe the event should say, “So-and-so was invited to speak but their lecture was disrupted by Brownshirts,” and everyone who reads it will understand what happened. Of course, this label should not apply to everyone who disagrees with us or even everyone who opposes the speaker being invited to whatever college, but rather we should use this term only to describe those who engage in the tactics of harassment and intimidation of which we are all getting far too familiar with.

    • Forshorn

      I think this is an important point, and the point is to control the language so the right wing can get off the defensive.

  • truebearing

    All of the motives Daniel listed are highly probable, but maybe Bloomberg had some others. Could it be that Bloomberg is alarmed at the growing extremism shown by the Left, including the rise of anti-semitism on campuses? He at least appears to have some conscience.

    The next question is who would Bloomberg hurt the most as an Independent presidential candidate. He has pretended to be a Republican in the past. He ruled New York as an iron-fisted liberal nanny. The country is trending to the Right as of now. Is he trying to crawl back over the political line?

    • Daniel Greenfield

      I don’t see Bloomberg running to the ‘right’ too well. He could manage a Huntsman type candidacy on fiscal conservatism and social liberalism

      If the GOP nominates another RINO, it wouldn’t be too easy to tell the difference

      • Abberline

        Right now I would be thrilled if we had a fiscally intelligent and conservative candidate who was a centrist on social issues and could get himself elected. A Rick Santorum will never become president. If you looked at Huntsman’s record in Utah he actually governed the state quite fiscally conservative.

  • Texas Patriot

    Truth has a life of it’s own and doesn’t walk in lock-step with anyone. The rigid mind and thought control tactics of the Far Left are no less false and misleading than the rigid mind and thought control tactics of the Far Right. Therefore, to follow truth above all things necessarily means alternately offending the Far Left and the Far Right in equal measure. Obviously Michael Bloomberg is more than willing to do that. Great speech!

  • Anukem Jihadi

    These arguments work for Bloomberg because he’s arguing his own corner. Would he make the same arguments for conservatives although they’re technically applicable? Probably not.
    All this shows is how far to the right he is of Ivy League.
    So this is not really hopeful in any way shape or form because Bloomberg is simply outmoded. His words will have no lasting effect – they only mark a way point. Progressives like de Blasio will one day look back whimsically at how far they’ve come.

  • Texas Patriot

    I hope he runs. He’s the only candidate on the horizon who has a chance of slowing down the Clinton Steamroller, and if he runs on a ticket of rebuilding and reenergizing the American economy, he could draw support from the Left and the Right. The truth is that the politics of personal attack and character assassination have resulted in a perpetual stalemate resembling the Maginot-Siegfried Line. Michael Bloomberg could be the game-changer America needs.