Liberal prof calls out illiberal liberals

Jonathan Zimmerman is going to get his ass fired.

Not at Penn where he teaches education and history (and has tenure), but from the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he has been a veteran, left-leaning contributor.

His offense? Deviation from progressive orthodoxy.

Look — it’s bad enough the broadsheet felt obliged to use two mainline conservative writers, Jennifer Stefano and Kyle Sammin (after ditching much more conservative Dom Giordano and Christine Flowers) — but Zimmerman was supposed to be one of their own. 

In recent months he has become a maverick, and the Inky does not like mavericks. (Believe me, I know.)

Zimmerman has become so much of a maverick — centering on freedom of speech — that I have republished several of his Inquirer columns, criticizing left-wing academics, and Woke culture.

He’s at it again, railing against liberals who claim to be opposed to censorship, yet use it themselves to try to stop dissenting voices. I agree with his theme, but I disagree with the culprit. 

He opens his column by reporting that he was outraged that “Gender Queer,” a coming-of-age book by a nonbinary author, was banned by many libraries. 

But he was also outraged by many libraries and book stores banning “Irreversible Damage,” a book that attributes the rise of gender surgeries more to “social contagion,” meaning cultural pressure, more than anything else.

“That’s how I differ from some of my fellow liberals, who scream bloody murder about restrictions on books they love but seem perfectly happy to remove ones that they loathe,” he writes. ‘I understand — and, in many ways, share — their distaste for ‘Irreversible Damage.’ But you can’t fight censorship with one hand if you’re furthering it with the other.”

A little later he adds, “When it comes to free expression, even liberals have become illiberal.”

I disagree.

Not with the sentiment, but with the target.

It is not the liberals, such as Zimmerman. It is some of the progressives.

To me, a liberal is defined as someone who may hate what you say, but will defend to their death your right to say it. 

Progressives are governed by their feelings about what you say and how it may affect the feelings of others. Like those magical, newly-invented micro-aggressions that are used to silence opposing views. Not all progressives, but the further left you go, the more detached from reality they are.

By exaggerating and elevating actual social ills, progressives create parody. They take a perfectly reasonable starting point of Woke — being aware of and confronting social injustice — and exploding it into the idea of viewing everything through a lens of race (or class), and assigning racism to any idea that opposes their own.

It is the kind of thinking that creates participation trophies, and demeans the idea of merit and hard work. It worships at the new Woke, and bows before Critical Race Theory.

So the “resolutely leftist school district” in Burbank, Cal., reports Zimmerman, barred the teaching of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on “the grounds that these books (which both use the N-word) cause ‘harm and trauma’ to Black students,” despite Black authors having praised both books.

Zimmerman is particularly harsh on the American Booksellers Association, which sponsors a Banned Books Week, and yet abjectly apologized after it sent “Irreversible Damage” to bookstores.

It described the book as “anti trans” that caused “pain” and “harm” to the trans community. “This is a serious violent incident that goes against ABA’s policies, values, and everything we believe and support.”

Violent? That word usually indicates physical force. This is an example of the exaggeration I talked about.

Zimmerman’s response: “An organization ostensibly devoted to the ‘freedom to read’ closed the book on it. According to illiberal liberals, you should be free to read what they like. Everything else is off the table.”

The tendency to squelch opinions that you don’t like does not exist only on the Left. The Right does it, too. 

Free speech can sometimes be ugly speech, but as my generation used to be told, “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never harm you.”

Today’s generation seems to be told that names will harm you.

That is a dangerous, anti-democratic idea.