So Breitbart has taken a leftist scalp.

They discovered tweets by Dr. Jamie R. Riley, University of Alabama’s assistant vice president and dean of students, that show [shocked face::gasp] that a leftwing university educrat holds doctrinaire woke leftwing beliefs.

In my opinion, people holding that kind of philosophy should not be allowed within a thousand or so miles of any educational institution because his callous, privileged bigotry is going to be evident any time he has to deal with a white student or a conflict between a black student and a student of any other race or when he has to interact with campus police, particularly when either the cop or the student is white and the other isn’t. That said, there is nothing terribly exotic about his point of view in progressive circles. The New York Times has hired opinion writers with much worse on their Twitter timeline .

But, for whatever reason, Breitbart hit the sweet spot here and within 24-hours an embedded educrat was able to devote more time to fine tuning his bigotry

Jackson Fuentes, press secretary for the UA Student Government Association, confirmed at 4:15 p.m. that Riley is no longer working at the University.

“For us right now, basically all I can tell you is that the University and Dr. Riley have mutually agreed to part ways,” Fuentes said. “So yeah, that’s true, and we do wish him the best.”

In an email at 5:03 p.m., assistant director of the Division of Strategic Communications Chris Bryant released an official statement on behalf of the University confirming Riley’s resignation.

“Dr. Jamie Riley has resigned his position at The University of Alabama by mutual agreement,” Bryant said in the email. “Neither party will have any further comments.”

Robbie Soave at Reason takes it from there:

Many pundits on the right constantly inveigh against cancel culture: the drive to shame, punish, and ultimately destroy people for having said something trivially offensive at some point. Comedian Dave Chapelle torched cancel culture in his recent Netflix special, and conservatives applauded. The clip of Chapelle scornfully imitating cancellers has been all over right-leaning media for the last two weeks.

I very much agree that cancel culture is bad. (In fact, it’s one of the main themes of my book.) But as long as the right is perfectly willing to enforce its own version of political correctness, it is difficult to to believe that they really agree in principle that you shouldn’t do this kind of thing. If you only defend the cancelled when you agree with them, then you’re not actually against cancelling. You’re just protecting your tribe.

Conservatives, please condemn Breitbart for this hit job and demand the immediate reinstatement of James Riley.

Ummm, no. Not just no thanks, but no f***ing thanks at all.

In this case, you can even–without having a “first class mind”–easily hold, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, these two opposing thoughts.

On the one hand, we should all deplore the “cancel culture.” It is corrosive of civil society and it forces you to limit social contacts to people who are pretty like-minded because you have to be attuned to the fact that there is no such thing as a progressive who will not burn you down if you say an unguarded word. On a personal level, I’ve slowly removed from my social circle anyone whose politics I distrust because the risk of being around them is simply too great.

I know many of “the canceled.” They’ve lost jobs. Been rendered unemployable because google never forgets. They’ve dealt with depression and suicidal thoughts. Many times the court of public opinion handed out a verdict before they even had a chance to defend themselves.

— Bridget Phetasy (@BridgetPhetasy) September 6, 2019

Or even worse—you justify why these people “deserve it” in which case you’re part of the problem.

— Bridget Phetasy (@BridgetPhetasy) September 6, 2019

Saying cancel culture isn’t a thing because people rich & famous enough to weather the storm can survive it ignore the real life people who can’t.

— Bridget Phetasy (@BridgetPhetasy) September 6, 2019

Then we need only to look at the saga of Leif Olson where a major center-left outlet fabricated stuff to get a guy they didn’t like fired to understand the utter righteousness of Breitbart’s action.

Soave presents us with a false dichotomy. We can either actively work against a outlet that is (mostly) an ally to try to get a rabid, frothing leftist bigot reinstated. Or we’re hypocrites. That’s simply bullsh**.

The real issue is more analogous to the standoff between the US (that would be us) and the USSR (that would be their fellow travelers who masquerade as Americans today). The US was beset throughout the Cold War with people who claimed we should engage in unilateral nuclear disarmament because that would show the we really had no ill intent. I mean, if we didn’t intend to use nukes on the USSR then we really didn’t need several thousand of them, did we? (Bizarrely enough, you hear the same cretins and their philosophical descendants making the same argument about why the DPRK should not be expected to give up its nukes.) Under Reagan we were scolded that if we build better nukes (the neutron bomb) and developed SDI then we would be hypocrites. It didn’t take a genius to see that a) building nukes and SDI was necessary for our survival and b) holding them did not compromise our principles.

We have a situation where the left and their fluffers in the media hunt through the history of conservative and GOP figures and find anything they can to take them out. This is demonstrated best by the dynamic of MMFA and CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski aka @KFile. So long as this kind of thing is permitted and rewarded, then we on the right have a very binary choice to make. We either unilaterally disarm and follow the lead of the “muh principles” gang, or we fight fire with fire.

To make matters worse, we have people who don’t really have our best interests at heart lecturing us on how we’re violating our principles by defending ourselves.

One of the worst arguments I hear conservatives make in defense of the right de-platforming the left is "we are just making the left play by their own rules." They are no longer the left's rules, if you are enforcing them. Then they are your rules. https://t.co/cFEpWjPFzK

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) September 6, 2019

Sorry, that dog ain’t going to hunt. We’re wise to that game. A couple of years ago a writer going by the nom de guerre Warden at Ace of Spades laid it out perfectly:

There’s a frustrating game that the left plays with conservatives. It’s an Alinksy tactic called, “Make them live up to their values.” Now, living up to one’s values isn’t a bad thing, but setting high standards ultimately means that you’ll sometimes fall short.

The left loves to exploit these shortcomings–every Christian who falls short of perfection is a hypocrite; the social values candidate you voted for just got arrested for drunk driving. Haha, everything you believe and advocate is now discredited.

…

It’s this that sent me to a place from which I’ll never return. I literally don’t care what Donald Trump does because nothing he can do is worse than what they’ve already done.

Donald Trump isn’t the bully; he only insults and abuses people in power who have attacked him. They’re the fucking bullies. The left, with their smears, their witch hunts, their slanders, their insults, their riots, their violence, and their weaponizing of the federal bureaucracy.

There aren’t any rules anymore because the left only applies them one way. And in doing so, they’ve left what once was a civil compact between the two parties in smoldering ruins.

I have no personal investment in Donald Trump. He is a tool to punish the left and roll back their ill-gotten gains, no more and no less. If he succeeds even partially in those two things, then I’ll consider his election a win.

Further, I no longer have any investment in any particular political values, save one: The rules created by the left will be applied to the left as equally and punitively as they have applied them to the right. And when they beg for mercy, I’ll begin to reconsider. Or maybe not. Because fuck these people.

This new philosophy has freed me of more emotional angst that I can describe. Literally nothing the left says or does matters to me anymore. I don’t care about their tantrums. I don’t care about their accusations. I don’t care if they say Trump is lying. I don’t care if Trump is lying.

They created this Frankenstein. They own it. I am free of all obligation. I will never play defense again. I will attack, attack, attack, attack using their own tactics against them until they learn their lesson.

What I will not do is let them play my values against me ever again. I don’t need to prove that I’m better than them. I already know it.

So no, we’re not going to criticize Breitbart on this. No, we’re not going to demand that this Riley character be reinstated. No, we’re not going to defend figures on the left from suffering the same consequences anyone on the right would suffer under similar circumstances. Yes, we are going to do whatever we can to burn down anyone on the left who looks even vaguely vulnerable. And when y’all get tired of this tit-for-tat bullsh**, let us know and we can talk about next steps, but for right now it is strictly #NewRules, baby.

Enjoy your New Rules.

When you want to go back to the Old Rules, let me know. I'd like that. Until then, hey, consequences, player. https://t.co/vQ1qohJaOz

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) July 20, 2018

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