Dance, folks. Thanks for being here. A this is really an exciting discussion that kim is going to lead today. He and i started talking about this a couple years ago and it is something ive been veryti interested in for a long time am i to see the growing intoleranc and intimidation from the left. The very first book i wrote is called why we whisper in the subtitle is losing our right to say its wrong. Its all about the growing intimidation of anyone who wanted to take a position that was based on any kind of traditional values, and a judeochristian reality and how the left carries out that intimidation in a way that makes everyone whisper. G the title of that book came from my experience has been something in my Senate Campaign for i was just pummeled in the media all over the place. There was no public support for me. Everywhere i went, people would come up after the meeting and get real close since they keep fighting. We are with you. But it was always a whisper because people were so intimidated. Cap homes kim holmes i sent a much better job to the point to where we collect liberalism today. I actually have some prepared remarks that i would just like to read, to give you a more scholarly introduction here because this book and i told kim after i read it, i was surprised he seemed so normal because they really deep analysis of where we are, more than most people would you willing to listen to, but very profound and Perfect Timing for this book to come out, given what we see happening around the country. Everyday we see stories about disruption to learning on College Campuses due to heat it protests over free speech onal racial issues. Ni the dismissal of the concerns of people of faith in running their schools or businesses, that announcements are professors, officials, scientists were opin unfashionable opinion in a disturbing trend to attempt to destroy the careers of public profiles of the individuals for their ideas. These are a few examples. You will agree with me that today the variations are almost endless. You may have experienced some of these in your own world. The overarching theme is the impulse to not just disagree, but to dismiss, and he mean, degrade and even try to use the law to silence those with whom you disagree. American society and Public Discourse reached such a levelra of instability and intolerance, leaving many afraid to exercise their constitutional right to express their own opinions on the important matters facing this country. Today we will hear about this from kim holmes, who will introduce to you his new book,nt the close of the liberal mind how groupthink and intolerance define the left. This did not happen overnight. As you will hear from a lon dr. Holmes, this is the result of a long philosophical growth has started prior to the american founding, a road that took two different directions. One european and one distinctly american. While this may seem academic, it is quite important to understand the situation we find ourselves in today and how to think about the terms liberal and liberalism. Dr. Holmes will talk about how american liberalism, which for centuries but for individual liberties such as free speech and freedom of conscience. It has become its opposite, close minded and intolerant differing points of view, a development that is transformtransform ing a once vibrant liberal tradition into and of liberal forests were denying peoples right and freedoms. The closing the closing of the liberal mind is threatening Constitutional Rights at one timene have been among americas greatest causes. It is up in indy or did that once was the bastion of American Freedom and equality, which in the end is not only a threat to the country, but to the great traditions of liberalism that health. But the prognosis is not all bad. Theres a way forward and dr. Holmes will talk about that, an too. Thank you all for joining us. Please give a warm welcome to one of heritages top scholars and a great friend of ours. Thank you. [applause] thank you, jim. P i was a better summary that im going to be able to do. That was perfect. Theres a lot of people to than. For me being able to write this book. I know its always a dangerous thing to start mentioning names. Surely jim, you are at the top of the list because two years ago when i went to see you in your office and i said i had this idea about writing the history of liberalism and why it has become the way it is. I remember i used a term and i said you know its becoming a liberal. You let that man like zero, hes going to go off in an academict. Direction. And i didnt do that. I benefited greatly not only from your support, but also from the discussions we had. I think the subtitle is entirely yours. A greatly benefit from your support and friendship and i greatly appreciate it. My old boss, i wouldnt even be in this position been able toe read these books are there werent for the faith and confidence of adding me. Its great to see you here. We do have a problem. If you look up the definition of the word liberal in the dictionary, you will find it means many different things. The word broadminded comes up. The word openminded comes up. A liberal is supposed to be somebody according to the definition that is tolerant of different points of view. The idea being that while you may disagree with me, with you have every right to yours the rt opinion. Above all, no one has the right to deny you of me reading of expression or freedom of conscience. In a marketplace of ideas, competition must be kept open. There is no settled science. The end of history are openended. We are not sure where we are going. Checks and balances must be maintained in the government to ensure that no one single party or even one partisan point of view ever prevails wherever. The rule of law is sacrosanct and the same rules should apply to everybody. That is sort of the general idea of what a liberal minded person should be. By the standards, today liberals have a problem, selfdescribed liberals have a problem. Speech codes and safe spaces are used on campuses to stifle dissent and shut down debate. Aggressive attorneys general are issuing subpoenas against socalled Climate Change deniers. Some activists actually want to try them as war criminals. The irs has targeted the president s political opponents by the president himself has abused executive authority. Religious people who question samesex marriages are called bigoted and worse. Some are even threatened to boycott signs and even imprisonment. Universities where progressivism reigned supreme in our places of stifling intellectual conformity and all across america, whether its in our neighborhoods, schools or local government, there is a zero tolerance ofhe anything that may offend or disturb whatever the orthodoxy happens to be in that particular institution at that particular time. It is plain to see that progressive liberals today have become the opposite of the liberal minded person as i described in here. They become intolerant in the name of tolerance. They become close minded. They become even yes liberal, which is the opposite of the liberal minded person. Close minded, intolerant,and tof stifling dissent. Too often made his public shaming rituals, particularly in the universities and even coercion and increasingly through the law to stifle dissent and shut down debate. So i wrote this book because i wanted to tell the story of how this happened. Its a long story. Its actually an historical story. Not just what happened in the last eight years. Its been going on a very long time. Unfortunately also theres a lot of misunderstanding segments that i want to tackle. I must say at the outset it will not do if you are conservative and simply argues that progressives have always been this way. This is the response ive gotten on twitter as ive been trying to promote the book. A lot of people come back with whats new under the sun. Theyve always been intolerant. I dont think that progressives, even though theyve held long, strong held views, but i think that their work is dissent and desire to control have never been as intense as they are today. Theres something fundamentally different and new. It wont argue either my opinion if you happen to be a liberal to say are you kidding me . You are calling us intolerant when you have so many big is in your midst as conservative . You can find intolerance and closemindedness that any ideology. You can find it on the left. You can find it on the right. Today with her post calleds is n intolerant and bigoted by conservatives is often a legitimate different that opinion. Apparently times change and standards shift. Just a few short years ago, for example, barack obama and Hillary Clinton held views on marriage that today progressives regularly condemn it bigoted. Should we call obama andinton clintons bigoted to . . I dont think so. Liberals have got a singular problem. They are caught up in a crippling contradiction. They brandished a sword of zero tolerance in the name of tolerance and they close down debate in the name of openmindedness. This is not just hypocrisy. I think more importantly it is a betrayal. A progressive liberalism is that ward with what it professes to believe in. Not only tolerance in the openrt mind, it increasingly freedom and democracy. Liberals are becoming their own worst enemies. They are becoming a force for undermining book remains of a once great liberal tradition in america. In the closing in the closing of the liberal mind, i will go through the books main points. The first one is somewhat surprising when i started the research. That is that todays progressive liberalism is not your parents liberalism at all. It is far more radical and far more different. Its just in the old liberal traditions of fdr and jfk such as freedom of speech, political pluralism and particularly respect for western values and family. Its not even the liberalism of president bill clinton when he waspo in office, who if you recl at the time was a moderate new democrat. You will recall in the 90s clinton disavowed the middle left with the socalled sisters soldier moment, but only a couple weeks ago he was forced to apologize to a group of black waste matter protesters who were shooting him down. The difference between the old bill clinton and the new bill clinton shows you how muchnted progressivism has changed. Todays progressivism, what i call in the book the postmodern left is a child of the new left of the 1960s. From the new blast, it got its start to revolutionize culture and society. And also got its unique talent for finding new issues such as politics and environmentalism tc advance the cause ofhe new egalitarianism. His particular genius, and i have to call it that, at least in terms of being politically affect the, was to infuse the cultural revolution and identity politics with the new ideas of postmodernism and multiculturalism. That is the belief that morality is completely irrelevant. Truth is totally subject to. All cultures, except for the west of rse, which is inferior or completely equal. Freedom and even reality are fit and, nothing more than social constructs an absolute redundant and perfect equality are achievable by the state and by the enforcement of the law. Provided the right people are in charge and enough enforcement is applied to the problem. So why do i say genius . These intellectual elements, values really a postmodernism as i have described them, once they were, once they were fused with the old radical dream of perfect equality, dave became a very powerful tool and deconstructing with t deconstructing that is dismantling the old order, the old culture and the old values of the postmodern left didnt appear to be about politics at all. Ns it appeared to be mainly about personal freedom and the never ending dream of achievings at perfect happiness in completema personal satisfaction. He looked out to be expanding the horizons of freedom and the practices we have seen intoe opposing speech codes and find them pastors are refusing aten samesex weddings. Make no mistake, a postmodern idea may have appeared to be all about language, art, Human Experience of ecoin any university, thats what they are mainly interested in. Activists and most importantly politicians and journalists became intellectual weapons to overturn the old cultural order. And what does this mean . Think about it. If all morality is relative, who needs that . If truth is subjective, men and women are free to define who and what they are, including the right to amend to claim it is really a woman in a court ofou law. If all white people are by definition guilty of white privilege, then who named to either with what it thinks, believes erdmann does. Ha it is a mere fiction, in their social construct and could be controlled and could be eliminated for the purpose of achieving the political agenda. It is boundless relativism and its utter lack of interest in history and in reality was a ken gateway for the radicalization of progressivism in the past 25, 30 years. It opened away for a new kind of radical individualism and i had to call it that. One where the only view that count is the one that a Single Person believes claims. That view is after all the very essence of identity politics. But it also redefined with the last manned by equality. It is true we still have, you know, Bernie Sanders is anan oldfashioned socialist. We still do have socialism defined economically. But in the kind of cultural radical design here, it wasnt just economic. It was focused on culture and social change and particularly the place that individuals had in certain social groups, particularly those based on race, gender and preferences. This world coming to danger individual right not by what you shared in common with all humanity as it had been understood by natural law could rather come you got them by virtue of membership in that group. If you belong to or, for example, a persecuted minority,i u. S. And individual shared in the persecution of the wholee, n quarter. It didnt matter if you had aser an individual can persecuted or not. What really mattered was the historic and social position of the group but which you remember and found that calms the whole basis of identity politics and the new kind of code increasingly enforced across america. That this was a momentous change. Not only fundamentally change the way we view civil rights. It also turned equality and two button that could be used against freedom of speech, which is what jim dement was talking about. Certain critical views cannot be called hate speech and you could develop elaborate legal concepts to go around this idea. If it was hate speech, it could legally be curtailed and even silenced if necessary. An expression could be silenced and it was all done of course in the name of quality. This world view, this postmodern worldview that i described here may sound a bit academic. It is true that i had to go back in and read some of the Academic Studies because this is where the ideas originated over theome last 35 years about critical theories and the like. I was astonished not only how badly written they were, but how much they relied on the kind of insular, hermetically sealed her killer reason, where nothing was allowed to interfere with and always ending, basically begging the question all along. But, it is not just academic. Its actually the very real stuff of modern politics and culture and it is spread and enforced by a prevailing world view, groupthink and theit is sp subtitle, that is professed by professors, teachers, journalists, lawyers, entertainers, increase in the Corporate Leaders who not only think alike, but who cannot possibly imagine and worldview outside of their own. It is not a conspiracy. Its just spring via consensus. They dont have to sit in dark rooms and concoct conspiracies all although the activists do. They are all part of the same class. Theyll largely share the same education. They operate in a world of cozy symbiotic relationship. They are wealthy, connected, come from the best schools, watch the same shows and movies. They live in the same neighborhood. They intermarry, interact with one another. E they are the most influential today, people in american politics and culture. Many of them, particularly the professors and researchers are refunded directly or indirectly by the federal government. So this process of liberalization but i described here has definitely accelerated under president obama. It has many different aspects come in many familiar to all of you here at heritage. Or indirec the abuse of executive authority the irs targeting political opponents. Laws were essentially written bl not enforcing them or by reinterpreting them to mean Something Different from what they had been originally intend to. There has been heavyhanded use of the Justice Department to investigate local jurisdictions, officials and Police Departments but only when they served the president s agenda. All in all, its a record of using power to get ones way. Science is settled. History is over. The whole system must be way. Transformed, which in reality means altering it for goods of the president s opponents, mainly conservatives, will have no means in the future to undo what he has achieved. All this means is that the main battlefront of intolerance inen america has shifted. It used to be that progressives, because they believed they were the minorities were all in favor of free speech and open discourse because they thought being a minority served their purpose as dissenters, a few well, to keep things up in. Now that they are increasingly in charge, they are trying to close the doors behind them. As a result, conservators find themselves to be a minority against a powerful new and even wealthy liberal majority, particularly in their influence in the industry, business, entertainment industry, and even frankly increasingly mainline churches. Across the various brands of the culture wars, we see them every day, progressives are pressing their advantage and they do so because they think they are winning. That is why they become of a boulder and make ever new demands. As a result, conservatives still on the defensive. They feel like they are the ones who now have to be worried about their rights because thats a minority, they are seeing the lot in certain areas of their beliefs being used to suppress their freedom of conscience or freedom of dissent, freedom of speech, which brings me to the trump phenomenon. The understanding has become in your possession. I go into this area with great trepidation. Everybodys got a theory what caused all of this. All i can say is what you see in donald Trump Supporters of a backlash against all of the things i am describing here. It is tight fire with fire is mentality. If you cant beat them with the old constitutional conservatism