Authors said the 'cancel culture' movement
seems based on 'twisted logic'
Reaction from Horace Cooper, Project 21 co-chair and
author of 'How Trump Is Making Black America Great Again,' and Scotty Smart,
activist and founder of the Smart Foundation.
Two professors from Princeton
University co-authored a column published Thursday that took
apart the country’s current “cancel culture” that they consider to be based on
“twisted logic,” but they said if the trend continues – to be fair
– the movement should consider relegating the Democratic Party to “the dustbin of history.”
Sergiu Klainerman, a mathematics professor, and John
Londregan, a professor of politics and international affairs, co-authored the
piece titled, “A Modest Proposal for a Name Change,” which appeared on the
National Review’s website.
They point out that there is a clear movement afoot in
the country that aims to erase the “symbols and exemplars of American
society” that have suddenly become the targets of an “unprecedented
iconoclastic purge.”
The column mentioned the obvious targets: Civil War
generals, slave owners, but they also point out that the movement goes much
further. Universities across the U.S., for example, are quickly changing the
names on school buildings to keep up with the trend. They pointed out that
their own university changed the name of its Woodrow Wilson School.
Christopher L. Eisgruber, the school’s president, wrote
in a letter last month that the school’s board of trustees “concludes
that Wilson’s racist views and policies makes him an inappropriate
namesake for the School of Public and International Affairs.”
Those in favor of removing statues and renaming school
buildings insist that they have no interest in erasing the country’s history.
They say that in order for the country to move forward to more racial equality
these symbols need to be removed because they create additional hurdles on
that path.
But critics have asked just how far the cancel culture
will go?
Klainerman and Londregan wrote, “Shall we also change the
names of months? We might start with July, which honors Julius Caesar, who by
common standards committed genocide against the Gauls, and August, named after
the man who put the last nail in the coffin of the Roman Republic and declared
himself emperor — both were also slave owners themselves as well as leaders of
vast slave empires."
The two then looked at the history of the
Democrat Party that up to the 1960s “was the party of slavery, Jim Crow,
segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, poll taxes, and literacy tests for
voting."
They listed other offenses that Democrats
committed in the previous decades-- including President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII-- and
noted that the party has “been able to redefine itself over the past
half-century as the champion of minorities.”
But they concluded that the party’s
"divide-and-conquer approach concerning race, ethnicity,
sex, and sexual preferences has advanced their political ambitions to the
detriment of our unifying motto E pluribus Unum."
Edmund
DeMarche is a senior news editor for FoxNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @EDeMarche.
