Ivanka Trump Fuels a Cancel-Culture Clash at Wichita State

By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

13 June 20

showdown over who rules America’s college campuses came to a head in Kansas on Wednesday, in a clash that might be called Cancel Culture vs. the Big Donors. It began last week, when a technical college affiliated with Wichita State University scrapped plans for a virtual commencement address by Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, in a bow to student and faculty criticism of the President’s response to the nationwide protests over George Floyd’s killing. On Twitter, Ivanka blamed “cancel culture,” calling it “antithetical to academia.” In a compromise brokered by the university, Ivanka’s remarks, instead of headlining the event, were demoted to being one in a menu of choices during the ceremony, on June 6th. If they wished, students could click on a link and see her dressed for the occasion, in a regal white sheath and turquoise earrings and brooch, as she addressed them as “wartime” graduates.

The approach of Wichita State University’s president, Jay Golden, won praise from students and faculty members who had circulated petitions opposing the address. But the decision roiled the school’s conservative corporate donors, including, reportedly, the billionaire libertarian oil magnate Charles Koch, the owner of Koch Industries, the largest company in Wichita and one of the two largest private companies in the country. According to the Wichita Eagle, Koch Industries threatened to withdraw its financial support for the university; its basketball arena bears Koch’s name. The newspaper’s story cited a letter, sent to the Kansas Board of Regents, by another corporate booster of the school, Steve Clark, which called for Golden to be fired and warned that Koch Industries and other major corporate donors—including Dan Carney, the founder of Pizza Hut—were “very upset and quite vocal in their decisions to disavow any further support.”

In his letter, according to the Eagle, Clark described a conversation that he’d had with Koch Industries’ chief financial officer, Steve Feilmeier, the chair of a fund-raising campaign for a new business building on campus. “He advised me he’s resigning . . . from any further association with the University,” Clark reportedly wrote. “He is also advising that Koch Industries rescind all their financial support for programs at the University they’ve previously funded.” In an interview, Clark told the Eagle, “We had Koch in the fold. Now we’re going to lose them, and they’ll never be back.” To avoid risking the loss of millions of dollars in financial support for the university, Clark called on the Board of Regents to fire Golden.

Instead, the board held a closed-door session on the matter on Wednesday, while students held a rally and circulated a campus petition in support of Golden, which has now garnered eighty-seven hundred signatures. After meeting for four hours, the board issued an equivocal statement supporting “freedom of speech and diversity and inclusion.” Tajahnae Stocker, one of the W.S.U. students who helped organize the rally, told the Eagle, “The Koch brothers have had a huge influence for way too long, and now is about time to start supporting us instead of supporting a check to the university.”

Clark, who had called for Golden’s dismissal, declined to comment.

The political pressure that wealthy donors exert on universities rarely gets aired so publicly. But there’s no mystery in why W.S.U. might quake at the prospect of alienating the Kochs. Charles Koch, whose fortune is estimated to be slightly more than fifty billion dollars, has reportedly given or pledged some fifteen million to W.S.U. in the past seven years. In addition, Koch has committed $3.6 million to fund the university’s Institute for the Study of Economic Growth. Although W.S.U. is a public university, the Koch-funded center is a think tank devoted to promoting the billionaire’s personal political philosophy, which promotes private enterprise, and not government, as the panacea to virtually all societal problems. In recent years, exposing college students to his libertarian ideology has been a major focus of Koch’s philanthropy, and there are now similar Koch-funded programs at some three hundred American colleges and universities. Despite reportedly bridling at the disinvitation of Ivanka Trump, Koch has not been a full-throated supporter of her father, nor a donor to his campaigns. However, Koch and his private political operation have enthusiastically backed a number of Trump Administration policies, including the 2018 corporate tax cuts and the Administration’s rollbacks of environmental regulations.

In a statement sent to me on Wednesday, a spokesman for Koch Industries tried to distance the company from the controversy. “Steve Clark is a private citizen who is not affiliated with Koch Industries,” the statement read. “His views were inaccurate and do not represent Koch Industries.” The statement went on to say that the company “is continuing its commitments to WSU” and believes in “academic freedom.” Yet it also said, “We object to speaker disinvitations,” adding that “universities offer students opportunities to encounter new ideas and think for themselves. Limiting access to unpopular speakers, viewpoints, and scholarship doesn’t protect students, it cuts off the chance to engage, debate, and criticize.”

A wealthy donor casting the controversy as a matter of free speech sounds noble. But some of the professors and students who led the protests against Ivanka Trump’s commencement address dismissed that argument as specious. Jennifer Ray, an associate professor of photo media at Wichita State, who wrote an open letter to the administration opposing the address that gathered nearly five hundred signatures, pointed out that “any student who wants to opt-in and hear Ivanka Trump’s speech can. It wasn’t cancelled, or censored. It’s on a menu of speakers they can listen to. So, this First Amendment talk doesn’t really apply. The people who are complaining know full well that the speech is available. They just don’t like the politics. It was all about the symbolism.”

Ray acknowledged that her reason for opposing the speech was symbolic as well. “It would have sent a message that the university was against the protesters,” she said. “Instead, the university tried to neutralize the situation. They did the right thing. It was quite brave.”

Amira Coleman, an aspiring opera singer who is a senior at W.S.U. and an African-American supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, noted that “Ivanka’s speech is still available for anyone who wants to watch it. They just didn’t want it to be the headliner. It was a compromise, yet the donors said they wanted to pull their donations. It was not an act of censorship. It was a shift of focus from Ivanka to the needs of the black community here. And now the president is getting punished for listening to the students here. That’s sad.”

If, in fact, there is any threat to free speech on campus, Ray suggested, the episode showed that it is posed by the school’s big donors. “The real peril is these business partnerships,” she told me. “They think they own the school. That’s the First Amendment issue.”

Democracy Remains Betrayed in Bolivia. "Pro-Democracy" Voices Don't Seem Too Bothered.

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

12 June 20

A new study is the latest to undermine widespread claims of electoral fraud by Bolivia’s Evo Morales. It isn’t the first such debunking — yet democracy remains betrayed in Bolivia, and “pro-democracy” voices don’t seem too bothered.

istakes happen. Sometimes you get a number wrong on a government form and are forced through rounds of emails and phone calls to fix the mistake; sometimes you uncritically trumpet false charges of electoral fraud and end up supporting a right-wing coup. We’re all human.

The latest whoopsie-daisy comes care of the New York Times, which recently reported on a new study debunking the central plank of the charges of electoral fraud lobbed at ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales in last year’s election. To recap, in last year’s election, the long-serving Morales looked like he might be forced into a perilous run-off as results trickled in, only at the last minute to jump ahead of the ten-point threshold needed to avoid one. It was this sudden leap that was deemed “inexplicable” by the Organization of American States (OAS), and was widely heralded as evidence Morales had stolen the election.

The new study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Tulane University, finds the precise opposite: that not only was Morales’s sudden change in electoral fortunes entirely explicable, but was in line with trends in earlier elections in Brazil, Colombia, and even Bolivia itself, which the OAS had signed off on. In fact, it also matches up with something American liberals are far more familiar with: US elections and the Democratic vote.

“Researchers understand why late-counted votes disproportionately favor the Democrats in the United States: young and nonwhite voters are more likely to cast mail-in and provisional ballots, which are more likely to be counted after election day,” the authors write. “While politicians and pundits often point to the blue shift as evidence of fraud, scholars find that it is predictable. In Bolivia, too, compositional changes likely explain the shift in late-counted votes.”

The study may be new, but the conclusions aren’t. Researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research had similarly argued at the time that Morales’s eleventh-hour vote surge was wholly predictable given that later-reporting areas had tended to favor him in previous elections. Likewise, in February of this year, two MIT researchers also disputed the OAS’ claim that Morales’ late-game fortune was a statistical irregularity.

You would think, given the worldwide official consternation at the prospect of a fourth Morales term allegedly secured through elections shenanigans, this would be big news. At the time, outlets including but not limited to the Times, the Washington Post, BBC, Financial Times, NPR, and the Associated Press all heavily suggested Morales — a “strongman,” as the Times briefly labelled him in a political Freudian slip — had overturned democracy. All pointed to Morales’s nick-of-time vote boost, cited the OAS’ statement, as well as an expression of alarm by the European Union. Some didn’t even bother to imply.

“It is hard to escape the conclusion that Evo is brazenly trying to steal the election to avoid a runoff that he might well lose,” the Post quoted from the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank funded by virtually every malign corporate interest under the sun, as well as USAID, a “democracy promotion” instrument of the US government with a history of sometimes violent meddling in foreign countries, which Morales expelled from Bolivia in 2013.

“To new age leftists like Morales, elections are like buses: they ride them until they get where they want to go, and they get off,” wrote the right-wing American Enterprise Institute’s Roger Noriega, outright accusing Morales of “stealing” the election.

With media and other international pressure lending legitimacy to the right-wing revolt against his government, Morales actually pledged a do-over of the election. Instead, the military told him to leave and Morales fled the country before armed intruders invaded his house.

A “Democratic” Military Coup

The Times has at least done the responsible thing and covered this latest study. But outside of the Gray Lady and the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, it appears to have been completely ignored by English-speaking media. Strange, given that we now have multiple studies telling us it was the right-wing Bolivian government in power right now, not Morales, that overturned Bolivian democracy.

It’s even stranger when you consider that the not-so-“interim” government headed by the unelected, far-right Jeanine Añez has embarked on precisely the kind of “authoritarian” and “arbitrary rule” that supposed defenders of liberal democracy like Yascha Mounk baselessly accused Morales of pursuing when they wanted him out. Since taking power, the Añez government has massacred protesters, arrested political opponents, and cracked down on the press and activists. In March, her government postponed an election she was on track to lose, the holding of which, as soon as possible, was supposed to be her only job, and in which she had initially promised not to run.

Morales was accused of authoritarianism, even of staging a “coup,” simply for going through the process to change the law and dispense with term limits, which, for better or worse, don’t exist in countless democracies. Term limits weren’t even in place in the United States until 1947, and numerous US political figures have suggested in the past they should be overturned, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Yet when a far-right government starts violently clamping down on journalists and its political opposition and actually suspends an election, many of these pro-democracy voices don’t utter a peep. The silence of the OAS, headed by a right-wing chameleon, is hardly a surprise. But where is the European Union, the last bastion of liberal democracy, as we are always told?

One instructive case study came during last year’s UK general election, unfolding at the same time as Morales’s ouster. When then–Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn denounced what he accurately described as a coup, the diplomatic editor of the Guardian, not averse to being caught up in anti-populism panic itself, expressed alarm at his “startling” position, pointing to — what else? — the OAS. “Democracy is still working in Bolivia, just,” insisted its sister paper not long after. Just a day before those words were printed, Añez’s government mowed down pro-Morales protesters.

In the situation that continues to unfold in Bolivia, we see the fruits of the last few years of anti-populist rhetoric from the liberal-center, popularized by figures like Mounk. They claim to want to protect democracy and civil liberties from “populists” — the shapeless rubric under which they place everything from the far-right Trump and Viktor Orbán to the left-wing Podemos and Morales. And many of those repeating these claims no doubt genuinely believe this framework, duped by a clever messaging.

But for others, what they really oppose is a challenge to the prevailing arrangement of global wealth and power that seeks to move the world in the direction of justice and fairness. If democracy and civil liberties are casualties in that effort, as has been the case in Bolivia, so be it.

It’s why public opinion survey results show that it’s centrists, not right-or left-wing “extremists,” who are most hostile to democracy. If there’s a group that, to paraphrase Noriega, jumps on something only as long as it continues to serve its true objectives, it’s the anti-populist center and the liberal democracy it claims to stand for.