President Obama Not Thrilled With Trigger Warnings

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I see that President Obama has waded in to the great trigger warning debate:

I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.

Apparently what happened is this: Boomers screwed up their kids by coddling the hell out of them, and now they’re all bitching because their kids have grown up coddled. Really, you gotta love Boomers. We’re the greatest, aren’t we?

I’ve paid only minor attention to the whole trigger warning/microaggressions bubble for two reasons. First, when you put several thousand smart, verbal 18-year-olds on a college campus away from home for the first time, they’re going to do all sorts of stupid stuff. Big deal. I’d be worried if they didn’t do stupid stuff. They’ll grow out of it in a few years.

Second, it really does seem like a flavor-of-the-week. The bubble will burst somewhere down the road, and something else will take its place that we older and wiser heads can all get terribly disturbed about. This is the way of the world. Kids search long and hard for something new that will annoy their elders, and their elders tsk tsk about the kids these days. Lather, rinse, repeat.

All that said, you can count me among the elders who are none too thrilled about the intolerance of non-lefty points of view on many college campuses these days. Trigger warnings are absurd in a public space like a university. “Microaggression” is just a trendy new word for a very old problem. And if Condi Rice gets invited to your campus to speak, mount a protest. But let her speak. If you can’t tolerate even the thought of listening to someone with whom you profoundly disagree—or of anyone else listening—then you need to examine your own principles pretty hard.

That’s one old codger’s view, anyway. But no one under the age of 20 will pay it any mind. And they probably shouldn’t. After all, sometimes worthwhile progress gets its start from even the dumbest movements.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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