Corruption is Everywhere > 70 Mafioso Convicted in Italy; Chilean President May Be Impeached; US Submarine Metal Strength Tests Faked; Swedish Oil Co., Charged with War Crimes; Another Black Eye for FBI

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Mafia ‘mega-trial’ convicts 70 members of Italy’s most powerful clan

8 Nov, 2021 14:19

FILE PHOTO: Francesco Sabino (C) arrested by Carabinieri during operation who dismantled an illicit system

of hoarding and managing public housing operated with the 'ndrangheta type mafia method.

© Alfonso Di Vincenzo / KONTROLAB / LightRocket via Getty Images

An Italian judge has convicted 70 people connected to the country’s most powerful mafia clan – the 'Ndrangheta, with some receiving maximum-length sentences.

The marathon Mafia trial was held over the weekend and saw 91 defendants tried in a specially converted court room in the Calabrian city of Lamezia Terme.

A total of 70 mobsters were convicted in the trial, one of the country’s largest ever. The charges against those on trial included drugs trafficking, murder, extortion, theft and abuse of office.

Anti-mafia prosecutor Nicola Gratteri – who has lived under police protection for more than 30 years as a result of his mission to defeat the clan – remarked that the sentencing was an “important” one and that he was not “afraid of anything or anyone”.

Some of the mobsters sentenced had opted for a quick, private trial to have their jail time shortened by a third if they were found guilty. About a third of the group are set to serve over 10 years behind bars.

However, a handful of key clan members were slapped with the maximum 20-year sentence prosecutors pushed for. Pasquale Gallone, 62, who helped coordinate his boss’s three-year run from 2014, was one of the gangsters to receive a two-decade long sentence.

Among the people tried, the majority of the 19 acquitted were only marginal suspects, Gratteri said.

Commenting on the verdict, he said that: “We continue our work with serenity and the firmness needed for such an important trial.”

The next two years will see 355 alleged gangsters and corrupt officials face the docks for their involvement with the 'Ndrangheta, a network of some 150 families.

The clan, more powerful than the notorious Sicilian Cosa Nostra mob, is a major player in Europe’s cocaine trafficking, said to control about 80% of the continent’s smuggling operations.

Chile MPs move to impeach president over Pandora Papers

9 Nov, 2021 14:04

Chile's president, Sebastian Pinera. © Reuters / Edgard Garrido

Chile’s Chamber of Deputies has approved a motion to impeach outgoing President Sebastian Pinera over alleged shady business deals that were seemingly exposed in the Pandora Papers leak.

The impeachment motion was narrowly passed by Chile’s lower house early on Tuesday following nearly 22 hours of debate. The motion was supported by 78 MPs, while 67 voted against and three abstained.

The motion is now set to head to the country’s Senate for approval, where it will need to get two thirds of votes to be passed. The upper house is expected to vote on the impeachment just days before the upcoming presidential election, which is set to take place on November 21.

Billionaire businessman Pinera will not partake in the polls, since the incumbent president cannot seek immediate re-election, according to Chile’s constitution.

The case against Pinera stems from allegations raised in the recently leaked Pandora Papers, a cache of nearly 12 million documents related to offshore deals, which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) began publishing on October 3. The expose alleged that multiple top politicians were among the list of businessmen with secret offshore accounts.

The leaked documents linked Pinera to the sale of the Dominga mining project through a company owned by his children to businessman Carlos Delano, a close associate of the president. A large part of the deal took place in the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands.

It is the second impeachment attempt to be made against Pinera during the current term. Back in 2019, an unsuccessful impeachment bid was launched against the president over his crackdown on anti-inequality protests that swept the country at the time.

Test results for steel used in US Navy subs ‘falsified’ for decades

9 Nov, 2021 09:11

Virginia-class attack submarine John Warner moved to Newport News Shipbuilding's floating dry dock.

August 31, 2014. © Reuters / US Navy Handout

A former metallurgist at a Washington state foundry that produced steel used in US Navy submarines has admitted to taking “shortcuts” and doctoring the results of strength and toughness tests on the metal for over three decades.

Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, pleaded guilty to the fraud at a Tacoma court on Monday. Thomas was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in the city that provided steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to manufacture submarine hulls.

According to the Justice Department, the tests were to prove that the steel would hold up in a collision or during certain “wartime scenarios.” While there was no information on whether any submarine hulls had failed, authorities said the Navy had incurred additional costs and maintenance-related expenses to ensure the vessels were seaworthy. 

Although the government did not reveal which subs were affected, the contractors have jointly built Virginia class submarines for about two decades. In a statement to the court, Thomas’ attorney noted that the “government’s testing does not suggest that the structural integrity of any submarine was in fact compromised.”

In her plea agreement, Thomas told the court that she faked test results for at least 240 steel productions between 1985 and 2017 – roughly half the steel the foundry supplied to the Navy. Her attorney said Thomas “took shortcuts,” but “never intended to compromise the integrity of any material.”

In 2017, a metallurgist being groomed to replace Thomas noticed the suspicious test results and alerted the foundry’s parent company, Bradken Inc. The Kansas City-based firm fired her and disclosed the falsified data to the Navy, but suggested that the discrepancies were not the result of fraud. Prosecutors said this affected the Navy’s efforts to investigate the scope of the problem and address potential risks to personnel.

The Justice Department said that when investigators confronted Thomas with the fraudulent results, she admitted that it “looks bad” and revealed that she had given passing grades in some tests because she thought the Navy’s temperature-testing requirements were “stupid.”

Thomas, who faces up to 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine when she is sentenced in February, was apparently not “motivated by greed nor any desire for personal enrichment,” her attorney said, adding that she “regretted failing to follow her moral compass.”

Are you kidding, 240 times; I think she followed her moral compass,  I'm just not sure her compass is set to true north.

Swedish oil executives charged with complicity in war crimes

12 Nov, 2021 12:18

FILE PHOTO: A Southern Sudanese soldier stands guard next to crude oil reservoir tanks

© Reuters / Roberto Schmidt

Swedish prosecutors have charged the chairman and former CEO of Lundin Energy oil and gas company for complicity in war crimes perpetrated by the Sudanese army and militias in southern Sudan between 1999 and 2003.

The Swedish Prosecution Authority (SPA) said on Thursday that the local firm, which was named Lundin Oil at that time, had asked the Sudanese authorities in May 1999 to secure a potential oil field in the south of the country, despite being aware that it wasn’t fully controlled, and that capturing the land would require the use of force.

“What constitutes complicity in a criminal sense is that they made these demands despite understanding or, in any case being indifferent to, the military and the militia carrying out the war in a way that was forbidden according to international humanitarian law,” it pointed out in a statement.

The Sudanese government forces “systematically attacked civilians or carried out indiscriminate attacks,” according to the prosecutors.

The probe against Lundin Energy had been initiated in Sweden in 2010 after a report by the Dutch non-governmental organization PAX accused the firm of being involved in human rights abuses in Sudan.

PAX praised the indictment of Ludin’s chairman Ian Lundin and former CEO Alex Schneiter, who is currently a board member, with complicity in war crimes as “a great victory for justice and a historic achievement.”

Lundin Energy, however, denied any wrongdoing, insisting in a long statement on Friday that its operations in Sudan were “fully legitimate and responsible.”

The prosecutors had no evidence or valid grounds to press the charges, with their statement of criminal action being “extremely vague and inexplicit,” it said.

The company argued that reports by NGOs “can’t be relied upon as evidence in court” as they lack credibility, accuracy and reliability.

Lundin Energy also challenged the claim by the prosecutors to confiscate 1.39 billion crowns ($161.7 million) that the firm made from the sale of its business in Sudan in 2003. There’s “no basis for a corporate fine or forfeiture,” it said.

The Swedish company was a major player in Sudan between 1991 and 2003 amid a decades-long civil war between the central government in Khartoum, the Muslim-majority north and the oil-rich Christian south. Omar al-Bashir, who was Sudan’s president during that conflict, is now wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for genocide and other war crimes. The fighting in the North African country ended in 2011, with South Sudan becoming an independent state.

FBI accused of leaking private data to NYT

12 Nov, 2021 03:49

The Federal Bureau of Investigation seal is seen at FBI headquarters in Washington, US, June 14, 2018 © Reuters

The New York Times has obtained ‘privileged communications’ of Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe, raising suspicions that an FBI source might have leaked the newspaper confidential data obtained during recent raids.

FBI agents raided the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe last Saturday as part of an investigation into the acquisition of a diary purportedly written by President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley. On Thursday, less than a week after the raid, the New York Times published an article claiming to have obtained “internal documents” from Project Veritas’ attorney.

The article sparked outrage among conservatives, who accused the FBI of leaking private communications from the organization to the newspaper.

“The FBI raided Project Veritas on a pretext and is now leaking their privileged communications to the New York Times. This is a scandal,” tweeted lawyer and Human Events co-publisher Will Chamberlain, who called for the article’s co-author, Adam Goldman, to be “subpoenaed tomorrow and forced to reveal his criminal source.”

Chamberlain also raised further legal concerns, noting that Project Veritas “is currently in litigation with the New York Times” over a separate issue, which would make any leaks to the newspaper an even bigger scandal.

“This isn’t journalism, this is straight up theft,” he concluded.

Attorney Harmeet Dhillon – who is currently representing Project Veritas and O’Keefe – also accused the New York Times of publishing a “private, privileged correspondence” which “they have no legal right to possess,” while political commentator and lawyer Mike Cernovich wrote, “This is not a grey area. It’s black letter criminal felonies committed by the FBI and the New York Times.”

A federal court ordered the US Justice Department to stop extracting information from O’Keefe’s devices on Thursday.

The FBI took two of O’Keefe’s phones during its raid on his home and the Project Veritas founder said his devices contained confidential material, including information relating to his journalistic sources.

“This is an attack on the First Amendment by the Department of Justice,” said O’Keefe this week, adding, “I've heard ‘the process is the punishment.’ I didn't really understand what that meant until this weekend.”

O’Keefe said he “wouldn't wish” the situation “on any journalist.”

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Editor Resigns, Leaves Scathing Indictment of New York Times

'Newspeak' bullying culture laid bare

by Meira Svirsky,  Clarion

The New York Times building in Manhattan (Photo: ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Bari Weiss, a Jewish, centrist, young opinion writer, and editor for The New York Times, left her position at the paper, leaving a resignation letter that is a damning indictment of how the Far Left and its bullying culture has taken over the paper.

The de-evolution of the Times is worth examining, not just because it is happening at one of the country’s papers of record, but because these same tactics are being mimicked at institutions across the country.

Weiss was hired by the Times in 2017 to bring centrist and conservative opinions as well as new voices to the paper following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, an election that the paper failed to anticipate. “It didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers,” according to Weiss as well as Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor.

“But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned,” Weiss writes.

Instead, she says, a new “consensus” emerged in the press and especially at the Times:

“Truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else …” 

This perception of reality was something antithetical to Weiss’ beliefs.

“I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.” 

In her letter of resignation, Weiss describes the constant bullying she was subjected to at the Times, both professionally and personally.

For her “forays into Wrongthink,” she was called a Nazi and a racist by fellow staff members. Particularly distasteful were the comments she received when she wrote about something having to do with Jews.

Coworkers thought to be friendly to her were badgered. Weiss writes that she was openly demeaned on the Times’ Slack channels, a company-wide messaging app in which top management also participates.

In true Orwellian tradition, her coworkers demanded that she be “rooted out” if the Times was to be “a truly ‘inclusive’ “ company. Others simply posted emojis of axes next to her name. In addition, she notes,

“Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.” 

As to the editorial bullying going on at the Times, Weiss writes that stories are chosen with “extreme selectivity,” to the point where writers and editors self-censor to avoid the inevitable harassment of offering anything but the accepted opinion.

“If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.”

Every employee is well aware of the perils of going against the narrative, Weiss contends. Even if a higher-up says they will stand behind a writer’s or editor’s work that goes against groupthink, Weiss advises not to believe it.

“Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry,” she says.

In his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell coined the phrase “Newspeak,” a language which was designed, in Orwell’s words, “to diminish the range of thought.”

Not only was Newspeak used to obfuscate (calling expulsion an act of “inclusiveness” in Weiss’ case), its purpose was also to promote a narrowing of thought about and awareness of the world.

Newspeak fundamentally left citizens in a binary world of simple dichotomies – good and evil, war and peace. You are either with us or against us.

Our modern version of Newspeak removes nuance from our perceptions of the world — either through indoctrination by the press or through the intimidation and shaming tactics used by the cancel culture.

If there was ever a time to speak up for free speech, it is now. By all accounts, it does work.

The recent attempt by the cancel culture to take down Goya Foods, because its (Hispanic) CEO praised President Trump at a recent White House event, has been an epic fail. Instead a counter “buy-cott” movement has flipped the narrative and seen a full-on buying spree of the company’s products.

As for Bari Weiss, her letter also leaves us with hope. Addressing young and upcoming writers and editors, she notes:

“As places like The Times and other once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles, Americans still hunger for news that is accurate, opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere. I hear from these people every day.

 “’An independent press is not a liberal ideal or a progressive ideal or a democratic ideal. It’s an American ideal,’  you said a few years ago. I couldn’t agree more. America is a great country that deserves a great newspaper.”

Opioids, a Mass Killer We’re Meeting With a Shrug

About as many Americans are expected to die this year of drug overdoses as died in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined

Nicholas Kristof

Credit Dominick Reuter/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

For more than 100 years, death rates have been dropping for Americans — but now, because of opioids, death rates are rising again. We as a nation are going backward, and drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

“There’s no question that there’s an epidemic and that this is a national public health emergency,” Dr. Leana Wen, the health commissioner of Baltimore, told me. “The number of people overdosing is skyrocketing, and we have no indication that we’ve reached the peak.”

Yet our efforts to address this scourge are pathetic.

We responded to World War II with the storming of Normandy, and to Sputnik with our moon shot. Yet we answer this current national menace with … a Republican plan for health care that would deprive millions of insurance and lead to even more deaths!

More on President Trump’s fumbling of this problem in a moment. But it’s bizarre that Republicans should be complacent about opioids, because the toll is disproportionately in red states — and it affects everyone.

Mary Taylor, the Republican lieutenant governor of Ohio and now a candidate for governor, has acknowledged that both her sons, Joe and Michael, have struggled with opioid addiction, resulting in two overdoses at home, urgent calls for ambulances and failed drug rehab efforts. Good for her for speaking up.

It should be a national scandal that only 10 percent of Americans with opioid problems get treatment. This reflects our failed insistence on treating opioids as a criminal justice problem rather than as a public health crisis.

A Times investigation published this month estimated that more than 59,000 Americans died in 2016 of drug overdoses, in the largest annual jump in such deaths ever recorded in the U.S. One reason is the spread of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is cheap and potent, leading to overdoses.

Another bad omen: As a nation, we’re still hooked on prescription painkillers. Last year, there were more than 236 million prescriptions written for opioids in the United States — that’s about one bottle of opioids for every American adult.

Even with all that’s at stake, there are three reasons to doubt that Trump will confront the problem.

First, Trump and Republicans in Congress seem determined to repeal Obamacare, which provides for addiction treatment, and slash Medicaid. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the G.O.P. House plan would result in an additional 23 million Americans being uninsured in a decade — and thus less able to get drug treatment. Other, more technical elements of the G.O.P. plan would also result in less treatment.

Second, Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, last month seemed to belittle the medication treatments for opioid addiction that have the best record, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions still seems to think we can jail our way out of the problem.

Third, Trump’s main step has been to appoint Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to lead a task force to investigate opioid addiction. But we needn’t waste more time investigating, for we know what to do — and in any case Christie talks a good game but bungled the issue in his home state.

Among experts, there’s overwhelming evidence of what works best: medication in conjunction with counseling. This doesn’t succeed in every case, but it does reduce deaths and improve lives. It also saves public money, because a result is fewer emergency room visits and inpatient hospital stays. So the question isn’t whether we can afford treatment for all people fighting addiction, but whether we can afford not to provide it.

The bottom line is that we need a major national public health initiative to treat as many Americans abusing drugs as possible, with treatment based on science and evidence. We also need to understand that drug overdoses are symptoms of deeper malaise — “deaths of despair,” in the words of Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University, stemming from economic woes — and seek to address the underlying issues.

Above all, let’s show compassion. Addiction is a disease, like diabetes and high blood pressure. We would never tell diabetics to forget medication and watch their diets and exercise more — and we would be aghast if only 10 percent of diabetics were getting lifesaving treatment.

Innumerable people with addictions whom I’ve interviewed haunt me. One was a nurse who became dependent on prescription painkillers and was fired when she was caught stealing painkillers from a hospital. She became homeless and survived by providing sex to strangers in exchange for money or drugs.

She wept as she told me her story, for she was disgusted with what she had become — but we as a society should be disgusted by our own collective complacency, by our refusal to help hundreds of thousands of neighbors who are sick and desperate for help.

‘Lies are Their Agenda’: Canadian Journalist Blasts MSM Syria Coverage at UN Event

MSM - Main Stream Media has been called to task in the biased reporting of the American election. Here, they are chastised for their pro-western, anti-Assad coverage in Syria, based on lies and little more than 'gossip journalism'. This is a serious charge and it is not the first time it has been made, but this time it is made by a Canadian who has been there for years.

Boys stand amid the damage in the government-held al-Shaar neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria December 13, 2016. © Omar Sanadiki / Reuters

Western mainstream media’s coverage of the Syrian war is “compromised” as their local sources are “not credible” and, in the case of Aleppo, not even there, a Canadian journalist said in an emotional speech at the UN.

Syrians support Assad

“I’ve been many times to Homs, to Maaloula, to Latakia and Tartus [in Syria] and again, Aleppo, four times. And people’s support of their government is absolutely true. Whatever you hear in the corporate media is completely opposite,” Eva Bartlett, a Canadian journalist and rights activist, told a press conference arranged by the Syrian mission to the UN.

video 3:45

“And, on that note, what you hear in the corporate media, and I will name them – BBC, Guardian, the New York Times etc. – on Aleppo is also the opposite of reality,” she added. The mainstream media narrative, she argued, is meant to mislead the public about what is really happening in Syria by demonizing President Bashar Assad’s government and altering the facts on Russia’s support for Damascus.

Bartlett’s statements did not seemingly play well with everyone in the room. A reporter from Aftenposten, Norway’s largest print newspaper, challenged her and demanded Bartlett explain what she thought was the “agenda” of Western mainstream media. “Why should we lie, why the international organizations on the ground should lie? How can you justify calling all of us liars?” he said.

Sources not credible

Bartlett, who has been covering Syrian events for several years since the outbreak of the civil war, noted that while there are “certainly honest journalists among the very compromised establishment media,” many respected media agencies simply seem to avoid doing a fact-check.

She then asked her Norwegian colleague to name humanitarian organizations operating in eastern Aleppo. As the Aftenposten reporter stayed silent, Bartlett added that “there are none.”

“These organizations are relying on the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights [SOHR], which is based in Coventry, UK, which is one man. They're relying on compromised groups like the White Helmets. Let's talk about the White Helmets,” she went on.

White Helmets

Members of the controversial group “purport to be rescuing civilians in eastern Aleppo and Idlib … no one in eastern Aleppo has heard of them.” Meanwhile, she noted, “their video footage actually contains children that have been ‘recycled’ in different reports; so you can find a girl named Aya who turns up in a report in say August, and she turns up in the next month in two different locations.”

White Helmets keep rescuing the same girl

“So they [the White Helmets] are not credible. The SOHR are not credible. 'Unnamed activists' are not credible. Once or twice maybe, but every time? Not credible. So your sources on the ground – you don't have them,” Bartlett concluded.

A journalist from Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera took a more measured tone and asked Bartlett to explain the difference between the Western and Russian media coverage, saying that Russian television channels report on humanitarian efforts and reconciliation instead of overt naming and blaming.

“You ask why we aren't seeing this,” Bartlett said. “This relates to the other gentleman's question about why most of the corporate media are telling lies about Syria. It's because this is the agenda; if they had told the truth about Syria from the beginning, we wouldn't be here now. We wouldn't have seen so many people killed.”

And if people aren't being killed, arms merchants aren't moving their inventory! Isn't it ironic that left-leaning media are totally supporting war mongers!

A Confession of Liberal Intolerance

Nicholas Kristof NYTimes


WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

“Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” said Carmi.

“The truth has a liberal slant,” wrote Michelle.

“Why stop there?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”

To me, the conversation illuminated primarily liberal arrogance — the implication that conservatives don’t have anything significant to add to the discussion. My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.

The stakes involve not just fairness to conservatives or evangelical Christians, not just whether progressives will be true to their own values, not just the benefits that come from diversity (and diversity of thought is arguably among the most important kinds), but also the quality of education itself. When perspectives are unrepresented in discussions, when some kinds of thinkers aren’t at the table, classrooms become echo chambers rather than sounding boards — and we all lose.

Four studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who are Republicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences between 7 and 9 percent.

Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents).

In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.


George Yancey, a sociology professor, says he has faced many problems in life because he is black, “but inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.” Credit Nancy Newberry for The New York Times

The scarcity of conservatives seems driven in part by discrimination. One peer-reviewed study found that one-third of social psychologists admitted that if choosing between two equally qualified job candidates, they would be inclined to discriminate against the more conservative candidate.

Yancey, the black sociologist, who now teaches at the University of North Texas, conducted a survey in which up to 30 percent of academics said that they would be less likely to support a job seeker if they knew that the person was a Republican.

The discrimination becomes worse if the applicant is an evangelical Christian. According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.

“Of course there are biases against evangelicals on campuses,” notes Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. Walton, a black evangelical, adds that the condescension toward evangelicals echoes the patronizing attitude toward racial minorities: “The same arguments I hear people make about evangelicals sound so familiar to the ways people often describe folk of color, i.e. politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor.”

A study published in The American Journal of Political Science underscored how powerful political bias can be. In an experiment, Democrats and Republicans were asked to choose a scholarship winner from among (fictitious) finalists, with the experiment tweaked so that applicants sometimes included the president of the Democratic or Republican club, while varying the credentials and race of each. Four-fifths of Democrats and Republicans alike chose a student of their own party to win a scholarship, and discrimination against people of the other party was much greater than discrimination based on race.

“I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950,” a conservative professor is quoted as saying in “Passing on the Right,” a new book about right-wing faculty members by Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. That’s a metaphor that conservative scholars often use, with talk of remaining in the closet early in one’s career and then “coming out” after receiving tenure.

This bias on campuses creates liberal privilege. A friend is studying for the Law School Admission Test, and the test preparation company she is using offers test-takers a tip: Reading comprehension questions will typically have a liberal slant and a liberal answer.

Some liberals think that right-wingers self-select away from academic paths in part because they are money-grubbers who prefer more lucrative professions. But that doesn’t explain why there are conservative math professors but not many right-wing anthropologists.

It’s also liberal poppycock that there aren’t smart conservatives or evangelicals. Richard Posner is a more-or-less conservative who is the most cited legal scholar of all time. With her experience and intellect, Condoleezza Rice would enhance any political science department. Francis Collins is an evangelical Christian and famed geneticist who has led the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health. And if you’re saying that conservatives may be tolerable, but evangelical Christians aren’t — well, are you really saying you would have discriminated against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.?

Jonathan Haidt, a centrist social psychologist at New York University, cites data suggesting that the share of conservatives in academia has plunged, and he has started a website, Heterodox Academy, to champion ideological diversity on campuses.

“Universities are unlike other institutions in that they absolutely require that people challenge each other so that the truth can emerge from limited, biased, flawed individuals,” he says. “If they lose intellectual diversity, or if they develop norms of ‘safety’ that trump challenge, they die. And this is what has been happening since the 1990s.”

 Should universities offer affirmative action for conservatives and evangelicals? I don’t think so, partly because surveys find that conservative scholars themselves oppose the idea. But it’s important to have a frank discussion on campuses about ideological diversity. To me, this seems a liberal blind spot.

Universities should be a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives from A to Z, not just from V to Z. So maybe we progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish — like diversity — in our own dominions.