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In what must be one of the most chilling and despicable actions recently undertaken on Long Island (and that covers a lot of ground) is the recent decision by two Long Beach community arts groups to cancel financial support from Equinor for its public events on the grounds that Equinor “offended” some of the local residents.
The Long Beach International Film Festival posted online that it was pulling the plug on Equinor’s sponsorship. The Long Beach Arts in the Plaza has also abdicated their role as a respected community organization by doing the same thing.
Equinor is the company proposing to bring ashore underground cables from offshore wind farms that will be built some 17 miles off the coast of Long Beach.
Some Long Beach residents have expressed concerns about any health or environmental impacts those cables might bring. These are legitimate questions that need to be answered by science. Others, however, have gone beyond reasonable questions, essentially launching a deliberate misinformation campaign calculated to demonize the project and its people. Equinor has sought to respond with town hall meetings and a community benefits program to demonstrate their commitment to Long Beach and surrounding communities. In return they have been verbally abused and publicly harassed by those who oppose the project.
Both of these community-based organizations have made a conscious decision to bow to a mob and it sets a dangerous precedent for every other nonprofit on Long Island. Regardless of how you feel about renewable energy, or climate change for that matter, Equinor is pursuing the installation of technology that is consistent with current state and national policy. If you have a problem with these policies then the proper course of action is to make your opinions known at the ballot box, not by libeling a company and dismissing the physics of electrical generation and transmission.
Contemplating the actions of these two community arts groups one can question whether our ire should be directed at them because, after all, their actions simply shadow the actions of what is happening on college campuses. Cancel culture is happening so often it could be a major.
The National Association of Scholars counts hundreds of academic cancellations in the United States and Canada, underscoring how the freedom of speech on campuses has become aspirational rather than a core founding principle of our society and these institutions. A survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression suggests that professors are withdrawing from a wide-ranging classroom discussion of issues for fear of being canceled by student protests or punitive administration actions.
Seventy percent of students in elite schools believe that there are cases where it is acceptable to shout down a guest speaker on campus. At schools ranked lower than 101, that figure is notably lower, hovering at 58%. Similarly, almost half of the student body (46%) at elite schools holds that it can be acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech if they disapprove of the content. This figure drops to 32% in lower-ranked schools. And in the case of violence to stop a speaker, there is again a significant difference: A quarter of elite students agree that violence is acceptable in some cases, but only 18% of their peers in lower-ranked schools concur.
So Long Beach has simply become a mirror of our nation’s cancel culture run amok, where nonprofits will quickly bow to the loudest voice and the most intimidating force. Which reminds me. Hey – Long Beach Film Festival organizers – there might be some of us who don’t like your third feature. Cancel that film or you just might face a boycott.
Ronald J. Rosenberg, a graduate of St. John’s University Law School and resident of Old Westbury, is senior founding partner of Garden City law firm Rosenberg, Calica & Birney LLP.
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