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Prosecutors are politically elected officials entrusted with the sensitive responsibilities of prosecuting law violators. The strength and admissibility of evidence is tantamount to a successful prosecution, not politics, personal views, or other outside influences. And, the Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors must ensure justice is achieved for crime victims and criminal defendants alike. However, outside influences, personal views, and other factors may influence a prosecutor’s leadership and decision making in some criminal cases. Since the office of prosecution is an elected position, their success is based on convictions whether achieved through plea bargaining or a guilty verdict at trial. This chapter examines criminal cases in which prosecutorial leadership strategies and decisions have circumvented justice in the name of politics or political correctness. The lack of evidence or withholding of evidence in these cases suggests that some prosecutors are more interested in personal or political interests rather than justice.

This book chapter reflectively explores the challenges of studying provocation, satire, bad taste and offence in stand-up comedy. The author’s sociological lens on the topic is situated within the broader field of humour studies, which is a relatively small yet creative and innovative field within the human, cultural and social sciences. This lost ethnographic project contains shelved and dormant interview data with a number of stand-up comedians, including the controversial and emotive late Bernard Manning and an early career Steve Coogan. The project also explores the author’s autoethnographic journey into rant poetry, as both a hobbyist and, on further reflection, a way of keeping the project informally but theoretically alive. The issues of censorship, political correctness and informed consent are key ones in the author’s confessional type analysis. Finally, the value and richness of loss, failure and resilience as marginalised yet significant and unacknowledged learning resources in our academic adventures are frankly discussed. The call here is for more lost ethnographic projects to be recognised and appreciated in academia.

The author addresses the relationship between populism and authenticity in the contemporary era. The author argues that for populists, authenticity is more than an image-building strategy and instead is used strategically to maintain a powerful emotional connection with supporters that extends beyond election campaigns. The chapter also examines the rise of a distinct populist style (ordinariness, provocation, a certain kind of intimacy) that is used in opposition to an established political class. This style is often represented, and celebrated, through social media and increasingly defines what it means to be authentic in the political sphere.

This chapter is an exercise in speaking, letting individuals speak for themselves insofar as possible. As Marx famously put it, “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” The “they” were peasants, potato farmers in 1840s France, and by extension peasants, workers, and other lower class groups, not to mention women and minorities who rarely made it into the historical record, and even more rarely in their own words. To give “voice to the voiceless,” as the now old new social historians of the 1960s and 1970s put it, I consciously include here numerous speakers, arranged in two sets of different voices: quotes in the text and endnotes to further document and amplify points. With this plethora of voices, the aim is not to complicate but to speak clearly, listen carefully, and engage respectfully. To multiply the speakers speaking is the single best way to make two primary points concerning what is most important about the Chief Illiniwek mascot controversy: that the sheer number of individuals speaking out is in itself significant, and that this community colloquy all comes down to identity – who we are, individual identity, communal identity.

The concept of “political correctness” (PC) does not have a clear and simple definition on which there is even a majority, let alone universal, consensus. Nevertheless, during the last decade, and especially in North America, a series of events and positions have emerged to which the term PC is at least partially applicable. I shall begin by alluding to North American PC in institutions of higher education and in scientific organizations, which I have discussed elsewhere in more detail. I suggest that North American PC has crossed the Atlantic and elaborate upon this suggestion by discussing the recent dismissal of a tenured member of the teaching staff by Edinburgh University, and relating this case to the Du¨hring dismissal.

Through an ethnographic content analysis of 936 letters to the editor, op-eds, and editorials and 1,195 online comments, this chapter examines how participants in the public sphere neutralized accusations of racism leveled against Donald Trump in the early phase of his presidential campaign. The study shows that both supporters and opponents effectively (if not purposefully) neutralized racism through a number of techniques. Trump’s opponents neutralized racism by calling attention to a number of other perceived flaws in his candidacy. Trump’s supporters obscured the charges of racism by endorsing him and calling attention to positive qualities. Others neutralized racism by changing the subject or making neutral observations. Supporters neutralized charges of racism in three additional ways. Most commonly, they framed Trump’s comments as accurate. Some defensively drew a distinction between legal and illegal immigration. A relative few claimed that others were also racist or xenophobic. That there were a number of ways of defining Trump’s stance toward Mexican immigrants demonstrates the role of human agency in producing social structures. Structural factors in the discursive field such as the stock of existing conservative frames, Trump’s absurdity shield, and political partisanship also facilitated the neutralization of accusations of racism.

Lynne Cheney Resigns as NEH Chairwoman Although she has often remonstrated against political correctness, particularly in units of government where it would seem destructive to hold public political views, Lynne Cheney, the present chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, announced her resignation in early December in reaction to an incoming Administration unlikely to smile upon her political outlook.

The notion of partner‐violence as a male‐perpetrated phenomenon is not a scientific position but an amelioration of cognitive‐dissonance within a political mindset. Against all the data, this ‘gender paradigm’ persists as a series of staged retreats as new research debunks each in turn. Supposed highly sex‐differential injury rates, male unilaterality of perpetration, female self‐defence, male ‘control’, and female especial fear are all discredited as reasons to focus solely on men's aggression. By contrast, scientific theorising regarding the root of the great bulk of partner‐violence is in terms of the biological phenomenon of mate‐guarding. However, the usual model of male proprietariness over female fertility itself is in part a ‘gender paradigm’ position. Recently revealed sex‐symmetries necessitate a major overhaul of this model. Drawing on new understanding of the basis of pair‐bonding, outlined here is a parsimonious account of mate‐guarding as being by both sexes; notably women, owing to sex‐dichotomous mate‐value trajectory. This framework heralds the complete abandonment of the ‘gender paradigm’ and thus the end of a highly inappropriate intrusion of extreme ideology into science.