The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, August 10, 2026

Notably: Bertrand Russell died in 1970. But he knew Ron DeSantis, or at least DeSantism, intimately. City College of New York (CCNY) had hired him in 1940 to teach three philosophy courses, none of them remotely controversial: Philosophy 13: A study of modern concepts of logic and of its relation to science, mathematics, and philosophy. Philosophy 24B: A study of the problems in the foundations of mathematics. Philosophy 27: The relations of pure to applied sciences and the reciprocal influence of metaphysics and scientific theories. But Bishop Manning of the Protestant Episcopal Church wrote the college to protest: Russell defended adultery. “There are those who are so confused morally and mentally that they see nothing wrong in the appointment . . . of one who in his published writings said, ‘Outside of human desires there is no moral standard.’ ” Russell’s appointment was rescinded. It was one of the great scandals of 1940, more scandalous still that The New York Times defended the college. Russell was left embittered at the claims of academic freedom in the United States. A couple of decades later, in an essay on freedom and its derivatives, Russell might as well have been writing about the Florida Department of Education’s idea of teaching history as it retards the minds of young people all over Florida these days: “History, or at least English history, was part of my education from a very early age. Constitutional history especially was implanted in me before I was ten years old. The instruction that I had in this subject was unadulterated indoctrination with as little attempt at impartiality as under any totalitarian régime. Everything was treated from a Whig point of view, and I was told, only half in joke, that history means ‘hiss-Tory.'”

The love of free inquiry and free speculation has never been common. When it has existed, it has existed in only a tiny minority and has always roused furious hatred and opposition in the majority. There have been times when it has seemed wholly extinct, but over and over again it has revived. Although the life that it inspires is arduous and dangerous, the impulse which leads some men to adopt it has been so overwhelming that they have braved all the obloquy to which they were exposed by devoting themselves to the greatest service that man can do to man. It is this indomitable quality of the human mind at its best that gives hope for mankind, and that causes me in spite of the unprecedented dangers of our age to believe that the human race will emerge as it has emerged from other dark times with renewed vigour and with a more confident and triumphant hope of overcoming not only the hostile forces of nature but also the black nightmares inspired by atavistic fears which have caused men, and still cause them, to create and endure great worlds of sorrow and suffering for which there is no longer any reason except in human folly. We know as never before the road to a happy world. We have only to choose this road to lead our tortured species into a land of light and joy.

–From Bertrand Russell’s Fact and Fiction (1961).

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