Barack Obama says political correctness has gone mad

There probably aren't many things that Nigel Farage and Barack Obama can agree on, aside from a shared love of golf perhaps, but it appears they now share a mutual disdain for "political correctness".

That's right. While it may be a usual line trotted by those on the political right, the supposedly liberal US president appears to think they may well have a point.

Speaking at a town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, on Monday, Obama reflected on the comments of Republican candidate Ben Carson who suggested that colleges with a particular political bent should have their funding reduced.

Ben Carson, Republican candidate (Picture: Getty)

Obama said:

I have no idea what that means, and I suspect he doesn’t either.

The idea that you’d have somebody in government making a decision about what you should think ahead of time or what you should be taught, and if it’s not the right thought, or idea, or perspective or philosophy, that person would be — they wouldn’t get funding, runs contrary to everything we believe about education.

That might work in the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t work here. That's not who we are.

While dismissing Carson's suggestion categorically, the president did state his belief that the student's should be more critical and exposed to a wider range of political ideologies.

It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too.

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. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em.

But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, 'You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say.' That’s not the way we learn either.

Amen to that.

HT Vox

More: Bernie Sanders says he will not repeat Barack Obama's 'greatest mistake'

More: George W Bush says this was the most nervous moment of his entire presidency