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Right Angle – Trump Derangement Syndrome: Losing Their Minds – 10/18/17

October 19, 2017

Right Angle – Trump Derangement Syndrome: Losing Their Minds – 10/18/17 via YouTube

(Please see also, Trump’s Constructive Chaos. — DM

The blurb beneath the video states,

Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to infect everyone on the Left who is incapable of coming to terms with the fact that President Trump emerged victorious a year ago. From late night shows to washed up comedians, it appears they are hell bent on making complete fools of themselves. It has even infected academia, where a Harvard Law professor named Lawrence Lessig suggested that Hillary could still be President. How is Trump able to drive these people crazy? Bill, Steve, and Scott explain this phenomenon.

Categories: Academia and absurdity, Academia and Trump, Trump and insanity, Trump Derangement Syndrome
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Getting Them Young

October 12, 2017

Getting Them Young, FrontPage Magazine, Matthew Vadum, October 12, 2017

People in Edina are tired of all of this.

They are angry about political agendas being pushed at the expense of education. At the same time they are afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals, Kersten writes.

Though a growing number of parents, students and teachers are angry and frustrated about recent developments, they hesitate to protest publicly. Students and parents fear bullying and retaliation in terms of grades and classroom humiliation. Teachers who don’t toe the orthodox line fear ostracism and a tainted career. The climate of intimidation is so intense that not one of those interviewed for this article would speak on the record.

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In places like Edina, Minnesota, the Left has transformed K-12 schools into indoctrination factories whose overarching purpose is to train students to be reflexively racist and anti-American.

Educators in Edina, a wealthy Minneapolis suburb, don’t even try to conceal their sinister goals. Elementary school students there are subjected to an A-B-C book titled A is for Activist. Among the alphabetized propaganda points are these gems:

“A is for Activist. Are you an Activist?”

“C is for … Creative Counter to Corporate vultures.”

“F is for Feminist.”

“T is for Trans.”

“X is for Malcolm as in Malcolm X.”

When Donald Trump won the election last November, anarchy and partisan bullying paralyzed the high school.

“I felt like the school was descending into mass hysteria,” one student said of the day after the election. Another said Trump’s victory was treated as “the end of the world as we know it.”

Students reported “[e]very teacher was crying in class, one even told the whole class ‘Trump winning is worse than 9/11 and the Columbine shooting.’” The sheer volume of “liberal propaganda that was pushed every single day in class this year was worse than it’s ever been–and you’re bullied by the teachers and every student if you dare speak against it.”

“[T]he teachers can absolutely do whatever they want. The administration will do nothing about it!! The day of the election every single student was in the commons chanting ‘F*** TRUMP’ and the teachers never did anything. A LOT of people are starting to complain and my mom has some friends who are leaving the school district.”

Teachers in Edina use totalitarian methods, particularly self-criticism sessions, to enforce ideological rigidity and reinforce social cohesion.

One mother complained of a humiliating Khmer Rouge-like denunciation process her son was forced to endure. In a 10th grade AP World History class, the teacher “called out any Trump supporters and asked them to assure the class that they weren’t racist.” In much of the United States, sending one’s children to public schools is already tantamount to child abuse. Too often elementary and secondary schools, especially in the inner cities, fail to teach pupils even the basics of reading, writing, and thinking critically. Nowadays they focus on crusades for so-called social justice instead of doing their jobs. This includes pedagogical sermons excoriating President Trump for the crime of trying to “Make America Great Again.”

In Edina radical indoctrination has supplanted actual education that helps students prepare for the real world.

Test scores in the community’s once top-rated schools have been plummeting, writes Katherine Kersten, senior fellow at the Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment, in Thinking Minnesota magazine.

“There’s been a sea change in educational philosophy, and it comes from the top,” she writes.

In recent years teachers have been shoving so-called white privilege, along with Marxism, feminism, and post-colonialism, down their young charges’ throats.

It’s no secret that public school teachers across America are largely driven by ideology, not a desire to educate. They teach students that America, a nation flawed in its conception by the original sin of slavery, has never truly experienced reforms. It is as if the Civil War and the Civil Rights Era never happened. Corporations and the rich oppress the citizenry daily as the U.S. unjustly pushes around less powerful countries, especially Muslim ones. America is so fundamentally corrupt and evil in their view that it can only be fixed by radical changes like those espoused by educational theorists like Paulo Freire and Bill Ayers.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argued that schools be used to inculcate radical, revolutionary values in students so they become agents of social change. Generations of teachers answered his call.

Freire was only expanding on the ideas of Vladimir Lenin who said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Teachers in publicly-funded elementary and secondary schools get a full eight years more than Lenin required to intellectually cripple students, perhaps for life.

“If we want change to come, we would do well not to look at the sites of power we have no access to; the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon,” Ayers said in 2012. “We have absolute access to the community, the school, the neighborhood, the street, the classroom, the workplace, the shop, the farm.”

Teachers in Edina take the ideas of Freire, Lenin, and Ayers seriously.

At Edina’s Highlands Elementary, teachers indoctrinate five-year-olds in order to radicalize them and encourage them to become activists obsessed with race.

The school district’s “unrelenting focus on skin color is the leading edge of a larger ideological campaign to shape students’ attitudes and beliefs on a range of controversial issues—most importantly, the familiar litany of ‘race, class, gender,’” Kersten writes.

While this is happening “ordinary students are too often falling through the cracks and gifted education is languishing.”

Edina embraces something called the All for All plan. Its “fundamental premise is that white racism—not socio-economic factors like family breakdown—is the primary cause of the achievement gap.”

School staff meetings there are social justice pep rallies. One teacher told Kersten that “equity was the only thing we talked about, not the nuts and bolts of teaching reading and math.”

Equity in this context doesn’t refer to equal treatment for all, she notes. Here the word “signals an obsession with ‘white privilege,’ and an effort to blame any academic challenge that minority students may have on institutional racial bias.” In other words, race-based identity politics rules.

At the elementary school, teachers of K-2 students dwell endlessly on skin color and encourage white pupils to feel guilty about being white. “Equity” is identified as the key criterion used to evaluate the school district’s K-5 math curricula.

Children have to watch their language and self-censor for fear of incurring the wrath of teachers.

“My kids have written things they don’t believe just to survive,” one mother told Kersten.

“They know exactly what the teacher wants. They almost don’t see anything incorrect in doing that anymore, because it’s so engrained. They have endured enough public shaming to say they will not put themselves in that position again.”

Another parent “was absolutely sickened” by the officially sanctioned psychological torture to which her young son was subjected. He explained that he was “labeled a racist, sexist and rapist — yes, a RAPIST — because he is a white male.” The parent added, “This was all in a Venn diagram on the white board. We have a photo.”

At the Edina high school’s multicultural show in April this year, student performers used the event to call for “students, faculty, staff and administrators to act en masse to address racial injustice,” according to the school’s student newspaper. Student organizers tried to “ignite a conversation pertaining to white privilege and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

A female student gave an explicit speech about the sexual fantasies she had about a classmate that sounded like a “Dear Penthouse Forum” letter. “I spent seventh-grade music classes imagining her legs intertwining with mine, her body constantly reminding me of a violin, and I was begging to be allowed to pluck one string.”

A male student revealing his sexual desires probably would have been kicked off the stage and accused of sexual harassment, Kersten writes.

Getting students to hate and distrust law enforcement officers is also a priority. One teacher was so wrapped up in cop-hatred that she claimed just saying the word police “made her feel physically ill,” according to a parent.

Teachers in Edina and across the fruited plan saturate students with information about real and imagined instances of racial injustice in America in a nonstop barrage of historic facts and ahistorical nonsense. And in the culture at large, the media, politicians, and the entertainment industry can’t stop talking about race. The last thing any young student in America needs is to be taught about is race. Race matters only to America-hating radicals.

People in Edina are tired of all of this.

They are angry about political agendas being pushed at the expense of education. At the same time they are afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals, Kersten writes.

Though a growing number of parents, students and teachers are angry and frustrated about recent developments, they hesitate to protest publicly. Students and parents fear bullying and retaliation in terms of grades and classroom humiliation. Teachers who don’t toe the orthodox line fear ostracism and a tainted career. The climate of intimidation is so intense that not one of those interviewed for this article would speak on the record.

Remaining silent is no way to win a culture war.

Categories: Academia and the left, Academia and Trump, Elementary "education", Political indoctrination of children
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New Book Sheds Light on Anti-Trump Agenda in Public Schools and Politicization of the Classroom

October 1, 2017

New Book Sheds Light on Anti-Trump Agenda in Public Schools and Politicization of the Classroom, Washington Free Beacon,  , October 1, 2017

Getty Images

In his newly published book, The Corrupt Classroom, Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute illustrates how the public school classroom has become increasingly politicized, with liberal teachers indoctrinating students with an anti-Trump and leftist agenda.

Izumi makes the case that while many school choice supporters rely on academic school performance data to show that public schools are failing, there are many other equally important reasons to support it.

“Many parents, for example, are rightly concerned about the growing politicization of the classroom,” Izumi explains. “Far from being mere anecdotal incidents—and there are lot of those—political bias is becoming systemic in public school systems and has turned many public schools into indoctrination centers for progressive ideologies and causes.”

For example, the United Educators of San Francisco, a teachers’ union, created an anti-Trump lesson plan and distributed it to 6,000 members. In the lesson plan, Trump was labeled a “racist and sexist man” and included only reports from left-wing sources such as Mother Jones. Teachers were instructed to tell students, “we will keep fighting” and “we must and will fight for justice against an unjust system and an unjust people.”

Izumi also cites the example of Yvette Felarca, a teacher at a middle school in Berkeley, Calif., who is the leader of By Any Means Necessary, which was described as a militant, radical group that uses violence to spread its message.

“Felarca reportedly shoved a man to the ground at a demonstration in Sacramento,” Izumi explains. “The brawl resulted in seven people being stabbed. Felarca told the Mercury News that the First Amendment should not protect speech with which she disagrees and that she labels ‘hate speech.'”

Izumi says that following these actions, parents were outraged and complained that her violent message should not have a place in the classroom. The book cites many more examples of how students were subjected to indoctrination in the classroom, including some who were asked to complete assignments with an anti-Trump bent or teachers who were very open about their liberal beliefs—including one who yelled “Die!” in front of students at a photo of President Trump.

Izumi says that parents should also be aware of school-related crime and the safety of their child when deciding what school to choose.

“There have been many instances of appalling crimes on school campuses, ranging from peer-to-peer bullying to classroom sexual assaults that make every parent shudder with fear for the safety of their own children,” Izumi writes.

For example, Lanny, a 9-year-old in Alabama, was attacked by a bully at her school and suffered a concussion, a bruised face, and two black eyes. Instead of accurately reporting the incident to the child’s mother, school officials said Lanny had fallen on accident. Lanny’s mother decided to homeschool her daughter following the incident because she doesn’t feel the school did enough to prevent bullying and did not even punish the bully.

“When I asked the principal what was being done about the bully, he said she would be suspended for two days,” Lanny’s mother said. “Then I found out they didn’t even do anything to her.”

In addition to safety, Izumi says there are religious biases that have been present in the classroom that parents should be concerned about.

“Just as parents do not like teachers and school officials to favor one political candidate over another, so parents oppose the promotion of one religious faith over another,” Izumi says. “Yet, in public schools across America, teaching, curricula, and policies seem intended to disfavor Christianity and favor other religious faiths.”

There have also been instances of sexualization in the classroom. Izumi explains that a school in Fremont, Calif., distributed a textbook for ninth-graders that taught teenagers about vibrators, oral sex, bondage, female sterilization procedures, and sexual techniques that went beyond the activities that cause birth.

“Not surprisingly, the textbook ignited outrage among parents in the school district, despite the socially liberal reputation of the San Francisco Bay Area,” Izumi explains. “Hundreds of people signed a petition to urge the Fremont school board to rescind its decision to use the textbook in ninth-grade health classes.”

Izumi says that all of these reasons are cause for parents to be concerned about what school their child is attending.

“A public school might have decent test scores, but if parents feel their children are being politically indoctrinated, are at risk of being victimized by other students or teachers, are being shortchanged because of mismanagement by school officials, or are having their basic value system overturned, then parents and their children should have the right and the tools to exit the public school system for educational alternatives that better meet their needs and preferences,” Izumi said.

Categories: Academia and freedom of speech, Academia and the left, Academia and Trump, Political indoctrination of children, Public schools in America
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The Left’s Mania

May 11, 2017

The Left’s Mania, Gingrich Productions, Newt Gingrich, May 10, 2017

The Left is getting trapped in its own mania.

Steadfast liberals in the media, academia, and Congress are so pathologically opposed to President Trump and the Republican majority – and so fiercely committed to rejecting the fact that the American people elected both, that they now willfully embrace vulgarity, insults, violence, and hysterical dishonesty.

Late night comedians are so dismayed that they have traded jokes for political assaults and opening monologues for lewd diatribes. Take for example Stephen Colbert’s unhinged rant against President Trump last week. His comments were as obscene as they were offensive, and went well past the line of political satire. Had a TV personality made a similar implication about President Obama or Secretary Clinton, he or she would have been promptly fired and blacklisted from the entertainment industry. Not surprisingly though, Colbert’s network, CBS, took no such action, further proving the media’s growing complicity toward this kind of behavior.

Meanwhile, on college campuses such as Middlebury College and UC-Berkeley, instead of learning to respect those with differing views, liberal students have resorted to violence and threats to silence those with whom they disagree. The academic institutions have largely let it happen – although Middlebury College has said it plans to discipline about half of the more than 70 students who rioted in order to keep Charles Murray, a libertarian social scientist, from speaking March 2, the college has been vague and indecisive about what the ultimate discipline might be. What message does this send to the student body? It implies that if you disagree with someone, it’s okay to shout them down and, if necessary, hurt them.

At UC-Berkeley, administrators have simply given up policing the violent Left. CNN reported that during one protest, “masked agitators” caused $100,000 in damage to the campus. The mere threat of another riot – and the college’s inability or unwillingness to defend against it – kept Ann Coulter from speaking there last month.

Finally, faced with the reality of their dwindling influence, Democrats nationally have turned to fear-mongering and outrageous lies to undermine the efforts of the Republican majority.

Here are a few examples:

  • Elizabeth Warren on May 4 tweeted that the American Health Care Act “will devastate Americans’ healthcare. Families will go bankrupt. People will die.”
  • Bernie Sanders told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on May 4, “If the bill passed today in the House became law, thousands of Americans would die.”
  • Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said Republicans will be responsible for “every preventable death, every untreated illness and every bankruptcy” if AHCA is passed.
  • Democratic groups across the country have promoted the blatant lie that victims of rape, domestic abuse, and sexual assault could be denied health insurance under the law. Even the Washington Post had to stand up and correct this complete falsehood.
  • Some spread the untruth that Congress was unaffected by the AHCA and had some other tier of health care. This is demonstrably false.
  • There are some liberal groups even offering to send the ashes of the dead to Republicans in Congress. This is just morbid and deranged.

From the party of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pledge that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the Left has descended to the politics of cremation and demagogic fear-mongering.

Let’s be clear: The Left is calling Republicans looking for a better health care plan murderers in order to distract from the complete failure of Obamacare. These extreme liberal over-reactions have even caused the New York Times to pause and fact-check their outlandish claims.

The Left is behaving like it has nothing to lose. The irony is its members’ actions are promoting ideas that are completely opposite to liberalism. Liberals are trapped in a pathology of anger and desperation that is leading them to silence dissenting opinion with vulgarity, threats, and violence; and obstruct real progress by spreading lies and propaganda. I discuss this pathology at length in my new book, Understanding Trump, which will be released June 13.

All Americans who care about maintaining the basic tenets of civil society today must stand up to the Left’s campaign of violence and intimidation.

Categories: Academia and the left, Academia and Trump, Media - leftist, Trump agenda, Trump Derangement Syndrome, U.S. Congress
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Ingraham to Hannity: Let’s tour liberal college campuses

April 28, 2017

Ingraham to Hannity: Let’s tour liberal college campuses, Fox News via YouTube, April 27, 2017

 

Categories: Academia and freedom of speech, Academia and the left, Academia and Trump, Conservatives, Contempt for America
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If You want Real Change, Start with Education

March 9, 2017

If You want Real Change, Start with Education, Front Page Magazine, Bruce Thornton, March 9, 2017

(Is it still possible to “make education great again?” Oh well. Here’s a flash from the past from Andrew Klavan:

— DM)

 

It is easy to put a low priority on our how progressive ideology has corrupted higher education, and spend our time and energy on reforming the tax code or reining in the EPA. But remember the Jesuit maxim: “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” Education today gets children at five, and in some cases continues to mold them until they’re 21. Changing the laws that empower bureaucratic ideologues to indoctrinate our children is the necessary first step to dismantling deep-state tyranny.

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The first eight weeks of Trump’s administration have been filled with executive orders attacking the unconstitutional excesses of the Obama presidency. He’s also pledged to kill the regulatory Hydra, increase defense spending, reform the tax code, and restore America’s prestige. And all these changes and promises have been met with vicious attacks and outlandish charges from the media, and scorched-earth obstructionism from Congressional Dems.

All of which is as entertaining as an MMA blood-fest. But to effect real change, we need to get beneath the telegenic food-fight and transient click-bait, and start dynamiting the foundations of the deep state. And that means going after higher education, the one institution that more than any other shapes the young and indoctrinates them with progressive ideology.

But it’s not enough to go after the ideologically biased professoriate and administrators, or ridicule the pretentious “research” churned out by pseudo-disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. No doubt such critical exposure of the “higher nonsense” is important, for those bad ideas trickle down from the research universities to the state colleges, where most of the K-12 teachers get their teaching credentials. And most of those teachers inflict these political prejudices and false knowledge on the impressionable young, who by the time they reach college will already have been primed for even more pernicious indoctrination.

Take, for example, the silly notion of “microagressions.” This is the preposterous idea that systemic racism, sexism, etc. are so pervasive that people can subconsciously inflict injury on women, homosexuals, “people of color,” and all the other certified victims due special treatment like “safe spaces.” This wacky idea got started back in 2007 with a scientifically dubious paper called “Racial Microagressions in Everyday Life.” An even more influential bad idea, “Islamophobia,” traces its origins to Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism, a “work of malignant charlatanry,” as Middle East scholar Robert Irwin described it, and one of the most-assigned books in social science and humanities courses. Like bacilli, such ideological prejudices disguised as scholarship have infected curricula from grade school to university, and from there sickened the whole culture. And they replicate themselves through the education industry’s monopoly on training, hiring, and tenuring of teachers.

Beyond this sort of research, however, lies the mother of all bad ideas, “diversity.” This pseudo-concept became part of national law in the 1978 Bakke vs. University of California case. In the Bakke decision, Justice Lewis Powell promulgated the idea that a vaguely defined “diversity” could justify racial discrimination in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on–– racial discrimination. How? Because “diversity” along with its alleged pedagogical benefits is a “compelling state interest.” Yet despite the continuing failure to specifically identity, define, or empirically substantiate this “state interest” or its benefits, the Supreme Court has continued to justify race-based policies by invoking “diversity.” Backed by the highest court in the land, promoting “diversity” now has become the dominant policy in nearly all colleges and universities. The result has been the institutionalizing of an illiberal identity politics that corrupts curricula, compromises liberal education’s traditional mission to promote “the free play of the mind on all subjects,” stifles free speech, and privileges politically selected “victims.”

Another example of how the deep state polices institutions to ensure their compliance with progressive ideology is the unconstitutional and unjust campus tribunals created to adjudicate claims of “sexual misconduct.” Robert L. Shibley, the executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has explained how the political corruption of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act has put the coercive, fiscal, and investigative power of the Department of Education behind ideologically based violations of the Constitution.

In 2011, the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights sent universities a “dear colleague” letter offering “guidance” about how schools should handle charges of sexual assault. As Shibley points out, the term “guidance” allows the agency to skirt the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirements that new agency regulations must notify those affected by the new rules and allow them time to comment. Thus the OCR in effect created two new laws, usurping the law-making powers of Congress. One allows both sides in a complaint to appeal the outcome of the proceedings, creating the possibility of double jeopardy if the accused is found guilty. Second, colleges have to use the “preponderance of evidence” standard, basically 50.01 percent certainty, when determining guilt, in contrast to the criminal justice system’s “beyond a reasonable doubt standard, a 98-99 percent certainty.

The result has been campus tribunals that violate the canons of justice and due process, leading to travesties of justice such as the falsely accused Duke lacrosse team, or the fake rape story published by Rolling Stone. In fact, the system is designed to be unfair. Administrators choose who presides over the hearing and who will be jurors––mostly other administrators with a vested interest in the outcome. Neither party has a right to counsel, cross-examination, or examination of the evidence, which can include even hearsay. As Shibley writes, “Such a system is not, by any stretch of the imagination, just, fair, or equitable.”

And huge difficulties face the unfortunate student found guilty who wants to sue, for his future in higher education could be compromised by allegations even if later proven false. Colleges and universities also have standing to sue, but either are ideologically committed to the politicizing of sexual encounters between adults, or fear the ever-present threat that the DOE can withhold federal money––$76 billion in 2013–– from colleges and universities that fall afoul of the agency’s diktats. Such leverage is so powerful that only one school, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, has filed suit against a Dear Colleague Letter.

The solution to this corruption of both the Constitution and the mission of liberal education is for Congress to pass legislation that reforms Title IX and corrects the over-vague and elastic language that gives the DOE scope for such bureaucratic tyranny. Yes, the DOE’s latest assault, the 2016 “Dear Colleague Letter” mandating that students can use whatever restroom fits their assumed sex identity, was suspended by Trump’s Executive order. But that’s a temporary fix that doesn’t get at the root of the problem, which goes beyond one federal agency. Congress must step up and reclaim its Constitutional right to make the laws. For just as appeasement begets appeasement, ignoring deep-state violations of the Constitution will create even more. The DOE’s tyranny permeates the federal bureaucracy, as we’ve seen under Obama with the politicizing of the IRS, the DOJ, and the intelligence community. That’s to be expected from a regulatory leviathan staffed by unaccountable partisan functionaries that every day encroaches on the Constitutional rights of American citizens and compromises their freedom.

It is easy to put a low priority on our how progressive ideology has corrupted higher education, and spend our time and energy on reforming the tax code or reining in the EPA. But remember the Jesuit maxim: “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” Education today gets children at five, and in some cases continues to mold them until they’re 21. Changing the laws that empower bureaucratic ideologues to indoctrinate our children is the necessary first step to dismantling deep-state tyranny.

Categories: Academia and freedom of speech, Academia and the left, Academia and Trump, Indoctrination
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Anti-Free Speech Riot at NYU: Crazier than Berkeley?

February 4, 2017

Anti-Free Speech Riot at NYU: Crazier than Berkeley? Power Line, John Hinderaker, February 4, 2017

This woman says that the job of the police is to beat up people with whom she disagrees. And she thinks the other side–the ones trying to give, and listen to, a speech–are “neo-Nazis.” That is modern liberalism in a nutshell.

An update to the Unz post says that the woman in the video “is possibly Rebecca Goyette, an artist who specializes in lobster-related pornography and video enactments of Donald Trump being castrated.” Based on a Google Images search, I would say the woman in the video is either Ms. Goyette or her double.

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On Thursday evening, Gavin McInnes, a comic, commentator and co-founder of Vice Media, attempted to give a speech at New York University, at the invitation of the NYU Republican group. A crowd of anti-free speech rioters battled police officers and ultimately succeeded in shutting down McInnes’s speech. Steve Sailer comments:

Unlike the Berkeley Police Department with Milo, the New York Police Department made sure Gavin McInness could actually deliver at least part of his talk at New York University at the invitation of the NYU Republicans. Gavin did get pepper-sprayed by anti-free speech activists, and eventually he got shut down after about 20 minutes by screamers.

***

The NYPD standing up for Gavin’s civil rights caused one protester to memorably enunciate to the line of cops protecting the dissidents the high principles and deep commitment to objective rationality that are at the heart of today’s anti-free speech movement.

nyu-riot-professor-video-crazy-1024x538

You have to see this to believe it, but trust me, you won’t be able to watch to the end:

The Blaze helpfully provides a transcript of the alleged professor’s rant:

Who’s protecting NYU from this bulls**t? Why are you here? You’re not here to protect these students from Nazis. No, you’re not! This is completely f***ed up. And these students had to f***ing face them on their own. You should be ashamed of yourselves! You should be standing up to those Nazis! You should be protecting students from hate! This is hate! These are f***ing assholes … you are a joke. You’re grown boys! You’re grown boys … and I’m disgusted! I’m a professor! How dare you! How dare you f***ing assholes protect neo-Nazis? F*** you! F*** you! F*** you! These are kids who are trying to learn about humanity! They’re trying to learn about human rights and against racism and xenophobia and LGBTQ rights, and you’re letting these f***ing neo-Nazis near here! You should kick their ass! You should! You should be ashamed of yourselves! You should! F*** that s**t. F*** that s**t. It’s not up to these students to kick the ass of a neo-Nazi! They don’t have to raise their fist! They were taught to be peaceful! F*** you! F*** you. I’m a professor. God f***ing damn it … you’re here to protect neo-Nazis! So f*** you! God f***ing damn it! Those kids should not have to take fists up to neo-Nazis, and you’re putting them in that situation! Go to hell. F*** you NYPD!

This woman says that the job of the police is to beat up people with whom she disagrees. And she thinks the other side–the ones trying to give, and listen to, a speech–are “neo-Nazis.” That is modern liberalism in a nutshell.

An update to the Unz post says that the woman in the video “is possibly Rebecca Goyette, an artist who specializes in lobster-related pornography and video enactments of Donald Trump being castrated.” Based on a Google Images search, I would say the woman in the video is either Ms. Goyette or her double.

Rebecca Goyette is indeed a professor, although not at NYU. I would post pictures of her “work,” only this is a family site. Among other things, she doesn’t just hate Donald Trump, she hates the United States. I think her biggest beef against the U.S. is that she isn’t able to jail the people she dislikes.

It’s just another day in the life of the American left. I am so, so glad I voted for Donald Trump!

Categories: Academia and freedom of speech, Academia and the left, Academia and Trump, Freedom of speech, Law enforcement, Leftists, NYU
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Safe Spaces for Fascists

January 18, 2017

Safe Spaces for Fascists, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, January 18, 2017

campus

Hammers, broken windows and fights. That’s what a safe space for free speech looked like at UC Davis. 

Safe spaces are places where everyone who isn’t a safe space fascist feels unsafe. The more safe spaces a campus has, the less freedom of speech the students and faculty dare to enjoy.  

UC Davis has a great many safe spaces. 

The University of California institution has safe spaces for illegal aliens (the Undocumented Student Center) and for asexuals (the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource Center) which hosted a “Tampon Tea Party.” It has segregated safe space housing in Campbell Hall for black students and the Women’s Resources and Research Center will provide safe spaces and “Mind Spa Services” for anyone offended by Christian views on abortion.

But all the safe spaces were about making life unsafe for everyone who wasn’t a left-wing fascist.

A visit to UC Davis is a descent into an Orwellian dystopia obsessed with controlling everything with “resource centers” providing ready resources for censorship.

The LGBTQIA Resource Center’s posters warn students against saying, “You guys”. The Women’s Resources and Research Center responded to a pro-life student event with “Report Hate and Bias” cards and attempts to prevent pro-life flyers from being distributed. The “leaders of the African Diaspora on the UC Davis campus” demanded a policy “targeting anti-blackness.” SJP and MSA did its own share of terrorizing Jewish students and silencing speakers while maintaining a safe space for their brand of hate.

UC Davis was named one of the top ten anti-Semitic universities in the country. It ran the board in all four categories. Disruptions of pro-Israel speakers and chants in support of terrorism are routine. Pro-Israel students said that the administration was too afraid to stand up to the anti-Semitic fascists.

When Trump won, it really all came apart. Crowds of marchers chanted, “F___ Trump.” The UC Davis riots were part of a frightening phenomenon. The phenomenon struck again when Milo Yiannopoulos and Martin Shkreli tried to speak on campus. The “Dangerous Faggot Tour” event ended with fights, at least one arrest, thrown hot coffee, allegedly smashed windows and wielded hammers, and, eventually, a canceled event courtesy of the heckler’s veto.

Instead of addressing the atmosphere of politically correct intolerance, UC Davis Interim Chancellor Ralph J. Hexter spoke in generalities. Before the event, he had released a letter stating, “As a public university, we remain true to our obligation to uphold everyone’s First Amendment freedoms.”

But UC Davis neglected that obligation when it gave in to the safe space censorship of left-wing fascism.

Hexter’s predecessor, Chanchellor Katehi, had been forced out in no small part by protests that included an “occupation” of her office. Hexter had been hounded out of Hampshire College by student protests. Despite being among the founding members of LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Education, he was accused of racism.  Hampshire’s attempts to appear that it was divesting and wasn’t divesting from Israel didn’t save Hexter then. His current efforts to have it both ways at UC Davis, calling freedom of speech a “treasure” while administrators intimidate College Republicans into cancelling won’t work either.

Appeasing fascists never works.

UC Davis administrators had intimidated UC Davis College Republicans into canceling the event by warning them that they would be held responsible for the actions of the protesters. And then issued statements regretting the loss of free speech. But there’s no doubt whom UC Davis brass fear more.

Shifting the cost of protests to the event organizers is becoming ubiquitous at UC schools. UC Berkeley is attempting to shift the cost of security for a “Dangerous Faggot Tour” appearance to the student sponsors. While UC Berkeley claims that the fee is not “content-based”, the heckler’s veto allows the left to shut down events by a combination of student protests and administration security fees.

Unlike NYU and DePaul, the University of California can’t move forward with an outright ban. But “fee bans” worked at Iowa State and North Dakota State. With the UC Santa Barbara event canceled, that leaves UC Berkeley. University of Washington president Ana Mari Cauce had consulted the Attorney General to find grounds to ban the tour while warning, in a message to left-wing students, that the College Republicans would be “responsible for expenses, including any security costs.”

The message was none too subtle.

By contrast NYU had no problem when its Students for Justice in Palestine brought Max Blumenthal in to speak. Blumenthal’s attacks on Israel had been cited by the Kansas Jewish Community Center gunman and his book had blatantly anti-Semitic titles such as “How To Kill Goyim And Influence People.”

At NYU, Blumenthal had taunted Jewish students in an “explicitly anti-Semitic” fashion, telling them that if they didn’t like his hate, they could go “to a Hillel house on campus, with 24-hour G4S security.”

Blumenthal had appeared at NYU and DePaul. He had suggested that anti-Semitic hate crimes at UC Davis served the “goals” of Jewish students. There were no bans or even official condemnations.

There is always a safe space on campus for left-wing bigotry.

“It’s arguably now politically correct to be politically incorrect,” Jerry Kang, UCLA vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, whined. But the responses by Kang, and others, show that is a lie.

Kang had played a key role in harassing Milan Chatterjee, president of UCLA’s Graduate Students Association, into leaving the school over charges that he had rejected anti-Semitism from SJP. He had attacked the Freedom Center for standing up to Islamic terrorists. But UCLA quickly removed the Center’s posters denouncing Kang. At UCLA, political correctness is still politically correct.

And dissent must be swiftly condemned.

Safe space culture is just another term for fascism. Hitler and Mussolini sought to create safe spaces in which only their views could be heard. Safe spaces aren’t therapeutic. They’re not the outcry of the oppressed. Instead they are sanctuary spaces for fascism.

Fascism begins with claims of oppression. The Nazis insisted that they were the victims. So did all their allies. But everyone can be a victim in their own narrative and victimhood provides unlimited license for abuses. It is not victimhood, but its rejection, that makes us strong and free.

College administrators have turned over campuses to weeping thugs and social justice crybullies who screech about their pain even as they smash windows and wield hammers against their opponents.

And free speech has been replaced with fascism.

Free speech, like all our freedoms, cannot be taken for granted. Instead every generation has to fight for its right to free speech.

Categories: Academia and Israel, Academia and the left, Academia and Trump, Freedom of speech
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A Modest Disposal

January 15, 2017

A Modest Disposal, PJ Media, Roger Kimball, January 15, 2017

(Good grief! How silly. Obviously, we send our kids to prestigious expensive universities to qualify for quasi-permanent government jobs if and when they bother to graduate with degrees in Women’s Studies, Black Grievance Studies,  Love not Hate Studies and Israel is the Most Racist Country on Earth Studies. So what if the employment market is about to change? Then they can cast even more aspersions on the vile new Fascist Trump government as they return to the hallowed halls of academia for more degrees and more mental constipation inspiration. — DM)

tor

There have been many inventories of academic hysterics over the Trump victory, and I won’t go through all of them now, other than to mention the latest that has come to my attention. “Teach! Organize! Resist!” intends to stage a number of on-campus protests and consciousness-raising events between Martin Luther King Jr. Day tomorrow and Mr. Trump’s inauguration Friday.  Although fomented at UCLA, this enterprise has, at last count, attracted the involvement of nearly twenty other institutions, including Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley . . . .

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I think people on all sides of the political divide are expecting big things from the incoming Trump administration.  Some of us are looking forward to lower taxes, a less burdensome regulatory environment, the enforcement of the country’s immigration laws, the harnessing of all the country’s energy resources in the service of a pro-growth agenda, a pro-American foreign policy and upgraded military to back it up, and the appointment of judges and Supreme Court justices who understand that their primary task is to interpret the law in light of the Constitution, not to use the court to reshape society.

It’s difficult to say what the other side is looking forward to.  The difficulty comes from the incredible nature of what they say about the prospect of a Trump presidency.  By “incredible,” I mean “not believable.”  Does David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, really believe (as he wrote in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory) that “the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism”?

Does he really believe that the fact that his candidate did not win in a free, open, democratic election is “a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy”?  On November 9, Mr. Remnick wrote that “Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted.”  Has he looked at the stock market recently? On November 1, the Dow Jones IndustrialAverage closed at 18,037. Friday, January 13, it closed at 19,885. 19,885 – 18,037 = 1,848. So, the market gained almost 2000 points in two and a half months. How do you define “tumble”?

But what about Trump “strik[ing] fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted”?  (“[T]he many other variety of Other”? Alas, yes. And in The New Yorker.)

I suspect that Mr. Remnick’s overheated verbiage is just calculated hyperbole. I suspect, that is to say, that he doesn’t believe a word of it. He doesn’t like Donald Trump. He wanted the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua, the Guardian of Benghazi, the Friend of the Syrians, and the Keeper of State Secrets to win. I understand that.  But where does all that “striking fear” into the hearts of people come from? I believe it’s fabricated, make-pretend melodrama.

It’s a popular entertainment, though, especially on college campuses, where cheap melodrama can usually be indulged in without consequence and chalked up as a “learning experience.” (“That will be $300,000, please.”)  Like many other commentators from the knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal precincts of humanity, I have had some jolly fun at the expense of our overbred campus snowflakes.

There have been many inventories of academic hysterics over the Trump victory, and I won’t go through all of them now, other than to mention the latest that has come to my attention. “Teach! Organize! Resist!” intends to stage a number of on-campus protests and consciousness-raising events between Martin Luther King Jr. Day tomorrow and Mr. Trump’s inauguration Friday.  Although fomented at UCLA, this enterprise has, at last count, attracted the involvement of nearly twenty other institutions, including Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, i.e., some of the most prestigious institutions in the country. As Campus Reform reports,  “nine of the participating schools are public, and a total of 46 teach-ins are currently scheduled to take place.” I hope the legislators who approve the budgets for the public institutions will sit up and take notice, since one of the immediate goals of “Teach! Organize! Resist!” is to encourage professors to “use your regular class time to attend a panel with your students.” Your tax dollars at work, Comrade, and for what?

The organizers of these sideshows are admirably clear about that. “We intend to organize,” their web site informs the world,  “against the proposed expansion of state violence targeting people of color, undocumented people, queer communities, women, Muslims, and many others.” What “state violence” would that be?  While you wonder about that, note too that the organizers “intend to resist the institutionalization of ideologies of separation and subordination, including white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and virulent nationalism.” Oh, I see.

Now some of this is just adolescent play-acting, even if many of those involved, being professors, are far beyond the chronological limits of adolescence.  Academia has an infantilizing effect. I understand that. Many professors dress and act like adolescents right up to the time they are ready to hand in their tenure and live off their generous pensions. The Peter-Pan aspect of academia is not entirely the professors’ fault.  After all, the points at which the real world intrudes upon academia are so few and so tenuous that academics may be forgiven for some of their hyperbole and inadvertently comic displays of self-importance.  They exist, like kept women of yore, entirely at the pleasure of an affluent society they despise. So in a way it is not surprising that they endeavor to transform their entire campus into a sort of existential boudoir, which is French for “room for pouting in.”

But behind or alongside the childishness of these academic histrionics there is something more malevolent going on.  If the students and professors who pretend to be frightened of Donald Trump could be sequestered into the “safe spaces” they say they desire, that would be one thing.  But they can’t. They have a deleterious effect on the larger academic environment and, beyond that, on the national conversation about the future of America. Something must be done. But what?

I have an idea. Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal advocated some original, organic, and environmentally conscious proposals to alleviate poverty, hunger, and over-population in eighteenth-century Ireland. Just so,  I’d like to offer a “modest disposal” to deal with some of the intellectual poverty, the hunger for genuine knowledge, and the clear reality of over-population at our nation’s universities.

As a first step, I propose the creation of a University Exchange Commission.  Just as the SEC was created in the 1930s to police fraud and chicanery in the stock market that had contributed to the market crash of 1929, so the UEC would police the integrity of university life in the wake of the collapse of academic standards and the proliferation of fraudulent and ideologically motivated campaigners.

I am still formulating the precise duties of this beneficent organization, but I believe that many recent initiatives could be turned from a bad to a good purpose by restaffing. For example, the totalitarian Title IX offices, which, taking a page from Orwell’s 1984, encourage anonymous reporting of students and faculty for saying or doing, or not saying or not doing, something that someone doesn’t like — this entire apparatus, I suspect, could be restaffed and employed to help dismantle all the bogus, intellectually vacuous programs, departments, and initiatives whose sole purpose is to foster an atmosphere of permanent grievance against free markets, the tradition of free inquiry and free speech, the achievements of America, or anyone associated with the male sex or ethnic and racial heritages not susceptible to preferential discrimination (“affirmative action”) by government entities and academic administrators.

That’s one thing.  The UEC will also see to it that no university will employ more than three deans, none of whom may be charged with promoting the spurious “diversity” on racial or sexual lines that has so disfigured academic life in recent years.

Women’s Studies departments and programs will be disbanded on the grounds that they are invidious: why, after all, should the study of women’s accomplishments be ghettoized by being segregated from the achievements of the rest of mankind?  Black or “African-American” Departments will be disbanded for the same reason, their legitimate subjects, as distinct from their organized opportunities for whining and complaining about how badly they are being treated, will be distributed into appropriate traditional categories: history, for example, or literature. (Also, the term “African-American will be deprecated in favor of “Black American” or, even better, “American” since the phrase “African-American” is frequently misapplied and is always divisive.) The whole industry of sexual exoticism — LGBTNONSENSE—will either be disbanded or consigned to the newly created Krafft-Ebing Institutes of Sexual Perversion.  No classes there will be eligible for academic credit.

This is just the beginning, of course.  The UEC will clearly have its work cut out for it if it is to make headway in reclaiming the university from those set on destroying it from within. But I am confident that a great deal of good work can be accomplished in a very short period if the UEC is given proper authority to enforce its determinations.  As an added inducement, I hereby volunteer to fill the slot of executive director for an entire academic year for the token sum of $1. I feel it is my public duty.  I’ll be waiting by the phone for the call from Trump Tower.

Categories: Academia, Academia and the left, Academia and Trump, Media and Donald Trump
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