Media Chicken Little

Student Fascists at Evergreen State College

They think they have a right to riot. Why? They are black. They have been taught they should be aggrieved, and have a right to riot, attack and insult people in order to express their aggrievement. And of course, they will be able to extract a bunch of concessions from cowardly administrators.

And none of them will address the real problems in the black community, which include 72% of black babies born out of wedlock, and blacks committing violent crime at a rate five, six or seven times (depending on the dataset) that of whites. With the overwhelming portion of victims being black.

But they can feel very self-righteous about being social justice warriors.

WARNING: LANGUAGE

Update

Black students aren’t the only fascists at this leftist hell-hole of a college.

Here is a professor who refused to leave campus on a day when all white faculty were supposed to leave campus.

Gender Studies in Academia: No Parody Needed

From the Washington Free Beacon:

That the scientific method and zoos are sexist, that menstrual periods are a social construct, and that Pilates teaches white privilege are just a few subjects of gender studies papers that inspired the biggest hoax since the Sokal affair.

It did not take James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian long to get their fake paper that claimed “the penis is conceptual” and causes climate change published. A reading of over a dozen gender studies papers provided to the Washington Free Beacon by Lindsay makes it easy to understand why.

“We, like many, have been seeing stories and examples of ridiculous papers coming out of the far-left activist wing of academia, fields like gender studies, women’s studies, and so on, based upon what’s sometimes called ‘critical race and gender theory’ or ‘radical constructivism,’” Lindsay said.

He first pointed to an infamous taxpayer-funded paper published last year that studied the “relationship between gender and glaciers.” One goal of the study was to “improve human-ice relations.”

“As many did, we strongly suspected the feminist glacier study was a hoax,” Lindsay said. “But the journal and author stood by it.”

Lindsay said he and Boghossian decided after the feminist glacier study that it was plausible to hoax the gender studies field, as Alan Sokal did in the 1990s. Sokal successfully submitted a paper that claimed gravity is a social construct.

Lindsay, a scholar and author, also said they witnessed many examples of gender studies proponents bullying other academics skeptical of their work, mostly by accusing their critics of racism and sexism.

“Thus we thought a hoax might be worth doing, not just possible,” he said.

“Eventually, we settled on the idea that the penis isn’t real, but that it causes all of our worst problems,” Lindsay said. “By tacking on the popular idea from radical constructivism that pretty much everything is a social construct, we were off to the races.”

Aside from the gender glaciers study, Lindsay pointed to dozens of examples of papers published in respected journals that sound like hoaxes, but are in fact real. The Twitter account @RealPeerReview highlights outrageous examples on a daily basis.

Among the examples Lindsay cited included a paper published in a top-ranked gender studies journal last fall that claimed menstrual periods are a social construct.

“Despite a great deal of feminist work that has highlighted its social construction, menstruation seems a self-evidently ‘natural’ bodily process,” wrote Karen Ann Hasson, in her paper “Not a ‘Real’ Period? Social and Material Constructions of Menstruation.” “Yet, how menstruation is defined or what ‘counts’ as menstruation is rarely questioned.”

Questionable research in gender studies goes back decades. A commonly cited paper by Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” was published in 1987.

West and Zimmerman call gender a “routine accomplishment,” an “achieved property of situated conduct,” and a “powerful ideological device.”

“We contend that the ‘doing’ of gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production,” they wrote.

Another paper published in the Women’s Studies International Forum in 1995 claims the scientific method itself is sexist and needs to be changed for feminists.

Donna M. Hughes wrote about a need for a “feminist critique of the scientific method,” because science is “sexist, racist, heterosexist, and classist.”

“Biological determinism has long been shown to be sexism, racism, and heterosexism at work under the guise of science,” she wrote. “The objectivity of science has long been suspect or rejected.”

Betsie Garner and David Grazian borrowed from West and Zimmerman for a paper published in 2016 that claims zoos are sexist.

An alligator’s sharp teeth reinforces “hegemonic norms of masculinity” to boys, according to Garner and Grazian, who scold parents for engaging in dangerous stereotypes in conversations with their children at the zoo.

One example derides a mother for telling her child that it is surprising that the male peacocks are the ones with the “pretty, bright feathers.”

A dad is rebuked for calling a white bear a “little sissy” for not running and jumping, “demeaning the bear as too weak and feminine to uphold masculine ideals of agility and drive,” the authors write.

“The Essence of the Hard On: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Cultural Construction of ‘Erectile Dysfunction’” was cited by Lindsay and Boghossian in their hoax.

The paper, written by Annie Potts in 2000, argues that curing erectile dysfunction reinforces hegemonic masculinity.

“This article employs feminist poststructuralist discursive analysis to investigate the effect of the metonymic relationship between the penis and the phallus on the cultural construction of male ‘sexual dysfunctions,’” Potts wrote.

Another paper claims fat men’s penises might not exist.

“Fat male sexuality: The monster in the maze,” published in July 2016, argues, “fat male sexuality paradoxically doesn’t exist” because of their depiction in the media. The first reference cited is Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, but lists the year 1992, instead of 1999, when the movie actually was released.

Other examples include donated blood is a social construction, how the Pilates exercises “Single Leg Stretch” and “Leg Circles” teach white privilege, and that male lactation is possible through social construction.

The article “The Lactating Man,” published in May 2016, presupposes that the idea that “lactation and breastfeeding are typically viewed as inherently female activities,” may be wrong.

Another paper published in April examines racism and sexism against squirrels using “feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies.”

Yet another gender studies paper published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies in 2013 explores the “conundrums for masculine lesbians” due to “heterosexism and patriarchy” that forces expectations of pregnancy on women.

Wikipedia is also sexist, because it “excludes and silences feminist ways of knowing and writing,” claims another paper. The federal government has also invested in this topic, spending $202,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist in 2013.

Syllabi used in STEM courses are also sexist, according to one paper that urges science professors to use “less competitive teaching methods and grading profiles that could improve the experience of female students.”

Lindsay said the most alarming paper he has encountered was published last year.

The paper, written Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger, favorably compares feminists to viruses like HIV and Ebola, who should infect other fields of scientific study with liberal ideologies.

“The truly scary papers are the ones from radical constructivist schools that seek to replace science with feminist science,” Lindsay said. “It’s very concerning.”

Nearly 15,000 students graduate with cultural and gender studies degrees each year.

This is all part of the decent of academia into politically correct madness. How can such stuff become so prevalent?

Start with the general leftist bias of academia. This extends to all disciplines, but some disciplines are more “undisciplined” than others. Physicists can hardly claim the universe is “socially constructed,” since that would render their own discipline useless and meaningless.

But academics in the humanities and social sciences can proclaim things they study to be mere social constructions. As a rule, the more hard data dominates a discipline, the less politically correct it is. Economics is pretty politically incorrect, but sociology and anthropology are very politically correct. Political science occupies a middle position.

Add to this the ability of a particular kind of theory, if it gains a certain number of adherents, to become a little academic cottage industry. The theorists can start their own journals. Referee each others journal submissions. Assign each others articles and books to their classes. Provide references to help each other get promotion and tenure.

If a particular approach becomes sufficiently prevalent in a particular discipline, its practitioners can take over established journals, professional associations, and hiring in departments all over the country.

And of course, any new approach benefits from “freshness” and novelty. If English professors have been saying similar things about Shakespeare for a couple of hundred years, it can seem an exciting innovation to talk about him in terms of “patriarchy” and “white privilege” and “heteronormativity.” Since there is no hard data your theory needs to explain, you can say pretty much anything you want. If it resonates with the dominant ideology in the discipline, you will prosper professionally.

All of this, of course, is a recipe for intellectual corruption, as the leftist biases of academics are amplified into runaway anti-male sexism, and anti-white racism, producing the sort of studies discussed above.

Insane

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Trump: Very Lucky in His Enemies

Peggy Noonan is far from being a Trump supporter, although she’s not an implacable enemy either. She sees his flaws, but hopes he will do better.

But she notes that Trump has one huge asset: his enemies.

Mr. Trump has struggled so colorfully the past three months, we’ve barely noticed his great good luck—that in that time the Democratic Party and the progressive left have been having a very public nervous breakdown. The new head of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, performs unhinged diatribes. He told an audience in Las Vegas that “Trump doesn’t give a sh— about health care.” In a Maine speech, “They call it a skinny budget. I call it a sh—y budget.” In Newark, he said Republicans “don’t give a sh— about people.”

This is said to be an attempt to get down with millennials. I know a lot of millennials and they’re not idiots, so that won’t work.

The perennially sunny Rep. Maxine Waters of California called Mr. Trump’s cabinet “a bunch of scumbags.” New York’s junior Democratic senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, has taken to using the F-word in interviews.

I thought Mr. Trump was supposed to be the loudmouth vulgarian who swears in public. They are aping what they profess to hate. They excoriated him for lowering the bar. Now look at them.

And they’re doing it because they have nothing else—not a plan, not a program, not a philosophy that can be uttered.

The closest they got to meaning recently was when Mr. Perez found it helpful to say, of a Democratic mayoral candidate who’d backed some pro-life bills, that that kind of thinking had no place in the party. Bernie Sanders rightly called this out as madness. You can’t do this “if we’re going to become a 50-state party.”

Imagine a great, lost party defining itself by who it’s throwing out. They’re like the Republicans the past 20 years, throwing people out for opposing Iraq or George W. Bush, or for not joining NeverTrump. Where does this get you? It gets you to where we are.

That most entrenched bastion of the progressive left, America’s great universities, has been swept by . . . well, one hardly knows what to call it. “Political correctness” is too old and doesn’t do it justice. It is a hysteria—a screeching, ignorant wave of sometimes violent intolerance for free speech. It is mortifying to see those who lead great universities cower in fear of it, attempt to placate it, instead of stopping it.

When I see tapes of the protests and riots at schools like Berkeley, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna and Yale, it doesn’t have the feel of something that happens in politics. It has the special brew of malice and personal instability seen in the Salem witch trials. It sent me back to rereading Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Heather Mac Donald danced with the devil! Charles Murray put the needle in the poppet! As in 17th-century Salem, the accusers have no proof of anything because they don’t know, read or comprehend anything.

The cursing pols, the anathematizing abortion advocates, the screeching students—they are now the face of the progressive left.

This is what America sees now as the face of the Democratic Party. It is a party blowing itself up whose only hope is that Donald Trump blows up first.

He may not be lucky in all of his decisions or staffers, or in his own immaturities and dramas. But hand it to him a hundred days in: He’s lucky in his main foes.

Even a casual observer can add to her list of liberal derangement. That’s not her fault. This is a column, not a book.

Health Care

Jeff Jacoby provides several examples from the debate on health care:

• “Donald Trump and Republicans just celebrated voting to let thousands of Americans die so that billionaires get tax breaks.” Those are the words of a prominent US senator.
• “They” — Republican House members who voted for the AHCA — “should be lined up and shot. That’s not hyperbole; blood is on their hands.” So fumes a professor at the Art Institute of Washington.
• “I hope every GOPer who voted for Trumpcare sees a family member get long-term condition, lose insurance, and die. I want the GOPers who support this to feel the pain in their own families. . . . I want them to be tortured.” Those sentiments are expressed via Twitter by a senior writer at Newsweek.
• “The GOP Plan For Obamacare Could Kill More People Each Year Than Gun Homicides.” That’s the headline in Vox, a popular news and opinion website.

There is no shortage of additional examples, just as enraged or hysterical. . . .

Some progressives justify the shredding of civil discourse; with Trump in the White House, they say, courtesy is a luxury the nation can’t afford. “America, don’t be polite in the face of demagoguery,” exhorts Jessica Valenti in the Guardian. Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, is likewise unapologetic about resorting to rhetorical brutality. “This is a new time in politics where people are just blatantly lying and essentially producing policies that are going to kill people,” Gallego tells CNN. “I think the old time of civility needs to go until we actually go back to the rules.”

The Daily Caller lists many more examples of violence, harassment and intimidation.

And of course, who could forget Stephen Colbert’s deranged rant.  (Note that one word has been censored in the YouTube version, but was originally broadcast.)

Trump, it seems, is not very good at governing, but he’s great at driving his adversaries nuts. That’s a political asset, although it’s not the sort we would prefer he have.

What is new about this is not that a lot of liberals hate conservatives, and particularly hate Donald Trump (who isn’t really a conservative). People in American politics have long hated their partisan enemies. It goes back even further than the followers of Jefferson and Hamilton. And plenty of conservatives have hated liberals.

What is new, and peculiar to the left, is the overt claim that it is good to hate. That people on the other side deserve to be hated, harassed, intimidated and even attacked.

Leftist Professor Tells His Students to Wipe Out Anti-Abortion Messages

This kind of intolerant fascism reminds one of a similar incident at Marquette, where members of the feminist group Empowerment defaced an anti-abortion display, and then blatantly bragged about it on Facebook.

Will this professor (William Gregory Thatcher) be punished for his attack on speech he does not approve? We doubt the institution will do it. But perhaps the lawsuit filed against him will have some effect.

While the media are constantly talking about how intolerant “snowflake” students have infringed on speech, let’s be clear on the fundamental problem: increasingly college faculty are intolerant bigots.

Leftist Activist: Campus Free Speech is a “Luxury”

Hello. I Need to Buy an Insurance Policy

Social Psychologists Finally Admit: Liberals are Prejudiced

Since the field of social psychology leans sharply left, it’s no surprise that a lot of “scholarly literature” claims that conservatives are more “prejudiced” than liberals.

Of course, “prejudice” is defined, by these professors, as disliking groups that the liberal professors like and are solicitous of. If you express negative attitudes toward such groups, it must be “prejudice” rather than some principled moral stance. If one believes homosexual acts are immoral, is one “prejudiced” or has one simply reached a different conclusion about sexual morality? The liberal social psychologists assume the former.

But sometimes, in the social sciences, empirical reality wins out.

From Politico, an article outlining recent research, titled “Why Liberals Aren’t as Tolerant as They Think: The political left might consider itself more open-minded than the right. But research shows that liberals are just as prejudiced against conservatives as conservatives are against liberals.”

This conclusion won’t surprise anybody who reads this blog; the only surprise is that several social scientists have admitted it, based on their research.

There is a long list of groups that liberals dislike, and they dislike those groups as much as conservatives dislike the groups they dislike. Citing just one example, while conservatives don’t like atheists, liberals don’t like Christians.

We, not surprisingly, think that liberal intolerance is a much bigger problem than conservative intolerance, for one simple reason: intolerant conservatives tend to be marginalized, far from centers of power, and intolerant liberals tend to be at the centers of cultural power and influence, in the media, schools and colleges, government bureaucracies. Where “social issues” like gay and transgender issues are concerned, they dominate the business world.

Thus we can’t remember when any leftist speaker on a college campus was shouted down or assaulted, but that happens to conservative speakers about once a week.

Trying to Put Out the Light

Warrior Blogger Legal Case Against Marquette: Our Lawyer Comments

Rick Esenberg, head of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is providing us legal counsel in our case against Marquette, discusses the case (and the recent judgment from Judge Hanscher) on the Vicki McKenna show.

Embedded player:

Direct Link to audio:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/audio/vicki_mckenna_5-4-17.mp3

Setback: Judge Rules Against Warrior Blogger in Academic Freedom Case

VOWS TO APPEAL DECISION UPHOLDING MARQUETTE’S DECISION TO TERMINATE HIM

May 4, 2017 – Milwaukee, WI – In a 33-page ruling today, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge David Hansher found that Marquette University had the legal right to terminate tenured political science professor, Dr. John McAdams. The judge treated the Marquette committee that sat in judgment of McAdams as the equivalent of a neutral, third-party arbitrator, adopting its reasoning and conclusions wholesale. McAdams has already vowed to appeal the ruling.

In November, 2014, McAdams shared a story on his blog, Marquette Warrior, of an undergraduate student who had been told by a graduate student instructor, Cheryl Abbate, that he could not express his disagreement with same-sex marriage in her theory of ethics class because doing so would be homophobic and offensive. The story went national, resulting in a lot of bad press for Marquette.

In response, Marquette summarily suspended McAdams from his teaching duties and banned him from campus, then initiated proceedings to revoke his tenure and fire him. An internal faculty hearing committee (FHC) was convened to judge the dispute, but it suffered from serious procedural flaws, as Marquette withheld evidence from McAdams and allowed a clearly-biased professor to sit on the FHC. The FHC eventually recommended McAdams be suspended for two semesters. Instead, Marquette President Michael Lovell suspended McAdams indefinitely without pay unless he issued a written apology for his behavior – effectively firing him.

Judge Hansher adopted the FHC’s cramped and unsupported view of academic freedom and the First Amendment. He concluded that because naming Abbate could conceivably bring negative attention to her, McAdams was prohibited from doing so.

“No college professor in Wisconsin has any real protection if that’s the standard,” explained Rick Esenberg, President and General Counsel of WILL. “If a professor can be held responsible for the actions of every person who reads or even hears about what the professor writes, then they have no protections at all. By that standard, every professor who was publicly critical of McAdams should be fired too.”

Tom Kamenick, Deputy Counsel at WILL, sharply criticized the court’s decision to defer to Marquette’s own internal committee: “When two parties to a contract disagree about its application, courts cannot simply let one side decide how to interpret it. That’s like saying an employee who brings a sexual harassment complaint against another employee has to abide by the employer’s internal review that finds no wrong-doing occurred.”

The court also found no problem with Marquette allowing a clearly-biased member to sit on the FHC. Professor Lynn Turner signed an open letter shortly after the controversy broke out condemning McAdams and concluding he had violated his professional responsibilities. McAdams asked that she be removed, but the FHC refused. The court decided that as long as the FHC had considered the request, that was good enough – it didn’t matter how biased she was.

“This is another example of the increasing unwillingness of colleges to stand up for free speech. Hardly a day passes without an example of a speaker being shouted down, or disinvited, or a student being punished for some innocuous (but politically incorrect) comment on social media,” commented Dr. McAdams.

“This is just another step in a long process,” said Esenberg. “As Ronald Reagan said, ‘Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.’ We will take this case as far as it needs to be taken to vindicate McAdams’ – and all professors’ – rights to freedom of speech and academic freedom.”

Background on the case can be found here.