Naima Lowe: Evergreen State College’s Incendiary Race Hustler

Evergreen State College: Left Wing Hell Hole

From Vice News on HBO:

WARNING: LANGUAGE



Two particularly good articles on the situation there are:

“The Appalling Protests at Evergreen State College” in The Weekly Standard. And . . .

“How a Campus Fight Drove 2 Left-Leaning Professors to Fox News” in the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The latter article is particularly interesting, showing how a left-wing academic couple, who had the usual biases against Fox News, found that liberal outlets ignored their plight. According to the article:

Still, the two professors feel as if they made the right decision to take their concerns to Fox News. In the weeks since Mr. Weinstein appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Ms. Heying [Weinstein’s spouse], who has been monitoring her husband’s email, said he had received “hundreds and hundreds” of warm messages from people whom he and his wife might never have considered allies.

“Before May 26 I had the same knee-jerk reaction to Fox News that all of my liberal colleagues do,” said Ms. Heying. “I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Increasingly, leftists who retain some concern with academic rigor (and thus worry about affirmative action hiring and flaky curriculum) and with free speech find themselves allied with conservatives.

We’d love to argue with Weinstein about his leftist views on economics and politics. That’s what people in academia are supposed to do.

But right now, he is facing down fascists whose only argument is “shut up!”

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.

Much Cheaper Ways to Get That Result

Claiming “Free Speech” as an Excuse to Censor

From the Wall Street Journal:

Higher education’s suppression of speech is well-publicized. But in an odder and less well-known twist, campuses are increasingly co-opting the language of free speech and using it to justify censorship. One example: The designated “free speech zones” that exist on roughly 1 in 10 U.S. college campuses, according to a report released last month by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The very existence of a “free speech zone” suggests that students’ expression is limited elsewhere on campus. And even in the “free” zones, administrators often restrict who can speak, when and for how long.

Dozens of universities have also used the language of free speech to justify trendy “Language Matters” or “Inclusive Language” campaigns. The point of these programs is to condition students to wince away from words and phrases deemed offensive, instead using politically correct substitutes.

Among the campaigns’ common targets are “hey guys” and “man up” (too gendered), as well as “crazy” (inconsiderate of people with mental illness) and “lame” (disrespectful to the disabled). Ironically—and insidiously—these “inclusive” language campaigns seek to exclude opposing political or cultural viewpoints. It’s an attempt to ban not only words but also thoughts.

The University of Northern Colorado’s “Language Matters” campaign last year warned students not to say “All lives matter.” The dean of students, Katrina Rodriguez, defended the program in an email last June to Heat Street, where I am political editor, saying it was “about being mindful about how words can affect others and the conversations provide an opportunity for individuals to understand why particular language may be hurtful to someone else in our community of learners.”

She continued: “We believe that fostering dialogue on a college campus so that multiple perspectives are explored and debated is the essence of free speech.”

The inclusive-language campaigns at the University of Wisconsin’s campuses in Milwaukee and River Falls have also discouraged students from saying “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien,” because either term “fixates on legal status instead of people as individuals” and “asserts that only certain groups belong in the U.S.”

UW-Milwaukee even included “politically correct” on its list of disfavored terms, arguing that it “has become a way to deflect, say that people are being too ‘sensitive’ and police language.”

Which brings us to the warped idea that by suppressing “dominant” voices, universities actually further free speech. Katherine Kvellestad, a University of Pennsylvania student, recently used a version of this argument to defend students who wanted a portrait of Shakespeare removed from the English department. The students also pushed for an English curriculum with fewer white, male writers.

“I think, in a way, the whole PC culture idea can almost promote free speech because there are a lot of people who have been marginalized in the past,” Ms. Kvellestad told Heat Street during a phone interview in December. “So it’s kind of free speech in a different sense, that we’re giving credence and voices to voices that we were not hearing.”

One of Ms. Kvellestad’s fellow Penn students made a related argument in a Jan. 11 op-ed in the student newspaper, claiming that his white professors’ refusal to censor class content had hindered his ability to learn. Sophomore James Fisher described how one Penn professor showed depictions of slavery and let students make comments Mr. Fisher considered “ignorant.” He told the professor that “what he was doing was traumatic to me . . . [so] I would not allow him to continue.”

The professor, Mr. Fisher wrote, “then used the argument that, in order to make the class a ‘safe space,’ he had to protect the voice of all students in class. . . . So, because my professor wanted to protect the voices of the white students who benefit from black oppression, the oppression unfortunately continued.”

In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell describes how the misuse of language can lead to messy thinking—and how, even worse, intentionally imprecise language can soften or obscure abhorrent ideas. He anticipated a world in which administrators, professors and students demand the right to act as censors even as they claim to venerate the right to unrestricted expression.

The writer, Jillian Kay Melchior, is an Political Editor at Heat Street, which does an excellent job of reporting on censorship on college campuses.

Anti-Trump Fascists Riot, Harass and Vandalize Rally Goers

Fascists on the Left

Hall of Shame: University of Illinois Chicago Faculty and Staff Who Wanted Trump Rally Banned

People who have been following this blog know that we are no fan of Donald Trump. But leftists who have tried to shut down his rallies are simply fascists.

Case in point: a bunch of faculty and staff from the University of Illinois, Chicago who demanded that the institution not allow the Donald Trump campaign to use a university venue for a rally.

At all public universities, the First Amendment prevails, and any limits on speech must be “viewpoint neutral.” In other words, you can’t refuse somebody the use of a venue simply because you disagree with him.

The mainstream media (and Trump’s Republican opponents) have largely blamed Trump’s own inflammatory rhetoric. But one evil doesn’t justify another. And leftists who want to call Trump a fascist should not step on their own narrative by acting like fascists themselves.

Here is the list of people who should be ashamed of themselves because of their intolerance of speech they disapprove.

Alan Dershowitz on Hypocrisy, Bigotry of Campus Protesters

Amherst Students Demand Apology For Support of Free Speech

And They are Demanding it From Administrators Who Did Not Even Endorse Free Speech

From the Daily Beast:

Students protesting at Amherst College have issued a list of demands to administrators that includes making them apologize for signs that lament the death of free speech.

A group calling themselves the Amherst Uprising listed 11 demands they want enacted by next Wednesday. Among them is a demand that President Biddy Martin issue a statement saying that Amherst does “not tolerate the actions of student(s) who posted the ‘All Lives Matter’ posters, and the ‘Free Speech’ posters.”

The latter posters called the principle of free speech the “true victim” of the protests at the University of Missouri.

Going further, the students demand the people behind “free speech” fliers be required to go through a disciplinary process as well as “extensive training for racial and cultural competency.”

University of Missouri Student Activist: Cast Aside First Amendment

Fascists: Leftist Students at University of Missouri Impede Press Photographer

It’s a stunning display of arrogance and intolerance.

And these are the kind of people, remember, who got the President of their university fired.


[Update]
Most people would consider this behavior unacceptable. But not the student activists, who care little about press freedom. And not one student activist who talked to MSNBC:

Naomi Collier, a student activist at the University of Missouri, defended the treatment of a journalist who was attacked while trying to cover the unfolding events on campus.

On Monday, Tim Tai, a student journalist contracted with ESPN trying to cover the protests on campus, was accosted by the school’s Greek Life director and protesters.

When Tai approached students in the protest to get their opinion he was told he needed to go. The situation escalated and one protester asked for “some muscle” to remove Tai.

Collier told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell it was a “peaceful protest” and Tai was just a victim of the “backlash” from “fed up” students. Collier also said the student journalist was “insensitive” to the “feelings and emotions that [were] present at that time.”

“Is there a way to get back to some sort of civil discourse here or there is still so much tension,” Mitchell asked Collier.

“Definitely,” Collier said. “I do believe that we are getting back to that civil discourse. I believe the whole thing was civil. At no point did anything get violent, everything was a peaceful protest, even with the camp-out. There was nothing that got, in my opinion, out of control. The students are fed up.”

“As far as the media’s concerned, at times they can be overwhelming and insensitive to the feelings and emotions that are present at that time. I think what that photographer experienced was kind of the backlash of that, and again, he may have just been ignorant or uneducated about how that particular group of students were feeling at the time and again.”

More Global Warming Fascism: Australia

Academia is more and more intolerant, and one of the tenets of the new orthodoxy is the idea that there is global warming, that human activity is the main cause of it, that it has potentially catastrophic consequences, and that radical policies have to be immediately enacted to deal with it.

Dissenting from any one of these propositions can lead to demands that you be fired, silenced, shunned and banned from public discourse.

And this indeed is exactly what happened at the University of Western Australia, where a climate change “contrarian” named Bjorn Lomborg was banned and denied a job because of his views.

We frankly wonder whether something like this could happen at Marquette. While faculty of natural science departments are mostly not into race, gender and sexual orientation political correctness, there is a certain kind of science political correctness. The prevailing attitude is “we scientists have discovered the truth, and don’t you dare doubt what we say.”

A writer for Reason makes some points that people in academia used to understand, but increasingly appear not to:

Learning is a process of testing, discussion, submitting your ideas to debate and standing by them as the brickbats of disagreement and counter-argument come flying in. This is why academic freedom is so important: the liberty to think and speak and argue is the only real way of getting to the truth of a matter, and in the process boosting our understanding of the world.

In the Lomborg scandal, this process was circumvented. Lomborg’s center was pre-emptively denied the right to put its case in Australian academia, by “passionate emotional” protesters who think they already know The Truth on climate change: that it’s happening, it’s terrible, and we will only alleviate its worst impacts by putting restraints on humanity’s material aspirations.

This isn’t learning, far less academic freedom in action. Rather, it echoes the old, pre-modern view of a university as, in essence, a bookish guardian of ecclesiastical authority. Only now it’s eco-authority that is protected from intellectual poking and awkward analysis, ringfenced from ridicule just as surely as the pointy-hatted overseers of universities in the pre-Enlightenment era also ringfenced ideas that they just knew were true.

Class of 2015: Some Frank Talk

Of course, only a minority of the Class of 2015 are politically correct yahoos. But they have disproportionate power, because they are the pets of university administrations, and of the faculty.

Politically Correct Fascism at Portland State University

Check this article for an explanation of the grievance of the intolerant people who felt they had a right to shut up the speaker of whom they disapproved.

Shouting Down a Speaker: Left Wing Fascism at the University of New Mexico

You can read an account of the event here.

The interesting thing here is that audience members, clearly sympathetic to the speaker, rushed the demonstrators and forced them out of the hall. Were they justified in doing that?

In this instance, yes.

Either you have the rule of law, or you have the state of nature. Had cops been present to quell the disruption and arrest the disruptors, then audience members would have been obligated to stand by and let the cops do their job. But no cops (apparently) were present.

In a state of nature, people have a right to use force if necessary to protect their rights. It is important that they not use more force than necessary, and in this case all that happened was that the disruptors were pushed or shoved out of the room, and there was a minor scrap over the page of slogans one demonstrator held.

Universities ought to maintain the rule of law. But often they do not, especially when the lawless are on the political left. That’s why we would like to see more cases where the audience uses the force necessary to eject people who have assaulted free speech.

Fascism in Madison: GOP Senator Glenn Grothman Chased, Trapped by Hecklers

Kudos to Democratic Representative Brett Hulsey, who saved Grothman from a very threatening situation.

Professor Tears Down McCain Yard Signs, Fired

From Politico:

The St. Olaf (Northfield, Minn.) professor who, in a well-read Huffington Post item, recounted tearing down McCain campaign signs has resigned.Per the Northfield News, it appears that Philip Busse was forced out.

St. Olaf spokesman David Gonnerman issued the following statement Monday afternoon:

“The St. Olaf College administration first learned of Phil Busse’s self-admitted theft and destruction of campaign signs on the morning of Oct. 31 as a result of his posting on the Internet. “The St. Olaf administration immediately referred the matter to local law enforcement authorities and commenced an investigation of its own.

“Mr. Busse has tendered his resignation and is no longer affiliated with St. Olaf College.”

Busse has been charged with misdemeanor theft.

This is far from the first time an academic has done something like this.

Would the average liberal college professor do something like this?

No.

Would the average liberal college professor feel just a little bit of glee on hearing about McCain signs torn down -- before a scruple or two kicked in?

Yes.

We were talking to a colleague the other day, and he was fussing and fuming about how George Bush is supposedly tapping everybody’s phones. He was delighted that somebody had hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account. His view seemed to be that Republicans deserve that.

So the problem is not that the average liberal professor is the sort of fascist who would tear down yard signs or hack into a political enemy’s e-mail account.

It’s that the average liberal professor is part of a culture so full of bias and hostility that such things happen.

Getting Emotional About “Global Warming”

From Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

Introducing Newsweek’s Aug. 13 cover story on global warming “denial,” editor Jon Meacham brings up an embarrassing blast from his magazine’s past: an April 1975 story about global cooling, and the coming ice age that scientists then were predicting. Meacham concedes that “those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 Newsweek piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be.” But rather than acknowledge that the skeptics may have a point, Meacham shrugs it off.

“On global cooling,” he writes, “there was never anything even remotely approaching the current scientific consensus that the world is growing warmer because of the emission of greenhouse gases.”

Really? Newsweek took rather a different line in 1975. Then, the magazine reported that scientists were “almost unanimous” in believing that the looming Big Chill would mean a decline in food production, with some warning that “the resulting famines could be catastrophic.” Moreover, it said, “the evidence in support of these predictions” -- everything from shrinking growing seasons to increased North American snow cover to record-setting tornado outbreaks -- had “begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”

Yet Meacham, quoting none of this, simply brushes aside the 1975 report as “alarmist” and “discredited.” Today, he assures his readers, Newsweek’s climate-change anxieties rest “on the safest of scientific ground.”

Do they? Then why is the tone of Sharon Begley’s cover story -- nine pages in which anyone skeptical of the claim that human activity is causing global warming is painted as a bought-and-paid-for lackey of the coal and oil industries -- so strident and censorious? Why the relentless labeling of those who point out weaknesses in the global-warming models as “deniers,” or agents of the “denial machine,” or deceptive practitioners of “denialism?” Wouldn’t it be more effective to answer the challengers, some of whom are highly credentialed climate scientists in their own right, with scientific data and arguments, instead of snide insinuations of venality and deceit? Do Newsweek and Begley really believe that everyone who dissents from the global-warming doomsaying does so in bad faith?

Anthropogenic global warming is a scientific hypothesis, not an article of religious or ideological dogma. Skepticism and doubt are entirely appropriate in the realm of science, in which truth is determined by evidence, experimentation, and observation, not by consensus or revelation. Yet when it comes to global warming, dissent is treated as heresy -- as a pernicious belief whose exponents must be shamed, shunned, or silenced.

Newsweek is hardly the only offender. At the Live Earth concert in New Jersey last month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced climate-change skeptics as “corporate toadies” for “villainous” enemies of America and the human race. “This is treason” he shouted, “and we need to start treating them now as traitors.”

Some environmentalists and commentators have suggested that global-warming “denial” be made a crime, much as Holocaust denial is in some countries. Others have proposed that climate-change dissidents be prosecuted in Nuremberg-style trials. The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen has suggested that television meteorologists be stripped of their American Meteorological Society certification if they dare to question predictions of catastrophic global warming.

A few weeks ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis published an article opposing mandatory limits on carbon-dioxide emissions, arguing that Congress should not impose caps until the technology exists to produce energy that doesn’t depend on carbon dioxide. In response to Lewis’s reasonable piece, the president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, Michael Eckhart, issued a threat:

“Take this warning from me, Marlo. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America.”

This is the zealotry and intolerance of the auto-da-fé. The last place it belongs is in public-policy debate. The interesting and complicated phenomenon of climate change is still being figured out, and as much as those determined to turn it into a crusade of good vs. evil may insist otherwise, the issue of global warming isn’t a closed book. Smearing those who buck the “scientific consensus” as traitors, toadies, or enemies of humankind may be emotionally satisfying and even professionally lucrative. It is also indefensible, hyperbolic bullying. That the bullies are sure they are doing the right thing is not a point in their defense.