HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College director: ‘Every white person in this country is racist.’ As taxpayers tire of supporting this kind of thing, we’re told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
Archive for 2020
August 31, 2020
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Sorry Dems — ‘Trump’s America’ Is a Glorious Place. “The greatest indication of how effective Trump’s speech was is the reaction from the other side. The Democrats have been awash in flop sweat and panic from the moment President Trump wrapped up his star turn in a glorious fireworks frenzy last Thursday.”
I WAS TOLD THIS WAS ABOUT CONFEDERATE GENERALS: Washburn Law School Removes Statues Of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson.
#METOO IS OVER, AND THE DEMOCRATS HAVE STOPPED PRETENDING TO CARE ABOUT WOMEN:
MICHAEL BARONE: A Democratic Cassandra gets canceled for telling the truth.
“I think Democrats are ignoring this problem, are hoping that it will go away. And it’s not going to go away.” That was CNN anchor Don Lemon, speaking to colleague Chris Cuomo on Tuesday night, on the Republican National Convention, five days after the Democrats had adjourned their convention sine die (as they used to say) during which they ignored “this problem” for four straight nights.
What was “this problem?” “Guess what, the rioting has to stop,” Lemon went on. “Chris, as you and I know, it’s showing up in the polls, it’s showing up in focus groups. It’s the only thing right now that’s sticking.”
“Sticking” in this context means hurting the Democratic ticket. Last week, when it evidently didn’t show up at the polls and in focus groups, Lemon was not giving similar advice to the party he obviously favors.
But he might have done so if he had listened to a shrewd Democratic political consultant — and if that consultant had not been “canceled” for giving similar advice three months ago.
The consultant in question is 28-year-old David Shor. On May 28, three days after the death of George Floyd, he made an interesting point in a tweet: “Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.” In the tweet, he cited Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow’s 53-page paper entitled “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting.” By the way, if it matters, Wasow is of African descent and co-founder of the social networking website BlackPlanet, which was sold in 2008 for $38 million. The paper, perhaps revised in the editing process, appeared in the American Political Science Review.
It didn’t matter. Shor lost his job, the riots rolled on, and now — as should have been predictable to anyone who wasn’t an idiot — they have hurt the Democrats. Epistemic closure has its costs.
THE EXODUS IS HERE: Pinterest cancels huge SF office lease in unbuilt project, citing work-from-home shift.
At exactly the time when big blue cities need to be at their most attractive to hold on to business and residents, they’re working hard to make themselves downright awful.
GLEICHSCHALTUNG: Ubisoft to Remove Raised Black Fist Imagery from Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad Following Controversy. “Ubisoft has decided to remove the black raised fist imagery from Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad’s intro, as it has been deemed ‘insensitive and harmful’ and appears to connect a fictional terrorist group called Umbra to the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Yeah, so?
WHAT’S IN STORE FOR CALIFORNIA?: A radical race agenda, that’s what. The California Senate has now passed a bill establishing a slave reparations task force. Meanwhile, it has also approved a bill that requires race/sexual orientation quotas for corporate boards of directors. A somewhat different version of the corporate board bill has already passed the Assembly, so it’s unlikely they will balk this time around. And, of course, the Legislature has already passed a bill asking voters to rip up the state constitution’s prohibition on discrimination and preferential treatment on the basis of race or sex. It’s all so breathtaking. Sorry I don’t have time to write more …
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Kurt Schlichter’s The People’s Republic wasn’t supposed to be a how-to manual. But if you want an idea of where California is headed, well, it’s the thing to read first.
PEOPLE — ESPECIALLY LAW STUDENTS AND EVEN MORE ESPECIALLY LAW SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS — NEED TO GROW UP: The Controversy Over Quoting Racial Epithets, Now at UC Irvine School of Law.
Prof. Carrie Menkel-Meadow—a distinguished scholar for more than 35 years, and very much a woman of the Left—was teaching a class on lawyer problem solving; her main field is dispute resolution (focusing on outside-the-courtroom resolution), a field that she basically helped found. (Note that she was a colleague of mine at UCLA, but I never got to her know well then.)
In the class Prof. Menkel-Meadow had a unit that discussed “hate speech” filtering on Facebook. . . .
Talking about this, she quoted the word “nigger,” which later led to an outcry. The Dean has now publicly condemned Prof. Menkel-Meadow’s actions, and barred her from teaching first-year classes. (She isn’t teaching any first-year classes this year in any event, but she sometimes teaches a mandatory 1L International Legal Analsysis class.)
Several administrators also released a public letter of condemnation, which said “We condemn without qualification the classroom utterance of terms, such as the N-word, that are loaded with histories of pain and oppression.” No exact list of condemned terms was given, but the “such as” makes clear that there would be others as well.
The condemnations didn’t mention the professor’s name, but to her credit, Prof. Menkel-Meadow e-mailed the faculty a letter that began, “I have no need to hide behind any anonymity of the Dean’s letter to you all,” and then defended her position. She remains unrepentant.
As well she should. (And yes, there’s some irony in that she’s been a big champion of “hate speech” regulation for years). But law students will become lawyers, and will have people depending on their lawyerly brains and judgment for their lives and liberty. If they can’t hold it together in the face of a bad word, they need to find another job. So too do administrators who throw their faculty members under the bus at the least threat of complaint. Deans are supposed to stand up for their faculty members, not betray them in the face of mass hysteria, and the proper response to this sort of student complaint is a teaching response, explaining to them why they are wrong, and aren’t entitled to what they’re demanding. Instead, we get abject surrender to obvious silliness. If you want taxpayers to think that academia is a silly place that is unworthy of their continued support, just keep this up.
Related: Randall Kennedy & Eugene Volokh , Quoting Epithets in the Classroom and Beyond.
I’M HAPPY TO SEE THE FACULTY OF GMU’S ANTONIN SCALIA LAW SCHOOL REAFFIRM THEIR Commitment to Open Dialogue and Debate.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: The Trayvon Hoax: Are Young Blacks Weary of Being ‘Played?’
JOHN FUND: “John Muir Is Cancelled. Who’s Next?“
JOANNE JACOBS: Start class with racism reminder? “In Sane Advice for an Insane World, Kat Rosenfeld, Persuasion’s new advice columnist, responds to a professor whose ‘woke’ college is urging faculty to begin all classes ‘by acknowledging racism exists on campus to make students of color feel more comfortable.’ The prof thinks this sets the ‘wrong tone for teaching’.”
It sets the wrong tone for a lot of things.
IMPOSSIBLE, I WAS TOLD THAT THIS NEVER HAPPENS: Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots.
A top Democratic operative says voter fraud, especially with mail-in ballots, is no myth. And he knows this because he’s been doing it, on a grand scale, for decades.
Mail-in ballots have become the latest flashpoint in the 2020 elections. While President Trump and the GOP warn of widespread manipulation of the absentee vote that will swell with COVID polling restrictions, many Democrats and their media allies have dismissed such concerns as unfounded.
But the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception. His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.
“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”
The whisteblower — whose identity, rap sheet and long history working as a consultant to various campaigns were confirmed by The Post — says he not only changed ballots himself over the years, but led teams of fraudsters and mentored at least 20 operatives in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania — a critical 2020 swing state.
I hope that Bill Barr will have a lot of investigators on this between now and November.
SURE, THIS WILL MAKE THE “STUDENTS OF COLOR” FEEL COMFORTABLE: Start every class with a reminder that your campus is racist.
SO MUCH EASIER TO TAKE THAN TO MAKE: ‘In Defense of Looting’ Author Says the Value of Small Businesses Is a ‘Right-Wing Myth.’
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Attempted rape on NYC subway platform thwarted, caught on disturbing video.
A creep pushed a 25-year-old woman on an Upper East Side subway platform to the ground and then attempted to rape her in a brazen daytime attack, cops said.
The woman was waiting on the platform for the Q train around 11 a.m. Saturday inside the Lexington Avenue and East 63 Street train station when the man approached her, police said.
Video taken by a witness showed the man on top of the woman before a crowd of bystanders intervened.
The bystander intervention shows that De Blasio hasn’t pushed NYC entirely back to the 1970s yet. But not for lack of trying.