Under the rubric “insanity” a friend just wrote with the news that the Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into New College of Florida. Why? Have they excluded black students from the tennis team? Have they made Mexican stud sleep in the parking lot? Nothing so minor. No, this is serious. Put a pat of butter on that crumpet and listen: the former director of “DEI” (“diversity, equity, inclusion” for the innocents among my readers) has revealed that Chris Rufo, a trustee of New College, “mocked and misgendered” this creature after she (or so I am guessing) complained.
Serious stuff. Can a dawn raid from the Stasi (aka, the FBI) be far behind?
The new is full of such reports these days. It is partly comic, yes, but also, when you step back, profoundly depressing, for at least two reasons.
First, with respect to the individuals involved, it is evidence of a profound psychological disturbance, a wound, as it were. Anyone who tells you that she (or, as the case may be, “he”) wants to be referred to as “ze/zir” (or whatever) is issuing not only a bid for attention but a cry for help. Such folks have my (qualified) compassion.
But when we see an agency of the federal government blunder into the case with talk of “civil rights” violations and so on, such episodes are occasions for melancholy thoughts about a government that is out of control.
It’s a political investigation, of course, by an illegitimate and politicized federal bureaucracy.
But oft evil will shall evil mar: “Across multiple polls, Biden seems to be losing support from minority voters…. This raises the possibility that there’s a social-issues undertow for Democrats in which even when wokeness isn’t front and center, the fact that the party’s activist core is so far left gradually pushes culturally conservative African Americans and Hispanics toward the G.O.P. — much as culturally conservative white Democrats drifted slowly into the Republican coalition between the 1960s and the 2000s.”
The racial and sexual politics that appeal to neurotic upper-middle-class white people are not those that appeal to most working-class Americans of any race.