Tuesday, October 06, 2020


Parents Outraged After Ohio High School Football Game Turns into a BLM Rally

In case you haven’t noticed, racially charged political movements are invading every area of American life. High school football games are no exception. Parents attending a football game at Lakewood High School in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, were outraged when someone took to the public address system before the game to declare that the school would henceforth be an “agent of change” in combatting “systemic” racism in “society as a whole.”

“All of the visiting parents were completely caught off guard,” popular Cleveland radio host Bob Frantz, whose son was playing in the game, told PJ Media. “We were standing respectfully for the playing of the Lakewood alma mater, and when it ended they began a new song,” which turned out to be “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Also known as the “black national anthem,” the song is featured before NFL stadiums as a part of the BLM movement.

“Then, when [the announcer] began telling everyone how horribly racist American society is, we were livid,” said Frantz, who hosts “Frantz Authority” on Salem affiliate 1420 The ANSWER. “Most of us sat down immediately, and the three dads near me, all of whom were police officers, were visibly angry. One said he would have walked out if it wasn’t his son’s senior season.”

As the marching band played the black national anthem, the announcement continued over the public address system: “Let us pause and reflect on the inequality that our nation has faced since its beginning.”

“The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tamir Rice among others remind us of the systemic racism that persists across so many of our nation’s institutions and society as a whole,” the speech continued. “By acknowledging, discussing, and taking action to address these inequalities, Lakewood City Schools aims to be an agent of change, not only in our community but in the world. We must all take a stand against racism. Let this be the moment when our children someday look back and say, ‘This is when we stood together for change.’”


Lakewood City Schools did not return a request for comment, but sources have confirmed that both the school principal and the band director knew in advance about the planned speech. The principal, Mark Walter, reportedly attended an anti-racism rally in Lakewood in June.

A source close to the situation told PJ Media that Lakewood police are furious about the political stunt and are threatening to pull security from the football games until they receive an apology. Despite receiving a slew of complaints from parents and law enforcement, the school reportedly still plans to repeat the BLM-themed stunt at future football games but will remove the names of those killed in encounters with police. They also plan to read a tribute to first responders at halftime as part of a compromise with law enforcement.

The text of the new speech, which was provided to PJ Media, gives the history of the black national anthem and explains, “‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ sets an atmosphere of reverence for the journey of people of color, gratitude for the selfless sacrifices of their ancestors and for the inheritance of indomitability and resilience. The song recognizes these moments as important to moving forward toward hope and faith for a better future and a better America. The song is universally uplifting and speaks to every group that struggles.”

The speech continues, echoing last Friday’s speech, “We must take a stand against racial, economic and social injustice. Let this be the moment that our children some day look back to and say, ‘this is when we fully saw and recognized the need to stand together for change with respect and civility for all.’”

At halftime someone will read the following script: “As we prepare for the second half of tonight’s contest lets please take a moment to acknowledge and thank Lakewood’s first responders. The work of our police, firefighters, and EMTs is challenging and oftentimes dangerous. These brave men and women put their lives on the line each day to protect us and keep our community safe. We are grateful for their service and their dedication to the City of Lakewood.”

Some police officers are saying the “compromise” does not go far enough. They want a full-throated apology from the school for disrespecting them by pandering to the BLM movement—which is calling on cities across the U.S. to defund their police departments and tarring all police as racist oppressors.

Bob Frantz said parents were angry about two things. “The first was the not-so-subtle suggestion that the three people they mentioned, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tamir Rice, were killed because they were black—implying that the police were racially motivated in each case—which is wholly untrue,” he said. “The second was just the idea that they would bring national politics and this racially divisive message into a high school football stadium and deliver it to a captive audience. It was inappropriate at best, and unconscionable at worst.”

The compromise, such as it is, demonstrates how citizens can have a say in policies (and political stunts) that are not in line with the community’s values. Leftist activists have been allowed to steamroll their way through schools with little resistance or consequence. Parents are often cowed into silence fearing they’ll be called racists or bigots. The fact that Lakewood High School was willing to work with parents and law enforcement to come up with a compromise will hopefully embolden other parents to jump into the fray to protect their children and their schools from the cultural Marxists who are threatening to destroy our institutions.

SOURCE

The Top Ten America-Hating Professors

“White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo and cop-hater Joshua Clover made the list.

1: Nicholas De Genova, University of Houston

2: Joshua Clover, University of California-Davis

3. Seif Da’na, University of Wisconsin-Parkside

4: Angela Davis, University of California-Santa Cruz

5: Robin DiAngelo, University of Washington-Seattle

6. Ibram X. Kendi, Boston University

7: Christine Fair, Georgetown University

8: Cornel West, Princeton University

9. James M. Thomas, University of Mississippi

10. Russell Rickford, Cornell University

The ivory tower has long been a refuge for those who hate our country. For decades past, students have been forced to endure scholarly lectures on the evils of American hegemony, imperialist dominance, Western civilization and festering racism. But never before in our history has the very concept of our nation—founded on our inalienable rights to life, liberty and property, equality before the law, freedom of speech, press and association, and control of individual destiny—been so trampled by the institutions that exist to educate our next generation.

As America prepares for the 2020 elections in a nation already roiled by the coronavirus pandemic and the racial unrest stemming from the murder of George Floyd, magnified by calls to “defund the police” and ever-increasing anti-Semitism, university professors across America are attacking not just the conservative principles at the heart of the American experiment but America itself.

At schools across the nation ranging from the University of California-Davis to the University of Mississippi, from Georgetown University to the University of Houston, the intellectuals charged with educating our next generation of American citizens are abdicating that duty, indoctrinating impressionable students with far-left ideology, battering the principles of capitalism, the economic system that has made our nation staggeringly wealthy and provided opportunities and economic mobility to past generations. These educators attack not only law enforcement officers who are dismissed as inherently racist but the very notion of law and order, instead urging revolution, anarchy, and violence. As we head into this election year, these America-hating professors dismiss all supporters of President Trump as evil white supremacists or “Hitler youth,” effectively barring true intellectual discourse in their classrooms or even the pretense of political neutrality.

It should perhaps be unsurprising that a significant number of these America-hating professors also persist in demonizing and delegitimizing the Jewish state of Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East, and in employing derogatory and racist stereotypes of the Jewish people.

In this election year, it is more important than ever to know and follow what our educators are saying about this fraught moment in American history. The following report names the Top Ten America-Hating Professors teaching at American colleges and universities. Please visit our website at AmericaHatingProfessors.org for more information and to report an America-hating professor on your campus!

More HERE

UK: The great student lockdown

Why are students being singled out for punishment?

Lockdown is an infantilising experience for all of us. That Boris Johnson’s occasional Covid press conferences increasingly feel like fatherly rebukes for our misbehaviour lays testament to this. But no part of the adult population is being more treated like children at the moment than students.

At present around 4,000 students in England and Scotland are in enforced isolation following coronavirus outbreaks at at least 32 universities, including Glasgow, Exeter, Manchester Metropolitan and Edinburgh Napier. Entire halls of residence have been locked down in an attempt to slow the spread.

That students gathering from all over the country would lead to outbreaks of the virus was predicted by basically everybody. Still, universities and the government urged them to take up their places in person, presumably to stave off deferrals and ensure universities could fill as many dorms and collect as much rent as possible.

Given those in their late teens and early twenties are incredibly unlikely to fall seriously ill with the virus, special dispensations could easily have been made. Many of them will be living and socialising almost exclusively with one another, with little contact with the older and more vulnerable.

Instead, many of them have been subject to insane collective restrictions that it would be unthinkable to impose on other sections of the population. The authorities and university administrators have come together to enforce lockdowns on thousands of students following outbreaks on campus.

At the University of Glasgow, where around 600 students are self-isolating following 172 positive Covid tests, students were told that breaking the rules could mean disciplinary action being taken, including termination of their accommodation contracts and even suspension from the university.

The same is happening at Manchester Metropolitan, where around 1,500 students have been locked down. A spokesperson told the BBC: ‘Our security teams will increase patrols to support the lockdown and we will take disciplinary action against any students found to have breached requirements.’

Students at Glasgow and MMU have also reported seeing local police getting involved. And if this all wasn’t Stalinist enough for you, MMU even sent around an email telling students to take down messages they spelled out in post-its in their kitchen windows, including ‘Let us out’, ‘Fuck Boris’ and ‘HMP MMU’.

The handling of it has been roundly shambolic. An MMU student told LBC that his flat of 10 has been asked to leave their full bin bags in a cupboard for three days before they can be ‘safely’ collected. While that smell gathered, he said they also struggled to use the washing machines, as they needed cash to do so.

While we have all been told to isolate if we or someone in our household test positive or get symptoms, these halls-wide lockdowns, including dozens of separate flats, are apparently indiscriminate. One MMU student told the BBC that he and all of his flatmates had tested negative, but were still prohibited from leaving.

For first years, looking to make new friends and enjoy themselves, the existing restrictions were trying enough – particularly in Scotland, where households are banned from mixing entirely. But since term began the authorities have been imposing strictures on students beyond that experienced by everyone else.

Guidance rushed out last week by Universities Scotland and the Scottish government told all students not to visit pubs or restaurants at the weekend, even with their households. It also said staff must be ‘vigilant against any breaches of the guidance’ and that downloading the Protect Scotland tracing app was mandatory.

While there’s been a lot of talk about it this week, the potential Christmas ban also seemed to come early for students. Last week Scotland’s national clinical director Jason Leitch made clear on Twitter that students should not visit their parents’ homes, and Matt Hancock refused to rule out students staying put at Christmas time.

Young people are often wont to feel hard done by. But it’s hard not to see their treatment in recent weeks as uniquely harsh. They have been quarantined at a stroke and threatened with eviction if they do not comply, all the while paying thousands for the pleasure of online freshers’ events and lectures via Zoom.

They are being treated even more like children than the rest of us, everything from their movements to their window displays policed by the authorities. That they are adults capable of making their own decisions seems to have gone out the window in favour of harsh, blanket measures unlike anything else we’ve seen.

That universities and the authorities feel emboldened to treat them in this way is telling. For years there has been a move towards infantilising students, treating them as in need of more support, direction and coddling in order to get them through university life. It’s hard not to see HMP MMU as an extreme expression of that.

In 2018, then universities minister Sam Gyimah said ‘universities need to act in loco parentis’ in relation to students’ mental wellbeing. Here he essentially called for a partial return to the system, abolished in 1970, that saw undergraduates as essentially children in need of paternalistic guidance.

Where prior to 1970 in loco parentis meant the policing of students’ social and sexual interactions, complete with curfews and gender-segregated halls, today universities talk up their obligations to students’ mental health. But what underpins both views is the idea that students are essentially still children in need of support.

It is telling that in all the sympathetic commentary about the great student lockdown, much of it focuses on the toll it is supposedly taking on students’ ‘wellbeing’. Rather than seeing these students as young adults deprived of their freedom and formative experiences, the temptation is to frame this in terms of mental health.

Here we glimpse why the authorities are daring to treat students in this way. We don’t really think of students as adults any more. Which is at least part of the reason why officials, when it came to the crunch, felt so comfortable railroading their rights. Here’s hoping the locked-down students fight back against this madness.

SOURCE

Colleges Where Free Speech Is Endangered

Leftists are no longer liberals because they hate the First Amendment.

There’s a sad irony in the fact that an institution originally conceived to encourage discourse and the free exchange of ideas is now rife with conformity and political correctness.

But a survey done this spring by campus free-speech advocates revealed that students at certain campuses are more into groupthink than others. This poll, which was conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and RealClearEducation and covered more than 20,000 students at 55 institutions across the nation, found that the University of Chicago was considered the best college for speech freedom, while students at DePauw University in Indiana believed their campus was the worst. Keeping DePauw company in the bottom 10 were Ivy League institutions Dartmouth and Harvard, along with other well-known schools like Louisiana State University and the University of Texas at Austin.

There’s one University of Chicago student, however, who begs to differ. Evita Duffy became the subject of derision when, as part of a “get out the vote” promotion, she wrote as her reason for casting a ballot, “I vote because the coronavirus won’t destroy America, but socialism will.” As Duffy explains, the reaction was fierce: “Fellow students attacked my character, my intellect, my family, my appearance, and even threatened me with physical violence, using foul and offensive language. I was called a racist and a xenophobe. Some compared me to animals. Others declared that they would personally stop me from voting, and many defended the personal attacks, saying I deserved to be bullied and that I don’t belong at the University of Chicago on account of my beliefs.”

Indeed, if that’s how they treat free speech at the first-place institution, one shudders to think of the reaction at the bottom-tier schools.

While the subject seems to be intended as encouragement, there’s a serious underlying problem illustrated by the survey. “Most students don’t want guest speakers with controversial views on campus,” writes analyst Jennifer Kabbany. “Seventy-one percent replied that they would oppose allowing a speaker on campus who would argue ‘transgender people have a mental disorder,’ 64 percent oppose a speaker who’d argue ‘abortion should be completely illegal,’ and 75 percent oppose a speaker who’d say ‘Black Lives Matter is a hate group.’” These ideas may not be mainstream, but they’re not particularly radical in nature, either. And they belong within the discourse on a college campus.

We often hear about conservative speakers getting shouted down on college campuses by left-leaning student groups. On the other hand, academics like Ibram X. Kendi, who recently coined the term “white colonizers” for white parents — such as Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett — who adopt black children, only create a ripple of criticism. Kendi dismissed these complaints, saying, “We should take it as a compliment when people attack us personally or when people misrepresent our work. Because that means they can’t challenge what we are actually saying or writing or meaning or doing. Take the compliments with grace and move on.” Of course, Kendi can say that since he has a secure position within the ivory tower, and since his cohorts secretly agree. And why shouldn’t they? Those on the Left are never subjected to “heckler’s veto” like conservative and libertarian speakers.

We should’ve seen trouble coming 40 years ago, when “free speech zones” began cropping up on college campuses. Even the ACLU objects to this censorship: “A university’s job is to teach students how to be contributing members of society, not to stifle expression.”

We’d argue that a university’s job is to broaden students’ educational horizons by teaching them about the benefits of Liberty and a free society, but at least they seem to get the point.

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