I remember how it was -- JR
Woke teacher exposed for forcing white kids apologize to black kids for skin color
Racism is something people should be able to discuss openly. There truly are situations in our society where racial bias still exists. However, our great nation is not systemically racist. What little racism that does exist is isolated. Normal, everyday Americans are not racists.
Systemic racism is a leftist lie. The little racism we do have is a problem unique to fringe groups. Racism is not rampant. But radical liberals will try to convince you otherwise. From Joe Biden all the way down to our children’s teachers, the left constantly wants to play this race card.
According to the left, the names of our roads are racist. Statues honoring American heroes are somehow racist. Fictional cartoon characters, books, and the lyrics to cherished songs are racist. The problem with this whole insane theory is that none of these things are racist.
The real racists are those who keep trying to make everything that’s not about ethnicity into some type of racial narrative. At its core, this ideology will lead young Americans to believe they’re racist when they’re not. Kids don’t even appreciate what it means to be racist.
However, one crazy elementary teacher in the North Penn School District wants to make sure they do. This fifth-grade teacher used a hideous game to try to convince kids that there was something wrong with them because of the color of their skin.
Other parents said their kids told them of more degrading tactics used by teachers at the school. Kids were targeted for having college-educated parents. In one instance, students were asked to announce if their mom and dad were married. We’re not certain whose business that is.
Children were even told to reveal if they had an in-ground swimming pool. Like CRT, these things have nothing to do with educating young students. One mother was irate. She pulled her child out of AM Kulp Elementary School after she found out what was happening.
Her child came home, distraught and confused. This child said that her teacher lined up all the kids in order, from the whitest down to the darkest skin tone. The teacher then forced the white children to turn and apologize to the black kids. But what were they apologizing for?
This lunatic teacher was forcing these young, impressionable children to believe something was wrong with them because of the color of their skin. They were saying they were sorry for being born white. It’s lunacy. Of course, school board officials denied anything was happening.
But this is the same school district where a teacher taped a COVID mask to a child’s face. The newest revelation exposes the radical and demeaning tactic that is at the core of Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT is based on a racist ideology. This is how you keep a racist belief alive.
It defies logic. To ask a child to apologize to another child because of the color of their skin automatically ingrains racism into our next generation. Kids are taught to look first at skin color and then at gender. This radical belief system is indoctrinating our youth to ignore character.
Our society, and how we perceive ourselves as part of that society, will be based on race. This is how you teach children to focus on race and ignore character. You’re bad if you’re white. You’re even worse off if you’re a white boy. God forbid you’re a white boy with a swimming pool.
An ideology that says it’s wants to stop racism is making it worse. It’s not a coincidence. This is a masterful plan. The target is the white race. This insane philosophy is trying to instill in white children an inherent sense that there is something wrong with them.
The CRT-based curriculum teaches kids to feel guilty because of their skin color. CRT is the theory with the racism problem. The left’s attempt to improve discrimination through CRT is making matters worse.
Thankfully, parents across the United States are now aware. Teachers like this radical Pennsylvania elementary school teacher must be held accountable. Parents have had enough. Even the threats of federal hawking by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland haven’t worked.
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FIRE calls on SUNY Fredonia to end suspension, investigation of professor for philosophical discussion of sex with minors
SUNY Fredonia philosophy professor Stephen Kershnar is known for his pointed, Socratic questions about morality. Like many philosophy professors, Kershnar asks difficult questions to get to the heart of why we think things are bad or immoral.
Perhaps unlike most philosophy professors, Kershnar has made it his niche to deliberately question conventional views on issues like slavery, torture, discrimination, abortion, affirmative action, venerating veterans, whether God exists, and so on. He also teaches a course — “Sex and Love” — that discusses “sexual ethics” and asks “Which kinds of sexual activity are morally permissible under what sort of circumstances?”
But this week, those questions became too tough for SUNY Fredonia, as it suspended Kershnar after his on-brand hypothesizing about the morality of “adult-child sex” on two podcasts went viral.
Despite the ensuing swift and heated criticism of Kershnar, many others — including those who strongly disagree with what he had to say — are speaking up in defense of his academic freedom to pose difficult questions.
While undoubtedly offensive to many, Kershnar’s speech is protected by the First Amendment.
The Daily Nous, a publication “for and about the philosophy profession” run by philosophy professor Justin Weinberg, noted this controversy is just the latest in a recurring cycle of backlash to Kershnar’s work and the charged topics he frequently explores. Weinberg correctly explained that “his work is professional and protected by academic freedom and freedom of speech” and concluded that “he quite clearly ought not be fired.”
We agree. FIRE sent a letter to SUNY Fredonia yesterday informing the university of its obligations under the First Amendment and urging it to return Kershnar to the classroom immediately. FIRE coordinated a letter signed by more than 30 faculty members supporting Kershnar’s rights to speak on controversial topics as an academic philosopher. The Academic Freedom Alliance also wrote SUNY Fredonia in support of Kershnar.
Even if you accept Kershnar’s critics’ framing — that his statements could lead to erosion of laws criminalizing sexual abuse of minors — his views are still protected by the First Amendment. As we wrote in our letter to SUNY Fredonia:
While the law provides no shelter for incitement, that exception is limited to speech “directed to” inciting “imminent lawless action” and likely to result in that action. The Supreme Court has made clear that this exception does not extend to the “mere advocacy” of unlawful conduct, the “abstract teaching” of unlawful conduct, or arguments about the “moral propriety or even moral necessity” for unlawful action, leaving all such speech within the protection of the First Amendment.
Kershnar’s controversial research interests and statements should not be news to SUNY Fredonia. For years, it recognized that academic freedom protected those research interests. In fact, Kershnar’s bio on the SUNY Fredonia website notes that he “has written one hundred articles and book chapters on such diverse topics as abortion, adult-child sex, hell, most valuable player, pornography, punishment, sexual fantasies, slavery, and torture.” The university didn’t have a problem with Kershnar’s patented devil’s advocacy and Socratic questioning until the online outrage machine manufactured a problem.
What changed?
The university didn’t have a problem with Kershnar’s patented devil’s advocacy and Socratic questioning until the online outrage machine manufactured a problem.
Yesterday, the university said the “volume” of “specific threats” it is receiving leaves them unable to “compile a list” to provide to Kershnar. That’s not surprising; when videos of academics’ controversial speech go viral, the vociferous public response — itself largely composed of protected speech — far too often includes some form of threatened violence. But taking action against an unpopular speaker serves only to reward such threats.
In so doing, SUNY Fredonia facilitates an impermissible heckler’s veto, which incentivizes more threats in the future. And when universities respond to threats by taking action against the speaker — as opposed to taking other steps to address security risks, or temporarily allowing classes to meet via videoconferencing — they send the message that speech in higher education is protected as long as it’s popular with people who would threaten violence. (See, for example, Dartmouth’s recent retreat from freedom of expression due to threats against conservative journalist Andy Ngo.)
While undoubtedly offensive to many, Kershnar’s speech is protected by the First Amendment. FIRE has provided Kershnar an attorney via our Faculty Legal Defense Fund. We will continue to watch this situation closely.
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Strange scholarship at the University of Melbourne
Insanity is everywhere these days. The aggressive Left have cowed people into adopting their ideas
The University of Melbourne advertises itself as Australia’s best university—the first and only member of the Australian Ivy League. This isn’t an unreasonable claim. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2019 put the University of Melbourne 32nd in the world, 17 spots ahead of Australian National University, its nearest Australian rival. Numerous other figures seem to demonstrate the school’s excellence at preparing students for prosperous employment and at developing their critical thinking skills.
Naturally, I was pleased and even proud to have been accepted into the University of Melbourne’s 2017 Master of Journalism program. I believed, without really thinking about it, that I was in for a challenging year and a half at a school far more rigorous than the one from which I received my baccalaureate. (The University of Oklahoma consistently lands somewhere in the 400s on the Times Higher Education index.)
Of course, I was aware of the complaints directed at Australian universities—that the integrity of their curricula had gradually been compromised to appease social justice activists. Ubiquitous Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson expresses these concerns somewhat apocalyptically:
You may not realize it, but you are currently funding some dangerous people. They are indoctrinating young minds throughout the West with their resentment-ridden ideology… They produce the mobs that violently shut down campus speakers, the language police who enshrine into law use of fabricated gender pronouns and the deans whose livelihoods depend on madly rooting out discrimination where little or none exists… And now we rack up education-related debt, not so that our children learn to think critically, write clearly or speak properly, but so they can model their mentors’ destructive agenda.
It’s natural that these denunciations should sound wildly hyperbolic—a bit like Joseph McCarthy’s claim that there were 81 Communists lurking in the State Department. Who but a political cultist would be willing to believe something like that without seeing it for himself?
The first indication I received that something had gone awry at Australia’s best university was in a criminology class titled “Violence, Trauma, and Reconciliation.” According to the University of Melbourne handbook, this class “considers the forms of trauma people experience as a response to… forms of violence and explores how this trauma propels calls for apologies, truth commissions, retribution, and torture.”
The instructor, Dr. Juliet Rogers, devoted a lecture to female genital mutilation—a natural enough topic for a class on trauma. In Rogers’s view, however, the true source of trauma was not the practice of FGM itself, but the “violence” of anti-FGM laws. After all, Western societies pressure women into body modification in the form of ear piercings—so who are we to pass judgment on those who practice clitorectomies and infibulations on children? And isn’t it true that legislators’ supposed concern with FGM is actually motivated by “Islamophobia”?
In the article “The First Case Addressing Female Genital Mutilation in Australia: Where is the Harm?” Rogers takes issue with Australian “prejudice” against the practice of clitoral “nicking”:
For each claim that a woman’s sexual health is impacted, there is a study which suggests it is not, and others which suggest it is enhanced. For each claim of trauma, there is another which claims empowerment. However, it is the violent images which are played and replayed, on airport shelves, in documentaries and in fiction that form opinion. These, “through repetition” have come in Obermeyer’s terms again “to gain authority as truth.” Similarly, in the FLC’s [Family Law Court’s] Report the image of violence is only presented and then repeated, with the name “female genital mutilation” always attached. There is no discussion of the benefits of the practices, the increases in sexual enjoyment that women report, the cultural empowerment that women experience, the desires of many to undergo the practices or the rage that many women have at being called ‘mutilated’ when so many clearly feel that they are not.
While working with the US Peace Corps in rural Gambia, I encountered the practice of female genital mutilation firsthand. The empowering effect of having one’s clitoris razored off was not readily apparent.
It was clear from the tone of Rogers’s lecture that she regarded these ideas as quite subversive and challenging. However, most of the room nodded along quite comfortably. If we didn’t actually find these ideas challenging, we could at least derive some satisfaction from the thought of how challenged a less enlightened third party might be.
Another peculiar class was Terror, Law, and War, ostensibly a survey of legal and military responses to terrorism. In practice, the class focused almost exclusively on American, European, and Israeli misbehavior, and on the perceived ridiculousness of Australian anti-terrorism measures. Islamist terrorism was left unconsidered except as a hallucination of xenophobic Westerners. As if to drive the point home, one presentation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict referred to Palestinian suicide bombings as “terrorism,” in scare quotes.
We spent a period discussing a televised interview with Wassim Doureihi, spokesman for the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. During the interview, Lateline host Emma Alberici took a combative stance, demanding that Doureihi either clearly denounce the Islamic State’s tactics or admit that he condoned them. Doureihi refused to cooperate, instead pushing the conversation toward Australian mistreatment of Muslims.
The subsequent class discussion became something like a rally: we unanimously acclaimed Doureihi’s dignity and courage and took turns mocking Alberici’s hypocrisy and ill-concealed racism. The teaching assistant declared with apparent pride that she was friends with Doureihi and that he had confided in her that the interview was a trying experience, but necessary. Some of the students who rose to voice their support for Doureihi were so agitated that their voices shook. Somehow, throughout this bacchanal of self-righteousness, the fact that Hizb ut-Tahrir is an explicitly anti-democratic organization that supports the killing of apostates and whose leaders describe Jews as “the most evil creatures of Allah” escaped mention. Evidently, one can’t take sides between liberalism and totalitarianism without knowing the pigmentations of those involved.
To hear Australia’s most privileged youth praise a theocrat like Doureihi was unsettling, but classes equally often took a turn for the comical. On one occasion, Rogers interrupted a Violence, Trauma and Reconciliation lecture to tell us about Lego’s “criminal” figure (right). The figure is about what you might expect: a child-friendly depiction of a burglar, sporting a sinister grin, a stocking cap and a black-and-white-striped prison uniform. What this piece of Lego has to do with either violence, trauma or reconciliation may not be immediately obvious: the criminal, you see, is depicted with visible chest hair. This chest hair is a coded indication that the criminal is nonwhite, thereby implying that people of color are criminals and terrorists. Oddly enough, another of my instructors also brought up this Lego figure and its racist chest hair during her own class. I suppose it had been doing the rounds among the faculty.
Students were always instructed to question their assumptions rather than acquiescing mindlessly to the status quo. At the University of Melbourne, however, the assumption that racial identification is of paramount significance, that Western societies are uniquely malignant and oppressive, that Islamist theocrats are victims and not perpetrators, et cetera, is the status quo. What does it signify when the authorities tell you to dissent?
In some classes, the frantic obsession with demographics was spearheaded by the students, against the apparent wishes of their instructors. In one nonfiction writing class, discussion of Gay Talese’s influential 1966 profile of Frank Sinatra centered not on Talese’s quippy yet unhurried scene-setting, or on his vivid portraiture of a subject he’d never actually interviewed, but on Talese’s misogyny. (One student said that Talese’s description of two Sinatra groupies as “attractive but fading blondes” was “chilling.”) David Foster Wallace’s essay “Tense Present” was subjected to a similarly myopic “discussion” of Wallace’s whiteness and his failure to acknowledge English as an “imperial language.” Any technical lessons we might have taken from Talese or Wallace were lost altogether—instead, we enumerated the things they might have learned from us.
During these Two Minutes Hate sessions, the instructor often stood back, grimacing uncomfortably and sometimes trying to steer the discussion back toward the piece of writing at hand. He was a gentle man with a clear love for long-form journalism, and I suspect he sometimes wondered why his class discussions had grown so frenzied.
What if I’d heard about this from someone else? I asked myself from time to time. What if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes? I knew the answer—I wouldn’t have believed a word of it. I would have assumed the narrator of these outlandish events to be a right-wing doomsayer ready to contort the truth however necessary to vilify his opponents. Can I reasonably expect more charity from you, the reader of this article? Hard to say.
Perhaps the most unexpected part of life at the University of Melbourne was how easy the actual work was. In Terror, Law and War, the essays I submitted consisted of structureless, deliberately turgid summaries of class readings, enlivened with the odd anti-Western cliché and handed in without proofreading or revision. This seemed to be the level of seriousness appropriate to the class. My diploma is proof that this material, produced almost without conscious effort, was up to the standards of Australia’s top university.
During one and a half years attending journalism classes, I was exposed to surprisingly little information on the actual craft of journalism. Recipients of the University of Melbourne’s Master of Journalism degree will know about the inverted pyramid model and other basic concepts. Deeper questions, however, are left mostly unexamined. When should an interviewer rely on a list of questions and when should he improvise? How does one efficiently cut a news story down to 125 words? How does news writing differ from other prose in grammar and punctuation? It is possible to obtain a 150-point journalism degree from the University of Melbourne without learning the answers to these questions. Of course, who has time for such trivialities when there’s a revolution on? University of Melbourne students may matriculate unprepared to produce clear and accurate news articles, but they will understand their political objectives.
I graduated in December 2018, amidst rallies against “fascism on campus.” (Given that, in 18 months on campus, I encountered no fascists, these rallies seem to have been very effective.) Behaving compliantly throughout these peculiar antics was a mistake. The most I can do after the fact is relay my observations without inventing a heroic role for myself.
Was pursuing a degree at Australia’s top university a waste of time? Not necessarily. The name of an institution whose superiority is supported by so many statistics surely helps beautify my résumé. And I was granted the chance to dip into a strange emerging culture, one whose existence I probably would not have accepted if I hadn’t seen it for myself. It seems the doomsayers are sometimes correct.
https://quillette.com/2019/05/22/when-the-authorities-tell-you-to-dissent/
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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