Education

How Did We Get Black Nazis?

Mark Noonan15 Comments

Kanye West pretty much ended his career today by speaking up for Hitler. Pro tip: not a good idea. But we shouldn’t just condemn Kanye and move on. This needs to be thought about.

Why would any person – especially a black person – in 2022 have the least kind thing to say about Hitler?

Ignorance.

But not just like we might think of it – for a long while, we all figured that it was just ignorant fools who kept the Nazi flame alive. But I’ve been looking into it and pondering it for a while now and it isn’t just that simple.

The origins of this particular problem – pro-Nazi attitudes – stems from the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Hitler was dead and his movement banned and most Germans, having the utter shock of the exceptionally violent (and cruel, on the part of the Russians and French) invasion of Germany in mind, dropped Nazism like a bad habit. This is why almost every Kraut you talked to in 1945 would say he wasn’t a Nazi. Of course, most of them were – from worker to nobleman, most of them had signed on for the ride, especially by the summer of 1940 when Hitler reached his pinnacle. It was, as I have noted before, a pagan carnival – as long as you obeyed, things were great for you…and even as the war ground on and defeat loomed, most retained their faith until an American or Russian boot kicked the door in. But even in that spring of ruin in 1945, there were those who kept the faith.

People like the Belgian Leon Degrelle, Luftwaffe pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Waffen-SS General Paul Hausser never stopped being Nazis. Of course, law and public opinion kept them from overtly being Nazi. What they did was far more subtle: playing on popular sympathy for combat veterans, they first latched themselves on to Wehrmacht generals trying to get pensions for German soldiers and with this sympathy, they started to whitewash the Waffen-SS. It was just a multinational military force against Communism! The War Crimes either didn’t happen, or where it was incontrovertible, that was carried out by Himmler’s people, not the Waffen-SS! And it was all BS from start to finish – the Waffen-SS were beasts in human skin who carried out massacres all over German-occupied Europe. But, it worked – especially as the Cold War came in and we felt we had to make nice with the Krauts, this drivel about the Waffen-SS being somehow apart from the SS gained purchase. This effort, along with later developing efforts to first downplay and then deny the Holocaust suckered lots of people in – the Germans in WWII weren’t that bad and the Holocaust was exaggerated if not false.

This, in turn, was seized upon by various Muslim organizations which had an interest in delegitimizing Israel. They broadcast these concepts far and wide – and also attached them to anti-Imperialism…the Germans fought France and Britain, after all: the colonial overlords of most of the Muslim world prior to WWII. And now this is where it gets interesting.

Because while these lies were gaining purchase around the world the teaching of history ceased in any meaningful sense. Sure, the kiddies these days probably have a lesson plan where they are told Nazis were bad people but I highly doubt they fully explain why the Nazis were bad or who did the most to stop them. A recent poll showed that only about one in five British youth have a favorable opinion of Churchill, the prime scourge of Nazis from the moment they rose out of the gutter. Churchill, you see?, was just a racist imperialist. But you can’t teach that Churchill was a racist imperialist unless you downplay or ignore Nazism. There is no real upside for the modern Left to talk about the Nazis in detail – because if you do, you eventually have to get around to pointing out that a bunch of straight, white, male Christians played the primary role in putting them down. Talking about them in general – calling them White Supremacists, for instance – is very useful because that fits with the Narrative. If you started pointing out that they were German-supremacists it starts to get complicated and doesn’t fit the Narrative.

But what this boils down to is that you have a couple generations by now rising to adulthood with no real knowledge of the Nazis but who can easily access on line the white-wash drivel about the Nazis. This is how a black man, just as well as anyone else, can be suckered in.

I’m sure West in his wanderings came across various sites where all or part of the Nazi whitewash is available. And more often than not, probably also tied to anti-Israel websites which will hold to the seemingly reasonable “we just want to stop the Israeli occupation” position…without, unless you deep dive, telling you that they consider all of Israel to be “occupied territory” and that the dream is to push the Jews into the sea. But at places where you can learn about how horrible the Israeli “occupation” is you’re going to be exposed to people who will downplay the Holocaust, assert that while there are good Jews, look at how many of them are in banking and entertainment…and doesn’t it seem funny that we give money to Israel? Laced with a bit of “hey, I’m no anti-Semite, but I am anti-Zionist”.

Additionally, West and his generation likely were never taught much about the Abolition movement. Nor given any instruction on just what Madison and Jefferson were up to besides being slave owners. What they have been given is a two-dimensional, cartoonish view of America where white Christians are always wrong and anything worthwhile was done by non-whites/non-Christians in spite of oppression. They are primed for drivel – it just so happens that the particular drivel that West latched on to was pro-Nazi. But other kids are out there banging the Maoist drum as if the Cultural Revolution never happened – which, for them, it never did because they were never told about it.

It is a huge problem. It is fixable – and in just a few years if we gain control of school boards and force them to so much as teach some basics. But regardless of what we do going forward, we’re going to have some millions of people who will always be open to lies beause they were never told anything true. People like West are navigating through lies traveling at warp speed with no underlying knowledge to bounce against those lies. So look for more people to come out and earnestly assert bizarre falsehoods.

The Death of Thought

Mark Noonan31 Comments

Saw a Tweet by Tom Nichols – you know, The Expert who deplores how we stupid people just don’t get it – bemoaning that America is being burned to the ground by people like Trump because the Elite never accepted them. Now, to be sure, there would be a bit to that – even when everyone officially loved Trump, he was considered a boor. A flashy, crude bull in the Ruling Class china shop. His family was rich, but still very nouveau; the Trump family started to pick up some money with Donald’s grandfather, but it was dad Fred Trump who got them rich. Basically, the Trump’s haven’t had their money long enough for it to have the stench of work removed.

Nichols isn’t rich – he does well enough, but he’s not one of the rich people who probably despised Trump all along. But while not rich, he is of the class. That is, the Ruling Class. He’s got his degrees and he’s got his positions in the Establishment and, dammit, he’s mad at us for not doing as we’re told – just as the upper class of New York City couldn’t stand Trump for not trying to be like them. But what got me thinking was how Nichols is claiming that Trump, et al are trying to burn it all down. In a flash it came to me what Nichols’ real problem is: he’s never once thought about things.

If you get an engineering or medical degree then, at the end of the day, you had to show you could do some engineering or medicine before you got it. There’s just no other way to do it. On the other hand, if your degree is in history or philosophy or such like, you don’t have to show the faintest thought about the subject: to get the degree, all you must do is repeat back what the professor told you. This doesn’t mean a person with a liberal arts degree can’t think, but it does mean that such a person doesn’t have to think in order to get the degree. And, these days with all the dumbing down, you can get all the way to doctorate without showing the least spark of original thought. My bet, actually, is that most degree programs in the so-called liberal arts these day are designed to discourage thought: they want people who regurgitate information but they don’t want anyone questioning the facts or drawing an unapproved conclusion from the facts as presented.

Man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. — G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton there was discussing specifically why we study philosophy, which he admitted can be a bit of a bore. But do keep in mind that in Chesterton’s day, he was talking about the educated people in this matter. He wasn’t expecting the store clerk to take the time to learn Aristotle and Descartes. Be ok if he did, of course, but Chesterton knew that most common people don’t have the time nor inclination for such things. But society, as a whole, is going to be ruled by one or the other – thought that has been thought out, or thought that hasn’t been. It was and remains the duty of those who rule us – by fate, inheritance or transient political victory – to be those who have thought their thought out. Because if we are ruled by people who haven’t thought things out then you’ll get…well, you’ll get what we’ve got.

Over in New York, governor Hochul is in some trouble – may even get beaten on the 8th. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Even in a GOP wave year, New York – really New York City – is so reliably Democrat that the particular conditions wouldn’t matter. There would be so many Democrat votes that the Democrat will win. But there’s a problem and it is particular, especially, to New York City. Crime is rampant. Now, the MSM tries to tell us that because the murder rate is still lower than the peak about 30 years ago, this complaint about crime is just a GOP psy-op designed to fool people into voting for them. It is another example of the MSM’s willingness to say things not only divorced from reality, but from the reality the reporters know from personal experience. The regime propagandists of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia weren’t this compliant! The MSMers know. They live in NYC. They can see it with their own eyes: people waltzing into stores to rob/trash them. Goods in stores increasingly locked up to prevent wholesale looting. The feeling of being unsafe on the streets and the subways. Everyone in NYC feels it. They know it. And while the MSMers are going to loyally carry that water, the voters of NYC are under no such obligation. To be sure, if Hochul is booted on Tuesday it won’t be because NYC went red – but it could because a lot of Blue NYC just stayed home rather than ratify the homeless bum pissing on the curb outside.

And the problem in NYC stems from the imposition of certain policies: most notably the end of cash bail. If you haven’t paid attention to it, you should, because ending cash bail has become the mark of Leftist justice reform. They’ve put it on mute the past six months for political reasons but make no mistake about it: ending cash bail is something they are determined to do. The theory behind this is that cash bail unfairly burdens poor people who are disproportionately minority. This is absolutely true. I mean, no duh: the poor person, whether criminal or just some poor schmuck who got picked up, doesn’t have the money for bail nor for good lawyers who can get bail lowered or removed. Obviously, any system of bail is going to hit against the poor vastly more than against any rich person.

But the solution – ending cash bail – is obviously something which was not thought out. I can totally dig trying to find some way to lower the burden on the poor, but blanket removal of bail requirement was going to have that effect: petty criminals would feel invincible. They wouldn’t even have to spend the night in jail. And people of low moral character would be encouraged to start engaging in crime – especially theft – for that same reason: no real sanction. They can figure: how likely is my trial for stealing $500.00 worth of stuff from CVS even going to happen? And that is if they even bother making an arrest. After all, what cop is going to bother arresting someone – taking that risk and that extra work – just to see the guy walk out of the precinct before the cop has even written up the complaint?

On and on like that, all across the nation and in every aspect of our lives we are burdened by the results of policies imposed by people who are sure they are right, but clearly never thought about what they believe. Sowell has been writing about this for decades. I’ve read those books but only just now am I fully understanding what his main complaint was and is: nobody is thinking. It is all very mindless what goes on. All of our problems – our lack of industrial capacity, or lack of energy production, our food shortages, our crumbling infrastructure, our crime rate, our collapsing education system, our drug addiction, our homelessness, our open border…all if it, every last bit, the result of the ruthless imposition of policies nobody thought about. Nobody sat down and said, “so, what will happen if we do this? It was all just done.

And people like Tom Nichols want us to stick with that. And for a long while I thought that it was, perhaps, pettiness or some other normal, human emotion preventing his like from seeing that Trump really isn’t all that bad (I mean, my goodness, compared to Joe Biden!) and that some good things come from ruthless rejection of Liberal/Left certainties. But then you see that Tweet and you remember that people like him are all-in on fighting Putin over Ukraine and then it really hits you: they’ve never thought about one darned thing.

We have to defend Ukraine!

Why?

To save Democracy!

If Ukraine falls I’ll lose my right to vote in the USA?

Putin stooge!

No matter what what way you ask about it, you won’t get an actual answer. We’re backing up Ukraine – at the risk of WWIII – to save Ukraine from Russia, or NATO from Russia, or Democracy from Russia…and blah, blah, blah. But no explanation of how, say, changing the Russian flag over Donetsk for a Ukrainian flag will actually benefit us. We just have to do it! Russia is bad, don’t you know! Don’t you remember Reagan!

Yeah. As I recall what Reagan wanted was to stop the USSR from expanding outside the USSR via proxy wars and, of course, to get a real nuclear arms reduction treaty with them. He got that. How is that similar to stopping Russia from taking over ethnic Russian territory governed from Moscow prior to 1991?

You’ll never get an answer to that. Nor to why we would, say, defend Germany from Russia rather than Russia from Germany. I mean, on the whole, the Germans are working against us in foreign affairs. They are also major economic competitors who don’t have to pay for an army because we’re there for them. Any chance we should reassess this situation?

No! You Putin Nazi Puppet!

Note that I’m not saying that defending Ukraine is wrong – I’m merely saying that no thought is happening behind our efforts and any attempt at thought is immediately shouted down. And the shouts are led by the people who supposedly have the superior education and thus can think things out better than us.

Until we clear all these people out – not just the politicians but the corporate bosses, the bureaucrats, the generals and admirals, the professors – everyone in charge, we’re not going to fix this. I would seriously expect better results at, say, Defense if I randomly selected some sergeant and made him Chief of Staff. I’d have some confidence, that is, that our four star sergeant might think about things before he made a decision…you know, like what might be the long-term effects of lowering physical requirements so that girls can be in combat outfits. Same with everything – put a plumber in charge of Harvard’s Department of Philosophy and there’s just that chance he’d crack open some of the books and think about whether or not what they’re saying is worth any human being knowing. They really do all have to go. I don’t care what they do, but they must leave. Anyways, might be fun to watch them try to tackle a job which requires results. But, more importantly, once they’re gone, we might be able to openly think about what we want.

What Are We Not Teaching Our Children?

Mark Noonan11 Comments

This article is an absolutely fascinating look into the world of transgenderism and de-transition. To nutshell it: the young lady was a confused teen (as we all were to one extent or another) and happened upon a series of Tumblr communities which led her to the path of becoming transgender. After some years in that world, she turned from it, de-transitioned and is now trying to put her life back together.

What caught my attention the most if the very cult-like atmosphere of the transgender community: how it is vigorously affirmed and rewarded in the transgender community and how our whole society is institutionally supportive of it. It is very much not something that comes to a person after careful, rational thought and weighing of risks and rewards, but as a fashion which, if you accept it, you’ll suddenly be changed from an oppressor-nobody into a hero-victim. It is a very toxic but very seductive thing.

After I read it and pondered it for a while, I recalled a passage. Of course it is from G K Chesterton:

Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing. It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles. Education is a word like “transmission” or “inheritance”; it is not an object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial facts or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities; but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are education. Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms. Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational. It is giving something—perhaps poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.

This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast, to take his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would abolish the boy’s breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine; Count Tolstoi would rebuke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of these advanced views, not even Fagin’s. But I do ask what, between the lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education. It is not (as commonly supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education plus crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

Children come in to the world as blank slates. Human children have a few very simple physical instincts but beyond that, everything they get into their heads was placed there by someone else. And it starts at the moment of birth (and maybe before). The infant human mind, provided it is physically healthy, absorbs gigantic amounts of information very rapidly. And we don’t even remember that exceptionally important part of our lives. I can dimly recall impressions of some things which happened when I was about 4. Prior to that: all blank. And my first connected memories – the first memories I could tell you a cohesive story about – are when I was about 7. And think of that: by the time I was 7 I could walk and talk, I could read and write a bit and do some basic sums. I was already well on my way to being what I was going to be.

But it wasn’t drawn out of me. There was nothing passive about it. Someone taught me. I was instructed on how to put on my pants. How to brush my teeth. How to hold a fork. I was entirely instructed in everything I knew until I grew old enough and knowledgeable enough to seek out information which was not being deliberately provided to me. And even then, I was merely taking information that someone else thought it would be good for people to know. I was not in any sense of the word a free agent. I could reason, especially as I got into my teens, but I wasn’t forging any new paths. I was still building knowledge.

Now, imagine if you will, as I sat there at the age of 14, all depressed because I wasn’t “cool” and I didn’t have the nice things others had and my parents were a bit off-kilter that I had found a community of people who told me I was depressed and felt alienated because I was actually X and if I would just join the X community, all my ills would be cured? At that age, I wasn’t remotely equipped to make such a decision. I was still a child. I had knowledge. I could reason. But I lacked the wisdom which can only come with age.

But that is precisely what happens to kids these days, as the linked article points out. The author found the community, learned its rules and then yearned for acceptance into it. Once she declared herself one of them, she received nothing but positive reinforcement for it and while her mother was dismayed, all official Authority told her that it was great and she was doing the right thing. There is only a very small chance a child can resist that. And this is especially true because in our modern world – especially over the past 20 to 30 years – even parents have refused to impart to their children the knowledge they have. The kids of the 21st century are rather cut adrift out there: no one says “it is thus, and so you must believe”. To do that is to be a dogmatic bigot, right? But as Chesterton points out, all education is the transmission of dogma. And if the parents of America won’t tell their children what is proper to believe, then somebody else will.

And don’t think that this is kids coaching kids. Kids don’t have anything to provide: they are still in the learning process. No kid sat around one day and all on his own decided he was trans. It not only doesn’t happen that way, it can’t happen that way. Someone has to tell the kid about transgenderism. There is nothing in nature or in the normal run of human family life which so much as implies that a person can be other than their biological sex. Every kid out there – and we see so many of them these days – who says they are trans are saying something they were instructed to say. And, bet on it, it was an adult who told them. The author of the article notes that the community she entered was filled with kids just like her – in the sense of being depressed and alienated. But it is inconceivable that a kid, all on his or her own, got the ball rolling. No, that would have been an adult. Or whole groups of adults: setting up communities which lure in the kids, propagandize them and then wait for the results. In other words, groomers almost certainly set these things up: people who want a steady supply of kids who will become what the adults wish them to become. The old, Catholic, Baptist and Jewish families produced steady crops of Catholics, Baptists and Jews because that is what they wanted – as hardly anyone really imparts their own views to their children, what we now have is others stepping in to get what they want.

What we are getting in our society today is not what we want. Outside a few loons hungry for attention, nobody looks at their infant child and goes, “I hope he wants to be a she”. No: the normal parent wants a copy: someone just like them. They see their boy or girl and imagine them doing normal boy or girl things leading up to a successful life, love and marriage and the production of grandchildren. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with producing people just like yourselves. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but the overwhelming bulk of people being decent, hardworking, law abiding citizens, a carbon copy is a laudable thing. But a very large number of parents aren’t doing it. That is, they aren’t taking the effort to impart knowledge.

They contract it out to the schools, to the TV, to the internet, to popular culture. Not all parents, but very large numbers of them. The author of the article gives the impression of parents who were a bit disconnected: after all, she had hours every day to spend on Tumblr being relentlessly propagandized. I’m not saying her parents were bad: I’m saying they didn’t take a deep enough interest. I can see a contrast in my own granddaughter: her father does let her waste some time playing video games but then he will take her out – to the park, up to Mt Charleston…somewhere, anywhere that doesn’t have internet access and where she has to physically move and engage in human interaction. I can’t know how she’ll end up, but I have my strong doubts she’ll wind up a sucker for a scam over the internet (her father carefully imparts to her how many scams there are out there). This must change: the family must become the primary source of information and the schools must only teach what the parents approve.

I’ve talked about this before, but this part of being a citizen: taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our families and our local communities. No more contracting out: we, the people, must take charge. And, hey, if there’s a local community out there who wants their children to learn about being transgender, that’s their business. As long as it is their decision, who am I to complain? But my bet is that if parents were fully engaged and insisting upon control of what goes into their children, you’d not hear a peep about it. Who in heck wants their kids to learn about that? Can’t be more than 1 or 2 percent: overly woke urban upper class people (mostly white, it goes without saying).

Lives are being destroyed – not just by this, but by so many other things. And it all comes back to this failure on the part of the adults to take charge and insist. Until we, the people, decide what is to be taught and to whom, this is just going to get worse. It is time to take a stand and start teaching what we want taught.

A Small Note on Why We Have Stupid People

Mark Noonan16 Comments

If you ever wondered why we have stupid people in the United States, Robert Stacy McCain points out the reason:

…Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) don’t want to admit the real nature of their own irrational prejudices, and Republicans are too polite to call them out on it. Has anyone in the Republican Party asked, for example, how much federal aid to education goes to elite private schools like Swarthmore College (annual tuition $49,104), where students enroll in “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology”? Why should the devout Catholic or Baptist be taxed to support such nonsense? Where are the GOP senators and congressmen demanding to know what kind of “education” taxpayers are being required to subsidize?

Because the Republicans are too polite (or too stupid) to call attention to what’s going on in our taxpayer-funded schools, a generation of young people has been indoctrinated in the anti-American prejudices of the Democrats who control university campuses…

Its not just that stupid people teach stupid things to youngsters but, also, because we refuse to stop the stupidity! If we want to stop the stupid, the first step is to stop paying for it…or, if that seems unfair, then at least insist that right next to Queering God there be a course on the works of C. S. Lewis or G. K. Chesterton. I’m all for kids being challenged in their views…and I think that Lewis is far more challenging than anything you’re likely to find in a major college these days (and let’s not even get into St. Thomas, or even Martin Luther, for our Protestant friends…). With the massive amounts of federal dollars pouring into education year after year, we do have a great deal of leverage…because regardless of ideology, the most important thing College Administrators serve is the dollar. We’re paying the piper, we should call the tune. Start making the dollars dependent upon intellectual diversity (ie, hiring even just a couple of moderately conservative professors every now and again) will start to break the stranglehold the left holds on higher education. And as an added benefit, the kids will actually learn something. You know, not just get a credential, but some education to go along with it.

Insanity on Campus

Mark Noonan7 Comments

When was the last time a student flunked out of college? I’m not talking about someone who hit the bong so often they just stopped going and dropped out. I want to know when was the last time someone attended class faithfully, attempted to do the course work and was found so lacking in ability that they were forced to leave college due to poor grades. I’ll bet it has been a long time – and if it does happen at all these days, I’ll further bet that such events are very few and very far between.

All of the lunacy we’ve seen on campus of late I trace back to the fact that you don’t need to be hard working or intelligent to get into college: all you need is money; and Uncle Sam will back a loan for you, if you don’t have any of your own. This has flooded colleges with vast numbers of people who don’t know much but who believe they do know quite a bit (after all, they’re in college, right? College people are smart, aren’t they? The current crop, however, is living off the intellectual reputation of those who went to college 50 or more years ago) – and college administrations quake in fear of them. Partially because the administrators are liberal and thus share a great deal of both the ignorance and the certainty of the students, but also because if you try to bring a bit of discipline to campus, you risk the revenue stream (a kid expelled is one less tuition check next semester – and if that happens often enough, there won’t be as much money to pay high salaries to professors and administrators).

It is a toxic stew – can’t risk the money; professors who are aged liberals; students who know next to nothing…and all stirred up by people who either just want a fracas, or who want to game the system to their own advantage (after all, if you’re set to graduate with a worthless “studies” degree next year, it is in your interest to demand that the college hire more people just like you).

There are colleges out there which don’t accept federal money and are thus free from all this – you never hear the kids at Christendom College or Hillsdale College demanding a “safe space”. This is the model we should take as our conservative alternative to the current higher education system. Either that, or make the federal money no-strings-attached – essentially say that as long as it is being used to educate kids, we don’t care what particular sort of education goes on (this has risks, of course – you could get a lot of Kook Universities springing up out there). But one thing is certain is that as long as we keep the current system, the lunacy will only get worse.

UPDATE: One of the events triggering the Missouri dust up was the alleged scrawling of a swastika made of feces. One small problem: no one has any actual evidence that such a thing occurred. We’ll have to see if any does come up. I doubt that it will: we’ve seen plenty of these alleged racist incidents turn out false, or at least entirely uncorroborated.

UPDATE II: Robert Tracinski writes up his own reform proposal – burn the universities to the ground. This is way too extreme, of course: such fires might spread to nearby property, some of which may be owned by sane people. So, I think my proposal still works better.

Orwell Was Only Off by 31 Years

Mark Noonan27 Comments

Just wow – from The College Fix, which I am assured is not a satirical website:

“America is the land of opportunity,” “There is only one race, the human race” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” are among a long list of alleged microaggressions faculty leaders of the University of California system have been instructed not to say.

These so-called microaggressions – considered examples of subconscious racism – were presented at faculty leader training sessions held throughout the 2014-15 school year at nine of the 10 UC campuses. The sessions, an initiative of UC President Janet Napolitano, aim to teach how to avoid offending students and peers, as well as how to hire a more diverse faculty…

…Other sayings deemed unacceptable include:

● “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough.”

● “Where are you from or where were you born?”

● “Affirmative action is racist.”

● “When I look at you, I don’t see color.”

These phrases in particular are targeted because they promote the “myth of meritocracy” or represent “statements which assert that race or gender does not play a role in life successes.” Others are said to be color blind, apparently a bad thing that indicates “that a white person does not want to or need to acknowledge race,” according to the handout, “Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send.”

If you’re thinking of going to college, I suggest a career in plumbing or farming – something which doesn’t require a person to be immersed in a place which says that meritocracy is racist.

The good news is that this sort of nonsense just cannot stand for long – the people who are de-educated in such a setting will simply not be able to compete in the real world and so those who managed to get a real education will outplay them for life’s rewards…

A Liberal Professor is Afraid of His Liberal Students

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Very interesting:

I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones…

So, what is happening? This:

I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We’ve seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on.

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either…

That is all very disturbing, but nothing that we on the right haven’t been aware of for quite some time. I don’t know how old the author is – and he’s using a pseudonym – but given that he says he started teaching in 2006, I’m guessing he’s in his 30’s, and thus went to college early in the 21st century and that means he was born maybe around 1980 or so. I point out the age thing because this means the professor wasn’t around when political correctness first started to rear its ugly head in the 1980’s. He was just a kid and, at all events, the Powers That Be in higher education were just getting rolling on it with speech codes and other things. But the warning was issued by those on the right – if we start trying to classify speech as “good” or “bad”, then it would be those who complain the most who will rule the roost. If a subjective judgement by an individual is all it takes to get a thing condemned, then those who are most sensitive – or who claim to be most sensitive – will have veto power over what everyone else says. Needless to say, it was also easily understood that it would be hard left fanatics who would take most advantage of this because we on the right are not at all interested in stopping someone from talking while our people on the left have always been in favor of blocking speech which disputes leftwing ideology.

Unfortunately for a good liberal like this professor, there isn’t much he can do about it. Later in his article – which is very much worth reading – he traps himself firmly by agreeing that the social status of a person does play a role in the worth of that person’s statements. This flies in the face of two basic, Judeo-Christian concepts:

1. The social status of a person is irrelevant in determining the moral worth of the person – or of what the person says.

2. Human beings are capable of exercising reason to determine what is true.

A beggar can get it right, a king can get it wrong – of course, they can both get it wrong or both get it right. As persons they are capable of finding the truth and, as well, capable of getting lost in the weeds and never figuring out the truth. If the king and the beggar tell us two different things, then it is up to the rest of us to try and figure out if either or both of them are right or wrong…and that takes free inquiry…to give the beggar, say, 50% more credibility on the theory that a beggar must be a morally better person than the king (or vice versa) is to sabotage our inquiry from the start. We just have to take what they say and apply our reason and any ascertainable facts to their statements and come to our best judgement about it.

Liberals, these days, reject this – even our frightened professor; and even though he sees right in front of him – risking his entire career – the results of rejecting the basic concept of inherent moral human equality, regardless of station, and the necessity of applying facts and reason to all disputes. The professors only defense is to subscribe to these concepts…because then when confronted with a student complaining about a “trigger” in his lecture, he could reasonably say, “I’m sorry that what I said made you uncomfortable – let us discuss it further and see which one of us was correct – me in making the statement, or you in feeling uncomfortable hearing it”. After all, not all feelings of discomfort are reasonable – and, in fact, some of them are downright irrational and based upon ignorance or unfair prejudice. But the professor can’t get there – first of all, because the system in place would probably ensure him being fired for trying, but most importantly because the professor, himself, agrees with the underlying basis of someone being able to assert moral superiority to shut down debate.

This is the tail end of 100 years of Progressive thought, now completely in control of our institutions of higher education. You can’t pursue truth – you can only repeat endlessly whatever is fashionable for the moment. If you step out of line, you’ll be hammered down into silence…and as we see in the article, the professor has been hammered down. He now teaches his class only what is fashionable. And if the fashion changes next week, he’ll go with that – the students will be denied the knowledge of anything which may offend any particular student at any time.

I’ll end with one last note – the professor in his article does permit himself one, small bit of venting…when he essentially says that the school administrators are always coming down on the side of the customers – the students. He’s a bit contemptuous of the fact that the college is a business selling products and you know what goes on in a business which sells products: the customer is always right. He’s right to be contemptuous of that – and of Administrators who, even if not full-on Progressive nitwits, refuse to back up the professors and keep the kids in their place (which is, allegedly, that of pupil – meaning, they are there to learn things; not tell the teachers what to teach). There is a great deal of truth in this because higher education has become a bit of a racket. The quality of the students isn’t at issue – it all appears to be about just getting as many of them in there as possible because bags of money are made off of each student duff sitting in a chair. And you don’t want to upset your customers! They might move on to the college down the street…better to just knuckle under. After all, if a professor has to tremble in fear and the kids aren’t really getting an education, that doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether or not the tuition checks are coming in.

I think we can pretty much write-off the existing higher education system – and I think that as conservatives, we need to start making a new one. Initially parallel to the current, but eventually to replace it. A system where there is genuine academic freedom; where education is kept to a low cost; but where admission to the college is governed entirely by ability and continued attendance is based upon educational achievement and proper deportment. Most kids won’t go for it, of course – but the best who aren’t currently going to elite schools will…especially kids from more modest economic backgrounds. And we’ll be turning about genuinely educated kids, who will blow out of the water the products of the current system (and, I think, even outdo those coming from the elite universities in the long run).

UPDATE: Ace gets a bit vigorous about this:

…there is no way to not get one’s ego invested in an idea one pushes. But the code of intellectual inquiry was that people who did so were committing an error, and could (and should) be derided for doing so. The actual capital-T Truth must always exist as an ideal outside of oneself — not just out of humility (can the Truth actually live inside a flawed human being?) but in order to make sure that the Truth could be argued about, without people–

Crying like little babies any time someone’s conception of the Truth disagreed with theirs.

This entire mode shifts the grounds from Intellect — where there are rules and codes and dispassionate standards — to the Emotion, to the Self.

There’s a reason the left wants to do that. Frankly, most of these people are rather dim, second-raters at best, and are accutely insecure about their place in the academic world, — as they should be.

The Bigotry of Low Expectations

Cluster43 Comments

I am still in a state of shock over the following report:

The Alabama Federation of Republican Women (AFRW) strongly opposes “race-based standards for student achievement” pushed by the Alabama Department of Education, as reported in The Tuscaloosa News on Sunday, June 30. Minority students will be held to a lower standard, and would be tracked at a lower standard throughout their academic career from K-12.

Beginning this fall, the liberal Department of Education in Alabama will take their racism and apply it to education – how wonderful. Obviously progressive liberals believe that those children, and adults for that matter, of a minority skin color are handicapped, and incapable living a life on their own without assistance from the government, or a helping hand from the altruistic agenda of the progressives. This is just beyond belief, and I feel so sorry for those kids in that school district who don’t stand a chance if progressive liberals continue to run this country. Instead of offering school choice, allowing parents the opportunity to send their children to better schools, with better teachers, and giving them a real opportunity at success, progressives have decided to dumb things down even more, effectively destroying any chance these kids might have. It’s outrageous.

 

In My Opinion

Cluster67 Comments

America not only has an economy problem, we have an economic educational problem that compounds the issue and our ability to resolve it. Most of our younger generation have been victims of educational malpractice as a result of liberalism and political correctness that infiltrated our educational system going back a few decades, and it will take a concerted effort, and a few more decades to overcome it. The curricula emphasis on diversity and political correctness took the place of history and economics and has produced a generation of ill informed, over emotional people with a distorted understanding of our Constitution and capitalism. One of our resident liberal teachers here has said on many occasion that the Constitution is racist and misogynistic, and even a liberal Supreme Court justice has said that if she were beginning a new country, she would not look towards the US Constitution as a foundational document, preferring instead to look towards other countries philosophy of governance. Unbelievable as that is, it’s true. The US Constitution is inarguably the greatest governing document ever written, and needs to be taught as such. The US Constitution is responsible for this country becoming the most powerful economy in the world, offering the most civil rights and liberties than any other country hands down.

Re: economics, too many people are financially illiterate as to capitalism, the private sector, and the role of government. Let me begin by simply saying that wealth is not a zero sum game, capitalism is the best economic platform hands down as “a rising tide lifts all boats” (think: JFK), and the role of government is simply that of a referee. Free markets are the foundation of the capitalist platform, and the Federal Governments role is to see that the rules are abided by, and the Federal Government has failed at this core responsibility so to think that they can perform any other function properly defies common sense. There should have been investigations, indictments, prosecutions and convictions stemming from the 2008 housing crash, but those investigations would have revealed some very uncomfortable truths for some very well politically connected people so the fact that those investigations never took place, should be disturbing to us all. The fact is, that more people can be lifted from poverty and the lower class via a healthy private sector, than any government program could ever accomplish, and the more money that the government extracts from the private sector, the less ability that private sector has to turn that money, creating wealth, jobs and ….. wait for it …… tax revenue. It’s all about the turns and any retailer, wholesaler and manufacturer can attest to that. The more you turn your inventory, the more income is produced, the more profit is produced, the more jobs are produced, which exposes more dollars to taxation. It’s better to tax a dollar that is turned 5x at 20%, than it is to tax that same dollar turned 1x at 40%, and any liberal that desires more revenue to the federal government needs to understand this basic economic fact. Sadly, this is not taught often enough in our primary and secondary educational levels.

As a country we owe our children an honest education, and there are certainly people who do take advantage of our capitalist system, as the very nature of the system can invite corruption, but if our federal government was more focused on it’s proper role, those instances would be few. Our children need to understand how the blend of our Constitution and our capitalist economy has created the most powerful, free country in the world unequaled by any other. As it is now, the misunderstanding of those two foundational components of our country has resulted in our current slide into malaise and mediocrity.