Hypocrisy: Is it OK to Want the President to Fail?

From MRC NewsBusters:

The Democratic Left is trying to pretend that Donald Trump wasn’t really elected President last year, with an unprecedented 67 U.S. Representatives boycotting Trump’s Inauguration after Congressman John Lewis told NBC that Trump was not “a legitimate President.”

But instead of scolding this divisive and unhelpful repudiation of a new President, the news media are enabling the sore-loser Left.

After Lewis announced his rejection of Trump, NBC’s Chuck Todd prodded him for more extreme action: “You believe this President is not legitimate. What would you tell young folks, young activists to do?”

And even though Trump hadn’t yet been inaugurated, Todd also pressed Lewis about impeachment: “Are you one of those that believe the impeachment process should begin?”

Contrast that with the news media’s hysterical reaction eight years ago when Rush Limbaugh said of incoming President Barack Obama and his ardently liberal agenda: “I hope he fails.”

It was a sentiment Limbaugh repeated a month later when he spoke at the annual CPAC conference: “What is so strange about being honest and saying, ‘I want Barack Obama to fail,’ if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? Why would I want that to succeed?”

Liberal reporters freaked out. CNN political analyst Bill Schneider said Limbaugh’s CPAC speech had “sinister” tones and had “crossed a line.” During a CNBC interview, host Mark Haines lectured Limbaugh that it was a “stupid and mean spirited thing to say,” an exchange that so tickled MSNBC host Keith Olbermann that he re-played it that night on his Countdown program.

Republican politicians were pressed to denounce Limbaugh. ABC’s Diane Sawyer asked John McCain to say he was “offended” by the remark (McCain demurred), while then-MSNBC anchor Norah O’Donnell scolded then-Indiana Representative Mike Pence: “Why don’t you feel like you could denounce something like that?”

On MSNBC in 2009, the failure to appreciate Obama was seen as treasonous, as Hardball host Chris Matthews asked viewers: “Does Rush Limbaugh hate this country?”

But last week, before Trump was sworn in, Matthews pressed Democratic Representative Maxine Waters if she would consider impeaching the not-yet-President. During Friday’s inauguration coverage, Matthews described Trump’s speech as “Hitlerian” and suggested Trump could use “Mussolini” tactics if he wanted to jettison his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a White House advisor.

And over the next few days, ABC, CBS and NBC all provided heavy and positive coverage of an anti-Trump protest march that included speakers like Madonna seeming to suggest assassination: “I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”

The news media are obviously not demanding a consistent respect for the office of the U.S. Presidency. The most obvious explanation is that eight years ago most in the so-called “news” media wanted Barack Obama’s left-wing policies to succeed and were appalled by dissent.

Now, the media see themselves as part of the opposition to President Trump and his agenda to roll back Obama’s policies — and they hope he fails.

Of course, the two most common elements in Washington (and this includes the Washington press corps) are hydrogen and hypocrisy. So none of this is a surprise.

As we write this, the media are in a frenzy about Trump’s criticism of a Washington state judge who put a hold on his immigration pause. But attacking conservative Supreme Court judges over Citizens United or Heller or Hobby Lobby is just fine.

It’s not that only liberals are hypocritical, but in any subculture that is overwhelmingly dominated by liberals it is liberal hypocrisy that is going to run riot. And the people in that subculture, being so entirely surrounded by people who think the same way, can’t see it.

It’s much like academia, where one of our colleagues in Marquette’s Political Science Department told us he did not know what “political correctness” means.

Fish don’t know they are wet.

Marquette’s Stunning Hypocrisy on “Hard to Hear” Opinions

From an article by Jerry Bader in Media Trackers:

The Winter Edition of Marquette University’s “Marquette Magazine” includes what appears to be a self-congratulatory piece where open expression on campus is concerned, through its yearlong Marquette Forum series. The column chronicles the university’s fall semester efforts to generate discourse on the topic of racial justice and inequality:

During the fall semester the university seized the moment when issues of racial justice and inequality were central in the national and local consciousnesses to launch a conversation format designed to inspire thinking — together. Those efforts included hosting a conversation with Sam Pollard about his film Two Trains Runnin’, which was featured at the Milwaukee Film Festival and a panel discussion “Segregation in Milwaukee: A Conversation with Leaders on the Near West Side.”

The sub-headline for the article was:

This is about talking and listening even when opinions may be hard to hear. This is about being a university.

The irony of that sentiment was not lost on suspended MU professor John McAdams. McAdams, you may recall, was suspended for a blog post about an instructor who wouldn’t allow debate over same sex marriage in her philosophy class. In January, McAdams received a letter telling him his suspension would continue until he apologized. Media Trackers asked McAdams for his opinion on the Marquette Magazine piece:

It’s absurdly ironic, since Marquette only wants to hear opinions from the hard left.

There are plenty of voices who would dissent from the uniform leftist slant of these programs. One thinks of Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell. On criminal justice issues, there is Heather McDonald. I could name a dozen more. But nobody who at all dissents from the notion of blacks as entirely innocent victims of white oppression is allowed to speak.

The notion that any of these issues should be debated seems never to have crossed the minds of the Marquette bureaucrats. There is only one “social justice” position, and every person of good will agrees on it, and only evil people refuse to sign on.

This is radically at odds with what discourse at any university should be, but it’s all too typical of academia today. There is no “engagement” with diverse ideas, but only one-sided indoctrination.

The only saving grace is that few people who don’t already think this way will attend. That is unless their instructors bribe students with extra credit or require attendance.

It is not “hard to hear” opinions you agree with. Marquette is happy to serve up ideas “hard to hear” for conservatives (typically “hard to hear” because they are absurd) but unwilling to allow anything that the politically correct liberals would find “hard to hear.”

In fact, the whole year of Marquette-sponsored programs has been entirely devoid of anything but standard leftist indoctrination.

Infrastructure of Indoctrination

Consider, for example, a faculty program “Faculty Conversations on Learning: Sparking Curiosity in our Students.” The point, as we have noted, was not at all to spark curiosity, but rather to encourage faculty to indoctrinate students into the standard politically correct view of racial issues.

Then there is the Center for Intercultural Engagement. How politically correct are they? Each staff member lists his or her “preferred pronoun” on the assumption that some “transgender” or “gender queer” or such person might dislike “he” or “she.” One of the staff (Enrique Tejada III) wants to be referred to as “they,” even though there is only one of him.

Not surprisingly, the list of events sponsored or supported by this office is a smorgasbord of politically-correct identity politics, with lots of gay and lesbian events, “dreamers” (read: young illegals) events, and a “Dining in Drag” event.

Catholic teaching on homosexuality is nowhere to be found. Why? That opinion is “hard to hear.” So is the opinion that we should control the border and stop illegal immigration. Those opinions aren’t allowed at Marquette, at least so long as campus bureaucrats are controlling the discourse.

Mission Week

Marquette’s Mission week is merely more of the same. Titled “Black, White and the Call of the Church,” there is not the slightest mention of the problems that most afflict the black community: illegitimacy, a high crime rate, drug use and poor urban schools.

Rather, it’s all about white racism. The video about the event gives the full flavor:

Angela Davis

And of course, Marquette is bringing Angela Davis to campus. Of course, having extremist speakers (and Davis is a communist) as part of a diverse menu of provocative and even extremist opinions is perfectly fine at any university. But there is no diversity in the events Marquette has scheduled. It’s all about leftist indoctrination, with Davis merely being the most extreme of a uniform slate of leftists.

Stunning Success: Ben Shapiro at Marquette

It was an event the campus left hated: Ben Shapiro, an actual conservative speaker at Marquette.

Not only did a staffer from the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies attempt to sabotage the event by advising leftists to get tickets and not show up (depriving a student who wanted to see the speech of admittance), but the campus feminist group Empowerment circulated a deranged letter accusing Shapiro of racism, xenophobia and hateful rhetoric.

But in fact, the event went off without a hitch.

Given the history of leftist mobs disrupting Shapiro events, it seemed that extra security would be needed. Initially, Marquette suggested that the Young Americans for Freedom, the group staging the event, would have to pay for the extra security. A terrible idea, this tactic (often used by universities hostile to conservative speech) amounts to a tax on any speech the campus left dislikes. Happily, Marquette backed down.

There were private security people at the event (paid by Marquette) and several of the campus police. Further, Shapiro has his own body guard. And the security people were instructed to remove anybody who caused any major disruption — in marked contrast to many universities where leftists are allowed to shut down events with impunity.

So far, two news outlets have published stories on the talk:

• Marquette Wire
• Channel 6 Milwaukee

Shapiro addressed various bogus liberal themes. For example, poverty. If you don’t want to be in poverty, he said, do three things: (1) don’t have babies until you are married, (2) finish high school, and (3) get a job. Sound social science, but not things the left wants to hear.

But according to Shapiro “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Invited Questions from Leftists

Shapiro answered questions for an extended period, and especially invited questions from leftists. Several leftists challenged him, all in a civil way. And Shapiro, who is often caustic in his speeches, responded in an earnest and respectful way.

In an epic exchange, one leftist challenged Shapiro about “institutional racism.” Shapiro responded by demanding to know what that means, and offered to fight it, if the questioner could specify exactly what should be fought. The questioner could not, an implicit admission that he had accepted vague rhetoric in the absence hard facts or analysis.

To his credit, this same leftist told Channel 6 that “By the end of the back and forth, I think we both had been respectful. I think we both learned something.”

Extremely gracious, Shapiro accepted requests from questioners to shake his hand and even to have a selfie made with him.

Conclusion

All this, of course, is exactly the sort of discourse that ought to take place on a college campus. But it is significant that a conservative student group, and not the Marquette administration, arranged it.

All that the Marquette administration has produced is the dour, race baiting moralists.

The contrast is stunning.

Ben Shapiro Talk at Marquette

Compare what Shapiro said at Marquette to the deranged, bigoted politically correct version of his views in a letter circulated by the campus feminist group Empowerment.

Pro-Israel Program at Marquette

Seeing a pro-Israel event at Marquette is a bit unusual, since there have been numerous programs bashing the Jewish state. For example:

• Arab Heritage Celebration in 2005
• A Manresa program titled “Jews of Conscience: Voices for Justice and Peace, Hope and Obligation.” Jews of “conscience” were all anti-Israel Jews.
• A Soup With Substance presentation by one Julie Enslow, an anti-Israel activist.
• Israeli Apartheid Week in 2014.
• Same event, 2015.

The striking thing about these events is that they have been either organized by Marquette bureaucrats, or supported by cosponsorship or money from Marquette offices. From the notice about Israeli Apartheid Week:

Students for Justice in Palestine (a registered MU student organization), Intercultural Engagement in the Office of Student Development, Marquette University Student Government, and the Office of International Education will be having the following speakers on campus for a series of programs to raise awareness about Israeli apartheid and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

The Voices of Israel program, in contrast, appears to be entirely student organized.

Which is typical of Marquette. Programs organized by the university are leftist and propagandistic, and it falls to student organizations (like the Young Americans for Freedom inviting Ben Shapiro) to provide a tiny bit of balance to the campus discourse.

Following is a promotional video for the program:

Called on the Carpet

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Ben Shapiro on Trangenderism and Abortion

Breaking: Condoms Being Handed Out In Front of Marquette Library

This is, in fact, the second time it has happened. It was on the public sidewalk (not Marquette property) but obviously targeting Marquette students.

Warrior Blogger on Vicki McKenna

This is from last Tuesday, where we discuss:

• Free Speech (or the lack thereof) on the Marquette campus
• Our court hearing on the previous Thursday

Not a Good Place for That

Marquette Provost Touts “Critical Thinking,” Then Repeats Politically Correct Clichés

That Marquette’s administration is dominated by politically correct leftists is shown by the fact that Provost Dan Myers took to the Marquette Tribune to argue against conservative speaker Ben Shapiro, who appeared on campus last week.

Myers claims to be making a plea for “critical thinking,” but in fact simply demands that people not critically examine politically correct shibboleths. He focusses on the notion of “institutional racism,” a notion that Shapiro challenged.

There is a lot to address there, but let’s focus on three critical questions before we express agreement. First, has the institutionalized racism of yesteryear really disappeared? Take one instance in our own world of higher education. It is widely accepted that back in the bad ol’ days, universities had racist recruitment and admissions practices that severely disadvantaged African Americans. That disadvantage is gone in our new enlightened era, Shapiro says.

But is it? Consider this: Almost all universities have long had recruitment and admissions practices that target legacy students (the children and relatives of its alumni). If the parents or grandparents were admitted using a racist standard, then doesn’t the legacy advantage replicate that racism in the next generation? Haven’t these legacy practices built racism into the access to higher education? Maybe it’s possible that racial advantages still exist more than we think.

Does Marquette target legacy students? If so, Dan Myers, you are the Provost, why don’t you stop it?

But of course, targeting legacy students is not racial discrimination, even if it has a differential racial impact. Universities target good athletes too, and (at least in “revenue sports”) this benefits blacks. But that’s not racial discrimination either.

Then there is the huge advantage racial minorities have with affirmative action. It typically is (as Shapiro reported) in the range of 250 SAT points (Verbal plus Quantitative).

School Choir

Myers then offers an example of a bad person: a choir director who systematically excluded black students from a highly desirable program.

Myers seems not to understand that this simply isn’t “institutional racism.” There was nothing about the “institution” of the choir that discriminated against blacks, but rather one bad person who did.

And Myers admits he is now dead. So much for this as any sort of example of contemporary racism, institutional or otherwise.

Individual Agency

Myers continues:

By denying institutional racism, Shapiro can boil racial differences down to individual agency: if Black people just tried harder and made better choices, they’d do just as well as Whites. Simply finish high school, avoid early pregnancy and get a job. If you do, you’ll be OK. Seems reasonable, but let’s pause again. Does everyone (regardless of race, income, where they live and family circumstances) have the same chance to finish high school? Does every high school produce the same results (learning, skills and chances of getting into college)? Does everyone have the same chance of getting a job? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” we must rethink whether individual agency is the only thing that matters.

Myers is oblivious to the fact that he is demeaning black people. They are, he seems to be saying, so beaten down that they are unable to make good decisions. For example, today about 72% of all black kids are born out of wedlock. Poor beaten down black folks can’t make good decisions about sex, birth control and marriage, according to Myers.

But in 1955, only 20% of black babies were born out of wedlock. Why could blacks make good decisions in the 1950s, before the civil rights legislation of the 60s, but can’t now? The generation of blacks that had kids in wedlock in the 50s was the generation that marched with Martin Luther King. What has happened in the black community? It hasn’t been the rise of “institutional racism.”

That blacks are, on average, in poorer schools than whites is certainly true. But it is leftists like Myers that are the staunch defenders of poorly performing public school monopolies in central cities, and the opponents of charter schools and vouchers schools.

It is, in other words, the people who whine about “institutional racism” who are defenders of the clearest form of institutional racism that harms black kids: the inner city public school monopoly.

Unemployment

Myers goes on to talk about unemployment, and claims that if the “jobs were there” black people would take them. He points to the fact that the black unemployment rate is consistently higher than the white unemployment rate.

But is this “institutional racism?”

In the first place, because blacks tend to have less human capital than whites (because of poorer education), they are at a disadvantage.

Secondly, because blacks tend to have less human capital, they are more likely to be lured into dependency on government programs, which compete too well with actual employment. (The same thing happens with poorly educated whites, but it is less noticed.)

Here are the data on dependency on means-tested programs, by race.

Here are the data on dependency and family structure. Married couple families are quite unlikely to be dependent on government programs.

One of the many things that politically correct types won’t talk about is the fact that the black/white gap in unemployment was, in an era where “institutional racism” was undeniable, nonexistent. This chart, from the linked article, tells the story:

Hypocrisy on Critical Thinking

But the most blatant, bizarre thing about Myers and his bureaucrats is that, instead of promoting critical thinking, they have promoted one-sided political correctness.

Critical thinking involves confronting diverse, often conflicting ideas. But the programming coming out of Myers office (and offices under his control) this year has consisted of nothing but leftist indoctrination.

And Myers, uncomfortable with Shapiro challenging his one-sided programming, goes to the Tribune to try to debunk Shapiro.

Coming Out

Taking Provost Myers to Task: Young Americans for Freedom

From The New Guard: An essay about Marquette Provost Dan Myers, whose bureaucrats have arranged an absurdly biased program of speakers on racial issues, and then hypocritically wrote an op-ed opposing the one conservative speaker who has been on campus this year:

Last week, the Young Americans for Freedom at Marquette held a wildly successful talk featuring Ben Shapiro. Two lecture halls were filled beyond capacity, even as Marquette staff attempted to sabotage the event behind the scenes.

The first time any Marquette administrator publicly addressed students about the Shapiro talk was in an editorial in the campus newspaper on February 14. Provost Dan Myers —who once carried a sign that labeled conservatives as homophobic, transphobic & biphobic—penned an op-ed pleading for “critical thinking” when considering conservative speakers like Shapiro.

His message was simple: the conservatives who came to hear from Ben Shapiro failed to think critically.

According to Myers, Shapiro’s visit “produced some controversy.” In reality, it was university staff that ginned up the controversy. Myers argues that campuses “should not avoid controversy.” Instead, he wants the campus to challenge “controversial” views. Myers, as the second in command at Marquette, has made it his duty to challenge exclusively conservative views the few times they are allowed to be heard on campus.

Interestingly, Myers did not even attend Shapiro’s lecture, but this did not prevent Myers from responding (presumably, he watched the video provided by YAF).

In his contradictions of Shapiro’s assertions, Myers leans heavily on fallacies. When Shapiro remarked that “institutional racism” is no longer the norm, Myers wrote that targeting “legacy” students is racist. He continued, asking whether the legacy advantage “replicate[s] that racism in the next generation.” That is, Myers believes recruiting students who are more likely to attend Marquette because of a prior family connection is racist. Surprisingly, Myers never mentions Marquette’s expressed desire to slant the admissions process in favor of Hispanic students, despite the fact that he himself supports a policy which would require Marquette’s racial demographic to reach at least 25% of all enrollments.

A quick recap of Myers logic reveals a troubling conclusion:

To recruit legacy students, those whose parent or sibling attended Marquette University before them (regardless of race), is institutional racism. But to set a goal of creating a Marquette where 25% of the population is Hispanic (potentially at the expense of other qualified minority students) in order to seek federal funds is not institutional racism.

That’s right Marquette alumni: The provost of your alma mater does not want to recruit your kid, younger sibling, or grandkid in the name of some warped version of Jesuit social justice.

Marquette’s desire to welcome more Hispanics is laudable – but not through this scheme. Skewing numbers to fleece the feds and pander to progressive pieties will throw off other diversity metrics, including socioeconomic status, religion, sex, and many more. Note that intellectual diversity is never part of any initiative promoting inclusion on the campus of Marquette University.

Doubling down on his accusations, Myers argues that Ben’s promotion of the Brookings Institution’s Three Simple Rules to Join the Middle Class is also racist: Graduate from high school, avoid early pregnancy, and get a job. Myers says not all races have equal opportunities to finish high school, get into college, or, evidently, avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Myers offers no solutions to address this broad institutional charge of racism. For decades, conservatives have advocated school choice that would benefit minority students. Yet progressives dramatically opposed Betsy DeVos for the Department of Education, despite her plan to expand to expand choice for impoverished children.

Milwaukee Public Schools (serving the residents who live around Marquette) have been run into the ground by progressive unions for decades. Perhaps left wing unions are the example of institutional racism Myers was seeking?

Myers writes, “Healthy skepticism is at the very foundation of active learning.” If Myers is genuinely interested in interaction with active learning, perhaps the Young Americans for Freedom might bring Shapiro back for a debate.

In fact, Young America’s Foundation has a strong reputation of supporting dialogue on Marquette’s campus. The Foundation has sponsored Attorney General John Ashcroft, Speaker Newt Gingrich, John Stossel, Michelle Malkin, S.E. Cupp, Allen West, Steve Forbes, Herman Cain, Christopher Horner, and many more.

Additionally, the Foundation has sponsored two debates at Marquette. Marquette’s own liberal theologian Dan Maguire backed out of a debate on pro-life issues with conservative Mike Adams.

The Foundation also paid for Liz Cheney to debate Howard Dean prior to the 2012 election. Marquette was one of only a handful of campuses to host such a debate. The Foundation paid for both speakers.

Non-progressives are left to wonder if Myers is planning to write a similarly scathing op-ed after Shaun King appeared on campus this week, or well-known domestic terrorist Angela Davis appears next month. We won’t hold our breath. As Myers pointed out in his op-ed, a “variety of speakers” were on campus last week. Myers singled out the conservative.

What does it say that, on the Marquette campus, it is usually conservatives who arrange debates, but the Marquette administration arranges only one-sided programs? It must mean that, deep down, the people running Marquette sense that they would be at a disadvantage in an open, balanced debate.

If they were confident of their views, they would welcome having those views be shown to be superior in head-to-head competition.

No doubt they are confident of their moral righteousness. But somewhere deep down they know that there are things they don’t want aired, else people start having doubts about the “social justice” agenda.

[Update from YAF]

YAF-Marquette chairman and adviser reached out to Provost Myers for a meeting. Through his chief of staff, Myers denied the request because he was too busy. Myers’ office said they could direct the YAF chapter to another person on campus. At this point, Myers is unwilling to defend his actions directly to conservative students.

We can’t imagine Myers refusing to meet with representatives of any politically correct victim group. But he refuses dialogue with conservative students. That’s the Marquette version of “inclusion.”

The Utopia of the Politically Correct

From Quillette, an essay by Gregory Gorelik, which looks forward to future, successful presidential candidate:

She walked up the subway stairwell, smiling. Atop the Fifth Avenue sidewalk landing, a crowd had already gathered. Cheers broke out as the first glimpses of her were caught by the impatiently awaiting audience. Once on the sidewalk, she gracefully and confidently approached the prepared lectern and waived to the gathered masses. Her smile slowly faded.

“Our country is fallen,” she began. “The legacy of colonialism and racism still haunts our communities. From small towns to big cities, police brutality is destroying lives and ruining families. Hate crimes are on the rise. Our Muslim and LGBTQIA brothers and sisters are traumatized by hate speech on college campuses and in the media. White, straight, cisgender men are bringing racism, they’re bringing sexism, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.” These apocalyptic images were followed by a few more depicting rampant bigotry and oppression and the all-consuming fires of capitalism.

“But today,” she continued, her voice brightening, “we say no more! Today will be remembered as the day when we all came together and dealt the first blow to the heteropatriarchy! Just as the spirit of our movement has inspired people throughout the land to resist fascist oppression by violently opposing the Nazis who question the self-evident truths of affirmative action and affirmative consent, so today I announce that it has inspired me to run for the highest office in the land.”

This never-before-encountered brand of leftist politics was a breath of fresh air to many — especially the multicultural cosmopolitans living on the coastal areas of the country. Lately, it seems, they had been forgotten by a nationalist regime beholden to backward interests such as the religious right, gun owners, soon-to-be-obsolete polluting industries such as oil and coal, and, of course, garden variety “racists,” “sexists,” and “Islamophobes.” In their new candidate, the coastal masses, heretofore unheard by the right-wing power-holders, saw a savior who would clean up the nativistic, nationalistic infestation at the nation’s capital and in the country.

As time went on, once-unquestioned assumptions about free speech and due process were attacked into oblivion. The candidate insisted that not only will her administration punish racists and sexists themselves — it will also punish their family members if they do not report their bigoted siblings, parents, and aunts and uncles to the soon-to-be established “Department of Hate and Bias Reporting.” Universities were likewise threatened with the withholding of funds if they deigned to allow student groups to invite controversial speakers who might “microagress” against vulnerable students, faculty, and administrators. The Department of Homeland Security was called upon to create an “online harassment taskforce” that would monitor citizens’ private and public communications for hateful rhetoric directed at minorities, government officials, and even abstract concepts such as “intersectionality.” The candidate even went as far as shaming specific yoga studios and Asian restaurants run by non-Asians for “cultural appropriation.” Death threats were leveled and the businesses closed.

And yet, the more the candidate spoke, the more popular she got. Liberals, libertarians, and conservatives who seemed horrified by the implications of the candidates’ policies were quickly drowned out with rally chants such as “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, right-wing bigots go away,” to the smirking approval of the candidate. Journalists and correspondents who dared to question the candidate’s contention that the country is overrun by bigots by invoking actual statistics on the matter were either ignored or had their sources maligned as “fake stats.” The candidate, meanwhile, boasted her “Ivy League” credentials and insisted that her education and subsequent experience as an activist shielded her from any and all accusations of being illiberal and despotic.

The author goes on to take a swipe at the Trump movement, although he is fair minded enough to admit that:

. . . Trump’s support is to some extent undergirded by authoritarianism (though perhaps it is grounded more in nationalism and anti-elitism) . . .

But his main target is the authoritarian left.

As in any good dystopia, the picture he paints merely starts with current trends and takes them to their logical conclusion, which typically is not that far from where we are now. His ranting presidential candidate is not that far from Hillary Clinton raving about a “basket of deplorables” or Barack Obama talking about “bitter clingers.”

And the idea of a Stazi tasked to ferret out and punish any politically incorrect thoughts is almost perfectly representative of the bias incident reporting systems on college campuses. Indeed, college campuses, being dominated by the left, are the places most like the dystopia that Gorelik has described.

Finally, A Success!

The “Living Constitution:” Trashing the Social Contract

An essay from The New American, a rather questionable source, but the essay itself is spot on:

This brings us to the opposition to President Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Judge Neil Gorsuch, who The New York Times actually calls a “Nominee for a Stolen Seat.” In reality, the Times advocates a perversion of judicial philosophy that long ago had stolen Americans’ birthright.

The paper complains that like Justice Antonin Scalia, Gorsuch “is an originalist, meaning he interprets the Constitution’s language to mean what it was understood to mean when it was written….” Leftists prefer the Constitution be considered a “living document,” interpreted to “suit the times” (and the Times). This just guarantees a dying republic.

Why? Consider: Imagine I violate the language of a contract to which you and I are party. You take me to court, but the judge determines that the contract can be interpreted to suit the times. You may object and say the “times” are being interpreted to suit me, but the judge is in my pocket.

Oh, he justifies this by saying he’s a “pragmatist.” Feel better?

The analogy is apt because, in essence, the Constitution is the contract the American people have with one another. It specifies the rights (of the people) and powers (of the different governmental arenas) of those party to it. It does have one significant flaw, however.

For it to work as intended, people must actually abide by it.

When they don’t, our very rights are in jeopardy.

Another analogy was drawn by Chief Justice John Roberts when, during his confirmation hearings, he said his job was only “to call balls and strikes.” Expanding on this, judges can in fact be likened to baseball umpires, while the players are the people, the game’s ruling body is the legislature and the rule book the Constitution.

Now, if a rule is thought inadequate, it’s the ruling body’s role to change it. Of course, the players, umpires or anyone else may lobby passionately in that regard. What, however, if an umpire considered the rule book living and said, “With the great pitchers in these times, three strikes are insufficient; I’m giving the batter four strikes”?

He’d be fired. And would it help his cause if he added an intellectual veneer to his cheating, saying “You don’t understand! I’m not a radical like those originalists! I’m moderate — a pragmatist”?

No, he’s a bad umpire — and he’d be history.

Likewise, all the terms describing justices — constructionist, originalist, moderate, pragmatic — are part of a pseudo-intellectual rationalization obscuring a simple truth: There are only two kinds of justices, good justices and bad justices. Good justices rule based on the founders’ original intent.

Bad justices don’t.

They put a spin on the Constitution to prove “by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white,” as satirist Jonathan Swift put it, so they can impose their agenda from the bench.

Some will say we mustn’t be hamstrung by a 200-year-old document. This gets at the big lie. There is a lawful way to make the Constitution “live:” the Amendment Process.

Yes, it can be long and difficult. This ensures that before our national contract is altered, the vast majority of those party to it (the people) agree on the change. “Living-document” judges, with an intellectual veneer and a sneer, usurp this power. The people are to decide when and how the Constitution will live — not five unelected lawyers.

Those who trade the rule of law for the rule of lawyers, to facilitate an unconstitutional agenda, tread a dangerous path. Their corruption of the establishment has led to precisely the kind of anti-establishment movement we see today. After all, if a game is judged and won or lost fairly, both sides can accept the outcome. But what happens when the vanquished know the judges fixed the contest for the other side?

That is the stuff revolutions are made of.

The living-document lie can be gussied up as “pragmatism” or something else, but it’s not a legitimate legal philosophy. We can have a living constitution or a living constitutional republic — but we cannot have both.

We don’t think the judges should literally always rule according to “original intent.” Sometimes previous Supreme Courts have made such a mess of the law that doing that would be like trying to unscramble an omelet. But what judges should not ever do is base their decisions on their policy preferences, violating each and every defensible rule of construction. That is indeed what most of the “landmark” decisions of the late 20th century did. We don’t need more of that.  We should, in fact, never vote for a presidential candidate who promises judicial appointees who will do that.

You Have 75 Milliseconds to Fix It

Being Blunt About Being a Bigot

From (of course) The Huffington Post:

I don’t like white women.

Whenever I say that, white women look at me like I just decapitated Taylor Swift. If I’m being honest, their reaction is part of the reason I say it. But rest assured, it’s not the only reason.

I don’t like white women because I’m not particularly fond of the construct of whiteness or what it represents. I also don’t appreciate those who are complicit in my oppression and benefit from it. When I say I don’t like white women, it’s not in reference to any specific white woman (aside from maybe Taylor Swift). It’s a declaration that white women pose a very real threat to my existence, and I don’t have to embrace that threat with open arms. You have to earn my fondness. This goes for several other groups, obviously, but for some reason white women seem the most baffled by it. Whenever I meet a white woman who’s not baffled by it, we instantly become friends. Those are the white women I like.

We first were about to label this tirade “politically correct,” but it turns out it’s not.

It turns out the author rejects “intersectionality,” a term that means, roughly, you’ve got to make common cause with all the other politically correct victim groups.

That, of course, includes “women,” but not the women of the real world. In that real world, a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016. It only means feminists.

But even in the Trump-hating “Women’s March” this writer feels alienated.

There is a bit of wisdom here. The writer understands that the white feminists who claim to speak for all women don’t. But the wisdom is buried under a huge racial grudge.

Warrior Blogger Receives Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Award

We are extremely honored to receive the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Award from the Bradley Foundation.

The award will be presented Friday night at CPAC (The Conservative Political Action Conference).

According to the Foundation:

McAdams was selected for his outspoken criticism of political correctness on college campuses.

Actually, one campus (Marquette) which led Marquette to attempt to fire us.

Bradley says:

“Professor McAdams is a fearless defender of free speech and open inquiry, and a martyr to political correctness,” said Richard Graber, President and CEO of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which supports the Kirkpatrick Award. “His dismissal from Marquette University flies in the face of the traditions of academic freedom.”

And now the really good part:

The award carries a $10,000 stipend and honors the memory of Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who was known for her outspokenness in hostile environments, her clarity and determination in the midst of oppression, and her fierce dedication to American ideals and academic freedom.

Kirkpatrick earned the enmity of the academic left by being an anti-communist. Further, she claimed that “moderate autocrats friendly to American interests” were better than communist (or other totalitarian) regimes which entirely suppressed civil liberties and where hostile to U.S. interests. History has proven her right, but at the time, leftist academics claimed that any less-than-fully democratic government might as well be replaced by a communist (or Islamist) regime.

We, of course, are not nearly as important as Jean Kirkpatrick, having done nothing but defy an attempt by a nominally Catholic (but actually secular and politically correct) university to fire us.

But we’ll accept the award anyway.

Alan Colmes Dies: Fox News Twitter Followers Respond

You might compare these to the liberal responses when Tony Snow died. Twitter login required (we think).

Fox News contributor @AlanColmes has passed away at the age of 66. pic.twitter.com/14LQUYqJ1I

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 23, 2017

Update

In contrast, the liberal online journal Slate posted a nasty obituary just hours after Colmes died.

CPAC Speech

CPAC was a hoot! We got to see only a couple of the panels, being involved in interviews most of the time, but we got the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Award on Friday night. Here is our acceptance speech.

You’ll need to go forward to 41:15 to see Rick Graber read the citation, and 47:36 to see our speech.

Also, an article and interview with James Wigderson of Wisconsin Reporter.

Finally: New York Times Cares About Anti-Semitism

The media, of course, tends to report things that fit their favored narrative, and the favored narrative of the liberal mainstream media is that the Trump campaign and Trump presidency has empowered the forces of bigotry in American life.

Of course, since they can’t actually quote Trump saying anything anti-Semitic, they have to resort to that evasive verbal formula.

Thus the mainstream media has enthusiastically reported a spate of anti-Semitic attacks and threats against Jewish institutions.

But similar attacks have happened for years under Obama. And they have gone virtually unreported.

Thus the website of the Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner explains how “Making the New York Times Care About Antisemitism” is “Trump’s Big Achievement.”

President Trump has been in office for barely a month, but he already deserves credit for at least one major accomplishment: He’s gotten the New York Times to discover a new interest in intensively covering antisemitism.

What am I talking about?

Consider the following brief recent history of vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and their coverage, or lack of it, in the New York Times.

Then, following, is a long list of ant-Semitic incidents during the Obama Administration that the New York Times failed to report, or reported summarily with no attempt to tie them to any larger theme.

To summarize: Ten Jewish cemetery desecrations, of which two — one of which was outside the US — were covered by the New York Times. Both times the Times bothered to cover the attacks, the newspaper did so in a way that minimized the potentially antisemitic aspect of the attack.

In November of 2016, Donald Trump was elected president.

In February 2017, there were two attacks on Jewish cemeteries. About 200 tombstones were affected at a graveyard near St. Louis, Mo., and about 100 at one in Philadelphia, Pa.

The Times responded in a markedly different way than it did to the earlier, pre-Trump attacks, which it had either ignored or minimized. One Times news article about the Missouri attacks carried the bylines of two Times reporters and was accompanied by two images shot by a Times-commissioned photographer. The article prominently noted that critics said the attacks “were an outgrowth of the vitriol of last year’s presidential campaign and Mr. Trump’s tone during it.” The Times reinforced this point with not just one, but two op-eds commenting on the attack, both of which were accompanied by additional photographs and carried headlines reaching speculative conclusions about the motive: “The New American Anti-Semitism” and “When Hate Haunts a Graveyard.”

Yes, the media report what fits their preferred narrative.

What happens when something radically contradicts their preferred narrative? They minimize or downplay it. Thus when the perpetrator of several of the phone threats against Jewish institutions was discovered to be an anti-Trump leftist, ABC News failed to report that.

And of course, the mainstream media have been little concerned about anti-Semitism where is is most overt, and most mainstream: on college campuses.

[Update]

Likewise, CNN completely failed to report the leftist, anti-Trump political views of the perp.

The Biggest Oscar Mistake

Former Stanford Provost: Intolerance a Threat to Higher Education

Former Stanford Provost John Etchemendy, and a speech to the Stanford Board of Trustees, talked about threats to higher education. After briefly discussing threats from outside the academy, he turned to the “The threat from within.”

But I’m actually more worried about the threat from within. Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we’ve built around ourselves.

This results in a kind of intellectual blindness that will, in the long run, be more damaging to universities than cuts in federal funding or ill-conceived constraints on immigration. It will be more damaging because we won’t even see it: We will write off those with opposing views as evil or ignorant or stupid, rather than as interlocutors worthy of consideration. We succumb to the all-purpose ad hominem because it is easier and more comforting than rational argument. But when we do, we abandon what is great about this institution we serve.

It will not be easy to resist this current. As an institution, we are continually pressed by faculty and students to take political stands, and any failure to do so is perceived as a lack of courage. But at universities today, the easiest thing to do is to succumb to that pressure. What requires real courage is to resist it. Yet when those making the demands can only imagine ignorance and stupidity on the other side, any resistance will be similarly impugned.

The university is not a megaphone to amplify this or that political view, and when it does it violates a core mission. Universities must remain open forums for contentious debate, and they cannot do so while officially espousing one side of that debate.

But we must do more. We need to encourage real diversity of thought in the professoriate, and that will be even harder to achieve. It is hard for anyone to acknowledge high-quality work when that work is at odds, perhaps opposed, to one’s own deeply held beliefs. But we all need worthy opponents to challenge us in our search for truth. It is absolutely essential to the quality of our enterprise.

I fear that the next few years will be difficult to navigate. We need to resist the external threats to our mission, but in this, we have many friends outside the university willing and able to help. But to stem or dial back our academic parochialism, we are pretty much on our own. The first step is to remind our students and colleagues that those who hold views contrary to one’s own are rarely evil or stupid, and may know or understand things that we do not. It is only when we start with this assumption that rational discourse can begin, and that the winds of freedom can blow.

Nice words, and when Etchemendy was actually serving as Provost, he made some comments that, in context, have to be interpreted as chastising the politically correct leftists on campus.

Unfortunately, your average university President / Provost / Chancellor is craven in the face of demands from intolerant leftists, or Federal bureaucrats demanding that speech be silenced as “harassment” or that males accused of sexual assault be convicted by kangaroo court proceedings. We are not aware that Etchemendy was any better than other university bureaucrats on these issues.

Conspiracy Theories

Indoctrination on Wage Gap: Feminist Instructor Tells Student to Use Only Feminist Sources

The full story about this can be found on the Toronto Sun website. This might seem to be merely one example of intolerant feminist indoctrination. Unfortunately, it’s utterly typical.

How White Folks Can Reject Their White Privilege

Going around on Twitter. And if you think this is some fringe or marginal thing, check out the fact that it’s on the Facebook page of the United Church of Christ. This is not to be confused with the Churches of Christ, that are rather conservative.

This is a real thing that people share seriously. pic.twitter.com/EqbfsEpVHX

— neontaster (@neontaster) March 12, 2017

Much Cheaper Ways to Get That Result

Talking About Race and IQ

The recent riot at Middlebury College over a speech by Charles Murray was based on some over broad generalizations about his book The Bell Curve. That volume certainly seemed to say that blacks are inherently less intelligent than whites.

So that makes him a racist who should be shut up, according to the politically correct left.

But what is the result of that sort of thinking? A fair number of people, and especially people who don’t just go along with the crowd, are going to be sympathetic to Murray.

Further, if the notion of black racial inferiority can’t be discussed, it takes on the character of a dirty little secret. People generally try to stifle discussion of ideas they consider dangerous, and people have to suspect that the most dangerous ideas are the ones that are disapproved, but true.

Thus, stifling discussion of supposed black racial inferiority actually gives a certain legitimacy to the idea. Further, since most people (at least outside academia) instinctively side with people being bullied (and not the bullies) the sort of thing that happened at Middlebury gives Murray a certain legitimacy. Since evil people hate him, he must be one of the good guys.

Murray is, in fact, a good guy in many ways, but that doesn’t mean his ideas on race and intelligence are valid.

Evading the Issue

Suppose, instead of trying to shut Murray up, people who disagree with him actually debate him? Try to show how his evidence and logic are deficient?

One suspects that, deep down, the campus social justice warriors believe that he might be right, and his beliefs are the “awful truth” that must be concealed, else it undermine their political agenda.

Further, since certain ideas have been ruled “out of bounds” even for discussion, the campus leftists would not begin to know how to refute Murray. So all they have is blind intolerance.

Confronting the Issue

People who are open minded enough to actually look at the evidence are perfectly able to refute Murray’s ideas on race and intelligence with data and logic. Consider, for example, a 2007 article by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.

Gladwell points to something known as the “Flynn effect:” human intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, has been increasing markedly for at least the last 100 years. It is implausible that the genetic endowment of humans has changed much during that time, and indeed the eugenicists of a hundred years ago believed that the “less intelligent” groups were breeding faster than the more intelligent, which would imply the genetic inheritance of humans was degrading over time.

Suggested reasons for this increase have included “improved nutrition, a trend toward smaller families, better education, greater environmental complexity.” Note that all of these factors are environmental. While nothing about this disproves black genetic inferiority, it does prove that environmental factors matter.

More relevant evidence is provided by racial differences in IQ broken down by age. Gladwell discusses a debate between Flynn and Charles Murray:

Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing different statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to be pessimistic that the racial difference would narrow in the future. . . .

Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.

That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children—and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade students in schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that “kids who want to be above average don’t have to aim as high.” There were possibly adverse differences between black teen-age culture and white teen-age culture, and an enormous number of young black men are in jail . . . .

Note the irony here: while the social justice warriors at Middlebury seek to shut Murray up (and ironically, he was not even talking about race and intelligence there) in a debate with a capable opponent, he was successfully refuted.

Gladwell goes on to provide further evidence:

When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”

The answer, of course, is “the latter.” The conclusion has to be that IQ differences of the magnitude of those that separate black and whites can be explained by environmental factors.

Gladwell goes on to explain that people who score poorly on IQ tests are not necessarily stupid. They merely have not been socialized to see the world through what Flynn calls “scientific spectacles.” That is to say, they have not been assimilated into the ways of dealing cognitively with the environment that characterizes advanced industrial and post-industrial societies. But socialization is not heredity.

Conclusion

The bullies at Middlebury are, to the cause of anti-racism, what the Inquisition was to the cause of Christianity. Trying to forceably suppress and shut up bad ideas is ultimately a foolish and counter-productive enterprise. The people who will confront the issue of race and IQ with data and logic play the same role as the great Christian apologists (G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, just to name two) who show that engagement, and not suppression, is the way to deal with ideas one believes are mistaken.

Academic Fascism by Transgender Activists

Something like this seems to happen every few days at some university. From Breitbart:

Students at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, derailed an event featuring University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson on Friday evening.

The event, which Peterson claimed was originally scheduled to feature a panel of three speakers, was whittled down to just himself after the school received threats for hosting the event.

Peterson was thrust into the spotlight after a video of him engaging with students over a controversial piece of Canadian legislation which would have made it a crime to address transgender individuals by anything other than their chosen set of personal pronouns.

That’s right. A crime. The act in fact does not literally say that, but in the hands of enforcement bureaucrats, failing to call a person with a penis “she” or even “ze” if that’s what he wants will quickly be considered “discrimination.” That is already the case in New York City.

As a precaution before the event at McMaster University, Professor Peterson had students guard the fire alarms around the building so that protesters couldn’t set them off in an attempt to derail the event.

On Friday evening, Peterson was unable to speak at his scheduled event McMaster University due to a group of students who shouted and blew horns. The students shouted “shut him down,” and “transphobic piece of sh

Let the Republicans Deal With It

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Fake News from the Anti-Trump Media

From The Federalist, a list of stories, virtually all negative about Donald Trump, from mainstream outlets that have turned out to be bogus. We will just list them, and you can read about them as you wish:

• Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates
• November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory
• December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure
• January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball
• January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’
• January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy
• January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter
• January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department
• January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair
• January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax
• January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake
• January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie
• February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico
• February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions
• February 2: Renaming Black History Month
• February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures

The concept “fake news” came into currency during last year’s election, mostly used by liberal media to condemn stories that favored Donald Trump. And a good number of genuinely fake stories, apparently intended a click bait, did appear.

But the cudgel has been turned on the liberal media, and the alternative conservative media (such as The Federalist) has scrutinized the liberal outlets.

One of Donald Trump’s “achievements” (if you want to call it that) is to excite such hostility and even rage in the liberal mainstream media that they create stories as wild and irresponsible as Trump’s own worst pronouncements.

Communist Angela Davis Gets Warm Welcome from Marquette Officials

Yes, she is speaking tonight, and at very large venue (the Al McGuire Center) which Marquette would not let Young Americans for Freedom use for the (heavily oversubscribed) Ben Shapiro speech.

But the crowd does not look especially large:

Reminder- @MarquetteU refused to let @benshapiro speak in the AL where murder conspirator & communist Angela Davis speaks tonight @yaf pic.twitter.com/yZQdiblnJh

— Ethan Hollenberger (@EHollenberger) March 30, 2017

Ethan Hollenberger, at the event and tweeting about it notes that President Lovell called Davis an “awesome example.” This about a woman who is a self proclaimed Communist, and who bought guns for her fellow black militants in a plot that led to the killing of several innocent people.

When Ben Shapiro was at Marquette, the university required the reading of a disclaimer that noted that Shapiro’s views were not necessarily the views of Marquette University.

No such disclaimer was read at the Davis event.

Davis discussed a mural of FBI most wanted terrorist Assata Shakur, which decorated the wall of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center at Marquette, until we reported it, and an embarrassed Marquette administration had it painted over.

Davis called the mural “whitewashed” and called Shakur “a comrade and a friend.”

According to the Washington Examiner:

Davis is most renowned for her career of radical leftist activism, involving leadership stints in both the Black Panther Party and Communist Party. Today, she continues to proclaim that “capitalism is the most dangerous kind of future we can imagine” telling the Los Angeles Times recently, “as long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.”

Davis is notorious for landing on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 1970 for fleeing police after she was charged with purchasing the murder weapon used in a courtroom shootout in 1970.

At the Women’s March in January, Davis called on activists to become “more militant.”

“Those who still defend the supremacy of white male hetero-patriarchy,” she said, “had better watch out.”

Her views on abortion and marriage openly contradict Catholic teachings. Nevertheless, Marquette is touting Davis as a “living witness to history” and featuring her remarks as a “distinguished lecture.” Davis’ speaking fee has previously been listed between $10,000 and $20,000.

Note the double standard: when Ben Shapiro, a rather mainstream conservative spoke on campus, Marquette officials threatened to charge the Young Americans for Freedom (who sponsored the event) for security.

They backed off that, but then staffer Chrissy Nelson tried to undermine the event by advising leftists to sign up for a ticket and not show up, depriving an interested student of a seat. She did so at the suggestion of an unnamed “director of diversity.”

A disclaimer, saying that Marquette did not endorse Shapiro’s views, was required to be read.

Not only did no Marquette official laud Shapiro, Provost Dan Myers took to Marquette Wire to argue against Shapiro.

While minor contributions to Shapiro’s speaker’s fee were made by Student Government and the Residence Hall Council, apparently all of Davis’ fee was paid by Marquette. Out of tuition money.

So what we have here is Marquette officially lauding and supporting a Communist who was party to a murder plot.

It would be different if Marquette sponsored a diverse group of speakers, including some extremists from both left and right. But Marquette is officially on the hard left.

Ship Going Down

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Angela Davis Speaks, Marquette Pounded on Social Media

Click on the image to see reaction on Twitter. You don’t have to click to see her described by Marquette as a “Scholar, activist and renowned speaker” who “will deliver a distinguished lecture.” Some of the tweets provide information about her background not generally known.

Scholar, activist and renowned speaker Dr. Angela Davis will deliver a distinguished lecture today at 7p.m. https://t.co/klTSOhEEYZ pic.twitter.com/szmyhyeIdH

— Marquette Today (@MarquetteToday) March 29, 2017

An earlier tweet from Marquette was just as bad:

Marquette is honored to host the brilliant political activist Angela Davis tomorrow at 7 pm at the Al McGuire Center.

— Marquette Today (@MarquetteToday) March 28, 2017

Warrior Blogger on Belling: Angela Davis, Campus Repression

Hosted by Matt Kittle, we discuss our lawsuit, Marquette’s reception of communist and party to a murder plot Angela Davis, and the broader issue of free speech on campus.

Why the Social Justice Warriors Hate Israel

Virulent, Abusive Facebook Posts of Former Marquette Official

That Marquette’s administration is strongly leftist and politically correct is obvious from their actions. Their public statements are also politically correct, but one wonders just how much virulent passion lies behind their public statements?

At least one of them, no longer working at Marquette, has let it all hang out. Bob Deahl, recently retired Dean, College of Professional Studies at Marquette University, has a Facebook page on which he does nothing to conceal his hatred of Republicans and conservatives.

[Warning: Offensive Language]

Attack on Conservative Christians

At the top of his page at this moment, he reposts (with obvious approval) an article that claims:

Worse than this chronic fixation on sex, gender, and sexuality, is that Conservative Christianity has somehow deputized itself as qualified and entitled to police such things for the world, with the Bible (not Science, facts, or reason) as its sole authority on the matter.

More accurately, not merely the Bible—but the Bible as carefully filtered through a repressed, puritanical, selective interpretation crafted almost exclusively by men raised to believe that God was a dude and that Eve ate the fruit and seduced poor Adam.

If that’s not bad enough, he adds his own comment:

F’ing sick nutcases

We all, of course, can imagine what would happen to any university bureaucrat who said anything even faintly resembling this about Muslims. But he doesn’t work at Marquette anymore, so he can let it all hang out.

On Trump and His People

In another shared post he says:

Well the Russians sure have succeeded in ruining AmeriKa....they got Trump elected who is, almost everyday, using his ignorant power to change things that will ruin our environment, health care, freedom and personal liberties, education, progress on sustainability, and on and on ....this monster asshole is a tool of the Russians and is RUINING this country.

If that seems pretty ordinary anti-Trump rhetoric these days, that’s merely a symptom of how the president has utterly deranged his enemies.

In other shared post about Mike Flynn he said “Disgusting white trash like the entire Trump family and administration.” But that was nothing compared to his next post, which said about Trump:

Corrupt, Incompetent, Mentally Disturbed, Malignant Narcisist, Idiot, asshole, monster

And then about Mike Pence:

You total fucking piece of inhuman shit.....You piece of pathetic gutless, heartless, cruel piece of shit...

And then about mild-mannered Boy Scout Paul Ryan:

Ideological asshole and morally bankrupt to boot

And then back to Trump:

this monster is destroying this country

He is a bit milder with Betsy DeDevos:

she is just one of many completely clueless, ignorant, arrogant right wing cabinet members...

But then returns to Mike Pence:

Just remember this is the extremist right wingnut bigot, sexist, homophobic, mysoginist that is now our VP...

Then, in a commentary on a video, he goes into a more extended rant on Trump:

Here is what everyone is missing...the ESSENCE of this asshole, what Trump REALLY believes in is....MONEY...he believes everything exists to MAKE MORE MONEY. And many of the Republicans see that this is Governments role as welll...they confuse Governing and Running a Business. So they don’t give a shit about you or me or the well-being of society or the common good or that government is about care and service and assistance...hence go fuck yourself about health care and social security and safety, etc....everything is just about making money. ThatHere is what everyone is missing...the ESSENCE of this asshole, what Trump REALLY believes in is....MONEY...he believes everything exists to MAKE MORE MONEY. And many of the Republicans see that this is Government's role as welll...they confuse Governing and Running a Business. So they don’t give a shit about you or me or the well-being of society or the common good or that government is about care and service and assistance...hence go fuck yourself about health care and social security and safety, etc....everything is just about making money. That’s all Trump cares about...he does NOT care about you duped Trump voters and supporters THAT IS FOR SURE....That’s all Trump cares about...he does NOT care about you duped Trump voters and supporters THAT IS FOR SURE....

Then Deahl posts a fake video with Donald Trump holding up a book reading “Fuck the Planet,” and comments:

Sums up this complete asshole's approach to life

Fan of Angela Davis

And of course, he is enthusiastic about Angela Davis speaking at Marquette. Indeed, he claims:

So proud of Marquette University for hosting Dr. Angela Davis who spoke on Freedom, equality, gender, race, feminism, LGBT, transgender, Palestinian, and other rights issues! Lots is students and faculty AND LOTS of members of our great community

Back to Trump’s People

And of Ivanka Trump joining the White House staff:

More pathetic ignorant corruption

If Ivanka can be attacked, of course Sean Spicer will be, with Deahl calling him a “mentally unbalanced man” and then back to Trump calling him an “asshole” and Republicans “Pathetic heartless bastards...ALL of them.”

Then, why not lump a bunch of people together and say:

Trump and Spicer and Bannon and all these Trump relatives are ALL fucking incompetent idiots

Not satisfied with attacking Trump and his Administration, he asked of Scott Walker:

When will this pathetic little boy idiot drop out ignoramace just finally go away

But then back to Pence:

Pence is an extremest to the extreme, a cruel, hateful homophobe and terribly anti gay and anti women....He must NEVER become president

And then Mike Pence meeting with the Congressional Freedom Caucus, with the observation:

Mysoginist racist white pigs, ALL

Conclusion?

We could go on and on, since Deahl does, but this raises a question. Is Deahl the secret id of the Marquette Administration, having come out of the closet since his division (Professional Studies) went down the drain?

That would be a questionable generalization, but neither would be be completely off base.

Campus bureaucrats are motivated by two things: their own ideology, and their own bureaucratic interests. Thus when an administration panders to the campus left, is it because the bureaucrats are leftists, or because they fear that campus leftists can make trouble for them, and thus need to be placated?

Marquette has gone much further than it has had to to merely placate the campus left. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that attitudes like Deahl’s are pretty common among people who run this “Catholic university.”

Update

As of 4/16/2017 Deahl seems to have sanitized his Facebook page by deleting the vast majority of his posts.

Media Hypocrisy: Filibuster Judicial Nominee

Now, with Senate Republicans poised to use the “nuclear option” to quash a Democratic filibuster against Trump Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, the media is portraying this as some sort of radical coup d’état. But back in 2013, when the Democrats used the same tactic to get Obama judicial appointees approved, the media spin was much different.

From the Media Research Center, a roundup of media reaction from the time the Democrats went nuclear.



The print media were equally bad.

. . . the cable network news hosts and analysts weren’t the only ones championing the nuclear option. On the pages of the Los Angeles Times, Reid’s move was celebrated in a November 22 editorial “Democrats bust the filibuster, and good for them.”

The Times editorial board crowed: “We welcome this action not because it represents a comeuppance for arrogant Republicans but because filibustering presidential nominees is undemocratic and violates the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution, which says that the president shall appoint judges and other officials ‘by and with the advice and consent of the Senate’ — not by and with a supermajority of the Senate.” The Times went on to call it “a victory not just for the Democrats but for good government.”

That same day, The New York Times championed the procedure in an editorial headlined “Democracy Returns to the Senate.”

Of course, the Republicans would be foolish to let the Democrats use the “nuclear option” and not use it themselves. That would simply make them suckers. Of course, often the Republicans have acquiesced in the role of suckers, but they seem to be wising up.

Even if one believes that requiring sixty senators to confirm a presidential appointee is appropriate, what the Republicans are doing will make that outcome more likely. So long as the Republicans fail to retaliate for the Democrat’s use of the tactic, the Democrats will have no incentive to stop using it.

For readers with a tolerance for academic jargon, the proper tactic in a Prisoner’s Dilemma is “tit for tat.” Or in everyday language, “we are not going to let you get away with screwing us over.”

Not News

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Race and School Discipline: The Leftist Fantasy

Now that Heather McDonald has received the honor of being shouted down and shut up by raving leftist campus bigots, it’s time to review another of her articles.

McDonald, one of our favorite scholars on criminal justice issues, is a “law and order” person. She believes that people who commit crimes should be punished. Since blacks commit proportionately many more crimes than whites, this makes her a racist in the eyes of the politically correct.

Remember, a key doctrine of the politically correct is that anything bad that happens to black people must be the result of white racism.

This past Christmas season, she noted the usual mall flash mobs, mostly consisting of black kids, and remarked on the connection to school discipline. Some key points from her essay:

Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes.

Of course, while the media assiduously ignore the racial component of flash mob violence, they can’t resist showing the video. And that tells the story.

That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

. . .

The idea that such street behavior does not have a classroom counterpart is ludicrous. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The lack of socialization that produces such a vast disparity in murder rates, as well as less lethal street violence, inevitably will show up in classroom behavior. Teens who react to a perceived insult on social media by trying to shoot the offender are not likely to restrain themselves in the classroom if they feel “disrespected” by a teacher or fellow students. Interviews with teachers confirm the proposition that children from communities with high rates of family breakdown bring vast amounts of disruptive anger to school, especially girls. It is no surprise that several of the Christmas riots began with fights between girls. School officials in urban areas across the country set up security corridors manned by police officers at school dismissal times to avoid gang shootings. And yet, the Obama administration would have us believe that in the classroom, black students are no more likely to disrupt order than white students. Equally preposterous is the claim that teachers and administrators are bigots. There is no more liberal a profession than teaching; education schools are one long indoctrination in white-privilege theory. And yet when these social-justice warriors get in the classroom, according to the Obama civil rights lawyers, they start wielding invidious double standards in discipline.

. . .

Over the last year, a Seattle school district in the throes of “restorative justice” experienced an alleged gang rape and several student deaths. Criminal charges, including murder, were filed against a group of students not yet out of middle school, reports the Seattle Times. Teachers’ unions in Fresno, Des Moines, New York City, and Indianapolis have all lodged complaints about the anti-discipline philosophy, according to Education Week. The Fresno teachers signed a petition pointing out that students are returned to class after cursing at teachers and physically assaulting them, without suffering any consequences. Fresno’s teachers have been injured trying to stop fights; some are retiring because teaching where severely disruptive students cannot be dislodged has become impossible. In Des Moines, students now hit and scream at each other and their teachers, reports the Des Moines Register.

Read the entire article.

Of course, the real “school to prison pipeline” is what happens when schools teach kids they can engage in disruptive and even violent behavior with zero or trivial consequences. That is, unless it becomes the “school to getting yourself killed pipeline” for people like Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, who somehow thought they could attack an armed individual with impunity.

This whole business reveals the dirty little secret of the race hustlers and the social justice warriors. Deep down, they would rather articulate grievances than make things better for black kids. Of course, they won’t admit this (not even to themselves), but to face the issue squarely, they would have to admit that disorder in the black community creates these kinds of conditions in schools, and that white racism has virtually nothing to do with it.

And if they admit that, their whole world comes crashing down.