Category Archives: Academia

The New ‘Systemic Racism’ That Is Coming, by Pat Buchanan

Posted on July 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

It looks like preferences—racism against disfavored groups—will be making a comeback. From Pat Buchanan at buchanan.org:

Before our Black Lives Matter moment, one had not thought of the NBC networks as shot through with “systemic racism.”

Yet, what other explanation is there for this week’s draconian personnel decision of NBCUniversal chairman Cesar Conde.

According to Conde, the white share of NBC’s workforce, now 74% and divided evenly between men and women, will be chopped to 50%.

Persons of color — Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and multiracial folks — are to rise from the present 26% of NBCUniversal’s workforce to 50%.

What does this mean?

White men will be slashed as a share of NBCUniversal’s employees from the present 38% to 25%, — a cut of one-third — and then capped to ensure that people of color and women reach and remain at 50%.

White men can fall below one-fourth of the workforce, but their numbers will not be permitted to go any higher.

To impose race and gender quotas like this on the workforce at NBCUniversal — half women, half persons of color — would seem to trample all over the spirit, if not the letter, of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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This Is A Great Opportunity To Destroy Academia, by Kurt Schlichter

Posted on July 9, 2020 | 1 comment

Now with even the corruption of hard sciences, most universities, particularly the high-prestige, high-dollar ones, do more harm than good. From Kurt Schlichter at theburningplatform.com:

This Is A Great Opportunity To Destroy Academia

Never let a good crisis go to waste, which in the current crisis means we must use the fact that our universities have shown themselves to be petri dishes swimming with anti-American ideologies, combined with pre-existing trends, to lance this particular cultural boil.

Let’s be clear: Academia today is a pack of rabid reds, and we need to put it down like Old Yeller. And academia itself has loaded up the 12 gauge.

They will say that we oppose academia because we are stupid Neanderthals, just like Trump is (That’s Lie #2 in my new book!). No. We would be stupid to let this undead institution on. This entire wokeness idiocy is the result of hack academics peddling half-baked theories that justify the consolidation of elite power at the expense of those of us who don’t live on the diploma dole.

The bizarre language – “We must struggle to decolonialize the cisnormative paradigm to purge the structural racism caused by the male gaze and amplify whiny, entitled voices” – and the performance art aspects of the media-friendly insurrection – notice how they only get frisky in jurisdictions where they can count on the pinko mayor to hold back the constables and on the local DA to merely slap their wrists? – is all a direct result of indoctrination in the colleges that we normal people support.

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“Racist” College Researcher Ousted After Sharing Study Showing No Racial Bias In Police Shootings, by Tyler Durden

Posted on July 7, 2020 | 2 comments

There goes what remained of academic freedom. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

The vice president of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University, physicist Stephen Hsu, has been forced out of his position at the university after daring to show actual facts from a 2019 study that show there to be no racial bias in incidents of police shootings.

Hsu wrote on his blog on Sunday that “The [Graduate Employees Union] alleged that I am a racist because I interviewed MSU Psychology professor Joe Cesario, who studies police shootings.”

“Cesario’s work…is essential to understanding deadly force and how to improve policing,” Hsu said.

Cesario’s 2019 study found “that the race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot.”

The conclusion of the study was that “contrary to activist claims and media reports, there is no widespread racial bias in police shootings.”

Cesario’s study was then cited in a June 3 Wall Street Journal op-ed called “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism”. The MSU communications team highlighted the mention of Cesario’s work days later and on June 10, the GEU “blasted” Hsu for sharing the research, claiming that it “did not alight with public statements issued by MSU,” according to blog The Police Tribune.

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Cornell Law Prof Says There’s A “Coordinated Effort” To Have Him Fired After He Criticized Black Lives Matter, by Tyler Durden

Posted on June 15, 2020 | 1 comment

So much for intellectual freedom on the campus. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Recall, it was just days ago that we pointed out Cornell professor and friend of Zero Hedge Dave Collum was publicly shamed by Cornell for daring to express the “wrong” opinion about current events on social media. Now, there’s a second Cornell professor coming under fire for his critique of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson has challenged any student or faculty member to a public debate about the Black Lives Matter movement after he says liberals on campus have launched a “coordinated effort” to have him fired from his job. At least 15 emails from alumni have been sent to the dean, demanding that action be taken, according to Fox News.

“There is an effort underway to get me fired at Cornell Law School, where I’ve worked since November 2007, or if not fired, at least denounced publicly by the school,” Jacobson wrote on Thursday. “I condemn in the strongest terms any insinuation that I am racist.

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Anonymous Berkeley Professor Shreds BLM Injustice Narrative; Berkeley Responds, by Tyler Durden

Posted on June 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

It is amazing that a professor at UC Berkeley, of all places, would release, even anonymously, a letter criticizing Black Lives Matter. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Update (06/13/2020): U.C. Berkeley’s history department has issued a statement regarding the anonymous letter, and instead of addressing – or inviting a vigorous debate over its content, Berkeley’s response validates one of the letter’s core claims that dissent outside “a tightly policed, narrow discourse” is not welcome.

“An anonymous letter has been circulating, purportedly written by a @UCBHistory professor. We have no evidence that this letter was written by a History faculty member,” the UC Berkeley History department tweeted Friday evening,” adding “We condemn this letter: it goes against our values as a department and our commitment to equity and inclusion.”

https://twitter.com/UCBHistory/status/1271608745047408641?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1271608745047408641&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fanonymous-berkeley-professor-shreds-blm-injustice-narrative-damning-stats-and-logic

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There Will Be Blowback, In Mostly Good Ways, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Posted on April 25, 2020 | 1 comment

At some point the pressure cooker explodes and people start thinking and acting for themselves and not according to the dictates of would-be dictators. That may lead to good things, today’s silver lining in the current clouds. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at aier.org:

Two months ago, it had been mandatory in my local grocery to use only shopping bags brought from home. Plastic bags were illegal by local ordinance. Then the virus hit. Suddenly the opposite was true. It was illegal to bring bags from home because they could spread disease. Plastic bags were mandatory. As a huge fan of plastic bags, I experienced profound Schadenfreude.

It’s amazing how the prospect of death clarifies priorities.

Before the virus, we indulged in all sorts of luxuries such as dabbling in dirtiness and imagining a world purified by bucolic naturalness. But when the virus hit, we suddenly realized that a healthy life really matters and that natural things can be very wicked. And then when government put everyone under house arrest and criminalized freedom itself, we realized many other things too. And we did it fast.

Lots of people are predicting how life will fundamentally change in light of our collective experience this last month. I agree but I don’t think it will turn out quite as people think. This whole period has been an unconscionable trauma for billions of people, wrecking lives far beyond what even the worst virus could achieve. I’m detecting enormous, unfathomable levels of public fury barely beneath the surface. It won’t stay beneath the surface for long.

Our lives in the coming years will be defined by forms of blowback in the wake of both the disease and the egregious policy response, as a much needed corrective. The thing is that you can’t take away everyone’s rights, put a whole people under house arrest, and abolish the rule of law without generating a response to that in the future.

1. Blowback Against Media

I’m a long-time fan of the New York Times. Jeer if you want but I’ve long admired their reporting, their professionalism, their steady hand, their first draft of history, even if I don’t share the paper’s center-left political bent.

Something about this virus caused the paper to go completely off the rails. In early March, they began to report on it as if it were the Black Death, suggesting not just closing schools and businesses but actually calling for a complete totalitarian policy. It was shocking and utterly preposterous. The guy who wrote that article has a degree in rhetoric from Berkeley and yet he was calling the shots on the paper’s entire response to disease on a national level. They’ve gone so far as to falsify dates in their reporting in order to manipulate the timeline (I called them out on a case in point; the paper made the change but never admitted the error.)

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The luxury of apocalypticism, by Brendan O’Neill

Posted on March 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

The elite want us to all to be Chicken Littles, which will make it easier for them to implement their deadly schemes. From Brendan O’Neill at spiked-online.com:

The elites want us to panic about Covid-19 – we must absolutely refuse to do so.

People’s refusal to panic has been a great source of frustration for the establishment in recent years. ‘The planet is burning’, they lie, in relation to climate change, and yet we do not weep or wail or even pay very much attention. ‘I want you to panic’, instructs the newest mouthpiece of green apocalypticism, Greta Thunberg, and yet most of us refuse to do so. A No Deal Brexit would unleash economic mayhem, racist pogroms and even a pandemic of super-gonorrhoea, they squealed, incessantly, like millenarian preachers balking at the imminent arrival of the lightning bolt of final judgement, and yet we didn’t flinch. We went to work. We went home. We still supported Brexit.

Our skittish elites have been so baffled, infuriated in fact, by our calm response to their hysterical warnings that they have invented pathologies to explain our unacceptable behaviour. The therapeutic language of ‘denialism’ is used to explain the masses’ refusal to fret over climate change. Environmentalists write articles on ‘the psychology of climate-change denial’, on ‘the self-deception and mass denial’ coursing through this society that refuses to flatter or engage with the hysteria of the eco-elites. Likewise, the refusal of voters to succumb to the dire, hollow warnings of the ferociously anti-Brexit wing of the establishment was interpreted by self-styled experts as a psychological disorder. ‘[This is] people taking action for essentially psychological reasons, irrespective of the economic cost’, said one professor.

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Peer-Reviewed Journal Publishes Article on Academic Resistance to 9/11 Truth, by David A. Hughes

Posted on March 12, 2020 | 2 comments

This is a long but very worthwhile article on the academic embrace of the official 9/11 narrative and its refusal to consider inconsistencies in that narrative and what those inconsistencies might mean. From David A. Hughes at lewrockwell.com:

The consequences of the terrorist attacks of 11th September, 2001 have been catastrophic. In addition to the estimated 3,000 people who lost their lives during the attacks themselves, millions more have been killed in the “War on Terror”; there has been an aggressive worldwide expansion of US military power, including the introduction of drone warfare; the MENA region has been destabilized, leading to massive flows of migrants; international law has been violated (most egregiously with the Iraq War); and domestically there has been a draconian scaling back on civil liberties, including historically unprecedented levels of surveillance, arbitrary detention, and torture. All of this has worked to undermine the post-1945 liberal internationalist order and has contributed to mounting concerns about liberal democracies being transformed into police states. It would not be difficult to defend the claim that “9/11” represents the most significant political event of the post-Cold War era. 

These consequences rest on the fundamental premise that the United States was attacked by Al Qaeda on 9/11. Upon that premise are erected the moral and legal bases of the “War on Terror,” i.e. that “civilized” states have the right to defend themselves preemptively against terrorist barbarism in an age where terrorism is networked, transnational, and more threatening than ever before owing to new technologies of destruction. Yet, what if the fundamental premise were false? As Benjamin observes, 

Were this claim ever to be proved false – were it ever to be shown that the United States was not in fact attacked by “others” on 9/11 but rather attacked itself (or let itself be attacked) for the purpose of blaming others and justifying international war – then its war would not be one of self-defence but of pre-meditated and carefully camouflaged aggression (2017: 373).

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How woke illiberalism is killing the academy, by Benjamin Schwarz

Posted on March 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

Is what is perhaps the US’s best university faltering in its commitment to free speech? From Benjamin Schwarz at spiked-online.org:

The University of Chicago was always a bastion of free speech. But even there, freedom is now under threat.

From its founding in 1890, the University of Chicago has occupied a singular place among American universities. Lacking the ancient lineages and social cachet of the Ivy League schools (Chicago welcomed women and Jews at a time when Harvard, et al, excluded the former and imposed strict quotas on the latter), Chicago, which is consistently ranked among the world’s top 10 universities, has always been known for its fierce intellectualism. ‘I think the one place where I have been that is most like ancient Athens’, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once declared, ‘is the University of Chicago’. Indeed, whereas the Ivy League universities, Stanford and their ilk, admitted – and continue to admit – their undergraduates based on such qualities as athletic ability, family connections, and that vague attribute known as ‘leadership’, students came to Chicago because they prized what it still venerates as ‘the life of the mind’. (Chicago’s students score on average higher on the SAT – a national standardised test that assesses academic aptitude – than do those at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford).

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Irrelevant Details, by Robert Gore

Posted on March 6, 2020 | 50 comments

You’ll be on your own during the Age of Chaos.

Once upon a time there was a village right next to a volcano. The villagers spent much of their time watching the volcano, which perpetually sputtered, smoked, and fumed. When they first awakened, they’d look up to it. At night they’d watch its lava glow against the dark sky. A special class of villagers instructed them on how to interpret the volcano and how they must live their lives to propitiate it.

Much of what the village produced was gathered by the special class, an offering tax that was supposedly left in a secret spot at the foot of the volcano (somehow the special class always lived better than everyone else). Unusually intense rumblings of the volcano terrified the villagers. The special class would tell them what village security demanded—usually higher offering taxes and more power for the special class—to prevent an eruption. One day there was an earthquake. A fissure opened and swallowed the entire village and its special class. The volcano never erupted.

Turn on the news and chances are the story concerns the special class. History books are mostly chronicles of the special class—their wars, machinations, depredations, follies, all-too-rare wisdom, monuments to themselves, and the invasions and revolutions that occasionally upend them. It goes far beyond propaganda or brainwashing, it is simply an ingrained fixation, accepted by virtually everyone, that attention must always be on the special class and its volcano—government.

We look up to the special class and their governments and ignore that which will render them irrelevant details—the tectonic shifts below. They perpetuate the illusion of control and many of the subjugated want to believe, but the illusion has always given way to failure and irrelevancy and always will.

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