The Campus Inquisition at Evergreen State College
Students are being steeped in an ideology and attitude in which racism in the name of social justice is accepted. That’s dangerous for the nation.
The events surrounding Professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College are receiving national attention. We covered the story originally
The short version is that Weinstein has become the target of students after he wrote an email objecting to a campus movement to exclude whites for a day, as impermissible racism. His email was polite and thoughtful.
Yet the reaction was vitriolic, as we covered in the post Evergreen State leftist professor stunned as SJWs viciously turn on him. Here is video of the professor being confronted:
[Update – YouTube took down the widely shared video above based on its “bullying” policy, which makes no sense. Another, longer version is available here, as of 6-5-2017.]
https://youtu.be/LTnDpoQLNaY
Weinstein explained on Tucker Carlson “I’m a deeply progressive person. I’m troubled by what this implies about the current state of the left.”
Weinstein tweeted out a cartoon by a friend explaining the situation:
This video, via the College Fix, shows how the protests spiraled beyond targeting Weinstein, into black power anti-white racist chants:
— “FUCK YOU, AND FUCK THE POLICE!”
— “Whiteness is the most violent fuckin’ system to ever breathe!”
— “I’m tired of white people talking about what black and brown people need.”
— “These white-ass faculty members need to be holding HIM, and HIM, and ALL these people accountable!”
— “FUCK YOU [President] GEORGE [Bridges], we don’t wanna listen to a GODDAMN thing you have to say! No, you shut the fuck up!”
— “I’m tellin’ you, you’re speakin’ to your ancestor, all right? We been here before you. We built these cities, we had civilization way before you ever had … comin’ out your caves.”
— “You have the fucking nerve to, like, fucking dehumanize our (unintelligible)!”
(Language Warning)
Blacks students at Evergreen State College in response to a professor objecting to having a "no whites day." THIS is racism, period. pic.twitter.com/SLsYXcLP9w
— John doe (@juhhhjgghk) May 28, 2017
What’s happening at Evergreen is similar to what we’ve seen at other campuses. I’ve compared it to the Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution, The new Cultural Revolution on Campuses:
The events of the past year on campuses have been beyond disturbing.
We are witnessing nothing less than a cultural purge of dissenting views on a wide range of topics in the name of social justice. No disagreement is tolerated, not even the slightest deviation. That purge has been going on for many years, but seems to have intensified and is turning on speakers, professors and fellow students….
The purge isn’t just shout-downs and shut-downs. It’s a demand that professors and other students not deviate one iota from the prevailing campus views, lest they be publicly shamed as racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and so on. Those labels can be devastating to careers, and fear of being labeled even when not warranted is enough to shut up most people on campus….
The tactics on campus have not reached the violence of the Cultural Revolution, but the attacks on speakers, professors and students deemed ideologically unacceptable, and the destruction of politically incorrect history, are eerily similar….
As I mentioned in that post, no historical analogy is precise, though I think the Cultural Revolution is a good analogy
NYU Prof. Jonathan Haidt, writing at Heterodox Academy, a faculty website devoted to diversity of thought on campuses, has another analogy. What’s going on at campuses, as demonstrated by the Weinstein case, is a religious heresy trial, and the religion is Diversity, The blasphemy case against Bret Weinstein, and its four lessons for professors:
In the wake of the violence at Middlebury and Berkeley, and in the aftermath of the faculty mob that coalesced to condemn gender studies professor Rebecca Tuvel, many commentators have begun analyzing the new campus culture of intersectionality as a form of fundamentalist religion including public rituals with more than a passing resemblance to witch-hunts. The second-clearest case of these dynamics that I have ever seen is currently underway at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington.
After reviewing multiple similar student protests centered on racial diversity issues, Haidt finds several lessons here:
There are several lessons that American professors can draw from these three events:
1) Never object to a diversity policy publicly. It is no longer permitted. You may voice concerns in a private conversation, but if you do it in a public way, you are inviting a visit from a mob or punishment from an administrator.
2) Do not assume that being politically progressive will protect you (as Weinstein and the Christakises found out). Whatever your politics, you are eventually going to say or do something that will be interpreted incorrectly and ungenerously. Your intentions don’t matter (as Dean Spellman found out at CMC.) This is especially true if your university offers students training in the detection of microaggressions.
3) If a mob comes for you, there is a good chance that the president of your university will side with the mob and validate its narrative (as the presidents at Yale and Evergreen have done, although the presidents at Middlebury and Claremont McKenna did not).
4) If a mob comes for you, the great majority of its members will be non-violent. However, given the new standard operating procedure (which I described in a recent Chronicle article entitled “Intimidation is the New Normal”) you must assume that one or more of its members is willing to use violence against you, and you can assume that many members of the mob believe that violence against you is morally justifiable.
This video shows the “witch” (i.e. Weinstein) being called out and told to sit down by students at a campus meeting in the presence of the college president:
Eric Weinstein, Prof. Weinstein’s brother who has been tweeting to call attention to the situation, astutely summed up what is going on – this is an Intersectional Shakedown:
The two videos below show the college President being berated into subservience to the crowd, which shouts repeated racial grievances which amount to demands for re-education of faculty and students with workshops, and demands for the administration to assuage students’ insecurities.
The videos are long, but watch them, and and you will see an intolerance and refusal to listen to others much like a witch trial. (added) John Paul Pagano has storified the first video below:
https://youtu.be/f3CRVLVGa5E?t=14m59s
https://youtu.be/DypKqdGK69Y?t=4m51s
No analogy is perfect, but regardless of historical analogy, what’s happening on campuses should disturb anyone who cares about education and the emerging college generation.
Students are being steeped in an ideology and attitude in which racism in the name of social justice is accepted. That’s a dangerous situation for the nation.
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Comments
I guess I better get a tan. LOL!
We have lost our youth attempting to become educated to liberal professors at our Universities. Liberal platform is steeped in Diversity UNLESS that diversity differs from theirs.
[class] diversity (i.e. judging people by the “color of their skin”) is a policy conceived under the Pro-Choice quasi-religious/moral doctrine that is a clear and progressive threat to human and civil rights, and a first-order forcing of catastrophic anthropogenic political correctness.
A solution to this problem is to revand our laws top to bottom to make everything color blind, and to base all placement solely based on who is best qualified. End all affirmative action, it is inherently racist.
Second, start prosecuting brown racists in the same manner we have prosecuted white racists.
Third, protests which do not infringe on other peoples civil rights should be allowed, those which involve assault, property damage and looting should be harshly dealt with, one bullet at a time.
Why the Hell are these students still there?
It’s only a matter of time before professors and administrators start getting dragged out onto the quad and beaten.
Take back your damn school. Expel these thugs.
Alas, the verbs you used…Dragged, beaten and take, expel…require action. College administrators are not designed for such. Those are the arena for men.
1) They are there because the professors and administrators admire and encourage this behavior.
2) You say that like the professors and administrators being beaten in the quad would be a bad thing.
3) #2 follows #1 as the night the day. I will watch and enjoy from a distance. If they get close, they may find that the rest of the world is not so tolerant of riots and assault.
I concur with your thoughts, and have to admit I have divided emotions on this entire story. Sure, what happened is reprehensible, but that liberal prof has spent his entire career enabling the power structure which has always been working to bring this about, so this is just a bunch of chickens coming home to roost.
Same goes for Evergreen U – it’s a piece of garbage uni, and this country would be a far better place if it were to close its doors and see all of its buildings demolished. Events like this bring that fortunate day ever closer to fruition.
Exactly so. Having been encouraged in antisocial behavior at every point in their lives, the entitled snowflakes, as they have throughout their lives, pitch a temper tantrum to get their way. Their way is no more than that of the 2 year old.
Gone are the times when children were punished for misbehavior, – taught the acceptable norms of adulthood. “oh, don’t spank them, you’ll hurt their self esteem” They have no self esteem. They’re anti social and should be treated such.
But, as said previously, the colleges have encouraged this behavior and aren’t adult enough to stop it.
Why the Hell are these students still there?
Rather, why the hell is that President still there?
Depressing answer: the blue-state Legislature of Washington hasn’t got the guts to immediately can him for failure to defend Professor Weinstein.
In being intellectually honest here, one has to point out that Evergreen doesn’t have grades or majors.
I’ve defended the institution in conservative arguments because I’ve met several brilliant people who are true independent thinkers. However it is a largely bastion for the bots you see in these videos to burn time when they aren’t out protesting something or other.
What do people who attend such a school do for a living afterwards? Or are these places populated with the children of the wealthy who were never going to need jobs anyway?
When Prof Weinstein was on Carlson, Tucker made the comment … “I guess you voted for Hillary” to which the good professor referred to his history of voting “progressive” … meaning he voted for Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.
Just more of the tribalism that we are descending into.
The so-called “right” is galloping right along with it.
Rags, remember the infamous Tea Party sign: “No matter what it says, you’ll say it’s racist.”
Only fools and cowards continue to play a game that offers no slightest chance of winning.
Nicely demonstrating my point.
I realize the long term consequences aren’t good, but I find it hard to work up much sympathy for colleges suffering from what I would call a self-inflicted wound.
Just remember that there are good people here caught in the crossfires in academia, and quite a few of them frequent this site.
So what? Seriously? The world of Academia is destroying itself and heading towards complete irrelevancy (focused training is better for jobs anyways). The argument used to be that higher education produced superior citizens, but if THIS is what it produces, why should it exist at all? Doesn’t it just become a giant leech on society that has no real purpose?
Refusing to talk about it and pretending everything is fine doesn’t help anyone in or out of the educational establishment.
“We demand that the video created for Day of Absence and Day of Presence that was stolen by white supremacists and edited to expose and ridicule the students and staff be taken down by the administration by this Friday.”
Next steps:
Based on conversations with the Attorney General’s office, the most likely course of action requires an investigation. We commit to launching an extensive forensic investigation of the theft of this video and to determining who stole it from the student. If that investigation yields a suspect, we will seek criminal charges against the individual in consultation with the Attorney General.
About 30-40 years ago, left wing academics invented courses to stoke hatred against white heterosexual men: African American Studies; Queer Studies; Hispanic Studies; Feminist Studies; Black Transexual Lesbian Studies. OK, I made the last one up. But nobody could be surprised to open a course catalog and see that offered as a course.
So after 30-40 years, some segment of almost two generations of college students have been indoctrinated in this anti-white ideology. (I’ve used the word “Anglophobia” a couple of times to describe it.) However, you don’t have to actually take the courses to understand that the ideology permeates the entire campus. I like the religion analogy. Humans, I think, want to believe in something bigger than themselves to give their life meaning, and traditional religion is now held in utter contempt by most academics and intellectuals. So they are substituting this anti-white ideology (and environmentalism) for traditional religion to make them think they are doing something higher than themselves. It’s twisted that at this moment in history we are more tolerant and more diverse than ever, yet people want to believe that everybody who is not a white male is a victim of some sort of white oppression. It’s an insane delusion. But that’s where we are.
Even sadder is that because this ideology has been under development for so long, parents and even grandparents are passing it on to their children. Presumably teachers in K-12 government run schools are passing it on to students, too.
It’s actually causing people to re-segregate. Why wouldn’t it? If you are teaching people they are not individuals but members of various race/gender victim groups oppressed by whites, why would they want to associate with any white people? I saw a story about black and minority students in CA demanding whites be excluded from their dorms.
This rot has been eating at the foundations of American civilization for at least fifty years, and is solidly ensconced at governmental level, where it is hidden under the benign name “Affirmative Action”. AA’s sole justification lies in the postulate that there are different kinds of racism—good and bad. Good racism is “good” because it can be used to oppose bad racism. But anybody with a lick of sense knows that it’s all racism, and all disgusting.
As long as college administrators are willing to play along with this vicious perversion, schools will remain unsalvageable.
Fortunately, I see little sign that this cancer is spreading too much into the real world. In my area, the blacks are no more surly or hostile than usual. And foreign blacks—recent immigrants from Haiti or Africa—show no signs of it at all; probably because they haven’t spent their entire lives wallowing in an atmosphere of resentment, entitlement and greed.
I don’t know about that cartoon, though—”I’d be interested in ANYONE with an actual argument” is not the sort of thing I think I’d hear from any Progressive.
“You may voice concerns in a private conversation, but if you do it in a public way, you are inviting a visit from a mob or punishment from an administrator.”
No. You may *not* voice your concerns in a private conversation without the possibility of your happy, nodding, agreeing conversation-pair going over to the administration a few minutes later to swear out a complaint against you for things you may or may not have said. And, of course, the administration of your university will believe the complainer and pronounce you guilty before you even know about the accusation. (Or perhaps they will not even *tell* you what the accusation is, because it’s too terrible and horrible for anyone to imagine.)
This is Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” at work, leftist fascism.
Maybe the cure is a campaign of charges again half of the administrators would cure this disease?
If you study a little bit of Chinese history of the modern era, you will recognize this in spades. Here is the Red Guard of Mao’s Cultural Revolution come to life before our very eyes.
There is a good analogy to all of this-the book “Frankenstein”.
If this continues, then you can expect an uprising, complete with torches, as they come to destroy the monster. How bloody will that become before it all ends?
Academia is slowly losing control of the monster they’ve raised.
Evergreen STATE is a public university. It is time for the taxpayers of the State of Washington as well as their elected representatives to step in. They should say clean up your act or you lose funding.
Alternatively, the Dept of Justice could file a lawsuit charging Evergreen State with racism and the denial of civil rights. It was done to many Southern universities in the 60s and 70s to desegregate them. Given the propensity of “progressive” schools to encourage re-segregation, it is time to force their hand.
Maybe all these academia types see the writing on the wall: huuuuuge student loan debt, calls for free tuition (what will the administrators do then?), worthless degrees, etc. etc. Everyone’s so angry and frustrated, it truly seems to me.
From Weasel Zippers, the cure for Evergreen nonsense: ID the students so that their parents know what they are up to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6e4gba/students_furious_over_release_of_video_showing/
I would guess that a lot of the entitlement and verbal abuse these students are displaying are the result of bad parenting.
When you see your child as your “best friend”, you don’t discipline your kid no matter how rude and obnoxious they are. Then guess what? Your kid grows up to be an a**hole.
The saddest and most horrifying part of this entire fiasco is listening to the functionally illiterate student at about the 3:35 mark in this video, trying to read their “demands”. This is college education?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO1agIlLlhg
This would not be news worthy if not for the fact that the overwhelming majority of patriotic Americans condemn the extreme racism displayed by these out of control ‘students’. There are plenty of majority black, socialist countries that these people will be more comfortable ‘living’ in. I say that with their expulsion notices that they get a free ONE WAY ticket back to their ‘first civilization’ of their choice.
The chickens are a coming home to roost.
I know there’s no reaching these ‘students’, but if I could, I’d have them watch the 1940 film ‘The Mortal Storm’, with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan, and then ask them if they recognized anything; because the film portrays Germany in the 1930s, and there is one particular scene of an interaction between a professor and a group of Nazi-inspired students, that is strikingly similar to what we see in the Evergreen videos.
I would say further, that the only difference between the scene in the film and the Evergreen videos is that, in the film, the Nazi students are far more polite in their challenges to the professor, than the students at Evergreen.
I don’t see students, I see thugs and bullies, and when they reach that stage, they’re beyond reasoning, so that leaves only one more way to deal with them.
How appropriate all this is in the year of the 100th anniversary of the Communist Revolution in Russia.
The leader of the pack of wolves just paid a mere $8 million for the home he was renting two blocks from the WH. He is behind the national zeitgeist of hatred, rampant racism against whites, anarchy and disruption. Smokin’ Slim and his “Organizing for Action” claims 30,000+ soldiers. Remember in ’08 when obama said he would create a civilian force larger and better equipped than the US military. Well, check George Soros accounts and see where his millions are being spent in support of the Obama wrecking crew. It will take violence to stop it. Maybe Bill Ayers can give the good guys some tips. Oh, wait, he’s with obama.
We seem to be reaching the point in the Cultural Revolution where speech was so carefully monitored the only safe things to say were quotes taken directly from Mao’s Little Red Book.
People during the Cultural Revolution in China used to have *entire conversations* made up of statements from the Little Red Book because nothing else was safe to say. Things reached the point where the ‘safe things’ to say changed so frequently that people were getting denounced – and occasionally killed and eaten – for things that had been acceptable just a few weeks or months previously. Sh!t got weird.