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Political Correctness Tag

Intersectionality is all the rage these days, but what is it? The Factual Feminist, Christina Hoff Sommers explains. "If you have wondered why there are so many millennials on campus telling people to check their privilege, demanding trigger warnings, calling people out for micro aggressions, and retreating to safe spaces, the Factual Feminist has the answer: Intersectional feminism," writes AEI. Are safe spaces part of one massive conspiracy theory? Is intersectionality a cult?

The other day we showed the full Rebel Pundit video of the anti-Trump protest on the streets of Chicago. It was not hard to guess which segment would go viral. It is this woman demanding that the videographer (I think it was Andrew Marcus for that segment) either leave or dismantle his white male privilege. Now it is viral on Twitter: https://youtu.be/Vat_w4QV_uM https://twitter.com/PotluckPolitico/status/711327502371831809 Language Warning

Happy Human Achievement Hour! The good folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute organize the hour-long event each year.
What is Human Achievement Hour? Human Achievement Hour is CEI's annual celebration of human progress! During this hour, people around the world pay tribute to human innovations that allows us to live better, fuller lives, and defend our basic human right to use energy to improve the quality of life of all people.
  • Human Achievement Hour is the counter argument to the World Wide Fund for Nature's Earth Hour, where participants symbolically renounce the environmental impacts of modern technology by turning off their lights for an hour.
  • Symbolically or not, Earth Hour does little to protect the environment and is a misguided effort that completely ignores how modern technology allows societies to develop new and more sustainable practices, helping people around the world be more eco-friendly and better conserve our natural resources.
  • Instead of looking to the “dark ages,” like Earth Hour, Human Achievement Hour promotes the idea that we should be looking to technology and innovation to help solve environmental challenges and problems.

I haven't covered this before, but there was a movement at Harvard Law School to remove three sheaths of wheat from its shield, because the sheaths of wheat represent the family crest of the slave-owning Royall Family. I've probably seen the shield a million times, and never once until this controversy associated it with the Royall Family, much less slavery. They were just sheaths of wheat. Background music at most. But nothing is non-political anymore. After research revealed the origins of the symbol, a movement arose calling itself Royall Must Fall. HLS Dean Martha Minow announced the decision in an email today (and an announcement), which reads in part:

One question I frequently get is something along the lines of "How did college campuses get this way?" And by "this way" people refer to the leftist intolerance of opposing viewpoints, now expressed through the misnomered "social justice" movement and Social Justice Warriors. My response is pretty consistent, that we abandoned the campuses and what you are seeing now was one or two generations in the making. What you are seeing play out now in the intolerance at Vassar related to Israel -- and many other campuses such as Oberlin College -- is just a variation on a theme that has been growing for decades. A reader, who is a Vassar alum, send me an interesting historical anecdote. William F. Buckley, Jr.'s was invitated to be commencement speaker at Vassar in 1980.

Conservative author and speaker Ben Shapiro has been banned from making an appearance at California State University Los Angeles by the school's president. Shapiro would apparently present too great a threat to the safe spaces of CSULA's sensitive snowflake students. Christine Rousselle reported at Townhall:
Conservative Writer Ben Shapiro Banned from CSULA Early Tuesday morning, conservative writer Ben Shapiro revealed on Twitter that his planned speech on February 25 at California State University-Los Angeles had been canceled by the university's president.

On Saturday morning we posted a brief compilation of recent events suggesting Twitter might be targeting conservatives, Is Twitter Silencing Conservatives? The impetus Saturday was the suspension of Robert Stacy McCain's account (@rsmccain).  McCain blogs at TheOtherMcCain.com and last February published a book, Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature.  That followed de-verification of Milo Yiannopoulos's account (@Nero).  Like McCain, Yiannopoulos is a prominent critic of modern feminism and the Gordian Knot of accusations and recriminations known as "Gamergate."  Oversimplified, Gamergate involves issues about the poor treatment of women in the gaming community.

Twitter, an invaluable news aggregator when properly run and used, has seemingly taken aim at conservatives and those advocating conservative causes. In early January, Twitter stripped Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero on Twitter) of his "verification," saying he violated the anti-harassment Terms of Service. https://twitter.com/Nero/status/685601754654871552

"Social justice" activism at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, is becoming self-parody, and not in a good way. We have covered extensively the anti-Israel activism that has led to anti-Semitic incidents in 2014 and 2016. Among other things, in 2014 Jewish students who stood up at a campus-wide forum were mocked and jeered by a raucous crowd of students and faculty, a class was picketed and a professor forced to cross a picket line of ululating students because the course involved a trip to Israel (and the West Bank), Students for Justice in Palestine posted a Nazi cartoon on social media, and pro-Israel displays were vandalized. Just recently, a Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolution campaign kick-off by SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace, followed by a faculty-sponsored event at which Israel was accused of engaging in an experiment to "stunt" Palestinian bodies, led to anti-Semitic messages on campus Yik-Yak. As if that were not bad enough, the social justice warriors at Vassar now have turned their sights on a feminist professor who allegedly did not use proper pronouns for transgender students.

The unexpected news that Antonin Scalia died was a punch in the gut. It reminded me of when I first heard that Andrew Breitbart had died -- my wife saw it on Twitter and asked whether it was true. Her comment about Breitbart applies equally to Scalia, A personal note on the death of Andrew Breitbart:
Since my wife called this morning to let me know of Andrew’s death, it has been hard to focus on anything else.  In her words, we don’t have that many bright media lights, and to lose him hurts.
Scalia was more than just a Justice. He was the embodiment of resistance to liberal political correctness and social justice war perpetrated through the judiciary rather than the electorate. I never met Scalia, but I heard him speak once at the Justinian Society in Providence, Rhode Island. He was larger than life, had total command of the room packed with 150 or more lawyers, and was incredibly self-deprecating. And we all laughed so hard at times it's a miracle no one choked on lunch.

An eight-year Marine Corps veteran his wife have filed suit against their daughter’s high school principal, vice-principal, school district and board of education for violating her First Amendment rights by indoctrinating her in Islamic thought. The case filed in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland is captioned Wood v. Charles County Public Schools, et al. The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Their daughter and her fellow students were instructed to write out the Islamic creed “Shahada,” which says, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” When recited by non-Muslims, the creed amounts to conversion to Islam. Students were also required to memorize and recite the Five Pillars of Islam and were subjected to disparaging teachings about Christianity. “Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian,” one worksheet read.

While Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had many well-known speeches and quotes, I think it's fair to say that his "I Have a Dream" speech is his most famous. And in that most famous speech, the following line may be the most famous:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
In a campus world of affirmative action based in part on the color of one's skin, and a hyper-sensitive microaggression mania, I've wondered how long it would take for Dr. King's most famous line to be repudiated. There is an irreconcilable tension between Dr.King's call to not base the evaluation of people on the color of their skin, and the modern progressive demand that skin color (and other immutable characteristics) be a central focus of everything.

Three weeks ago the Huffington Post published an article detailing the distress of transgendered parents who breastfeed, "The Troubling Erasure of Trans Parents Who Breastfeed." The article describes the way gendered pronouns and attitudes are excluding men who nurse, and the legalities associated with challenging the heretofore female-centric endeavor of breastfeeding. In particular, women who have had chest surgery and now identify as men, described how they are made to feel unwelcome in breastfeeding circles. Here is one example from Canada:

Does this go too far? Of course it does. Comments by Donald Trump about a temporary ban on Muslim immigration, which almost certainly never will happen even if there were to be a President Trump, hardly compare to round-up for extermination. There is no equivalent -- fortunately -- of Kristallnacht against Muslims in the U.S. The few instances of violence are being prosecuted, and one is still far more likely to be the victim of religious hate crimes for being Jewish. The Times of San Diego reports, USD Professor Leads Silent Protest Against Anti-Muslim Rhetoric:
A religious studies professor at the University of San Diego who is concerned about growing anti-Muslim rhetoric has started a silent protest, with students and faculty wearing yellow stars marked “Muslim.” Bahar Davary, associate professor of theology and religious studies, came up with the idea during her class “Islamic Faith and Practice,” an introduction to Islam, and her students suggested several designs.

William F. Buckley Jr. had a great disdain for entrenched, self-perpetuating elites epitomized by thefaculty of Harvard:
I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
In light of our prior reporting on the "Demands" and protests at Yale, and considering this new video, I'd like to expand on Buckley's theme:

Many college campuses are seeing sets of “Demands” issued by students to administrations, often seeking to suppress speech the students deem offensive and to increase faculty and student affirmative action policies and programs. Hamilton College students using the name "The Movement" recently set what was believed to be a record 83 Demands. At least one of the Demands, for a "President of Color," was promptly ignored by the college when it named its new President recently. Oberlin College students, however, may be about to set a new record for length if not number of Demands. Oberlin, a self-proclaimed progressive institution, has seen racial strife on campus in recent years, including The Great Oberlin College Racism Hoax of 2013 perpetrated primarily by a progressive white student trying to get the campus talking about race. Even after the hoax was exposed, the resulting campus conflict was exploited to advance “even more extreme policies.” (You can listen to my explanation of the hoax and result here.) More recent strife on campus involved protests by the Black Student Union over the quality of food in the Afrikan Heritage House. Oberlin also is known for non-racial activism, such at the "trigger warning" protests against the appearance of Christina Hoff Sommers. A student tipped us off that starting last night students began circulating and signing a 14-page list of 50 separate demands, in the name of the Black Students Union (BSU).