Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College – Did Trump win spark campus ‘dissociative fugue’ against the bakery?
With a one-day pause in witness testimony, a chance to explore some theories of the case, and explain some open issues.
Yesterday concluded Day 8 of witness testimony in Gibson Bros. v. Oberlin College. The events giving rise to the lawsuit have been said to represent “the worst of identity politics.” You can read about some of the background on this case here.
Today was a day off from witness testimony due a a prior commitment of the Judge. For those of you who have not been following along, here are our prior trial posts:
- Juror perceptions of reputation and social media emerge in questioning
- Opening Statements: Claims of War and Peace
- Trial Day 1 – “It was a mob mentality out there”
- Trial Day 2 – “I don’t know” may come back to haunt the defense
- Trial Day 3 – To “unleash the students” or not, that was the question
- Trial Day 4 – As protests grew, Mrs. Gibson was “very nervous and afraid”
- Trial Day 5 – 90-year-old Allyn W. Gibson testifies “some threats made to us”
- Trial Day 6 – What’s a bakery worth?
- Trial Day 7 — Damages Expert says Show Gibson’s The Money!
- Trial Day 8 — “my dad was going to pass away labeled as a racist”
Given that sitting through a complex legal manifesto in person like the Gibson Bros. v. Oberlin College can be “Zen Buddhism” at times and “Zen Garbage-ism” at others, it is good to take a step back from the courtroom bubble at times and take a deep breath. So put up with my ramblings below, as I try to make some serious sense of some things, and have some fun with some others.
One caution: If you think of this civil case as the simple good vs. evil, take a step back yourself. This case has a little taint of that in it, but it is still in a courtroom, and the legal sense of good and evil and the cultural determination of such opposites, operate in different galaxies. So as much as people think this is the MAGA hat people against the SJWs movement, not really. It’s more about the basic big bully accused of beating up on the little guy. But beating them up with the type of bats we haven’t seen much before.
So, here’s some thoughts to clear up your mind and mine:
Why Isn’t Gibson the Younger Being Called to the Stand.
A lot of people have been wondering why Allyn D. Gibson, the guy in his 30s who worked the cash register at the store and tussled with the shoplifters outside Gibson’s Bakery & Market on Nov. 9, 2016., is not going to be called to the witness stand by his family’s lawyers.
This is what I have gathered as the reasoning for that. First, the case is not about the shoplifting itself legally; that has been decided and adjudicated and specific details of the crime and protests are not allowed to be used as evidence in general. The plaintiffs’ attorneys figure that they have already gotten into evidence through police testimony that Allyn D. was beat up in the park across the street from the store by the three Oberlin College African-American students after they tried to steal wine, and his father yesterday testified as to the specific racist libel allegations against Oberlin College. Plus, the grandson of 90-yer-old Allyn W. has little usable evidence about the key parts of this case, i.e., the school’s role in promoting the racists views of Gibson’s through their alleged activity with flyers passed out at the protests and posting a college student senate resolution accusing the store of racism the day after the shoplifting occurred.
The plaintiffs also figure that Allyn D. has a good chance of being called as an “adverse witness” by the Oberlin College side, and they are wary of having him hit the stand more than once. So they figure having him called as an adverse witness is safer than having him open to cross-examination twice. He still may be heard, but not in the way most expected.
Where is All the Political Upheaval Testimony?
I have had to answer these questions of political ideology about this over and over again, but again, to understand the basis of this case, you have to get your mind more legal that political.
These two pieces of evidence that matter, and not much else does in this civil case: 1) The student senate resolution says “Gibson’s has a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment of students and resident alike” and 2) the flyer passed out at the protests says, “A member of our community was assaulted by the owner of this establishment” and “The is a racist establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION.”
[Flyer handed out by protesters outside Gibson’s Bakery]
The judge isn’t allowing any speculation as to what political ideology these statement belong to, and rightly so. The plaintiffs have hinted at that aspect of the case, and may find ways to brings such speculation into the minds of the jury during cross-examination of the college administrators and students expected to testify next week. But don’t expect the judge to allow too much of that.
One theme that will be raised by the plaintiffs in cross next week, however, is how the school looks like it is in the throws of a personality crisis. What that means, and what David Gibson raised in is testimony yesterday, was that the school was having issues with its more radical minority students, and used the racial anger over shoplifting accusations against Gibson’s to deflect that student anger away from the school. We’ll get more into that as it comes into play from the witness stand when the defense puts on its case.
The Fugue State
A psychology professor I know told me he thought all the problems Oberlin College is going through right now on this case have to do with being in a “fugue state.” Like you (more than likely), I had no idea what it was and he pointed to me to this definition:
Dissociative fugue (formerly called psychogenic fugue) is a psychological state in which a person loses awareness of their identity or other important autobiographical information and also engages in some form of unexpected travel … The onset of a dissociative fugue state is usually sudden and follows a traumatic or highly stressful event … Dissociative fugues are associated with difficult events, such as natural disasters and wars, as well as severe marital or financial distress. In addition to confusion about identity, people experiencing a dissociative fugue state may also develop a new identity. Dissociation is generally thought of as a defense against trauma that helps people disconnect from extreme psychological distress. A dissociative fugue state is a condition in which a person may be mentally and physically escaping an environment that is threatening or otherwise intolerable.
The psychologist thought Oberlin College has been in a decades long huffy and snotty transition phase, and the election of Donald Trump and the racial protests that happened within a few days of each other were the highly stressful events that caused the confusion about their identity and pushed them over the edge. What’s the chance Oberlin College will mount a “personality crisis from dissociative fugue” defense?
Sherwood Anderson and the Railroad Walk to Cleveland
A famous northern Ohio writer who has slipped into obscurity was Sherwood Anderson, the early 1900s American leader in the change of the novel style. William Faulkner once said, “Sherwood Anderson was the father of all my works — and those of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. We were influenced by him. He showed us the way.”
His most famous work is “Winesburg, Ohio,” published in 1919, and some thought it might be a quaint story about the charms of a small Ohio town at the turn of the century. But it is not quaint at all; more about the cultural change of society in the early 1900s going from agricultural to industrial and how the common man couldn’t handle all that. Too much technology and too much big city life being forced on them. Most of the characters in this book felt so trapped and alienated that Anderson coined a term for them: “grotesques.”
Every day in court at this Gibson Bros. V. Oberlin College trial, I am able to look down at the house where Sherwood Anderson lost his mind more than 100 years ago and started writing. The house is just six blocks away from the Lorain County Courthouse in downtown Elyria.
On Thanksgiving Day of 1912, Anderson was the president of the American Merchants Company of Elyria and went into the office. He was known in town as a bon vivant business guy, and his wife Cornelia was at home preparing the Thanksgiving meal for the couple, her visiting out-of-town parents, and their three children. But he seemed rather odd at the office. His assistant, Frances Schute, also there that Thanksgiving morning, later noted that he was “acting queerly.”
He was 36, a captain of free market industry, had a beautiful wife and three children, and decided he couldn’t stand that life any more. I’ll let the Ohio literature expert Buckeye Muse take over story:
He turns and says to [Frances Schute], “I feel as though my feet were wet, and they keep getting wetter.” He writes a note for Shute to give to Cornelia, and then leaves his office, walking out into the clear, cold day. His note to Cornelia reads “Cornelia: There is a bridge over a river with cross ties before it. When I come to that I’ll be all right. I’ll write all day in the sun and the wind will blow through my hair. Sherwood.”
He walks past his factory [in Elyria] next to the Black River and continues eastward along the railroad tracks. The crossties, rails, and gravel make rough walking for a man in dress shoes. Three days later a Cleveland pharmacist sees a man enter his drugstore. Hair unkempt, his face covered with four days’ growth of beard, his shoes battered, his trousers covered with mud up to the knees, Sherwood Anderson tells the druggist he has no idea where he is or how he arrived there. He doesn’t even know his own name. For nearly four days this neatly dressed, handsome man in his suit has been walking along railroad tracks, sleeping in fields and nibbling on the detritus of the recent harvest: hard corn kernels and cast off apples he has scavenged from fields and orchards. He produces a pocket notebook and gives it to the pharmacist, who calls one of Anderson’s friends in the Cleveland area. He takes Anderson to Cleveland’s Huron Road Hospital for treatment, where he remains for several days and recovers from his ordeal.
Over time, Anderson moved to Chicago to become an advertising copy writer and his new life as novelist took off. “Winnesburg, Ohio” is still a standard to be read in English Lit classes, and no doubt Oberlin College students have been reading it this year.
But every day, as testimony begins, and I think of how unhinged people can be, I look down at that home below, and think of the crazy guy who walked on railroad track for 35 miles in 1912 and moved on with his life. BTW, I can see the RR tracks from the 7th floor window in the courthouse too.
But I also think about what Anderson wrote in the first chapter of “Winesburg, Ohio” while looking down from my perch at where he used to live. It was about an old guy who was lying in his bed dying off, and contemplating what life really means. This is what the old guy came up with:
“It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”
After listening to testimony each day, about young intellectuals deciding that people who make cookies and bagels and sell beer to them are racist, I look down at the house where this once famous writer lived, now old and rundown and in a bad neighborhood, and think of his theory of how the grotesques turn truths into falsehoods. And how this writer came to this conclusion in the time when Gibson’s Bakery was first doing business with Oberlin College.
Testimony will start again tomorrow with David Gibson’s cross-examination by the defense. If all goes as planned, the defense portion of witnesses will begin Friday.
Daniel McGraw is a freelance writer and author in Lakewood, Ohio. Follow him on Twitter @danmcgraw1
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Comments
A really interesting essay. Thanks. It does seem that Oberlin students and administration are not living in the same world as ordinary people like the Gibsons.
Yes, I gotta compliment you – an amazingly literary piece to find in the middle of a legal analysis! Well done!
I wonder if the college is so far gone that they will use the “orange man bad” defense.
Essentially claiming that the bakery is racist because the school and students say it is racist and truth doesn’t matter just that the school deserves to be clapped for and told they are so brave because they are woke and have the right feels where as those they proclaim their enemy deserved what they got and more.
It seems the unicorn haired Leftists have left reality and see themselves as heroes beating old people with bike locks and cheering on post birth abortions because the woman has a right to a body that is even no longer a part of her. It seems they have given their souls to their woke cause and are just lying hate filled bigots looking to destroy anyone who doesn’t follow and clap for them.
….So long story short, Gibson is the scapegoat for Oberlin’s sins and in condemning the Gibson bakery, Oberlin cleanses itself of suspicion?
That’s even worse than before.
I appreciate the literary reference and context regarding Sherwood Anderson — I’d never heard of him.
Doesn’t the basic psychology of this type of unhinged student mob action come down to a couple of simple concepts? Firstly, a type of lemming, groupthink conformity that is so prevalent on the Left, especially in academia and in the entertainment industry; the desire to “fit in” with the prevailing mindset and “belong,” and, not risk censure or ostracization by “rocking the boat,” ideologically-speaking; and, also, a self-congratulatory narcissism, in which the SJW jackboots revel in their self-perceived moral superiority and “wokeness.”
The school administrators may have acted with similar motivations as the student SJW jackboots, but, they also plainly wanted to use Gibson’s as a convenient sacrificial lamb in order to placate the SJW mob and to boost their own SJW credentials.
Against lemming groupthink and self-congratulatory narcissism, rationality, facts and fairness do not enter into the equation. Gibson’s was victimized by a trio of black shoplifters and declined Oberlin’s request to accede to the prosecutor dropping the charges; ergo, the business must be condemned and vilified as “racist.” That’s how the equation works out.
“Gibson’s was victimized by a trio of black shoplifters and declined Oberlin’s request”
More like extortion. That alone is damming.
Well it’s not just that, is it? We already have evidence in the record that Oberlin saw Gibson’s refusal to pound on the prosecutor’s door and demand the charges be dropped as a prerequisite for Oberlin maybe, by the goodness of its heart, re-opening business with the bakery, as unbelievable arrogance and gall and a complete failure of Gibson’s to recognize its racial sin against America. Thus, it saw Gibson’s as the one doing the extortion, holding unjust charges against three disadvantaged shoplifters as leverage against the college.
I hope the jury is unsympathetic to the college.
Frankly, I don’t care about why Oberlin College or their students did this. It does not matter that they might be suffering from TDS, no excuse is acceptable. They all need to be held accountable. If Gibsons survives this, it will take years to recover, and everyone involved should be suffering though that recovery with them.
I agree with Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit; our modern education establishment is really a systemic form of child abuse. There was a story a few years back about a kid eating the lunch his mom packed him and he was looking at the clouds, as it turned out. And absent mindedly chewed his pop tart into the shape of one of the clouds.
A teacher monitoring the playground insisted he had chewed it into the shape of a gun. They are indoctrinated to always see guns where none exist. She marched him off to the principal’s office where he was promptly suspended and they threatened to call the police and have him arrested. Basically, the traumatized the poor kid who if I remember correctly he was about 7.
The school district later issued a preening press release praising the “alert teacher” and how their “zero tolerance” policy keeps their students safe and essentially promised more in the future. And as we’ve seen they’ve delivered across the nation.
When they outlaw pop tarts, only outlaws will have pop tarts.
If you’re interested you can find a 1995 video of Eric Holder speaking to representatives of the nation’s teachers’ unions about how they need to brainwash kids to think differently about guns. A better term than brainwashing is coercive persuasion. That’s the term psychiatrists and psychologists use, primarily to describe cult indoctrination.
That’s what these kids undergo k-12, and if they go to college it continues. It has the opposite effect of the techniques cognitive behavioral therapists use to help people overcome crippling phobias. The child abuse system formerly know as an education system creates anxiety disorders and stokes them into full blown phobias. So of course they see racism everywhere. That like a phobia about guns is another of the phobias the system tries to instill in children. And there are many more. So in their minds there really are racist monsters under every bed. And, what the teachers’ unions, which are really just an arm of the leftist political establishment, want to achieve as an outcome is that the children grow up convinced that only an all powerful government can protect them from all the monsters that don’t actually exist but they’ve been indoctrinated to believe are real.
https://pics.onsizzle.com/wants-more-government-cg-bll-more-government-usa-com-5930688.png
We’re not talking about people who are normal emotionally or mentally. As intended by your government. If you’re not home schooling your kids you’re subjecting them to this abuse.
“How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
“The Coddling of the American Mind
In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.
The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse…”
Go ahead and blame the students if you want to. I do, but not nearly as much as I blame those who warped them into these cartoons.
…
I suppose this goes here.
https://www.popehat.com/2015/04/27/tumult-at-oberlin-in-wake-of-emotional-support-animal-companion-initiative/
It’s supposed to be a parody, but honestly Oberlin is beyond parody. As are most colleges and universities today.
I would have said that the way to avoid inflicting this systemic, pre-meditated child abuse on your child is to send your child to private school. I suppose that’s still possible in some localities. But as I see it the window is closing because, who controls the ed school curriculum, who is or is not allowed to graduate, and the licensing of teachers? That’s right, the brainwashing child abusers.
One of them, ironically enough, is Barack Obama’s old mentor (and probable ghost writer) Bill Ayers.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/ed-schools’-latest—and-worst—humbug-12948.html
The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug
Teaching for “social justice” is a cruel hoax on disadvantaged kids.
…All music to Bill Ayers’s ears. The ex-Weatherman glimpsed a new radical vocation. He dreamed of bringing the revolution from the streets to the schools. And that’s exactly what he has managed to do…”
One item that was in the news shortly before I left Kali for good was a conservative was trying to get his teaching credential. And the ed school wouldn’t admit him because he was a conservative and consequently wouldn’t be teaching for social justice. He said he would take all the required coursework and do his best. But they refused to admit him because he might have done well academically (as if that’s difficult; the ed school is the only grad school to rank lower then the j school in terms of the idiots they let in and the even greater idiots they excrete out the other end). Their problem with him is that he would never be a true believer in teaching for social justice and therefore would be “unsafe” to have around the kids.
He might have undone their indoctrination.
I bet you think I’m making this up. Really, I don’t have that much imagination. And we are talking about Kali.
https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2019/02/01/nj-schools-teach-lgbt-history-new-law/2743028002/
“New Jersey has become the second state in the nation after California to adopt a law that requires schools to teach about LGBT history in a move hailed by civil rights groups as a step toward inclusion and fairness…”
Needless to say that “LGBT history” isn’t history. It’s LGBT activists claiming that a bunch of people long dead and not around to defend themselves anymore were gay. How many of you have heard the Spartans were gay. While the Spartans did practice a form of mentorship, wherein a youth going through the Egogi was assigned to an older warrior, it wasn’t sexual like pederasty was in Athens. In fact, the great Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus had decreed that if there was any sexual contact between a mentor and his apprentice that was to be punished by execution or banishment.
There were 1,500 Greek city states all with their own views on the subject. The Thebans, for instance, had their Sacred Band which consisted of 300 hoplites which consisted of 150 homosexual couples.
Philipp of Macedon wiped them out at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC). They did fight bravely and didn’t retreat like the rest of the Theban army. But they were no match for the Macedonians, particularly when Alexander as Philipp’s cavalry commander led the decisive charge against them.
But as Philipp was surveying their bodies all piled in a heap he told his troops, “Let no man here suspect that these men either did or suffered anything dishonorable.”
Why would he have had to make that speech if all the Greeks were “gay?” The thing is they weren’t all cool with homosexuality.
But that’s not what the kids are taught beginning in grammar school in Kali. Homosexuality was a capital offense in the Roman army. Guess who isn’t going to learn that? The concept of transgenderism didn’t exist until the last few decades of the last century. That’s not what the kids are going to be taught.
It’s a very Bolshevik curriculum, Charlie Brown!
Meanwhile, in addition to not teaching actual history Kali schools won’t be teaching math, English, science, reading, writing, etc. Kali consistently ranks at the bottom in terms of student performance. In 2017 Kali was the tenth worst in the nation.
It’s a funny thing about English teachers. I actually heard one English teacher quoted as saying that she thought it was “imperialistic” and “colonial” to teach her black students English. So instead she taught them East African oral tradition.
As a former employer I can tell you that’s exactly what I’m looking for in a new hire. Potential foreign employers look at this in dismay. Literally. I know Asian students who come to the US and are shocked by just how racist Americana classrooms are. And I don’t mean white racism. What kind of stories do you think they bring back home with them.
Also, it’s “othering” and “stigmatizing” to teach the Hispanic kids they need to learn English to succeed.
But, hey, on top of all this let’s fabricate an LGBT history and foist that on the students while poisoning their minds with “social justice” idiocy.
I meant to note that the teacher (she was in Oakland, CA) was being stupid on so many different levels it’s almost impossible to keep track.
But one level that’s easy to spot is this; almost no black Americans have roots in East Africa. Because the vast majority of blacks in America are descended from Africans enslaved in West Africa. You know, the coast just on the other side of the Atlantic from the North and South American Atlantic coasts? Not the opposite side of the continent on the Indian Ocean coast.
The East African slave trade, along with the Trans-Saharan slave trade, was exclusively Islamic. The Islamic slave trade lasted 1400 years, 1000 years longer than the Atlantic slave trade, involved millions more slaves, was in fact as genocidal as the descendants of the West African slaves imagine the Atlantic slave trade was (Hello, McFly, if the Atlantic slave trade was genocidal why are there tens if not hundreds of millions of descendants of West African slaves in North and South America) and only officially ended in the Islamic world in 1980 when Mauritania outlawed slavery (although it continues to flourish under the radar in much of the Islamic world and right out in the open in Libya courtesy of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama).
Of course, they students will never be taught there ever was (and is) an Islamic slave trade. They brainwashing child-abusers will indulge in such stupidity as showing East African slave trade routes going around the Horn of Africa!?!?!
A route so dangerous even in the days of steam that avoiding those waters was one of the main reasons for digging the Suez Canal. Even today ships avoid that region when they can.
So, some English teachers think it’s just wrong to teach black kids English, so they teach them instead an oral tradition that is completely alien to their actual heritage. That seems, fitting somehow in this day and age. It’s an incredibly stupid time to be alive.
While deep psycho-social analysis will undoubtedly explore this dispute at some future date, THIS JURY need not undertake any such examination. Winesburg Ohio, grotesques, and fugue states are beyond the scope of the jurors’ SWORN CIVIC DUTY “to reach judgment based on the law given by the judge and the facts admitted in the trial”. I trust THIS JURY to follow the facts and the law.
A series of facts have been established by: documents, direct testimony, and cross-examination. These include, but are not limited to, the following:
1. Oberlin students engaged in criminal behavior at Gibson’s resulting in their arrest. Trained and experienced law enforcement personnel reported on the crimes committed. Gibson’s staff was innocent of any misconduct with regard to those crimes. (Without cause, the college has condemned those law enforcement officers and their reports with vulgar and abusive language unfit for an institution of higher learning.}
2. Oberlin staff, including the Dean of Students, organized and supported demonstrations of students at the Plaintiff’s business claiming racial enmity and A LONG AND VICIOUS PAST HISTORY of racism by the bakery and its owners. THEY HAD NO REASONABLE BASIS for these claims–which led to further student fury, express hostility, and economic attacks against the bakery.
3. Oberlin students and staff organized a spiteful and unwarranted campaign of physical, economic, and emotional harassment of the bakery, its owners, and its staff.
4. College staff, UP TO AND INCLUDING ITS PRESIDENT, promised to conduct a thorough and searching investigation of the events surrounding the charges of racism and alleged attack, BUT NEVER, EVER ENGAGED IN ANY SUCH INVESTIGATION. Had they done so, they would have been compelled to admit THEY WERE WRONG.
5. The college expressly, but without any legal justification, embarked on an intentional and bad-faith campaign of accusation, boycott, and harassment.
6. Good faith efforts by Gibson’s management, who had a DECADES LONG HISTORY OF SUPPORT FOR THE COLLEGE AND FAIR AND RESPECTFUL TREATMENT of all segments (races, genders, ages, etc.) of the student body to REDUCE TENSION, HEAL THE WOUNDS, AND MAKE PEACE WERE REPUDIATED BY EVERYONE AT THE COLLEGE, INCLUDING ITS PRESIDENT, AND THE BAKERY WAS LED TO BELIEVE THAT ONLY BY RENOUNCING THEIR RIGHTS WOULD ANY PEACE BE POSSIBLE.
7. Oberlin’s staff, including but not limited to the Dean of Students, have been shown to be DISHONEST, BIASED, AND INACCURATE IN THEIR CLAIMS AND TESTIMONY.
8. As a direct and foreseeable consequence of Oberlin’s misconduct toward Gibson’s, its owners, and its staff have suffered enormous economic losses, and other damages to their good names, reputations, and mental and emotional well-being.
9. Oberlin’s wilful civil misconduct, its refusal to FULFILL ITS PROMISE TO INVESTIGATE, AND ITS DEMAND THAT GIBSON’S TAKE ALL BLAME FOR THE STUDENT’S/COLLEGE’S MISCONDUCT C-O-M-P-E-L-L-E-D Gibson’s to seek legal redress to repudiate the lies and calumny marshaled against it.
10. Trusting in the RULE OF LAW and praying for the intervention of the Divine to reveal error and uphold truth, Gibson’s has made a PRIMA FACIE case which calls for a jury verdict and civil judgment in its favor. That verdict/judgment should be sufficiently large to redress the horrific abuse (economic, physical, emotional) which the bakery and its owners and staff have suffered. Evidence of ACTUAL MALICE on the part of the defendants also justifies a meaningful award of punitive damages pursuant to Ohio law.
I respectfully implore that any impartial and reasonable spectator to this trial join with me to raise our prayers with those of the Gibson’s bakery for relief from the unconscionable horrors this injustice has inflicted upon them.
“deep psycho-social analysis”
This will no doubt be used as an excuse for their behavior. If Oberlin gets off easy on theis, it is only a matter of time before they do the same to others.
This whole incident was nothing more than a culmination of the last 50 years of a calculated strategy designed to benefit the Progressive Elite in this country.
One of the oldest power gaining strategies in the world is to convince groups that they are the victims of oppression on the part of the majority and that the current government is used to oppress them. Progressive elites, in this country, all of whom are wealthy and/or privileged members of the majority, have convinced various minority groups that they are victims. Prior to 1965, these groups were mainly ethnic minorities like the Italians and the Irish. In the late 1960s the target minority changed to African-Americans. And, even though other racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation groups have been added over the years, Blacks are still the favored target demographic. This victimization program was seriously ramped up during the Obama Administrations. Every action against an African-American was viewed as a racist attack and even the Obama officials supported this view and encouraged violent opposition against the government. We saw it in Sanford, Ferguson and Baltimore. We saw it in New York, Chicago and every other part of the country. The message was always the same; the evil White-dominated society was actively oppressing minorities, especially Blacks. And, one of the bastions of Progressive elitist thought, the institutions of higher learning, led the charge.
So, here you have Oberlin College, traditionally one of the most liberal activist institutions of higher learning in the US. Fresh off of eight years of minorities being encouraged to exercise power through acts of street violence, with the defeat of another Progressive icon [HRC] and with three members of the Oberlin tribe facing conviction for criminal acts, the Progressive activists of Oberlin decided to act to save them from “racial persecution” by a bastion of evil White privilege, Gibson’s. The leaders of the anti-Gibson’s demonstrations didn’t really care about the damage done to the business, the owners and employees of that business, the town of Oberlin or it residents, Oberlin College or even of the three people arrested. It was all about having the power to make the owners of Gibson’s and the evil White power structure bend a knee to their will. It was nothing more than Progressive power street level politics.
What is so ironic about this whole thing is that the Town of Oberlin has been a center of anti-slavery abolitionism and racial equality since its inception in 1833. Its problem, today, is that the employees and students of Oberlin College see themselves as a separate tribe from the citizens of the Town of Oberlin. It is the new tribalism.
I wonder what it must be like on campus when the administration and others feel it is acceptable to have 3 thugs who attacked a grocery clerk who caught them stealing remain at the school. How many more like that are at Oberlin? Is that the new student body?
It is worse than that. What do you think Elijah Aladin, one of the students who tried to shoplift and who beat up the shopkeeper, did during his final year at Oberlin?
He was the Student Treasurer and on the Student Finance Committee. Yes.
You can’t make this stuff up. I would imagine that quite a few other students were uncomfortable about this, and about speaking up.
OK, time to place bets as to when he is invited back as commencement speaker.
Nicely drawn essay.
“Fugue state” is so much more sophisticated than “temper tantrum.” We will doubtless be seeing more of this phrase.
Parents of young children get this experience. A child can tolerate being hungry or tired or told no. A child who has any of the two will be cranky, such as a hungry and tired child will start to misbehave a little. All three stressors will result in a meltdown. Any parent who tells a hungry, tired child that no, that toy is not coming home with us knows this from experience.
So now we have a professor telling us that Democrats who lose an election are no better equipped to deal with daily life that a two-year-old. They will commit crimes, slander people and businesses, and generally behave in an entirely unhinged manner because they just cannot help themselves.
This theory suggests that Democrats are not fit to be considered adults: not the kids, and not the grown-up college administrators.
Mmmmkay. If that’s his story, let him stick to it.
I swear, this pernicious psychobabble is enough to turn a Liberal into a Conservative.
As a parent of two now grown young people, I remember it didn’t take all 3 for a meltdown…. 😉
I cannot fathom the mind of any intellectual that would try to claim a collective “fugue state” as rationale for this hideous display of leftist-progressive power-play bullying, but the left never ceases to amaze me at how low they can go, how deep is their derision and ridiculousness.
I can only hope the jury hearing all this realizes how much these arrogant Oberlin leftists hold them in contempt, along with all others “beneath” them, and rule in favor of the Gibson family.
For those not in the know, it was Walter White in “Breaking Bad” who popularized Fugue State as an excuse for a prolonged absence.
Might be a good time to re-read A Clockwork Orange. We seem to be getting close it being the norm.
I think the essay, while interesting, probably misses the mark. Instead, I believe something simpler (and much cruder) is at work at Oberlin. A disturbing number of administrators, faculty and students sincerely believe that non-leftists are not human beings and deserve nothing but torture and death. In their eyes “racists” (read: anyone who does not bow before Holy Socialism) shouldn’t have the right to go on breathing, let alone have any kind of legal protections.
Think I exaggerate? On many college campuses violent paramilitary terrorist groups like BLM and Antifa enjoy a quasi-legal status operating with the schools’ tacit blessing. These groups form the “muscle” that does the dirty work faculty and administrators crave but are too cowardly to do themselves. Due process is not only sneered at, but in a growing number of schools administrators and faculty pride themselves for their ability to conduct kangaroo courts and witch hunts. A decade from now – maybe sooner – the school-backed mobs will be dragging the “racist” owners from their businesses and slaughtering them instead of settling for wrecking their business.
I fear the damage that BLM is doing to race relations. 3 black students stole some wine. What were the storekeepers supposed to do? Pretend it didn’t happen. This case is about racism. Not on the part of Gibson’s but the College and its students. Racism is treating someone differently because of his race. Turning a blind eye to theft because the thieves are black is racism. Accusing the owners of the store of racism for wanting the law to be enforced against black thieves is racism. Racism is evil and thus falsely accusing someone of racism is also evil.
I do not use the term reverse-racism because racism is racism whether the racists are white or black.
Oberlin College has done a great disservice to race relations in America. I don’t think it can possibly repair the damage it has done and I hope that this jury hammers them for their crimes against civility and their attacks on the victims of their inverted, psychotic reality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberlin_College
They have a long history of promoting blacks, and apparently somewhere along that path they went overboard.
I think that most of what ails the black community is driven by having fairly low IQ. With a group average or 85, most will not be college material. As that became obvious, colleges started dumbing down curriculum, and introduced largely useless majors to accommodate black capabilities.
I hope that eventually we will understand which genes drive intelligence and be able to fix this, for the benefit of all people. For now we have to live with the reality of the situation.
Society has created a monster with affirmative action, it needs to end, with everyone judged on merit.
Under Bob Mueller’s legal theories isn’t it obstruction of justice for the school to tell Gibson’s that they will do business with them again if they drop charges?
First off, I want to congratulate you a a job very well done in covering this trial. This coverage is important work, even more so because attention from the legacy media has been so limited.
You should know though that a dissociative fugue is a very rare and very specific thing that doesn’t have anything to do with this situation. Occasionally you might hear in the news that someone left their home, often traveled to a different city and can’t identify themselves. That is a dissociative fugue.
I just wanted to let you know so that this misunderstanding doesn’t confound otherwise excellent work.
The whole thing is completely asyymmetrical. Oberlin is trying to ruin the Gibson family, but I doubt that the family wants to destroy Oberlin. Oberlin, OH is their home town, and it’s a company town. If the College goes away a lot of people in town would be hurt.
But that won’t happen. Oberlin College’s endowment is around $900 million dollars. If the Gibsons prevail, no matter how much money they get, it won’t really make them whole, and it won’t really hurt Oberlin. It’ll just be the cost of doing business for the college and the Gibsons will probably be in the Left’s crosshairs for a long time. And whether Oberlin College loses or wins the legal case, they will likely keep collaborating with the Left.
That’s two uses of “dissociative fugue” at LI this week! I used in a comment two days ago and earned a down twinkle. I was so upset I forgot my own name, where I was, how I got there… But I’m okay now.
Dude who was “36, a captain of free market industry, had a beautiful wife and three children, and decided he couldn’t stand that life any more.” ….. sounds like a real a-hole