The song – “We’re in the Money” – immediately came to mind after learning of the money trail for the misnamed Jewish Voices for Peace. They’ve been active with anti-Israel malcontents since the October 7 massacre. Radicalism on the Left is an ecumenical ideology not restricted to the fashionable identities. Your physical characteristics, background, and choice of bed partner says little about what is rolling around in your head. There are Jews who are all into self-negation as there are in any group in or out of the “protected classes”. And a Daddy War Bucks can always be found to fund your efforts at self-negation.
Take the aforementioned Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP). Here’s a list of the fat cats who dug deep to bankroll the extremist group (and the fellow-travelling IfNotNow) from 2019 to 2021 (see Sources below). The Daddies War Bucks include the $650,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Kaphan Foundation’s $441,510, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s $340,000, the Schwab Charitable Fund’s $654,233, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund’s $260,705, $175,600 from Morgan Stanley Global Impact, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program’s $98,650, and the Tides Foundation’s $75,000. No mere chump change, lefty revolution is expensive.
No wonder the encampments seemed so well provisioned and coached. It’s because they could sing along, “We’re in the money, we’re in the money . . . “. Enjoy the rendition in the clip below as you view the campus chaos.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “George Soros Funds Groups Behind DNC Riot Where Protesters Assaulted Cops”, Chuck Ross, The Washington Free Beacon, 11/16/23, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/george-soros-funds-groups-behind-dnc-riot-where-protesters-assaulted-cops/
2. “Jewish Voice for Peace’s Funding Network”, NGO Monitor, 11/13/23, at https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/jewish-voice-for-peaces-funding-network/
3. A special thanks to Brittany Bernstein in “Activist Groups behind Violent DNC Protest Have Long History of Defending Terrorism, Receive Funding from Major Corporations”, National Review, 11/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/activist-groups-behind-violent-dnc-protest-have-long-history-of-defending-terrorism-receive-funding-from-major-corporations/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in-tag&utm_term=second
NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus in New York City on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Multiple students were arrested as officers cleared an encampment on the campus’ lawn. (Peter Gerber for Fox News Digital)
In many cases, if not most, the students (and non-students) occupying buildings, entire swaths of many campuses, supporting the barbarism of Hamas and expressing Jew-hatred, were radicalized before they arrived in higher ed. They didn’t suddenly discover their inner Marx in their college Sociology class. Predating the college acceptance letter, they were long marinated in the revolutionary dialectic, probably without even knowing it.
Parents, dropping your kids off at school for six hours and off you go on your merry way meant relegating their minds to God knows what. Well, we’re getting a glimpse of the consequence at places like Columbia, et al.
Robert P. George, professor and scholar at Princeton and other schools, acknowledges as much. See at https://www.foxnews.com/video/6352285225112.
A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)
Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”
Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”. His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).
A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.
“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America]. No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump. But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction. A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness. No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”
The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses. High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below). Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools. Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole. How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed? The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks. When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.
And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s. Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.
It’s everywhere. It’s on YouTube. For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes. It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more. No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad). It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good. 16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”. You know the banter.
This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away. Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself. For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings. Quoting him:
“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes. I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth. They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly. They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”
Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth. You might be surprised at the answer.
There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind. The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
Students spray paint pro-Palestinian messages at a protest encampment at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., April 28, 2024. (David Ryder/Reuters)
Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in a song admonished mothers to not “… let your babies grow up to be cowboys”. As the saying goes, that was then, this is now. It’s not cowboys that we ought to be worried about. It’s college students. College is in the process of demolishing itself. Look no further than the Ivy League. From there, a degradation has taken root that has spread like a cerebral small pox epidemic, infecting the vast majority of campuses. They’re proving themselves to be embarrassments. The rot extends right through the administrations to the faculty and passes into the students. Beware, parents, your kids may leave the house leaning right but may return with a criminal record for defacing veterans’ cemeteries.
To be fair, not all of higher ed is an intellectual cesspool, but the problem is so pervasive that it has begun to besmirch nearly anyone with a degree on their resumé. Add Sociology or Humanities or English Lit or any of the “soft sciences” and their paper bio could be well on its way to the circular file.
The recent antisemitic pro-Palestinian encampments and protests are telling us the time of day. The fixation with the “marginalized” now includes a sanction for the genocidal butchery of 10/7. So warped is the thinking that the charge of “genocidal butchery” has become monopolized by those who committed actual “genocidal butchery” – the kind that you saw with your own eyes on 10/7 – and daily perform war crimes using civilian human shields, not shirking from hiding their military caches and facilities in and under schools, hospitals, orphanages, and housing complexes. Thus, savagery is excused. The natural apprehension about civilian casualties is distorted to pardon unspeakable barbarism in practice. What a warped universe.
sraeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)Hamas body cam photo of terrorist shooting indiscriminately into a house in Israeli kibbutz near Gaza border. (Israel Defense Forces via AP)
Don’t expect many of today’s college students to get it, having been raised on a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed falderol throughout K-grad school, from public and elite prep schools all the way to the identity-mongering college curriculums. The curriculum of entire college academic departments, many of them mandatory for graduation, are based on this narrow little looking glass. The kids’ minds are forced shut, unable to exercise any kind of self-examination.
Anti-Israel tent encampment at Columbia UniversityPro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ at Columbia University in New York on April 24. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu/Getty Images)
For instance, a radicalized Columbia faculty senate in a 62-14 vote on Friday (4/26/24) approved a resolution to investigate the administration of an already weak and vacillating college president for finally taking action against an illegal campus encampment and student-led pogrom targeting Jewish students. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote of a strikingly similar situation in his three-volume The Red Wheel, a novelized account of the socio-political setting leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. He’s got the same mix of characters of academic adults and youths who’ve been radicalized. There’s something about the violent potential in socialism.
Not that all socialists are militant fanatics, mind you. It’s just that socialism is a systematic critique of a society, and there’s few things more thrilling for those immersed in a bubble divorced from realities, for four years or in a life of tenure, than the exciting prospect of overthrowing everything. Bulls in china shops are electrifying things to be for such young and stilted minds. The narrow-minded don’t know that they’re blinkered because they don’t know or understand or appreciate any alternatives. These are the reincarnated “comrade children” of the Khmer Rouge, alongside their adult abettors. Welcome to Columbia’s faculty senate and a chunk of the student body. The best and brightest or the worst and barbaric?
Not surprisingly, the faculty is as extreme as the youths given the fact that they curated this mess. It doesn’t take much to uncover the concomitant antisemitic student rage. Take, for instance, Khymani James, leader of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) cell who announced (see #1 below), “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Such bombast would be treated as isolated anecdote until one notices that the school’s Jewish students were advised to stay home due to rampant Jew-hatred on campus (see #2 below).
Khymani James, shown in this photo from 2021
Ya think? This neo-Marxist antisemitism is in the academic ether, and in more than faculty offices and campus greens. George Washington University exploded and since the Jacobins also control the Washington, D.C., city government, the city won’t help the school enforce its rules. It declined the school’s request for police assistance. In the worst governed cities, we find the worst behavior. Get out of DC if you can and move the college to more civilized environs. The nation’s capital is a hot mess, and has been for quite some time.
As usual, Texas is showing how to handle the miscreants. The Austin chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee called for another one of these campus intifadas and were promptly arrested and carted off. UT’s Office of the Dean of Students declared to the group, “The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere.” Enough said. Call momma for the bail money.
Pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus of UT, Austin
Yale and Princeton followed suit in showing more backbone than Columbia. As soon as the tents went up on Princeton, the school authorities ordered them down “now”. Down they went and the waifs then resorted to their usual standby, a sit-in. Yale’s campus police did the work of clearing the foolishness by arresting around 45 (see #4 below). Mom, expect a call.
Los Angeles’s USC constructed a pickle for itself. It’s got the usual intifada circus on campus but it is happening at graduation time. They really stepped into it when they chose a self-styled pro-Palestinian activist to be the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum. This one is a real winner. Her Instagram profile links to a pro-Palestinian website that proclaims,
“Zionism is a racist settler-colonialist ideology. One Palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”
USC student Asna Tabassum speaks to ABC News, April 16, 2024 (Video screenshot)
The choice of speaker amid the broader call for intifada ignited a real hornet’s nest. The school canceled the school-wide graduation (see #4 below).
How did this person get into a position to be valedictorian? Good grades, high GPA? Well, today, given rampant grade hyper-inflation, they have as much value as the Turkish lira (54.8% inflation). Watch her tying herself in knots in an attempt to avoid the charge of Jew-hatred. Like many of her fellow protesters, she is a contortionist in concocting a hypothetical distinction between venom for Zionism and antisemitism. It’s a difference without a difference.
An overly inflated GPA must be the culprit since one need not be a genius to see that a one-state “river to the sea”, with the obvious right of return, would lead to another wholesale slaughter of the Jews. Just take today’s Iran and graft it onto the narrow trip between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Combine the Sharia viciousness of Hamas and gross misgovernance of the PLO and see what you get. Get the idea?
Living cheek by jowl with people who’ve been raised on a steady diet of characterizations of you as evil incarnate isn’t a recipe for kumbaya (see #5 below). Sorry, Miss Tabassum. Ditto for the munchkins in our classrooms. Parents, another four years in a neo-Marxist bubble isn’t necessarily a pathway to betterment for your offspring. As the song goes, mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be . . . college students. Beware, oh, beware.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’: Meet The Leader Of Columbia University’s Anti-Israel Encampment”, Kassy Akiva, The Daily Wire, 4/25/24, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/zionists-dont-deserve-to-live-meet-the-leader-of-columbia-universitys-anti-israel-encampment
2. “Columbia rabbi warns Jewish students to go home, don’t come back to campus because of ‘extreme antisemitism’”, Doree Lewak and Isabel Keane, New York Post, 4/21/24, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/columbia-rabbi-warns-jewish-students-to-go-home-don-t-come-back-to-campus-because-of-extreme-antisemitism/ar-AA1nouyc
3. “George Washington University Suspends Students for Organizing Anti-Israel Encampment”, James Lynch, National Review Online, 4/27/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/george-washington-university-suspends-students-for-organizing-anti-israel-encampment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
4. “USC Cancels Graduation Ceremony over Anti-Israel Protests”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review Online, 4/25/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-cancels-graduation-ceremony-over-anti-israel-protests/
5. An accurate window into what Israel is facing can be found at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) at https://www.memri.org/
School children with masks and behind Plexi-glass in a San Diego school during the COVID-19 pandemicDestroyed, burned, and abandoned cars at music festival, Israel, October 7. Some UN aid workers were implicated in the massacre.
If the quality of our civilization can be gauged by the quality of our institutions, then we’re in serious trouble.
Domestically, our schools, FBI, CIA, a good portion of big business, the entertainment industry, federal bureaucracies, many state bureaucracies and local governments, many of them urban, much of the judiciary (federal to local, judges to juries), and the health bureaucracies (federal to local) have soiled themselves in neo-Marxist claptrap, authoritarian impulses, or rank donkey party partisanship. The rule of law is actually the rule of deeply compromised men and women. And it gets worse when we saunter on down to Turtle Bay in New York City, the United Nations.
We get daily reminders of the civilizational decay. Now, it’s another UN flight into gross immorality. The affiliated International Court of Justice (ICJ) trampled on any remaining moral authority that it may have possessed by bizarrely indicting Israel on charges of genocide. The absurdity of the pronouncement is obvious if you just think it through: the victim of genocide is guilty of responding to it. Then, the UN’s human rights conglomerate reserved for Iran the “Chair for the Human Rights Council’s one-day ‘Social Forum’” (see #1 below). Adding moral injury to moral injury, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East had people who were involved in the massacre of 1,200 mostly civilian Jews in Israel on October 7 (see #4 below). Can the “international community” get any more putrid?
The ICJ, specifically ordered Israel to stop “genocide-attacks” on Palestinian civilians in Gaza after, of course, finding evidence of “Israeli genocide” (see #3 below). Let me get this straight: the organization that runs Gaza stormed into southern Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Jews, took over 200 hostages, is not the party guilty of genocide; it’s the country who responded to the genocide. How does that compute?
Let’s rattle this around in the head a bit more. The nation that defends itself against a genocide is guilty of genocide as the original perps of the primary genocide commit another war crime by using the Gaza population as a writ-large human shield (see #2 below). Does this make any sense? Completely absent from the black robes’ decision is Hamas’s fundamental war crime – Gaza civilians as human shields – which immensely complicates the Israeli defensive response without running afoul of “genocide”. The elaborate and massive tunnel network under and into hospitals, schools, homes, large apartment buildings, orphanages, wherever civilians congregate in large numbers, the kind of civilians that are easily exploited for propaganda purposes, didn’t grace the Court’s printout. Since civilian casualties are inevitable when the human shields are used in crowd number, the Court’s opinion is tantamount to a blessing for the practice of large-scale human shields.
Maj. (res.) ‘Mem,’ a combat engineering officer, shows a tunnel that troops found inside a home in northern Gaza. The entrance was hidden underneath a bed in a children’s bedroom, November 7, 2023. (photo: Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)
If that isn’t crazy enough, we get to experience mullah-ruling Iran as a guardian of human rights. Isn’t that like the Grand Dragon of the Klan heading the Office of Civil Rights? Gracing the mullahs with the Chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s one-day “Social Forum” at the end of last year was too much even for the Iran-appeasing Biden administration. Biden’s Human Rights Council Ambassador Michele Taylor wrote (see #1 below), “It is unacceptable that any body associated with the promotion and protection of human rights be chaired by a representative from a nation implicated in such persistent and flagrant human rights abuses as Iran.” Exactly.
Yet, here we are, but there’s more. Speaking of the 1,200-person atrocity by Hamas on October 7, UN Works and Relief Agency workers were implicated in the barbarousness. Several had to be fired. Where’s the prosecutions (at the ICJ)? And related is the Hamas hijacking of that much-vaunted AOC-demanded “humanitarian aid” to Gazans (see #4 below). According to one source, “Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers, and it manages UNRWA. . . . From the day they [Hamas] rose to power they took control of everything.” Much of the aid is dispensed by USAID. The federal organization’s Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG) “…has identified deliberate interference and efforts to divert humanitarian assistance in regions where FTO [foreign terrorist organizations, Hamas] activity is prevalent … [t]his includes systemic coercion of aid workers by FTOs…”, as reported by Jim Geraghty of National Review (see #4 below). Things at UN headquarters and in the field resemble the anti-Semitic chaos on our college campuses.
It’s getting so bad that almost anything with thousands of employees, funded by taxpayers, distant from them like D.C., the Hague and UN, and big-international in scope is a civilizational embarrassment. The little taxpaying guy and gal in the U.S., and the nation of Israel, get hosed. In this sense, bigness has become badness. I’m skeptical that anything can be done about the situation short of tearing the whole edifice down and starting over.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Outrage as Iran regime chairs United Nations Human Rights Council body despite ‘alarming’ abuses”, Peter Aitken, Fox News, November 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/outrage-as-iran-regime-chairs-united-nations-human-rights-council-body-despite-alarming-abuses/ar-AA1jhvrT
2. “Human Shields in International Humanitarian Law: A Guide to the Legal Framework”, Beth Van Schaack, Just Security, 12/7/2016, at https://www.justsecurity.org/35263/human-shields-ihl-legal-framework/#:~:text=Making%20the%20civilian%20population%20or%20individual%20civilians%20the,and%20Article%208%20%28e%29%20%28i%29%20%28applying%20to%20NIACs%29.
3. “ICJ ruling: Key takeaways from the court decision in Israel genocide case”, Reuters, 1/26/24, at https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/key-takeaways-world-court-decision-israei-genocide-case-2024-01-26/
4. “What about the UNRWA Humanitarian-Aid Trucks?”, Haley Stack, National Review, 1/26/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-about-the-unrwa-humanitarian-aid-trucks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”. Who’s back? The ghosts, of course. For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked. A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!” This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).
The little girl from “Poltergeist II”
And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.” According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”
A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State. LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class. People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia. Hell on earth is not a magnet.
A common strip of homelessness in Los AngelesLitter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles
Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.
For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.
RogerG
Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52
During the Cold War, the Soviets in their efforts to harness to their side the so-called Third World – mostly poorer, developing and nominally nonaligned countries (at least officially not tied to the western or communist bloc) – created a “university” to train the next generation of Marxist revolutionaries. Modeled on Soviet “education”, the schooling is premised, straitjacketed, on the absolute truth of Karl Marx’s revolutionary dialectic. Deeply implanted is the alleged Marxist reality of systemic oppression, the same kind of thing now commonplace in our schools of higher ed, and lower.
The Soviet tactic was to hide the indoctrination behind the name of a popular “hero” like Patrice Lumumba. Officially titled Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow implanted Marxist thought in the next generation of revolutionaries and activists from around the world. Notable alumni include a long list of murderous malcontents such as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Iran’s totalitarian mullah Ali Khamenei, the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and the one-man-one-vote-one-time ruler Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
Students at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 1985Carlos the Jackal
The politicized heirs could include much of the college graduating classes in the U.S. going back at least a decade or two. The Marxist-thought concept is infectious and is now established ideological orthodoxy throughout the college landscape across America. Scholarship is bastardized by Marxist jargon, politically weighted vocabulary for which no one is allowed question. Thought begins with the boilerplate, ends with the boilerplate. This passes for learning in America (and elsewhere).
In a previous post, I wrote of the troubles at Bakersfield College, the Kern Community College District, and the Community College System in California. Clearly, the intellectual rot doesn’t begin or end there. The results are found in the polling of the under-24s. The recent Harvard/Harris poll shows 51% of the 18-to-24 cohort supported the ending of the state of Israel and turning it over “to Hamas and the Palestinians”. Increasingly, these people aren’t just liberal; they’re Marxist, having applied the Marxist rhetoric of oppressor and colonizer to Israel. It is what is meant by “not being liberal enough”. Translation: being Marxist. Welcome to America’s future.
We’d be much more honest with ourselves if we renamed all American higher ed Patrice Lumumba Universities because that is what they are. Parents, beware, you might be subsidizing the future authors of the next holocaust.
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)
RogerG
Sources:
* “Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’”, Toi Staff, The Times of Israel, 12/17/23, at https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/
How did we get to this place? In one of the last remaining conservative bastions in a state gone neo-Marxist, the area’s community college district – Kern County CCD – is at the vanguard of the same poisonous revolution engulfing Sacramento and the Left-happy denizens on the populous coastal plain. I left the state, and a near 30-year academic career in the county, because there’s no escaping the toxic governing philosophy that holds sway over the entire state. County boundaries are no protection. The lines don’t shelter your schools from being engines of state-sanctioned revolutionary indoctrination.
I got out. You too may be left with no other option.
The happenings in the District and its main Bakersfield College campus are a scandal. A few names and words typify the sickening situation. Sonya Christian (no “Dr.” designation because it is reserved for those who passed their medical boards; PhDs in Education don’t qualify), English instructor Paula Parks (no “Dr.” designation; ditto), John Corkins (radicalized president of the Kern Community College Board of Trustees), radical jargon like DEI, and faculty counterrevolutionaries such as Daymon Johnson, Matthew Garrett, and Erin Miller of The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College (see Facebook page below)
Sonya Christian
Karl Marx wrote and spoke of a “false consciousness” among the people that prevents the revolutionary uprising. “False consciousness” is reserved for those who simply disagree, the counterrevolutionaries. It must be overcome and control of the schools is essential to that end. In a recent meeting of the Board of Trustees, its president, John Corkins, reminiscent of Lenin before his Council of People’s Commissars, called for the extermination of faculty who dare to oppose the revolution’s DEI ideology. Corkins said in reference to the faculty critics of the revolution’s doctrines – in essence, those guilty of “false consciousness” – of the need to “cull the herd”. He said, “We put a rope on some of ’em and take ’em to the slaughterhouse”.
John Corkins
In 1918, a Bolshevik organ, Krasnaya Gazeta, in the midst of their revolution put it in similar terms: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood . . . . let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois – more blood, as much as possible.” Culling the herd, indeed.
More shocking were the reputed erudites seated to his right at the trustee table who were smiling, giggling, and nodding in approval. See for yourself in the video clip from the meeting. It was a monstrous display of revolutionary groupthink.
Corkins was caught in the fever of a revolutionary moment, like the editors of Krasnaya Gazeta, and subsequently apologized. Yet, it’s a window into the mind of a revolutionary. In that mind lies a modern manifestation of an old revolutionary dialectic in the form of DEI – “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”, or more accurately, “Discrimination, Exclusion, Indoctrination” in the words of Wisconsin’s Robin Voss (R.), Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly.
“Diversity” is code for a return to race-based hiring, promotions, and admissions. “Equity” is code for a spoils system for selected “protected classes” (synonymous with the Marxist “oppressed”). “Inclusion” is code for excising western civilization from instruction and replacing it with a litany of oppression by oppressors noted for their light pigmentation, male genitalia, and membership in wealthier societies. “Privilege” and “systemic” is more jargon to that end.
How any of this can pass the muster of the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC decisions (2023) is difficult to imagine. Chief Justice John Roberts put it succinctly in an earlier case (2007) when he wrote in the majority opinion, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” DEI is illegal if the rule of law has any meaning today.
Some didn’t get the Roberts memo, or more accurately ignored it in a brazen flaunting of the rule of law. The state’s Leninist Attorney General, Rob Bonta, rushed to the defense of Sonya Christian, chancellor of the state’s community college system and past president of both the Kern Community College District and Bakersfield College, and the target of lawsuits filed by faculty victims of the purge and loyalty oaths to the revolution. Bonta tried to recast the DEI mandates as advice, suggestions, or general guidelines, or “competencies” in Christian’s words. DEI “competencies” (or whatever) “advising” descriptions of the ways that the faculty will implement the revolution’s doctrines into classroom management, instruction, and grading is ipso facto forced endorsement of the revolution. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth would be proud.
Rob Bonta, state Attorney General
Others have also noticed the discrepancy between the law and California’s zeal for neo-Marxist revolution in the upper reaches of its community colleges. In a matter related to the lawsuit filed by the Institute for Free Speech on behalf of BC history professor Daymon Johnson against the district’s forced fealty to “anti-racist” ideology, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled that the district was wrong for stepping into a spat between faculty members Johnson and English prof Andrew Bond. At issue was an incendiary Facebook post by Bond:
“Maybe Trump’s comment about sh**hole countries was a statement of projection because honestly, the US is a f***ing piece of sh** nation. Go ahead and quote me, conservatives.”
Andrew Bond, left-wing activist and BC English profMatthew Garrett, BC History profDaymon Johnson, BC History prof
Johnson responded by suggesting that Bond “move to China”. And for that, Bond filed an administrative complaint of bullying against Johnson. Hyper-sensitive academics unable to engage in discourse have no business instructing anyone’s student body. The magistrate’s ruling is advisory while the lawsuit is pending before the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of California.
But it was the case regarding history prof Matthew Garrett that drew the ire of Corkins in his infamous remarks that “bad actors” like Garrett needed to be “culled” to the slaughterhouse. What was Garrett’s great and unforgiveable sin? He presented a different point of view to the reigning DEI orthodoxy on campus. He had the temerity of defending on free speech grounds “Smash Cultural Marxism”, etc., bumper stickers. And he was hauled before an administrative tribunal for criticizing the controversial University of Southern California Race and Equity Center poll on campus racism; trying to host a conservative speaker in violation of the school’s COVID restrictions at a time of approved progressive events, a jazz festival, football banquet, and a Day of the Dead celebration; and chiding “safe spaces” for black students as “segregation”. If Andrew Bond’s “the US is a f***ing piece of sh** nation” earns nary a glance of concern, what to make of the administrative hammer bearing down on Garrett for presenting a coherent alternative point of view?
Sonya Christian’s influence on campus during her tenure has been anything but salutary. She’s a lightning rod; her allegiance to neo-Marxist dogmas is provocative because the dogmas are provocative. They goad reaction because revolutions of this nature are totalitarian. They repudiate the central tenets of liberty which is a cornerstone of our society. The revolutionary ends now justify the revolutionary means.
Take a look, Kern County residents, at what your Board of Trustees is doing in your name. Please watch the clip. In the meantime, resist or leave the state. Your choices are simple at this juncture. Good luck.
RogerG
Sources:
* “California college trustee is forced to apologize after he was recorded saying anyone opposing woke anti-racism and ‘equity’ measures should be ‘roped’ and taken to the SLAUGHTERHOUSE”, Melissa Koenig, Daily Mail, 1/3/23, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11596097/California-college-trustee-apologizes-saying-opposing-anti-racism-roped.html
* “California’s Troubled Community-College System Just Got Worse”, Will Swaim, National Review, 12/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/californias-troubled-community-college-system-just-got-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
* Daymon Johnson’s lawsuit case filing: “Johnson v. Watkin”, Institute for Free Speech, 6/5/23, at https://www.ifs.org/cases/johnson-v-watkin/
* The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100048586580019
* “LENIN AND THE USE OF TERROR: SOME IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS”, World Future Fund, at https://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Quotes/leninkeyquotes.htm#:~:text=We%20will%20let%20loose%20the%20floodgates%20of%20that,bourgeois%20-%20more%20blood%2C%20as%20much%20as%20possible.%E2%80%9D
L-R) Harvard President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, American University professor Pamela Nadell and MIT President Sally Kornbluth testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec 5. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
* “The Beast” is taken from Naomi Wolf’s latest book “Facing the Beast”.
You’ve all seen it or at least heard of it: the congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT, particularly under the questioning of Elise Stefanik (R-NY). In monotone answers, as if coached by lawyers or PR experts, these people refused to declare that antisemitic speech calling for genocide of Jews by staff and students violates their schools’ official code of conduct (see video below). Their cagey responses say much about them and more so about the educational rot on their campuses and in their heads. It’s as if a malign beast has descended upon these places. Parents, beware.
What “beast”? The thing is more than a personification of evil. It’s the influence of ideas that can inspire people to do evil things. Some ideas are inherently evil. Some ideas are “beasts”, mostly because they contradict our nature. They bring out the worst in us and cause our demise. How do we know them? A biblical warning: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).
Today’s “beast” is the Marxist oppressor/oppressed claptrap. It’s everywhere in the quasi-mystical jargon in DEI, ESG, CRT, the politics of identity, etc., and throughout K to grad school. There aren’t many institutions not infected by it. Your kids are getting a steady dose of it whenever they step into a classroom, watch TV, go to a movie, and cruise the internet on their cellphone.
The “beast” has a family tree. The 60’s counterculture was a hip version of an older belief system, the same one that is now bombarding your kids from age 5 to 26. German Marxist agitator Rudi Dutschke in 1967 preached a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy, the so-called Long March through the institutions. In other words, he proposed that the zealots conquer the system from within rather than tear it down – co-opt it through infiltration. He rejiggered one of his Marxist inspirations’ (Antonio Gramsci) revolutionary “war of position” language from a few decades before. And, boy, did he and they succeed as evidenced by the prevarications on display in last week’s congressional testimony. The college presidents can’t bring themselves to condemn the now common Dutschke/Gramsci/Marcuse grotesqueries replete in their lecture halls and on their grounds.
Parents, are you sure that you are not bankrolling the ruination of your child’s mind in a leftist finishing school? And all this so your kids can have the prestige in possessing something that is quickly losing its prestige? How does that compute?
The degree and campus experience are rapidly losing their value. The indoctrination and subsequent lack of rigor cannot be hidden for long. Dunces and extremists with degrees cannot interminably escape the withering eye of reality. Every employer will come to realize the truth in “Ye shall know them by their fruits”. Statue-topplers aren’t likely to keep the sewer system in operation.
Send your kids and money elsewhere. Please watch the short clip.
Some people believe in things that are completely nuts. Look at “gender-affirming care” and the adults in positions of authority who have bought into it. Think about it: the self-diagnosis of a toddler or tween is sufficient to invoke a permanent life-altering trajectory as the result of a medical intervention that screams malpractice. Despite the indoctrination that is mislabeled as counseling, the kid will never be the same, either emotionally or physically, and can’t return to their former self.
After the victims’ exposure to the counseling/indoctrination, Lupron (AbbVie’s chemical castration drug and puberty blocker), cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, we’re starting to see regret in the form of the word “detransitioner”. Later comes the realization, after all of the changes to the body and mind, that the tween’s rash self-diagnosis for sex-transition can’t be fully undone. Cutting to the chase, this whole thing is c-r-a-z-y!
Of course, the response of the adult enthusiasts in the transition Borg when confronted with any reluctance to the treatment is a resort to the rhetorical equivalent of Defcon 1 (nuclear war is imminent or has already begun) – “Do you want a dead daughter or an alive son?” Heck, the affected are still committing suicide . . . after the transition.
I give you three cases of regret: one ends in suicide; the other is ending in a lawsuit; and still another concerns a whistleblower at a gender clinic.
The situation involving David Reimer (the full account below) will turn out to be a refutation of the behaviorist’s chief insight, that social conditions overwhelmingly define a person’s development. It was believed by some that the influences of biology can be replaced by the social engineering of “expert” interventions. Reimer was thrust into the trap of a psychologist’s effort – John Money, a Johns Hopkins University psychologist – to reengineer David from a boy to girl. It didn’t work. David committed suicide at age 38.
David Reimer as Brenda (l) and the Reimer familyJohn Money, Johns Hopkins University psychologist
The story begins 8 months after David’s birth in 1965 when his penis was accidentally removed during a surgical procedure. After consultation with John Money, his parents agreed to interventions to turn David into Brenda. 14 months later, David’s remaining male genitals were removed, artificial and rudimentary female genitals installed, and he started a regular regimen of estrogen injections. His upbringing as Brenda ensued.
An uneasiness would plague him for the rest of his life. And then he learned what happened to him. He would “detransition” back to David and replace his artificial female genitalia with artificial male genitalia. He got married, adopted 3 children, but continued to be consumed by depression up to the moment of his fateful decision to take his life.
He was misdiagnosed as an adult with “gender dysphoria” because he wasn’t “in the wrong body” so to speak – or maybe he was, put there by an “expert” whose ideological inclinations would prevent him from realizing the obvious truth that XY chromosomes signal the release of male hormones to the body and brain. The potential for harm is as great for the modern version of the John Money approach, “gender-affirming care”.
That brings me to the case filing of Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Inc, in early 2023. At age 13, Chloe fell into the arms of Kaiser’s gender team. According to her filing (see below), “a team of doctors (i.e., the Defendants) . . . decided to perform a mutilating, mimicry sex change experiment on Chloe.” Even more damning is the treating practitioners single-minded commitment to one approach – gender-affirming care – without adequately divulging the controversial nature of the treatment, risks, and the shortcomings of much of the research into it. How could anyone, let alone a 13-year-old, exercise informed consent under the pressure of doctrinaire activists in white smocks? Chloe’s formal complaint reads,
“Defendants [i.e., Kaiser] obscured and concealed important information such as the following: the conflicting studies in this area; the high quality evidence demonstrating poor mental health outcomes; the existence of only low to very low-quality studies purportedly supporting this treatment; the significant likelihood that desired outcomes would not be attained; the significant possibility of desistence, detransition and regret; and the lack of accurate models for predicting desistence and detransition.”
Chloe Cole
Chloe detransitioned at age 17 and is now seeking legal redress for what can only be described as mental and physical mutilation by a branch of the medical industry that is more beholden to an ideology than real medical science. It’s nearly as horrific as anything that came out of the German SS Race and Settlement Main Office or the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics of the 1930’s with its fixation on other forms of malevolent flights of fancy under cover of “science”.
Now, other clinics and hospitals have earned suspicion and scrutiny for engaging in practices that can only be described as licensed mutilation. Jamie Reed, a former pediatric gender clinician at Washington University Transgender Center, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, blew the whistle on the hasty and obsessive herding of minors into gender-affirming care.
Jamie Reed
Even the New York Times, frequently dismissive of such charges, has confirmed much of Reed’s story. They validated many instances of the facility’s staff jumping to transition counseling and testosterone before any underlying emotional issues were addressed. It became commonplace at the clinic, facing a social contagion of gender dysphoria among adolescents, particularly young girls, to reach for short cuts in processing the horde with a reliance on highly dubious outside examiners and the snap push into cross-sex hormones and the indoctrination of the patient into accepting that they’re the opposite of their chromosomes.
Manias based on dubious “truths” aren’t unusual in history. Astrology, phrenology (skull shape is determinative of a person’s nature), and bleeding (opening a vein, leeches) were integral elements of medical training and practice. Pre-Civil War, some races were said to be best suited for subjugation (slavery for instance, John C. Calhoun). It carried over into Jim Crow. An incomplete and rudimentary understanding of heredity led to the horrors of eugenics which fed into the Supreme Court’s Oliver Wendell Holmes’ stupefying opinion in Buck v. Bell (1927) – “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” – and Auschwitz, et al. Karl Marx was intent on uncovering a “science” of history which, when put into practice in the 20th century, led to over 110 million deaths. Far from enlightening, some “scientific truths” have been the harbinger of much misery.
Who knows, climate change in its current ideological form may join history’s many delusional offramps from real science.
Meanwhile, the self-diagnosis of tweens as a proper basis for life-altering treatment is farcical. Euphemisms like “gender-affirming care” can’t hide the ugly reality. Which leads to another profound question: Why does it seem that the vulnerable – the mentally limited, those powerless in slavery, the subjugated by military conquest, the people stripped of their power of self-defense, children – are chosen to be the guinea pigs? Harvard grads don’t usually show up in the casualty lists.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The story of the David Reimer and Dr. John Money can be read at “John Money Gender Experiment: Reimer Twins”, Julia Simkus, Research Assistant at Princeton University, review by Saul McCleod, PhD, in Simply Psychology, June 23, 2023, https://www.simplypsychology.org/david-reimer.html#:~:text=The%20John%20Money%20Experiment%20involved%20David%20Reimer%2C%20a,identity%20and%20transitioned%20back%20to%20male%20in%20adolescence.
* An excellent introduction to the Cole v. Kaiser can can be accessed here: “Cole claims that Kaiser Hospital physicians encouraged her to undergo irreversible, gender-affirming procedures without exploring alternate options, such as psychotherapy”, Ryan J. Farrick, Legal Reader, Feb. 23. 2023, at https://www.legalreader.com/detransitioner-chloe-cole-lawsuit-kaiser-hospitals/. Also here: “Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Permanente”, Dhillon Law Group (representing Chloe), at https://www.dhillonlaw.com/lawsuits/chloe-cole-v-kaiser-permanente/.
* The story of Jamie Reed’s allegations can be read at “How a Small Gender Clinic Landed in a Political Storm”, NYT, August 23, 2023, at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/health/transgender-youth-st-louis-jamie-reed.html
* More on Jamie Reed’s allegations can be read at “I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle”, Jamie Reed, The Free Press, Feb. 9, 2023, at https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids
* Excellent reportage on the troubles with gender-affirming care can be read at National Review Online. For example, “New York Times Confirms St. Louis Gender Clinic Whistleblower’s Claim That Adolescents Were Rushed into ‘Affirming’ Care”, Ari Blaff, NR, Aug. 23, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-york-times-confirms-st-louis-gender-clinic-whistleblowers-claim-that-adolescents-were-rushed-into-affirming-care/. Also in “Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Permanente”, Madeleine Kearns, NR, March 14, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chloe-cole-v-kaiser-permanente/.
