RUTHFULLY YOURS

In August 2017, Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Larry Alexander, a law professor at the University of San Diego, wrote an article arguing that we are paying the price for the loss of values that we had up to the mid-60s. They listed those values as:

“Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

They argued that these values are superior to what we have today such as “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks and the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

One could hardly imagine a more innocuous article, yet the blowback has been escalating ever since and Black Lives Matter plans to sow chaos on Penn’s campus if Dr. Wax is not fired.

Note that while single parenthood is a bigger problem in the black community than in the white community, Amy Wax and Larry Alexander went out of their way to describe it as a characteristic of the white community, because they wanted to stress that people from all segments of our society have lost the values of the past. Wax emphasized that “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” and that “bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead” in an interview about her article with the Daily Pennsylvanian.

The efforts of Wax and Alexander to be evenhanded didn’t protect them from false accusations of racism and white supremacism from organizations at Penn. It didn’t stop 33 Penn Law faculty members from publishing a letter in the Daily Pennsylvanian condemning Amy Wax.

There’s something horribly wrong with the world when language is policed to such a degree that calling a woman a woman is controversial. However, that’s the world we live in.

The most recent example comes from Mount Holyoke College.

For those unfamiliar with Mount Holyoke, it’s a small college in Massachusetts with an enrollment of just over 2,200. All students are women.

That’s right. Mount Holyoke does not allow men. So you might think they would not have the absurd SJW issues with gender that you see at co-ed universities, because Mount Holyoke clearly believes that gender is a fact.

Nope. A school-produced guide titled Supporting Trans and Non-Binary Students instructs professors: “When discussing the student body, say ‘Mount Holyoke students’ rather than ‘Mount Holyoke women.'”

It adds: “Avoid making statements like ‘We’re all women here … ‘, or referring to ‘… the two genders.'”

Hold on: why might someone who does not identify as a woman be at an all-women’s school?

The guide continues: “[M]any students spend the first day of class braced against various types of disrespect … professors who mispronounce their names, call them by the wrong name entirely, misgender them, and so on.”

CONTINUE AT SITE

Until last week, I’d never heard of Amy Wax. She is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who landed in hot water after she co-authored a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed last August 9 with Larry Alexander, who teaches law at the University of San Diego. Under the headline “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture,” Wax and Alexander began their piece by listing some of the sociocultural pathologies currently plaguing America – low job skills, widespread opioid abuse, inner-city gang violence, one-parent homes, and high-school and college students who lack basic skills. They went on to attribute these problems to “the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.”

They recalled the precepts by which Americans lived in the mid twentieth century: get married before you have kids; try to avoid divorce; get educated; work hard; be patriotic, neighborly, charitable, respectful, and law-abiding. Yes, they admitted, mid-century America was hardly perfect. There was racism; there were rebels who broke the rules. But the rules themselves were good. They resulted in “productivity, educational gains and social coherence.” Now they’re gone, replaced in many subcultures by “antisocial habits,” “rap culture,” “anti-assimilation ideas,” an obsession with group identity, and other destructive forces that do a terrible job of preparing young people for responsible adult lives.

Every word of that op-ed was sheer common sense. (As NYU professor Jonathan Haidt observed, Wax’s concerns about the black subculture were expressed in the 1960 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who at the time “was roundly condemned as a racist” but whose analysis is now echoed by countless sociologists.) Yet the op-ed was widely seen as scurrilous. The very next day, the Daily Pennsylvanian ran an interview with Wax in which she declared that “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms” were “superior” to others. “I don’t shrink from the word, ‘superior,’” she said. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” She underscored that Western norms “aren’t just for white people” but “can help minorities get ahead.”

On March 14, I attended a public presentation entitled Islam 101 at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California. The presenter was Nicole Bovey, a convert to Islam and public information officer at the Islamic Institute of Orange County in Anaheim. Bovey also works with the Muslim Speakers Bureau in Orange County (an arm of the Islamic Networks Group). The presentation was sponsored by GWC professors Kaine Fini (Anthropology) and Communications Professor Kristine Clancy (most of the audience members were her students, and this was part of her class.) The event had been advertised publicly, hence was open to the public. Altogether, there were approximately 50 people present. I videotaped the entire proceeding. The event was scheduled to run from 6:45-9:30 pm. As it was, it was cut off at about 8:30 by one of the professors (more about that later.) During the event, Professor Clancy called in campus police and she admonished a couple of the people in the audience who had asked pointed questions.

Ms. Bovey’s presentation was a very basic and very vanilla presentation of Islam, explaining what Islam is, what it means, who Muslims are, Muslims’ worldwide demographic breakdown etc. Bovey’s lesson plan, consisting of slides posted on the walls, was about subjects like the 5 pillars of Islam, daily prayers etc. She stated at the outset that she was there to clear up misconceptions about Islam. In fact, the first image on the wall was of a masked man representing a terrorist. Yet, it was clear later into the presentation that she was not going to get into areas like terrorism or Sharia law. She invited the audience members to raise their hands to ask questions at any point.

Bovey was doing fine handling soft, non-controversial questions, but plainly could not handle pointed, uncomfortable questions from a few members of the audience, including myself. One audience member identified himself as a former Muslim from Egypt, who left Islam and became a Christian pastor. When he began to contradict statements by Bovey, she became uncomfortable. Subsequently, he was approached by Prof. Clancy who asked him to step outside. He returned a few minutes later. While Bovey was discussing Zakat (Islamic charity giving), another audience member asked her about the categories of Zakat and whether any of them allowed giving to non-Muslims. She was unable to answer the question. Another man in the audience, a Muslim, stated that there was a separate channel of giving other than Zakat that could be directed to non-Muslims.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s bold new campaign to expose the rampant anti-Semitism and dangerous, genocidal rhetoric of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and their student supporters across the nation is officially underway.

The campuses of four California universities –UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, UCLA, and USC— have already been blanketed with hard-hitting, fact-based posters that detail the virulent Jew-hatred of these activists and the neo-Nazi-sympathizing professors who try to grant them moral authority.

The posters are coming soon to many more college and university campuses across the country.

To bolster the campaign, the Freedom Center will be debuting a powerful new pamphlet by Sara Dogan titled SJP: Neo-Nazis on Campus, as well as publicizing the effort at its Stop University Support for Terrorists website.

This groundbreaking investigative report examines how anti-Israel activists affiliated with SJP, MSA, and likeminded groups are using social media to praise Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, urge an intifada-style uprising in the U.S., and call for a second Holocaust to exterminate the Jews. The same people also smear Israel, describing Jews as “colonial-settler” occupiers of a nonexistent state called “Palestine,” while calling Israel an “apartheid state” even though it is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and a staunch U.S. ally.

The profiles in the pamphlet—which were assembled using carefully documented references from the Canary Mission, a nonprofit group dedicated to cataloguing hatred across the political spectrum— showcase the statements, actions and motivations of 10 of the most ardent neo-Nazis leading the campus war against Israel.

PJ Media previously reported on the story of a 17-year-old high school student from Farmington, Conn., who was originally blocked from participating in a school assembly on March 14 where she had planned to present her conservative and pro-Second Amendment views. Thanks to the attention her story received, the student, Ashley Dummit, was eventually able to participate, and gave a speech at the assembly in defense of Second Amendment rights. In fact, she ended up being the only speaker at the assembly.

Unfortunately, not all incidents involving pro-Second Amendment students have ended so well.

Another high school student, 17-year-old Christian Breault, a senior at Middleburgh Junior/Senior High School, in Middleburgh, N.Y., found himself physically attacked for standing up for the Second Amendment when his school participated in the nationwide walkout on March 14. After the school participated in the walkout, an assembly was held in the school, featuring local law enforcement and community leaders to talk to the students about school safety. Instead of safety, the assembly turned political, tensions rose, and Christian found himself targeted for defending the Second Amendment. His father, Brian Breault, spoke out about the incident on Facebook:

Today the school my son, Christian, attends participated in the National School Walkout for Gun Control and School Safety. The school held an assembly after the walkout bringing in community leaders and law enforcement to speak. Toward the end of the assembly they showed an Anti-NRA video vilifying the gun organization and its members (American citizens).

Following the dismissal of the assembly Christian engaged in a conversation with other students who felt the assembly was not handled well. Christian expressed he felt the Anti-NRA video was over the top and he found it offensive. Another student not involved in the conversation threatened him for his view on the video going as far as telling the school nurse that he would punch Christian in the face if he didn’t stop defending the NRA. The nurse told the student he could not say that and no further action was taken. CONTINUE AT SITE

The campus mob at the University of Pennsylvania Law School has scored a hit. Prof. Amy Wax will no longer be allowed to teach required first-year courses, the school’s dean announced last week. Now the leader of Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania wants Ms. Wax’s scalp. According to a weekend newspaper report, if she isn’t fired within a week, “he plans to make things on the West Philadelphia campus very uncomfortable.”

Ms. Wax’s sin this time was to discuss publicly the negative consequences of affirmative action. Her punishment underscores again the dangers of speaking uncomfortable truths in a university setting.

The academic left has been gunning for Ms. Wax since last August, when she co-wrote a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed calling for a return to the “bourgeois culture” of the 1950s. She was branded a white supremacist for advocating personal responsibility, even though the op-ed criticized “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites.”

Half the Penn law faculty signed an open letter denouncing the op-ed. The dean, Ted Ruger, asked her to take a leave of absence and stop teaching her first-year course, Ms. Wax wrote last month in this newspaper. She declined his request. (The law school denied her account and said the discussion was merely “about the timing of a regularly-accrued sabbatical.”)

Simmons College, a women’s school in Boston, wants to make sure all students are completely up to date on what constitutes a microaggression. So they published an extensive list of no-nos so that absolutely no one on campus will ever be offended by anything anyone says ever.

They also took great pains to list what might be “microinvalidations,” “microinsults” and “microassaults.” And when I find out which microbrain thought these things up, I’ll let you know.

The Washington Times reports that on the college website they list “six ‘anti-oppression’ categories—’anti-racism,’ ‘anti-transmisia,’ ‘anti-ableism,’ ‘anti-Islamomisia,’ ‘anti-sanism’ and ‘anti-queermisia’—with which students should be familiar.”

Only six? Keeping the list short is probably a microaggression itself.

A description of the guide reads, “This guide is intended to provide some general information about anti-oppression, diversity, and inclusion as well as information and resources for the social justice issues key to the Simmons College community.” As you will see, the “general information” includes loads of specifics.

What exactly is “anti-Islamomisia”? Saying “God bless you” after a sneeze is to commit the microaggression because of the “assumption of one’s own religious identity as the norm.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Florida this week joined eight other states that have banned “free speech zones” at public colleges — which, in the topsy-turvy way things work on campus these days, is a win for free speech.
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It’s a win because schools set up such zones in order to limit speech everywhere else. This cuts at the (orderly) free exchange of views that is supposed to be at the heart of any college’s mission.

But that ideal runs counter to the progressive dogma that young men and women need protection from ideas that somehow cause them pain. And it makes things tough on college administrators who must deal with the kids (and non-student radicals) who’ll happily stage a riot to serve their inner censors.

Thus Florida State, for example, offered a campus “compliance” map showing the exact locations where literature distribution and sign postings can take place — because the zones are otherwise so hard to find.

Yes: It actually takes a law to stop many school officials from caving in to the left.

Interestingly, the states that have taken this principled stand tend to be “purplish” ones, neither deep lefty blue nor righty red: Virginia, Missouri, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee and now Florida — plus Utah, whose many Mormons have historic reasons for respecting speech rights.

It’s shameful that such laws are needed — and depressing that states like New York are behind the curve.