RUTHFULLY YOURS

We spent the second half of the last century in a long war with a bunch of leftists who wore funny clothes and shouted a jargon of incomprehensible slogans.

These days you can only find them in North Korea and on your local college campus.

As free speech disappears from campuses faster than beer during Hell Week, here’s your guide to understanding what the people taking away your free speech are saying while they pepper spray you.

Free speech is actually not at all endangered on campus, according to the Wellesley News which defines free speech as any speech that protects the underprivileged. The only free speech is left-wing speech. Any other speech is a form of oppression against the underprivileged who have the privilege of calling it out by harassing anyone who engages in it to protect their existence from your existence.

That includes lying down in the middle of freeway traffic so as to impede white supremacy by preventing teachers from getting to work, kids from getting to schools and ambulances from transporting dying patients to the hospital. This calls attention to the plight of angry African Studies majors who almost read “Between the World and Me” and named their gerbils after wanted terrorist Assata Shakur.

All non-social justice forms of speech are hate speech. These include supporting Trump, quoting the Bill of Rights or refusing to check your privilege. Checking your privilege determines how much free speech you really have. The privileged have the least free speech because of their burden of privilege and the underprivileged are privileged with the widest latitude of free speech.

This includes bursting into the library and shouting racial slurs while everyone is studying for their finals.

Objecting to racial slurs, death threats, fake hate crimes, machete attacks, pepper spray and/or arson is “tone policing”. Policing the tone of angry left-wing minority hooligans who have Tumblr pages full of clips from The Boondocks is deeply wrong and you need to check your privilege. They are already performing enormous amounts of “unpaid emotional labor” by just existing in white spaces and then trying to educate you about your privilege and their agony by yelling racial slurs in your face.

It doesn’t help when you refuse to be educated about your privilege and instead whitesplain, mansplain, hetsplain or cisplain to them about the challenges you have overcome. If you aren’t enduring daily “microaggressions” when people fail to use the correct personal pronoun that reflects your agender identity (Zer or Ler are both acceptable) then you have no idea how privileged you are.

Existence is resistance. The mere existence of an agender Muslim Eskimo Lesbian who is differently abled on account of Zer’s learning disability is an act of resistance against a system of white supremacy filled with unthinking privileged cis and het normative people like you.

Every time that Zer encounters anything from a bathroom sign to a wedding cake that normalizes heterosexual and cisgender people who are racist enough to love the opposite sex and believe that they’re still men and women, it is triggered and must defend its existence. This requires it to perform enormous amounts of unpaid emotional labor from which it must retreat into self-care mode where it binge watches a season of Orange is the New Black while shoveling pints of Ben & Jerry’s into its maw and then demands class credit and a grant for all that unpaid emotional labor.

Failure to accede to its demands is also a microaggression.

Unpaid emotional labor is any emotional friction resulting from Zer fighting back against being marginalized, triggered and bloated. Social justice crybullies will often demand to be paid for their emotional labor. The emotional labor they demand to be paid for includes yelling at people on Twitter, posting social justice cartoons on Tumblr and reporting people for offensive Halloween costumes.

New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo rolled out a plan last week to give free tuition to middle-class students attending the state’s public colleges. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were quick to praise Mr. Cuomo’s political ploy, whose true target isn’t New Yorkers but Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The governor presents himself as a champion of the middle class, but it has been fleeing the state in droves due to the lack of jobs and high cost of living. More than 191,000 New Yorkers decamped last year for other states, 43,000 of them to Florida alone. About three-quarters of the state’s counties have lost population since 2010, when Mr. Cuomo was elected. The New York City area continues to grow thanks largely to an influx of foreign immigrants.

Alas, the plan for tuition-free college merely redistributes income while giving the middle class little actual help. In fact, many of the scheme’s putative beneficiaries may be harmed.

Consider the terms and conditions for the state scholarship. To qualify, students must come from families earning less than $100,000 ($125,000 by 2019)—and they must attend school full-time and graduate on time. The State University of New York estimates that about a fifth of its undergraduates would be eligible. A mere 2% of students at the City University of New York would qualify—in part because of low graduation rates, just 5% for full-time students at CUNY’s York College.

There are also claw-back provisions. At the end of each year, scholarship recipients who don’t complete 30 credits—a full course load for two semesters—could lose their grant award for that second semester and get stuck taking out loans to pay back the state.

Students also have to commit to living and working in New York after they graduate for as many years as they receive the scholarship. If they leave the state, the grant turns into a loan. This kind of indentured servitude could keep young graduates from pursuing higher-paying employment elsewhere.

Scholarship recipients also won’t save as much money as they might think. Annual tuition for in-state students at SUNY community colleges is roughly $4,370. The figure for the state’s public four-year schools is about $6,470. Low-income students can get federal Pell grants of up to $5,920 a year. New York’s Tuition Assistance Program, which covers students whose families earn less than $80,000, can further reduce tuition by $500 to $5,000 each year.

In other words, many middle-class students already are paying little to nothing for tuition. Students who receive Gov. Cuomo’s scholarships, however, would still have to pay for room and board, which SUNY estimates will run between $10,000 and $13,000 a year.

Mr. Cuomo says the plan will cost state taxpayers a mere $163 million by 2019. Yet hundreds of millions more in federal student aid may flow to public colleges because of increased enrollment, which may be one of the governor’s unstated goals. Since 2010, enrollment at SUNY community colleges has fallen on average by about 12%. Between 2011 and 2015, enrollment dropped by 8% at SUNY Buffalo State and 18% at Erie Community College.

Promising free tuition could steer more students to public schools from private ones. The Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities in New York estimates Gov. Cuomo’s plan would boost enrollment at public colleges by 116,000 while reducing the head count at nonprofit schools by 11%. The declines would be particularly acute at small, less selective colleges. For-profit schools would be pinched, too.

According to the commission’s analysis, the plan would shift $1.4 billion away from nonprofit colleges, resulting in 45,000 job losses. Compensating jobs would be created at public schools, but dislocations would invariably occur. “Once this is out there and implemented, possibly some of the more precarious institutions will go under,” Gary Olson, president of Daemen College, told Inside Higher Ed. “And what that will do is cause millions of dollars of lost economic impact on the local community where the college is located.” CONTINUE AT SITE

A Letter From An Ivy League Admissions Dean – WSJ By James Freeman

Brown University in Providence, R.I. houses one of the country’s most selective undergraduate colleges. The Brown Daily Herald, a student-run newspaper, cites Dean of Admission Logan Powell in reporting that the school received a record-high 32,724 applications this year, and admitted just 8.3% of applicants.

Among those lucky few is the daughter of a Journal reader who is still trying to make sense of a letter the family received this week from Mr. Powell. Our reader’s bright daughter had already received news of her acceptance when a letter arrived that was addressed to her “Parent/Guardian.”

Oddly, the note referred to the accepted student not as “she” but as “they.” Dean Powell’s letter also stated that our reader’s daughter had no doubt worked hard and made positive contributions to “their” school and community. Our reader reports that his perplexed family initially thought that Brown had made a word-processing error. That was before they listened to a voice mail message from the school congratulating his daughter and referring to her as “them.”

We’ve read about the literacy crisis in the U.S. but would not have guessed that the problem extends to Ivy League administrators. An item on Brown’s website announcing Mr. Powell’s 2016 hiring reported that he had previously served at Bowdoin, Harvard and Princeton—and also noted that he would be overseeing a staff of 38 people at Brown. One would think that at least some of them are familiar with pronouns.

It turns out that the errors were intentional. Brown spokesman Brian Clark writes in an email that “our admission office typically refers to applicants either by first name or by using ‘they/their’ pronouns. While the grammatical construction may read as unfamiliar to some, it has been adopted by many newsrooms and other organizations as a gender-inclusive option.” Our reader figured as much. “Mind you, our daughter has always been clear what her biological gender and identity is — she’s a woman,” he reports. He believes the school “wants to make it clear that only left wing extremists are welcome at Brown. Fine with us — good riddance.”

The letter from Dean Powell included a total of four short paragraphs, including this one: “And now, as we invite you to join the Brown family, we encourage you to allow [daughter’s name] to chart their own course. Just as you have always been there, now we will provide support, challenge and opportunities for growth.”

Nearly a complete stranger, Mr. Powell is writing a short, error-filled letter to parents claiming that his organization is fit to replace them. No doubt the “Brown family” with all its “thems” and “theys” can offer a wealth of valuable educational opportunities. But anyone who buys the line that competent parenting is part of the package has probably never set foot on campus.

Something alarming is happening on campuses, fueled by tendentious and morally self-righteous progressive students, and some faculty, who have displayed a shocking disregard for the university’s cardinal virtue of free expression, deciding themselves who may say what about whom on their respective campuses—and purging from campuses those ideas they have deemed too hateful, too unsafe, too incendiary to tolerate or to allow to be heard.

Until now, these champions of the aggrieved have been less than transparent in both their motives and intentions, disingenuously asserting that their efforts to suppress the speech of those with opposing conservative views is done to protect perceived victim groups. Ideas which are contrary to these social justice warriors’ acceptable worldview are dismissed as contemptible—not even worthy of being debated—or are neutralized and debased by designations which characterize it as ‘hate speech’ because it is, depending on the victim groups attacked, racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, or homophobic. So sure of their righteousness and ideology are they that they do not even try to hide their preconceived notions and evident bias against ideas they have decided are beyond the pale or unworthy of being given voice.

Feelings, not ideas, are what count; emotionality now trumps rationality.

The defective rationale for the thuggish substitution of the suppression of other people’s speech for what is supposed to be two-sided academic dialogue was just revealed at Wellesley College, where both students and, unusually, faculty publicly articulated the shocking notion that only certain speech is to be permitted—namely, those ideas which promote and support progressive liberal views—and that opposing views, and the conservative speakers who utter them, are not even deemed worthy of being able to share their ideas on the Wellesley campus.

In an astoundingly facile editorial in the April 12th issue of the Wellesley News, the paper’s editors responded to recent debates over free speech on that campus, precipitated, somewhat ironically, by a series of lectures as part of Wellesley’s Censorship Awareness Week, during which one controversial speaker, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, critiqued the notion that American campuses are awash with sexual assault. In her book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, in fact, Kripnis asserted the view that, “We seem to be breeding a generation of students, mostly female students, deploying Title IX to remedy sexual ambivalences or awkward sexual experiences, and to adjudicate relationship disputes post-breakup — and campus administrators are allowing it.”

That opinion was apparently intolerable to Wellesley’s students, and some faculty, who refused to acknowledge Kripnis’s notions, theories that contradict their preconceived worldview that men are predatory and women have to be protected from them, something she describes as “neo-sentimentality about female vulnerability.”

Virulently anti-Trump professors — by which I mean “most professors” — feel pretty invincible. After all, when a video recently surfaced of a professor comparing the election of Trump to a terrorist attack, the student filming it got punished.

So imagine Fresno State professor Lars Maischak’s surprise last week when his tweet demanding President Trump be hung was reported to law enforcement by Fresno State’s president:

Though Maischak did not respond to Campus Reform’s initial inquiry on the matter, he did try to clarify his comments on Twitter, saying that while he “did not intend to harm Mr. Trump” nor “wish for anyone else to harm Mr. Trump by way of an assassination,” he does think “given the nature of [Trump’s] regime, that he will be held accountable for his crimes in a court, and that historical precedent suggests that a death sentence is inevitable, if democracy prevails.”

Now, however, Campus Reform has been informed that university President Joseph Castro promptly alerted multiple federal agencies to the tweets after becoming aware of them, and has been in “regular contact with federal authorities” over the past several days.

“President Castro said that the university alerted the FBI, Secret Service, and Homeland Security as soon as it became aware of the comments made by Dr. Maischak on Twitter,” Director of Communications Kathleen Schock told Campus Reform. “He went on to say that the university been in regular contact with federal authorities. There are no other details we can disclose about those communications.”

The tweet in question from Maischak’s now apparently deleted Twitter account read:

To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance #DeathToFascism

I spend a lot of my time reporting some crappy news about school administrators. President Castro’s decision to adhere to the law is a welcome change and should be applauded.

It can be argued that Maischak didn’t spell out his desire to assassinate the president — that’s for the investigators to decide. However, his claims that he doesn’t want someone else to assassinate Trump rings hollow considering what he also expressed last week: CONTINUE AT SITE

The University of California-Davis’s student senate voted to allow the removal of the American flag from its meetings.

Saying “patriotism is different for every individual,” the senate voted to make displaying the flag optional.

Any idiot can see where this is headed.

Fox Insider:

Pete Hegseth pointed out that the senate appeared to say that there would be instances where the flag’s presence was inappropriate.

“We’ve got patriotism triggering people now,” Campus Reform reporter Cabot Phillips remarked.

In a statement, Student Senator Jose Antonio Meneses further clarified that the flag was not banned from meetings, but only had its mandated presence lifted.

Phillips said the vote was not an isolated incident, recalling a situation in New Mexico where a student was forced to remove a flag from his dormitory window.

Does anyone doubt that some snowflake will call for the flag’s removal? The student senate thought they were being clever in hiding their intent behind sophistry, but if there isn’t at least one member of that body who will complain about displaying the flag, I’ll be shocked.

The problem isn’t so much that one or two people will object to displaying the flag. It’s that there will be intimidation to force others to go along with it. That’s the true fascism on the loose on college campuses – the forced acceptance of a minority viewpoint through intimidation and threatened ostracizing of anyone who disagrees.

Anyone who feels uncomfortable about a national symbol that has stood as a beacon of liberty and freedom for the truly oppressed people of the world is probably too sensitive to survive outside a university setting. Most of them will be unable to live on their own and will end up living with their parents or marrying someone who will be forced to care for them.