RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/people-getting-fired-for-referring

It has become clear over the past year that our racial reckoning has shaped attitudes about the N-word. Or, among a certain few who scare the rest of us into pretending to agree.

As someone who is both a linguist and commentator, I am in an awkward position on the N-word. The linguist describes; the commentator opines. In my new book Nine Nasty Words, which publishes tomorrow, in the chapter on the N-word I try to stick with just describing. However, many will wonder how I “feel.” I have opined here on this topic before; in anticipation of the publication of Nine Nasty Words I will share some further thoughts.

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A widely discussed documentary on James Baldwin in 2019 was carefully titled I Am Not Your Negro, as opposed to what Baldwin actually said in an interview, “I am not your nigger.” In 2019 when literature professor Laurie Scheck ventured a discussion in a class at the New School in New York on why Baldwin’s actual phrasing had been elided, she uttered the word itself – only to be reported to the administration by students in her class and narrowly avoid being fired. And then, more recently, she was indeed fired, with no compelling reason given. It is hard to imagine that continued evaluation of the N-word incident in light of the “racial reckoning” starting last summer had nothing to do with this.

It has become almost hard to keep up with the episodes of this kind of late. As I have discussed here, law professor Jason Kilborn was barred from the University of Illinois in Chicago’s campus as a threat to black students’ safety after in frustration referring to himself in satire as a “monster” in a conversation with black students intended as a healing one. The conversation’s spark? His writing “n*****” in an exam question about employment discrimination, that had bothered no one until – golly, wonder why? – this year.

About ten minutes before this, Greg Patton had been dismissed from a class he was teaching at the University of Southern California for mentioning that in Mandarin, the equivalent of the hedging “like” in English is “nèi ge, nèi ge” which translates as “that, that …” but sounds like, well, you know. Not only had Patton given the lecture countless times before with no problems, but – you couldn’t write this better – the class was on communication in global markets!! Yet the usual suspects went about for weeks claiming that Patton had committed a kind of “violence” added to the grinding burden that being black in modern America is.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/soviet_tyranny_warmed_over_is_still_tyranny.html

A colleague recommended I read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a long and deep look into the abyss of Soviet communist oppression in the first half of the 20th century.  In her opinion, “everyone should read this book.”  I must agree — the world would probably be a better place if the book was required reading in universities, especially in the West.  It should also be taught in high schools, at least in excerpts.  Sadly, in the age of the tweet, Solzhenitsyn’s 700-odd agonized pages are probably doomed to general neglect.  More’s the pity.

Mark Twain said long ago: “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”  The Gulag Archipelago, though intended by its author as a forlorn memoir to the hundreds he saw ground up by the Soviet state, is also the most powerful of warnings.  Communism is still with us.  Its central themes have never been extinguished.  Its salespeople are still out on the street.  The seductive lies of dead ideologues have never lost their power to persuade.  They have changed a little, adapted to new cultures, new eras, and new technologies — but in the end, the Devil’s siren song still rhymes.

One hardly knows where to begin.  Let’s start with the political usefulness of the common criminals — people Solzhenitsyn summarizes as “thieves.”  In Soviet prisons and labor camps, the truly antisocial elements were made the jailers of the rest.  They could torture, rape, and sometimes kill their fellow prisoners with near impunity.  “Thieves” were officially designated as a victim group, a people wronged by capitalist oppression.  They were not to blame for their own actions.  They were, in the terminology of communism, “socially friendly elements.”  The people whom the state didn’t like, on the other hand, the people who had lingering ideas of individual rights and freedoms, or who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were the peoples’ enemies — the socially undesirable.

This exaltation of the criminal classes was not merely a feature of the penal system, but permeated the judicial system as well.  Sentences for property crimes and violent crimes tended to be light.  When ideology dictates that bad is good and good is bad, the results are predictable.  Crime, fear, and suffering flourish.

When we see the knee-jerk movement to “end mass incarceration,” to “abolish the police,” and then watch as the mob terrorizes and loots city after city — we can only assume that the current revolution is progressing nicely.  The left has begun to release the pent up power it has long been nurturing in our prisons, leavening it with a hefty dose of race-hatred to increase its ferocity and garnishing it with a dollop of class envy for the sake of old-time Marxist nostalgia.  You cannot say the Marxist narrative hasn’t kept up with the times, but the core doctrine remains unaltered: thou shalt terrify and cow the populace with such sociopathic operatives as come to hand.  Nor is such doctrine in any way unique to Soviet communism.  Other socialists have played variations of this tune.  The Fascists had their black shirts and the Nazis had their brown shirts in the early stages of their development.  We now have BLM.  A thug is a thug is a thug.  His color is irrelevant.  By any other name, a fist is a fist, and a burning bottle of gasoline smells as sweet.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/03/the-democratic-partys-stasi/

While reading emails in his bedroom last Wednesday morning, Paul Hueper heard a loud commotion inside his house. Still clad in pajamas, the Alaska business owner ran to his dining room to see what was happening.

Hueper found himself face-to-face with several armed FBI agents, guns drawn, barking orders to him and his wife, Marilyn. The agents had kicked down the front door of their home in Homer, Alaska where they also operate a day spa and inn.

The pair were quickly handcuffed along with a few houseguests, including a teenager. Paul and Marilyn, who had attended Donald Trump’s speech in Washington, D.C. on January 6 and then walked to the Capitol, were interrogated for at least three hours by federal investigators.

“They said they had a search warrant but didn’t present it to us . . . they said it had something to do with the January 6 riot . . . as they called it,” Hueper told a local radio station after the April 28 raid. “They put us in different rooms to make sure we were telling the same story. They treated us like criminals.”

Marilyn was told she was a suspect in the case of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “stolen” laptop; a few hours into the inquisition, an agent finally showed Marilyn a photo of someone inside the Capitol on January 6 who looked like her. She told agents it wasn’t her and insisted the image had been photoshopped.

The whole incident was somewhat amusing to the Huepers. “We laughed a lot of the time because it was so ridiculous,” Marilyn said. “I could hear Paul laughing in the other room.”