RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is a place in America where civil rights don’t exist.

The First Amendment doesn’t apply. Neither does the Sixth Amendment. (Never mind the Second.) Not only Freedom of Speech, but Freedom of Association (NAACP v. Alabama) is under fire.

Snowflakes. Oversensitive. We’ve all heard those accusations leveled at college students. Are millennial college students really an oversensitive generation? Or are they right to be oversensitive.

Two types of people are sensitive; the entitled and the endangered. It’s reasonable to be paranoid about subtle social nuances if you live in a totalitarian state where the wrong word or look will be punished. Where someone is always watching for even the most minor acts of political incorrectness.

College students are afraid. And they should be.

The average college campus with its speech codes, thought policing, violent protests and kangaroo courts has no resemblance to anything else in the United States of America.

Colleges are totalitarian states. And they are the blueprints of the left’s plan for the entire country.

Individuals have no rights on campus. Intersectional tribes do. The way that these tribes negotiate conflicting rights is a mix of Kafka and Orwell. In Orwell’s homeland, Oxford University’s Equality and Diversity Unit (a name that could easily have leaped from the pages of 1984) warned students that failing to make eye contact was a racist microaggression. The usual sensible responses accomplished nothing. Then autistic students complained that the microaggression guidelines were themselves a microaggression against students with disabilities. And the “Unit” quickly apologized and retreated.

The absurdity of the situation reeks of old Soviet anecdotes. But the same system exists in the United States.

An individual’s right to free speech on campus derives from his membership in a group. What might be dangerously offensive from a white man is fully legal when coming from a Latino woman or a Muslim man.

Not just the speech, but the evidentiary process is fundamentally different based on group membership. Hysterical panics by favored minority activists lead to quick and illegal sanctions against students and faculty with no regard for the facts. Facts, like truth, are viewed as favoring white males.

Editor’s note: The University of Chicago joins nine campuses on the list of “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” The University of Chicago provides financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech exposing the truth about Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.

Last night, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between the terrorist group Hamas and SJP on the University of Chicago campus. When the Freedom Center placed similar posters on the campus last fall, a university spokeswoman called them “defamatory and inconsistent with our values and policies.” This latest round of posters serves to inform students about SJP’s true motives and allegiances and challenges the Chicago administration to uphold their stated commitment to free expression.

University of Chicago: Campus administration

The University of Chicago has long prided itself on producing independent thinkers and encouraging a certain iconoclasm among its students and faculty. In the fall of 2016, the university’s dean of students, John Ellison, engendered a national controversy by making an explicit statement in support of free speech in a letter to incoming students: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

It seemed that Ellison was bravely sailing against the winds of political correctness, but recent events at the University of Chicago suggest that this cherished commitment to free speech applies to students and campus organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, but not to those who defend the Jewish state and expose the terrorist connections of its enemies.

In the past few years, Chicago has witnessed the development of a highly active BDS campus movement, U of C Divest, which is currently supported by more than 20 student organizations on campus. In the spring of 2016, U of C Divest succeeded in passing a resolution endorsing BDS in Chicago’s student government. During the debate over the resolution, an amendment supporting the continued self-determination of the Jewish people and the existence of Israel was rejected, indicating that the coalition’s goals align with Hamas’s aims of destroying the Jewish state.

The University of Chicago has brought numerous pro-Hamas speakers to campus. In October 2015, UC-SJP hosted BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti for a speech on “BDS and the Ethical Obligation to End Complicity in Oppression.” During his address, Barghouti labeled Israel a “savage unrepairable society” that conducts “ethnic cleansing.” He praised terrorism against Israel’s Jews, stating that “resistance” is a legitimate response to “the violence of an oppressive system.” Several UC organizations and departments co-sponsored Barghouti’s address including the Global Voices Program – University of Chicago International House, the Pozen Center for Human Rights, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of International Studies.

Later that same month, UC-SJP held a panel titled “Jerusalem in Crisis: Insider Perspectives on the Violence in Palestine-Israel” as part of the “UChicago Israeli Apartheid Week.” One speaker at the event, a graduate student member of SJP, stated: “Palestinian violent resistance against the violent Israeli military is always justified; it is the equivalent of biting the hand that is trying to choke you to death.”

From 2009-2013, Janet Napolitano headed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security but as president of the University of California she has been unable to prevent violent thugs from quashing free speech on UC campuses. Napolitano has also remained silent during the smear surge against UCLA professor Keith Fink, but that should come as no surprise.

Janet Napolitano made her public debut in the 1991 smear campaign against Clarence Thomas, in an effort to keep the conservative African American off the Supreme Court. The lead smearer, Anita Hill, accused Thomas of sexually harassing her and Napolitano, then with a Phoenix law firm, represented Hill in the matter.

The false accusations of Napolitano’s client supplied ammo for white Democrats Howard Metzenbaum, a former Communist; Ted Kennedy, who sought support from the USSR against Reagan; and Robert Byrd, a former high-profile Ku-Klucker. Napolitano’s representation of Anita Hill came up in 1993 when president Clinton appointed her as a U.S. attorney.

In the confirmation proceedings, Napolitano interrupted Hill’s witness Susan Hoerchner, who after an off-the-record conversation, “suddenly developed amnesia,” about parts of her story that contradicted Hill. Napolitano refused to answer questions whether she had persuaded Hoerchner to change her testimony.

Napolitano’s great achievement as Arizona attorney general was to ban Christmas displays on public property. As Arizona governor, she inclined to cronyism, appointing to the state supreme court her campaign attorney Scott Bales, a liberal Democrat who also worked at her former law firm. Napolitano vetoed seven bills intended to fight illegal immigration but her anti-conservative zealotry came to the fore during her stint as Department of Homeland Security boss.

Like the 44th president, Napolitano believed that radical Islam was not the primary threat. She expunged the word “terrorism” from the DHS lexicon and purged experts showing the connection between terror and jihad. She put out the DHS report Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, a sweeping indictment of conservatives for preferring limited government and constitutional measures such as the Second Amendment.

That, of all people, Barack Obama recently received the Kennedy Library’s “Profile in Courage” award proves that the latter has about as much to do with recognizing courage as the Nobel Peace Prize, of which the former President was also a recipient, has to do with honoring peace.

This is not meant to be a knock against Obama. Rather, it is an observation that no unprejudiced spectator of the contemporary American scene could fail to make. The stone-cold truth is that there is utterly nothing courageous about being a self-avowed “progressive,” a Politically Correct leftist, in today’s Western world.

And Obama is nothing if not a leftist.

No, neither Obama nor his ideological ilk in Washington D.C., Hollywood, the (fake) news media, and academia display a scintilla of courage in their public lives. Real bravery, as all of us teach our children, is a matter of resisting groupthink—or “peer pressure,” as we call it when referring to youth. Real courage consists in daring to challenge the prevailing ideological orthodoxy—or “what’s popular,” as the kids call it.

There are indeed people who are deserving of an award affirming courage. One such person is Paul Griffiths, a divinity professor at Duke University. Professor Griffiths, whose area of specialization is Catholic theology, is a prolific writer and scholar. He has been teaching at Duke since 2008.

He will not be returning to his position in the fall.

In February, an invitation was emailed to the divinity school faculty encouraging them to attend a two-day seminar on “racial equity” training. Anathea Portier-Young, an Associate Professor of the Old Testament, replied enthusiastically: “Those who have participated in the training have described it as transformative, powerful, and life-changing,” she wrote. “We recognize that it is a significant commitment of time; we also believe that it will have great dividends for our community,” she said.

Griffiths disagreed. He copied all of his colleagues on his response. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he began. “Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show.”

Griffiths concluded: “Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual.”

Of course, Griffiths is entirely correct. “Events of this sort” are most definitely, always, profoundly anti-intellectual. They are instruments designed to totalize the groupthink, the religious-like dogma, of the academy. That Griffiths dared to defy the orthodoxy, that he dared to openly resist the “cool kids,” and that he undoubtedly knew what was to come next earns him a Profile in Courage award.

The Divinity school Dean, Elain Heath, responded to all faculty. She didn’t mention Griffiths by name. However, it was clear to all that it was he who she had in mind when she condemned the “inappropriate and unprofessional” nature of “mass emails” containing “disparaging statements—including arguments ad hominem” that are intended “to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree.”

To insure that her point wasn’t lost upon anyone, Heath was explicit: “The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.”

While Dean Heath reportedly attempted to meet with Griffiths in person, this never came to pass. Subsequently, Griffiths sent out another mass email. The subject line read: “intellectual freedom and institutional discipline.” According to The News and Observer, Griffiths revealed to his colleagues that he had become the “targets” of two disciplinary proceedings. The first involves a harassment complaint filed by Portier-Young, the Old Testament professor who couldn’t rave enough about the “racial equity training.” The other has led Dean Heath to ban him from all faculty meetings and deprive Griffiths of funding for future research and traveling expenses.

As Griffiths sees it, Heath’s actions are “reprisals” against him, means by which she can “discipline” him for articulating views with which she disagrees. “Duke University,” Griffiths stated, “is now a place in which too many thoughts can’t be spoken and too many disagreements remain veiled because of fear.”

This being the case, Griffiths urged a “renunciation of fear-based discipline to those who deploy and advocate it, and its replacement with confidence in speech.”

Professor Griffiths has resigned from his position at Duke, effective next fall.

Griffiths richly deserves an award that recognizes his bravery. To be fair, however, so too does his colleague, Thomas Pfau, a professor of English and German, warrant recognition for having come to Griffiths’ defense. “Having reviewed Paul Griffiths’ note several times,” Pfau commented, “I find nothing in it that could even remotely be said to ‘express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.’ To suggest anything of the sort strikes me as either gravely imperceptive or as intellectually dishonest.”

Pfau added: “I also felt that differences of opinion, however stark, ought to be respected and engaged, rather than being used for the purpose of moral recrimination.”

Pfau describes Griffiths as “one of the pre-eminent theologians working in the United States today and a vital resource for students and colleagues engaged in rigorous theological reflection here at Duke.” He claims to “profoundly regret” Griffiths’ decision to part ways with Duke, and told him that he believed that it was a “mistake.”

Evidently, though, it is too late.

In response to the racist-banana incident at the private American University – now under investigation by the U.S. attorney in D.C. as well as the FBI – the editorial board has declared that all colleges should censor students if someone thinks their speech or behavior is racist:

Two-bit provocations such as hanging nooses on campuses play on emotions made raw in the wake of a presidential campaign that featured the vilification of minorities and barely veiled race-baiting. For university administrators, the challenge is to address that legitimate pain with sensitivity and make crystal clear that racist signs, symbols and speech are off-limits.

UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar, doesn’t try to explain away what appears to be a clear and chilling call for censorship from a legendary newspaper. He writes in his own Post column today:

This is an editorial, the product of carefully considered labor on the part of a group of people, not an extemporaneous remark …

And the editorial’s proposal is an awful idea. At public universities, it would violate the First Amendment; at private universities, it would violate many of the universities’ stated commitments to open debate, as well as basic principles of academic freedom.

The editorial board has no clue how wide a swath of speech it would be implicating, according to Volokh: Claims of “whites being an oppressor race” could just as easily be punished as bananas found hanging from makeshift nooses.

The same goes for criticizing Islam as illiberal, calling for stricter immigration limits or condemning Israeli policies:

All such advocacy that runs against university administrators’ political views would be deterred when “university administrators” “make crystal clear” that “racist … speech” — racist in the views of whatever disciplinary committee is making decisions — is “off-limits.”

Hans Bader, former lawyer in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, said in an email today the Post has reached the “opposite extreme” from its past position:

Once upon a time it called for Congress to pass Congressman Henry Hyde’s bill to ban campus speech codes even at private campuses. Of course, that was years ago, when moderate Democrats still existed. …

A conservative professor at UCLA claims his superiors are working to get him fired because they do not like his politics. https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32533/

UCLA communication studies lecturer Keith Fink’s assertion comes several months after his department chair put a cap on the number of students who could enroll in his class. That left a long line of very frustrated students saying they wanted to take his class, and there were empty seats inside Fink’s classroom, but campus administrators effectively blocked their ability to enroll.

Fink, a conservative, an attorney, and a free speech defender who has been openly critical of ways in which UCLA has trampled on students’ free speech rights, said the discrimination against him has grown worse.

Now he claims his department “has done everything it can to rig” his performance review in an attempt to oust him from teaching at his alma mater.

‘Modern day star chamber’

A vote on the popular lecturer’s excellence review took place last week, but the results might not be known for up to two weeks, teaching assistant Andrew Litt said.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Fink described last week’s closed-door meeting as akin to a “modern day star chamber.”

Lecturers at UCLA are required to go through the excellence review process by the end of their 18th quarter of teaching and the review includes compiling an “Initial Continuing Appointment” dossier.

Included within the file are items such as a curriculum vitae, list of students to be solicited for reviews, a list of those who might not provide objective evaluations, a classroom observation, and an optional list of names who may speak to the lecturer’s teaching ability.

In his candidate response to the department’s dossier, Fink lays out that his right to a fair review was denied. He alleges, in the document obtained by The College Fix, that the communication studies department worked to keep evaluations from students of his choice out of the file and that a teaching evaluation is “riddled with falsehoods and distorted facts,” written by a faculty member Fink deemed biased at the beginning of the excellence review process.

Last month, I attended an interfaith panel discussion, “Unpacking Misconceptions,” at Portland State University, where I’m a political-science graduate student. I ended up being fired as the multimedia editor of our student newspaper, the Vanguard, for tweeting about what was said there.

Much of the discussion was uncontroversial. The students on the panel mainly shared complaints of what they perceived as misconceptions about their religions. A Hindu student lampooned author Reza Aslan for his depiction of Hinduism on CNN’s Believer, which showed a minority sect’s practice of eating human flesh. A Jewish student said most Jews don’t have payot, the side curls worn by some Orthodox Jewish men. An atheist student spoke on behalf of a secular-humanist worldview and challenged the audience to think about how we as a society can develop our own moral framework without religion.

At one point, a woman in the audience asked the Muslim student if a specific verse in the Koran actually permitted the killing of non-Muslims. “I can confidently tell you, when the Koran says an innocent life, it means an innocent life, regardless of the faith, the race, like, whatever you can think about as a characteristic,” he began.

At this point, I took out my mobile phone and began recording as he continued:

And some, this, that you’re referring to, killing non-Muslims, that [to be a non-believer] is only considered a crime when the country’s law, the country is based on Koranic law — that means there is no other law than the Koran. In that case, you’re given the liberty to leave the country, you can go in a different country, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. So you can go in a different country, but in a Muslim country, in a country based on the Koranic laws, disbelieving, or being an infidel, is not allowed so you will be given the choice [to leave].

Although I was not there officially as a reporter to cover the event, I shared a 40-second snippet of the video on my personal Twitter account, with a message that conveyed my understanding of the speaker’s meaning — namely, that non-Muslims would be killed or banished in a state governed by Koranic law:

At @Portland_State interfaith panel today, the Muslim student speaker said that apostates will be killed or banished in an Islamic state. pic.twitter.com/YpsVSB1w9P
— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 27, 2017

I later posted a longer version of the video in a follow-up tweet to provide more context:

.@Portland_State Here is full clip that I recorded. An audience member asked about Quran 5:51 & “infidels.” He summarizes Quran 5:32 just before video starts pic.twitter.com/7FMgsPbFR6
— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 27, 2017

This longer video includes a response by someone in the audience who disagreed with the speaker, saying it was “perfectly okay for non-Muslims to live in Muslim lands.” The audience member cited the existence of religious-minority communities in the Middle East as an example of Islamic tolerance.