RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/racism-cancel-culture-and-hypocrisy-harvard-richard-l-cravatts/

As racism continues to engulf campuses in paroxysms of aggrievement and perceived oppression by black students, Harvard University has become another in the growing list of universities where professors found themselves victims of the cancel culture. At UCLA, University of Chicago, Cornell, and Skidmore, faculty members were maligned and threatened with termination for purportedly critiquing Black Lives Matter, defending the police against attacks for perceived racist brutality, and even questioning the extent and reality of anti-black racism at their respective institutions and outside the campus walls.

At Harvard one of the current faculty targets is David Kane, Preceptor in Statistical Methods and Mathematics in the university’s Department of Government, who first made the apparently unforgivable error of inviting Charles Murray to speak to his Gov 50 class. Murray, of course, is a political scientist, libertarian, and the author of the still-controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, in which the authors demonstrate, in the most inflammatory section, genetic differences in intelligence between whites and blacks. Although Murray was going to discuss his new book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class in Kane’s class, it was Murray’s reputation as an alleged racist white supremacist that was on students’ minds when they learned of the upcoming speech.

To make matters worse for Kane, some of his assiduous students uncovered racist posts he had allegedly written on his website EphBlog. over the course of several years under the pseudonym “David Dudley Field ’25.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/16/liberal_totalitarianism_on_campus_144472.html

American liberals once prided themselves on their fidelity to the First Amendment. Indeed, they had an expansive understanding of it. They defended unpopular speech and even the most provocative examples of “freedom of expression.” One could question their hesitation to set limits in these areas, but there was something admirable about their principled defense of the free exchange of ideas.

This kind of liberalism, however, is in massive retreat today and is barely present on our colleges and university campuses. Instead, the forces of ideological correctness demand intellectual and even political conformity and seek out dissenting voices to humiliate and silence. Two recent examples from Harvard University and Middlebury College illustrate the illiberalism that has become ascendant on many campuses and in many of our cultural institutions. The responses to these incidents, however, provide some grounds for hope.

Last week, Harvard student Joshua M. Conde, an “editorial editor” for The Harvard Crimson, wrote an op-ed demanding that two instructors be fired for offenses against the new racial norms animating the woke left. The case of one of them, Diana J. Schaub, is best known to me. I have admired her writings and thoughtful presence in the conservative intellectual community going on 35 years now. She is also a friend. Dr. Schaub is a political theorist who has written gracefully and profoundly on the political thought of Montesquieu, the liberal French philosopher who was an inspiration for the federalism and separation of powers championed by the authors of the Federalist Papers. Her work also includes deeply thoughtful expositions of African American political thinkers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/cunys-systemic-jew-hatred-richard-l-cravatts/

When a provocative Tiktok video uploaded by Nerdeen Kiswani, a second-year student at CUNY law school, went public recently, the anti-Israel sentiment of the clip came as no surprise to those who were aware of Ms. Kiswani’s long record of toxic activism. In the video, Kiswani is seen attempting to light on fire an IDF-emblazoned sweatshirt worn by an individual sitting with her, expressing her hatred for the IDF and the nation it defends—a loathing that apparently animates Ms. Kiswani’s life, since she is fully engaged as the former vice president and president of the virulent student group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Hunter College and at the College of Staten Island (CSI), City of New York University (CUNY).

And, as evidenced by the video clip, Kiswani (pictured above) is perfectly willing to use and celebrate violence against Israeli Jews. In fact, when in 2017 Palestinian terrorists killed four people and injured 17 others by ramming them with a vehicle on a Jerusalem promenade, Kiswani lauded and encouraged celebration of the murders, ghoulishly noting that “Palestinians in Palestine are giving out sweets in celebration. I will not hide from this. I will not be ashamed or embarrassed by this. These celebratory actions are what keep the resistance moving forward, they are what keep it alive.”

Needless to say, this type of murderous activism can poison the climate of a university campus, exactly what took place at CUNY for another law student there, Rafaella Gunz. Gunz, a Jewish journalist who studies LGBT and feminist issues, herself became a target of pro-Palestinian students, including Kiswani, and eventually dropped out of the law school this year after she was relentlessly targeted by anti-Israel activists. “It came to my attention that there was this petition,” Gunz wrote. “It was inspired by me, it doesn’t say anything by name, that it’s me, but it says ‘a certain subset of Zionist activists.’ And that’s just me. I’m clearly outnumbered on this campus, right?”

“All the student groups signed it, professors signed it, a bunch of my classmates signed it, so it’s basically saying that if you are anything less than unequivocally supportive of the Palestinian groups, you shouldn’t be at this school,” Gunz wrote. “And then I was accused of ‘Zionist violence.’ I don’t know how my words are violent, but there it is.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/10/indoctrifornia/

California governor Gavin Newsom is a force of nature. He leads a state which has record homelessness, rising crime and exploding pension debt. But wait, there is so much more! Ruling more like dictator than an elected official, Newsom ordered a draconian lockdown in March to stem the spread of COVID-19. But more than anything, his autocratic move unnecessarily killed many businesses and livelihoods. Then in September, Newsom ordered a ban on gas-powered cars starting in 2035 because California is facing “a climate damn emergency.” For good measure, he then happily signed off on a bill that mandates the “study and development of proposals for reparations for blacks who live in the Golden State.” Newson insisted in a Tweet that our past is “one of slavery, racism, and injustice.” Could he not know that California was not part of the Confederacy?

But then he went against form. In a major surprise, he vetoed Assembly Bill 331 on Sept. 30th. This wretched legislation would have made taking an ethnic studies class a requirement to graduate high school in the state. “There is much uncertainty about the appropriate K-12 model curriculum for ethnic studies,” Newsom wrote in his veto statement. “The latest draft, which is currently out for review, still needs revision.”

Revision? Mercy killing is more apt. Bills like this invariably come replete with a strong political agenda, and more than anything promote victimology and anger, as well as providing a future army for the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. As I wrote two weeks ago, the model curriculum approves of classes that stress “modern day movements and intersectional struggles for social justice like the Immigrant Rights Movement, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the Environmental Justice Movements, Feminist Movements, LGBTQIA Queer Movements, and others.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/10/09/doj-sues-yale-university-over-race-based-admissions-policies-n1027040

After complaints from Asian-American groups, the U.S. Department of Justice is suing Yale University for discriminating against applicants based on race.

The suit alleges that Yale violated federal civil rights laws for the last 50 years. The suit also says the university uses an “oversized, standardless, intentional use of race” to favor black and Hispanic students over whites and Asians.

The Hill:

DOJ alleges that Yale University’s practices place “undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants, including in particular most Asian and White applicants,” according to a press release.

“Instead of using race in a narrow, time-limited, and targeted manner to achieve specific and defined educational goals, Yale has institutionalized its use of racial preferences as a permanent feature of its admissions process and decisions,” the complaint said.

There are hundreds of schools that give a wink and a nod in the law’s direction in order to favor black and Hispanic candidates for admissions. They don’t use race as the sole determinant in choosing students, they say. Indeed, as long as their policies conform to the statutes, they believe they’re in the clear.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/black-law-students-demand-racism-thought-police-richard-l-cravatts/

In George Orwell’s dystopian view of the totalitarian state in his novel 1984, freedom of speech and expression is controlled completely, and if the individual seeks to articulate his views openly it is considered to be something called “thoughtcrime,” “the essential crime that contained all others in itself.” And in that repressive future, the enforcers of intellectual conformity, using the mandatory relinquishing of individual thought and imagination, were the Thought Police, who forced “the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”

Now, in an effort to filter out any visible or invisible racism in their law school classrooms, the Black Law Students Association of University of San Diego’s Law School have proposed creating their own version of Orwell’s ThinkPol.

“As Black law students we are privileged with the opportunity to pursue a legal education and seek membership to the legal profession, however, we are not immune to the oppression that is inextricably linked to our Blackness,” the group whined in a six-page letter to USD law school faculty and students in the wake of the George Floyd death. And in order to create a brave new anti-racist world at USD, the BLSA letter presents a long list of specific demands, including the predictable ones which appear regularly in lists of anti-racist demands at other schools, such as: mandatory diversity and inclusion courses, access to complete biographies of law faculty, presumably so students can avoid taking courses from professors with unacceptable views, more scholarships for black students and students of color, and a call to hire more minority professors.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/stripping-jews-their-self-defense-what-u-illinois-richard-l-cravatts/

Led by the virulent anti-Israel, often anti-Semitic group Students for Justice in Palestine, the student government at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently passed a resolution calling on the university to oppose anti-black racism and also to divest from Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Company, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar Inc. and Elbit Systems Ltd., firms, the activists allege, that are “involved in human-rights violations and violations of international law, including the confiscation and destruction of Palestinian lands, criminalization of immigrants and communities of color, and other human rights violations,” offenses that would “make UIUC complicit in these crimes.”

Although this was the third time in four years the toxic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has appeared on this campus, this permutation included, predictably, language on anti-black racism and police brutality. In fact, the anti-Israel portion of the resolution was furtively obscured by the language of racial equity, defunding law enforcement, and emptying prisons—even the absurd idea to defund the University’s own police department.

Conflating the alleged oppression of the Palestinians by the IDF with the oppression and racist treatment blacks in the United States purportedly experience at the hands of police officers, the resolution garnered support from those currently energized by the Black Lives Matter movement as well as those anti-Israel campus activists who promiscuously malign, slander, and libel the Jewish state.