RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/2020/02/06/the-unteachables-n2560821

Last week, I received a phone call from a professor who teaches in another department here at the University of North Carolina – Wilmington (UNCW), where I have taught for the past 27 years. He was reporting a case of possible discrimination, which resulted in a professor being denied tenure thus losing his livelihood very soon. When I received the call, I immediately began asking questions to assess the validity of his concern. After just a few questions, I came across some information that will shock the conscience of any clear thinking, rational individual.

By way of background information, professors at our university must pass through several hoops to get tenure after they are initially hired for a tenure-track position. The initial contract is only for a few years. If professors get reappointed, a few years later they have an opportunity to apply for lifetime tenure. But to get this tenure, they first have to get approval from a majority of the tenured professors in their department, their department chair, and their college dean. If applicants succeed at this, they face a final vote from the university-wide Reappointment, Tenure, and Promotion (RTP) Committee. Since every faculty member must pass through this committee, its chair is arguably the most powerful professor on campus.

In the case that was reported to me, the applicant had received all three initial approvals. But, then, the RTP committee chair rejected the application. When I learned this, I asked about who is currently on the RTP committee. That is when I learned that its chair is Dr. Kimberly Cook.

https://townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/2020/06/02/white-man-cant-breathe-n2

Cary Aspinwall and Dave Boucher are investigative reporters for The Dallas Morning News. They deserve a Pulitzer Prize for an article written last summer that apparently no one in America has read, which is why I am summarizing it here today. It was about a man named Tony Timpa who cried for help more than 30 times as Dallas police officers pinned his neck to the ground. Before he died, Timpa shouted repeatedly, “You’re gonna kill me!”

And kill him the police officers did. After Timpa became unconscious, the officers who had him cuffed assumed he was asleep. As the minutes passed, the officers joked about waking him up for school and making him waffles for breakfast.

Body camera footage shows first responders waited at least four minutes after Timpa became unresponsive to begin CPR. Even worse, the police officers pinned his handcuffed arms behind his back for nearly 14 minutes and zip-tied his legs together. Shortly after he was loaded onto a gurney and put into an ambulance, Timpa was pronounced dead.

This culminated an incident that began when Timpa called 911 from the parking lot of a Dallas porn store. He told a dispatcher he suffered from schizophrenia and depression and was off his prescription medication. Later, police incident reports falsely claimed Timpa’s behavior that night was aggressive. In stark contradiction, the police video shows Timpa struggling to breathe and asking the officers to stop pinning him down. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/democrats_have_completely_abandoned_civility.html

On July 20, Nancy Pelosi said that if President Trump refuses to accept the results of the November election, he will have to be “fumigated” out of the White House.  Fumigation is a technique used against insects, and the idea that human beings are insects has a long history in totalitarian discourse.  Hitler described Jews as “vermin” and “parasites,” a form of dehumanization that is always just one step away from physical violence.  Speaker Pelosi should apologize immediately, and profusely, for her use of this inappropriate rhetoric.

Most thoughtful persons would agree that labeling another an “insect” is uncivil.  A cultured individual who practices civility is tolerant of the opinions and beliefs of others, and indeed, toleration is the best measure of civility.  One may be a Catholic, but he practices tolerance toward other Christian and non-Christian forms of belief, even including atheism and agnosticism.  He may be a liberal, but he values the opinions of conservatives and treats conservatives with respect.

By this measure, Joe Biden and the radicals who now support him have not been civil.  Biden now expresses contempt for conservative policies before even considering their potential value.  So it was with President Trump’s pledge to buy American-made goods.  That pledge of “America First” drew harsh criticism from Biden and his party — until Biden stole the idea and made it part of his own platform.  Biden could not bring himself to admit that Trump was right.  That sort of contempt for another is the essence of incivility. 

Like most liberals, Biden’s contempt is all-encompassing.  In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., ultimately decided in Hobby Lobby’s favor by the Supreme Court, Biden sided with those who would force persons of traditional Christian faith to pay for employees’ contraceptives.  Indeed, it was Biden’s Affordable Care Act that forced Hobby Lobby to provide all twenty FDA-approved contraceptives to employees.  The Obama administration was intolerant of traditionalists when it wrote the contraceptive mandate into the Affordable Care Act, and Biden would only double down on this intolerance if he sought to restore the mandate to his “expanded” version of Obamacare.

Hobby Lobby was not an isolated case of liberal intolerance.  In every free speech case that arose during the Obama years, Biden seemed more than willing to force his opinions on others.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/07/24/the-frankfurt-school-and-excellent-foolishness-how-the-left-infects-impressionable-minds-n696846

It has long struck me how the Frankfurt School, a collection of Leftist émigrés from Nazi Germany, could have been so successful in dominating the curriculum of the American university and wielding so massive an influence over following generations of students. Its major figures, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, were the main authors of the political revolution of the 1960s which gradually filtered into the culture to produce the revisionist “narrative” and physical violence we observe all around us today.

The most publically significant spokesperson was Herbert Marcuse, whose One Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization and his influential, totalitarian-inspired essay “Repressive Tolerance” planted the seeds of political and epistemic subversion in the fertile soil of American academia and, ultimately, in the marl of the cultural and institutional life. Marcuse argued in the essay that we must be “intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” By “status quo,” he meant classical liberal thought with its emphasis on tradition, individual autonomy, civic responsibility, and limited government, which he thought were responsible for deep-rooted social injustice. The narrative he developed was irresistible to his legion of acolytes.

The Frankfurters were the red brigades of the university Left, striving to fill their students’ minds with the doctrine of human and social perfectibility according to the egalitarian principles of their Marxist forbears, in particular the theories and ruminations of the Italian revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács. The Woke generation now rioting in the streets of Portland, Seattle, and other cities are their unwitting progeny, the shock troops of Antifa and BLM who never read Marcuse, let alone Horkheimer, Adorno, Gramsci or Lukács—and surely would be incapable of doing so with any comprehension. They have succumbed to a political virus of which they are unaware, fallen prey to a toxic narrative developed by the luminaries of the intellectual Left. This is what I would dub trickle-down intellectonomics, how complex thought (however specious) gradually leaks away into howls, bellows, and yawps.

There is no doubt that the crucial figures of the “Western Marxist” movement were brilliant men and erudite scholars, eloquent to a fault. They were right about some things, in particular about the rise of anti-Semitism as a function of a world sinking into barbarism. But how could they have been so wrong about America, working to transform the American Dream into the American Nightmare?