Posted on 11/10/2015 1:12:02 PM PST by Red Badger
The student protest at the University of Missouri began as a response to a serious problem — outbursts of vile racism on campus — and quickly devolved into an expression of a renewed left-wing hostility to freedom of expression. At the protest on Missouri’s campus yesterday, on a space that is expressly open to free expression, protesters barred journalists from covering the demonstrations. In one scene, protesters surrounded and harassed Tim Tai, a photographer with the student newspaper, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, journalists have got to go.†The scene is captured on a video here, which rewards close watching until the end, where Melissa Click, a professor of mass media working with the protest movement, calls out, “Help me get this reporter out of here. I need some muscle over here.â€
It is possible — and, for many sympathizers on the left, convenient — to dismiss these sorts of incidents as just so much college high jinks. “College students have been saying stupid things since the invention of college students,†argues Daniel Drezner, in a passage that attracted widespread support on the left. It is probably true that a strange and sudden new hypersensitivity among young people has produced a widespread expectation of a right to be protected from offense. It is also undeniably true that outbursts of political correctness disproportionately take place in campus settings. In recent weeks, UCLA, Wesleyan, and Yale have seen left-wing student activism aimed at shutting down the expression of contrary viewpoints.
Even if it were the case that political correctness was totally confined to campuses, it would not make the phenomenon unimportant. Colleges have disproportionate influence over intellectual life, and political movements centered on campuses can spread well beyond them (anti-Vietnam began as a bunch of wacky kids, too). But to imagine p.c. as simply a thing college kids do relieves us of taking it seriously as a coherent set of beliefs, which it very much is. Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender. It manifests itself most prominently in campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne, but because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life where the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others. The phenomenon also exists in other nonacademic left-wing communities, many of them virtual ones centered on social media, and its defenders include professional left-wing intellectuals.
The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)
American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).
The scene in Columbia and the recent scene in New Haven share a similar structure: jeering student mobs expressing incredulity at the idea of political democracy. As far as the students are concerned, they represent the cause of anti-racism, a fact that renders the need for debate irrelevant. Defenses of p.c. tactics simply sweep aside objections to the tactics as self-interested whining. “It’s not about creating an intellectual space,†shouts one Yalie. Notably, the events at Yale have redounded in New Haven to the benefit of the protesters, who have renewed their demands, and Nicholas Christakis, the Yale administrator seen pleading futilely for reason, issuing apologies for his behavior. Likewise, at Wesleyan, the student newspaper that sparked outrage by publishing the op-ed of a student (cautiously) questioning elements of the Black Lives Matter movement has been harshly sanctioned.
That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it — and make a decision on whether they agree with it.
The opening sentence is BS. None of those claims of racism has been validated. And we know these freaks are not above staging phony acts to gin up their cause - just look at the hoax of a KKK infiltration coming to Berkeley, perpetrated by a black kid.
But that will come.
Thanks to Steve Jobs, the revolution will be televised.
Don't worry, a few more steps and they are there.
They will NOT hold back. Ayers and the Weathermen along with Tom Hayden talked about liquidating 25 million.
They are all nothing but Maoists.
And yet we now have gay marriage (whatever that is), illegals treated better than citizens, and we are a whisker away (pun intentional) from making it a free-for-all in answering the calls of nature - something that has been handled in a common-sense, orderly fashion since before the dawn of writing or tools.
I shudder to think what 'full control' might look like.
PC will have the begining of the end come around this time next year with these four words:
President-Elect Donald Trump.
Mark my words, angry blowback against PC is coming, next November. Count on it.
They need to find the leaders of these movements, separate them from the heard and open a can of whoopee on them. I would be interested in knowing where they got their marching orders. Students at Universities are too stupid to do this on their own.
Check out the leader of this fiasco, Student Government President Payton Head:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paytonhead - Notice that Chicago pops up in this community organizers’ resume. The only thing he left out was the week in 3rd grade he was in charge of clapping the blackboard, uh, make that “green†board erasers after school.
http://www.hercampus.com/school/mizzou/payton-head - Awww, a widdle King Obama.
https://twitter.com/MSAPresident - Just a bit of a narcissist there with the twitter name.
A confirmed RABBLE-ROUSER hears a racial slur from a passing car. Did anyone else hear it? ANYONE can say this at anytime.
A swastika painted in feces. Makes me think of Morton Downey Jr.
This is the “99%” Wall Street fake movement, and every other FAKE progressive Liberal group.
How long before Missouri stops allowing this nonsense to ruin the school’s reputation? If they do nothing they are tacitly confirming the charges.
The complete cave in at Mizzou almost guarantees we will be seeing this type of crap at more schools. I have never understood the liberal obsession with race..
Even if Ted or Don win.\, they have a congress filled with the exact people that stood silently or joined with Democrats that created this situation.
We are not getting out of this without the left going to an actual war to retain the gains they have made under a Republican congress. Such are the wages of electing our problems in the holy name of ‘winning’. “No matter what.”
“outbursts of vile racism on campus”
Oh Really? Where’s the video. Everything is videoed these days.
The “obsession” is simply the destruction of the White race/Western Judeo-Christian culture. They(i’ll let you figure out the constituent parts of “they”) want payback and they want it to be a bitch.
And “they” are succeeding....
Kiss my lilly white rear NY Magazine.
It is getting to that point.
These little bastards are heading to a line they seriously don’t want to cross because these things always eats its young.
It's a form of division that even the most stupid can key in on.
Freshman orientation needs to include some variation of Gunny’s opening speech from Full Metal Jacket.
Where else - the Democrat Party.
“It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement.” Nailed it.
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