Posted on 05/12/2017 6:30:04 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell
The College Blueprint for a Totalitarian America The battle over freedom on campus is the battle for freedom in America. May 12, 2017 Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
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.
“The idea that there is a single truth–‘the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West," African-American students at Pomona College wrote. "This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”
We used to ask who was afraid of the truth. Now we have the answer.
Truth is a construct. The search for truth endangers minorities. That isn’t just true in the intellectual sense, but in the evidentiary one. If you try to determine whether a hate crime really happened or whether discrimination really exists, you are endangering their ability to exercise power through claims of oppression.
Facts and truth create unsafe spaces for politically correct tyranny. Safe spaces are places where truth and civil rights don’t exist.
The United States (not to mention capitalism and imperialism) were built on the notion that truth exists. So was our system of law. People are considered guilty until proven innocent because we believe that it is possible to find the truth. But if there is no objective truth, only subjective narratives, and social justice mandates to unpack our knapsacks and cast aside privileged narratives, then the privileged are guilty. And they can never be proven innocent without endangering the privileges of the oppressed.
That’s not an abstraction. It means that if you are accused of a microaggression, you are guilty. If you made too little eye contact or too much eye contact, you are guilty. Your explanations don’t matter.
Truth doesn’t matter.
Campus kangaroo courts operate in this post-truth space. Accusations don’t depend on proof, but on membership in the right identity group. Accusations of oppression must always be treated as valid. But accusations by the privileged can and should be ignored. That is how social justice works.
Crimes are collective. As are punishments. Individual guilt and innocence is a function of collective guilt and innocence. It doesn’t matter what you did. It only matters what group you belong to.
On campus, as in prison, there is safety in an identity group. Only the group has the power to protect you. But even within the group there is never any true sense of security. Intersectional tribalism is always being negotiated and renegotiated. The microaggression you condemn might very well turn out to be your own. No matter how oppressed you are, someone is always more oppressed.
The wrong joke, costume, idea, inference or even lack of eye contact can make you a criminal.
Innocence is not an option. The very concept of white privilege indicts you for crimes that you had no idea you were even committing. At worst, your very existence is an affront. And ignorance is no excuse. Whiteness, masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality and even Americanism are pre-existing crimes that require an endless process of atonement which by its very nature will always be incomplete.
You oppress by existing. To defend yourself is to further oppress your accusers by rejecting their pain. As in all totalitarian systems, your claims to innocence only deepen your guilt by challenging the moral authority of your accusers. The safest response is to confess and learn to love Big Intersectionality.
Colleges have always been the training ground for the leaders of tomorrow. The blueprints for a new society begin there. If you wanted to know what leftist ideas would be going mainstream in a decade, you went to a fashionable college. The leftist idea that is going mainstream is a totalitarian state.
Microaggressions, safe spaces, tone-policing, identity caste systems, no platforming and the end of truth aren’t just some silly campus nonsense. They are the blueprint for the future of the United States.
Violence against free speech migrated from the campus to the city street. The rejection of truth and facts climaxed with rejecting the outcome of a presidential election.
Imagine what tomorrow’s leaders would be like if they all got an education in North Korea. That’s the crisis we face today. The leaders of tomorrow are coming of age in the totalitarian campus states of today. When one of those polls emerge showing that 7 out of 10 college students want to ban offensive speech, it’s not a generational phenomenon so much as it is environmental indoctrination.
The left’s experiment in college totalitarianism has normalized an environment in which free speech and individual rights don’t exist, in which truth and facts were invented by imperialists, and in which a single cultural misstep can have shattering consequences for anyone who isn’t part of the right identity clique.
Today’s campus is unsafe for America. Taxpayers have invested enormous amounts of money into funding an educational system that rejects everything that makes our society work. If that does not change, then our society will be destroyed by the consequences.
The battle over freedom on campus is the battle for freedom in America.
Front Page mag - A Project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center
Daniel Greenfield Ping List Notification of new articles.
I am posting Greenfield's articles from FrontPage and the Sultan Knish blog. FReepmail or drop me a comment to get on or off the Greenfield ping list.
I recommend an occasional look at the Sultan Knish blog. It is a rich source of materials, links and more from one of the preeminent writers of our age.
FrontPage is a basic resource for conservative thought.
Lou
![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fiGVhiSe7Es/UC2iXPZr6dI/AAAAAAAAIBo/dnH7JqKKqVQ/s1600/sidepicture.jpg"left")
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
To get on or off the Greenfield ping list please reply to this post.
Tyranny is ruining not only our colleges it is destroying the Christian church. Hierarchies in our mainline denominations are embedded with Marxism. Ministers in local churches live in fear of reprisal by those in authority over them. Those who should be moral heroes are instead sniveling cowards. Christianity must find a new structure for its message. The church is no longer the voice of Christ.
Nope. Only power matters. So far they've been careful with the violence, but in the end only that will matter. The key to the success of this war is the takeover of state resources in the same way that university administration resources have been taken over. When that happens we will wake up to find ourselves in a totalitarian state. At least at that point we'll have identified which of the tyrants needs to be shot.
Powerful piece. And very scary.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” —Ronald Reagan
Listen to this, and I’ll tell you ‘bout the heartache
I’ll tell you ‘bout the heartache and the loss of God
I’ll tell you ‘bout the hopeless night
The meager food for souls forgot
Listen to this, and I’ll tell you ‘bout the heartache
I’ll tell you ‘bout the heartache and the loss of God
I’ll tell you ‘bout the hopeless night
The meager food for souls forgot
Leftist universities bloated by $400000 professors teaching six hours per week are begging for a major disruption. Their days of enslaving indebted students are numbered. Classes will be taught in virtual reality for tuition less than the price of a movie. Employers will remember how bad it was in the past when they got so many snowflakes applying for jobs. In the future, professors of race and gender studies will just have to suck it.
Academia will not continue to be a political force.
This video illustrates much of Mr. Greenfields point in this article.
https://www.facebook.com/seen.everything/videos/1154800587957810/
From personal experience as the father of a very conservative child that recently graduated from an Insane liberal University, the vast majority of students think these “Snowflakes” are stupid and insignificant to be concerned about.
I’ve shared dozens of stories along these lines with her and had many discussions about the influence the left is exerting on college campuses, the administrations and the student body. Her, and most of her peers brush this stuff off as, whatever, no one really cares. They are an irrational distraction from their studies and the student body as a whole doesn’t take them seriously.
Personally, I don’t know what to make of this.
I see the destruction of our Constitution by a very vocal and belligerent minority while the majority keep their heads down and don’t concern themselves with what they see as, well, just stupid.
Makes one reminisce about Kent State and the glorious smell of gun powder and teargas.
I believe that things are not as bad as Mr. Greenfield describes them to be.....yet. There are many schools that have not sunk to the depths of Berkeley, the Catholic colleges, the Ivy League and the small liberal schools that we read about. There is also a core of conservative Christian kids that go to college and keep their mouths shut to get the diploma, but don’t buy the BS. I know - I raised 2 of them.
The cancer must be starved - If President Trump can get federal money withheld for the worst of the offenders, and if states pass free speech laws like Tennessee has just done, and if we withhold private support as much as we can, then the model will shift to online classes and the tumor will start to shrink. The state supported schools will remain relatively sane if their customer base (that’s us) demands it. If the job market picks back up such that real degrees from real institutions of learning are worth something again, the private libtard paradises can then rot as employers refuse to hire their grads.
Unfortunately I think he is absolutely correct on this.
March on down south, little Marxist weenies, and watch what happens to you.
The last bunch that tried it got 10 to 30 years in state prison under the state’s anti-klan law.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.