RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/bucknell-university-to-host-antifa-leader-who-promotes-political-violence/

On the American college campus, the constant advance of extremist ideas goes on. Sometimes, those ideas are put into direct action in the form of violence, such as when radicals attack speakers and physically prevent audiences from gathering to hear them. But the more insidious aspect of the advance takes the form of invitations to propagandists in the garb of scholars who defend and encourage violence while attempting to mask their deeply totalitarian motivations in a superficial and mendacious veneer of moral self-righteousness and academic respectability.

At the campus where I teach, this week we are seeing an example of this insidious creep toward the left’s open embrace of violence against those who advocate for conservative ideas. The Humanities Center at Bucknell University has invited Mark Bray to speak on September 10, 2019, the day before the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.  It is the inaugural event in a year-long series the Humanities Center has put together on the theme “Confronting Fascism.”

Bray is an advocate for and participant in Antifa, an amorphous group of communists and anarchists who engage in thuggish street violence, attacking property and individuals they label “fascists” or “white supremacists,” designations they use sufficiently liberally as to include just about anyone they feel like vilifying and attacking. In his book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” Bray carefully adheres to this crude and toxic system of definition, calling all those who support the current president of the United States “everyday fascists” and wrapping up with a concluding chapter with the astounding title “Whiteness is indefensible.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/6/coddling-campuses-and-crippled-culture/

Summer is over. School has started. Students from coast to coast have returned to their college campuses, and the nation waits with bated breath as to what will happen next. 

Will the self-absorbed snowflake insanity persist? Will you continue to hear cries of “you offended me” and “trigger warnings” in the halls of the academy? Will the demands for “safe spaces” continue to trump the study of science? Will the fixation on “micro-aggressions” continue to be more important than teaching morality? Will victimization continue to trump virtue?  

In the days ahead, what will the news from the ivory tower be? If the old axiom that the best predictor of future behavior is always past behavior is true, here is just a shortlist of what you can expect in the coming weeks and months.

Students at Emory University will renew their cry for counseling because someone used chalk to write the name of an unpopular politician on a campus sidewalk. 

Young intellectuals at Yale will continue to demand the termination of professors because of their “hurtful” views on such critical issues as Halloween costumes.

Southern Illinois University will double down on its brilliant plan to host campus “naps” in its library so students can snuggle up together in sleeping bags as they seek to solve our nation’s ills. 

In the coming academic year, millennials from campuses across the land will persist in their juvenile fits of rage. 

At American University, the University of Wyoming and the University of California-San Diego, burgeoning scholars will, once again, receive coloring books to help them cope with their stress and anxiety.