The Problem with Today’s Woke Students

This article about the dumbing down of American students quotes Camille Paglia:

What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!

There’s one exception to this, however. Even while today’s students have not been taught knowledge, they have also been taught not to bully a person on the basis of their race, class, gender, or any other trait.

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The Intellectual Perversion of the Gay Rights Movement

Andrew Sullivan Writes:

We gays emerge from a past in which the freedom to say the unsayable and unpopular — often to great public derision or anger — was almost defining of our kind. We have always been the creators, not the censors; we defend the outrageous, celebrate the subversive, and revel in shock. We have never been the puritans, or the humorless, or among those who want to shut down free expression in order to “prevent harm.”

We defend the eccentric, the unusual, the blasphemous, the offensive. We have never attempted to control anyone else’s speech — until very recently. And this is part of what gays have long brought to the world: the fresh air of freedom and creativity and boundary-pushing against the tut-tutting forces of disapproval and censorship . . .

The capture of the gay rights movement by humor-free, fragile products of the social justice industrial complex is not just terrible PR for all of us. It’s awful politics. They are not even trying to persuade, debate, or make reasoned arguments — as we did relentlessly in the marriage movement. They do not engage and invite critics, as we did. They try to destroy them. Instead of arguments, they tweet out slogans in all caps — TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN — as if they’re citing a Biblical text. And the act of persuasion, the key to any liberal democracy, is, for them, an unjust imposition of “emotional labor.” So much easier to coerce.

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New York City Council Hides Statue of Thomas Jefferson

From the National Review, an article titled, "Canceling Thomas Jefferson."

After more than a century, the New York City Council is removing a statue of Thomas Jefferson from its chamber. The decision, which was made by the New York City Public Design Commission, was unanimous. It was wrong, too.

Justifying the move, Councilperson Adrienne Adams proposed that Jefferson had to go because he “embodied some of the most shameful parts of our country’s long and nuanced history.” But, ironically enough, it is precisely “nuanced history” that is missing from this analysis. Like many people, Jefferson could, indeed, be hypocritical and self-contradictory. Like many people from his region, he did, indeed, own slaves (and, unlike George Washington, he did not free them upon his death). And, like many people of his generation, he possessed some unpleasant private views. But it is not for any of that that we celebrate him. We celebrate him because he authored the Declaration of Independence — a magisterial document, which, both at home and abroad, has served as a beacon of hope and liberty throughout that “long” history to which Adrienne Adams refers.

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Race Relations: Then and Now

Excerpt from an article at FAIR's Substack by Alice Irby, who helped establish the Job Corps, and in the 1970s joined Rutgers University as the first female Vice-President of a major university. Title of her article: "Then and Now":

Many of us who labored in the civil rights movement were inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. I heard him call on us to respect others, not suppress them; to embrace diversity, not discriminate against each other; to improve our country, not tear it apart. Hope. Dreams. Fairness. Equality. The coming together of diverse people from all walks of life to work toward fulfilling the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as promised by the Declaration of Independence. The Civil Rights movement opposed bigotry by relying on hope, opportunity, and cooperation. We did not succumb to anger, dissension, despair, or intolerance.

Now, as I look around, I am frightened. I see hate, not hope; dissension, not dreams; tribalism, not unity. The Civil Rights movement fought for the principle of equal opportunity, regardless of race. Today, those who call for “equity” actually support discriminating against individuals based on race to bring about equal outcomes between racial groups.

I am a follower of Martin Luther King Jr., not Ibram X. Kendi. I do not believe that present discrimination is the remedy for past discrimination. Our nation was not founded on slavery, but on ideas that paved the way for the abolition of slavery. It is because of these beliefs that I support FAIR, a multiracial, non-partisan organization dedicated to principles of fairness, tolerance, and equality—a community whose advisors and members stand tall in reaffirming our common humanity and who show courage in combating forces of intolerance, racism, and injustice. I stand not only for our founding ideals and aspirations, but also for more eternal verities—compassion, respect for all, kindness toward others, and love of mankind. I choose the optimism of King over the pessimism of the neo-racist “anti-racism” of today.

We are all one race—the human race. We laugh, cry, and bleed the same. America is a beautiful multiracial mosaic, and it grows more diverse with each passing year. In our present moment, it is especially necessary to hold true to the values of fairness, understanding, and humanity that shaped the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. These are the values that can help to heal our societal wounds, restore excellence to our educational institutions, ensure justice and equal rights for all, and garner our many diverse strengths as we seek, as ever, a more perfect union.

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