Cultural Marxism

U of W Senior Austin Morgan Debates Dennis Prager

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis is joined by protester Austin Morgan, Senior at University of Wyoming, regarding the “fuss” [lies] over Dennis’ speech Thursday. Dennis has been labeled by the protesters as anti-academic, a rape advocate, and of spewing hate speech against blacks, women, Muslims, and fellow Jews. I include a call from the following hour regarding Matthew Shepard. See more at NY-POST.

Here is more via THE COLLEGE FIX:

A student government diversity leader has vowed to work “tirelessly” to shut down conservative Dennis Prager’s upcoming talk at the University of Wyoming.

So far, Hunter McFarland has amassed a group of nearly three dozen peers who say on social media they plan to help protest the talk, titled “Why Socialism Makes People Selfish.”

McFarland, director of diversity for the university’s student government, told The College Fixshe wants Prager’s talk to be canceled because he “is an anti-academic, rape advocate who spews hate speech against Muslims, Black people, Latinas, and many other groups who deserve to be protected at the University of Wyoming.”

[….]

According to the Laramie Boomerang, McFarland told Jessie Leach, president of the university’s Turning Point USA chapter, in an email that “If you continue, you will have the entire campus against you. This will be another Milo situation.”

McFarland was referring to anti-feminist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who has had speeches canceled at multiple campuses nationwide and was prevented from speaking earlier this year at UC Berkeley because of riots.

A Facebook event page for the protest against Prager currently list about three dozen people planning to attend the demonstration.

However, Prager vowed he won’t let the protesters derail his visit to the Wyoming campus.

“This event will take place as planned,” he said in a press release.

Prager said he intends to answer every question students throw his way, arguing the attempt to silence him is the latest attack against conservatives appearing on college campuses.

“This is yet another example of the illiberal left’s attempt to shut down free speech on college campuses. Rather than simply choosing not to attend, or offering a dissenting viewpoint in an informed, respectful and courteous manner, their preferred approach is to intimidate and shut down conservative speakers,” he said….

Cultural Appropriation Halloween

Published by Papa Giorgio

Curing cancer through cultural appropriation:

REMY:

Just when you thought joyless, whining social justice warriors couldn’t possibly ruin anything else, they’ve now set their sights on Halloween. (H/T to Gateway Pundit)

GAY PATRIOT comments well on the above PC Police stopping “cultural appropriation”

…Another sanctimonious leftist advises on how to lecture people whose costumes are politically incorrect.

  • Among all the tricks and treats, cultural appropriation is an undeniable problem this time of year.

By “undeniable problem” she means “irresistible opportunity for moralistic preening by social leftists.” In this case, she recommends cornering those whose costumes are deemed “offensive” and delivering a stern lecture on the sin of “cultural appropriation.”

“Cultural Appropriation” is a term created by sanctimonious social leftists to attack white people who enjoy partaking of non-white, non-European culture. White entertainers that incorporate elements of African, Caribbean, or Asian influences into their art and music: jazz, for example or Kabuki-inspired costumes, are guilty of cultural appropriation. Note that “Cultural Appropriation” only goes one way; to suggest that Africans should not attempt “white European art” such as ballet or classical music would be racism. “Cultural appropriation” has been extended by the sanctimonious social left to condemn colleges that serve tacos on campus and people who dress up as ninjas or bandidos for Halloween.

In reality, “cultural appropriation” is something privileged leftists made up to lord over other people because they have no real problems and no real morality. There’s also an element of the Baby Boom Left — for whom race sensitivity rivals only hyper-environmentalism as their religion of choice — that needs to keep their pieties from dying out in the Next Generation; even as racism becomes culturally and socially irrelevant.

“The original cultural appropriators”

More on the YALE PROFESSOR

(Young Conservatives have a really good post on this) This comes via Gay Patriot’s commentary on “a generation is raised to believe that they are so wonderful and so special that anything that offends them…”

  • They were mad because a professor said in an email that if someone’s Halloween costume offended them, they should try and act like adults about it. (The longer version can be found here)

SEE MORE HERE

Narcissism Girds the Statement of “Not Real Communism”

Published by Papa Giorgio

Jordan Peterson, Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, speaks with The Epoch Times about Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism. Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been fully compiled and its ideology still persists.

Boom! NFL Star Burgess Owen Lays Down the Law!

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via POLITISTICK:

“One of the biggest things we can do is identify what our problem is. We have a problem which we have a white Marxist organization that has indoctrinated our kids the last 15 years with anti-white, anti-flag, anti-American — everything you see on the sidelines today has been flooded into our community — the liberal filth for 15 years — it’s called Black Entertainment Television [BET].

It’s not owned by black people It’s white people with a black facade, black employees with a message that is anti-American. So you have all these kids growing up in this environment, they’ve become millionaires, they’re going to believe what they were taught to believe.

We are up against a very evil ideology, guys. And understand that and we pull these guys from behind their corporate boardrooms. Have them stand in front of the American people and explain what they are doing to us.”

White Privilege Invoked In Vegas Shooting

Published by Papa Giorgio

Being a White Male helps in mass shootings as well. I guess that is why about the same number of black youths are killed every month in Illinois… #BecauseWitePrivilege.

Here are a few quotes from that Philadelphia INQUIRER article

…Like anyone, I am anxious to know why the shooting happened and how we can prevent such horrors in the future. As a black man, though, I have queries that are different from those on the other side of America’s racial divide. First among them: Was the shooter black? Second: How does race shape the media coverage? Third: Why do I have to ask those first two questions?

The answer, quite simply, is racism.

[…..]

While the Trump administration fights tooth and nail to maintain a travel ban that affects black and brown people from countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America, the people who pose the biggest threat to America go largely unwatched and unchecked.

That’s because since 1982, white men have committed 54 percent of the mass shootings in America. Those statistics, published by Newsweek, are troubling. But so is our reluctance to challenge white male privilege….

A Return To The 1940’s To Mid-1960’s “Bourgeois” Norms?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is an excerpt from the article mentioned on the show:

Paying The Price For Breakdown Of The Country’S Bourgeois Culture

….That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.

Did everyone abide by those precepts? Of course not. There are always rebels — and hypocrites, those who publicly endorse the norms but transgress them. But as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. Even the deviants rarely disavowed or openly disparaged the prevailing expectations.

Was everything perfect during the period of bourgeois cultural hegemony? Of course not. There was racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism. However, steady improvements for women and minorities were underway even when bourgeois norms reigned. Banishing discrimination and expanding opportunity does not require the demise of bourgeois culture. Quite the opposite: The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.

This cultural script began to break down in the late 1960s. A combination of factors — prosperity, the Pill, the expansion of higher education, and the doubts surrounding the Vietnam War — encouraged an antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal — sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll — that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society. This era saw the beginnings of an identity politics that inverted the color-blind aspirations of civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into an obsession with race, ethnicity, gender, and now sexual preference.

And those adults with influence over the culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values. As a consequence, the counterculture made great headway, particularly among the chattering classes — academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists — who relished liberation from conventional constraints and turned condemning America and reviewing its crimes into a class marker of virtue and sophistication.

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.

See also the interview at the NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S wonderful piece. JONATHAN HAIDT also has a fine piece defending the freedom of thought in such a piece… and those that wish to censor anything that disagrees with Leftism. Here is a snippet of it:

….The letter includes a call to action:

This is the time for members of the University of Pennsylvania community who claim to fight systemic inequality to speak up, especially those anthropologists and scholars who claim an understanding of culture and who recognize culture talk’s deleterious potential as a vehicle for racism and sexism… We call for the denunciation, not of racism as some abstract concept “out there” — in Charlottesville, in America, by the poor uneducated white or by an individual racist ideologue — but for a denunciation of racism at the University of Pennsylvania. In particular we must denounce faculty members that are complicit in and uphold white supremacy, normalizing it as if it were just another viable opinion in our educational tenures at the University. We call for the University of Pennsylvania administration — Penn President Gutmann and the deans of each school — as well as faculty to directly confront Wax and Alexander’s op-ed as racist and white supremacist discourse and to push for an investigation into Wax’s advocacy for white supremacy.

This call to denounce Wax was answered by 33 of her colleagues at the law school—nearly half the faculty—who signed and published an Open Letter to the University of Pennsylvania Community. In it, the law professors affirmed Wax’s right to express her opinions, but said:

We write to condemn recent statements our colleague Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at Penn Law School, has made in popular media pieces. In an op-ed published recently at Philly.com, Wax and a coauthor wrote that “All cultures are not equal,” going on to claim that various social problems would be “significantly reduce[d]” if “the academics, media, and Hollywood” would stop the “preening pretense of defending the downtrodden,” because that would lead to “restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture.” In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian about the op-ed, Wax was quoted as saying that “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans,” because, in the phrasing of the DP article’s author, “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.” … [they then affirm Wax’s right to express her opinions, then say:] We categorically reject Wax’s claims.

Those are the basic facts.

I think it is important for the academic community to reflect on this case. In the wake of Charlottesville, all of us on campus might encounter passions among our students beyond even what we saw in the previous academic year, a year in which violence and the justification of violence became more common on campus. This year, we are likely to find many more professors accused of “white supremacy.” Professors and administrators may face many more campaigns designed to get them to sign open letters and collectively denounce colleagues. It is important, therefore, that we think about this case carefully and draw the right lessons. When and why should professors come together to denounce and condemn other professors? Of course we are always free to dispute each other; Wax’s colleagues could certainly have written essays or a collective essay debating her claims and pointing out flaws in her reasoning, but when is it morally and professionally appropriate to issue a collective public condemnation of a colleague?

I think such collective actions are only appropriate when colleagues have clearly and flagrantly violated their professional duties. I mean things like data fabrication or taking bribes to produce dishonest academic papers desired by a trade association. I would include writing a racist and hate-filled diatribe in that list, but is that what Wax did? She wrote an essay on the importance of culture for poverty-related outcomes, and the Penn students asserted, in their open letter, that such “culture talk” has “deleterious potential as a vehicle for racism and sexism.” The students are certainly correct that claims by a professor about the value of bourgeois culture could be misused by racists to say that one race is inherently superior to another. But does that make any discussion of cultural differences taboo? Does that make Wax a white supremacist for saying that culture matters for poverty-related outcomes, that not all cultures are equally good for escaping poverty, and that the 1950s American “bourgeois cultural script” was particularly good for that purpose? No…….

(read it all)

NATIONAL REVIEW gets into the weeds as well, via, Heather Mac Donald. Why? Because of the uproar from such an article. Someone stepped out of line and needs to be corrected… sent to re-education camps!

Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries.

On August 9, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and University of San Diego law professor Larry Alexander published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for a revival of the bourgeois values that characterized mid-century American life, including child-rearing within marriage, hard work, self-discipline on and off the job, and respect for authority. The late 1960s took aim at the bourgeois ethic, they say, encouraging an “antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal [of] sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society.”

Today, the consequences of that cultural revolution are all around us: lagging education levels, the lowest male work-force participation rate since the Great Depression, opioid abuse, and high illegitimacy rates. Wax and Alexander catalogue the self-defeating behaviors that leave too many Americans idle, addicted, or in prison: “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

[…..]

The fuse was lit. The rules of the game were the following: Ignore what Wax and Alexander had actually said; avoid providing any counterevidence; and play the race card to the hilt as a substitute for engaging with their arguments.

First out of the gate was the Penn graduate students’ union, GET-UP. On August 11, a day after the Daily Pennsylvanian article, GET-UP issued a “Statement about Wax Op-Ed,” condemning the “presence of toxic racist, sexist, homophobic attitudes on campus.” The “superiority of one race over others is not an academic debate we have in the 21st century,” GET-UP wrote. “It is racism masquerading as science.”

But the Wax-Alexander op-ed and the Wax interview said nothing about racial superiority (much less about sex or homosexuality). It argued for a set of behavioral norms that are available to all peoples but that had found their strongest expression over the course of a particular culture. As the Daily Pennsylvanian itself acknowledged, Wax had emphasized to them that she was not implying the superiority of whites. “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she had said. “The irony is: Bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.”

Finally, of course, comes the demand for booty and bureaucracy: a “formal, centralized Diversity & Inclusion office with staff that are charged directly with . . . providing resources for students experiencing marginalized [sic] or discrimination at Penn.” Never mind that Penn has been cranking out “Action Plans for Faculty Diversity and Excellence,” “Faculty Inclusion Reports,” “Gender Equity Reports,” and “Minority Equity Progress Reports” for two decades…..

(read it all)

ESPN’s Gettysburg

Published by Papa Giorgio

TWITCHY has fun with General Lee’s doppelganger:

On Tuesday night, ESPN confirmed what people had been assured was not a satirical piece from The Onion, though it would have been a great one — announcer Robert Lee had been pulled from calling a college football game because it just “felt right” at the time, so soon after a woman had been killed while protesting white supremacists in Charlottesville.

In an email to reporters, ESPN said it all came down the simple coincidence of Lee’s name. We know that Merriam-Webster is quick to correct President Trump on Twitter whenever he goofs up, so we hope someone there is paying attention to Reuters’ feed today………

Democratic Strategist Starts Twitter Hashtag: #HuntRepublicans

Published by Papa Giorgio

While the story from BREITBART below notes James Devine apologized… he is actually doubling down on his #HuntRepublicans hashtag via his TWITTER:


BTW, that first Tweet (above) of his is easily disproved, here are a few places to go:

  • No Evidence Sarah Palin’S Pac Incited Shooting Of Rep. Gabby Giffords (POLITIFACT)

According to news reports, Loughner became fixated on Giffords several years before his Jan. 8, 2011, shooting rampage that killed six and injured 14, including the Arizona congresswoman…. According to the Washington Post, there is no evidence Loughner was aware of Palin’s maps. And according to an interview with one of Loughner’s high school friends, the gunman did not watch the news. His rampage was akin to “shooting at the world,” said Loughner’s friend Zach Osler.

Despite the facts which have come out showing that Jared Loughner was not a political person and was motivated by his own delusions rather than politics…. Remember, there is not a shred of evidence that Jared Loughner ever saw the map.  As discussed here numerous times, the connection of the map to the shooting was a complete fiction concocted moments after the shooting by certain left-wing bloggers who spread the connection into the mainstream media.

  • The New York Times Runs The Worst Editorial In Human History, Blames SARAH PALIN For Giffords Shooting AGAIN (DAILY WIRE)

Jared Lee Loughner wasn’t a conservative. He wasn’t a Republican. He wasn’t sane. There is no evidence whatsoever that he ever saw the infamous Palin targeted district map. None. The rumor was discredited within hours of the shooting. But six years later, The Times is still repeating the lie as true — and not just as true, but as the ultimate example of political rhetoric prompting violence.

See more at NEWSBUSTERS and LOUDER WITH CROWDER! Oh, and there are some people late to the Party!

(Via BREITBART) A New Jersey Democratic strategist is capitalizing on the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) by launching the hashtags #HuntRepublicans and #HuntRepublicanCongressmen, and he is showing no signs of backing down, claiming “the chickens are coming home to roost.”

James Devine, a longtime political strategist in the Garden State, tweeted in the wake of the shooting at a Republican baseball practice in Alexandria on Wednesday that “we are in a war with selfish, foolish & narcissistic rich people”…

[….]

He also accused Republicans of starting a “class war.”

“If you want to invite a class war,” he said, “then you have to expect people to fight back at some point.”

On his website, Devine claims to have served in multiple roles in the state, including as the Democratic State Committee political director between 1992-3, where he “authored the coordinated campaign plan that helped Bill Clinton become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win New Jersey since 1964.”

Here is his information and self aggrandizement:

James J. Devine is a masterful Democratic Party campaign strategist, a crusading journalist and an accomplished leader with extensive experience managing large organizations.

Over the past 35 years, Devine accumulated experience in every facet of politics (running campaigns for local school board, city council and mayor to state legislature, governor, congress and the presidency) and government (as a top level legislative staff member and manager of a federal agency with 1,150 employees under his command).

Contact Jim Devine at 908-458-6397 or devine@usa.net

(ABOUT ME)

We Call Them Snowflakes, They Call Us NAZIs

Published by Papa Giorgio

That sums up the rhetoric of the Left/Right distinction in dialogue. Two segments from Larry Elder, the “Prince of Pico-Union,” about the rhetoric of the Left when they say — “yes, the tone in politics is out of control… BOTH sides are to blame.” Not. In “Sage” fashion Larry points out the gap in civil dialogue. (See this earlier upload as well.) The “thumbnail” art piece is Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover art entitled, “Breakfast Table Political Argument,” or, “Dewey Vs Truman.”