There is a word for this — it’s called… RACISM.
(GATEWAY PUNDIT) The British Royal Air Force has suspended job offers to white men to meet their diversity targets.
No longer will white men be hired to pilot the RAF planes. They are the wrong color and gender.
[Editor’s Note: I do wish to note what Dennis Prager does, that is, the driving force of this view and its “advocacy” is women. Especially white progressive women.]
Following the unexpected cancellation of our Reverse Q&A at Brown University, we created an ad hoc event on the streets of Portland. Here, we are exploring the reasoning behind agreement or disagreement with the claim: “There are only two genders.” We were approached by a group of students and here’s what happened.
This video was filmed on May 11, 2022 outside a Portland State University building that houses the department of social work.
In this excerpt of ARMSTRONG AND GETTY, the reading of and commentary about an article by Frederick Hess goes a long way to uncover an aspect of education that is the “new” product to push via the “educational industrial complex.” The article is entitled, “How Social and Emotional Learning Became a New Front in the Culture Wars” (AEI).
Here is an excerpt from Mr. Hess’s article:
…..There’s much about SEL that appeals. It’s stuff that good schools (and parents) have always done, and it’s been a healthy course correction for an education system that’s been test-obsessed in recent decades while giving short shrift to character development and civic formation. As CASEL board chair Tim Shriver and I noted a few years ago, “Since the dawn of the republic, teachers and schools have been tasked with teaching content and modeling character,” and, pursued responsibly, SEL can help with all of that.
In fact, while SEL can seem like a new idea, it’s more of a variation on a historical theme—that educators cannot focus only on academic mastery but must also develop the “whole child.” Readers who are so inclined can trace this impulse to John Dewey, Rousseau’s Emile, and all the way back to Plato’s Republic.
Given all this, SEL’s surging popularity is no great surprise—especially after the dislocations of the pandemic. In fact, SEL was already flying high in 2019 when that Aspen commission issued a blockbuster report, backed by an impressive array of funders and endorsees. The research on persistence that fueled Angela Duckworth’s New York Times best-seller Grit? That’s SEL. So is psychologist Carol Dweck’s influential research on “growth mindset.” And two years of pandemic, during which kids were lonely, isolated, and suffered walloping blows to their social and emotional well-being, have only turbocharged SEL’s ascent.
But as with so many well-meaning education reforms, SEL has a Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect. As has been true with the Common Core and “anti-racist education” (née critical race theory), SEL can be reasonably described both as a sensible, innocuous attempt to tackle a real challenge and, too often, an excuse for a blue, bubbled industry of education funders, advocates, professors, and trainers to promote faddish nonsense and ideological agendas. The latter is why SEL invariably comes up as a justification for doing away with traditional grading, eliminating advanced math, subjecting students and staff to “privilege walks,” or teaching first-graders about gender identity.
[….]
Should parents be concerned about SEL? Well, look. If you’re getting sensible notes from the principal suggesting that teachers are making a concerted effort to promote tolerance, cultivate relationship skills, and encourage better decision-making, that’s generally a terrific thing. But if school SEL missives are dotted with talk of microaggressions and implicit bias, parent-teacher night features a pitch for eyebrow-raising disciplinary strategies, or classrooms are cluttered with feeling thermometers and privilege maps? I’d say concern is in order.
Yet again, as with Common Core or “anti-racist education,” an idea that makes some intuitive sense gets sucked into our roiling culture war by the smug aggression of woke reformers and the inevitable counterpunching from the right. Teachers and parents wind up trapped in between. And something that can and should be useful, when employed wisely and well, instead gets used clumsily and carelessly, sparking yet another radioactive shouting match.
READ MORE ABOUT IT HERE:
FLIPSIDE:
This first part is really a set up to add context to the more important aspect of the conversation I listened to between Scott Adams and Dr. Drew. While I do not subscribe to everything discussed herein, I believe that what is discussed can help pastors and people who disciple others better note and respond to our cultural “rumblings.” The Bible calls it pride, but yes, “everyone else is to blame and the battle is not me and my sin nature.” Excellent conversation. (The full Dr. Drew episode can be found HERE)
I would not have uploaded that portion to my RUMBLE if it weren’t for this “2nd PART” I isolated by itself. This is a major explanation in my mind’s eye and even the noting of the majority women is something Prager notes that it is predominantly women destroying education and leading the #WOKE mobs.
(THE PIC IS JUST FOR LAUGHS, IT ADDS NO INSIGHT OR CONSTRUCTIVE VALUE OTHER THAN AN LOL — THE LINK IN THE PIC IS SERIOUS HOWEVER)
….Feminist groups describe the state of American women in dire terms. Young middle-class and upper-class women, many attending the most expensive universities — paid for by their parents — are among the greatest malcontents in American life.
In fact, women today, including young women, who lead lives the very opposite of those described in “The Feminine Mystique,” are about twice as likely to be depressed as men. And that statistic is true for women across all economic, racial and ethnic groups.
So, then, what was my big and troubling thought?
If women are as likely — perhaps more likely — to complain about being oppressed today when they aren’t oppressed as they did when they were oppressed, and if women today are nearly twice as likely as men to be depressed, and if women at elite colleges — where they are pampered and more assured a financially successful future than most men living now or who lived in the past — are particularly angry and malcontented, simple logic suggests two choices: Either women remain as oppressed as in the past, or women tend to be malcontents.
Given that the reality is that American women — especially the ones who do the most complaining — are not oppressed, we are left to conclude that the female of the human species may tend toward being malcontents. The simple-minded will respond to this exactly as they were indoctrinated to respond — not by asking, “Is it true?” but by accusing the person who offers this suggestion of sexism and misogyny.
So, allow me to respond in advance: This is no more an attack on women than describing men’s nature as aggressive is an attack on men. Each sex has built-in issues that an individual has to overcome in order to develop into a mature and good person. Men have to deal with aggression and the sexual predatory aspect of male nature in order to develop into mature and good men. Women have to overcome the power of their emotions and their chronic malcontentedness in order to mature into good women. But in our disordered society — a society that has rejected wisdom — in raising their children, two generations of Americans have told only their sons, not their daughters, that they had to fight their nature. The feminization of society has brought with it the destructive notion that only males have to suppress their nature. Feminists really believe females are superior, so why would women have to fight any aspect of their inherently beautiful nature?……
(DENNIS PRAGER, “Are Women Malcontents?”)
SEE MORE HERE:
Most people advocating for radical social change on behalf of people of color are not themselves people of color. How do you explain that? Wilfred Reilly, professor of political science at Kentucky State University, has some answers.
(RED STATE) Tuesday’s House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Fiscal Year 2023 Defense Budget Request produced some great theater as Florida Representative Matt Gaetz took on the shabby and incompetent record of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
It all started innocently enough, though the contempt the two men had for one another was on display.
(100% FED-UP) Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has a reputation for exposing the Left and their radical ideology in House committee hearings. Today was no exception.
This afternoon, Rep. Matt Gaetz blasted Joe Biden’s woke Defense Secretary Lloydoor with the House Armed Services Committee Austin during a heated exchange on the House fl. Gaetz began by exposing the woke secretary, accusing him of allowing a lecture by Thomas Piketty, “Responding to China: The Case For Global Justice and Democratic Socialism,” that took place at the National Defense University. The concept of the lecture was “It’s time for Socialism,” Gaetz told him, as Secretary Austin attempted to interrupt him to object to Gaetz’s assertions.
[….]
Gaetz ended with a final death blow. “I saw that the Obama administration tried to destroy our military by starving it of resources, and it seems the Biden administration is trying to destroy our military by force-feeding it wokeism.”
Armstrong and Getty read the CITY JOURNAL article titled: “Social-Justice Lingerie: Victoria’s Secret ditches physical beauty for left-wing activism.”
Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” shares a clip of Bill Maher’s appearance on The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special where he explains how woke culture has tricked liberals into supporting crazy leftist ideas, like defunding the police and letting 3-year old’s choose their gender. He laments that they no longer care about important issues like free speech or debate. He explains how he hasn’t changed, but liberal culture most certainly has. Compare what’s going on today to the incident with Bill Maher, Sam Harris and Be Affleck from 2015 which seemed to be a sneak preview of the larger culture wars.
Armstrong and Getty read from an NEW YORK POST editorial by former Levi Strauss & Co brand President, Jennifer Sey, titled: “How I Was Bullied Out of My Top Job at Levi’s by the Intolerant Woke Mob.” I read the entire article when I got home. Wow. This woman is bad ass! How many people could have done this?
…In the last month, the CEO told me that it was “untenable” for me to stay. I was offered a $1 million severance package, but I knew I’d have to sign a nondisclosure agreement about why I’d been pushed out.
The money would be very nice. But I just can’t do it. Sorry, Levi’s….
What a rock-solid chick!
The GOP is thinking,
LEFTIE MOMS RAGE AGAINST THEIR MACHINE!
This first article is via THE ATLANTIC: Why I Soured on the Democrats: COVID school policies set me adrift from my tribe.
MOM #1
Until recently, I was a loyal, left-leaning Democrat, and I had been my entire adult life. I was the kind of partisan who registered voters before midterm elections and went to protests. I hated Donald Trump so much that I struggled to be civil to relatives on the other side of the aisle. But because of what my family has gone through during the pandemic, I can’t muster the same enthusiasm. I feel adrift from my tribe and, to a certain degree, disgusted with both parties.
I can’t imagine that I would have arrived here—not a Republican, but questioning my place in the Democratic Party—had my son not been enrolled in public kindergarten in 2020.
Late that summer, the Cleveland school system announced that it would not open for in-person learning the first 9 weeks of the semester. I was distraught. My family relies on my income, and I knew that I would not be able to work full-time with my then-5-year-old son and then-3-year-old daughter at home.
Still, I was accepting of short-term school closures. My faith in the system deteriorated only as the weeks and months of remote-learning dragged on long past the initial timeline, and my son began refusing to log on for lessons. I couldn’t blame him. Despite his wonderful teacher’s best efforts, online kindergarten is about as ridiculous as it sounds, in my experience. I remember logging on to a “gym” class where my son was the only student present. The teacher, I could tell, felt embarrassed. We both knew how absurd the situation was.
Children who had been present every day the year before in preschool, whose parents I had seen drop them off every morning, just vanished. The daily gantlet of passwords and programs was a challenge for even me and my husband, both professionals who work on computers all day. About 30 percent of Cleveland families didn’t even have internet in their home prior to the pandemic.
I kept hoping that someone in our all-Democratic political leadership would take a stand on behalf of Cleveland’s 37,000 public-school children or seem to care about what was happening. Weren’t Democrats supposed to stick up for low-income kids? Instead, our veteran Democratic mayor avoided remarking on the crisis facing the city’s public-school families. Our all-Democratic city council was similarly disengaged. The same thing was happening in other blue cities and blue states across the country, as the needs of children were simply swept aside. Cleveland went so far as to close playgrounds for an entire year. That felt almost mean-spirited, given the research suggesting the negligible risk of outdoor transmission—an additional slap in the face.
Things got worse for us in December 2020, when my whole family contracted COVID-19. The coronavirus was no big deal for my 3- and 5-year-olds, but I was left with lingering long-COVID symptoms, which made the daily remote-schooling nightmare even more grueling. I say this not to hold myself up for pity. I understand that other people had a far worse 2020. I’m just trying to explain why my worldview has shifted and why I’m not the same person I was.
By the spring semester, the data showed quite clearly that schools were not big coronavirus spreaders and that, conversely, the costs of closures to children, both academically and emotionally, were very high. The American Academy of Pediatrics first urged a return to school in June 2020. In February 2021, when The New York Times surveyed 175 pediatric-disease experts, 86 percent recommended in-person school even if no one had been vaccinated.
But when the Cleveland schools finally reopened, in March 2021—under pressure from Republican Governor Mike DeWine—they chose a hybrid model that meant my son could enter the building only two days a week.
My husband and I had had enough: With about two months left in the academic year, we found a charter school that was open for full-time in-person instruction. It was difficult to give up on our public school. We were invested. But our trust was broken.
Compounding my fury was a complete lack of sympathy or outright hostility from my own “team.” Throughout the pandemic, Democrats have been eager to style themselves as the ones that “take the virus seriously,” which is shorthand, at least in the bluest states and cities, for endorsing the most extreme interventions. By questioning the wisdom of school closures—and taking our child out of public school—I found myself going against the party line. And when I tried to speak out on social media, I was shouted down and abused, accused of being a Trumper who didn’t care if teachers died. On Twitter, mothers who had been enlisted as unpaid essential workers were mocked, often in highly misogynistic terms. I saw multiple versions of “they’re just mad they’re missing yoga and brunch.”
Twitter is a cesspool full of unreasonable people. But the kind of moralizing and self-righteousness that I saw there came to characterize lefty COVID discourse to a harmful degree. As reported in this magazine, the parents in deep-blue Somerville, Massachusetts, who advocated for faster school reopening last spring were derided as “fucking white parents” in a virtual public meeting. The interests of children and the health of public education were both treated as minor concerns, if these subjects were broached at all.
Obviously, Republicans have been guilty of politicizing the pandemic with horrible consequences, fomenting mistrust in vaccines that will result in untold numbers of unnecessary deaths. I’m not excusing that.
But I’ve been disappointed by how often the Democratic response has exacerbated that mistrust by, for example, exaggerating the risks of COVID-19 to children. A low point for me was when Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe inflated child COVID-hospitalization numbers on the campaign trail. It was almost Trumplike. (If I lived in Virginia, I admit I probably would have had to sit out the recent gubernatorial election, in which the Republican candidate beat McAuliffe.)
MOM #2
And another Leftie mom wrote about an almost identical experience[s] in POLITICO: How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics: I’ve never felt more alienated from the liberal Democratic circles I usually call home.
June 26, 2020, was the day I went public with just how angry I was about my son’s school closing down for Covid, and my life hasn’t been the same since.
I had begun to sense a difference between my own feelings and those of my mom’s text group, which included nine of us whose kids had gone to preschool together since they were 2 years old; the kids were 8 at the time. These were the parents of my son’s closest friends. We even had a name for our group, the “mamigas”— as most of us were either Latinas or married to Latinos and shared a commitment to bilingual education.
I tweeted, “Does anyone else feel enraged at the idea that you’ll be homeschooling in the fall full-time? Cuz my moms group text is in full-blown acceptance mode and it bugs the shit out of me.” I didn’t know it yet, but this would be my first foray into school reopening advocacy, which eventually included helping lead a group of Oakland parents in pushing the school district to be more transparent about the process of reopening (particularly in negotiations with the teachers union) and writing several pieces on the topic.
I probably should have inferred that becoming a school-reopening advocate would not go over well in my progressive Oakland community, but I didn’t anticipate the social repercussions, or the political identity crisis it would trigger for me. My own experience, as a self-described progressive in ultra-lefty Oakland, is just one example of how people across the political spectrum have become frustrated with Democrats’ position on school reopenings.
Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labelled advocates’ calls for schools reopening “white supremacy” called us “Karens,” and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic agenda.
There was no recognition of the fact that we were advocating for our kids, who were floundering in remote learning, or that public schools across the country (in red states) opened in fall 2020 without major outbreaks, as did private schools just miles from our home. Only since last fall, when schools reopened successfully despite the more contagious Delta variant circulating, have Democratic pundits and leaders been talking about school closures as having caused far more harm than benefit.
Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.
So did Democrats, even if they didn’t realize it until later, or still don’t. Glenn Youngkin’s surprise gubernatorial win in Virginia in November was a wake-up call for the party. As has been recognized, Youngkin’s focus on school-related issues, especially after Terry McAuliffe made a dismissive remark about parents, was an effective tactic. Still, all over Twitter I saw progressives denying that parent anger at prolonged school closures was a major issue in that election — they claimed it was all about anti-critical race theory sentiment, despite research showing school pandemic policies were more to blame. Even more disturbing, as evidenced in the comments on a recent tweet by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), is that many still believe shutting down schools for a year or more was justified.
Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.
So did Democrats, even if they didn’t realize it until later, or still don’t. Glenn Youngkin’s surprise gubernatorial win in Virginia in November was a wake-up call for the party. As has been recognized, Youngkin’s focus on school-related issues, especially after Terry McAuliffe made a dismissive remark about parents, was an effective tactic. Still, all over Twitter I saw progressives denying that parent anger at prolonged school closures was a major issue in that election — they claimed it was all about anti-critical race theory sentiment, despite research showing school pandemic policies were more to blame. Even more disturbing, as evidenced in the comments on a recent tweet by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), is that many still believe shutting down schools for a year or more was justified.
Some unions and districts are now using last year’s closures as a precedent. Recently, with the Omicron surge, several major school districts announced they were switching to remote learning for a week or more, including Newark and dozens of other New Jersey districts, Ann Arbor and Cleveland. Then last week, the Chicago teachers union voted for a sickout, followed by teachers in San Francisco and Oakland engaging in similar actions.
Spring 2020 had been a disaster for my son when his school in the Oakland Unified School District switched to emergency remote learning. He had recently been diagnosed with ADHD and did not do well with me at home — he often flatly refused to do any work. Although I saw a range of reactions by teachers to emergency remote learning that spring, and know that some went to great lengths to keep their students engaged, my son’s teacher only met with the kids one-on-one on Zoom for 15 minutes a week. Beyond that, parents were given worksheets to do with our kids; there was no actual instruction that spring.
When the new school year began in August 2020, Oakland provided only fully remote instruction. My incredibly bright but impulsive son found the temptation of having a computer screen in front of him irresistible — and would often open other windows or try to surf the internet.
By January 2021, with my son increasingly disengaged as Zoom school dragged on and no hope of an imminent return to school in Oakland, I promised him I wouldn’t make him go through another year like this. I knew that he desperately needed to learn alongside other kids.
I had until then resisted my dad’s suggestion that I consider sending him to private school. I was a proud alumna of San Francisco public schools and planned for my kids to attend Oakland public schools, despite their reputation for behavioral and academic problems. As an interracial, bilingual/bicultural family, what we wanted was for our son to attend a dual-language immersion program with plenty of other kids of color. My family was also in no way able to pay for private school.
But I began to fear that even in-person school in fall 2021 was at risk because of the impossible demands of the teachers union (that schools remain fully remote until there were “near-zero” Covid cases in Oakland) and apathy of the school board and district; even after teachers were prioritized for vaccination, there was no urgency to get kids back to the classroom. My dad offered to help pay for private school, and we applied. In March we were notified that my son was admitted to a private dual-language immersion school, and that we had been granted a 75 percent scholarship. There was still no deal in place between Oakland’s school district and the union to return to in-person school. I had lost all faith in the decision-makers to do what was best for my kid. So I made the only logical decision.
Even then, I feared what fellow parents might think of me. I’m well aware of the stereotypes of white parents choosing the private-school option when the going gets tough at public schools. I told myself that prioritizing being a “good leftist” at the expense of my son’s well-being wasn’t good parenting, but as a red-diaper baby myself, the white guilt dies hard. My own parents had sent me to an elementary school with a huge majority of Black and Pacific Islander students; while many might assume the white parents documented in the New York Times podcast “Nice White Parents” were pioneers, my parents reverse-integrated me into a “failing” school 40 years ago. Sending my kid to private school was accompanied by a lot of angst.
My fears were amplified by the backlash I and other school reopening advocates had faced throughout the school year, particularly on social media. There were a range of insults lobbed at us: We were bad parents who didn’t care about our own kids or teachers dying, we only wanted our babysitters back and our frustrations about school closures were an example of “white supremacy.” Los Angeles teachers union head Cecily Myart-Cruz stated that reopening schools was “a recipe for propagating structural racism.”
I was put in Facebook Jail fir the following:
Here are some supporting claims for the record:
POINT 1
See also my “HIGH TECH BOOK BURNING“
All the following companies are pushing some type of “woke,” politically correct extremism:
POINT 2
“He.” “She.” “They.” Have you ever given a moment’s thought to your everyday use of these pronouns? It has probably never occurred to you that those words could be misused. Or that doing so could cost you your business or your job – or even your freedom. Journalist Abigail Shrier explains how this happened and why it’s become a major free speech issue. (PRAGER U)
Later ages are always surprised by the casual brutality of totalitarian regimes. What those innocent ages neglect is the unshakeable (though misguided) conviction of virtue that animates the totalitarians. The historian John Kekes, writing about Robespierre in City Journal some years ago, touched on the essential point. If we understand Robespierre, “we understand that it is utterly useless to appeal to reason and morality in dealing with ideologues. For they are convinced that reason and morality are on their side and that their enemies are irrational and immoral simply because they are enemies.” That is the position of conservatives in American culture today. (AMERICAN GREATNESS)
Tammy Bruce’s book, “The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds,” was an important salvo in all this. Not the first book, but one of the most relevant for it’s day. Tammy has noted for years the censorship of the Left, one example is an older post:
Well, this explains why I never got a response to my #AskPOTUS questions, “What’s wrong with you?” and “What meds are you on?”
A former Twitter CEO took measures to ensure messages critical of President Obama wouldn’t circulate too widely on the platform during a 2015 question-and-answer session, according to a new report.
The incident allegedly occurred during a May 2015 “#AskPOTUS” event on the platform, when former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo purportedly ordered the creation of an algorithm to suppress the messages and used employees to manually scrub any critical content missed by the software.
Costolo kept the decision secret from company executives for fear that someone might object, several sources told Buzzfeed….
Related: NY Observer: Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google, and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump
The tech companies are just emboldened now. That’s all.
POINT 3
Some examples via HERITAGE FOUNDATION
The following examples of cases that the ACLJ has been involved with illustrate this problem:
See also this NATIONAL REVIEW article.
POINT 4
The anti-Trump Lincoln Project is building a database of Trump officials and staffers with the intention of holding those people professionally “accountable” for supporting the president, according to Stuart Stevens, a Republican operative who works with the Lincoln Project.
Stuart Stevens revealed in a tweet Saturday that the group is building what appears to be a blacklist. (BREITBART | PJ-MEDIA)
…. if “A”….
…why not “B”…
THE OTHER JOHN MACCAIN has a good post dealing with all this:
….Whoa! Heather Mac Donald comments:
It is now a standard trope, implanted in freshmen summer reading lists through the works of Ta-Nehesi Coates and others, that whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks…. Just this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization. According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.
Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes — by 50 percent — according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.
You would never know such facts from the media or from Democratic talking points.
Do you see that what the national media have been telling America about racial violence is the exact opposite of truth? This mirror-image distortion is not accidental; it has a political motive….
See Larry Elder’s “Trump’s ‘Racist’ Rhetoric Blamed for Anti-Asian Hate” article for more.
This comes by way of the WALL STREET JOURNAL:
I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities. That marks a change. A decade ago I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest. Today? Not so much.
As a graduate of Haverford College, a fancy school outside Philadelphia, I took interest in the campus uproar there last fall. It concerned “antiblackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.” A student strike culminated in an all-college Zoom meeting for undergraduates. The college president and other administrators promised to “listen.” During the meeting, many students displayed a stunning combination of thin-skinned narcissism and naked aggression. The college administrators responded with self-abasing apologies.
Haverford is a progressive hothouse. If students can be traumatized by “insensitivity” on that leafy campus, then they’re unlikely to function as effective team members in an organization that has to deal with everyday realities. And in any event, I don’t want to hire someone who makes inflammatory accusations at the drop of a hat.
Student activists don’t represent the majority of students. But I find myself wondering about the silent acquiescence of most students. They allow themselves to be cowed by charges of racism and other sins. I sympathize. The atmosphere of intimidation in elite higher education is intense. But I don’t want to hire a person well-practiced in remaining silent when it costs something to speak up.
The traditional Islamic world exhibited a modicum of tolerance. Christians and Jews were dhimmi, allowed to exist, but on the condition that they accepted their subordinate role in society. While studying this arrangement, sociologists coined the term “dhimmitude,” which refers to the mentality of those who have internalized their second-class status.
Haverford, like Harvard and other top tier schools, graduates fine young people, no doubt many with well-adjusted personalities and sensible views of the world. But in the past decade, dhimmitude has become widespread. Normal kids at elite universities keep their heads down. Over the course of four years, this can become a subtle but real habit of obeisance, a condition of moral and spiritual surrender.
Some resist. They would seem ideal for my organization, which aims to speak for religious and social conservatives. But even this kind of graduate brings liabilities to the workplace. I’ve met recent Ivy grads with conservative convictions who manifest a form of posttraumatic stress disorder. Others have developed a habit of aggressive counterpunching that is no more appealing in a young employee than the ruthless accusations of the woke.
In recent years, I’ve taken stock of my assumptions about who makes for the best entry-level employee. I have no doubt that Ivy League universities attract smart, talented and ambitious kids. But do these institutions add value? My answer is increasingly negative. Dysfunctional kids are coddled and encouraged to nurture grievances, while normal kids are attacked and educationally abused. Listening to Haverford’s all-college Zoom meeting also made it clear that today’s elite students aren’t going to schools led by courageous adults. Deprived of good role models, they’re less likely to mature into good leaders themselves.
My rule of thumb is to hire from institutions I advise young people to attend. Hillsdale College is at the top of that list, as are quirky small Catholic colleges such as Thomas Aquinas College, Wyoming Catholic College and the University of Dallas. In my experience, graduates from these sorts of places are well-educated. But more important, they’ve been supported and encouraged by their institutions, and they haven’t been deformed by the toxic political correctness that leaders of elite universities have allowed to become dominant.
Large state universities and their satellite schools are also good sources. In my experience, top-performing students at Rutgers are as talented but less self-important than Ivy Leaguers. They’re more likely to accept the authority of those more experienced. This allows for better mentoring, which in turn produces better results over time.
The biggest liability that comes with hiring graduates from places like Haverford and Harvard is that they have been socialized to panic over pseudocrises. Talk of systemic racism and fixation on pronouns inculcate in young people an apocalyptic urgency, a mentality that often disrupts the workplace and encourages navel-gazing about “diversity,” “inclusion” and other ill-defined notions that are far removed from the main work of my organization, which is good writing, good editing and good arguments.
A few years ago a student at an Ivy League school told me, “The first things you learn your freshman year is never to say what you are thinking.” The institution he attended claims to train the world’s future leaders. From what that young man reports, the opposite is true. The school is training future self-censors, which means future followers.
Mr. Reno is editor of First Things.
In an excellent Armstrong and Getty Show, audio of Seth Rogan as well as a refutation of critical race theory by Allen Guelzo on Fox News’ Martha MacCallum: