Yesterday, Yale President Peter Salovey announced nine actions “to enhance diversity, promote equity on campus, and foster an environment in which all community members feel welcome, included, and respected,” causing rational alumni, en masse, to go and throw up in the street.

If you want to read a really choice example of vacuous and pretentious academic blather, go and check out:

“Recommendations of the President’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging”

Dollar quote: “Yale can and must improve in how it creates a climate where all feel safe and valued.”

In today’s America, alas! the national establishment elite has so declined in character and intelligence that its members routinely manifest guilt and a consciousness of their own unworthiness. They are only too eager to grovel, abase themselves, and surrender to the insolent and irrational demands of a deluded radical fringe, addled and intoxicated with a pernicious ideology hostile to Civilization, America, and Yale itself. The people entrusted with custodianship of the Culture and the Canon are classic examples of C.S. Lewis’s “Men Without Chests,” who care for nothing, who believe in nothing beyond personal advancement and the sweet smell of success, and who will reliably pay homage to the latest emotional upheaval afflicting the national community of fashion. Men like Peter Salovey are incapable of conserving anything, of defending anything.

The Post Millenial:

The Mathematical Association of America released a statement Friday claiming both that mathematicians should engage in “uncomfortable conversations” about race, and that policies of from the Trump administration, like the lack of a mask mandate in the United States, are somehow an affront to mathematics. The group concludes with a call for a “pursuit of justice” within math. …

“It is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases. Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential,” wrote the group. “Reaching this potential in mathematics relies upon the academy and higher education engaging in critical, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community. The time is now to move mathematics and education forward in pursuit of justice.”

RTWT

No embed available. Click on image to go to video. Read the Coulter column first.

Last May 30th, bar owner and Marine Corps veteran Jacob Gardner, in the course of defending his father and his property, ran afoul of BLM protestors. Two protesters knocked him to the ground and began grappling with him. He fired two warning shots and they retreated, but another protester named James Scurlock put him in a chokehold from behind. Gardner shot Scurlock who then died. Scurlock had been engaged previously in vandalizing businesses and had an extensive criminal record.

An open-and-shut case of self defense, you’ll say. Right! Well, not in democrat-controlled cities like Omaha.

Scurlock’s family complained, a couple of sexually-deviant state senators demanded Gardner be indicted, and democrat district attorney Don Kleine obliged. Gardner was charged by a grand jury on September 15th with Manslaughter, attempted first-degree assault, making terroristic threats, and felony use of weapon. He faced a potential 95 years in prison. On September 20th, the day Gardner was scheduled to surrender to police, he killed himself.

Moral: Whites guilty of self defense in democrat political strongholds with large black populations are going to get the kind of justice that we have heard so much about occurring a century ago to blacks in the Deep South. The only answer I can see is just don’t live, work, or do business in such locations.

Read Ann Coulter on the Jake Gardner tragedy.

University of Chicago

Faculty Statement (July 2020):

The English department at the University of Chicago believes that Black Lives Matter, and that the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks matter, as do thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence. As literary scholars, we attend to the histories, atmospheres, and scenes of anti-Black racism and racial violence in the United States and across the world. We are committed to the struggle of Black and Indigenous people, and all racialized and dispossessed people, against inequality and brutality.

For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods. For more information on faculty and current graduate students in this area, please visit our Black Studies page.

The department is invested in the study of African American, African, and African diaspora literature and media, as well as in the histories of political struggle, collective action, and protest that Black, Indigenous and other racialized peoples have pursued, both here in the United States and in solidarity with international movements. Together with students, we attend both to literature’s capacity to normalize violence and derive pleasure from its aesthetic expression, and ways to use the representation of that violence to reorganize how we address making and breaking life. Our commitment is not just to ideas in the abstract, but also to activating histories of engaged art, debate, struggle, collective action, and counterrevolution as contexts for the emergence of ideas and narratives.

English as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction, and anti-Blackness. Our discipline is responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why. And while inroads have been made in terms of acknowledging the centrality of both individual literary works and collective histories of racialized and colonized people, there is still much to do as a discipline and as a department to build a more inclusive and equitable field for describing, studying, and teaching the relationship between aesthetics, representation, inequality, and power.

In light of this historical reality, we believe that undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere. In support of this aim, we have been expanding our range of research and teaching through recent hiring, mentorship, and admissions initiatives that have enriched our department with a number of Black scholars and scholars of color who are innovating in the study of the global contours of anti-Blackness and in the equally global project of Black freedom. Our collective enrichment is also a collective debt; this department reaffirms the urgency of ensuring institutional and intellectual support for colleagues and students working in the Black studies tradition, alongside whom we continue to deepen our intellectual commitments to this tradition. As such, we believe all scholars have a responsibility to know the literatures of African American, African diasporic, and colonized peoples, regardless of area of specialization, as a core competence of the profession.

RTWT

You could as easily accuse any university English Department of systematically being anti-Lithuanian, anti-French, anti-Japanese, or anti-Eskimo (excuse me! Inuit) for its shameful neglect of the artistic legacy of any, or all, of the above, and for its “aesthetic rationalizations” of the unequal representation of Lithuanians, Frenchmen, &c. in their universities’ student bodies, in high-paying elite positions in American investment banks and Wall Street Law Firms, and in Supreme Court Appointments.

Personally, I think sane people with a deep interest in English Literature are just as well off not studying under such a collection of lachrymose and deranged Marxists as apparently currently infest Chicago’s English Department.

That distant buzzing sound you hear is the late Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, spinning in his grave at 78 rpm.

Irish Examiner:

The University of Edinburgh has renamed its David Hume Tower over the philosopher’s “comments on matters of race”.

The building, which will be used as a student study space in the current academic year, will now be known as 40 George Square.

An online petition claiming David Hume “wrote racist epithets” was set up in the summer calling for the building to be renamed and has been signed more than 1,700 times.

The university announced the move in a statement on the work of its Equality and Diversity Committee and its Race Equality and Anti-Racist Sub-committee.

It said its work had been “energised” since the death in the US of George Floyd and campaigning by the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It is important that campuses, curricula and communities reflect both the university’s contemporary and historical diversity and engage with its institutional legacy across the world,” the statement said.

“For this reason the university has taken the decision to rename – initially temporarily until a full review is completed – one of the buildings in the central area campus.”

It added: “The interim decision has been taken because of the sensitivities around asking students to use a building named after the 18th century philosopher whose comments on matters of race, though not uncommon at the time, rightly cause distress today.”

It remains a mystery how, practically universally, the people who have risen to the top in the West’s most elite institutions are all such idiots and cowards that they will instantly surrender to the insolent and irrational demands of students intoxicated with a contemptible and pernicious ideology. Somehow it has happened that the responsibility for transmitting and preserving knowledge has been placed in the hands of people who are incapable of, and indifferent to the moral obligation of, distinguishing irrationality and barbarism from the fundamental values of liberal education.

Why aren’t there grownups in charge?

The Hill has the bad news for all seriously committed Whigs.

Lawmakers in Buffalo, N.Y., approved a motion to remove the name of the 13th U.S. President Millard Fillmore from properties owned by the city.

The Buffalo Common Council is seeking input from residents as to what name should replace Fillmore’s on city property, local ABC affiliate WKBW reported.

The motion was voted on after Buffalo residents voiced concerns about keeping Fillmore’s name over his role in signing into law legislation that represented the Compromise of 1850.

Those bills allowed California to enter the union as a “free” state with no slavery, but also included a fugitive slave act that required officials and citizens in states where slavery was outlawed to help in the return of escaped slaves.

The motion follows the University of Buffalo’s decision to remove Fillmore’s name from the campus in August.

Residents are urged to contact the city council for nominations of new names to replace the old.

The Community Development Committee of the Buffalo Common Council is slated to convene Tuesday to deliberate the proposal of replacing Fillmore’s name.

During our Second Reconstruction, retrospective failure to have been as radical as Thaddeus Stevens or Charles Sumner will receive condign punishment.

HT: JWB.

The College Fix:

In collaboration with the Black Student Union at the school, University of Wisconsin-Madison leaders are discussing plans to remove a 70-ton boulder from campus grounds due to it once being called a racist name nearly a century ago.

The boulder had traveled to the region over 10,000 years ago, deposited by ancient pre-Cambrian bedrock drift from Canada, according to its plaque.

In 1925, workers pulled the rock out of the side of a hill on campus and named it “Chamberlin Rock” after Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, a 19th century glaciologist and University of Wisconsin president. The rock was adorned with a plaque commemorating Chamberlin and placed at the university’s Washburn Observatory, where it remains today.

While Chamberlin Rock has been a campus fixture for 95 years, it recently came under fire due to once being described as a “n****rhead” in 1925 as was common geological practice at the time to describe large dark rocks, Madison.com reports.

The Black Student Union at UW is now calling on the university to find an alternate way to represent Chamberlin on campus without the legacy implied by the rock.

“You clearly see what the rock was called and you can’t deny the history. Additionally you can’t deny the way it makes some people feel,” Black Student Union president Nalah McWhorter told Madison.com. “If you’re not going to move the things that are disrespectful to us because other students love it, put something up that us Black and brown students can celebrate.”

WT

Does that look like First Degree Murder to you?

Zman is ranting, and it’s perfectly understandable.

Kenosha Wisconsin has now become the pivot point for the revolution from above being waged on middle America. Riots have convulsed the city for three nights since a violent black rapist was shot by police after resisting arrest. Large swaths of the city have been burned as the mayor cheered on the rioters. This led to the shooting of three rioters by a 17-year old kid, who volunteered to help defend the property owners. The video of the incident has become a world-wide sensation.

Of course, this being Jim Snow America, the white kid is now charged with capital murder and faces life in prison. White people who kill in self-defense get charged with capital murder, while blacks who kill for sport are allowed to go free. You see, the former is exercising white privilege and is guilty of being white. The latter, on the other hand, is the victim of white privilege and is justifiably angry. In post-reality America, privilege means being stripped of your rights and dignity.

If Kyle Rittenhouse was a black or an immigrant from the third world or even a transexual, he would not be in jail right now. He would be held up as a hero by the mainstream media. President Trump would send Air Force One to bring him to Washington for a special ceremony. Speakers at the RNC convention would be told to mention his name in their speeches. He is white, so no one at the convention will mention his name. They have not mentioned Cannon Hinnant either.

Unlike other cases where the media can suppress the truth while spreading lies, this time the truth was all over the internet before the media could act. As soon as it happened, social media had video of the attack on Rittenhouse. He fell to the ground as violent criminals attacked him and he opened fire on them. There can be no narrative in which he is the villain. He may have been naive, but he was simply following the civic nationalist code and doing what he thought was his duty.

This is Jim Snow America. A white kid following the rules is guilty, no matter what the facts say, so he sits in prison. His family started a defense fund on Go Fund Me, but it was immediately taken down. Again, in Jim Snow America, whites are not allowed to avail themselves of the resources for self-defense. The system will now wage war on this kid’s family in order to prevent them from defending their son. In Jim Snow America, white people just have to take it.

It is an infuriating reality, for sure. In a better world, the mayor of Kenosha would already be swinging from a tree.

RTWT

It’s actually been this way for decades in every major metropolitan area. A career criminal shooting an innocent victim provokes a yawn, and his crime gets cursorily processed and plea bargained down. A middle-class white person shoots a criminal and, the system goes into high gear, throwing the book at him.

It’s past time for things to change.

#BREAKING: Looting happening now at Lululemon Store in Walnut Creek's Broadway Plaza https://t.co/oFV0lmV8yp pic.twitter.com/9OYA7dtb4L

— KRON4 News (@kron4news) June 1, 2020

Jennifer van Laar, at Red State, explains what Justice as administered by minority left-wingers elected with George Soros-funding looks like.

Last week we brought you the story of Nichelle Holmes, a Deputy District Attorney in California who made social media posts proclaiming “We want more than a citation for vandalism” for the couple who painted over a Black Lives Matter mural in her jurisdiction. The office has now charged the couple with a “hate crime.”

Holmes’ boss, Diana Becton, is in her first term as elected District Attorney, one of a number of district attorneys heavily supported by lefty billionaire George Soros. Sources tell RedState that as soon as Becton took over she implemented major changes in the way the office was run and in the way crimes were charged and how aggressively cases were prosecuted. One recent change, which I’ll address further in a moment, has to do with charging people for “looting,” which is basically stealing during a state of emergency (i.e., protests or riots).

Becton is BFF’s with St. Louis’ Kim Gardner and Chicago’s Kim Foxx, who’ve been in the news for their terrible policies. This week she co-authored a Politico op-ed with Gardner, Foxx, and two other Soros-funded DA’s explaining their philosophy and 11-point plan for further ruining America’s cities.

The quintuplet started off by sharing their completely inane understanding of the origins of our justice system (apparently not understanding that criminal legal systems pre-date the colonization of North America):

“Our criminal legal system was constructed to control Black people and people of color. Its injustices are not new but are deeply rooted in our country’s shameful history of slavery and legacy of racial violence. The system is acting exactly as it was intended to, and that is the problem.

“We should know: We’re Black, we’re female, and we’re prosecutors. We work as the gatekeepers in this flawed system. And we have some ideas for how to fix it.”

Say what? And the fact that they’re the gatekeepers is scary as hell – not because of their skin color or their gender (wait, is gender actually a thing anymore?), but because they want to remove the blindfold from Lady Justice’s eyes.

Instead, these prosecutors place a duty to enact societal change upon their deputies and believe they must “rectify past wrongs”:

The decisions that prosecutors make can either work to rectify the inherent harms in the legal system or perpetuate them. Part of our responsibility, as elected public servants, is to be self-aware and recognize that we are part of the problem. It is our moral and ethical duty to start advancing racial equity-minded policies—and community advocates and voters should hold us accountable for doing so.

Working from within, we have begun the steps to rectify past wrongs. We are implementing policies that include declining to prosecute minor offenses, overturning wrongful convictions, refusing to take cases from officers with a history of racial bias and expunging marijuana convictions. And we are currently working within our own offices to make the system fairer and more just.

Becton, the Contra Costa County DA, is already putting “racial equity-minded policies” in place and enforcing them in her office. The following “Looting Guidelines” document was provided to RedState by a confidential source and verified as authentic by a separate source familiar with the office’s policies. [see below]…

So, let’s get this straight. Deputy District Attorneys and/or the county’s law enforcement officers are supposed to go through a flow chart, including a psychological and financial analysis, to determine if looting charges should be filed?

This is what’s happening in the Bay Area right now.So, let’s get this straight. Deputy District Attorneys and/or the county’s law enforcement officers are supposed to go through a flow chart, including a psychological and financial analysis, to determine if looting charges should be filed?

This is what’s happening in the Bay Area right now.

And if the property owner points a gun at looters, these DAs will indict for assault.

Jemele Hill, staff writer, The Atlantic.

Been reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste,” and if you were of the opinion that the United States wasn’t nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, how wrong you are. Can’t encourage you enough to read this masterpiece.

— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 23, 2020

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You can see below just how terribly the racist American genocidal regime has treated Jemele.

October 1, 2018:

Journalist Jemele Hill is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer, The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and editor of TheAtlantic.com Adrienne LaFrance announced today. She begins with The Atlantic next week.

Hill will be covering issues related to sports, race, politics, and culture for both the magazine and TheAtlantic.com. She will be based in Los Angeles, where The Atlantic is establishing a second California bureau after opening an office in San Francisco this summer.

“Jemele is a wonderfully talented journalist who is famous for her acute commentary, fearless writing and encyclopedic knowledge of sports,” said Goldberg. “But what drew us to Jemele in particular is her deep commitment to reporting. There are a million stories to be uncovered at the intersection where sports, race, money and politics meet, and Jemele is the exact right person to do this uncovering, and The Atlantic is the exact right home for this sort of journalism.”

“The Atlantic made perfect sense to me because during this period, it’s critical to be aligned with people who understand this mission: Sports is a great entry point for exploring what’s happening in the wider society,” said Hill. “You can’t talk about sports without talking about race, class, gender and politics. I want to explore the complications and discomforts with a publication that has a long history of supporting this kind of work.”

In her nearly 12-year career at ESPN, Hill rose to fame for her exceptional coverage on the air and for ESPN.com. She was a columnist, a host of “SportsCenter,” and a college football sideline reporter. Most recently, she covered the intersection of sports, culture, and race for ESPN’s The Undefeated.

Hill began her journalism career at the Raleigh News & Observer before moving back to her hometown to cover sports for the Detroit Free Press, and later the Orlando Sentinel. She joined ESPN in 2006.

Frankly, instead of being employed in highly-paid, prestigious establishment positions as commentators and editorialists, I’d contend that people this delusional ought to be netted and taken away to the laughing academy where their excessively rich fantasy lives will no longer pose a danger to themselves or anybody else.

Turner Classics Movies is broadcasting “Gone With the Wind” (1939) tonight at 8:00 PM EST. It might be advisable to catch what may be one of the famous film’s last public viewings. Woke hysteria finds the social attitudes and language of 1939 every bit as unacceptable as those of 1859.

Today, GWTW must be presented with a warning label:

“Presented as originally released in 1939. Includes themes and character depictions which may be offensive or problematic to contemporary audiences.”

Bruce Bawer has a good essay, just out in the New Criterion, that corrects a large number of common misconceptions about the novel.

Gone with the Wind tells the story of the flirtation, lasting from the eve of the war until many years after, between Scarlett and Rhett. They’re drawn to each other, Mitchell wants us to understand, because they’re both, by nature, at odds with the social system into which they were born. If Mitchell celebrates anything, it’s not the conformist pre-war lives of planters and their families but the spirit of nonconformity exhibited by Rhett and Scarlett. During the war, the other members of their race and class are devoted heart and soul to what they describe as “the Cause.” In her account of the Atlanta bazaar, Mitchell describes the devotion of the women present to “the Cause”—“A Cause they loved as much as they loved their men, a Cause they served with their hands and their hearts, a Cause they talked about, thought about, dreamed about.” But neither Scarlett nor Rhett has any attachment whatsoever to the “Cause.” He runs Union blockades, he tells her, only to enrich himself; as for Scarlett, it’s plain from the first page that she has no attachment to the Confederacy. Toward the novel’s end, he says: “We are both scoundrels, Scarlett, and nothing is beyond us when we want something.” When Scarlett finally realizes that she loves not Ashley (the now-useless embodiment of pre-war Southern knighthood) but Rhett, she sees that “he, like her, saw truth as truth, unobstructed by impractical notions of honor, sacrifice, or high belief in human nature.” With this long-delayed self-insight, Scarlett fully embraces Mitchell’s own cold-eyed realism.

No, this is assuredly not a soggy, sentimental drama of cavaliers and chivalry, but a candid, even cynical, study of two strong-minded survivors set against the backdrop of America’s greatest social upheaval. Nor is it, as Mitchell readily and repeatedly admitted, a beautifully written book or a masterpiece of plotting. (She could never grasp why it became a bestseller or won the Pulitzer Prize.) But there’s no fictional work that paints a more sweeping and meticulous picture of the South at war, or that contains more characters of that place and time—women and men, black and white—who stir our sympathies and tremble with life. It’s a puzzlement, then, that Selznick—who in supervising the writing and rewriting of the script was almost fanatically insistent that, wherever possible, it was preferable to use dialogue from the novel rather than to write original lines—decided to frame the film with a title card that invites audiences to view the pre-war South with a romantic nostalgia that Mitchell’s book itself urges the reader to reject.