The bad news is that every institution is so thoroughly infused with insanity … and our political structures in the US are so deeply corrupt (it is fundamentally a racket), that they are more-or-less un-rescuable. Our US Constitution is quite good and is [therefore] targeted by people that [see] it [as] an obstacle to [their] power. Both parties are so deeply corrupt that they are … un-rescuable. The same can be said of our newspapers, the entire tech industry. … And the big players, including, unfortunately, X, which is a mystery I would love to see solved.
Bret Weinstein, former “progressive” Biology professor at Evergreen College, who was driven off campus with his wife, Heather Heying, also a biology professor, when he objected to progressive racism on campus.
Before one can understand the significance of Professor Weinstein’s remark that all of our institutions are so corrupt that they are un-rescuable, it is useful to examine his biography. In September 2017, biology professor Weinstein (Ph.D. University of Michigan) was a “progressive” Bernie Sanders and “Occupy Wall Street” supporter (until Sanders “lost his way”) at Evergreen College (Washington state), along with his progressive wife, biology professor Heather Heying (Ph.D. University of Michigan). Both were driven off campus and forced to resign their positions after Weinstein objected when students proposed a “day of absence” on which white students were “invited to leave the campus for the entire day because “students of color”, after the election of Donald Trump, which had literally nothing to do with Evergreen College, felt “they are not welcome on campus.”
Weinstein objected to barring members of one race, Caucasians, from campus because that would be “a show of force and an act of oppression.” That is, Weinstein was foolish enough to support Martin Luther King’s view that one should judge people, not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character. His wife’s sin was to write a letter in the staff and faculty in which she criticized the administration’s handling of the situation. Although she made no racial remarks whatsoever, she was, of course, accused of being a racist.
For his unforgivable sin of objecting to racist segregation at Evergreen, Weinstein was confronted by about 50 students outside his classroom calling him a racist and accusing him of supporting white supremacy. Weinstein had, of course, not defended white supremacy but the criterion of being a white supremacist is no longer that one is a white supremacist. The new criterion is that one disagrees with the leftist children running the university.
While this adolescent silliness was unfolding, photographs and names of Weinstein’s students were circulated online and the words “Fire Brett!” appeared on campus walls. It is no longer sufficient to destroy a professor’s career because he did not submit to the mob. One must now intimidate and endanger their students as well.
The college president, George Bridges, displaying that level of courage and commitment to principle one now expects from college administrators, ordered the campus police to stand down and informed Weinstein that he could no longer guarantee his safety on campus. Weinstein had to move his classes to a public park. President Bridges, perhaps working on a comedy routine for Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, dusted off his Orwellian Newspeak and called the “protestors” courageous, expressed his “gratitude” to them, and reminded everyone that “freedom of speech … must be protected” – even as he allowed a pair of distinguished professors to be run off the campus for exercising their 1st amendment rights. The new motto at what remains of our universities is, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”
The New York Times responded by quoting a line of Allen Bloom’s, The Closing of the American Mind: “A few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.” The mob did not turn Weinstein or his wife into dancing bears but president Bridges quickly improvised a new academic shuffle. Eventually Evergreen had to pay Weinstein and his wife a half-million capitalist dollars (which is a tad more expensive than showing a modicum of common sense and courage in the face of leftist mobs would have been).
The events were a major learning experience for Weinstein. In a discussion in 2023 with Dave Rubin, himself a former Democrat who eventually saw through the leftist thuggery and silliness and became a conservative, Weinstein stated that “the conservatives are now seeing how right they were and feeling vindicated. I get it.”—pretty impressive from a former Bernie Sanders’s supporter. Weinstein did go on, however, to say that “you can cannot conserve your way out of [our] predicament”. Although this needs further discussion, the basic point is fair enough. Conservatism may not be a sufficient solution to our leftist created problems but it is a necessary part of the solution.
The same thuggery and silliness are evident all over US campuses. Professor Peter Boghossian is an “atheist man of the Left” philosophy professor who resigned from Portland State University because “Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive [an] intolerant [environment] where students are afraid to speak openly and honestly.” Boghossian, displaying the patience of a Hindu saint, now conducts quasi-Socratic discussion sessions on various university campuses to help people discover why they hold the beliefs that they do. Just as in Socrates’ discussions in ancient Athens, they usually don’t want to know and have no idea whatsoever how to find out.
In this video, Boghossian, who pushes no thesis of his own, attempts to discuss the thesis that “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers” with PSU students. The video begins with a trans person, call them XYZ, later identified as a PSU faculty member, saying they are happy to disrupt Boghossian’s discussions. XYZ claims to be very happy “except for all the fascist [explicative] politicians and people like you saying they want to kill us [trans]”. Asked to provide an example, XYZ cannot provide a single one. XYZ later, aggressively pushing into one of the crew, says, “Do not f****** touch me.” XYZ, on a bicycle, grabs someone’s phone and throws it away. Another person with a ponytail throws a drink on one of the crew. A large fellow in a red-shirt shouts at the crew, “There are a lot of loving kind hearted people here. … We have to import you motherf****r”. He then tells people to “shut the f*** up” and gives them the finger. Very kind-hearted and loving! Another person, covering his face to conceal his identity, says he agrees that children should not take puberty blockers but is afraid to reveal his identity because PSU will eliminate his scholarship.
The Maoist cultural revolution in China started out with university students wearing red armbands (Mao’s Red Guards) chanting emotive slogans about the glories of socialism but soon degenerated into almost “unimaginable brutality”, people being “publicly humiliated, beaten, murdered or driven to suicide.” Sound familiar? Before it was over Mao’s not-so-heroic socialist revolution starved or murdered tens of millions of people, some estimates as high as 45 million people. Does anyone think it might it have been better if Socrates (or maybe Boghossian) had been there to help them talk things out?
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The article reports on some grim events. As grim as those events were, I see even more grim events on the horizon.
Sadly I agree with you Jeffrey, The Democrats have become demonic.
Richard